The Ivey Files

Justice Blackmun may be famous for having authored the majority opinion in Roe v. Wade, but he's also famous for the "sappy" 1972 baseball antitrust decision Flood v. Kuhn, which exempted baseball from antitrust laws just because baseball is, well, special:

[Flood v. Kuhn] begins with a hopelessly sentimental ode to baseball and a long list of best players who "sparked the diamond" through the national pastime's glorious history. It was so sappy that two justices in the majority refused to join that section of the decision.

How bad and sappy? The blurb above, from a Tony Mauro article about the decision in today's Legal Times, doesn't really capture the florid wretchedness of Blackmun's writing in this opinion, which deserves some kind of bad writing award (on top of legal reasoning so poor that it stands as an embarrassment to lawyers everywhere):

Then there are the many names, celebrated for one reason or another, that have sparked the diamond and its environs and that have provided tinder for recaptured thrills, for reminiscence and comparisons, and for conversation and anticipation in-season and off-season.... [See entire list of players below.*] And one recalls the appropriate reference to the "World Serious," attributed to Ring Lardner, Sr.; Ernest L. Thayer's "Casey at the Bat"; the ring of "Tinker to Evers to Chance"; and all the other happenings, habits, and superstitions about and around baseball that made it the "national pastime" or, depending upon the point of view, "the great American tragedy."

So along came a controversial and best-selling book by Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong called The Brethren (if you're applying to law school and haven't read it, you should, along with Jeffrey Toobin's forthcoming The Nine and Jan Crawford Greenburg's Supreme Conflict). The Brethren, which was overall very hostile to Blackmun, included a few sentences about the fact that Blackmun hadn't listed any black players in the first draft of his opinion and added them only at the behest of Thurgood Marshall. We were supposed to conclude that Blackmun was a bigot.

Turns out, "the story is false," according to Ross Davies in a recent interview with the Legal Times about an article he published in the current edition of the Journal of Supreme Court History entitled "A Tall Tale of The Brethren." (Ross is a professor at George Mason Law School, editor of the endlessly entertaining Green Bag, author of a new law school ranking called The Deadwood Report, and my former law review boss.) Ross's research shows that the infamous first draft omitting black players never existed.

Eagle-eyed readers of Ross's article might notice that this is not a battle of anonymous sources, as is so often the case, particularly with Woodward. The authors of The Brethren claimed to have relied on an actual draft of the purportedly all-white document, and they have yet to produce it. (See in particular pages 11-12 and 20-23 in Ross's article.)

What else can we take away from the Flood decision? As Brad Snyder, lawyer and author of a book about Curt Flood, explains in the Legal Times interview: "Even the best judges turn into pennant-waving schoolboys when they decide cases about sports."

* Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Tris Speaker, Walter Johnson, Henry Chadwick, Eddie Collins, Lou Gehrig, Grover Cleveland Alexander, Rogers Hornsby, Harry Hooper, Goose Goslin, Jackie Robinson, Honus Wagner, Joe McCarthy, John McGraw, Deacon Phillippe, Rube Marquard, Christy Mathewson, Tommy Leach, Big Ed Delahanty, Davy Jones, Germany Schaefer, King Kelly, Big Dan Brouthers, Wahoo Sam Crawford, Wee Willie Keeler, Big Ed Walsh, Jimmy Austin, Fred Snodgrass, Satchel Paige, Hugh Jennings, Fred Merkle, Iron Man McGinnity, Three-Finger Brown, Harry and Stan Coveleski, Connie Mack, Al Bridwell, Red Ruffing, Amos Rusie, Cy Young, Smokey Joe Wood, Chief Meyers, Chief Bender, Bill Klem, Hans Lobert, Johnny Evers, Joe Tinker, Roy Campanela, Miller Huggins, Rube Bressler, Dazzy Vance, Edd Roush, Bill Wambsganess, Clark Griffith, Branch Rickey, Frank Chance, Cap Anson, Nap Lajoie, Sad Sam Jones, Bob O'Farrell, Lefty O'Doul, Bobby Veach, Willie Kamm, Heinie Groh, Lloyd and Paul Waner, Stuffy McInnis, Charles Comiske, Roger Bresnahan, Bill Dickey, Zack Wheat, George Sisler, Charlie Gehringer, Eppa Rixey, Harry Heilmann, Fred Clarke, Dizzy Dean, Hank Greenberg, Pie Traynor, Rube Waddell, Bill Terry, Carl Hubbell, Old Hoss Radbourne, Moe Berg, Rabbit Maranville, Jimmie Foxx, Lefty Grove.

For an unrelated discussion of Blackmun's list of players by law professor/baseball fan/former Hall of Fame scholar-in-residence, see this 2006 article by Roger Ian Abrams.

Good friend Chioma Isiadinso, formerly on the admissions board at Harvard Business School and founder of her own MBA admissions consulting firm Expartus, just came out with her first book: The Best Business Schools' Admissions Secrets. Find Chioma at one of her speaking events here.

One of the hardest things to sort out in law school is whether to choose a litigation or transactional career. Law school training (at least the required part) is notoriously biased in favor of litigation, so the burden is on law students to figure out whether they want to default into a litigation career or seek out training for a transactional practice.

Prof. Jeff Lipshaw has some great postings on how to go about deciding whether transactional law is a good fit. Check them out here and here.

By the way, you are forgiven if you are a law student and don't even know what a transactional practice is. (And when transactional work is slow at law firms, as is the case on a fairly cyclical basis, even first-year lawyers walk the halls asking themselves, "What's a 'deal' anyway?") Prof. Kenneth Klee has written a great paper on transactional law, and you can also check out Columbia Law School's transactional program (arguably the best around) to get a sense of what's involved.

Note, too, that transactional work can get very specialized. For example, my old law firm (Irell & Manella) has sub-groups focusing on art transactions, intellectual property transactions, and IPOs and private placements (among others).

Edited to add: Prof. Lipshaw kindly sent this follow-up to his original posting, with an emphasis on in-house counsel positions. I have a posting on in-house roles here as well.

It's depressing that I have a whole blog category called "Cheating," but there you go.

From BusinessWeek:

More than 1,000 prospective MBA students who paid $30 to use a now-defunct Web site to get a sneak peak at live questions from the Graduate Management Admissions Test (GMAT) before taking the exam may have their scores canceled in coming weeks. For many, their B-school dreams may be effectively over.

On June 20, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia granted the test's publisher, the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC), a $2.3 million judgment against the operator of the site, Scoretop.com. GMAC has seized the site's domain name and shut down the site, and is analyzing a hard drive containing payment information.

GMAC said any students found to have used the Scoretop site will have their test scores canceled, the schools that received them will be notified, and the student will not be permitted to take the test again. Since most top B-schools require the GMAT, the students will have little chance of enrolling. "This is illegal," said Judy Phair, GMAC's vice-president for communications. "We have a hard drive, and we're going to be analyzing it. If you used the site and paid your $30 to cheat, your scores will be canceled. They're in big trouble."

Read the rest of the article here. 

The front page of today's Boston Globe has a story about how July is just around the corner, but "a startling number of incoming freshmen are still torn over their college plans," and "some waitlisted students still hold out hope they will get into their top-choice school, while others who have already been accepted are not sure they can afford theirs." Multiple deposits are alive and well, no doubt.

As painful as it is, some of this soul-searching should have happened earlier in the process, and better late than never. It's healthy to be questioning whether $50,000 a year makes sense to attend some colleges.

More on the hell of waitlists here and here, and on bling-bling college tuitions here and here and here.

A short TV interview I had done on the subject aired today -- watch it here.

Always the innovator in one of the most sclerotic and hidebound industries on the planet, Northwestern Law School will be offering a 2-year JD, as reported in today's Chicago Tribune.

Even more exciting is that the 2-year JD students will be the first to take newly required classes in accounting, finance, and statistics. I have long told rising 1Ls that the best class they can take while in law school is financial accounting. You shouldn't even be sitting on a local PTA board without being able to read a financial statement, let alone work as a lawyer.

From the article:

"We don't intend to put out a generation of accountants or business analysts, but we do hope to put into the workplace alumni who have a better grounding in the kinds of issues that they will face from their client's perspective," said Mascherin, a Northwestern alumna and member of one of the focus groups that helped shape the new curriculum. "Clients don't like lawyers who can spout legal analysis but can't do strategic analysis."

Expect lots of sniping from other top law schools. Unlike other top schools, though, Northwestern requires work experience, and someone who has already been out in the working world will have a much clearer and more targeted idea about what he wants out of his legal training than your typical college senior. In any event, the market for legal talent will soon tell us how graduates of the 2-year program stack up against their 3-year counterparts.

I say: Northwestern rocks.

It's an interesting day when a fifty-something federal judge commits the same sins as the Say Everything generation. Remember this awesome article from New York magazine a while back?

Kids today. They have no sense of shame. They have no sense of privacy. They are show-offs, fame whores, pornographic little loons who post their diaries, their phone numbers, their stupid poetry—for God’s sake, their dirty photos!—online. They have virtual friends instead of real ones. They talk in illiterate instant messages. They are interested only in attention—and yet they have zero attention span, flitting like hummingbirds from one virtual stage to another.

Turns out, the Hon. Alex Kozinski, chief judge of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, got busted posting his own dirty pictures online. He's no technophobic octogenarian, either. He's very tech-savvy, so it's a weird mistake coming from him. Password protection just isn't that hard.

The timing, for my modest purposes, couldn't be better. This past season, a number of applicants have written me because they've gotten into a spot of trouble after posting things online that they shouldn't have. Sure, they use cutesy handles to hide their identities on discussion boards, but as Prof. Brian Leiter reminded us in the wake of the AutoAdmit discussion board scandal (see here and here), posters are just two subpoenas away from having their identities exposed.

Will Kozinski survive this scandal? Yeah, probably. He's a bigwig. Mere mortals generally don't.

Learn from Judge Kozinski, young grasshoppers. (And from Whole Foods CEO John Mackey.) Don't assume you have any real privacy online. You don't.

Edited to add: Updates here and here.

Our college counselor Christine reports from Silicon Valley:

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“I would give my left testicle for my son to get into Harvard.”

Appalling? Absolutely. Actually said? You bet.

Madeline Levine, a psychologist in Marin County, California and author of The Price of Privilege: How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage are Creating a Generation of Disconnected, Unhappy Kids, shared this quote from a patient’s father during a recent talk I attended in Palo Alto, California. Her point was clear – the stress wealthy communities put on kids is inappropriate and unhealthy. In some cases it is even killing them.

As the parent of three little ones, I left the talk feeling almost ill. Levine pointed out the skyrocketing suicide rates among young teen girls, how school, homework, and structured activities fill up 16 hours and more a day for your average high schooler, and how the craziness of traveling sports teams for kids starts as young as 7 and 8 years old.

Kids like those Levine treats used to have it made. They had involved parents, comfortable homes, and lived free from financial concerns. In the last decade, though, these upper-middle class teens have shown shockingly high rates of mental illness. It used to be that depressed kids looked depressed – poor hygiene, sucky grades, behavioral problems in school. Now the kids in Levine’s office have acceptances to Stanford and Princeton in hand. They look like they have it all together – until they lift their shirt sleeves and you see the cutting marks.

My read on this – based on reading Levine’s book and on spending the last 8 years parenting in Silicon Valley – is that more and more parents in elite communities view their children as products to be perfected. Sending a kid to the Ivy League is like having your initial public offering outperform all market expectations.

None of this is to say that aspiring to raise kids who are academically successful is bad in and of itself. My own progeny are the IPOs of two Ivy League-educated parents. It wouldn’t surprise me if they were academically able enough to attend elite schools someday. I certainly won’t discourage them. Levine’s point is that the problem comes when the child’s identity – and that of their parents – revolves completely around achieving that dream. If they want to be a lifeguard, a pirate, and a lawnmower man (my kids' current aspirations at 7, 5, and 2), I feel like my job is to help them be the best they can be. Well….maybe not the pirate.

Many of the things Levine recommended to save our kids I am already doing – trying to ensure that my kids get good sleep, trying to lay off the pressure. I just wonder how to maintain this when it seems like I am a fish swimming upstream. It’s hard to not worry that your kid is missing out when everyone else is spending the summer at tutoring centers and language immersion camps and you know yours will be eating popsicles and playing in the backyard sprinklers.

The only positive? More than 1,000 Palo Alto area parents turned out for Levine’s speech. Perhaps we can start a trend.

Mary Abraham, who blogs about knowledge management at law firms, writes:

I can't wait until Generation Y lawyers start flooding through the doors of big law firms. We're told that just about everything about Gen Y runs counter to the work ethic and environment of these firms. So a showdown is inevitable. It will be very interesting to see which force prevails.

I'd put my money on Big Law. All this talk about "Gen Y works to live" just doesn't reflect the weakness of any twenty-something, of any generation, in the face of six-figure paychecks right out of school. Are they all tempted? Of course not. And they're not all in the running for those big paychecks either; most people don't even come close. Still, unless there's a fundamental change in the business model of Big Law, or a big drop in the number of law school students graduating with boatloads of debt, Big Law will continue to have the leverage. (I've written more on that here and here and here.)

Of course, retaining their associates is a different matter entirely, and Big Law will continue to get clobbered on the retention front.