lukegilman.com : The Blawgraphy

Life of a Law Student, University of Houston Law Center

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m deeply ashamed at how funny I found this. Curses, bluebook!

Filling a void inexplicably left by the U.S. News Rankings, SubtleDig posted Party Law School Rankings. UHLC came in 5th or 98th depending on how you look at it. Baylor Law had a trifecta with the top overall prize of the least partying law school, least happy student body, and Least Alcohol Consumption; Surely that’s a coincidence.

Above the Law picked up a video ad on the website of Dallas law firm Korn, Bowdich and Diaz in Adventures in Lawyer Advertising: Texas is a galaxy far, far away. In a service industry, the first rule of advertising should be - ‘be yourself’ so to KBD I say ‘use the force’.

Read the rest of this entry »

As noted on the Texas Bar blog, KERA public radio in DFW has put together a series called Texas Trailblazer, featuring two noted Texas lawyers - Judge Barefoot Sanders and Louise B. Raggio. Raggio’s segment is available below:

In the 1950s, married women in most states needed their husband’s permission for legal and business transactions. They couldn’t open their own bank accounts, sign contracts or control their own paychecks. Texas Trailblazer Louise Raggio tells the story of the Texas attorney who changed all that. Raggio went to law school to support her family after her husband returned from WWII emotionally shattered. She made history by leading the effort to draft and secure passage of the Marital Property Act of 1967 and became an icon in the struggle for women’s rights.

My favorite story from the interview:

Then in 1954 she got a call from then Dallas Court district judge Sarah Hughes. “Go down to see Henry Wade. He may have an opening. So I got myself fixed up and went down. He hired me. He told me a year later that he only reason he hired me is he figured I would fall flat on my face and he wouldn’t have to listen to Sarah Hughes any more. He didn’t realize that a woman could do the job.” A year later she was assigned to county criminal court. Her appointment made headlines as the first woman prosecutor in Dallas County.

Interestingly, both Louise Raggio and Sarah Hughes took their law degrees in evening programs, Hughes while working as a police officer.

It never ends does it? You start off with stars and stickers on your grade school quizzes, graduate to variations on the ’satisfactories’, check, check minus, check plus and such, then on to alphabet soup of high school and finally the 4 point scale of higher education. Once upon a time a person could graduate, pass the bar and enter a blissful standard-evaluation-free existence. But lo, Avvo surveyed the lawyer landscape and said what these people need are ratings. Escape to the judiciary? Not even there, the Houston Bar Association just released it’s 2009 Judicial Evaluation. As Mary Flood noted, among the elected judiciary no news is good news and all publicity is bad publicity. Something to look forward to.

• 2009 HBA Judicial Evaluation Results (.pdf)

Photo: Andy Wright

Happy Finals Everyone!

Sasha Volokh ends Choosing Interpretive Methods: A Positive Theory of Judges and Everyone Else with this remarkable line:

I do not suggest that a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, but, as an economist, I suggest (less eloquently) that an unexamined consistency may be individually suboptimal.

We were fortunate enough to have Prof. Volokh at the University of Houston Law Center this past year. The rest of the paper is well worth discussion but exams loom. It’s published in the Legal Workshop, a new site that’s off to an auspicious start, featuring op-ed versions of the articles published by the member law journals.