It’s that time of year.

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UD thanks Wendy.

The work to which Paul Campos referred in the last sentence of this April 2011 New Republic piece involved honest analysis of (wretched) job placements for law school graduates.

And now, with the latest numbers on applications to America’s law schools – not surprisingly, given the lack of jobs, they’re way, way down, especially among America’s smartest students – the work also involves an honest look at tuition, law professors’ salaries, and the outrageous rate at which new law schools (most notoriously, the one at Irvine, and the one at U Mass) are opening.

On the salary issue: As Campos noted in a comment on this blog:

A range of $140K to 300Kish is accurate for top law schools… Mid-tier schools are more likely to have a range from the low $100s to the mid $200s. Lower tier schools pay less, perhaps $80K to high $100s.

At Above the Law, a writer asks, “could the decline in law school applicants mean tuition cuts [and therefore lower salaries] are on the way?,” and answers no: “[I]nstead of listening to reason, law school tuition is still on the rise.”

It’s really a kind of let them eat cake madness.

… may have died – in New York City last week – of an accidental overdose.

… has been found dead in a midtown Manhattan hotel under odd circumstances — maybe suicide, maybe an assignation gone wrong… or maybe natural causes:

Detectives were treating Richard Descoings’ death as suspicious after finding his cellphone on a third-floor landing as if “it had been flung out the window,” a police source said.

Descoings, director of the prestigious Institute of Political Studies in Paris, was found dead about 1 p.m. in his seventh-floor room at the Michelangelo Hotel.

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Update: The clues (if they’re reliable; it’s still early in the story) point to suicide. Friends have apparently told police Descoings was depressed; empty liquor bottles and anti-depressant pills were found in the room. No marks of trauma were on the body. Someone had hurled his laptop and cell phone out of the room, onto an exterior landing.

One possible sequence of events: Suicidal, but not wishing to kill himself at home, in France, he determined to wait until he was in a hotel room (it’s not uncommon for suicidal people to choose hotels – hotels are anonymous, and you spare the people who live with you the trauma of discovering your body). He drank a lot of liquor (alcohol for that matter may have been a factor in his depression), maybe took a bunch of pills… In a kind of rage, or in despair, he threw, as it were, his life away – the laptop, the phone – and then lay down.

This would explain his condition when hotel security came to check on him on the morning he was supposed to appear at a conference. Colleagues, concerned that he hadn’t shown up, contacted the hotel. Hotel personnel said they heard him snoring.

Some time later, they checked again, and found him dead.

Pure speculation, of course – but, again, if the clues are correct, it’s a possibility.

There are also reports that he had visitors to his room that night. So something very different might have happened.

“…[F]or 25 years, I lived and breathed business, and the economy, and jobs. I had successes, and failures. But each step of the way, I learned a little bit more about what makes our American system so powerful. You can’t learn that teaching constitutional law [at] the University of Chicago, all right?”

We’ll see if the perennially popular professor-as-pussy strategy works for Mitt Romney.

Police have reportedly arrested at least 16 judges in an operation centered on the Italian city of Naples, the BBC reports.

Those arrested are thought to be linked to the Fabroccino Camorra clan, one of Italy’s most notorious criminal organizations.

Corriere.it describes those arrested as “at least sixteen tax magistrates, eight tax tribunal officers, a prominent lawyer who also teaches at university, and an accountant”.

Imagine his Rate My Professor page:

Brings an immediate, real-world understanding of the workings of the Italian tax system. Insider’s knowledge. Dresses extremely well, drives an amazing car. Avoid arguing with him about your grade.

Why is Brandeis so inept? UD has followed several Brandeis stories over the years (the Rose Art Museum fiasco, the Donald Hindley fiasco… the president who threatened to sue a magazine because of an article he didn’t like) and they tend to be about administrative ineptitude. Here’s another one.

Because its journalism department had to make “an emergency hire” (Huh? If you can’t find a replacement at the last minute, you cancel the course rather than picking someone up off the sidewalk.), it picked up this chick – an alcoholic with a serious rap sheet. A friend of a friend of someone in the journalism department recommended her.

Scot Bemis up there in the headline explains it all very clearly for us. It’s illegal to ask applicants about their criminal backgrounds. However, if you ask applicants about their criminal convictions, they have to tell you about them…

Anyway, it doesn’t matter, no one asked this woman anything. But you could Google her, the way a Brandeis student journalist did.

Ross’ criminal background, according to her blog as well as multiple newspapers, includes numerous convictions for operating a vehicle under the influence, conspiracy to aid an escape from jail and conspiracy in attempting an escape from jail. On Feb. 28, the day after she was placed in protective custody in Waltham, she was arrested for operating under the influence and operating a vehicle after her license was revoked for drunk driving, according to the Barnstable Police Department.

The Barnstable Police Department confirmed that Ross has been convicted of OUI more than four times; under Massachusetts law, that many convictions requires a lifetime suspension of the involved individual’s driver’s license.

… Despite the fact that information about Ross’ arrests is publicly available through her blog, Google searches and public records, nobody at the University knew about her criminal history before hiring her, according to multiple University officials.

All this info got stirred up when Pippin Ross was found “intoxicated and unresponsive” in her car on campus. She’s been fired.

… can be eloquent; it can have a pathos, as when Yeshiva University, on that auspicious Madoff/Merkin eve, page-not-founded its two – until that story-breaking moment – esteemed trustees, together tasked with making the financial health of the institution flourish… Page Not Found, in these circumstances, says NOTHING TO SEE HERE PLEASE DISPERSE, and only those determined enough to discover the cached page will fail to obey.

Medical schools page-not-founds are reserved for professors selling painkillers on the side, making up their research results, and – like Mount Sinai Assistant Professor of Pediatrics Tatyana Gabinskaya – arrested as part of massive insurance fraud rings.

The suit says she had submitted hundreds of charges for expensive MRI tests for car accident victims, despite the fact that — as a pediatrician — she had no training to actually read an MRI. In one year she billed for $2 million.

Trevor Hodge, professor of ancient technology, seems to have had a good life.

[S]he had a trait that I see in the very best trial lawyers, the very best teachers, and the very best parents. She was a wonderful listener. She would lower her head a little bit, lean against a counter, and do nothing else but take in what you were saying. She was comfortable with being quiet as she listened, which is a rare and wonderful trait. If she wanted to clarify something, or ask a question, her hand would come up, palm out, to signal that, the gentlest of signs.

Then she would nod. If she nodded hard, her hair would bounce, and sometimes she did nod hard. She understood, and she really did — her intelligence could be sharp and fierce or soft-spoken, but it underlaid everything. She was, as we say in law, a “quick read,” a talent that takes equal measures of intelligence, empathy, and critical thinking.

It was those traits — intelligence, empathy, and critical thinking — that would frame her response. One did not go to Katherine Darmer if you wanted a simple “yes” or affirmation; she was too smart and honest for that.

I cannot ask her about the piece I am pondering [writing], because she is gone. We miss those who have died when we stumble on the hole that they leave, and for Katherine that will be different for different people; she left many very large holes.

For me, the rest of my life, there will be a repetition of the same moment… I am thinking about writing something, or doing something, and it is her counsel I need. That is when I will stumble into that hole and remember her as she was — a woman who worked most hard for people who were not like her, who turned her mind and energy to justice, and who so often used her prodigious gifts in the ways that were best for God’s creation, this world.

Mark W. Osler remembers Katherine Darmer, law professor and advocate for justice. She committed suicide.

[Brian Tamanaha] also takes aim at the claim of law professors that their high salaries and low teaching loads (relative to other academics) are justified by the revenue they forgo when they enter the academy. No, he replies. Not only is “our pay far better than that of other professors,” not only do we have lifetime security and hours of work that are “whatever we want them to be,” but “our quality of life is far better than that of lawyers and we make more money than most lawyers.”

Who wins? Nice plot twist: The professor!

A life so amazing you just have to laugh.

They shoot professors, don’t they?

A very cool idea from a couple of Yale law professors: Along with being totally candid with applicants about LSAT scores, grades, passing the bar, getting a job in a terrible legal market, and of course your school’s prestige or lack of same, and the effect of this on employment prospects, all law schools should “offer to pay off part of their first-years’ loans should these students realize that their prospects of successful legal careers are slim.”

Disapproving Yale professors fret about how the school would afford this idea. Yale’s endowment sputters along at around twenty billion – a big fat nothing compared to Harvard’s almost forty billion. They also think it would encourage students to drop out. They also fear it would lower their salaries.

None of the other professors says this last thing, of course. About salaries. But people who are still pulling down $300,000 or so in the worst market for their students in years have got to be keeping an anxious eye on the bottom line.