Here's the Keker

Looks like a new firm is springing to life in SF. (Website here). Of course Mark Lemley is the former Boalt professor who formed 1/3 of the big wig IP trio. And Ragesh Tangri was a visiting professor at Boalt a while back.

Loan Forgiveness for Public Service? Depends on the Service

It looks like Stanford's famous lady of the night, who has graced our hallowed pages here, here, and here, will be shutting down her operations for a little while. (HT: The Shark, which *cough* could be you.)

Tax evasion. They'll nail you for anything, but tax evasion . . . ? A good law student knows to keep those things confined to New York, but that's not the punch-line. The punch-line is her sentence: house arrest.

Carbolic Commemorates Prop. 2 Supporters

Here.

Enjoy the break, everyone.

Hey There Little Cardinal Riding Hood

Compare this and this with this.

UPDATE: Nevermind, for some reason I thought these were separate incidents. Same Cristina, new charges.

Building a Better Legal Profession

Like the author of the post below this one I also share a letter, this time from Building a Better Legal Profession.  BBLP is an organization that was created last fall by Stanford students (referenced here on N&B) and is itching to grow.  The letter is self-explanatory, and I think you'll find its message germane to the looming OCIP season.

Or, germane at least to a discussion about methods by which to choose a law firm, aside from the good old fashioned NALP-sheet-salary-troll.

----------------

Dear Students, Colleagues, Friends of Boalt:

Another season of on-campus interviews is fast approaching, and law students across the country will soon be scratching their heads, wondering how to differentiate between law firms. Building a Better Legal Profession was launched by two law students last fall in an effort to create greater transparency in the profession and to change the way students approach interview season. The more students talk about choices and balance, the more firms respond. We're hoping that this year, you'll join in the call for reform by starting a chapter at your school. With a new website set to launch, a fall OCI campus tour in the works, and a new round of rankings, we're poised to up the ante this year--but we need your help. (You can check out some of the press BBLP got this year here: The Lawyers Weekly, Law.com, Daily News, The Shark, The Chicago Tribune, JD Bliss, Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, [and *cough* Nuts & Boalts].)

The race to $160K means cash on hand for young lawyers, but what's the catch? We can probably expect more billable hours, less balance, fewer opportunities for pro bono work, and greater dissatisfaction. The resulting mass exodus from firms is not just bad for recent law grads, it's bad for the profession. By starting a BBLP chapter at your school, you can bring real choices to your colleagues. For every friend and colleage at your school who chooses job satisfaction over the highest salary, firms will have another reason to shift their focus.

Law students are in high demand, and we can afford to be more selective in our career choices. Building a Better Legal Profession seeks to harness the market power of law students to encourage reform at large private law firms. As a national grassroots organization, BBLP is only as strong as its student network.

This is where you come in.

We hope you'll join with us by starting a BBLP chapter at your school this fall. With your help, your colleagues can walk into interviews with a better understanding of their market power. Instead of being auctioned off to the highest bidder, they can join a generation of associates who are swapping dollars for time, balance, and community. Empower your friends by shedding some light on the import of their career choices, and they will thank you.

Spearhead a BBLP chapter, and we'll send you all the materials you need to spread the word. Please let us know if you would like to get involved as a chapter director. Or if there's someone who you think might be interested, we'd appreciate your passing this message along.

I look forward to connecting with you soon!

Best Regards,
[The Folks at Better Legal Profession]

www.betterlegalprofession.org
BBLP on Facebook

March Bracketness?

So the best three weeks of college sports / illegal gambling are about to descend upon us, and I just have one question: is someone running the Boalt pool this year? Cause I ain't heard nothin'.

Now, I know it will be hard to imitate the inimitable MW, who has run the pool in years past but is now here only in spirit and through the occasional North Oakland house party. But I hope someone steps up to the plate. In fact, if someone is willing to run the logistics and the math, I'd be happy to send out the sardonic round-by-round update emails (and offer full abuse of my journal's copier too.) Yeah, that's not the fairest division of labor, but I'm up for it -- and I'd hate to see the Boalt pool go the way of the Boalt Briefs.

In the meantime, in case anyone feels a need to argue with someone other than a televised Billy Packer (he couldn't hear you in real life either!), I offer the following questions to whet your whistle:

1. Is Memphis the most overrated 1 seed since...Memphis in 2006?
2. The Pac-10 officiating crew will be locked in the broom closet of the Staples Center for the duration of the tournament, right? Cause finding three homeless bums from under the 110/101 interchange and giving them whistles would be a more preferable option than allowing these clowns to blow another game.
3. Stanford's Mitch Johnson: Worst point guard in the Pac-10 -- or all of college basketball?
4. Are you honestly going to listen to the selection committee and take Wisconsin over SC in the second round?
5. If Duke and UNC both lose before the Sweet Sixteen, will Dick Vitale's head explode?
6. Come on, Kansas plays one (admittedly) awesome game on national TV, and suddenly they're everyone's favorite?
7. If that guy with the pony-tail from Washington State hits one more goddamn clutch three...
8. Excuse me, but who did Xavier play again?
9. You'll get no pity from me Arizona State!
10. How many minutes can a normal human endure a UCLA fan hyperventilating about how "Wooden is great!" and "Howland is great!" and "The yellow C means we're the first to get to a 100 championships!" before you have to beat yourself unconscious with your own flip-flop?

Sharing the spotlight

I apologize. This post has absolutely nothing to do with law, our campus, or even the city of Berkeley itself.

Rather, I'm posting it because we, each as a college, a town and a school of law, have looked ridiculous to the outside world for a number of things recently and I think it's time to share the spotlight with those students across the bay.

Here they are, looking ridiculous in my favorite article of the week.

Making the Grade

When a classmate sent me this article with the comment, "Stanford students are grading their employers," I shot off a hasty reply: "Someone should tell Stanford that is so last semester. Boalt students have been databasing employer information with the CDO office for some time, and by all indications Berkeley Law students will continue the tradition."

A couple hours later I had time to read the article and I found that the Stanford students are most decidedly not up to the same thing as Boalties. 

Although I am sympathetic with many of their concerned observations (yes, even in 2007 it might not be an accident if you can't find a single black partner at a large law firm, and an absence of female partners at the same firm may indeed be telling, too), the project also makes me feel weird and uncomfortable.

First, there is the implied conception of "diversity" as something to be measured, ranked, and advertised.

Second, why have these mysterious anonymous students who would otherwise be at BigLaw chosen this moment to make their stand for social justice?

Third, there is the precociousness of statements like this: "'Firms that want the best students will be forced to respond to the market pressures that we’re creating,' said . . . a law student . . ."

Realistically, however, I have had a tad too much coffee and I am edgy and cranky with Online Citation Exercises and just itching for something defenseless to nitpick.

Weirdly pensive as I feel about the project, I give it a vote of support. Come to think of it, it might have happened here at Berkeley, if we had thought of it first.

Un-Stanford-lievable

Yeah, Cal could wake up tomorrow as the #1 team in the country, but how about the football upset of the YEAR down in the Coliseum? I've been a Harbaugh fan the whole year (and, uh, a Stanford fan for a bit longer, sorry to say) and this just seals it: Stanford football is back baby. Big Game could be interesting this year.

I only have two small regrets. One, I don't have the blogger privileges from Armen to paint this whole site in Cardinal red. Two, there's no channel I can turn to that would just pan to the SC fans walking out of the stadium. I could watch that shot for hours.

Terms of Encouragement

The time draws near. I thought some guidance would be appropriate, but in what style? Something like Churchill's defiant beaches speech? FDR's admonition about fear? It occurred to me: the most appropriate guidance for Boalt students would come from that sage old salt, two-time skipper of the Cleveland Steamers, Jesse Jacobsen. In his style, I dedicate these words to all Boalt exam takers of the summer of 2007, including one Mr. Bundy and my appellate mentor, TL:

"Ok guys. Go out there. It's a pretty hard test. Actually, it's a test that's tougher than we are. We probably can't beat it, but I guess we should try to make it look respectable. Riley, no cursing after you popup a softball question. Armen, we'll have a towel waiting at the end of the first morning's essays. Glasser, you're too old to take this exam. Martin, you're a bar exam cancer and you're bringing everyone down. Beat it."

"I mean, think about it guys. This is a test that humbled the dean of Stanford. So don't take it too personally. Now bring it in, and let's steam it up."

--

I strove for authenticity. Feel free to suggest additions or corrections in the comments.

Official March Madness Thread II

Ah, my most favoritest two days of the year! May the basketball wash over you, the upsets flowing like accusations of Fascism and Communism! So many questions will be answered today: Can Billy Packer be any more unlikeable? Joakim Noah: ugly woman, or ugliest woman? Will Maryland make The Crow eat crow?

Thoughts, predictions, and comments on games, players, announcers all encouraged!

UPDATE I: Well, TF's heroic 10 AM visit to Henry's aside, it was a rather unremarkable morning. The top seed won every game, with only 1 game within single digits. Penn put a bit of a scare into Texas A&M but couldn't hang with them down the stretch; Old Dominion had a shot against Butler, but got flustered when the Bulldogs hit a few 3's; The Crow is enjoying a steaming plate of crow, served by a Terrapin; Oral Roberts hung tough in the first half, but they were just too nice to stay with WSU in the second; and Stanford was crap, pretty much from beginning to end.

So is this just prelude to the craziness tonight? Are Duke, Pitt, and--dare I say it--UCLA in trouble? Or are we in for the most boring first round in the history of the universe? My guess is that it will be a fun night, but it's not yet clear if that's because of the basketball I'm watching or the Miller High Life I'm drinking.

Putting Hegel Right-Side-Up Again

In the current breathless climate epitomized by Autoadmit.com, it’s easy to forget that there were law school prestige wars a long time before there were ever USN&WR rankings. Answers.com tells a pretty fluent and compact version of the story.

The earliest American legal education worked on the apprenticeship model. The first organized U.S. law schools centered around well-reputed individual attorneys or groups of practitioners. These instructors retained much of the apprenticeship model, lecturing and training on practical skills.

When Christopher Columbus Langdell took over the Harvard program, he did much more than invent the case method and the first-year curriculum we all know and love. He also began to shift the whole approach of legal education from a practical to a quasi-scholarly pursuit. Many--but not all--schools followed in his footsteps. The intervening period has seen a pronounced divide between schools emphasizing practical skills and those that aspire to be, like Harvard, centers of legal scholarship.

Schools on the pre-Langdell model have typically had evening and part-time programs; Langdell-style schools did not. The former continued to teach state law in a serious way; the latter generally focused on federal law or on the commonalities between and among state bodies of common law. See, e.g., the ALI’s Restatements and “Principles” projects. There has been a degree of convergence, and the quasi-scholarly Harvard model basically won the battle for prestige, in part by capturing the relevant ABA comittees, creating the AALS, and forcing nearly all schools to adopt their core curriculum and basic method of instruction.

Even today, though, there’s a clear line between schools that, for instance do and do not have evening or part-time programs, schools that emphasize state over federal law, and—the occasion for my present post—schools that do and don’t put real emphasis on and direct real resources towards their trial advocacy programs.

It’s not a coincidence that Harvard and Yale historically have not had strong trial programs—it wasn’t gentlemanly, it wasn’t consonant with their view of legal education, and it just wasn’t “the sort of thing” they did. It also wasn’t possible for them, since they tended to hire instructors with limited practical experience. And so it’s not a coincidence that Boalt and other schools aspiring to membership in the Harvard/Langdell club have also tended to lack such programs—it was a way of proclaiming that we “belonged” to that select crowd. Meanwhile, many “lower tier” schools have continued to train people to be trial lawyers. Much of the strongest competition in the trial advocacy realm comes from schools not normally mentioned in the same breath as Stanford, Boalt, or any of the other “top ten.”

But we happen to live in exciting times, trial-advocacy-wise, at Boalt. Interest in the program is at a record high. Boalt has fielded a total of seven trial teams in four separate regional and national competitions this year. Competition results thus far have been very positive, and in fact our SFTLA team won first place in their fall competition--by a landslide, according to all reliable reports. Several outstanding practitioners have volunteered a great deal of time to the program, and participants are very enthusiastic. (I am a participant, for example, and I am totally enthusiastic, in case you can’t tell.) Note that this is all taking place at a time when Boalt is also rising in the heavily Langdell-inflected USN&WR rankings and investing in quasi-scholarly centers like BCLBE and the Earl Warren Center.

So I encourage people to try out for next year’s trial teams, when the board of advocates holds tryouts. There’s a workshop this Saturday that it may not be too late to sign up for. There are some excellent trial ad courses available. Ask around. Think about it. If Hegel is right that history is an episodic narrative of thesis (the apprenticeship model) and antithesis (the Harvard/Langdell model), then we may be at the cusp of a paradigm-shifting synthesis—the Rise of the Boalt Hall Trial Ad Program.

Call Me Quebecois

Before I rant once more about the crappy IT here, I want to congratulate Tom. His post on Boalt faculty is garnering a lot of attention (see, e.g., here, here, and here. Although I'm perplexed a bit at Leiter's reaction given his obsession with needless data by which to sort law school faculty). I assume Tom will have a response in short order.

Alright here's my rant. I want the law school to declare its independence from the campus...in an IT sense. This isn't a UC issue. Plenty of other UCs have centralized websites where you can access all important information. You can browse their "My" pages with guest logins. (UCD, UCLA [with an online forum], UCSD [no guest access], and Stanford for good measure). So why can't we break from the main campus and set one up on our own? Any former Boalties out there who want to donate to a worthy cause...do you hear me? We REALLY could use an updated centralized website.

I've ranted about this before (only to have older Boalties complain that we have it too easy because the various "Bears" now all use the same password). Now I realize that main campus has no intention of changing anything. They can't even maintain what little there is. "When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another..."

Bar Exam Review

The official July 2006 stats are here. Summary:

Stanford 89%
UCLA and U$C 86%
Boalt 85%
Pepperdine 84%

People's College of the Law...0% out of 1 takers.

Gavel to Gavel

With grades due to come out within the next few months or so, I hereby present quotes by WF in last semester's Fed Courts class.

***

Student: "Oh I don’t want to make accusations against the Supreme Court."
WF: "Go ahead, that’s what we’re here for. "

WF: “If you weren’t getting enough cynicism, here is some more.”

WF: "There's a statute that authorizes a federal judge to hold court in Humbolt County, but the last judge to do that was Sam Conti who wanted to go fishing in Eureka."

WF: “Sometimes the Supreme Court makes bad law by accident. Sometimes they make bad law on purpose.”

WF: “What I’m suggesting in a cynical, slightly mean-spirited sort of way is that State judges are elected and they want to say the ‘devil’ that is the supreme court ‘made me do it.’”

WF: “The rule makes it citable, but it’s not precedential. You can cite it all you want. Tough luck. [jolly laugh].”

Student: “I didn’t get a chance to read the majority opinion.”
WF: “It’s a Douglas opinion, it wouldn’t have helped.”

WF: “Sometimes I’m grateful academics don’t write judicial opinions. That’s an ironic remark.”

WF: “The railroads were the 19th century equivalents of Al Davis.”

WF: “Judge Givens’ article came out first because THE STANFORD LAW REVIEW IS SOOOOO SLOOOOOOOW.”

WF: [What if I made copies of the course textbook and sold them to the students] “And then I wrote letter to Dick Fallon, Dan Metzer, and David Shapiro saying ‘Ha ha.’ And they sued me for copyright infringement. What then?”
Student: “Seriously?...well clearly you’re violating the copyright act.”
WF: “I’m not contesting that. That’s why I wrote the letter.”

WF: “The reason why Justice Scalia recused himself is because he made this same point in a public speech. This is not a public speech by the way. HAHAHAHAHAHA.”

WF: “You are wrongly attributing a sense of humor to Justice Frankfurter.”

WF: “Frankfurter is one of the tragic figures of the Supreme Court.”

WF: “This is a really wicked question, Miss _____”
Miss: “I thought you were going to be nice.”
WF: “I changed my mind.”

WF: “For those of you who read law stuff instead of murder mysteries.”


WF: “What are these animals thinking when they act from their gut to make these decisions.”

Student: “Would you start with the history or the modern state?”
WF: “’You can see a lot of things by observing.’”

WF: “In the Ninth Circuit we have a mediation division. If we get a hard case, we’ll tell the parties, ‘You know we have mediation downstairs, why don’t you go down there and talk for a while.’”

WF: “You now know more about the 11th Amendment than most federal judges…even though I’m working on the 11th Amendment today which I know about, tomorrow I’m working on bankruptcy which I don’t know anything about.”

WF: “He was described as Frankfurter without the mustard.”

WF: “I can’t say the Supreme Court is wrong, the Supreme Court is right by definition.”

WF: “White doesn’t tell you why.”
Student: “That’s my job now?”
WF: “Yeah. Too bad.”

WF: “I’m past the point in my life where I think they’ll fire me for bad evaluations.”

WF: “The California Supreme Court is quite content with passing its problem cases to us. We get a lot of abuse, but they can’t can us.”

The Boalt Hall Blue (and Gold)

I watch too much sports. Way too much. So much so that I cried for missing the UCLA Notre Dame game on Saturday. But thinking about the Fighting Irish, I remembered an old trivia question a friend once asked me. How many team names DO NOT end with an "s." The list I have so far is:

Alabama Crimson Tide
Notre Dame Fighting Irish
Stanford Cardinal
Orlando Magic
Miami Heat
Colorado Avalanche
Tampa Bay Lightning

Am I missing any? Also this post is not meant to be sexist. It is, but it wasn't meant to be. And there are too many teams in the BCS top 25 with "Tigers" as a team name.

Grade Me Now

Both Volokh and Kerr discuss curves in law schools, with an emphasis on the increase in the mean/median GPA. Well it seems like most schools are hovering around a 3.2 curve with Stanford at 3.4. Hmmm, so where do we stand?

Just to explain things to 0Ls, in your first year large sections the curve is top 10% = HH, next 30% = H, and remaining 60% = P. If we assume the grading basis used to determine order of the coif (HH=5, H=3, and P=2) then simple math gives us a mean curve of 2.6 and of course a median of 2.

Another way of doing it would be to do what the main campus registrar does...convert all H grades to A and all P grades to B. That of course gives use a 3.4 mean GPA with a 3.0 still as the median. But that doesn't seem right. Keeping my ears close to the ground, the most common way I've heard our grades distilled is by counting the number of H grades. Similar to the one above, but with a slight twist. So my hunch is that our curve is not that far off the rest of the schools. It's just a matter of figuring out the right numerical value to assign to an H and to a P to get a 3.2 curve.

In other news, I'm glad to hear that the Virginia Supreme Court rejected the testimony of Dr. Stan Samenow (in a redux of the Atkins case that many of you will remember from law review write-on 05). Samenow's main argument is that every criminal makes a choice to commit crimes. Forget about poverty, education, opportunity, influence of groups, etc. It all boils down to choice. And this guy was used by the state to testify in the case of someone arguing mental retardation. Sigh.

USF'in Hot

That just about summarizes the admitted students at USF Law School. I was at their admit day reception today on an espionage mission. Let me tell ya...HOT HOT HOT. Although my cohort said that guys were not that cute, but still...how can we land some of those here?

Maybe I should transfer there. Sure they had a bunch of 3Ls without job offers and sure during OCIP the firms screen potential interviewees like a federal judicial nominee, but hey, at least I'd be around hotties. Or maybe it's the whole Catholic school thing.

Allow me to retort

Responding to a Boalt Briefs listing that the no. 9 worst 1L pick up line overheard at bar review is, "Hi, I'm Jesse; can I buy you a drink?" Jesse writes the following about the author of Boalt Briefs: (Note, I think this is too funny to be deprived from the general public, and so while I apologize if I offend anyone by posting, I'm not going to budge).

***

This just in: Martin White Sucks!!

As some of you may know, in the latest edition of the venerable Boalt Briefs, editor (by default) Martin White posited what he claimed was the 9^th worst pick-up overheard at Bar Review: “Hi, I'm Jesse; can I buy you a drink?” This joke being at my expense, I thought that I may enter into a dialogue with Martin White to respond to this affront to my dignity. What follows may or may not be true, but if you know Martin White personally, something I don’t recommend, I am sure that these will resonate harmoniously with your conceptualization of that funny looking man.

While he might claim that his busted arm is the result of a rugby injury, in actuality, his collarbone fracture is the result of a freak accident arising from his favorite hobby: baby seal clubbing.

Martin White cannot say the phrase “pro bono” without giggling. In spite of this, or because of this, he was offered a position at the firm of Kirkland & Ellis, which he quickly turned down, because he felt that they were “too liberal.”

Martin is the type of guy who would start “the Wave” at a funeral.

I like the guy, but I would never leave him alone with my younger brother, or any of my younger brother’s clothing.

Martin White sets the prices at “Café Zeb.”

Contrary to popular belief, the term “martinize” does not mean a process for cleaning/pressing clothing. Its real definition is : “ to express a blatant and gratuitious contempt for the well-being of your fellow man.” The following is the proper use of the word:

Poor homeless pregnant woman: “Can you spare change?”
Martin: “Don’t you look me in the face you smelly drug addict!” (spits on her)
Woman: “Please don’t Martinize me.”

In high school at Lick-Wilmerding in SF (a private school), Martin White was voted “least likely to be a decent human being.” That category did not exist before Martin’s year, and he was the unanimous recipient of that distinction. Thereafter, the superlative has been changed to “most likely to be the next Martin White.” It has only been awarded 3 times; two of the students awarded are now in jail and the third is at Stanford.

Martin White thinks Boalt Women are: “ [too] smart [for their own good].”

Martin White is a staunch supporter of frois gras, and not because he likes the way it tastes. He actually hates the way it tastes (“not enough like veal”); he just likes the idea of force-feeding helpless geese.

Several federal courts have issued a nation-wide injunction, at the behest of the Humane Society and several state governments, against pet stores from selling animals to Martin White. Similarly, he is not allowed within 50 feet of any playground.

In a high school production of "The King and I,” Martin was passed over for the role of Satan, because Martin “looked too evil” for the part.

When asked about Martin White, Jesus Christ was known to say “Hell, if I knew I’d be dying for his sins, I might have done things a little differently. Would have definitely thought longer about a career in usury, that’s fo sho! ”

Unlike images of Allah, Muslims do not mind drawings of Martin White. They use them as a warning to their children of the ill effects of not properly observing the faith. I hear it works really well.

When Martin White thinks of “Passover,” he thinks of asking for his favorite, and thus triaf, dish: “please Passover the lobster-ham casserole with extra cheese.” He washes this down with a tall glass of luke-warm RC cola.

When Buddhists advocate “oneness with all,” they are sure to include that provision that Martin White is not included.

Martin’s favorite movie is “Life Aquatic.”

Martin considers “disco” to the pinnacle of western popular culture, second only to physiognomy.

Martin White gets all his news from Fox News.

Martin White has been kicked out of several Hindu religious events for inappropriately fondling the more ample features of some of their deities.

In Swahili, “Martin White” roughly translates to “malevolent goat man” and is used to scare small children and domesticated animals with great effect.

Martin White voted for George W. Bush, twice. OK, OK, that’s not true. He isn’t that bad.

Martin White is on CLR.

Edley or Not Here I Come

Second liveblogging of a talk by Dean Edley.

-- I want to note that there is no food provided. I just purchased a salad for $89 at Zeb. BTLJ will probably be serving lobsters.

-- UC Berkeley chancellor claimed that the mission of a public school is for a world-class education for the masses at a bargain. Edley replied, "That's not Boalt's mission" because Boalt is selective and it is not at a bargain. If that's not the mission then what is the mission of a public law school? This is the key to Boalt's campaign. Edley wants to make the case to public and alumni about the need for (a) lawyers and (b) a public school for lawyers. (cf. VC guest-blogger).

-- Berkeley serious about (1) diversity (2) interdisciplinary approach utilizing main campus and (3) and resources.

-- Why are we ranked 11 on US News but have a reputation ranking of 6? Short answer is resources. Michigan and VA got serious about resources 15 years ago. They recognized that state governments woul dnot subsidize. Michigan and VA are about 5-8K more than Boalt. Harvard and Stanford about 12K more. We are spending less than our competitors because we are getting less. We spend $31K per student while top 10 publics average $36K and top 10 privates even more. State support has shrunk in last few years. Almost dollar for dollar increases in fees have gone to cover the cuts and not to make the school stronger. DE thinks we've turned the corner in the budget mess. There is a deal between UC, Gov and Leg. In mid 90's PDF (Professional Degree Fee) instituted to attract new resources to these schools. Regents and Leg decided to cut state fees and allow schools to use PDF to cover cuts. DE: "As you can see this was like cocaine. They tasted it, they liked..." DE is trying to get them to kick the habit. DE has also requested specific increase in PDF for fin aid use.

-- We spend more of our budget to fin aid than competitors. But we are not targetting as we should. Fin Aid now used to reduce tuition for as many people as possible rather than targetting students who really need aid and giving them really sweet deals.

-- Student Faculty ratio lagging. We've been filling the whole on the cheap by hiring lecturers and adjuncts. In the last two years we've been making ground in this area, but the idea is to sustain it. Relatedly, the course offerings have gone through the roof.

-- Case for the Campaign:

(a) Faculty -- Help build momentum and secure the brightest stars for an ever expanding curriculum. Wants to expand faculty from 50 to 72 in the next 4-5 years.

(b) Students -- continue to have most generous fin aid plan of any school. Continue to give students freedom of career choice on the back end.

(c) Facilities -- Classrooms need to be improved and more office and research space necessary. New building model. It will be located between Cell Block B(oalt) and Haas Castle. Building will have two wings (Haasr and Boalt wings) with the center having a ground floor to serve as a Piazza with opera style seating [Ed. Note: Opera style seating? Don't get me wrong, I love to listen to a bunch of Haasholes speak as if they own the world, but opera style seating?]. The building like a pyramid steps down the hill.

(d) Research -- Need to expand multi-disciplinary research centers. BCLBE (pronounced Bicklebee, Law, Business, and Econ); BCLT; Global Challenges and the Law; Center for the Studey of law and society; Public law and governance; Center for Social Justice; Kadish Center on Law and Philosophy; YYY Institute (something on healthcare policy); ZZZ Center (misc)

These ambitions will cost $500 million. Since we don't have the cash up front, we need to find a way of financing the portions of this program. The capital campaign will cover about $100 million of the cost. He has specifics about what pieces of the program the capital will cover. DE also wants state to increase funding of faculty slots.

-- Last set of fee increases - About a year ago DE asked Chancellor for a $1500 increase in PDFs. DE wanted to use the money for rennovations and fin aid. Regents decided to increase for its own purposes. Only $750 will go to the school. There is a consensus among the Regents that the pro schools cannot be expected to subsidize the rest of the system. In November UCOP will present a three year plan for the Pro schools.

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

-- Something inaudible about how fin aid works.
-- DE: Boalt still has less debt burden than other schools. Plus it's hard to convince the Regents that a farmworker in Fresno should subsidize someone who will go to private practice.

-- Priorities in re $500 million?
-- DE: Not until financial reality sinks in. At Harvard alumni don't give to loan forgiveness program. If pattern holds here, then that program will be funded by tuition. But Boalt alumni different and if they are willing to give then he will reconsider fin planning.

-- If we request fee increases, then what incestive does the Leg have to increase funding down the road?
-- DE: Central campus assured uas that we can eat what we kill. Or I guess we can eat what we grow.

[several questions omitted]

-- Thanks for all that you do but why the dip in minority enrollment?
-- DE: No clue. Our competitors increased fees more than we did. We're going to send out a questionaire to get feedback.

-- What can students do?
-- DE: Call to solicit money. Go on trips to get alumni to donate (e.g. to alumni chapters).

-- UCLA relationship?
-- Dean Schill (sp?) and DE are joined at the hip. Along with Carnesale. A little friction for stealing their best faculty, but they are pushing for changes together.

[Aside form the building model, this really did not offer anything not covered in previous talk. I will add in links and further comments later on]