The Red Velvet Lawyer

This past week, a number of news outlets and bloggers reported on a new economic analysis of the value of a law degree.  The authors make a persuasive, well-researched argument that a law degree confers measurable life-time advantages on law graduates compared to persons who get only a bachelor’s degree. The report:  Micahel Simkovic and Frank McIntyre, The Economic Value of a Law Degree (unpublished manuscript 2013) is found here .     Simkovic, an Associate Professor of Law at Seton Hall University School of Law, and McIntyre, an Associate Professor of Finance and Economic at Rutgers Business School answered the following questions:  Does a law degree typically increase the earnings of law graduates compared to what such individuals would likely have earned with only a bachelor’s degree? How does the law school earnings premium vary by gender and at different points in the distribution of outcomes? How much of the increase in earnings is higher hourly wages, and how

An ASL grad posted this Facebook comment in response to my blog posting yesterday about claiming your right to success, abundance, love, and creative energy found here . "Prof. Young, last year you recommended bar takers to do affirmations to boost our confidence and success rates. It felt hokey and certainly could never take the place of diligent studying[.] [B]ut, it definitely helped me relax before the exam and helped reduce my stress during it. A very belated thank you and a recommendation to bar takers that you give wonderful advice!" To make it easier for you to find some affirmations that may work for you, I am providing them below. Find the affirmation that deals with a specific challenge you face right now in connection with the bar exam.  Also, find an affirmation you plan to use shortly before the exam date and as you sit to take the exam.  Write the affirmation ten times in your journal every day.  Say it just as often.  When you say the affi

Only two weeks to the July bar exam.   Will our 2013 graduates take the big leap?   My business coach recommended that I read, The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks, which suggests ways to conquer your hidden fear that prevents you from keeping and enjoying greater love, financial abundance, increasing success, and more creative energy.  You can find more information at http://www.thebigleap.net/ Hendricks is a psychologist, writer, and practitioner in the field of personal growth, relationships, and the mind-body connection.  He has written 25 books, taught at University of Colorado, has a consulting business, and graduated from Stanford University. The Upper Limit Problem He uses the term “Upper Limit Problem” to identify our tendency to follow great leaps forward on all these dimensions with big mess-ups.  We subconsciously use the mess-ups to keep us in our comfort zone when increasing success is taking us to new areas of personal growth and happiness.   “The Upper Limi

When I was in grade school, we lived in a typical St. Louis bungalow.  It had a wide front porch and a small back yard.  A wire fence separated our yard from the neighbor's yard.  On it grew an abundant vine of sweet pea with huge purplish-pink blossoms.  Giant bumble bees grazed the blossoms throughout the summer. My youngest brother, John, was still a baby sustained by jars of Gerber baby food.  I would take the smallest jars -- the squat ones -- and herd a bee into the jar and then screw on the lid.   I was capturing the largest bee in the smallest jar.  I do not recall why I did it, or why I chose that method.  I do recall several people suggesting I was daft or careless or fearless. I'd have one captured bee at a time.  But, I had them all summer long. I now have a garden that blooms from late February to late September.  I pay attention to my pollinators, which include bees, flies, wasps, and perhaps bats.  I protect them from injury, unless a clueless group of wa

Declare our Inter-dependence Last night, while I was ironing linen blouses, I watched a Netflix film called Connected .  Written and created by Webby Awards founder, Tiffany Shlain, it was an oddly organized musing about what it means to be connected in the 21st century. Her discussion of disappearing honeybees and the intentional killing of sparrows showed graphically how we are connected at a fundamental biological level. Her stories about the important role her neurologist father played in her life spoke to family connections, that for her, extended back to Russian pogroms against Jews.  She wove the news about his brain cancer in with her story about her pregnancy with twins, -- who came later in her reproductive life through fertility medicine after a successful birth and then five miscarriages. She talked about her early interest in something that would later be the World Wide Web, and the role it might play in making feminist dreams of work-life balance real by offer

As part of my summer concentration on books written by Seth Godin, I recently read his 2010 Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?  It ties to many of the themes I summarized in my post, “Leaning In” as a Woman Lawyer , found here .   Godin argues that with so many means of direct communication with so many different “tribes” in a hyper-competitive world, each one of us can make an indispensable contribution, as a linchpin, to a business, art, project, or something we care deeply about.  You have the choice of being indispensable.  Just make it. He defines linchpins as the “people who own their own means of production, who can make a difference, lead us, and connect us.”  “The linchpin is an individual who can walk into chaos and create order, someone who can invent, connect, create, and make things happen.  Every worthwhile institution has indispensable people who make differences like these.”   They are artists and givers of gifts.  They bring humanity to work.  They have visio

Some qualified good news.  Overall employment for 2012 law grads suggests an improving trend. The 2012 grads obtained more jobs than 2011 grads, but the class also had more graduates in it. Accordingly, the percent of employed fell to 84.7% from 85.7% the previous year.  The 2012 grads entered law school in the fall of 2009, and so the larger class size apparently indicates the choice of many college graduates to attend graduate school rather than face a job market deep in recession. The NALP Executive Director, James Leipold, stated: "I continue to believe that the Class of 2011 represented the absolute bottom of the curve on the jobs front . . . ." Many of the stories about job prospects for law school grads compare current employment rates to the pre-recession rate of 2007.  This comparison misrepresents the situation because employment that year represented a 24-year high of 91.9% according to NALP.   I compute the 20-year average (from 1988 to 2007), as 88.7%, wh