CLE for lawyers

Every state bar has a continuing education requirment for lawyers. It's a good idea to require lawyers to keep up with new developments in the law, but as Scott Greenfield of Simple Justice points out, it's not always so clearly of professional value.

In talking about a mailer for a CLE course he recently got, the asks

There's no mention of who will be the instructor, and clearly this isn't a law firm, bar association or law school, but an entity whose purpose is to selling marketing. How the heck did this group obtain authorization to provide continuing legal education? Who in their right mind would give an PR firm the power to confer CLE credits for teaching ethics to lawyers? Apparently, the State of New York did so.

That struck a cord with me because a few years back I gave a talk at an event that gave CLE credit for lawyers in Texas. I'm not a lawyer and don't have any real credentials in the field.

I was teaching Business Analysis (statistics and operations research) at a small school in East Texas and was also a graduate student in Criminal Justice. As part of a CJ course in administrative law I'd written a term paper on the applicability of federal minimum wage laws to prison labor. When a business conference came up in San Antonio and I wanted to take a trip I put together a talk on that term paper topic and submitted the paper. It was accepted in a session that was approved for CLE credit.

I just remember thinking how weird that was -- my total legal education consisted of a Business Law course I'd taken as an undergraduate (and made in C in), a Constitutional Law course I'd taken as a CJ graduate student and the Administrative Law course I'd written the paper for. Not exactly what I'd consider a serious legal education. It made me wonder how serious they were about actual continuing education for lawyers.

Cops out of control

When there's a large snowstorm pretty much anywhere people often tend to take to the streets and play -- which involves things like throwing snowballs.

In DC the requirement to show deference to police, even when you don't know they're police, takes precedence over any normal sense of human frivolity.

UPDATE:
The idiot law school teacher Althouse thinks the Reason description is inaccurate because they use the term "brandish" when he didn't actually point the gun directly at people.

She doesn't seem to understand that if they'd actually meant "point" then that's what they would have said. She's been teaching law for way too long, the law being a field where words have no actual meaning.

Logic and rhetoric of Law

Simple Justice has a nice blog post on logical argument and the process of a law school education. I made a comment on the post

Law is about rhetoric, not logic. It can't be about logic because the axioms of law (the black letter part) doesn't form any kind of consistent system, the axioms themselves are self-contradictory.

My mother never told me

Some Oakland cops are trying to anew defense for their criminal behavior -- their training never included specific instruction that it's wrong to sign a false affidavit to present to a judge and that it's wrong to intentionally violate the 4th amendment.

Will better training really solve this problem?

Rhetoric of Law Schools

The standard course grading system in United States colleges and universities is A, B, C, D, F. A five grade system. For most graduate and professional schools that effectively collapses into a four grade system since D and F are effectively the same (I been a student in 3 graduate schools and a faculty member in a couple others and I've never seen a grad program that will give a student credit for a course he got a D in).

Now we learn that our nations leading law schools are all deviating from the norm. Pretty edgy stuff. Tbey've established 4 and 5 point grading systems that use words instead of letters to represent grades.

Stanford’s new system — which will award grades of honors, pass, restricted credit and no credit — resembles that at Yale Law School, whose four grades are honors, pass, low pass and fail. Across the bay, the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law also eschews letter grades but has two levels above pass: honors and high honors.

To a lawyer, someone who has been trained to believe that meaning has no meaning, changing the name of something changes the thing itself. I'm pretty sure Shakespeare wasn't a lawyer.

“The new system includes a shared norm for the proportion of honors to be awarded in both exam and paper courses. No grading system is perfect, but the consensus is that the reform will have significant pedagogical benefits, including that it encourages greater flexibility and innovation in the classroom and in designing metrics for evaluating student work,” wrote Stanford Law dean Larry Kramer

This stuff is just pathetic.

Althouse blogged about this.

The mind of a prosecutor

Sometimes I think you have to be brain damaged to work as a prosecutor.

Life at the Harris County Criminal Justice Center is a blog written by a prosector in Harris County, Texas (Houston). It really gives a lot of insight into how prosecutors tend to think.

In a recent post he whines about not being understood. Here's part of what he says

Yesterday, Quannel X and a pretty sizeable group of protestors were in
front of the CJC protesting. As I've pointed out, some of things they said were
valid. Some were not. But what was impossible to ignore was the fact that there
was a vast vast disconnection between the (mostly) African-American protestors
and the Criminal Justice System (specifically the HCDA's office). There were
many things that were said by the multiple speakers, where I couldn't help but
think "they just don't understand".

And then I realized that I may have just stumbled onto something. They
didn't understand.

They don't understand. Of course there's no possibility at all that he's the one that doesn't understand. After all, he's a prosecutor, he's smart and he understands.

This is the mindset of government employee who actually makes life and death decisions. It's a really good reason to not have a death penalty.

Somebody is responsible

A Harris County Prosecutor made a blog post today about a dead baby that was found on the side of the road. Nobody really knows what happened. But he seems to think he knows that

someone is (responsible)

Somebody will pay.
That's the way too many prosecutors think. They think of themselves as avenging angels sent by God.

He doesn't know what happened. It's possible (very remote, very unlikely, but possible) that the baby was picked up and dropped by a tornado. The prosecutor in question isn't aware of any tornado in the area, but that doesn't mean there wasn't one.

Also, this guy thinks that praying to God for the soul of the baby is some kind of rational behavior. If he really thinks that why does he not allow for the possibility that God did it?

Somebody is responsible, he says. What a nutcase.

Law and Rhetoric

The Supreme Court issued an opinion today about a prison inmate who had a bunch of his stuff stolen from him by prison guards simply because he's a Muslim and they could do it with impunity. The ruling was that they were right, they could do it with impunity. Some statute about US customs was interpreted to mean that prison guards have immunity from any recourse against them or the government stemming from such thefts.

The whole thing is totally irrational, completely ignores any attempt to consider actual facts, and the opinion focuses more on commas than on actual meaning of language.

It's an example of the way the law works. The court just finds some rhetorical bullshit to lead them to the conclusion they want to reach. That's law. That's procedural justice. That's America.

In another example of the absurdity of legal thought in America, the DOJ submitted a brief to the Supreme Court on the current gun case being considered by the court where they argued that the Second Amendment defines an individual right but that the government must be able to ban hand gun ownership because if we don't allow that people will be allowed to run around on the streets with missile launchers. Or something like that. Just absurd.

Patterico is an ex-patriot Texan who works as a prosecutor in Los Angeles. You can tell a lot about what's wrong with the criminal justice system in the United States by reading his blog and getting some insight into the way prosecutors tend to think.

Recently he argues that it's a good thing to convict someone of murder if you can just prove that they had knowledge that someone else planned a burglary. Read the whole blog post, he really says that.

I didn't even know that it was illegal to plan a burglary, much less it was equivalent to murder to know someone who planned a burglary. But to a typical prosecutor in the United States such logical analysis is just part of a days work.

Legal theory

For those of you who doubt my frequent claims that law has nothing to do with logic or rational thought, read this.

Lawyers and communication

A law blogger writes

An exchange I heard a few months ago -- I reproduce it from memory, so the account will not be precise, but I think I remembered the substance accurately:

[Talk had turned to effective legal writing; B is a smart soon-to-be-law-student.]

A. Another thing I learned about legal writing: Don't use exclamation points for rhetorical emphasis. And all-caps -- don't do that, either. Bold is also very bad. So is italics: It's OK to use it to highlight important terms in quotes, or terms that you're trying to distinguish from each other in your arguments, but don't use it as an exclamation point.

B. But what then are you supposed to use for rhetorical emphasis?

A. How about ... forceful arguments?

I'm a little stunned that law school students have to be taught this.

I can specifically recall this being covered in a freshman composition course taught by the Department of English, in a freshman course in technical writing taught by the College of Engineering (although they said no italics) and in a sophomore course in business communication taught by the Department of Management.

How do you get to law school without already knowing that basics of written communication?