Ignorant Idiot of the Week: David Ziemer

I've heard Wisconsin has pretty low bar admission standards (e.g., if you graduate from Marquette or U. of Wisconsin, you don't have to sit for the Wisconsin test), but little did I know one could practice, teach CLE, and write for the Wisconsin Law Journal without even being able to fully comprehend what they read.

Yet, today I've been proven wrong. Enter David Ziemer. David has chosen - about 2 weeks late, mind you - to chime in on the New York Times piece, and to do so in colossally ignorant fashion:

The thesis of this awful piece of drivel is that law school is “three-card monte, with law schools flipping the aces and a long line of eager players, most wagering borrowed cash, in a contest that few of them can win.”

Exhibit A in the article is a recent law school grad who has more than $250,000 in student loans and can’t find a job...

Ziemer then spends five paragraphs talking about Michael Wallerstein (Ziemer doesn't even have the human decency to name the poor guy) and slamming his life choices and attitude. This is somewhat fair game, IMO, as I, like others, don't think Wallerstein was the best spokesman for sympathy from anyone.

But even though a 4th-grader could tell that Wallerstein is merely a frame for an article chock-full of other damning statements, statistics, and anecdotes, and a general theme that transcended Wallerstein, Ziemer calls the piece "awful" "drivel," seemingly because of its focus on Wallerstin.

Which makes it all the more curious that he AGREES with the basic, broad premise of the piece:

But instead, the thesis of the article is that somehow the law schools are at fault, because they lie to prospective students about the job prospects of their graduates.

I’m sure they do. But it is not as if this is news. It’s been common knowledge for years that graduates of fourth-rate law schools have few options.

So David is "sure" the law schools lie about their job prospects, and yet the piece was "drivel?" And if it's "not...news" and has "been common knowledge for years," why did the New York Times piece create such an impact? Why have so-called "scam-bloggers" like TTR and FTT faced highly-skeptical reactions? And David, why are you ignoring the commentary in the article about schools like Georgetown lying about their job prospects?

Could you be any more pompously contradictory? It can't be common knowledge if people are shocked by it, unless he meant "common knowledge in the legal community," at which point I have to ask why he and others kept their mouths shut, or why he thinks a piece is "awful drivel" that calls a spade a spade.

But of course David has a solution to this problem: hard work.

Listen to what this ass-clown writes:

As readers of the Wisconsin Law Journal, you are all more sophisticated than the naïve readers of the Times, so I don’t need to explain how real life works to you; but I’m going to do it anyway, lest someone pondering law school comes across this column.

You sign up for the LSAT, you study for it, and you take the test. If you do well enough to get into a good law school, you go. Then, you work very, very hard.

If you do not do well on the test, or if you’d rather play beach blanket bingo in San Diego or the Riviera than study hard, then you find something else to do with your life.

Yet the Times apparently thinks I should feel sorry for those who don’t understand this.

Good God! Talk about missing the point entirely!

The whole point of the NYT article, the so-called "scamblogging" movement, the whole ball of wax here is that kids who do very well on the LSAT and do very well in a good law school are still getting screwed. Do you really not understand that, David? Are you really that dense? There are Georgetown graduates out of work. There are Duke graduates who have to take temporary jobs basically bought by the school. Last year's Law Review Editor-in-Chief at a top-70 school is unemployed.

Those students obviously did well enough to get into selective schools, and they worked hard enough to either graduate a T-14 or make law review; although it may have been different in your day (given your reading ability, David, I doubt you really worked that hard in law school), you have to work hard to be the Editor-in-Chief on a law review. These kids aren't going to the Riviera or the beach.

The New York Times piece is full of insight into a variety of factors, causes, and ramifications of the current law school climate. It is the most objective piece yet written on a subject that had previously existed outside of the general public's radar. This is precisely what journalism is about.

Somehow David Ziemer read that lengthy, thorough piece as a sympathy call for one single student (whose story was irrelevant to the substance of the article) that was "awful drivel," whose revelations were "common knowledge" even though they meet no definition of "common knowledge." And then he has the douchebag audacity to suggest that Segal lacked "perception" and that the Times has a "naive" readership.

With analysis such as this, there is a pretty damned good reason David Segal works for the New York Times and David Ziemer writes lame, ignorant, psuedo-snarky pieces for the Wisconsin Law Journal.

What a moron.