Marquette University Law School Faculty Blog

What Should Be Done with Legal Education? (Part IV)

Post author:Michael Ariens
Post published:January 18, 2010
Post category:Legal Education

One of the “hot topics” at the 2010 annual meeting of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) in New Orleans was the topic of “assessment.” The ABA has traditionally approved law schools based on inputs (LSAT/UGPA scores of enrolled students, student-faculty ratio, number of volumes in the library, etc.) rather than on outputs. This in part was a consequence of the already-existing output of the bar exam (though not for Wisconsin). Theoretically, if a school had a poor bar passage rate, it would surely end up going out of business. That hasn’t happened, anywhere. Law schools don’t go out of business; they simply shift to survival mode when necessary. The ABA several years ago added a Standard (these are the criteria used by the ABA in determining whether to approve or re-approve a law school, which permits the graduates of those law schools to take the bar exam in any state) requiring law schools to meet several criteria regarding first-time bar passage rates. However, those criteria were easily avoided. Additionally, the struggle of graduates of historically black law schools with the bar exam made the ABA leery of creating a Standard that might apply in a manner that discriminated in effect even though not in purpose. Now the ABA has a new idea: assessment of outputs other than the bar exam.

Assessment of what law graduates know and what they can do is a good thing. But if history is any judge, it likely will turn out to be bad for both law schools and law graduates.

Seventh Circuit: Earlier Sentence Served in Juvenile Detention Facility Can Make Defendant a Career Offender

Post author:Michael M. O'Hear
Post published:January 17, 2010
Post category:Circuit Splits Criminal Law & Process Federal Criminal Law & Process Federal Sentencing Seventh Circuit

seventh circuit After pleading guilty in federal court to various drug-trafficking offenses, Isaiah Gregory received an eye-popping sentence of 327 months in prison — more than 27 years behind bars. Driving this extraordinary sentence was the district court’s finding that Gregory was a “career offender” under the federal sentencing guidelines. It was the career offender guideline that raised Gregory’s guidelines range from either 120-135 months (as he calculated it) or 121-151 months (as the government calculated it) to 262-327 months. Thus, the career-offender finding likely added more than fourteen years to Gregory’s sentence.

Although the term “career offender” may conjure up images of a hardened criminal with a rap sheet down to your knees, the guidelines require only two prior felony convictions of either a crime of violence or a controlled substance offense in order to trigger the career-offender sentence enhancement.

Even at that, Gregory hardly seems the sort of defendant that the Sentencing Commission must have had in mind when it drafted the career-offender guideline. In particular, one of his two qualifying convictions was a $30 robbery he committed when he was only fifteen (he is now in his mid-20’s) — a robbery for which he was sent, not to prison, but to a juvenile detention facility. Although it is not clear that the conviction should have counted under the plain terms of the career-offender guideline, the Seventh Circuit nonetheless affirmed his sentence last week in United States v. Gregory (No. 09-2735).

Contract Rights Under Assault

Post author:Matthew Fernholz
Post published:January 16, 2010
Post category:Business Regulation Corporate Law Legal Ethics Negotiation Political Processes & Rhetoric President & Executive Branch

In 1789, as the inchoate American government was climbing out of the mountainous debt left over from the Revolutionary War, a thorny political problem emerged. While most of the chattering class was consumed with the debate over whether the states’ war debt should be federalized, another far more visceral controversy arose. Because the Continental Congress lacked funds during the war, the Revolution was funded partly by wealthy private citizens who invested in bonds. As a result of the lack of governmental money, many American soldiers were given worthless IOUs at the end of the war, as states scampered for a way to give the patriots their back pay. Many of these soldiers panicked, and sold their IOUs to speculators for as little as fifteen cents on the dollar. The problem was, once the federal government began repaying the debt, the value of the bonds soared. So who should get the money: the patriots who fought bravely for their country and only sold the IOUs because of fear they would get nothing from their government, or the speculators?