When Proggy Law Students Overvalue Themselves

Leftist law students at elite law schools tend to have oversized sense of self importance and the egos to match, not to mention a highly developed yet undeserved sense of entitlement.

They also, in a fit of TDS,  seem to have forgotten the dynamic of the employer-applicant relationship.

Forbes:  Law Students Push Back On Firms That Have Capitulated To Trump

This week, first year students at Georgetown Law were required to submit their final rankings of which law firms they most wanted to interview with—for summer associate jobs in 2026, after their second year. The hiring of summer associates hit an 11-year low last year, but these summer gigs are still highly coveted. That’s because they pay more than $4,000 a week and boost the chances students will snag a Big Law job paying $200,000-plus when they graduate after year three, assuming, that is, they excel in law school and don’t have a prestigious judicial clerkship or a public interest law job lined up.

But this year, the 1Ls (as first year law students are known) are confronting an unusual question: Whether or not to rank Skadden Arps; Paul Weiss; Milbank; and Wilkie, Farr and Gallagher among their choices. These four firms have one thing in common: They’ve bent the knee to Trump following the threat of, or the actual signing of, executive orders that aim to restrict their ability to represent clients with government contracts. All four have agreed, for example, to provide a combined total of at least $340 million in pro bono legal work for causes Trump favors and to swear off any “illegal” programs aimed at promoting diversity.

Read the article to see the entitlement inherent in the (rather privileged if one might borrow the term) leftism!

“The legal recruitment process is the only leverage that we really have to influence the behavior of law firms,” says Caleb Frye, a 33-year-old second-year law student and copresident of the Georgetown Law Energy Group

That's not how this works, verily that's not how any of this works. 

By not applying, you don't get considered for employment.  

Publicly announcing that you're a TDS-infected entitled brat who criticizes decisions of your potential employer and demonstrating you will noisily put your own interest ahead of your potential employers likely renders them as a less-than-desirable hire.

Seriously? And You Want To Practice Law?

Instapundit points to this real head-scratcher coming out of the Columbia Law School:

Powerline:  Not a parody

Columbia Law School is permitting students claiming to be impaired due to the emotional impact of recent non-indictments in the Michael Brown and Eric Garner matters to postpone taking their final exams.

Columbia, allegedly a first-tier law school, apparently has some real special snowflakes that need to postpone taking their exams to deal with the trauma of the grand jury decisions regarding Michael Brown and Eric Garner.  Not that they're relatives or anything like that, just because they are "particularly, but not only, students of color".

Columbia has even arranged for a trauma specialist to be available for those who can't handle the results of the two grand jury decisions, one of which, in the case of the Brown decision, was by all evidence quite correct.

Look, if you can't handle the outcome of an unfavorable judicial decision of which you were not even a part of and then you become so traumatized that you can't write an exam, you have no business practicing law or even planning to do so.

What are you going to do when you're representing a real client?  Ask for a timeout when you get an adverse decision? State you're too traumatized to go to trial?  Ask for a trauma specialist when the court rules against your motion for summary disposition? Your client will be rather unimpressed, as will the court.

Quick note kids:  In real life, a judge will not give you a hall pass due to unrelated judicial results in another state or even another court that doesn't affect your case.

Sorry, but Columbia should move down a few tiers for this idiocy if this decision is indicative of the caliber of student that they have.

Update: via Legal Insurrection, this insanity has spread to the delicate flowers at Harvard Law School as well.

You Know You're Getting Legally Old When....

I'm teaching a class on computer law and the night's lecture is on cyberspace and copyrights.

I begin with a general overview of copyrights and then start talking about the Sony safe-harbor decision.

The Sony Safe Harbor rule, which sprang out of the case of Sony v Universal Studios, essentially summarized, is that if a technological device is capable of mainly non-copyright-infringing uses, then it is not banned as a technology just because it might have infringing uses as well. This decision has had a profound effect on computer and home entertainment technology. In fact, the decision, so bitterly opposed by the MPAA, has resulted in their making massive revenues off the sale first of movies on Betamax and VHS tapes, and then on laser disc and DVDs.

Sadly, None of the law students in the class knew what the namesake of the safe harbor rule, the Sony Betamax even was.

None of them currently own a VCR.

At least all of them knew what Napster was, so we could analyze how the courts ruled that it didn't fit the Sony safe harbor.

Ah, a bunch of kids and Baby Sharks, the lot of them.