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July 21, 2006

Back to School

Ah, the end of July, when young twenty-somethings' thoughts turn to attending (or returning to) law school. Some of us spend the time planning out our course schedule. [Hanah is not taking remedies either.] Others hold forth with good and bad advice on law school etiquette. Barely Legal has a list of 20 tips for not being a "douchebag". As PG points out, the list is an odd combination of advice to stop bragging (good), being sensitive to the fact that other people are as busy and important as you are (good), and anti-intellectual busy-body-ness (bad).

Anyway, most of the list is hopefully not meant seriously, but PG does take advantage of the occasion to offer two good pieces of advice of her own, which largely boil down to "grow up" and "chill out".



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Bad Man's Blunder

Thanks to those who linked to or emailed about my post on "footnote 1", where the Seventh Circuit cites musical examples of the legend of the 99-year-sentence. Friend of Crescat C.Ch. also writes in to point out the court's inexplicable neglect of The Kingston Trio's Bad Man's Blunder:

It was a most unsatisfactory trial. They gave me ninety-nine years on the hard rock pile.

Ninety and nine on the hard rock ground. All I ever did was shoot a deputy down.

Ninety and nine (It could have been life.) on the hard rock pile (They might-a hung me)

And all he ever did was shoot a deputy down (This whole thing has sure been a lesson to me. Bang! You're dead!)



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Bilked by BAR/BRI?

BAR/BRI-- the fearmongering company that charges confused law school graduates thousands of dollars to watch videotaped lectures about the law that their even-more-expensive law schools never taught them-- faces an antitrust class-action. Anthony Rickey lauds it. Jason Czarnezki ponders it here:

Every time I get a Class Action Notice or Notice of Settlement, I wonder: (1) If I exclude myself from the class, could I, with additional effort, improve upon my monetary recovery?, and (2) If I object to the settlement, might this precipitate an offer from the defendants in exchange for withdrawal of the objection? Simply, will exclusion or objection lead to pecuniary gain worth more to me than a 5% off coupon for my next BAR/BRI course?

Czarnezki jokes(?) about getting paid in coupons, which would seem particularly odd in a case like this one, since presumably a large number of people who take a bar review course only take it once. As I have written before, one is simply begging for principal-agent problems by letting attorneys purport to represent thousands of people, then settling for funny-money for the plaintiffs while compensating themselves with cash. So if the class members do get stuck with a 5%-off coupon, hopefully the attorneys will all get stuck with several thousand of them rather than a few million dollars.



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