Shack Attack

Mission Complete; Law School Disaster Exposed

I've been following "Inside the Law School Scam" for years. A brave, long-running hit on the perfect storm of weak job market, rising tuition, and rampant denialism in the law school market, it spawned a great book, and I always try to send a link to any friends considering law school. 

ITLSS closed its doors recently, with this missive (slightly edited for length):

I began this blog one summer afternoon in exactly way I’ve started every other professional project I’ve undertaken which ever amounted to anything: without thinking about whether doing so would achieve anything worth achieving, or at least win the approval of important people.

I started it because I had something to say, and this seemed a good way of saying it. For a few days I wrote anonymously – something I had never done before – more as a stylistic experiment than anything else.  But naturally people in legal academia instantly became more concerned with Who Was Saying These Outrageous Things than in whether those things might actually be true.  So I dropped the mask -- which ensured that a few of those people would busy themselves henceforth with irrelevant personal attacks, rather than substantive responses. 19 months and 499 posts later, it turns out that the core message of this blog – that legal academia is operating on the basis of an unsustainable economic model, which requires most law students to borrow more money to get law degrees than it makes sense for them to borrow, given their career prospects, and that for many years law schools worked hard, wittingly or unwittingly, to hide this increasingly inconvenient truth from both themselves and their potential matriculants – has evolved from a horrible heresy to something close to conventional wisdom.

That enrolling in law school has become a very dangerous proposition for most people who consider enrolling in one is now, if not a truth universally acknowledged, something that legal academia can no longer hide, either from ourselves, or – far more important – from anyone who doesn’t go out of his or her way to avoid contact with the relevant information.

ITLSS has played a role in what can be without exaggeration called a fundamental shift in the cultural conversation.  How big of a role it’s not for me to judge. 

This blog is now the length of about four typical academic books.  Anyone who wants to browse through it will find posts touching on just about every topic related to legal education and the legal profession regarding which I have something to say.  Readers looking for a more concise statement can buy or borrow a copy of my book Don’t Go to Law School (Unless), either in paperback or e-book form.

All of which is to say that I’ve said what I have to say, at least in this format.  I’ll continue to write on this topic, both in academic venues, in the popular media, and even from time to time in blog form, at Lawyers, Guns and Money.   But the time has come to move on from here.

I’ve never written anything about the professional and personal price I ended up paying for starting to investigate, more than a year before I began this blog, the structure of contemporary American legal education. Perhaps I’ll tell that story someday.  For now I’ll merely note that if people enjoying the extraordinary protections afforded by tenure aren’t willing to confront institutional corruption, then academic tenure is an indefensible privilege.  

Farewell, and thanks for all you have done on this project.

Bruce Schneier vs. Kip Hawley: FIGHT!

Schneier is a well-known security blogger, and Hawley is the former head of the TSA. The motion on the table: "This house believes changes to airline security since 9/11 have done more harm than good." Moderator Adam Barne sets the stage:

Bruce Schneier, a security expert, is tasked with defending the motion. He says that neither the TSA nor its foreign counterparts have foiled a single terrorist plot in ten years, and that the security procedures put in place since 9/11 are not sufficient to stop well-financed, well-organised terrorists. He condemns developments in airport security as backward looking and overly specific, and argues for a return to the style of security in place before the 9/11 attacks, with money spent instead on investigation and emergency response.

He is opposed by Kip Hawley, who was the head of the TSA between July 2005 and January 2009. Mr Hawley defends the outfit, and says the ten years of safe flying it has overseen show that its methods are indeed working. He admits that the cost to passengers of increases in airport security has been great, but says these procedures are much more adaptable than their forebears, and that a programme made up of multiple layers of security, such as is being developed now, stands a greater chance of success.

Over the next ten days our guests will present further arguments and, I hope, answer the points made by their opponents. But the result of this debate rests in your hands: do not be afraid to vote immediately, as you can change your mind at any time. And once you have cast your vote, please add your voice to the debate and explain your decision. This debate may be American in tone—that is where the 9/11 attacks took place; that is where our debaters are from—but I would ask those of you familiar with airport security in other countries to take part with gusto, and make your experiences and opinions known.

Opening statements and rebuttals are already up, as well as fantastic moderator and audience comments. Very cool debate framework- kudos to The Economist. I look forward to seeing Hawley ripped to shreds. 

Just When You Thought Patent Jurisprudence Couldn't Get Any Worse...

Ars:

The case focuses on a patent that covers the concept of adjusting the dosage of a drug, thiopurine, based on the concentration of a particular chemical (called a metabolite) in the patient's blood. The patent does not cover the drug itself—that patent expired years ago—nor does it cover any specific machine or procedure for measuring the metabolite level. Rather, it covers the idea that particular levels of the chemical "indicate a need" to raise or lower the drug dosage.

The patent holder, Prometheus Labs, offers a thiopurine testing product. It sued the Mayo Clinic when the latter announced it would offer its own, competing thiopurine test. But Prometheus claims much more than its specific testing process. It claims a physician administering thiopurine to a patient can infringe its patent merely by being aware of the scientific correlation disclosed in the patent—even if the doctor doesn't act on the patent's recommendations.

This extraordinary claim prompted a broad coalition of public interest groups to write amicus briefs urging the Supreme Court to invalidate the patent and others like it. The American Association of Retired Persons and the American Civil Liberties Union both wrote briefs arguing the patent should be invalidated. The ACLU brief argued that regulating doctors' thoughts runs afoul of the First Amendment.

Justices Scalia and Breyer showed some skepticism that patents could cover the use of scientific correlations in medical practice. But the other justices expressed no such skepticism. At one point, Justice Kagan offered some advice to Prometheus's lawyer. "What you haven't done is say at a certain number you should use a certain treatment, at another number you should use another treatment," she said. "I guess the first question is why didn't you file a patent like that? Because that clearly would have been patentable. Everybody agrees with that."

(Full Post on Ars Technica)

These are the same people that let companies patent the "Buy it Now" button, refuse to address patent trolling, and caused the multi-billion-dollar portfolio war between electronics companies. This money isn't spurring innovation, it's quashing it.

If you haven't been following the patent fiasco, I highly, highly recommend the three-part This American Life series "When Patents Attack!" It's available for free online streaming or from the iTunes store. 

The Fizzling of Occupy St. Louis (or: Encampment Removal- Doing It Right)

Great news for the St. Louis PD; bad news for the movement:

The first thing they did was the one that baffled me the most, at first: they gave the protesters nearly 36 hours notice, as opposed to the 20 to 60 minutes' notice other cities gave. It has taken me almost a week, and the mistakes of several other cities, to see why that was a good idea, because here's how they did it. Early afternoon on Thursday, they gave the protesters 24 hours' notice: as of 3pm on Friday, the no structures in the plaza rule was going to be enforced, and as of 10pm, the curfew was going to be enforced. So, unsurprisingly, Occupy St. Louis put out a huge call for as many people as possible to come to the plaza by noon, to be trained in peaceful civil disobedience; local civil liberties lawyers showed up to brief them. Needless to say, the cops did not oblige them by showing up at 3pm. Heck, I knew they weren't going to show up at 3pm; no way were they going to snarl downtown traffic during rush hour; I told my friend not to expect them any earlier than 7pm at the very earliest.

So, when no cops showed up anywhere near 3pm, the protesters had their biggest rally to date (as I suspect the cops were thinking, "getting it out of their system"), and then started to drift away. Rally organizers advised people to be back before 10pm, to block the enforcement of curfew. Sure enough, by 10pm, they had 350 people down there. And scant minutes later, people were jazzed up and ready to go, because outlying scouts reported that the police were gathering, en masse, with multiple cars, multiple buses, an ambulance, and a firetruck, only a couple of blocks away!

And sometime around an hour, hour and a half later, the cops just disappeared, dispersed, without ever having gotten within two blocks of the plaza. So the confused protesters declared victory, let most of the troops go home, and fewer than a hundred of them bedded down for the night in their tents. An hour later, somewhere around 150 cops showed up. I'm sure people in those tents tweeted and text messaged and phoned for reinforcements. But between the late hour, and the fact that people were exhausted after having been out there all day, and that it was the third call-up of the day? Nobody showed.

Ah, but the cops did more than just show up after two head-fakes and with sufficient numbers ... they did right exactly what the Obama administration told everybody else to do wrong. They didn't show up in riot gear and helmets, they showed up in shirt sleeves with their faces showing. They not only didn't show up with SWAT gear, they showed up with no unusual weapons at all, and what weapons they had all securely holstered. They politely woke everybody up. They politely helped everybody who was willing to remove their property from the park to do so. They then asked, out of the 75 to 100 people down there, how many people were volunteering for being-arrested duty? Given 33 hours to think about it, and 10 hours to sweat it over, only 27 volunteered. As the police already knew, those people's legal advisers had advised them not to even passively resist, so those 27 people lined up to be peacefully arrested, and were escorted away by a handful of cops. The rest were advised to please continue to protest, over there on the sidewalk ... and what happened next was the most absolutely brilliant piece of crowd control policing I have heard of in my entire lifetime.

All of the cops who weren't busy transporting and processing the voluntary arrestees lined up, blocking the stairs down into the plaza. They stood shoulder to shoulder. They kept calm and silent. They positioned the weapons on their belts out of sight. They crossed their hands low in front of them, in exactly the least provocative posture known to man. And they peacefully, silently, respectfullyoccupied the plaza, using exactly the same non-violent resistance techniques that the protesters themselves had been trained in. Downtown bicycle patrol cops had spent weeks coming to the Occupy St. Louis general assembly and working group meetings, paying respectful attention and engaging people in polite conversation, listening intently; who knew that they weren't surveilling protesters, as some of us paranoidly assumed, they were seeing what the protesters had to teach them about tactics! A few of the protesters stayed for a couple of hours, to maintain the stand-off; the police uncomplainingly and politely continued their occupation of the plaza, flawlessly turning Occupy St. Louis's tactics back against them.

By dawn, the protesters were licked. They weren't just licked Friday night, they're almost certainly licked permanently, too. When the park re-opened Saturday morning, a few protesters gathered, caught unprepared with no signs or other gear, quietly discussing what to do. One of them went right to the center of the plaza and set up a tent. A couple of officers came by, engaged him in quiet conversation, and once everybody was calm, they pointed out to him that nobody else was joining him. He took the tent down.

Source: The Infamous Brad

A great protest should be a singular, powerful, shocking act that brings an obvious truth to the public eye. Rosa Parks, Martin Luther Kind, and other civil rights protesters didn't create the movement, they lent powerful words and images (in highly-planned, well-thought-out acts) to an idea already held by millions of Americans, articulable in a single sentence: "No one should be denied rights because of the color of their skin." 

Occupy Wall Street has some good ideas. They have some great ideas. They have some ideas, like taking financial regulation out of the hands of bank lobbyists, that are shared with the majority of Americans. But they don't have that single, universal truth they need to endure as a lasting movement. I hope we see them back in a month or a year or more, their ideas refined and reduced, with a message that speaks so clearly it cannot be ignored.

The OWS saga brought forth a tangential truth, though, one that I hope will spark its own, more powerful movement: citizens are not terrorists. No matter how annoying or unsanitary their encampments, no matter how misguided or disolute their message, they are free to share it, and you may not beat them, tase them, pepper spray them, or use anything but the minimum amount of force required to protect the public's right to their space. It's got all the elements of a good, viral, protest cause: logical (they're here to protect and serve, supposedly), universal (we've now seen police beat people of every age, gender, and color), and outrageous. The police are not the military, the 1st Amendment is not a terrorist creed, and we as a country cannot stand for beating the defenseless.

The Most Powerful Photos of 2011

The diffusion of cheap, powerful digital cameras has seriously raised the photojournalism bar. Buzzfeed's 45 picks are a crazy trip through last year. My favorites:

Dust storm "Haboob" in Phoenix, AZ:

Pepper spraying at UC Davis:

Scott Jones and Alex Thomas kissing during the Vancouver riots:

Christians protecting Muslims during prayers in Cairo:

Woman mouring damage in Miyagi Prefacture after the earthquake and tsunami.