GopherGrad

Closing the locks and installing the electricity barrier had no effect. Silver carp from poliscijobrumors have invaded our pristine waters and are whacking the fishermen in the head.

It seems pretty clear you're making all the right noises here. Paralegals do all right for themselves, especially if they can foster good relationships with the attorneys they support, and it's one of the best ways to understand the reality of legal practice. The knock-on benefits of working for a few years will surprise you, too. In terms of the substance of your question: I'm an attorney, not a paralegal, but I have some reactions. Your four-year degree will put you ahead of the pack and you should choose a school that requires one if only because those programs tend to be a tad shorter and assume some basic writing and research skills (so you'll be repeating less). I've never heard that ABA approval matters to being hired. That said, research research research the schools and placement records. Find the email addresses of a few law firms of the size you might like to work for one day (at a biglaw firm, the HR departments have recruiters, and that's where you want to look) and ask which school they prefer. And what else they look for. Talk to reps from both schools and see what they think the strengths of the program are. Etc. EDIT: One of the advantages you have in your attitude is that you are clearly aware that the purpose of this education is to get a job. If you end up in one of these programs, don't lose sight of that. Keep pestering career services and (within reason) law firms about what types of experience you need. Network. Network. Network. The job market sucks for everyone right now and while the path you've laid out seems well-considered, it still does not guarantee that you will avoid stagnation. Set yourself apart. Sometimes that means more than succeeding inside the box of your program. Meeting potential employers outside the HR mill is a great way to start that process.

If the weather is nice and you sleep on a park bench instead, can you make said grad student buy you a fifth of whiskey?

Sounds stressful, WB. I can sympathize with that sort of stranded away from what's important feeling. I hope things settle down for you, although (and I hope you don't take this the worng way) I'm excited about what seems to be happening in North Africa right now.

I'd believe the staggered acceptances, but there are four Columbia applicants on the board who have not received the supposed rejection. If they put out a big batch of email rejections, one of us would have one by now.

I'd guess fake, too, then.

I did and I don't have an email one way or the other, which is how both results were delivered. Interesting.

HEART ATTACK. The email from N'western was only a confirmation that my application is complete and under review. Edit: the status page says that decisions will be finalized by early March.

How is everyone hearing these things?

I have never been happier to feel like I have no shot.

Really excited for the positive results; none of my schools have hit the list, though. Tufs, yea or nay on Stanford, I've got lots of faith you're going somewhere great.

Most people on this board don't have any experience to judge for themselves the exact balance of the substance of a legal education, so they rely on the only person in the room who has some. Because your argument boils down to a great extent on trusting your opinion about legal education, it's natural to ask how informed that opinion is. Agreed. That doesn't mean that the substance of those topics is relevant to political science, though. Torts is a substantive course, too. Even when it is relevant, substantive offerings in such courses add up to a the depth of knowledge required to be qualified or competitive with Ph.D.s in terms of teaching those topics. You might call it a two-pronged test. What's really baffling is why you think I said any such thing, or why you think that argument is even relevant to your original question about the number of JDs teaching.

You haven't offered anything to verify. If my credentials or background are seriously in doubt, I can verify them to a poster we agree on.

You have not pointed to a single description that I have disputed. I'd love to see a description of a tort litigation course that includes material truly applicable to political science. ETA: "practical" and "substantive" are not exclusive, as you seem to suggest.

Ditto'd!

Blew. My. Mind.

Oh, FFS. A two-credit seminar? That's it? So. On one hand, you've got a Harvard lawyer that could make six figures doing just about anything related to law and he's taken two credits of political philosophy. On the other, you've got a Ph.D. who's highest paying job offer will probably be teaching and who has spent six years studying political philosophy. And you seriously have to ask why MOST people on polisci faculty are Ph.D.s?

See, when you make the debate about the substance of law courses, I'm inclined again to point out that you've never taken one. You said that plenty of JDs would disagree with my characterization of legal courses being mostly practical. If you can find one, let me know and I'll talk to him. You seem to base your intuition on legal coursework from watching The Paper Chase. Bruce Ackerman is not a tenured political science professor. He holds an office there by courtesy because he is one of the most thundering giants of Constitutional scholarship and litigation living in America today. If your argument is that someone like Bruce Ackerman is qualified and attractive to polisci departments to teach a ConLaw course here and there, you have the field. Congratulations. But law schools currently graduate 45,000 new lawyers a year. Very few are like Ackerman. We have all happily admitted that someone with only a JD and some other amazing, off-the-charts experience would make a great addition to polisci faculty. Your original question, after all, is why faculty are MOSTLY Ph.D.s. The half-dozen Bruce Ackermans in the world wouldn't tip the balances (in fact, those people are probably all on the balance already). Hardly. wtn is right; I'm having some fun with this, but hardly enough to list every objection, only to have you switch the goalpost from "qualified" to "competitive"* and back again. There are a couple on your list that make sense to me (International Law), but some of them don't even sound like polisci courses (Federalism? How many departments have undergrad courses specifically in American Federalism?) *Depending upon which of these you actually want to talk about, you'll get vastly different responses. I'm happily able to keep my time-wasting internet personality fully segregated from my work self. Except when I post at work.

WashU must blaze through their selection. I think their deadline was Jan. 15!

I'll play, I guess. Political Philosophy. I don't think any part of earning a JD would or could qualify a person to teach political philosophy. There are no courses in most legal programs that deal substantively with political philosophy. Knowledge of political philosophy would have to be gleaned almost entirely outside of the JD curriculum. Of the T20, Harvard has the largest class, largest faculty and largest selection of courses. Here is a link to Harvard's course catalog: http://www.law.harvard.edu/academics/courses/2010-11 Using this link or any other catalog, please name courses which are actually taught at law schools which would qualify a JD holder to teach political philosophy to undergrads. Please link to descriptions of those courses. Make an argument based on what is taught in your cited course and describe the content of the course you propose the JD would teach. If you would like, I would be willing to do the same for Harvard's KSG, highlighting courses in political philosophy that would lead to great enough knowledge to teach at the undergrad level.

Put another way, while it might be tempting to simply accept Troll's cynicism, isn't it also possible that Ph.D. programs have recognized that many students seek social science Ph.D.s in order to teach and therefore crafted a degree program to help them be better teachers? Isn't it also possible that most people recognize the different strengths of the different degrees, and so people who want to be lawyers are more likely to attend law school, while people who want to teach are more likely to pursue Ph.D.s? The fact that the Ph.D. to faculty process (and the J.D. to attorney process) create something of a feedback loop doesn't need to be (totally) self-serving and sinister. People get jobs by seeking out the training that leads to those jobs in basically all fields. As your argument has progressed, it doesn't just implicate Ph.D.s and academics, but the entire presumption that training and specialization leads to better and more productive professionals.

No. That has never been the argument. The argument has been that the average JD is not as qualified to do academic research as the average Ph.D. Obviously, some JDs can do amazing, exemplary things that would make them equally qualified to do academic research. But they need to be outside the norm for JDs to get there, which explains why more Ph.D.s get chosen than JDs. (No, I'm not maligning the JD. In fact, I think that getting into the very top law programs is far harder than getting into the top Ph.D. programs. An attorney's work is often harder than the work of an academic. Those students very clearly have the brains and work ethic to become social sciences profs. But they decided not to develop those skills, and simply being smart enough is not always enough to overcome a deficit of training.) Anyway, not that I totally disagree with Troll's cynical response, but it feels a little weird to me to level "guild" accusation in favor of lawyers. Lawyers created an obtuse legal system that hinges on specialized vocabulary and as a result the normal person can hardly access the system in a meaningful way. Lawyers created rules barring anyone from practicing law that hasn't entered the guild. It's totally illegal! If you want to aim your ire at self-serving and protective clan-occupations, your choice of lawyers as the downtrodden class was a really poor one.

For starters, SOG does not have a JD. I participated for awhile because I bang my head against the wall for a living and have found that there are some aspects of it I perversely enjoy. This type of head banging is, for a short while, slightly preferable to the type that results in a "private attorney general" complaint for consumer protection violations.

I'm tempted to register a few extra handles to "like" that more times.

Oh, so you'd trust an attorney on that score? Rim-shot!!