Rest in peace, Will Kohn

Will, who was delightful, warm, funny, and extremely smart (see here), passed away suddenly last week.  I'll really miss him.  I met him when I was still at Ohio State, and we worked together on the American Board of Certification.  He was a natural leader and modest as all get-out.  His obituary is here.

The former University of Maryland law dean's current troubles

I've been following the stories about Karen Rothenberg's current troubles over some payments made to her while she was Maryland's dean, and two particularly good posts are here and here.  I don't know Karen that well, but I certainly saw her in action, and I found her to be extremely energetic and committed behavior. 

Were the payments authorized?  I'll bet that they were.  Were they vetted thoroughly beforehand?  Who knows?  Should academics get those big salaries?  Maybe not, but as the Feminist Law Professors post points out, Karen probably found herself in the crosshairs of all of those folks who are angry at Wall Street bonuses as well.

All I know is that being in the public eye is sometimes really, really miserable, and that Karen has my sympathy right now.

Newsflash: small, newly established law schools not in National Law Journal's top 25

Thanks to my home Google page, I read TaxProf Blog regularly, so I clicked on the links (see here and here) to the National Law Journal's Law School Report (here).  The basic methodology:  "[NLJ has] ranked the top 50 law schools by the percentage of 2009 juris doctor graduates who snagged jobs at NLJ 250 firms by Sept. 30, 2009."

What I like:  the ranking at least gives users some useful information about the link between going to a particular school and how many of that school's grads go to BigLaw; my alma mater (Stanford) did well, even though many older grads (25th reunion this year!) are BigLaw refugees; and there are thoughtful articles that accompany the report (see Emily Spieler's thoughts here). 

The only drawback is that some newer schools (think Boyd) won't make the cut for a while, if ever:  we're still new-ish, as law schools go (in two more years, the school could have a Bar Mitzvah), and we don't have the benefit of having a plethora of branch offices of BigLaw firms in Nevada, although we do place graduates in many other states.

All in all, though, the Law School Report makes for juicy reading.

Will the crash in BigLaw hiring be a boon for lesser-"ranked" law schools?

We won't know for a while, but if some law schools didn't place a lot of their grads in BigLaw firms before the crash, and the graduates at those "lesser" schools find more jobs than those do who hail from "elite" schools, will we see a big change in the USNWR rankings in a couple of years, when the data from the placement crash play out?

You know you've been in legal education a long time when . . .

You remember being dean at Nebraska and helping to hire someone who is now the incoming dean at Nebraska.  Congrats to Susan Poser (see here)!

I get a kick out of this one (hat tip to PrawfsBlawg again)

See the commentary and the comments to How to Write an Incendiary Blog Post (here).  The post refers to the original full article in the Boston Globe (here), but I got a huge kick out of the comments to the post on PrawfsBlog.  Hat tip to that blog and to my buddy Bernie Burk, who sent me the original BG version a while back. 

My two favorite comments so far:

This sentence says that I know you won't publish this comment, but you neglected to consider a point that is not even germane to the post. This sentence makes it clear that I'm very angry because there is some trivial difference in our world-views.

Posted by: Bruce Boyden | Feb 17, 2010 1:39:22 PM

This sentence is not self-referential except to the extent that it is.

Posted by: Matthew Reid Krell | Feb 17, 2010 1:55:25 PM

Bravo to Paul Horwitz for the post!

I hate bullies--especially anonymous ones.

Just got a nastygram today from RoastMail (meaning that the sender wasn't brave enough to sign his or her own name to the email).  The person, in the guise of being concerned about professionalism, suggested that I was cluttering up everyone's inboxes with my congratulations when people at Boyd did something praiseworthy.

Here's the text:

Nancy,

Please read and heed the subject line.  Everyone at Boyd (especially because we are lawyers/law students) would probably like to throw in their two cents and congratulate whoever deserves congratulations, BUT can you imagine what a mess our inboxes would be if we all gave in to our desires.  Besides it being rude and unprofessional, it's just downright annoying to see a reply to every announcement regarding our school/faculty/students.

PLEASE, out of professional courtesy, keep your personal comments off the email server. 

Good day.

And here was my response:

Tell you what, anonymous roaster---let me put this up to the whole faculty. I'm happy to bow out of congratulatory emails, if my colleagues would prefer that. But I would have had more respect for you, whoever you are, if you'd had the courage to sign your name.
NBR

I'll let readers know which way the faculty goes on this issue.  If I'm really annoying people, then I'm happy to lay off the congrats, even though my guess is that most people feel underappreciated and could use some well-deserved congratulations.*  But I truly hate bullies and cowards, having had enough experience with those to last a lifetime.

Had this person had the courage to come into my office, shut the door, and express his or her view to me directly (or even in a private but signed email), I would have felt bad that I'd annoyed the person, I would have apologized to him or her, and I'd have gone to other colleagues to ask them if I really was irritating the crud out of my colleagues.  But that's not what the person did.

If it's important enough to send a nastygram, it's important enough to sign it.  And I'm going to assume that this person who sent it to me isn't a student, due to the salutation using my first name.

Readers:  are we at a point when praising others is a bad thing?

* See Kent Syverud, Three Principles of Effective Deaning, 31 U. Tol. L. Rev. 751 (2000).