Texas law students who have completed 60 credit hours and are not on academic probation may apply for a third-year bar card. The temporary trial card allows the student to “participate in the trial of cases in Texas under the supervision of a licensed attorney.” Students who wish to apply for a third year bar card outside of a clinical program should take the following steps:
1. Download and complete the Third Year Bard Card Application. (Word, PDF)
- Review pages 1-5.
- Complete the student information section of page 6. Page 6 will need to be signed and notarized.
- Complete page 7. Page 7 will need to be signed by one of the law school deans.
- Page 8 requires information on the student and supervising attorney. Tip: You can find pre-fill most of the requested information for your supervising attorney by searching the Texas Bar Directory. Page 8 will also need to be signed by the supervising attorney.
- Complete page 10-12, and have the supervising attorney sign pages 11 and 12. Page 12 will need to be notarized.
2. Download and complete the Authorization and Release (Word, PDF) with the supervising attorney’s information. This will need to be signed by the attorney and notarized.
3. Mail pages 6-8 and 9-12 of the Bar Card Application, along with the Authorization and Release form and a check for $10 made out to the State Bar of Texas to the following address:
The State Bar of Texas
Membership Department
P. O. Box 12487
Austin, TX 78711
4. The turnaround time for third year bar card applications is anywhere from two to five weeks, so make sure you apply early.
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“You come in here with a skull full of mush and you leave thinking like a lawyer.” Professor Kingsfield, The Paper Chase
Professor Kingsfield was right; law school changes the way you read, the way you think, and the way you analyze. Not unlike boot camp, this three-year odyssey is meant to break you and then remake you into something better than you were before. There are a number of things that you can do to ensure you come out on top when all the making and breaking is done:
1. Get advice from 2Ls and 3Ls who are successful in the areas you want to be successful in. There are a number of ways to be successful in law school. You can make the highest grades, become an acclaimed advocate, or become an editor for a law review or law journal. An important key to being successful in law school is getting advice from students who are already successful in the areas you want to be successful in. Every law student wants to make good grades, and high grades, more than anything else, are rewarded upon graduation. Find students who are at the top of their class and find what worked for them, how they managed their time, and how they prepared for their finals. Find students who have had the professors you are taking to get an idea of what to expect and what the professor expects of you. If you want to focus on honing your litigation skills, seek out a mentor who has been on a national mock trial or moot court team. If you want to become an editor on law review or a law journal, focus on improving your writing skills, pay attention to detail, and find someone who already is on a journal to learn about what it is like being on a journal and tips on effectively managing your time.
2. How you do on the final is much more important than how you answer a question in class.
The Socratic Method strikes fear in the hearts of 1Ls across the nation every year, and it is easy to be caught up in just reading for class to make sure you can answer the question when the professor calls on you. However, knowing the minutiae of every case is not what is going to get you the best grades, you need to be able to step back and see the big picture, so don’t sweat it if you get an answer wrong in class, but make sure you understand why you missed it, and focus on preparing for the final.
On July 31, 2008, Congress passed the College Opportunity and Affordability Act of 2008. The bill, which will now be sent to the President for his approval, has a number of provisions that affect current and future law students:
Section 951 of H.R. 4137: A loan forgiveness program for state or local criminal prosecutors as well as state, local, or federal public defenders which will allow for the forgiveness of $10,000 in students loans per year, up to $60,000, provided the attorney commits to at least three years of continuous service as a prosecutor or public defender. Federal prosecutors were not included in this forgiveness program because there already a Loan Repayment Assistance Program for federal prosecutors, although the forgiveness program for federal prosecutors is available only to a very small number of applicants.
Section 110: Colleges and universities will be required to publish the cost of textbooks as part of a drive to encourage “institutions of higher education to implement numerous options to address college textbook affordability.”
Section 401: The Pell Grant will be increased to $9,000.
Section 482: The Free Application for Federal Student Aid will reduced in length by at least half.
Bill Tracker:
A master wordsmith, Justice Antonin Scalia is without a doubt the most colorful writer on the Supreme Court. Examples of his most famous lines include:
The story is told of the elderly judge who, looking back over a long career, observes with satisfaction that, when I was young, I probably let stand some convictions that should have been overturned, and when I was old I probably set aside some that should have stood; so overall, justice was done. I sometimes think that is an appropriate analogy to this Court’s constitutional jurisprudence, which alternately creates rights that the Constitution does not contain and denies rights that it does. County of Riverside v. McLaughlin, 500 U.S. 44, 59-60 (1991).
Today’s extension of the Edwards prohibition is the latest stage of prophylaxis built upon prophylaxis, producing a veritable fairyland castle of imagined constitutional restriction upon law enforcement.
Minnick v. Mississippi, 498 U.S. 146, 166 (1990).
[N]o government official is “tempted” to place restraints on his own freedom of action, which is why Lord Acton did not say “Power tends to purify.” The Court’s temptation is in the quite opposite and more natural direction–towards systematically eliminating checks upon its own power; and it succumbs. Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833, 981 (1992).
At a recent Federalist Society event, Justice Scalia was asked which one of his dissents was his favorite. Justice Scalia responded with a quote from Morrison v. Olson. Morrison was the case in which the Court ruled that the Ethics in Government Act did not violate the separation of power doctrine. The Ethics in Government Act empowered the Attorney General to appoint independent counsel to investigate and prosecute government officials. The lone dissenter, Justice Scalia, penned his favorite lines stating,
Frequently an issue of this sort will come before the Court clad, so to speak, in sheep’s clothing: the potential of the asserted principle to effect important change in the equilibrium of power is not immediately evident, and must be discerned by a careful and perceptive analysis. But this wolf comes as a wolf. Morrison v. Olson, 487 U.S. 654, 699 (1988).
For more of Justice Scalia’s greatest dissents, check out Kevin A. Ring’s book, Scalia Dissents: Writings of the Supreme Court’s Wittiest, Most Outspoken Justice.
Loading ...A recent SMSB post also featured t-shirts with some of Scalia’s more memorable quotes on them.
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Bluebook Rule 18 specifies how materials available in electronic formats should be cited. However, merely proving an “available at” citation does not ensure the content you are referencing will be available at the URL on a later date. In the past, printing a hard copy of the URL or saving an image of the site a PDF documents have been the preferred methods to preserve the content being referencing. Now there is a better way to ensure a website is available for future reference exactly the way it was when you made reference to it: Iterasi.
Iterasi allows you to save a complete webpage on a secure, searchable account while retaining all of the site’s dynamic content. Importantly for lawyers, it allows you to “notarize” a website, which provides verification of the authenticity of the saved page. Once Iterasi is installed, you will see the Iterasi buttons in your browser menu, allowing for one-click notarizations and easy access to all the pages you have notarized. As the Iterasi website puts it, “When a user wants to save a page, one click on the Notarize button instantly transfers the page to a secure personal account, providing a high-fidelity copy of the page, including images, forms, transactions, receipts, confirmations and personalized content.”
Unlike bookmarks and favorites, Iterasi ensures the page you saw is available for future reference long after the site content has changed. While some websites like the Internet Archive and Google Cache are able to retrieve cached pages from the internet to show you what a page looked like in the past, (See eg. Yahoo, circa 1998) there is no guarantee the page you need will be cached from the date you need it or cached at all. Notarizing a website through Iterasi ensures you will be able to save all the data on a website. Because Iterasi also retains the interactive capabilities of a website, it is a much better option than saving a webpage as a PDF document. So next time you are using a “available at” citation to an internet source, consider using an Iterasi link as additional way to ensure the content you are referencing will available whenever you need it.
Iterasi, responding to beta-tester feedback, has also implemented an automatic scheduler that allows you to schedule notarizations of websites you want to keep an eye on. You can also add notes and tags to your saved pages so that your notarized pages can be found quickly later. Saved pages can be shared through email, and Iterasi allows the recipient to see the shared webpage without logging into Iterasi.
More about Iterasi:
The one drawback of Iterasi is that currently on the Windows platform is supported, though a Mac version is scheduled to come out later this summer.
Demonstration of Iterasi:
You can sign up for Iterasi and get more information here.
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One factor that is often considered in determining a law school’s ranking is the number of scholarly articles published per year by the school’s faculty. Since larger schools have an advantage in this regard, a more equitable measure of publication rates is a comparison based on the number of papers published per full-time faculty member. This offers a better measure of how often professors are being published. For example, under the traditional measure the University of Texas would come out ahead in terms of the number of papers published, whereas University of Houston professors actually publish papers more frequently on a per capita basis.
Although the publication rate per professor is a useful tool to compare one aspect of a law school’s ranking, the measure is subject to a number of limitations. First, it does not take into account how many times the published articles were cited, a measure that focuses more on the quality of articles written rather than the quantity. Second, the publication rates per professor measure do not reflect how many professors were actually published in a given time frame. Professors who publish a large number of articles increase the overall publication rate for the whole school. For example over the last year, Antonio Gidi of University of Houston published ten articles and Bernard Black at the University of Texas published fourteen articles.
The findings are subject to the limitations of the source data. The data for the number of papers published comes from the Social Science Research Network. While the SSRN has a majority of the scholarly works published, SSRN only publishes those articles made available by the authors for publication through SSRN. SSRN data also reflects the year in which the article was first made available through SSRN, not the year which the paper was first published. For the sake of consistency, the numbers used in the full-time faculty column were based on the numbers most recently published by the ABA through lsac.org.
One final note, while the publication rates are often referred to and are commonly used as one measure in deriving law school rankings, it is important to note that at least one in depth study concluded that there is little correlation between publication or citation rates and effective teaching.
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Texas Tech University School of Law announced today that it will be hosting United States Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia this Fall as he takes center stage for the Sandra Day O’Connor Distinguished Lecture Series. The Series, which started last year with the attendance of former United States Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor is the result of the continuing efforts of Dean Walter Huffman and distinguished alum Mark Lanier to bring much deserved recognition to the law school.
On a related note, my thanks to Bryan Jepson for getting me a signed copy of Justice Scalia’s new book during my visit to D.C. last month.
In reponse to a 465-page lawsuit filed in his court, U.S. District Judge Roland Leighton in Tacoma, Washington had this to say regarding the lack of a ”short and plain statement showing the plaintiff [wa]s entitled to relief:”
Plaintiff has a great deal to say,
But it seems he skipped Rule 8(a).
His Complaint is too long,
Which renders it wrong,
Please re-write and re-file today.
The Seattle Times reports that the title alone covered eight pages, and it took another 18 pages just to identify the parties. The lawsuit includes 37 pages of quoted emails and a 224-page “odyssey” listing the claims for relief.
Sources: Seattle Times and ABA Journal
Today in a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court struck down the ban on handguns in the District of Columbia. At issue in District of Columbia v. Heller was whether the Second Amendment protected the right of individuals to bear arms, or whether it applied only to the collective rights of states to maintain militias.
In the majority opinion written by Justice Scalia, the Court held that the individual right to possess a firearm is unrelated to service in a militia, and instead, was a right to bear arms for “traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home.” In reaching its decision, the Court examined the language used in the Second Amendment, which provides: “[a] well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” The majority noted that the operative clause used in the Second Amendment was the “right of the people to keep and bear [a]rms.” The Court determined the phrase “right of the people” referred to an individual right rather than a collective right. In dissecting the phrase “keep and bear arms,” the Court found “arms” traditionally referred to “weapons that were not specifically designed for military use and were not employed in a military capacity.” The majority also determined that the most natural meaning of the phrase “keep arms” was “have weapons.” The Court went on to note that every time the phrase “keep arms” was used in the founding era, the phrase referred to an individual right unconnected with militia service. Having addressed the operative clause, the Court went on to address the prefatory clause “[a] well regulated [m]ilitia being necessary to the security of a free [s]tate…” The majority found that the phrase “well-regulated militia” referred to every man who was physically capable of bearing arms. The majority also pointed out that “a militia” was distinguishable from the phrase “organized militia,” and that the phrase “well-regulated” meant only “the imposition of proper discipline and training.” The majority went on to note that the “security of a free state” referred to the “security of the polity” rather than the security of each of the several states. Having addressed each phrase in the pertinent portion of the Second Amendment, the majority concluded that the Second Amendment created an individual right to keep and bear arms.
Majority: Scalia, Roberts, Kennedy, Thomas, Alito
Dissent: Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg, Breyer
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Early last week, I wrote a post about the CCRAA loan forgiveness program in which I noted that it was still unclear whether loan forgiveness under the CCRAA would trigger tax liability. Paul Caron of the TaxProf Blog reported on Friday that the IRS handed down Rev. Rul. 2008-34 “which clarifies that law school public interest loan forgiveness programs qualify for the § 108(f) exception (and, as a result, students need not report the forgiven interest as discharge of indebtedness income). ” The ruling applies to loans made through the Loan Repayment Assistance Program (LRAP) under which loans, administered directly by law schools, are offered to students pursuing careers in public service. LRAP loans have provisions similar to loans consolidated under the CCRAA including a loan forgiveness provision. While Rev. Rul. 2008-34 does not specifically address loans made under the CCRAA, it is an indication that the IRS is likely to find that CCRAA loan forgiveness provision will also fall under the 108(f) exception and the forgiveness will not trigger tax liability.
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