Discourse.net

I mentioned last week that there was some good news about the sequel to the University of Miami Law School Foreclosure Fellowship program. (See U Miami Law Foreclosure Fellowships 2009-2010 Final Report.) We placed eleven recent law graduates with a variety of organizations providing legal assistance to homeowners facing foreclosures. We helped a lot of people, and we also helped some of our graduates find jobs. The program died for lack of funding, but I'm glad to report that it has spawned a bigger, and I hope better, successor in the UM Law Legal Corps Fellowship Program.

Dean Patricia White has announced that she is, in effect, going to clone the Foreclosure Fellows program and expand it beyond fighting foreclosures to encompass a wide range of pro bono activities, and not just in Florida. The law school will pay students who pass a state bar after graduation a stipend of $2,500 per month for up to six months after graduation to do pro bono work. The plan — although I gather things are still a bit fluid — is to run a massively larger program than my eleven graduates, with the goal to reach perhaps as many as 100 new lawyers, or even more (the press release quoted below speaks of “more than 200 potential placements” but one can have more opportunities than takers).

As I understand it, details are still being worked out — including what students will have to do to qualify (although the press release suggests all graduates who pass a bar will be “eligible” it also speaks of those “qualified,” neatly leaving open the issue of whether it will take more than passing a bar to be qualified for a Fellowship), whether we can find a way to provide Fellows with affordable health insurance, the extent to which the law school will take on the responsibility of finding placements for the graduates, and the legal implications of each of these decisions for tax, malpractice, and other types of liability. I'm also a little unclear about how the out-of-state component will work. On the one hand, I think it's great to open up the program to out-of-state bar takers, who would then do pro bono work in the state where they plan to stay. On the other hand, it may be quite hard to arrange for the out-of-staters to participate in the planned “rigorous biweekly professional development sessions” either where they are located or remotely. Not to mention getting them CLE credit. But these are details, and good problems to have as they are the sign of an ambitious program taking off.

What I liked best about Dean's White's presentation of the idea to the faculty at a recent meeting is that she emphasized that her objective was to make the Fellowships both meaningful and prestigious — to match strong graduates with placements where their participation would result in good works; that her aim is to make the Legal Corps something that our graduates will brag about being a part of. That, I think, is a critical goal.

If this sort of thing takes off, I wonder if US legal education will end up with a de facto equivalent to a medical residency, or the UK barrister's pupilage and solicitor's articles. There are pluses (it can be very good training) and minuses (more time before the graduate starts earning a real salary) to these semi-apprenticeship models, but it's something to think about. Arguably, we've had something like that already with judicial clerkships (although they pay better) but we limited them to a small number of students.

Below I reprint the University of Miami School of Law's press release, issued today, announcing the Legal Corps program:

First there was the original ad that started it all

Then the Saturday Night Live parody version,

And then it all went very viral, very fast:

• The inevitable Monty Python treatment
• The Wizard of Oz version
• The Barbie Doll/Harry Potter version
• A post-modern cat does his bit
• The space alien version
• Christine O'Donnell, The Musical
• The Nixon angle
• And a silly chaser

David Rivera has a problem with the truth. A big problem. And the Miami Herald has Rivera in its sights.

We've known for some time that GOP Congressional candidate David Rivera (FL-25) was sort of weird and shifty, but the narratives were a little complex and weird. (Rivera ran a delivery truck off the road to prevent his opponent's mailers from getting to the post office? Rivera either was battering a woman or having an unknown doppelganger with the identical name who had a restraining order? Rivera was saying one thing in Spanish, then denying it English? Rivera was accused in an FEC filing of illegal campaign activities?)

But here comes something easy to understand: today's paper reports (Source of Rivera's income unclear) that Rivera has for years been getting money from a secret source that Rivera will not disclose. Yes, the one and only David Rivera in the Florida state legislature has either been lying on his sworn financial disclosure forms, or taking some kind of secret payoff, or both.

See, there's this money he has been saying for seven years that he gets in salary from consulting for the USAID, a federal agency. But the Herald discovered that USAID says it has never heard of him. Oh, says Rivera, I was a subcontractor. But I won't tell you for whom. I didn't mention the subcontractor in my sworn ethics disclosure form because the money originated at USAID (which I'm sure is an ethics violation right there). What, asks the Herald, did you actually do for USAID? I took trips like these, says Rivera, showing receipts of three trips to Mexico and Chile.

And here the Herald does real journalism: it looks into those trips and finds they were funded exchanges by the US State Department, on which Rivera got expenses and $200 per day – not the thousands he lists on his ethics forms. Oh, says Rivera, well those were just examples of what I did. And it goes round and round and round, including the creation of a possibly sham company in Puerto Rico (to launder the money?).

Somewhere in all this I lost track of the number of times the Herald caught Rivera lying, but it's a large number. And don't miss the last few paragraphs of the story, in which the Herald, purely deadpan, presents facts relating to large payments by previous Rivera campaigns, for what seems like not much, to a corporation that had a close relationship with his mother. At least he's a family man.

This Alex Sink 2-minute ad, Profits Over Patients: The Rick Scott Story, is hard-hitting and, I would hope, devastating.

Devastating, that is, unless TV viewers are inured to scandal…which is always possible in Florida. Polls in the Governor's race suggest a very close race.

It must be a cold cold day in the nether regions when I find myself substantially in agreement with ultra-right-wing activist Karl Denninger. Yet, his plan for dealing with the spiraling mortgage mess (incentivize quiet title actions on a mass scale) seems — at first glance — to have quite a lot going for it.

See What Must Be Done - Today. What do you think? Am I missing something other than the fact that our courts don't currently have the capacity to hear all these cases?

I think this is a very striking image:

Copyright © 2008 - Mirko Ilic Corp All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by Permission.

As I work on a blog redesign, it's one of my favorites for a theme. But unfortunately, both its verticality and its greenness make it hard to use; it looks like I'll end up with something a bit less striking, more soothing, and much more horizontal, as a banner.

The artist — whose work came to my attention because of this great image regarding court decisions supporting gay rights — very kindly gave me license to use it if I wanted to.

It is not easy to explain the debate over whether — were the FCC to reclassify broadband as a Tittle II service — Sec. 201 and 202 of the Communications Act of 1934, as amended, would then permit or require the agency to allow tiered services or whether net neutrality would/could survive. It's complicated, but grandmaster telecoms lawyer Harold Feld not only explains it in plain English, but manages to be really funny too. I hope he'll forgive my reprinting one of the better punch lines.

Wetmachine » Tales of the Sausage Factory » Sorry AT&T, Title II Would Not Require The FCC To Allow Paid Prioritization. So lets pretend we’re living now in the happy land where Genachowski has reclassified broadband access as a Title II service and the FCC is now trying to decide what actual rule to adopt for network neutrality. AT&T will show up with its precedents and say “Yo! FCC! See all these precedents? That means you need to let me do paid prioritization.” And I will show up and say “Yo, FCC, AT&T’s precedents are not in the least relevant to the actual technology or market situation applicable here. My precedents, requiring a complete ban on paid prioritization as inherently unfair and/or too hard to monitor for fairness are much more relevant. And besides, allowing paid prioritization would be bad policy.” (I expect to have more of them if we ever reach that point. Remember, this is a blog post.) Bob Quinn and his buddies, being good lawyers, will come back and reply: “Harold is so wrong. Not only are our precedents directly applicable and relevant, but his are utterly irrelevant and totally not applicable. And besides, Harold’s rule would be bad policy.” And we’ll go back and forth and eventually the FCC will make a decision, one of us will lose and will file an appeal, where we will get to argue whether the FCC did a good job and explained itself in a coherent way given the deference the court is supposed to show the agency. Unless the DC Circuit gets ahold of it, in which case they will just ask which side AT&T is on and go with them.

That last crack is maybe (maybe) less then utterly fair, but I was very glad I wasn't drinking something while I read it.

A former student writes,

I am happy to report that I landed a new job with the [federal agency name deleted] and so far everything is great. As part of my duties I am reviewing the entire [agency] rulemaking process and ensuring we follow the proper administrative procedures. I also provided rulemaking guidance and explained the feasibility of creating interim final rules to the [agency's] Under Secretary on a few issues and my recommendations actually led to a change in US negotiating policy [in something big and international]. So it's looking like your admin law class easily ended up being one of the most useful and practical and I often find myself looking at my class notes for guidance.

Of all the things I have ever taught, it is the Administrative Law course that students most often come back — several years later — and thank me for. While I'm happy to take some of the credit, I think most of it belongs to the intrinsic importance of the subject.

• It's very hard
• It's not on the bar exam
• No one makes TV shows about administrative law or administrative lawyers.

But law students take note: you should take Administrative Law before you graduate — ideally in your second year of law school, because it's a foundational course that will help you with many other subjects.

U.S. Senate candidate Sharron Angle told a crowd of supporters [last week] that the country needs to address a “militant terrorist situation” that has allowed Islamic religious law to take hold in some American cities.

So says the AP, in Angle: Muslim law taking hold in parts of US.

According to the AP, Ms. Angle was referring to … wait for it.. Dearborn, Michigan.

Dearborn, Michigan? Controlled by militant terrorist Muslims who want to deport all the other citizens of the town?

A spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations was really quite kind about it all, settling for calling Angle's demagoguery “incoherent bigotry”. How about, maybe, several sandwiches short of a picnic? Certifiable? Raving delusional? Unfit for public office? Yet Angle is leading in some polls in Nevada.

Time to dust off one of my favorite Thomas Jefferson quotes:

I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that His justice cannot sleep forever.

Then again, maybe Sen. Angle would be the retribution.

Eye on Miami has been reading the Miami Herald, and has learned that U Miami President Donna Shalala has changed.

It's true Shalala can be pretty scary at times, but I have never seen her in that headdress.

I laughed at this future-retro mashup:

(via SFDB, via The Daily Wh.at)

If, like most people who read this blog, you get the entry feed but not the comments feed, you might want to head over to the comments on The Burning Question.

They're heating up.

One of the most disturbing things I've seen online is this report, via Think Progress, Tennessee County's Subscription-Based Firefighters Watch As Family Home Burns Down.

When we've come to a state of mind in which firefighters will stand around and watch a house burn down either because they think it's the right thing to do — just deserts, you know, should have paid your $75 fire subscription — or because they believe themselves to be helpless pawns in a bureaucratic machine that has sapped their own morality and replaced it with a soulless role morality, either way, something banally evil is going on.

I am not blind to the long-run repeat game aspects of this transaction: without some way to sanction non-payers, the fire department will have trouble collecting its fee from those who see fires as low-probability events. One imperfect solution might be some kind of penalty fee — $1000? — for callouts to the non-payers, and maybe an hourly charge too.

Or, better yet, maybe we should just tax everyone for basic services like fire protection — and especially for those services where the decision to shirk may have negative externalities for the neighbors to whose houses the fire may spread. What a radical idea!

In fact, this is a classic collective action problem that government solves well. Is the world better off letting houses burn down (and next time perhaps with loss of life?) in the name of libertarian purity? No. No way. No how.

Got my refund; re-ordered from a different supplier. The package arrived Saturday.

The End.