Accommodation and Satisfaction: Women and Men Lawyers and the Balance of Work and Family

This study of graduates of the University of Michigan Law School from the late 1970s reports on the differing ways that women and men have responded to the conflicting claims of work and family. It finds that women with children who have entered the profession have indeed continued to bear the principalr esponsibilitiesf or the care of children, but it alsof inds that these women, with all their burdens, are more satisfied with their careers and with the balance of their family and professional lives than other women and than men

SALT Survey: Minority Group Persons in Law School Teaching

In the summer and fall of 1981 we sent questionnaires to faculty members1 at all 172 law schools accredited by the AALS, asking questions about current numbers of minority group members and women on their faculties and about numbers of offers made and offers accepted, tenure decisions and denials, and resignations. Our principal goal was to measure the progress that has been achieved in adding minorities and women to law faculties. In this issue, we report on our findings about minority groups

Retirement, Partial Retirement, and Working into Old Age: Michigan Law School Graduates 45 Years Out of Law School

In 1966, the University of Michigan Law School began an annual survey of selected classes of its graduates. For the first few decades of the survey, only the graduating classes five and fifeen years out of law school were included in the survey. Beginning in 1997, graduates 25, 35, and 45 years out of law school were added. This memorandum focuses primarily on surveys conducted between 1997 and 2006 of the living graduates of the classes of 1952 through 1961, who had by then been out of law school for 45 years. After 45 years, the great majority were 69 years or older. More than half the graduates reported themselves as still working and most of those who were working reported that they were still working fulltime. Only 39 percent of the graduates regarded themselves as fully retired. This memorandum provides information on the ages at which graduates shifted to part-time work or retired fully and on the differences in the timing of retirement between those working in private law firms and those working in government or business. It also provides information on the incomes and career satisfaction of the graduates in relation to their work status at the time of the survey. Finally, the memorandum includes a brief discussion of the plans for retirement reported by the graduates surveyed when 25 and 35 years out of law school, the huge majority of whom were still working full-time at the point of our survey

The Increasing Reliance on Educational Loans By University of Michigan Law School Graduates

Among graduates of the University of Michigan Law School in the classes of 1970 through 1979, about half borrowed to pay for their college or legal education. By the early 1980s the portion who borrowed had risen to about 80 percent and has remained at that level through the classes of early twenty-first century. Even greater growth has occurred in the average debt of those who incurred debt. In actual dollars, average debts among those with debt have increased twenty-fold from the 1970s to the early 2000s. Even in CPI-adjusted dollars, average debts have tripled. By the classes of 2000-2001, 42 percent of students were borrowing more than $90000 to attend law school. This memo tracks the changes over time in the ways law students have paid for their education, the growth of borrowing as the principal means of financing legal education, and the difficulties reported by our graduates in paying off their loans

The Right to an Adequate Income and Employment: A Reply to Professor Bernstein

Bernsteins\u27s Paper advances no constitutional arguments for requiring the government to ensure economic security for retarded citizens. His omission is justified not merely by the alternative focus he has chosen, but also by the absence of any sound or vendible constitutional arguments to advance. There remain, however, important roles for attorneys

Wade H. McCree, Jr.

At Wade McCree\u27s funeral service in Detroit, Otis Smith introduced the many people who spoke. Mr. Smith reminded us that, when Wade ceased to be Solicitor General, he had many offers from law firms in Washington and New York. Wade, he said, turned the offers down and chose to remain in public service. When Mr. Smith made this statement, my first thought was, Wade didn\u27t stay in public service. He became a law professor. After all, for so many of us teachers, life is a wonderful self-indulgence, the opportunity to read and write just what we please. But, of course, for Wade, teaching in law school became simply the next stage of a full career in public service. He viewed it as an opportunity to instill in young women and men the importance of taking seriously their lives as lawyers and public servants; as an opportunity to give advice to students; and as an opportunity to speak widely across the nation on issues of public importance

For the Best of Friends and for Lovers of all Sorts, a Status Other than Marriage (Symposium: Unmarried Partners and the Legacy of Marvin v. Marvin)

American governments have recently begun to experiment with new familial statuses for gay male and lesbian couples, who have demanded the right to marry but have been appeased with more modest forms of recognition.4 What I propose here is quite different. It is a status for people who have close bonds but do not want to be married to each other. I call this status designated friends. Once registered, designated friends would obtain a limited number of privileges and undertake a limited number of responsibilities relating to the care for the other when ill or incapacitated or upon death, but would not receive any of the governmental financial benefits or undertake any of the financial responsibilities that attach to marriage. Gay male and lesbian couples would be among those eligible to register, but the premise of this proposal is that same-sex couples would also be permitted to marry.5 Same-sex couples who do not choose to marry would be eligible, like any other pair of unmarried adults, to register as designated friends if they wished

The First-Year Courses: What\u27s There and What\u27s Not

For many of you, law school will be a full-time occupation for three school years; for others, a second job squeezed in at night over four or five years. Whatever your route to a degree, whatever sort of law school you attend, the beginnings of law school are likely to be much the same. You will face initially a set of required courses that will probably bear the same titles as the titles of our next six chapters: Civil Procedure, Contracts, Criminal Law, Property, Torts and Constitutional Law. The six are likely to be taught in ways that resemble each other on the surface. Each will have a casebook slightly heavier than a medicine ball. Each casebook will devote more pages to the decisions of courts of appeals than any other form of material, and your assignments will come almost entirely from the casebook. Your professors will have an arched eyebrow for every confident assertion a student makes, though they will probably be far less cold and crusty than the caricature of the film Paper Chase. They will lecture in varying degrees, but nearly all will call on students who have not volunteered, asking questions about the assigned cases and the issues they raise

Overstating the Satisfaction of Lawyers

Recent literature commonly reports US lawyers as disheartened and discontented, but more than two dozen statistically based studies report that the great majority of lawyers put themselves on the satisfied side of scales of job satisfaction. The claim of this article is that, in three ways, these statistically based studies convey an overly rosy impression of lawyers’ attitudes: first, that many of those who put themselves above midpoints on satisfaction scales are barely more positive than negative about their careers and often have profound ambivalence about their work; second, that surveys conducted at a single point in time necessarily fail to include the views of those who once worked in that setting but have now gone elsewhere; and third, that few studies address the problems of bias that may be caused by lower rates of response from the least satisfied persons in the population sampled

The Changing Student Body at the University of Michigan Law School

Most of the content of the memo that follows has been previously published in the article Who We Were and Who We Are: How Michigan Law Students Have Changed Since the 1950s: Findings from 40 Years of Alumni Surveys. T. K. Adams, co-author. Law Quad. Notes 51, no. 1 (2009): 74-80, available through this website. This memo provides more detail about changing entry credentials and about the great expansion beginning in the 1970s in the numbers of women students and of racial/ethnic minority students. It also provides information not in the article about the patterns over time in students’ parents’ occupations, in students’ education prior to law school, and in students’ political views when they entered law school