Law schools are due for a mega-contraction soon anyway. They have long been known as money-makers who do not produce much value; if it were not required in every state for one to attend law school to take the bar, the apprenticeship/”reading law” method would come back with a vengeance.

Methinks this a method by which law schools hope to encourage more unqualified students to apply, get in, and pay $150,000 to have a degree that gets them no decently paying job—or any job at all.

If your LSAT score is low, many are turned off at applying to law school especially when they hear about how big firms have been collapsing and lucrative jobs are few. So if the law school folks can fool you into thinking your LSAT score isn’t that bad, you might be fooled into thinking you can make it in the law.

So law schools must be hurting enough that they need to pull this crap and bilk some more money off of people. In about 10 years we’ll see articles about how “minority” law graduates are “drowning” in debt and couldn’t get a job despite “decent” LSAT scores, and how this was all a scam.

I don’t know much about the LSAT, but I presume the Logic Games are intended to test for the ability to decipher and think about complex contracts

More like it’s a sneaky IQ test. If you score a 180 on your LSAT (the highest score possible), you’re a very intelligent person who will be a great lawyer/politician, so Harvard will want you. Like the SAT and ACT, you can’t accidentally score high on the LSAT and be low IQ.

What we are moving towards is an explicit racial/gender caste system. With White Men (straight ones anyway) at the bottom.

Already we see movements for genetic testing to prevent Whites from Rachel Dolezal-ing. Elites recognize that White men are fleeing from White just as fast as anyone else. White women still retain a privileged position not the least of which is that they are a massive consumer base that the major corporations cannot afford to offend, Black Twitter notwithstanding. They are the China of Mass Consumerism. White men, not so much.

You will see more power outages every day, as in SoCal tomorrow, as lack of White men running things and doing things creates a critical skills/competency vacuum.

Pretty much all of our professional class will have to be as Black as the actors in Commercials. Not the least of which is that White women demand it.

Well now, how did the blind superhero Daredevil pass the LSAT? Now the whole thing seems completely unrealistic

What is important about this story is the continuing misuse of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Nothing can be tested properly any longer because someone somewhere will say it is unfair to him or her due to his “disability”. The LSAT already gives unlimited time to whoever produces a doctors note saying they have a disability. Same as the SAT. MCAT? Why not? Your doctor may need extra time when you have a heart attack because he’s retarded. In this case a blind person could take the test but he can’t use the same technique to map the solution. That’s great. Maybe we should have blind men leading army patrols. Just this last week Dominos Pizza lost a case because their website isn’t enabled for the handicapped. Never mind that anyone can call any store and put in any order – the website doesn’t work for the blind, therefore it has to go! money to the plaintiffs’ Lawyers. It has to go! A few years ago a university had to remove its on line lectures for the same reason. None of this was an intention of the original law, but our Congress is too dysfunctional to think about and improve anything in this country. An old law – it’s as immutable as a law of physics. Besides we have to worry about the Kurds.

C) L, N

Edit: misread it, not even blind!

Law schools will still need ways of screening out candidates who are unable to pass the bar exam. Traditionally, LSAT and undergraduate GPA have been the two dominant criteria for admissions into law school (with the typical affirmative action departures up to the level of diversity a particular school can get away with before its bar passage and placement numbers take a hit, along with its US News standings).

California has seen a years-long controversy over its bar passage rates, which have never been high and have been trending worse in recent years. (Part of the reason for this, aside from the usual diversity and credentialist trends most readers of this blog are probably familiar with, is that California allows non-ABA-accredited law schools to sit for the exam, which most state bars do not.) So far, the state Supreme Court has held the line on changing the cutoff score. Given that the Court’s justices eventually have to deal with the consequences of their past decisions on the cutoff score, they’ve had an incentive not to throw the floodgates completely open (a look through any phone book’s yellow pages tells you how low those standards already are). Two years ago, the Bar did cut the exam from three days to two.

On the other hand, the State Bar is also now talking about allowing non-lawyers to be involved in the delivery of legal services and to have ownership interests in law firms (essentially getting around ethical rules that have traditionally protected the professional independence of lawyers and held practices accountable to the ethics rules). The prediction is that this would open up a profit incentive for Silicon Valley to somehow close the gap in access to legal services by coming up with an app or something that could handle basic, common legal work.

The background macroeconomic story is that California’s economy and demographics can’t support a middle class anymore, meaning that practicing lawyers have to have either rich clients or rich practices. Accordingly, nobody who isn’t either rich or suing somebody rich is likely to have an easy time of finding a halfway-competent lawyer.

This change should help applicants who aspire to become great jurists like Judge Allison D. Burroughs. After all, it is axiomatic that logic is a White construct and is therefore a racist system that results in disparate impact.

Methinks this a method by which law schools hope to encourage more unqualified students to apply, get in, and pay $150,000 to have a degree that gets them no decently paying job—or any job at all.

This might be true for bottom-tier law schools, but the T14 is still going to need a way to maintain their standards and reputations.

Oh man, I coulda been a contender without that section!

Not really. It seemed to be a pretty accurate predictor of grades.

Right, always must make special accommodation for just that one (((guy))).

Suing the LSAT. That’s almost as good as our local school district screening a special documentary to teens about screen addiction.

Accordingly, nobody who isn’t either rich or suing somebody rich is likely to have an easy time of finding a halfway-competent lawyer.

Ha – so true!!

Soon enough we arrive at a time where even the stupid citizen understands that the cornucopia of licenses, titles, awards and certificates provided by schools of all types and governments near and far don’t mean shit.
Indeed, I expect the train engineer to be a narcoleptic, the VP to be selling influence, the lady cop to shoot someone in their own apartment, the Challenger to explode, the FIU bridge in MIA to collapse, 737’s to fall out of the sky; and so should all people who notice things.

R.G. Camera…

“Law schools are due for a mega-contraction soon anyway. They have long been known as money-makers who do not produce much value”.

Paging The Anti-Gnostic…

“It’s by no means unthinkable. Because psychometric testing is, in substantial measure, a test of the general factor of intelligence, there can be many ways to create reasonably valid tests.”

Direct credit to CanSpeccy, whose comment ought to be gold boxed.

Speaking of “reasons to support IQ research,” I would say that there are none. IQ-ism is just a phase in the development of psychology as a pathological intellectual discipline. IQ-ism is the latest in a series of attempts to comprehend the vast complexity of the operation of the brain by alchemically simplistic means.

First was psychoanalysis, aptly described by Peter Medowar as:

… like a dinosaur or a zeppelin; no better theory can ever be erected on its ruins, which will remain for ever one of the saddest and strangest of all landmarks in the history of twentieth century thought.

Then there was Behaviorism, which sought to explain human behavior and personality in their entirety solely in terms of the acquisition of operant conditioned reflexes. That theory crashed and burned as cybernetics confirmed what Behaviorists had denied, namely, that humans are conscious beings and that what consciousness tells of our feelings and intentions is a valid source of information.

And now we have IQism, which claims to be able to quantify a person’s intelligence on a unidimensional scale by means of a simple paper and pencil test involving a few logical puzzles plus, depending on the test of choice, miscellaneous other items.

How do the IQ-ists sell this idea? Primarily by the artful use of language. Their little test, they call an “intelligence test,” thereby establishing in the minds of the masses the unquestioned assumption that intelligence is what the IQ-ists test measures. In fact, however, as a Google search will confirm, intelligence is the ability to acquire and to use information, whereas an IQ test measures neither except in an incredibly limited domain and with a test the results of which are subject to massive circumstantial bias.

But the IQ-ist scam has worked so well for so long that psychology has yet to even broach the real scientific questions that must underlie the measurement of intelligence: namely, how to measure the capacity for information acquisition; and how to measure skill, effectiveness, Darwinian fitness, or whatever, in the use of information.

When one considers the measurement of intelligence in those terms, one is confronted by the realization that information is acquired via multiple channels, auditory, olfactory, visual, proprioceptive, etc. with data from each channel processed by a specialized brain modules, or probably in most if not all cases, by multiple specialized brain modules.

So now if we take account of the fact that there are hundreds if not thousands of structural genes that impact the development and characteristics of those sensory channels and processing modules, we see that the capacity for the acquisition of information is not a single characteristic of the brain but a large collection of independent variables, as is well known to common sense. People vary hugely in powers of memory and, moreover, that variation is type specific. Mozart transcribed the entire Allegri miserere after a single hearing, Stephen Wiltshire sketched the whole of Red Square from memory after a brief visit. Mozart, so far as we know, was no graphic artist, and Stephen Wiltshire is no musician. Others do more or less brilliantly remembering poetry, the numbers of pi, or conversational tittle tattle.

So in only the matter of data acquisition, we see that intelligence is multiple not unitary. But much more complex to analyse than the capacity for information acquisition is the capacity for the use if information. In fact, perhaps, that is an impossibly difficult challenge. But it is a challenge that must be faced by anyone who claims to measure intelligence in a scientific and quantitative way.

As for the innateness of intelligence, it is axiomatic that the potentiality is entirely innate. Moreover, we know that there are hundreds, perhaps thousands of genes that direct brain development, plus probably many thousands of hereditary controlling elements, most yet to be identified, that shape the development of the brain and hence intelligence.

But the function of the brain is to record both sensory inputs, i.e., experience, and the internal workings of the brain, i.e., the development of our ideas, both of which shape the way we use information. So certainly, environmental factors that shape the contents of mind must have a huge impact on intelligence, which is why focusing the genetic basis of intelligence to the exclusion of environmental factors, such as education and culture, cannot result in a comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon.

When Stephen Hawking lost the ability to write he developed his own symbology to allow him to do mathematics in his head.

Blind guy just isn’t trying very hard.

“if it were not required in every state for one to attend law school to take the bar, the apprenticeship/”reading law” method would come back with a vengeance.”

California permits apprenticeship. That is how Kim Kardashian intends to become a lawyer.

I don’t remember these from the 1979 test. Were they introduced after that?

It seems to me that being blind is, in itself, a negative characteristic for an attorney. I admire people who can overcome it, but controlling for intelligence, the sighted attorney is going to be a better bet. Even if, say, the blind attorney has an assistant that overcomes 90 percent of the handicap, there is going to be an efficiency tax, plus you’re paying for two people.

I think it is possible to apply cold dispassionate logic (in the sense Star Trek writers had Spock use , not in the sense of merely formal logic) to words and sentences.

I was never a very high scorer on the SAT math section, but did well in verbal. I got a very high LSAT score..

If you read LSAT questions very carefully and apply reason, you will get the correct answer. It also requires the ability to abstract ideas (universals) from particulars. Rules of law are basically all universals: battery is unprivileged harmful or offensive touching of another. A law school exam might have a homeless woman late for her cleaning job shove a Goldman banker at the subway door causing him to fall between the train and platform,. The rule of law is an abstract universal. Is it relevant that the woman is homeless? that the banker is rich? that the woman is late? that the correct result pains you? No, shoving someone at the subway door is harmful and offensive touching, and once you commit a tort you are responsible for all foreseeable consequences.

I used to love the law back when it was a set of rules – under the common law rules distilled from experience and applicable to all. Now the law is a priest in black robes who makes an ah hoc decision based on his or her preferences and public fashion. Such a debased field. And to think lawyers (mainly) in America created the Constitution, defended the British solders in the Boston Massacre, broke the code of silence in the medical profession that prevented wronged patients from justice . . .

The real question, albeit a cruel one, to ask is, why is a blind man being encouraged to assume that he is suited to a legal profession, a profession that is so heavily dependent on written texts? His problems are not going to end at the reasoning section of the LSAT.

“Personally, I have lots of sympathy for the blind.

Obviously, it would probably make more sense for the small number of people who are truly blind enough that they can’t use pencil and paper to be granted some kind of accommodation on the LSAT by law schools, such as that their LSAT scores get reported without the Logic Games section, and they are evaluated based on their percentile score on the rest of their LSAT.”

And perhaps the airline companies will too come up with a way to accommodate blind pilot trainees. I too hold a degree of sympathy for those with handicaps. It doesn’t mean we create enormously impractical accommodations for them for the sake of virtue signaling. My poor vision and color deficiency excluded me from quite a few specialties in the Marine Corps. Being left handed meant I couldn’t play short stop in T-ball. This is life.

I’m not even remotely an expert on IQ, but even I could easily blow holes ten feet wide in CanSpeccy’s hapless anti-IQ screed.

They don’t have to worry, the top LSAT scores will still be aligned with intelligence, and they will all apply to the top schools and get in. This is about making sure the bottom-scoring kids are raised to the level of looking merely mediocre. The top schools ain’t going fishing down there anytime soon.

lol. Mr. Soros is certainly getting his per-word and per-post money’s worth out of you these past few days, little hyperventilating liar!

Most test-takers first take a class on how to to do them with pencil and paper (or judging by this example to the right, multiple colored pens). People who go on to score well on the LSAT tend to improve a lot from their first sample test encounter with Logic Games to their final sitting of the LSAT.

That’s the whole point. Law school itself involves learning how to derive implicit rules from case reports using an unfamiliar method and then apply those rules to novel situations. If you can learn the unfamiliar mental skill of how to do logic puzzles then you can probably also learn the unfamiliar mental skill of how to read cases.

The people who put these tests together (psychometricians) are pretty good at what they do – they figured out how to give useful tests 100 years ago. The problem is that the results that they produce are not the answers that the Woke want to hear. They are like the AI that keeps producing “racist” results.

One of the very odd things about the LSAT is that it deliberately does not measure knowledge of law, government, politics, history, social sciences, etc. The fact that the “logic games” resembled nothing a lawyer actually does in real life was not a bug, but a feature.

Law school, in general, places a high value on the ability to speak authoritatively from a position of ignorance — in other words, to bullshit — so I suppose this makes a certain sort of sense.

By contrast, the MCAT (for medical school) requires actual knowledge of biology and other substantive pre-med material.

Yes. L has to be included in the answer .
If both M and R are reduced, then L cannot be according to one of the rules. That’s pretty obvious.
So cross out B. and E – L has to be one of the pair.
M is not implicated in any of the other rules, but R is.
“If N is reduced, neither R nor S is reduced.”
But we know that R IS reduced so N cannot be. If N was reduced then R wouldn’t be, but it is.
So answer is L, N.

Any reasonably intelligent person could ace the Logic Games if they had all day to solve the problems.

The challenge of the LSAT is to complete them in a limited time.

As Malcolm Gladwell has recently been asking, Why do the LSAT and other tests reward or require speed when, in real life, you never have to answer 60 different, dense questions in 3 hours?

My guess is that the people who make the test think quickly, are proud of the fact that they think quickly, and want to reward people like themselves.

The Gladwell podcast:

http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/31-puzzle-rush

I was a LSAT instructor for a bit back in my school days. My anecdotal experience was that the Logic Games section was the most coachable. So one benefit of this is that it may actually lead to a better test – at least in the sense that one’s score will be determined more by innate ability/intelligence than by coaching.
I’d also like to echo what a few others have said above – why the f*** is a blind guy trying to become a lawyer? There aren’t a lot of books on tape in the legal profession, and I’ve never seen any courts releasing audio versions of their court decisions. He’s going to waste three years of his life and a couple hundred grand on something that will be totally useless to him.

On goody. The erasure of standardized testing will usher in brilliant doctors just in time for my first major operation in a few decades. This is literally becoming a world of idiocracy.

“I’m not even remotely an expert on IQ, but even I could easily blow holes ten feet wide in CanSpeccy’s hapless anti-IQ screed.”

Code for “I lack the intellectual chops to dissect CanSpeccy’s razor sharp logic, but will pretend that I have the ability, but not the requisite time, to counter with a dialectic approach”.

L has to be included in the answer .
If both M and R are reduced, then L cannot be according to one of the rules. That’s pretty obvious.
So cross out B. and E – L has to be one of the pair.

No, all you know is that L is false. A more complicated question might have this fact produce pairs that are false but do not contain L.

M is not implicated in any of the other rules, but R is.

M is involved in the rule that exactly 5 of the 8 can be reduced.

So answer is L, N.

Correct.

One of the very odd things about the LSAT is that it deliberately does not measure knowledge of law, government, politics, history, social sciences, etc.

Unlike for med schools, there is no required undergrad curriculum – you can major in anything and go to law school. The official narrative is that this is because law schools and the profession will benefit from the diversity of viewpoints. I think the real reason is two-fold: (i) having prereqs would eliminate the “I’m done with college, but I still don’t know what to do with my life, might as well keep going to school” pool of applicants, which is a significant number, and (ii) if you made people take law courses in undergrad, we would wise up to the fact that law could and should be something that only requires a bachelors, as is the case in the UK and many other countries. Requiring a graduate degree to practice law isn’t necessary.

Right, always must make special accommodation for just that one (((guy))).

Yes indeed nothing says Jewish like lawsuit plaintiffs Angelo Binno and Shelesha Taylor. They practically reek of gefilte fish. Every single time! theology, often wrong, but never in doubt.

“We really do seem to be reaching the end of the standardized testing regime.”

Correction: “We really do seem to be reaching the end of competence.”

The rationale for the decision here seems mistaken to me, though the decision itself might not be. (I’m not a lawyer and I’m speaking here in terms of the decision’s morality/common sense rather than its legal implications.)

If logic games are good at predicting success as an attorney, then they can be validly included on the LSAT. If blind men do not do as well at them as non-blind men, this is certainly unjust in some sense, but the LSAT is nonetheless still performing its intended and just function of assessing how fit its takers are to become attorneys. (If visual aids help one solve logic games, they might also help one complete analogous tasks as a lawyer.) The existence of a difference between the blind and non-blind doesn’t seem to me to be conceptually different from the existence of differences in LSAT scores between individuals or other groups.

If logic games aren’t good at predicting success as an attorney, then they shouldn’t be used on the LSAT in any case.

Like Steve, and I imagine most people, I’ve got a lot of sympathy for the blind and am perfectly happy with society going out of its way to accommodate them in various regards. (Unlike a lot of various other alleged victim groups whose problems we hear about these days.) However, I think that pretending that differences don’t—or couldn’t— exist is not a sensible way to go about doing so.

If both M and R are reduced, which one of the following is a pair of areas neither of which could be reduced?

Not the toughest question, but that sentence brought back painful memories of being under the clock and having to not only figure something out, but having to fight through a stilted, overwritten sentence, forcing me to read it 2 or 3 times and wasting valuable seconds.

How about, “If both M and R are reduced, which of the following pairs isn’t?”

The Carter lawyers contended that the new Reagan Administration could surely whip up a non-discriminatory replacement exam real soon now on which all groups would average equal scores.

We’re still waiting.

The government dealt with this by subcontracting government work to private companies. So instead of civil servants doing the actual work, the work of various government agencies is farmed out to private government consultants on a rolling, continuous “project” basis. A lot of the major accounting and management consulting firms such as Deloitte and Booz Allen have government consulting departments doing this work. The consultants basically do all the work and interface with government employees who usually have the government job for political reasons i.e. they’re black, or military veterans, etc. Most professionals in DC who aren’t lawyers or lobbyists or in politics seem to be involved in this sort of work.

Law schools are due for a mega-contraction soon anyway. They have long been known as money-makers who do not produce much value; if it were not required in every state for one to attend law school to take the bar, the apprenticeship/”reading law” method would come back with a vengeance.

The thing is, they’ve been saying that for 20+ years now. Might take another fifteen years until it pops. I agree it’s a big waste, but those turds have been floating on the sea (lack of fiber thus substance) for a while now.

Also, there are just too many lawyers. Not nearly enough money/business to go around.

A few states, including California, have a law apprenticeship allowed in place of law school. Very few people do it however.

Here’s an article about it:

https://www.schools.com/articles/legal-apprenticeship-programs

When the process works it is usually a way a paralegal with a good relationship with her boss can switch to doing 30 hour work weeks and 10 hours of study for a few years, then take the bar exam and become a lawyer.

In practice it doesn’t work because people who do this instead of going to law school fail the bar exam. In July 2018 6 people who did the apprenticeship took the bar exam, and 1 passed. 30 people who previously had failed the bar exam (repeaters) took it again, and all 30 failed again.

The oldest data on this is from 2007. 2/6 first timers passed, and 1 of 17 repeaters passed. So there are probably under 50 lawyers in California who did an apprenticeship instead of law school, but a few hundred who tried but were never able to pass the bar.

The reason the LSAT is so close to an IQ test is because state bar exams are too. It is unethical to admit to law school someone with 0% chance of passing the bar exam.

I have known at least one blind lawyer.

He was paid by his employers what every other lawyer was paid who was doing the same work as him, but they also hired a legal assistant to read stuff to him, and read back to him what he wrote, to make sure he got it right.

They were lucky to have him work for them, the benefit of his work was greater than the cost of paying him and his assistant.

Soon enough we arrive at a time where even the stupid citizen understands that the cornucopia of licenses, titles, awards and certificates provided by schools of all types and governments near and far don’t mean shit.

That time has been here for awhile. When I graduated high school in the 90s, it was almost passe to note that that diploma didn’t mean a damn thing. And with the wider advent of open admissions higher ed., why not slack off and not take the HS diploma college plan, take your first two years at comm college or Podunk U., transfer to a better known school, and as far as jobs go, you’re just as well off as the poor bastard who had to sweat grades under the ‘gold’ diploma plan. If only I’d known this back then.

Slightly OT for this, but I’m going to go apeshit crazy if a pundit on the right describes a political divide between the ‘highly educated’ left and working class right. A bullshit degree does not mean you are highly educated. Most college educated leftists work for the government, and many government jobs only require ‘a’ degree to hold a certain position. Or they are public school teachers, about 2/3 of which are lefties, and also not too bright (not dumb, but also not having anything in the way of mental talent — See the Norm MacDonald bit about the education needed to be a grade school teacher).

The test supervisor must’ve provided that section verbally. He could’ve listened to the heartbeat and choose the correct multiple choice question.

Corvinus hits a new low, now copypastaing extremely low and incoherent comments of others he has inexplicably bookmarked.

Speaking of which…

A few states, including California, have a law apprenticeship allowed in place of law school. Very few people do it however.

That’s because of this sentence: they must also “complete “a course of study that usually closely emulates what’s being taught on brick-and-mortar campuses.” In other words, they still have to take the worthless classes at law school (either at the law school or online) in addition to working under an attorney.

In other words, they still have to go to law school for some period of time, which is the case in almost all the states. In NY , for example, you have to go for at least 1 year of law school before taking the bar, and most states its the full 3.

A true “reading law” approach doesn’t require any classroom courses. Just apprentice for x number of months/years, then take the bar exam. Plenty of good cram courses can get you ready for the bar exam if you just apply yourself. E.g. Abraham Lincoln.

The reason the LSAT is so close to an IQ test is because state bar exams are too

That’s absolutely not true. Unlike the LSAT, state bar exams are merely cram-rote-memorize-regurgitate exams that, in the end, have no bearing on actual practice. This is why post-law school students usually take a 2 month intensive cram course that basically tells them what the essay questions will be and what the minor differences in state X law on theft or contracts are versus the federal rule.

State bar exams are merely an exercise in how much random law you can memorize to simply vomit up in a 2-3 day time. Certainly requires some brainpower, but even if you fail once, the second time (which has usually the same multiple choice and slight variations on the essays) you should pass, given you have seen it before and now you get six extra months to memorize everything.

. It is unethical to admit to law school someone with 0% chance of passing the bar exam.

You’re assuming laws schools —which are run by lawyers and universities trying to make money—are ethical. They are not. They are cash grabs that do almost no training for actual practice.

Obviously correct.

South Korea has an ancient law, still in effect, that reserves the massage profession to the blind. That’s brilliant since it is a rare job that the blind can do about as well as the sighted, and the higher wages involved in restricting entry to the profession is a luxury consumption tax to subsidize people who’ve been dealt a sad hand in life.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1081777/Only-blind-people-masseurs-says-South-Korean-court.html

Law school, in general, places a high value on the ability to speak authoritatively from a position of ignorance — in other words, to bullshit — so I suppose this makes a certain sort of sense.

Bullshit, but well said, with authority.

You might start out from a position of ignorance, but the authorities you cite (whether or not you are actually speaking with authority), if well researched, will have been arrived at after a journey through applying existing law to the facts of a matter such that you are not speaking from a position of ignorance.

First, we had Lewontin’s “race does not exist,” now we have “IQ does not exist.”

You’re Exhibit A as to why “intelligence does not exist.”

Anytime I hear the term “dialectic,” there’s certainty of some Marxian claptrap being spouted like diarrhea of the brain.

Mr. Soros pays him by the post, not the quality.

Former New York [acting] governor David Paterson was blind and was also an alumnus of Hofstra Law School. However, he couldn’t pass the New York bar, so he wasn’t a lawyer per se.

Anyway, if he was smart enough, he should be able to keep track of everything in his head.

For those on this blog who hate the Democratic Party, please note that this nonsense was facilitated by Bush 41, who signed the ADA in 1990.

Japan puts a lot of blind people into acupuncture. That Japanese cult leader from back the 1990s who released the gas on the subway was blind and began as an acupuncturist before turning into a cult leader.

“Corvinus hits a new low, now copypastaing extremely low and incoherent comments of others he has inexplicably bookmarked.”

The reality is I posted something that was germane to the thread. Now, why don’t actually try to counter CanSpeccy’s argument rather than threatening to huff and puff and blow the house down. Perhaps you need a primer on offering counter rebuttals.

Would you like to know more, citizen?

Sigh. Ok, I’ll feed the troll.

Psychoanalysis is a set of theories and therapeutic techniques[1] related to the study of the unconscious mind,[2] which together form a method of treatment for mental-health disorders.

Spearman’s g had nothing to do with treatment of mental health disorders.

Behaviorism (or behaviourism) is a systematic approach to understanding the behavior of humans and other animals.[1] It assumes that all behaviors are either reflexes produced by a response to certain stimuli in the environment, or a consequence of that individual’s history, including especially reinforcement and punishment, together with the individual’s current motivational state and controlling stimuli. Although behaviorists generally accept the important role of heredity in determining behavior, they focus primarily on environmental factors.

Spearman’s g is narrower than “understanding the behavior of humans”. 100 years of work shows reasonable ability to make certain predictions: the AFQT is just one example.

Canspeccy:
And now we have IQism, which claims to be able to quantify a person’s intelligence on a unidimensional scale by means of a simple paper and pencil test involving a few logical puzzles plus, depending on the test of choice, miscellaneous other items.

Canspeccy doesn’t understand what he’s babbling about. Corvinus is just demanding attention. It’s a lot like trying to have an adult conversation with a screaming toddler underfoot.

PS: Steve still won’t pay attention to you.

A lot of American law schools only demanded 2 or 3 years undergrad classes, no degree until about 60 years ago.

Some states still have the ancient apprenticeship program in which a person can work 5 years in a law office then take the Bar Exam. If they pass, they’re admitted to the State Bar.

Since so many spend 7 years in school then another year memorizing Bar Exam questions and answers the 5 year paralegal or even courier then the exam seems like a way to save 8 years and 200k in tuition.

How to practice law and serve your clients?

Open the specific practice manual. Follow directions. Hold out for your client. Don’t settle too soon. Avoid going to court. Never know how drunk, stoned or insane a judge will be at any time. Make sure client not only can, but will, pay the fee without a lot of hassle.

The reality is I posted something that was germane to the thread.

No .You did not.

Corvinus – the name was Medawar, not Medowar, and he was a flunky for the globalist abortionist lobby.

Up your game my young friend!

You must know that a large number of (((those guys))) are pretty good at logic and argumentation, right? Not all, mind you, but many.

This means it is absurd to assume that the one guy who needs special accommodation is a member of the J set. That is a non sequitur. In a Venn diagram, the set of Joos and the set of potentially good logic gamers overlap.

In fact, you and I know it is ridiculous to assume that the accommodation is needed for anyone except NAMs.

I am just goofing around here to show that members of our set don’t have to allow each other to make weak arguments. We are much better than that.

(((Happy New Year)))

Buzz off you bigot. You aren’t impressing anybody.

What a tirade!
I agree with every word.

I raised my LSAT around 20 points after a year of studying (textbooks many practice tests). Scored in up to the mid the 170s on practice tests, wasnt able to break the barrier for actual exam.

There are so many handy rules-of-thumb for the logic games . IF you learn these— how to identify different types of games, identifiable symbols for different rules and how to efficiently/clearly diagram each game—you can improve your score a lot. Same goes, to a lesser extent, for logical reasoning.

Can you train for IQ tests? Doesnt that defeat the purpose?

I remember Steve and some other people had LSAT to IQ conversion tables awhile back (and a post trying to determine Obama’s LSAT: ~168 apparently). According to the conversion a 170 would put you at around 130 IQ (verbal exclusively I can only assume).

It is flattering but I don’t buy it. Maybe it measures IQ if its your 1st time taking the test w/o studying/knowing the format. But not with months of studying.

If I recall correctly, the Logic Games section has been criticized for the degree that women and minorities under-perform, far more than the other two sections. I suspect they’d been trying to make to make it easier since when I took it recently I got a perfect score despite not normally doing so on my practice tests.

Wouldn’t be so bad if he bothered to use the MORE tag so everyone wouldn’t have to scroll past his endless screed. But that might require a certain degree of self-awareness, not to mention concern for others.

On one hand, I’m against making it easier for mediocre to get into law school, but then again, but then again, there’s nothing to prevent the somewhat bright from getting into law school, passing the bar, and going on to become really slack ass lawyers.

I really started learning this a few years ago. Other than a few Beto O’Rourke-type moments in my misspent youth, I’d never had any interactions with a lawyer. But as I’ve gotten older, and the older people of my youth have started dying, I’ve had more than a few, mostly involving property, estate, powers of attorney, and the like.

I’m by no means an expert, but my advice to others is always that if you have more than a pot to piss in, if you’re spending less than $300 an hour on a lawyer, and one who has has at least five, preferably ten, years experience, you’re just screwing yourself or the beneficiaries of your will.

With enough money on the line to entice a shyster, it’s amazing the number of loopholes that can be found in a poorly crafted legal document. Fortunately in my case, even with some bad blood among the parties, everyone agreed to play reasonably fair.

PS, not that I’m rich or anything, it was just enough stuff to fight over. Say, like a Ferrari and a few really nice vactions money, but that had to be split amongst others.

The blind guy should forget lawyering and become an airline pilot. Boeing can come up with a kludge for him on the MAX 8.

If not that, at least he could be an Uber driver in a Tesla.

Looks like the evil old crow found a software search program that searches like google and then clips and pastes paragraphs that the software deems germane to the subject

It’s like the 19th century index card system for research. Only the toddlers found the box and threw the cards all over Daddy’s study.

Here’s the thing: I went to law school with a blind guy. He was very sharp; probably doing well, though we dis not keep in touch. I have also worked with a blind lawyer in practice: again, top notch.

Neither of these guys bitched about the LSAT; they, and all the other hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of blind people who have practiced law had any problem with the LSAT.

Here’s the other thing: I did not draw any diagrams or take any classes before I took the LSAT. I did a practice exam to understand what it would entail, then I showed up. Truth is, if only people capable of excelling at the LSAT without doodles and preparatory courses were allowed into law school, we’d have appropriately fewer and better lawyers, but they’d earn more money. The law schools will be damned if they want any limit to the hordes of fools paying them, and the employers (firms, corporations, etc.) will be damned if they want to pay lawyers any more money than they can get away with, or have them so in demand they could work for themselves earning decent money before their stultifying loans are discharged.

The dude who filed this lawsuit is too stupid to practice law. This is no different than the classic cases Mr. Sailer has written about in which a Negro too stupid to be a fireman (or other governmental employee) files a lawsuit to ensure any imbecile can become a fireman, etc.

Logic Games section is probably the single best predictor of lawyering skills in existence – I would gladly trade CVs and law school transcripts for the Games score when interviewing law students. 99% of putting together a legal argument is correctly discerning what conclusions follow from, and what conclusions are foreclosed by, the given premises. Yes, it is basically like coding. You are trying to create a process that goes from inputs to output without crashing on a divide-by-zero error or some self-contradiction and without needing to rely on an input you don’t have. The idiot quoted in the article who said he’s never been asked to do any of this stuff in legal practice is like a child who foolishly questions what he’s ever going to need math for. If he is not using these skills in practice, then he isn’t winning any cases.

Drawing diagrams is one way to solve the Logic Games puzzles. Writing formal logic proofs is another, but most people don’t take formal logic.

Without Games, LSAT is just a reading comprehension test, and won’t be very useful. Most college graduates are fine at reading comprehension, it’s writing and logical reasoning where they fall apart.

I can’t even begin to imagine how huge a handicap being blind is on this part of the test – or in the industry in general for that matter. There is too much information to absorb and no other method of doing it has the bandwidth of reading. Of course, some blind people have achieved great success in the profession (Judge Tatel, for example) and contemplating the drive and skill it must have taken to do that is just awe-inspiring. But in general I think there have to be many better career options out there where blindness isn’t quite as imposing a handicap.

Why do the LSAT and other tests reward or require speed when, in real life, you never have to answer 60 different, dense questions in 3 hours?

Seems mostly practical. You have to give enough questions to separate out the people along a spectrum, and you can’t have a test that lasts all day.

[I]n real life, you never have to answer 60 different, dense questions in 3 hours…

I take it you’ve never worked as a clerk for a busy judge or a research librarian in a large firm. (You’d simply adore patent law….)

South Korea has an ancient law, still in effect, that reserves the massage profession to the blind.

I think that must have changed since the article came out (2008), because I have been to Korea since then and can confirm that there are non-blind masseurs.

(and a post trying to determine Obama’s LSAT: ~168 apparently)

This sounds interesting, anyone have a link?

According to the conversion a 170 would put you at around 130 IQ (verbal exclusively I can only assume).

MENSA will take a little lower (168) as a qualifying score.

Malcolm Gladwell did a podcast on the LSAT. Gladwell took the exam at the same time as his assistant. He had never taken a standardized exam and he wanted to see how he would perform against someone much younger than himself.

Since the LSAT rewards fast test takers, Gladwell came to the conclusion that law school graduates shouldn’t say which law school they attended and future employers shouldn’t ask applicants where they attended law school. That way slow test takers won’t be penalized in the job market for attending lower ranked law schools.

http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/32-the-tortoise-and-the-hare

http://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=324

Of course, the GRE replaced its analytical section with an analytical writing section two decades ago, requiring that test takers write an essay pointing out flaws or assumptions in a given premise. The grading is somewhat subjective and requires two readers to converge on a grade. I assume the LSAT would consider a similar model.

Ah, kinda like going to the VA hospital….kidding. Actually have a good one here for the most part. One of the little publicized actions by President Trump has been the Choice program that lets veterans get appointments with private doctors closer to home.

Al Pacino as the blind retired Marine Lieutenant Frank Slade in Scent of a Woman put out a memorable (good? bad? hellifiknow) performance as something of a (ahem) non-attorney spokesperson for schoolboy Charlie Simms (Chris O’Donnell) in a sort of courtroom. Charlie had been a witness to a prank played on the school’s headmaster, Mr. Trask by three students coming from wealthy backgrounds. As an incentive to inform on the perps, the headmaster offered Simms a letter of recommendation which would guarantee him admission to Harvard. Slade advises Simms to take the deal, but the latter refuses to snitch.

Pacino won the Academy Award for Best Actor (only two genders here) perhaps in part for having avoided any lines such as, “Like Justice, I am blind.”

https://americanrhetoric.com/MovieSpeeches/specialengagements/moviespeechscentofawoman.html

There’s really no point to the format of the MCAT and for the pre-med prerequisites in general. You basically force undergrads to cram for the science courses and the MCAT, and they forget everything they crammed for as soon as the classes are over and the MCAT is taken. Doctors don’t remember anything from their undergrad science courses. In other countries, the necessary science background is integrated in the curriculum in medical education.

Don’t lawyers bill by the hour? Is there any demand for slow lawyers?

The zeitgeist is inclining toward dumping standardized testing as racist.

However, the rush among elite schools to make testing optional is not driven by this reason. It’s US News that motivates them, instead. If your diversity admits don’t take the test, you don’t have to report their scores in your USN&WR statistics.

This is great for elite schools, because there are now multiple pathways for diversity admits – prep schools, athletics, and QuestBridge. Demand for diversity admits has produced a reasonable supply of kids, but the test scores will never be a net benefit, to say the least. Solution – drop the test scores.

This is still a great scene.

Any idea what the average turnover rate is for a lawyer who made partner? Just for a modest, respectable firm.

Tangentially related– you can find 260-year-old dictionaries online, but not 60-year-old ones:

This is astounding to me… I can find the chest size of any porn star that has ever lived, but I can’t find out what “racism” meant in 1960. Sakes alive.

https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/17443/where-can-i-find-old-dictionaries

No one spends a year preparing for a bar exam; one typically graduates in, day, late May; most exams are offered in the middle of summer. One studies for the exam for a month or two.

Much of your point is quite well made, though.

MENSA will take a little lower (168) as a qualifying score.

You mean it’s still an aptitude test? Mensa stopped accepting SAT and ACT scores back in the 20th century.

How does this blind fellow manage the math section? There too, he’s at a disadvantage if he can’t use paper and pencil.

That movie’s opening was a pretty accurate description of how many moderately successful criminal lawyers work today. No office, always on the go, squeezing clients for money,close working with ADAs, living on your cellphone, and buttering up courthouse staff— all pretty accurate. Once the main plot hits, though—blond handsome preppy serial rapist killer marauding around LA—-it gets ridiculous real fast.

…why the f*** is a blind guy trying to become a lawyer?

Ask the gal on the right:

and a post trying to determine Obama’s LSAT: ~168 apparently

You sure that wasn’t his sperm count?

I didn’t know Jones argued in front of the Supreme Court; any cites? I’m surprised that Jones argued at the Supreme Court as his firm wasn’t in D.C or NYC., he was in Atlanta.

Supreme Court advocacy is usually reserved for a select few, usually even if you were the trial lawyer/appeals court lawyer, you’re supposed to strongly consider hiring one of the guys who are already sworn in there. e.g. Abe Fortas, IIRC, argued pro bono in front of the Supreme Court for the famous plaintiff in Gideon v. Wainwright, a plaintiff who was, ironically, arguing that he deserved a free lawyer for his criminal. Gideon had represented himself up until that point.

Interesting to note that during his down years between losing the California gubernatorial election and winning the presidency in ’68 that Nixon argued before the Supreme Court as a private lawyer a few times. He worked in NY as at a major law firm.

As a side note, the most embarrassing lawyers at the Supreme Court tend to be trial lawyers who happened to get a juicy case. Trial lawyers make arguments that work on juries (i.e. bored laymen) and harried/unprepared lower court judges, but rarely make the kind of arguments that appeal to well-prepared justices.

Well, the professionalization of lawyering has had some negative effects.

Haben Girma, daughter of Eritrean immigrants, is a 2013 deafblind graduate of Harvard Law School. She is on a book tour now, acknowledging that she has limited vision and hearing. She carries two keyboards with her in order to communicate with hearing people. Her keyboard generates braille.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/habengirma

It was introduced in summer of 1991. Very little gas changed since then.
I’ve been teaching the LSAT since 2006. The games section is the most intimidating for most students and keeps some out no matter how hard they try. Most students though, see considerable improvement with practice.
In essence, games tests your ability to follow simple rules and make inferences from those rules. It is the most abstract section.
Honestly, it will not make much difference. More and more schools are accepting the GRE which doesn’t have the games section. It’s too bad. The games section is what made the LSAT unique.

Everything Comes Down To Golf?

John Mortimer, the creator of “Rumpole of the Bailey” was a barrister, as was his blind father. As a schoolboy, he would sometimes have to read aloud the salacious legal briefs of some divorce case whilst on the train to London.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Mortimer

Yeah, on your chin.

In fact, however, as a Google search will confirm

A “DICTIONARY DEFINITION!” deflection that doesn’t even use a dictionary. Bullshit goes digital, thanks to Carrion Breath.

Well everyone’s afraid of agitating anyone unless they’re (non-Jewish) white males.

Since the LSAT rewards fast test takers, Gladwell came to the conclusion that law school graduates shouldn’t say which law school they attended and future employers shouldn’t ask applicants where they attended law school.

This is what is known in English as a non sequitur.

And I hate to break this to Malcolm, but yes, speed is a sign of intelligence. If you ask person A what 8 times 7 is and they tell you 56 instantaneously, and you ask person B the same and they proceed to draw an array that is 8 by 7, then count all of the cells to get to 56, would you say they are the same intelligence just because they arrived at the same answer?

Didn’t they remove a genuine math section in the 1980s?

It is about competition and showing off which is good for self-esteem but not for the depth of thinking. The speed which is a very superficial brilliance can inhibit a deeper thought. The profound thinking often comes from people who do not impress us as quick and brilliant. They have less need for showing off and so they can dwell on the essence more than the immediate outcome for instant gratification would compel them. But obviously the speed is useful. You want to have an employee or assistant that is a quick thinker. The quick thinking as showing off is advertising: hire me, I am very useful and easy to work with as a subordinate employee.

Good points all: a possible solution would be to ban diagrams, spare paper and pencil. Sighted test takers would have to puzzle it out in their heads, just as blind test takers in effect are doing. While it is in general a bad idea to alter a test to accommodate a tiny minority, in this particular example changing the test would simultaneously level the playing field, and would, per your comments above, winnow out the truly gifted sighted test takers from those had done a lot of prep. Sighted, or blind, test takers who have studied formal logic would have an advantage, of course. Both questions in the text are easily solvable with one’s eyes closed, by visualizing sets. Unfortunately, this does not address all of the other issues facing blind lawyers in actual practice, but the above solution is both fair to the blind and gives the result of higher quality sighted lawyers.

some stupendously brilliant mathematicians were nearly blind. Carl Gauss and Ronald Fisher come to mind.

Though Fisher was a frequentist statistician (think garbage) he was a smart dude. He created the randomized sample.

Don’t lawyers bill by the hour? Is there any demand for slow lawyers?

In house counsel.

I don’t know much about the LSAT, but I presume the Logic Games are intended to test for the ability to decipher and think about complex contracts.

Like Van Halen’s notorious brown M&Ms rider.

2 great problems I see with American law:

1. It’s precedent-based (never, EVER do this unless you want a 30000% increase in nation entropy rate)
2. Greedy law schools admitting nitwits who then become lousy lawyers

Personally, I have lots of sympathy for the blind.

Who doesn’t? — is this supposed to distinguish you from the unwashed masses? — but blind people have little/no business being lawyers (if they want to try, and a law school is willing to/can take/accommodate them, a personal interview, which most top 50 schools apparently don’t do, is probably better for someone who’s blind –> link) — and if that’s (“G, L, M, N, P, R, S, and W”) an example of a ‘logic game’, no reasonably intelligent person needs to ‘draw a diagram’ to answer/solve it.

The grievance will last him a lifetime.

when, in real life, you never have to answer 60 different, dense questions in 3 hours?

Gladwell, this is the same sort of reasoning as ‘I don’t have to learn stuff that I can just look up on wikipedia’ or ‘I’ll just use the calculator’. Superficially plausible but it still leaves you tooling along in the slow lane.

In Sweden, last time I checked both med school and law are undergraduate degrees. You start on day 1 of your college experience. It seems to work well.

Afterwards his pal the blind surgeon can operate on the victims.

In this thread: boomers who think they’re not living in gulag.
Gay marriage was about denormalizing families, not enabling people who don’t marry to get married.
Tranny normalization is about sexualizing kids, nor about a minority of a minority of a minority.
Removing the evaluation of logic from this test is about creating a different kind of lawyer (and one day, legislator), not accommodating one guy who could have been administered a verbal version of the test or given non-color criteria.

You say that with jealousy.

A test like this is, perforce, superficial. It can be highly predictive, all the same.

Oxford university recently announced that they were increasing the alotted time for maths exams, because currently the highest scorers were all men.

The justification was that the point was to test knowledge, not speed.

But better mathematicians are also quicker – they find things easier. Allowing more time compresses the bandwith of the test. And that is why it results in more women scoring top marks.

The higher the ability level, the more skewed the sex ratio. Cap the test at a lower level and you reduce the skew.

Can you train for IQ tests? Doesnt that defeat the purpose?

No.

IQ is not a magical physical quantity that is residing under the hair. The value is the outcome of a random process that can be changed or changes depending on circumstances.

Train hard.

Same as with “being good at sports” or “being able to read”.

I don’t see where the starting point is to solve the problem.

Would some commenter walk us through the solution to the question posed by showing us the logical chain by which one arrives at the correct answer? That would be a helpful diagnostic to locate one’s place in the spectrum of intelligence.

Steve, why were the lawyers at Oracle aghast at your comparison of them to programmers?

Was it because they were disgusted by the idea that what they do is in any way comparable to “code monkeys. ”

Honestly, a lot of lawyers are snobs. One lawyer I know in my family wears a 3 piece suit to every family gathering. He’s in his 30s.

You are right. A shocking number of wills are ripe for contesting if there’s enough motivation. Few are ironclad (read: competently drafted and witnessed).

Thanks for your several authoritative remarks on this topic.

With that picture, he ought to have been seated on the trunk of the Lincoln so we could see the date of the movie from the license plates, just like the Slamming of the Trunk in L.A. Law back in the 80-90s time frame.

LA Law was an influential series and I’ve read that lots of ills in the law regarding trendy liberal issues of today were conceived and incubated in that series. Never missing an episode, lawyers paid attention and carried that into the real world, especially judges, who have a rather large say in the outcomes in the series. One of many, LA Law uncorked the issues of feminism, gays, trannies, divorce rape, affirmative action and pushed out-sized sensitivities to the races, favoring Blacks and Hispanics, especially if they were gay. Another side of that series is that it gave consumers of the products of the legal profession the mistaken impression that their issues will clear up quickly and of course, in the law, nothing goes quickly.

I see there are some episodes up at YouTube, the whole series, in fact if you hit the right channel. Still, I wonder who owns the rights to that series these days? It doesn’t seem to come out in Xfinity searches on their system.

tl;dr
“Insert MORE Tag,” try it.

“Corvinus – the name was Medawar, not Medowar”

Talk to CanSpeccy about the spelling mistake.

“and he was a flunky for the globalist abortionist lobby. Up your game my young friend!”

Which is a red herring on your part. Now, why don’t you try to address the points which were made.

“Sigh. Ok, I’ll feed the troll.”

Actually, I’m a regular poster here.

“Spearman’s g had nothing to do with treatment of mental health disorders.”

Which is a strawman on your part, since CanSpeccy did not directly nor indirectly made that statement. Moreover, it would appear that Spearman’s g research has an impact on mental health and its relation to treatment.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.2044-8341.1934.tb01116.x

“Canspeccy doesn’t understand what he’s babbling about. Corvinus is just demanding attention. It’s a lot like trying to have an adult conversation with a screaming toddler underfoot.”

You haven’t provided a rebuttal, just bloviation. Try again.

Maybe, but the conditional phrase “if well-researched” is doing a lot of work, there.

The authorities one cites are appellate court decisions, which (at best) are well-researched as regards previous appellate court decisions. At best, this provides authority for neutral principles of law. When courts (and lawyers generally) go beyond that, they end up saying absurdly wrongheaded stuff about history, politics, etc. Law students don’t even know those authorities yet, so law school in particular encourages an ability to feign authoritative knowledge.

Paul Campos’ “On Bullshit and Law Schools” really spoke to me on this — I quoted it on at least one exam or term paper per semester.
http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2011/12/on-bullshit-and-law-schools

Law schools in the 1960s sweet ground zero for the homo takeover of the nation. Groups organized to encourage and enable many bright activists to become lawyers and judges

Logic Games to be Purged from Law School Entrance Exam

The last thing the legal system wants is logic. It has alway been arbitrary and capricious.

Rules of law are basically all universals: battery is unprivileged harmful or offensive touching of another. A law school exam might have a homeless woman late for her cleaning job shove a Goldman banker at the subway door causing him to fall between the train and platform.

IV. Insufficient information given to answer the question.

Was the cleaning lady a POC? With dreadlocks? Did the banker touch, or look?

What if Amy Harmon had tweeted about the case? Must know what she said before responding.

I believe electrical engineering has bit the bullet in the other direction and said: “sorry – you cannot do electronics or wire a home if you are colour-blind, we know it sucks, but that’s how it is.” Sometimes, fact-based reality wins.

I did a cursory search on the Web and didn’t find anything, but it seems that if these analytical reasoning problems are word problems from a course in Boolean Algebra, the foundational math to designing logic circuits used in computers and other forms of automation.

It probably takes a certain level of G to master Boolean Algebra, but it is not the hardest Math subject out there. Once you receive that training, it should be possible to ace the analytical reasoning section? At least knowing this would give a person and edge, even over a very smart person who never heard of Boolean Algebra and had to reinvent this subject on the fly within the time limits of the test?

Boolean Algebra was just theoretical math when it was invented by George Boole in the English Victorian Era. Without it, most computer designers would be just foundering. With it, graduates of second-tier engineering schools and even technical colleges can have effective careers in this area.

Now that these question are being removed, I guess that closes off my entreprenurial opportunity to run a test-prep school teaching this?

Makes sense can’t have pygmies or Eskimos passing the test at less than four fifths the white male rate. Might be racist. Those high power firms might miss out on the real talent, diversity.

I have a dream… that someone will wake need up.

A. G, L
B. G, N
C. L, N
D. L, P
E. P, S

Dear God, that’s badly laid out. If they’d hired someone intelligent he might have used, for example

(i) G, L
(ii) G, N
(iii) L, N
(iv) L, P
(v) P, S

Or even

a. G, L
b. G, N
c. L, N
d. L, P
e. P, S

I don’t remember having to draw any diagrams on the LSAT, but then I got a perfect score….

Not sure I know what answer you are seeking to the question you pose.

Knowing that 8 times 7 is 56, instantly, is recall of an entry in the multiplication table. Remembering something like this is indeed a property of IQ.

Not knowing 8 times 7 equals 56 may be the consequence of going to bad schools or having a completely incompetent teacher. It could also be the result of being taught by the New Math method a generation ago or by Common Core today.

Not having memorized 8 times 7 equals 56 but being able to calculate it by counting the squares in an 8 by 7 grid shows IQ in the form of having a deep understanding of the relationship of multiplication to the coverage of a rectangular grid and having the presence of mind to apply this knowledge. On the other hand, counting out the squares in an 8 by 7 grid may be what they are teaching in Common Core for all I know, and in the movie Idiocracy being reality, we don’t teach the multiplication tables anymore “because calculators.”

Southwestern Law School on Wilshire in LA is the go-to provider of such courses for the non-enrolled. The law school itself is basically a big bar review course. The more prestigious the law school, the less practical law is taught. You have to learn stuff for the bar after graduation, and you’re probably smart enough to do that, At the blue collar Southwestern they know their students need to prepare for the bar exam from day one.

I do not know how much Lexis has to do with the surplus of lawyers. If legal research can be more quickly done on a computer than by rummaging around in a law library, there would seem to be less need for as many lawyers.

Gore Vidal provided that service, as a youth, to his blind grandfather, Sen. Gore of OK. Excellent training for a future political novelist and commentator, I would think.

Blind lawyers have always been a thing (is the mention of Blind Justice so irresistible?) rather than blind accountants or physicists. As a former law librarian, I’ve never understood how they could manage the education, much less the practice, especially in the old days. It’s a very book-intensive field. I was once walking behind a new associate who was showing off his workplace to his girlfriend, and she said, “Wow, you had to read all these books?” Charmingly naive, but though you don’t have to read thousands of books, you do have to read dozens of summaries and digests thereof, just to keep up. Not being cynical, just honestly puzzled at how they can do it. Hat’s off to ’em.

“Looks like the evil old crow found a software search program that searches like google and then clips and pastes paragraphs that the software deems germane to the subject”

No, it’s called reading different threads and NOTICING other arguments which, when relevant, are brought forth to the table. Note that you are the fifth “learned” person who has yet to offer a cogent rebuttal to CanSpeccy. You would think a woman of your supposed stature–an “Anglo-Saxon professor”–who mouthed off that she has read a couple hundred thousands books in her lifetime would engage in substantive discourse.

“You’re Exhibit A as to why “intelligence does not exist.””

LOL. Do you enjoy vigorously pressing the ad hominem button on your computer?

“Anytime I hear the term “dialectic,” there’s certainty of some Marxian claptrap being spouted like diarrhea of the brain.”

According to Who/Whom? Moreover, you do realize that what you read on Sailor’s blog is “dialectic”, right?

“And I hate to break this to Malcolm, but yes, speed is a sign of intelligence.”

Context matters.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/does-thinking-fast-mean-youre-thinking-smarter-180950180/

Any idea what the average turnover rate is for a lawyer who made partner? Just for a modest, respectable firm.

Not in the sense that I’d have numbers. What do you mean by turnover, people moving between firms or people leaving the profession? The former isn’t uncommon, though usually by the time a lawyer has made partner, or at least equity partner, if they’re going to join another firm, they’re usually going to be expected to bring work with them or somehow otherwise to bring work in the door (no firm wants to add another mouth to feed from the firm’s profits unless they’re bringing something extra to the table). Often when partners leave a “modest, respectable firm” for another firm, the original firm is splitting up and the partners are going their separate ways and taking their business, associates, and staff with them (very often acrimoniously, especially if there’s a dispute over who keeps which clients).

In the other case, of leaving the profession, by the time a lawyer has made partner, they’re usually somewhat stuck in the typical career and life plan trap most people fall into by 40, where they’re far enough along and competent enough to do it until retirement, but also committed to that career, and usually saddled with expenses, family, etc., such that making major career moves becomes a lot more complicated. A lawyer who has made partner at any real firm is competent enough to not need an exit, though they may be either tired of the law or else stuck on the income ladder somewhere (especially if they’re non-equity, or the firm’s compensation arrangements are skewed). Transactional lawyers, especially at big firms, often have a more clearly marked set of potential exits (e.g., finance, business, or in-house, often with one of their old clients).

Why is engineering a 4 yr bachelor’s progam but law is a 7 yr doctorate (4 yrs batchelor + 3 yr JD)?

Get ride of law school altogether, bring back the Batchelor of Law as the starting qualification. Or just go back to the apprenticeship system.

1. Apprenticeship has been replaced by formal education in almost every field, not just law. Law firms would rather hire someone who is already professionally trained (and billable at high rates) rather than train their own employees from scratch . I don’t think we are ever going back to the old model.

2. This case was driven by some handicapped person (and presumably some handicapped advocacy organization in the background), not the law schools. Law schools are free to set their own admission standards and didn’t need the LSAT to be redone – they could just reach lower into the pool. Apparently, there is no real limit on how low you can go. Theoretically the ABA can sanction you but they have been reluctant to do so and in some states (CA) you don’t have to attend an ABA accredited school to sit for the bar.

California for some reason has historically loose regulation of law schools and a number of extremely low quality unaccredited (by the ABA) law schools which are in effect comparable to “reading law”. A very low % of the students in these schools are able to pass the bar exam but they attend nevertheless – Dunning-Kruger I guess.

Statistically, once your LSAT is below 150, you have maybe a 50/50 chance of being able to pass the bar exam. At below 144, you have maybe a 1 in 4 chance of passing. The LSAT is doing people a favor by warning people with low scores not to attend but not everyone wants to hear the message, especially in the current Woke/egalitarian environment. These bottom fisher schools are for the most part fulfilling a demand from the public rather than luring in the unwary. Maybe they should be required to carry warnings like cigarette packages but ultimately the students have agency – no one is chaining them to their desks and forcing them to attend.

https://www.lawschooltransparency.com/reform/projects/investigations/2015/analysis/

(To understand LSAT scores in the familiar 200-800 SAT terms, subtract 100 and multiply the remainder by 10, e.g. 145 = 450 SAT. )

The transition of law schools to accepting the GRE is interesting. The tests accepted by Mensa make a useful overview of what has happened to standardized tests over the years (also worth noting, the LSAT threshold is 95th percentile, not a numeric score).
https://www.us.mensa.org/join/testscores/qualifying-test-scores/

The following is a list of admissions tests and the years they stopped being accepted by Mensa.

ACT Composite 1989
GMAT still accepted (95th percentile)
GRE 2001 (note comment earlier in thread about GRE being changed about 20 years ago)
LSAT still accepted (95th percentile)
PSAT 1993
CEEB 1977
SAT 1994

I wonder if removing logic games from the LSAT will cause Mensa to stop accepting it.

Also, all of the military tests stopped being accepted in 1980. I wonder if that was caused by the Luevano decision iSteve mentioned or if it was a separate strand of the same process.

‘Highly educated’ is newspeak for ‘highly indoctrinated’.

I wonder if Corkanus ever received a positive comment on a single one of his countless posts. Tiny makes no sense but as an obvious troll is at least somewhat funny. Corky is not only wrong about virtually everything, but manages to somehow be a colossal asshole on top of it. In a sense he’s quite accomplished.

Keep being you Corky

Somewhat on topic, The Atlantic has a new article on education today:
The Contradiction at the Heart of Public Education
Gifted education puts in tension two equally treasured American ideals: egalitarianism and individualism
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/10/gifted-and-talented-programs-arent-problem/599752/

Seems like an attempt at a balanced look at the gifted issue, but for me it is ruined by the following.

If you believe—and you should—that unusual cognitive abilities are evenly distributed among the population, then it’s a problem that disadvantaged kids are significantly underrepresented among those identified for special programming.

GIGO

And the failure of the author to acknowledge that the “reformers” (which he considers himself) did not fail by just ignoring the gifted:

In hindsight, it is striking how little discussion we had in the reform community about how these efforts did or did not address the needs of kids who were excelling, or how these initiatives were landing on non-disadvantaged communities—places where parents liked things just as they were.

They were actively hostile to gifted programs and tracking. (I suppose the last bit could be considered an oblique reference to their negative impact, but how about taking a bit more ownership?)

The consultants basically do all the work and interface with government employees

This. I was a “consultant” for a few years before interacting with morons and doing pointless make-work tasks (most of the federal government does nothing that, were it to stop, anybody would notice) drove me insane and I left. The size of the “workforce” is 50-75% larger than people realize. There are the federal employees, then there is the vast army of “consultants” that do whatever it is the federal employee is supposed to do.

Whatever people think about DC and its vast waste, the reality is even worse.

Justice isn’t blind anymore (if she ever was.)

Great stuff.

Contract law is rather like a computer programming language

All law is contract. The language is legalese.

They should just drop analytical testing altogether. It has nothing to do with practicing law – bribing judges through campaign contributions does (at least in those jurisdictions where they are elected; where appointed, the bribes are directed to the elected officials who appoint them).

I’m against making it easier for mediocre to get into law school, but then again, there’s nothing to prevent the somewhat bright from getting into law school, passing the bar, and going on to become really slack ass lawyers.

Chief Justice Warren Burger said that “90 percent of American Trial Lawyers are incompetent, dishonest or both.”

I’m sure the numbers are more amusing under our present kakistocracy.

The idea that IQ is not unitary so therefore it is worthless is idiotic and unworthy of refutation. IQ stems from the verifiable observation that people who are good at one type of abstract or academic task tend to be good at all of them. If you can manipulate and memorize symbols and learn to read, you can also probably manipulate and memorize symbols and learn to do math. If you can learn chemistry then you can also probably learn physics. Different people have different strengths and weaknesses but overall it is possible to average these out and come up with a composite measure of intellectual horsepower which can be proven to be valid and repeatable and useful for many things. This is not at all in doubt. A person with a measured IQ of 85 can almost never be trained to become a physician or an engineer, etc. nor would you want such persons in such positions in your society if you value your safety.

So certainly, environmental factors that shape the contents of mind must have a huge impact on intelligence, which is why focusing the genetic basis of intelligence to the exclusion of environmental factors, such as education and culture, cannot result in a comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon.

This is just a straw man. No one (to my knowledge) has ever said that IQ is 100% based on heredity. The exact % is not known (especially since research in this area is a political minefield and it is difficult to do controlled experiments on humans) but for want of a better number the assumption that humans are roughly 50/50 the products of nature and nurture seems to be a fair approximation.

The idiotic position is that of the Left, which, against all common sense and observation, maintains (and this is NOT a straw man position – they really say this) that man is 100% the product of his environment and that heredity has ZERO bearing on intelligence.

If you believe—and you should—that unusual cognitive abilities are evenly distributed among the population,

“If you believe — and you should — that unusual height is evenly distributed among the population…”

“If you believe — and you should — that unusual sprinting abilities are evenly distributed among the population…”

…and you should…

Everybody could cut and paste any lengthy pile of garbage. Then, after nobody cared to answer it, he would claim to be the king of the hill.

Good joke!

Hey, Idiocracy isn’t so much a movie as a prophesy.

Extended time on the SAT itself (or rather the fact that the test was given under conditions of extended time would be hidden from colleges) was itself the result of an ADA suit by someone who had no arms.

What seems to be going on is that the “disability advocates” find some posterboy with an extreme disability and they use that as a lever to negate test standards for everyone. The vast majority of people who now take the SAT under extended time conditions (and by vast majority I mean maybe a 100 to 1 ratio) are kids with “learning disabilities” rather than physical disabilities. “Learning disability” is more or less a euphemism for “not that bright” and since the SAT is supposed to test how bright you are, the whole thing makes no sense – might as well give slow runners extra time to finish a race. At this point it is a standard technique used by Rick Singer client type parents to buy their kids higher SAT scores – you pay several thousand $ to get your kid tested and viola, it turns out that Johnny is learning disabled and needs more time on his SAT. Unlike bribing the proctors, this is legal. It is so standard that it is losing its effectiveness since all the other White Tiger mothers have the same idea so half the kids in your private prep school are also getting extended time. I say White Tiger because Asian Tigers use different methods such as extreme test prep to boost little Sun-Hoo’s score. Getting their kid officially diagnosed as retarded is not an appealing idea in Asian culture.

The LSAT predicts whether you’ll be good at law school and whether you’ll be able to pass the bar exam. It doesn’t predict whether you’ll be a good attorney. There’s overlap of course, but success as an attorney, assuming at least an IQ of 115, depends on a lot of soft factors, including luck and preexisting connections.

Those are very much akin to my observations. But there are far more lawyers coming into the profession than going out. But because turnover from partnership-level positions are really low (any good position really,) all this pressure builds up. It brings profits and salaries down.

A law school exam might have a homeless woman late for her cleaning job shove a Goldman banker at the subway door causing him to fall between the train and platform,.

Let’s pray that the subway wasn’t built with a gap so large between the train and the platform that riders are at risk of falling into it.

Let’s pray that law school exam questions aren’t filled with requirement to suspend experience.

What is important about this story is the continuing misuse of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

My only argument with you, Ibound1, is the word “misuse”.

This is exactly what ADA is was intended to be. It was hardcore ideological minoritarianism. And a lawyers’ scam, written by lawyers to be a lawyers’ scam–sucking billions from the productive economy and dumping it on lawyers (for plantiffs and defense)–from the beginning.

~~

It is one thing to figure that some people have been dealt a bad hand and we should mandate braille buttons in elevators, or have sidewalk curb cuts and wheelchair ramps to public buildings. (What exactly the US Congress is doing mandating acess to public buildings in say Arkansas is another question.) But those are specific rememdies with fairly specific costs we can decide to shoulder.

There is no sense, no logic–and no budget!–that can actually fully “accomodate” everyone’s “disability”. It’s right there in the word itself “dis-ability“–linguistically apart from normal abilities, functionally less ability.

If everything must be made “accessible” to those with reduced or inferior abilities than the norm, then a) it’s a blank check, b) everything/everyone is open to legal challenge and shakedown and worse c) no standard of ability may be maintained. Think golfers in your competition should be able to walk–you are wrong! Think lawyers ought to be smart enough to knock out some little logic puzzles–you are wrong! Think your employees should be able to walk or see or mentally stable–you are wrong! Think your web site is your business–you are wrong!

Mid 20th century America was majoritarian and pretty darn nice. Americans–too late–had reined in immigration, got through the Depression, won the War, constantly consolidating as a people and nation and unprecedented prosperity and social stability was within reach of the vast majority of working people. Then with the rise of the Jews and minoritarianism as the dominant ideology everything headed downhill. Only the continued technological progress–delivered by white guys–and most of it the direct outgrowth of one technology–the transitor–has masked the decline. But the social and political decline is obvious.

Smart nations with a common culture and strong identity can do great things. But once you are running around ass kissing all the “special” people, forget it. You are swirling around the toilet bowl.

The logic games are an efficient way to test for “analytical reasoning” within the limitations of the testing format because speed and ability are related. For example, people that are able to solve relatively simple math problems faster and with less effort are nearly always much better at more difficult math problems.

The entire test is set up like this. If you have an IQ above 100, perseverance and unlimited time all of the LSAT problems are solvable (note the 3 sections are: Reading Comprehension; Logical Reasoning; and Analytical Reasoning). But – at least for the vast majority of people – the time restriction adequately measures ability (IQ) even at the high end. As with any test there will always be exceptions that don’t test to their potential, like blind people, but it goes without saying that minoritarianism is always a bad idea for society at large.

The great thing about the LSAT is that it may be the hardest standardized test to prep for because it requires virtually no acquired knowledge (as opposed to say the GRE Math, MCAT, et al). Having taken a LSAT prep course myself, I’m suspicious of anyone that claims more than a 7-point gain and doubtful of gains above 10 points.

I’d hate to see any changes to the LSAT or its importance. It’s one of the few meritocratic holdouts in our Clownworld.

Unlike for med schools, there is no required undergrad curriculum – you can major in anything and go to law school.

And in most other Western countries, law is not a graduate degree–it is an undergraduate degree program. Training and education for the law would be massively cheaper were it, say, incorporated as a four year undergraduate degree. Seven years of formal education (expense in time and money) is a significant burden to sit for the bar exam. A burden that benefits all the bureaucratic functionaries employed in the law gravy train.

I personally have known several lawyers from Ireland who practice in the US, without having had the expense of four years of undergraduate education before studying the law.

“Learning disability” is more or less a euphemism for “not that bright” and since the SAT is supposed to test how bright you are, the whole thing makes no sense – might as well give slow runners extra time to finish a race.

This. Well said Jack.

Generalized, “accomodation” simply makes no sense. If your “disability” is preventing you from doing X then you do not have the ability to do X. Case closed. There’s no need for the world to “accomodate” you incapability.

If some law school thinks that current optical-to-audio technology makes it possible for smart blind people to be effective lawyers … fine. (Count me as dubious.) Go figure all that out and craft the blind lawyer test you think works. But that should have absolutely nothing to do with the standards for normies.

and a lawyers’ scam, written by lawyers to be a lawyers’ scam

I believe it was Bob Tyrell at The American Spectator that referred to it as “The Lawyer’s Full Employment Act of 1990”. Another one of Bush the First’s many mistakes.

Used up my agree but I agree.

Oxford University recently announced that they were increasing the alotted time for maths exams, because currently the highest scorers were all men.

That’s of a piece with all the other machinations in modern-day testing–or qualifications of any kind. If white males outperform, then the test must be changed, and changed again, until they don’t. The contortions which result are often far more ludicrous than extra time.

Dictionaries dating to the postwar period are7still available online and in book stores. I value mine highly.

Colloquially, intelligence is linked to speed – of the retarded we say “he’s really slow”. Mental HP IS linked to processing speed just as it is in computers. It’s not wrong to have timed tasks on IQ type tests . Even someone who is quite retarded could tell you what 5+3 given enough time by counting on his fingers but if you task people to solve 10 addition problems in 30 seconds, you’ll be able to separate the sheep from the goats

People who are intelligent will also see the non-obvious shortcuts to getting to the answer. If I ask a stupid person the sum of all the numbers from 1 t0 10 he will add 1+2+3, etc. but a clever person will see that it is really 5 pairs of 11 each (10+1, 9+2, etc.) and tell you the answer in a flash. A stupid person might approach an SAT algebra problem by solving for X while a smart one will take note of the fact that there are only 5 values to choose from and it might be faster just to plug those 5 values into the equation than to solve the problem algebraically – if you are lucky you might even solve it on your first or 2nd guess, especially if you eyeball the equation first to see which values appear most plausible. Someone who is smart might pick the choice that is in the middle of the range as his first guess and then he would know that if that choice was too low, all the lower numbers could also be ruled out so he could reduce the maximum # of plug operations from 5 to 3. And so on.

The more prestigious the law school, the less practical law is taught

This is true in many fields.

In my experience, reading complex prose is one of the most demanding and necessary skills for a lawyer.

And it should be easy to test – give someone a dense sentence or two, and ask a few questions about how this would apply in a few cases.

Just to reminisce, my strategy for some really tough drafting was to locate the key verb(s), underline, and work from there. And I remember trying to explain a provision to a public servant who had completely misread a fairly simply sentence and could not be persuaded otherwise.

But what about blind people sitting for the test? They could, of course, read in Braille, but I’d expect them to be at a disadvantage with sighted people who can study the sentence/ para more holistically.

Mostly OT, but there were were blind people in Byzantium who actually did make decent lawyers and diplomats. I’m not joking: blinding was how Byzantine emperors could remove rivals without killing them, and if you could escape infection, there was nothing theoretically preventing you from going on with your life, if you had the means.

Somewhere I read that the largest proportion of “extra time” test takers is in Nassau County NY. Make of that what you will. Wish I could remember the proportion–it was shocking, on the order of 30 or 40%.

Logic Games to be Purged from Law School Entrance Exam

To be replaced with Hunger Games.

Everybody could cut and paste any lengthy pile of garbage. Then, after nobody cared to answer it, he would claim to be the king of the hill.

Corvinus, like the rest of his species, just loves a good pile of garbage.

I understand that the CA bar exam is the toughest in the country by far.

I’m watching it right now. (Jeez, look at all that hair.) you recommend any other good law shows? What about Boston Legal?

Mark, doesn’t California still have the Blow-Job exemption or was that done away with after Kamala Harris was admitted?

Lawyer Turkish, quoted in the article, is definitely right in my opinion. I took the LSAT twice. The first time I didn’t do very well and the second time I did even worse. I recall that my eyes would glaze over upon reading the logical/analytical stuff. I never had any interest in doing puzzles and I subsequently learned that people who are into puzzles often ace this section. In any event subsequently, as part of my job in the insurance property/casualty claims business, I had to take several law courses including contract law and tort law, with emphasis on reading different cases just like in law school. As it turned out, I did quite well. Of the lawyers with whom I’ve dealt over the years, some were smart and some were total douche bags. Most of them were frankly not very impressive intellectually. I wonder how many people might have succeeded in practicing law if they didn’t have to take those tests and, instead, “read law” like Jefferson and John Adams did, apprenticing in a law firm under the tutelage of an experienced practicing attorney.

I don’t think Gauss was blind. You’re probably thinking of Leonhard Euler, who went blind later in life and dictated his mathematics to an assistant.

I’d love to have a Fowlers’s from each decade.

Perhaps I came across as an absolutist regarding people with handicaps, which isn’t my intention. Handicapped individuals who can overcome their disability and perform a task/job/etc. to the same standard as the rest are held to I certainly don’t have any problem with. My problem arises with lowering standards to accommodate unworthy individuals based on the grotesque current year morality on display.

Your points are well taken.

Sorry – a point I meant to add:

“Truth is, if only people capable of excelling at the LSAT without doodles and preparatory courses were allowed into law school, we’d have appropriately fewer and better lawyers, ”

We would also have fewer and better law professors.

“Any reasonably intelligent person could ace the Logic Games if they had all day to solve the problems.

The challenge of the LSAT is to complete them in a limited time.”

The bar exam prep course I took recommended taking as much time as necessary to work through each logic puzzle to really come up with the right answer, and then if there were any remaining unanswered as time ran out, pick a single letter and mark that same letter the rest of the way down. So that way you got points for all of your correct answers (which should have been all of them that you worked through if you actually took your time), plus as many more points as the law of averages would grant you from your remaining same-letter answers (e.g., one point if there were five questions that you same-lettered, bearing in mind that each question had five possible answers). This in contradistinction to what I was told was the more usual method, which was making absolutely sure you went through each and every question, but just sort of half-assing each one to make sure you didn’t run out of time, a method which, given the difficultly level of these logic puzzle questions, may not have gotten you a much better score than just picking answers at random. Anyway, my score landed me in the top 12% of takers.

Damn, your right.

I hated the LSAT logic games, the prep for it, the crazy wording, the extra prep for it.

However, two of the three years of law school were learning the rules for a made up logic game and applying those rules. It literally is the most important part of lawyering.

I understand that Blacks do worse on logic games, but once they made the bar exam hard in my state, testing the knowledge and application of the made up rigid rules the law game, Blacks got hit hardest. One of the exams a few years ago 60% bombed it. That time, and most times, more Blacks blow it than other races.

Getting rid of the LSAT logic games won’t help on the bar exam end, after they have invested three years and tens of thousands of dollars.

I recall that my eyes would glaze over upon reading the logical/analytical stuff. I never had any interest in doing puzzles.

It sounds like you weren’t that motivated. I often have to read material that makes my eyes glaze over or in which I have no interest but I power thru it because it’s my job – I’ve promised to do this for my clients and I have to carry it out whether I like it or not.

Any Asian kid would have buckled down and studied how to do logic puzzles until he could do them in his sleep. “Like” or “interest” doesn’t come into play – you gotta do what you gotta do.

If some law school thinks that current optical-to-audio technology makes it possible for smart blind people to be effective lawyers … fine. (Count me as dubious.) Go figure all that out and craft the blind lawyer test you think works. But that should have absolutely nothing to do with the standards for normies.

This is one of the biggest problems with the Left’s long march through the institutions of our civilization. These lawsuits are generally more like collusive scams on the citizenry than the adversarial processes they are touted as. The LSAT admins and the plaintiffs hash out whatever changes they want behind closed doors , than pretend that this is what they were forced to do. The same thing happens with environmentalists suing the EPA. They enter into consent agreements that they had planned on b4 the suits were ever filed. The administrative state is inimical to the liberty of the citizenry.

We’ve had Braille drive up ATM’s for a while.

Which set(s) are you a member of, my anonymous friend, and why did I make such a big impression on you?

I’m watching it right now. (Jeez, look at all that hair.) you recommend any other good law shows? What about Boston Legal?

Yeah, the LA Law guys all had the Clintonesque windblown mane, Bernstein and Harry Hamlin and Smits. That hairdo was all over the professional world like a persistent rash for 15 years.

Harry Hamlin did a stint on the series Mad Men, he was one of the later-episode partners. He still has his hair, the bastard. I don’t watch much TV really. I have all the options on Xfinity and don’t bother with it, my chicks do when there’s one around. I tend to latch onto what becomes “Classic”, like the aforementioned Mad Men and L.A. Law. Don’t know from Boston Law really and I’m in Boston.

The law and business are so debased as professions I don’t think they deserve much examination in entertainment arts outside of Sex Sells. And I’m not interested in any case. They aren’t my cup of tea.

If your LSAT score is low, many are turned off at applying to law school especially when they hear about how big firms have been collapsing and lucrative jobs are few.

Where are they hearing that? Lucrative jobs don’t grow on trees, yeah, but big firms are going gangbusters.

If 2017 was a good year for law firms, 2018 was better. On the heels of a year considered to be the strongest for the Am Law 100 since the Great Recession, the nation’s top law firms took their performance a step further. On aggregate, revenue grew at a muscular 8 percent clip over the last year, hitting a record $98.7 billion. That’s well past the 5.5 percent growth rate from 2017, the previous high-water mark in the post-recession new normal.

https://www.law.com/americanlawyer/2019/04/23/the-am-law-100-reached-new-heights-driven-by-nearly-universal-growth/

I don’t think law schools have anything to do with this change.

More like it’s a sneaky IQ test.

This, I think, is true. But logic games are teachable, to an extent. The three sections of the LSAT are reading comprehension, logical reasoning (which is largely reading comp again) and analytical reasoning a/k/a logic games. When I did practice tests, I had no trouble with the first two sections but I did very poorly on logic games. I took a Kaplan prep course, and I never mastered logic games, but I got to where they weren’t killing me, and I wound up with a very good score overall.

That’s absolutely not true. Unlike the LSAT, state bar exams are merely cram-rote-memorize-regurgitate exams that, in the end, have no bearing on actual practice. This is why post-law school students usually take a 2 month intensive cram course that basically tells them what the essay questions will be and what the minor differences in state X law on theft or contracts are versus the federal rule.

You are mistaken. Most states use some variation of the multistate, which includes lots of multiple choice questions, kind of like an SAT for lawyers, essays, and the like. For example, the NY bar has 200 multiple choice questions, six short essays, and the MBT, which is:

a 90-minute assignment designed to test the Bar candidates ability to use fundamental lawyering skills in a realistic situation. A Case File and a Library are provided along with an assignment such as write a memo, a brief, a statement of fact or a will.

https://law.hofstra.edu/currentstudents/academicsuccessprogram/barexamprep/ny/index.html

I don’t remember that, so I guess it’s relatively new. And yes,the bar exam is a demanding cognitive test — in NY the pass rate last year was 63%. And yeah, people take prep courses, but they take prep courses for the LSAT too.

https://abovethelaw.com/2018/10/the-new-york-bar-exam-results-are-out-and-theyre-not-so-great-july-2018/

I think the bar exam is probably slightly more closely related to the actual practice of law than the LSAT, but neither is particularly close. How could they be?

As Malcolm Gladwell has recently been asking, Why do the LSAT and other tests reward or require speed when, in real life, you never have to answer 60 different, dense questions in 3 hours?

Try arguing a criminal appeal to a hot bench, you’ll be answering difficult, dense questions at a much faster clip than that. Or writing a motion in limine at 10 pm that needs to be presented to the judge in the morning.

it’s ok, because they already purged law from the court room.

at this point what’s purging a few questions from a law school test gonna change?

What are you blathering about moron? Read your incoherent nonsense before clicking publish comment.

Justice Burger was one of the 9 scumbag minions of Satan who found mental hospitals are bad and ordered them all closed down and the inmates put on a bus to the nearest city and caused the homeless problem in the 1975 Donaldson case. 3 cases, 2 Hodge cases the one Donaldson case about 15 judges and no more mental hospitals

Hope Justice Burger and the other supreme scumbags are reincarnated as mentally homeless and spend their entire adult lives living in the street in a cold northern state.

The damages a thousand or so judges have done to America and White people is incalculable. Unlimited immigration, school bussing and desegregation affirmative action closing the mental hospitals do the most vulnerable live on the streets like Indian untouchables.

Even the terrible wildfires of 2017 were caused by idiot judges forbidding the clearing of brush and dead trees because millions of years ago before evil humans arrived, no one cleared dry brush and dead trees

Very few legal conflicts are adjudicated. It’s just lawyers talking and writing till the clients agree to settle.

Aren’t CanSpecy and Corvinus the sane incoherent babbler?

California permits apprenticeship. That is how Kim Kardashian intends to become a lawyer.

How many states still allow architects to apprentice their way to a license? That used to take 12 years vs five for school.

I’d rather have a legal case collapse around me than a building.

South Korea has an ancient law, still in effect, that reserves the massage profession to the blind.

I think that must have changed since the article came out (2008), because I have been to Korea since then and can confirm that there are non-blind masseurs.

I think he’s referring to genuine massage.

So what is a Korean “happy ending” like?

When one considers the measurement of intelligence in those terms, one is confronted by the realization that information is acquired via multiple channels, auditory, olfactory, visual, proprioceptive, etc. with data from each channel processed by a specialized brain modules, or probably in most if not all cases, by multiple specialized brain modules.

LOL, and a Lada has an engine block, a crankshaft, a starter, a fan belt, pistons, an air intake manifold… it’s just so complex that drooling retards think they can generalize some kind of ‘horsepower quotient’ that allows one to differentiate it from a Ferrari!

If we saw the same variation in prioproception that we do in intelligence, most Africans would be covered in bruises from walking into doors. ‘Blue man’ indeed!

Telling that the argument persuaded you; it’s a variation on reddit-style IF UNIVERSE BIG, HOW GOD REAL?

Longtime lurker, first time poster. Commercial real estate finance lawyer (179 LSAT).

Wrote to say Malcolm Gladwell has no idea what he’s talking about. Literally all I do is solve complex problems rapid fire. There is always too much work. There are always too many deals. There are always more pieces of paper than one person can *really* read every line of.

The idea that I have unlimited time to sit around thinking to solve obscure issues is ludicrous. The joint venture agreement came in an hour ago and the managing partner of the fund wants a call with you and the tax lawyer in two hours so we can turn the doc tomorrow. You are on 10 other deals and have 4 conference calls already scheduled. You going to ask for extra time?

They were actively hostile to gifted programs and tracking.

So were conservative education reformers in lily-white areas such as suburban Minnesota. Tracking was a pernicious Prussian import being imposed by alien commies like Al Gore.

Gifted programs were quite popular with the same crowd, though.

Both the Rumpole of the Bailey books and the tv shows with the inimitable Leo Mckern are hilarious.

I wrote John Mortimer a letter years ago telling how much I enjoyed all his work and I received a very nice hand-written reply.

Corvinus,I like you, and I am a little surprised that you don’t know you are talking to one of the great geniuses of the age.

If I wanna say someone was a flunky for the abortion racket, you have two choices, my young friend.

The first choice is to listen to what I say with respect.

The other choice is the wrong choice.

Good luck going forward, my young friend —– I Know what inspired George MacDonald in the best of his novels, with the old crow mildly but unassailably walking on the lawn outside the library, hopping onto the window frame , and cooly observing all the books, knowing he knew more than any of the authors of all those books ——-

Not having memorized 8 times 7 equals 56 but being able to calculate it by counting the squares in an 8 by 7 grid shows IQ in the form of having a deep understanding of the relationship of multiplication to the coverage of a rectangular grid and having the presence of mind to apply this knowledge.

No, it shows an inability to answer the question asked. No one asked WHY 8 times 7 equals 56. Now a student who needs to resort to array is more intelligent than a student who simply drools on the paper, but isn’t as intelligent as the student who simply knows this, ceteris paribus.

In a similar vein, the best actuaries didn’t major in actuarial science. If that’s your major, your coursework is geared toward having you pass the tests. If you major in something else and are still able to pass the tests, you are probably more intelligent.

I like your name, reminds me of the first years of my triumphs in upstate New York.

I am just sad to see a bright guy like you suck up to the Jew-haters and sign up with those disgusting little paragraph things, as if you were trying to signal to your bigoted leaders that you are subservient and stupid and subservient, but I repeat myself.

And the most important set I belong to is a set you have never heard of,
but God knows what it is ….

and all of us need to try and do this ….

to understand the world sufficiently that we can make God laugh with our ability to explain what we have understood.

Happy now?

Think golfers in your competition should be able to walk–you are wrong!

John Daly, by virtue of winning the 1995 British Open, has a lifetime exemption from qualifying for this event. He wanted to play this year, but was too fat to walk and requested the use of a cart. Since Northern Ireland is not part of the USA, they told him to pound sand. He ended up withdrawing.

When I tutor for the SAT Math, I tell the students not to rush. Since the test is arranged in difficulty order, you don’t want to make a silly mistake rushing through an easy question just to get to a hard question you are going to get wrong anyway.