April Fools, UVA Students, No Jobs for You, Either

You know the employment situation is dreadful when a supposed top law school's newspaper runs an article claiming the law school will found a firm for unemployed graduates called "MMMJK (named after some of Virginia's Deans and Professors):"

“We’re very serious about MMMJK,” said Dean Paul Mahoney. “Because they will be full equity partners in this groundbreaking venture, the faculty will be incentivized to teach actual law and practical skills rather than meaningless abstraction. More importantly, we’ll be able to leverage faculty expertise and our unusually strong clinical programs in order to hit the ground running in terms of our junior associates’ workload.” In light of this strategy, the firm is expected to have especially strong practices in the areas of Supreme Court litigation, feminist legal theory, and international human rights law.

Well done.

What isn't as funny is that Sen. Barbara Boxer is now calling on the ABA for change. I hope other members of Congress follow suit and start investigating the ABA's practices and not only how we got into this mess, but what kind of negligent mismanagement led us here.

Law School of the Day: Ave Maria

In the wake of Villanova admitting that they "lacked character and fitness," shall we say, I find it necessary to give credit to a law school administration who appears to be doing things right.

I've previously disparaged Ave Maria; in one comment on another blog I remember naming it as a bottom-five law school on the grounds that it moved to a completely different region of the country (granted, they left Michigan, but seriously, who does that?).

But not only was Ave Maria the first school to agree to the reasonable requests of law school transparency, today it announced that it was freezing tuition rates - again - for next year:

Ave Maria School of Law announced Monday that it will freeze tuition for the 2011-12 academic year. It’s the second consecutive year the Naples-based institution has kept its rate flat.

Is there tuition still high as a kite at a Charlie Sheen all-nighter, all things considered? Yes, of course. But in a world where tuition rates vastly outpace the CPI, leveling tuition is an act worth beatification. This is undoubtably a positive that reflects well on Ave Maria's administration in comparison to many of its peers (and many schools regarded as significantly better).