Around the Blogosphere: July 2008

* The Empirical Legal Studies Blog has an interesting piece on the legal job market for new attorneys. It is old news that most law graduates do not make $160,000. What leaves many graduates still perplexed, however, is how much less their starting salaries actually are and where the "middle of the road" jobs are hiding. Based on NALP statistics, the ELS blog explains that first year law salaries have something of an inverse bell curve -- or two peaks with a trough in the middle -- called bimodal distribution. As the ELS Blog explains, until approximately the year 2000, law salaries followed an ordinary bell-curve, but then top firms started following "the Cravath system," i.e. hiring only top law graduates or laterals from comparable firms and paying them exorbitant salaries. The result was a two-tiered system for recent law graduates: one with a dominant salary around $40,000 (in 2006); and the other with a dominant salary of $135,000 (in 2006); with relatively few jobs available in the intervening ranges.

* The Snark has an amusing post on office decoration. Unfortunately, I think my office may fall into the "as soon as I finish my novel I'm out of here" category. I still haven't hung my law degree or bar admissions (I'm just too lazy to get them framed). I do, however, have several plaques, a plant, a nice desk set, a stuffed dragon, and a little talking Yoda figure. And, of course, a lot of redwells. Hopefully, rather than "I'm out of here...," my office says "I'm too busy to frame stuff." Of course, who knows what'll happen when that novel is finished.

* According to the WSJ Law Blog, Texas wants to execute five mexican nationals who were not offered their Geneva Convention Rights (Foreign Nationals must be instructed that they can contact their consulate). At least one of the nationals had lived in the US illegally since preschool. The World Court found that the executions would violate the Geneva Convention, and ordered the US to stop them. President Bush issued a memo telling the Texas State Court to impliment the decision, but the Texas courts found that the nationals had waived their rights by not raising them in the ordinary course of the appeals process. The Supreme Court upheld the ruling, President Bush went to the World Court and said, essentially, "I tried." Mexico is arguing that the US Federal Government should do more to stop the execution.