I don't pay a lot of attention to the law school rankings, but yesterday two bits of trivia about my law school crossed my desk. One was a letter to students from the Dean, responding to the unwelcome news that Maine Law fell into the dreaded fourth tier this year, based largely, I guess, on the placement rates of the class behind mine. Yikes. But the school did make the top 10, in a different ranking. That's the ranking of whitest law schools, which I found via Slithery D (who offers more pragmatic advice on choosing law school classes than I've got). Great. So come to Maine for a fourth-rate education and a withering lack of diversity. We'll need to work on this, it seems to me.
Categories
- 15 Things (19)
- A Series of Letters I'll Probably Never Send (19)
- All Requests (183)
- Being Outside (121)
- Books (77)
- Culture of the Legal Profession (108)
- Fumbling Toward Legal Competence (237)
- Good Riddance Project (15)
- Instructions (14)
- It's a dog's life (92)
- Material things -- gadgets and gizmos (68)
- Music (62)
- Personal / Misc (767)
- Pictures (33)
- PopTech (17)
- Projects and Goals (11)
- Questions (74)
- Relationships (158)
- Remembering College (23)
- Sailing and Sailboats (137)
- The Weather (18)
- Walking A Marathon (88)
- Weblogs (216)
- Writing Exercises (19)
Thing is, you don't really notice those things until you go out of state for a while.
I think I'd settle for a fourth-rate education if USM offered more than a MS in Comp. Sci.
Posted by: pjm | April 15, 2004 at 10:11 AM
Well, at least the footnotes are very kind to Maine regarding its inclusion. As for ranking...bah. As one who did undergrad at USM and went "Top 100" LS, I would probably stay in Maine were I to do it over again (and my checking account would radically different). I'm a firm believer that law school is what you make it...Tier 1 and Tier 4 produce, I wager, relatively equal numbers of competent and imcompetent proto-attorneys. There is no doubt, however, that the higher the tier, the more likely one is to attract good students and staff (wonderful and freakish exceptions like S, notwithstanding). Personally, I think the profession would be greatly served by returning to earlier model of apprenticeship. Law school does not, in my not remotely humble opinion, prepare students to "practice" law. I think the best thing that could happen to legal education would be to adopt the medical school model...inflict a year or two of black letter classroom work and then make every student serve another year or two as an intern...actually learning the practice before inflicting their incompetence upon an unsuspecting public. Of course, I don't practice at all any more....so what do I know *wry smile*...
/ijk
--
If a million people believe a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.
- Anatole France
Posted by: ijk | April 15, 2004 at 11:33 AM
Hah! Ole Miss isn't one of the top ten whitest law schools! HAH!
WOOOHOOO! We are so out of the sixties!
Posted by: Scipio | April 15, 2004 at 12:45 PM
I'm sure these days they go there hoping to meet fellow students as interesting and nice as you, madame.
Posted by: Slithery D | April 15, 2004 at 03:48 PM