Corp Law Blawg has a new web location, with an RSS feed. Looks like more refugees are streaming out of Blogger. Expect long delays at the border check points.
8:38:06 PM
Tom Mighell reports that 6 of the 10 members of the first graduating class of the Concord Law School have passed the bar exam. Congratulations to them.
Ah, law schools. Concord is an interesting concept, as the MSNBC story about it reveals
"Concord Law School... opened with much fanfare at the height of the dot-com craze. The school was launched in 1998 by Kaplan, the standardized test preparation company...
At Concord, students attend lectures as in traditional schools, with an average class size of 35. Lectures are heard over streaming audio in real time; certain guest lectures are also available by video at any time. Broadband Internet connections help, but they are not required...
Concord is not perfect: To begin with, the school isn’t approved by the American Bar Association. The ABA has no provision for approving schools that offer their entire curriculum online, a spokeswoman said. That might hurt some graduates’ careers, as some jobs require applicants to hold a degree from an ABA-approved law school, and some states insist on the ABA seal of approval before graduates can take the bar exam. "
No surprise that it isn't approved by the ABA. One of the requirements of ABA approval is a respectable library. That is, one with lots of books.
I'm sure that the ABA has other reasons than just the lack of a library for not approving Concord, but it does raise an interesting question: is a real physical library really necessary for a law school? How much do current law students use books as opposed to the free Westlaw and Lexis access that they are given? One thing is certain: it's a lot less than when I was in law school. And one day soon, I suspect, the reliance on books will be minuscule.
I wonder what effect will that have on the ABA's approval formula? Having a respectable library with lots of books is one of the formidable costs in running a law school. But, if you do away with that cost, the "barrier to entry" in opening up a law school becomes a lot lower. Not that we need more lawyers, but maybe the cost of educating the ones that we produce could be a little lower.
Randy Barnett, an emminent legal scholar who is now a "columnist" over at the Volokh Conspiracy, has a nice post about the Privileges & Immunities Clause of the Constitution. It used to be that to get this sort of easy to understand legal explanation you'd have to pay for a hornbook, or some "poop" (speaking of which does the Emanuels series still exist?). Now it's free from a highly respected source, available right in your browser.
10:19:50 AM
From Denise Howell's unofficial transcript of the recent conference with luminaries such as the founders of Google (Larry Page and Sergey Brin), we get this statement from Larry Page:
Page: "I've been waiting for them to start teaching searching, alongside spelling, in school."
And then, serendipitously, from Tom Mighell's blog comes this post about learning better searching on Google:
"The MIT Technology Review has an article on Getting More from Google, with helpful tips for squeezing more information out of the search engine. I agree with the author -- most people don't want to learn these tips; they would rather just type a few words into the search box and take their chances with what they get.... "[via Inter Alia]
I agree that we should teach searching in schools, and it wouldn't have to be limited to Google. It hasn't taken my kids much prodding to grasp the concept that they can find things quickly with the computer. Then again, maybe the problem with teaching Internet searching is that there aren't enough teachers who would know how to "teach" this; perhaps the process doesn't lend itself to "formal education" because the target is moving too quickly.
But I can tell you that if my kids didn't know how to search the Internet, I'd be worried. It's a basic skill along with reading, writing and calculating.
