The Legal Employment Market: Determinants of Elite Firm Placement, and How Law Schools Stack Up

Data collected on 15,293 law firm associates from 1295 employers who graduated from law school between 2001 and 2003 were used to develop a “total quality score” for every ABA-accredited law school, both nationally and for nine geographic regions. Quantitative methods were then used to identify factors that help explain the variation in a law school’s national career placement success at elite law firms. The findings revealed that while a law school’s academic reputation is the single biggest predictor of placement, several other factors were also highly significant. Differences in grading system, class rank disclosure policies, and the number of first year courses required were responsible for significant variation. Numbers grade systems, such as those used at the University of Chicago, and honors/pass/fail grading systems, such as those used by Yale, both have a strong negative impact on placement when all else is held equal, likely because both systems impair the middle of the class’s job prospects relative to traditional letter grade systems. Law schools that do not disclose class rank to students or employers place better than schools that disclose rank, when all else is held constant, although it is unclear whether this is due to employer preferences or due to disparate psychological effects on students that impact their career placement strategies. Law schools that require a greater number of first year classes, however, can make up for deficiencies in these other areas

TERRITORIAL PATERNALISM

This Article strives to deconstruct and dismantle the most prominent misconceptions and outright lies being used to justify the continued withholding of constitutional rights and liberties from American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Part II addresses the claim that territories are not self- governing or are otherwise effectively ruled from Washington, D.C., by a Congress that is completely unresponsive to any of their concerns. Part III examines the portrayal of the territories as geographically isolated, crumbling, lacking safe drinking water, and otherwise substantially underdeveloped compared to the mainland United States. Finally, Part IV proposes several empowering strategies that the territories and their allies could pursue to improve their current status-quo, which are not grounded in paternalism and would not require surrendering the long-term struggle for equal rights

Judicial Antifederalism

The United States has a colonies problem. The more than 3.5 million Americans who live in the U.S. territories of American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands lack some of the most fundamental rights and protections, such as the right to vote. This is due to a series of decisions decided more than a century ago, collectively known as the Insular Cases, in which the U.S. Supreme Court held that the “half-civilized,” “savage,” “ignorant and lawless” “alien races” that inhabited America’s overseas territories were not entitled to the same constitutional rights and protections afforded to Americans residing in the mainland United States, based on the idea of the white man’s burden and similar, then prevalent theories of white supremacy. For decades, the Insular Cases have had “nary a friend in the world,” with even the Supreme Court repeatedly imploring that they “should not be further extended.” Yet despite their firm placement within the constitutional anticanon and having “long been reviled” by all corners of the legal community for several decades, the Insular Cases have never been overruled by the Supreme Court. Perhaps most surprisingly, the lower federal courts in recent years have ignored the Supreme Court’s admonition and extended the Insular Cases to cover a whole host of new situations. The failure of the Supreme Court to overrule the Insular Cases—and the lower federal courts’ extension of them even after the Supreme Court instructed them to the contrary—is unprecedented. Why, then, do the Insular Cases not only persist, but thrive, despite virtually unanimous condemnation from all sides of the political and legal spectrums? This Essay attributes the longevity of the Insular Cases to an unlikely source: the failure of Congress to timely extend the well-known principle of judicial federalism, operative in all fifty states, to the five presently unincorporated territories

Judicial Antifederalism

The United States has a colonies problem. The more than 3.5 million Americans who live in the U.S. territories of American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands lack some of the most fundamental rights and protections, such as the right to vote. This is due to a series of decisions decided more than a century ago, collectively known as the Insular Cases, in which the U.S. Supreme Court held that the “half-civilized,” “savage,” “ignorant and lawless” “alien races” that inhabited America’s overseas territories were not entitled to the same constitutional rights and protections afforded to Americans residing in the mainland United States, based on the idea of the white man’s burden and similar, then prevalent theories of white supremacy. For decades, the Insular Cases have had “nary a friend in the world,” with even the Supreme Court repeatedly imploring that they “should not be further extended.” Yet despite their firm placement within the constitutional anticanon and having “long been reviled” by all corners of the legal community for several decades, the Insular Cases have never been overruled by the Supreme Court. Perhaps most surprisingly, the lower federal courts in recent years have ignored the Supreme Court’s admonition and extended the Insular Cases to cover a whole host of new situations. The failure of the Supreme Court to overrule the Insular Cases—and the lower federal courts’ extension of them even after the Supreme Court instructed them to the contrary—is unprecedented. Why, then, do the Insular Cases not only persist, but thrive, despite virtually unanimous condemnation from all sides of the political and legal spectrums? This Essay attributes the longevity of the Insular Cases to an unlikely source: the failure of Congress to timely extend the well-known principle of judicial federalism, operative in all fifty states, to the five presently unincorporated territories

TERRITORIAL PATERNALISM

This Article strives to deconstruct and dismantle the most prominent misconceptions and outright lies being used to justify the continued withholding of constitutional rights and liberties from American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Part II addresses the claim that territories are not self- governing or are otherwise effectively ruled from Washington, D.C., by a Congress that is completely unresponsive to any of their concerns. Part III examines the portrayal of the territories as geographically isolated, crumbling, lacking safe drinking water, and otherwise substantially underdeveloped compared to the mainland United States. Finally, Part IV proposes several empowering strategies that the territories and their allies could pursue to improve their current status-quo, which are not grounded in paternalism and would not require surrendering the long-term struggle for equal rights