Infinite Loathing

Rumors about the legal profession’s demise have become so common lately that one can almost be faulted for not knowing its dismal state. The WSJ legal blog and Above the Law were among the earliest and most vocal critics of the profession’s future, but recently even the mainstream media have started banging the drum. Both [...]

I’m tired of talking about this, so I can only imagine how tired your must be of hearing about it. In my first post on this subject I argued that the USNWR rankings use LSAT scores in a way that is inappropriately self-reinforcing. In my second post, I argued that the use of lawyers’ and [...]

In my last post , I bemoaned USNWR’s law school rankings as being performative rather than merely descriptive; that is, I claimed that the rankings create and reinforce a hierarchy of law schools, rather than merely tracking an independently established hierarchy. I’m going to do more of the same here, but now I want to [...]

Every year when the U.S. News and World Report (hereafter USNWR) ranking of law schools comes out, I’m annoyed. Not just watered down drink, cold entree, stain on your new shirt annoyed either, but deeply existentially troubled. Riley just wrote a piece about the USNWR rankings and, in doing so, he brought it all back. [...]

A recent op-ed in the New York Times commented on the sources of genius.  We’ve traditionally thought of genius as something innate, an intangible kernel that allows an oddly chosen few to flourish while the rest of us toil in mundanity without any hope of reaching such heights.  The pathos, for example, of the film [...]