Law Grads - the chances of getting a job / Brian Tamanaha/Balkinization

"For the class of 2009 (nine months after graduation), at 30 law schools, only 50 percent or fewer of the graduates obtained jobs as lawyers. At nearly 90 law schools, one-third or more of graduates did not land jobs as lawyers nine months after graduation. 2009 was not a good year for legal employment, but 2010 was even worse (numbers are still unavailable), and 2011 will not be much better. Many of these schools, I should add, had poor success rates even before the current legal recession".

Balkinization: "The chart below plots the percentage of the 2009 class that obtained lawyer jobs against law school by rank (fourth tier schools have no rank, so are indicated after the line in alphabetical order). As one would expect, the top schools tend to have the highest rates of graduates who obtain jobs as lawyers (in the 90 percentile range). What this suggests is that law graduates who can get jobs as lawyers gratefully take them."

Law, Order, and Baseball: Perfect Game, Bad Call, Perfect Gentleman

Perfect game.  Gross error, as the camera shows.

Armando Galaragga, victim of the bad call, lost what should have been his: the 21st perfect game ever thrown in the major leagues.  The next day Galaragga brought out the card to Jim Joyce, who was plate umpire for the next afternoon's game.

Jobs Picture for 2009 Law Graduates - 88% working, many in non-legal slots

The New York Law Journal reports today:

The post-graduation employment rate for the 2009 law school class fell to the lowest rate since the mid-1990s, with only 88.3 percent nationally finding a job, according to the National Association for Law Placement.

The decline marked the second year in a row that the number of jobs fell. And while there are more graduates working than many expected, a good portion of their jobs are part-time, temporary or do not require a law degree, masking the weaknesses in the job market, said James Leipold, the executive director of NALP, which released a report yesterday.

"People can't graduate with this much law school debt and nine months after graduation not be working," he said.

The study collected information on employment nine months after graduation from 192 law schools on more than 40,000 graduates, nearly 93 percent of the class of 2009.

The basic facts are in the NALP report HERE