"[D]on’t do me any favors. The last thing I need is someone telling me it’s okay to be fat."

Says a fat man, objecting to the following emergent dogma:

Telling fat people they ought to be thin is about as helpful as telling gay people they should be straight. It took many decades for the medical establishment to recognize that its “cures” for “homosexuality” did far more damage than the imaginary disease to which they were addressed, and that the biggest favor it could do for gay people was to stop harassing them. Fat people are still waiting for the same favor.

Let's bring in Ricky Gervais:

I heard someone on the radio once say that they were tired of the prejudice aimed at the overweight. They said something like "you're not allowed to make fun of gay people, so why are you allowed to make fun of fat people? It's the same thing."

It's not the same thing though, is it? Gay people are born that way. They didn't work at becoming gay. Fat people became fat because they would rather be that way than stop eating so much. They had to eat and eat to get fat. Then, when they were fat they had to keep up the eating to stay fat. For gayness to be the same as fatness, gay people would have to start off straight but then ween themselves onto cock. Soon they're noshing all day getting gayer and gayer. They've had more than enough cock... they're full... they're just sucking for the sake of it. Now they're overgay, and frowned upon by people who can have the occasional cock but not over indulge.

When a doctor tells me that that's how you become gay, I'll stop making jokes about fat people.

"Should Professor Campos’s authorship of Inside the Law School Scam come as a surprise?"

"In hindsight, perhaps not. The universe of law professors writing negatively about the legal academy is not huge. For a law prof, saying that the status quo in legal education has problems constitutes a declaration against interest."

Says David Lat. Me, I've been hearing professors saying negative things about legal education since the day I started work in the legal academy (in 1984). But then I stepped right into the hotbed of Critical Legal Studies. Back then, everyone was reading "Legal Education and the Reproduction of Hierarchy: A Polemic Against the System," by Duncan Kennedy. Campos's criticisms are mild compared with that! Has everyone forgotten that 1983 book? The so-called "little red book" barely even has a Wikipedia entry. From the Preface:

The general thesis is that law schools are intensely political places, in spite of the fact that they seem intellectually unpretentious, barren of theoretical ambition or practical vision of what social life might be. The trade school mentality, the endless attention to trees at the expense of forests, the alternating grimness and chumminess of focus on the limited task at hand, all these are only a part of what is going on. The other part is ideological training for willing service in the hierarchies of the corporate welfare state.

To say that law school is ideological is to say that what teachers teach along with basic skills is wrong, is nonsense about what law is and how it works. It is to say that the message about the nature of legal competence, and its distribution among students, is wrong, is nonsense. It is to say that the ideas about the possibilities of life as a lawyer that students pick up from legal education are wrong, are nonsense. But all this is nonsense with a tilt, it is biased and motivated rather than random error. What it says is that it is natural, efficient and fair for law firms, the bar as a whole, and the society the bar services to be organized in their actual patterns of hierarchy and domination.

Because most students believe what they are told, explicitly and implicitly, about the world they are entering, they behave in ways that fulfill the prophecies the system makes about them and about that world. This is the link-back that completes the system: students do more than accept the way things are, and ideology does more than damp opposition. Students act affirmatively within the channels cut for them, cutting them deeper, giving the whole a patina of consent, and weaving complicity into everyone’s life story.

Resist! 

Now, that's not really a declaration against interest for Kennedy, and Campos's book isn't a declaration against interest either. Both men were/are promoting their own work from a safe position of tenure.

"Anonymous Law Prof Behind Law School Scam Blog Outs Himself: Paul Campos."

Ha.

Paul is one of the bloggers at that blog I stopped linking to after they deleted all Meade's comments (Lawyers, Guns & Money). Here's what I wrote about the Anonymous Law Professor blog. I thought it was a student, because it had some bad writing and simplistic thinking.

Is the Anonymous Law Professor blog more important now that we know who it is? (Assuming you ever cared at all.)

IN THE COMMENTS:  somefeller said:

It was dumb for him to try to write anonymously/pseudonymously, because he already was a fairly well-known blogger who writes under his own name. That really added nothing to the conversation and if anything detracted from his points by creating a biographical whodunit...

I disagree. He got attention with the "Anonymous" tease, with an Inside Higher Ed article and lots of links and discussion. If it had just been Paul Campos's next diatribe, who would have cared? Maybe by the time he'd worked the whole thing into a book, with an impressive publisher — like his "Jurismania: The Madness of American Law," published by Oxford University Press — everyone would take the trouble to read and talk about it. But this way, he got lots of publicity for his project, right at the outset. He even got the eminent lawprofcrank Brian Leiter bellyaching about it. That was pretty rich. I'd say Paul Campos is doing just fine. He should keep up the graphomania, hook Oxford University Press again, and grasp the fame and money that comes from writing a pithy polemic that hits right in the zone as people question the value of a legal education.

"Anonymous Law Prof: 'Law Professors Are Scamming Their Students.'"

Paul Caron draws attention to a new blog, purportedly written by a law professor "at a Tier One school."

Sorry, I don't think this is a law professor. I think it's a law student. Why do I think this? Well, I remember the "Anonymous Lawyer" who was supposedly a partner at a big law firm. The blogger liked to talk about how contemptuously he treated underlings. It turned out the blogger was a law student with experience being one of those underlings as a summer associate in a law firm.

This new blog has the same feeling to me. The blog tries to take the perspective of the professor as he mistreats the students. It sounds like a student uncharitably projecting thoughts onto the professor:

Now I’m sure there are certain paragons of pedagogic virtue who conscientiously keep up with the latest legislative and judicial developments in the classes they teach – who spend countless hours pouring over new statutes and opinions and law review articles, to make sure that their knowledge of adverse possession or promissory estoppel or the felony murder rule is well and truly up to date. I don’t know too many law professors like that. The typical professor teaches the same classes year after year. Not only that -- he uses the same materials year after year. I’m not going to bother to count – this is law school after all, and we don’t do empirical research -- but I bet that more than half the cases I teach in my required first-year course were cases I first read as a 1L 25 years ago. After all I use the same casebook my professor used. I even repeat some of his better jokes (thanks Bill). And, with very few exceptions, I know nothing about the formal legal material that I haven’t gleaned from reading the casebook and the teaching manual. This is how much preparation I’m doing this summer for the classes I’ll teach this coming academic year: None. And that, I guarantee you, is the median amount of time law professors have spent over the past three months preparing for the classes they’re about to start teaching again.

First of all, I don't think a real law professor at a good school would write "pouring" for "poring."  But what also rings false is the lawprof's seeming knowledge of how all the other professors are preparing for class. I've never heard any lawprof admit he just reads the casebook and the teacher's manual. Asserting that as if he knows makes me suspect that he's faking a lot.

Now, let's see what some of the other blogs are saying? Do they suspect fakery? Orin Kerr says:

Some of the author’s posts are interesting, but then a lot of the claims are pretty hyperbolic. Plus, the idea of law professors blogging truthfully about being law professors is a large part of what law professor blogs have always been about, so I don’t quite get the “speaking truth to power” tone.

David Lat says:

Is it possible that LawProf isn’t really a law prof, but just a bitter and unemployed law grad masquerading as an academic? People have been known to misrepresent their identities on the internet. For example, I pretended to be a judge-obsessed woman working at a law firm, while blogging as Article III Groupie of Underneath Their Robes, when in reality I was a judge-obsessed man working as a federal prosecutor.

With respect to Inside the Law School Scam, it appears that this is not the case. First, the site has the ring of truth to it; there’s enough behind-the-scenes and historical knowledge about legal academia to suggest the author truly is a law professor. (If not a law prof, the writer has gone to an awful lot of trouble to sound like one.)

Yeah, too much trouble. A real lawprof blogging doesn't strain to sound like a lawprof.

(And, yes, I did see that Inside Higher Ed says: "He agreed to reveal his identity to Inside Higher Ed, and his description is accurate.")

UPDATE: Anonymous Law Prof outs himself as Paul Campos.

"How law schools completely misrepresent their job numbers."

Lawprof Paul Campos in The New Republic:

Until little more than a month ago, almost all 198 ABA-accredited law schools were reporting nine-month employment rates of more than 90 percent, and it was a rare top 100 school that had a rate of less than 95 percent. 

It's a key number in the U.S. News ranking of law school, which puts the schools in a desperate struggle against each other, and there's so much lying that the price of honesty may be a big drop in rank.

But last month, in the wake of criticisms that these figures were literally incredible, USNWR revised its employment statistics in an effort to combat some of the legerdemain law schools engaged in, such as excluding from their calculations graduates who described themselves as unemployed but not seeking work. 

Amusingly, that's the way the government keeps unemployment statistics down and mostly gets away with it. What's the unemployment percentage if you throw the people who have given up back in?

Despite the U.S. News fix, there's still plenty of inaccuracy.

How many of the graduates who report doing full-time legal work have permanent jobs—in the employment law sense of permanent—as opposed to doing temp work, such as being paid $20 an hour to proofread financial documents in a warehouse, or $12 an hour to do slightly glorified secretarial tasks?

What percentage of graduates have jobs that you would go to law school if you knew in advance that was the job you'd get? That's the relevant question.

Campos looked at "employment data drawn from 183 individual [National Association for Law Placement] forms, in which graduates of one top 50 school self-reported their employment status nine months after graduation," and found that "fully one-third of those graduates who report they are working in full-time jobs that require a law degree are in temporary, rather than permanent, positions." (Go to the link if you want to know how he dealt with judicial clerkships, which are temporary, but usually excellent jobs.) Counting temporary and permanent jobs, only 45% had "real legal jobs." Drop below the "top 50," and the percentages are almost certainly worse.

"Then there are the nutritional concerns about a diet that some say mimics anorexia."

Says the NYT in a prominently featured article that gives some credence to the science behind an inane weight loss scheme in which some doctors charge over $1000 to inject you with a hormone and — guess why it works — you also limit yourself to 500 calories a day.

As Paul Campos says: "Limiting yourself to 500 calories a day 'mimics' anorexia in the same way that injecting heroin every day 'mimics' heroin addiction."

"PAUL CAMPOS BECLOWNS HIMSELF YET AGAIN, and Brian Leiter pinches the red rubber nose."

Says Glenn Reynolds — you can tell it's Glenn from the all caps — linking to Leiter.

Here's the underlying Campos compost:

Leiter thinks various members of the Bush administration are war criminals, and that their worst crimes - crimes for which they should apparently be subjected to Nuremberg-style prosecution - include the systematic torture of helpless prisoners in the name of a phony "war on terror."

Anyone who believes this must also acknowledge that John Yoo's eagerness to make specious legal arguments in support of torture seems to have led directly to lots of people being tortured, some to death.

Under such circumstances, it takes a twisted sense of moral priorities to get outraged about the (very slim) possibility that Yoo might lose his academic sinecure because he went out of his way to help the U.S. government commit war crimes.

In the end, I suspect that for Leiter, as for so many professors of this or that, words such as "torture" and "war crimes" are indeed nothing more than words, with which they can continue to play their petty and useless academic games.

I don't know what's more common among law professors — "eagerness to make specious legal arguments" or willingness to apply the label "war crime." And sure, there are plenty of petty and useless academic games ... but why is Campos so sure he's outside of these games as he makes his pronouncements?

The trick of "insulting upward."

Ann Coulter uses it, and so does that lawprof columnist Paul Campos -- who went to University of Michigan Law School with her -- Dave Kopel observes.

[P]ick somebody more famous than you. Vilify the person in some outrageous way. Ideally, the target gets upset and responds, and the press covers your public argument. By engaging in a public fight with you, the target has implicitly raised you to his own level of importance....

His column ... insulted upward at University of Wisconsin law professor Ann Althouse (bizarrely claiming that she is part of a conspiracy to protect Coulter). Althouse is far more famous than Campos on the Web and in academia; her record of scholarly publications in law journals is significantly larger than his. She responded to Campos on her blog, thus giving him more publicity.

A couple of weeks ago, Campos also successfully insulted upward when he accused University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds of advocating murder, and urged that the school censor Reynolds. Reynolds too has a vastly larger record of scholarly publication than Campos, and Reynolds' Web log, InstaPundit, is the most influential in the world (based on incoming links statistics at truthlaidbear.com).

Kopel notes that Campos also tried the insulting upward trick on Coulter but she used the correct response of ignoring it, while Glenn and I fell into the trap by responding. Well, it's not as if I don't know not to ignore an insulter who stands to gain from the attention. I do ignore insults every day. Some days, like yesterday, I ignore a whole slew of insults. But I choose some to respond to for various reasons. One reason I responded to Campos is that he's a fellow law professor. Another is, I actually know him. Also, he's got a column in a major newspaper.

Hey, I guess I should perceive Kopel as using the trick of defending upward! He got me to write about his damn Rocky Mountain News column.... at 3 a.m....

(Can you trust your own judgment, blogging at 3 a.m.?)

"Ann Althouse would probably write a column in The New York Times about how, if Pelosi were really a feminist..."

Why is lawprof Paul Campos invoking my name in his Rocky Mountain News column?

Now suppose I were to stand up here and call Coulter a \[expletive]. (Interestingly, unlike "faggot," American newspapers won't print this word, although it's no more offensive). That would, I believe, be a highly inappropriate thing to do. Even though it's my personal opinion that, if anyone deserves to be called a \[expletive], Coulter does, it's still the sort of thing any decent person will avoid doing.

Yet if I were to point out that Coulter is, by any reasonable standard of evaluation, a \[expletive], I suspect much outrage would ensue. After all, Nancy Pelosi is giving a speech later tonight inside this same hotel, in which - in this hypothetical scenario - someone Pelosi doesn't know (i.e., me) would have called Coulter a \[expletive].

If such a thing were to happen, the entire right-wing noise machine would leap into action. Ann Althouse would probably write a column in The New York Times about how, if Pelosi were really a feminist, she would unequivocally condemn some guy Pelosi has never heard of, who called Coulter a \[expletive] in front of 75 people in a hotel room in Denver.

What the hell is he talking about?

For reference, here's my post about the Coulter/"faggot" thing. My point was that I'm under no obligation to disassociate myself from someone I've never allied with. So this hypothetical column writing he's imagining... it doesn't fit me at all.

Thanks for keeping my name in the press, Paul. But that was just weird.

IN THE COMMENTS: Go in there and read Daryl Herbert's 11:08 comment. I'd reprint it on the front page here -- it's one of the best comments ever -- but it's kind of long, and it's got that word. You know, the word.