Transcripts For CSPAN QA 20150907

Where were you and what actually got you connected to the Civil Rights Movement . Deborah i read a book by richard cougar called social justice which was about brown versus the board of education and it was a gripping narrative. And i thought, that is what i wanted to do. Brian where were you . Deborah oh, i was a High School Student in chicago. Brian was there any person in your family deborah no. Brian nobody in your family was a lawyer . Deborah no, nobody thought it was a good idea. Brian where did you go . Deborah i went to yale law school. Brian what was it like at the time . Deborah there wasnt a lot of women. In my class, there was maybe 13 women. Most of the great lawyers were, of course, all men. Brian what did you notice about being a woman in law school at yale . Deborah how little notice i gave to it, really, and this is in retrospect. What is startling to me now is just how law and life were. There was discrimination everywhere, but it wasnt often talked about in law school. Brian did you have any women professors . Deborah no. Brian lets talk about it today. Lets talk about the numbers. Deborah it has changed dramatically from when i went to law school. Brian why are women half of the law school . What changed . Deborah the culture. You know . And expectations about women and the profession and of course, the law itself, it was the product of some early efforts to create as a discrimination lawsuits for women, and that was sufficient. So we are a litigious bunch and we sued a lot of people to open some doors. And the vietnam war brought a lot of change in deferment, so the president of harvard was famous for saying now we have the blind, the lame, and the women. Boost schools got a big during that period. Brian how long have you taught in the classroom . Deborah oh, about 35 years now. Brian what do you notice about women law students versus men law students . What is different . Deborah they dont talk as much, especially in big classes. And that is not just true at stanford, but it is across a variety of institutions and pretty much every study that has been done about classroom participation that it varies somewhat in size to the class, but in general as Sheryl Sandberg would say, women dont lean in and they are not vying for your attention. Brian what about you . Deborah i never talked in law school in a big class. Brian is there a difference between how the men write and the women write . Deborah no. I dont see a gender difference. Little classes, the classes i know. But i dont see a gender difference. Brian your book is called the trouble with lawyers, which we will get to in a minute, but i want to show you video from an author who went to Harvard Law School and he now just writes for a living, and i want to hear him back in 2007 about what he says about being a lawyer. Brian now why did you leave law . I was about the worst person ever suited for law. I went into law school believing that lawyers did what they did on the Television Show l. A. Law. There were romantic, spectacular cases every week and it involved celebrity cases and it was all very glamorous and romantic, and when i got to law school, it took me about two or three days to realize that much of the practice of law was about dotting the is and crossing the ts and all of that. Being careful and avoiding disasters. I stuck out the degree but i was fundamentally as miserable as a person could have been. Brian he is actually from chicago also and he practiced law in chicago also but he has not done that for a long time. What did you hear there . Deborah law in realtime and law in primetime are very different. A lot of students go to law school for the wrong reasons, and it should not win by default. I only scans people if they think about law as a career that they should do something lawrelated first and to see if they are wellsuited for it. Brian what did you do after you left law school . Deborah i clerked for a justice, Justice Thurgood marshall in the Appellate Court and in the federal Circuit Court of appeals in new york and then i went directly into teaching. Brian let me show you this video of Thurgood Marshall, who became a justice, i believe in 1957, and you clerked for him for one year. Deborah 1978. Brian what was happening that year . Deborah we had an affirmative action case that was important and an Abortion Case that was important. We had a wonderful case where he wrote the denial about a librarian and a janitor who were fired because they were living together in a small town. Brian here he is in 1988. Justice marshall i have been watching those around here and those who came and i am so impressed with those who were around in the good old days. You know, you talk now about lawyers and lawyers fees and these things, and you know, when i was running the job that the most we could give any lawyer was 25 a day. Now they need about 24,000. As a matter of fact, i dont know what fees they get. Brian you write about fees in your book, but what about Thurgood Marshall. What you are member about your experiences . Deborah he was wonderful to clerk for, just his stories of the Civil Rights Movement alone made the experience wonderful. You know, he just had a real sense of justice and you know, that is kind of what took me to law in the first instance. So it is very great to be at the knees of a very great lawyer. Brian i looked up some statistics for clerks under Thurgood Marshall. He had about 53 clerks. 24 of them are from harvard, 13 from yale, and then there were others from all over the place, from georgetown, from georgia, from texas. You were from yale. What does this say about the kind of folks who end up clerking . Deborah well, the one question he had asked me in my interview is that i have read all of the opinions that i could put my hands on. He looked at my resume and looked down at me and said, so, i see you were a phi beta kappa. Do with your key . And i said, well, i gave it to my mother. And he laughed and he took chances and he had quite a smattering from schools that he thought would produce well. The other thing that i should note though from a marshall is at a time when a number of the Supreme Court justices werent taking any women, he had two. Brian so in the end and this is a question how do you show somebody like a Supreme Court justice that you are smart . Deborah you work really hard. Brian but he didnt know when he interviewed you. What do you say deborah in the interview it is not about being smart but if you have some decent people skills and if you have a sense of humor and he had a Screening Committee that looked at all of the resumes and the letters of recommendation and screened for smart, so by the time you got an interview with him, it wasnt so much about that. Brian you clerked as you said for a number of judges and then for Thurgood Marshall. When all of those experiences were over, what have you learned that you would not have learned had you not done the clerkship . Deborah oh, you know, an enormous amount. I think i was struck by one thing, and my husband at the time was working for the department of justice for something called the office of improvements and the administration of justice, and one of the tasks in that job was to write up a draft testimony for senators and representatives on various bills that the Justice Department was putting through. And of course, that testimony would get submitted to the record, and you know, legislative intent and i as a Supreme Court clerk would say that congress clearly intended this, and it was kind of a never never land, i dont know how many congressmen had actually read that testimony and whether that was really their intent, and so it gave me a dose of realism about the process that i otherwise would not have had. Brian how political was the court . Deborah i dont think it was political at the time, but there were strong divisions of views. Marshall and brennan and stevens were holding up the liberal end. Brian what evidence do you have that it is more political today . Deborah well, you know, i think there are just more polarized decisions in which you just know that it is going to be 54 and the only question is, which way is the swing vote going . I think that has been true of some recent decisions. In cases like bush v. Gore, probably being the greatest example of one where it is hard to think that that was decided in a political vacuum. Brian does that include both sides making the decision . Deborah oh sure. Brian did you see that very often when you were there, when Thurgood Marshall would predict how he was going to go on a case before you even asked him . Deborah on some cases you knew because he had his principles. You knew how he was going to come out on the race case or on a Death Penalty case. I mean, he didnt believe in the Death Penalty. You know, he got above his share of cases that he used to jokingly put or would have the least impact on the fewest possible people, because the chief justice from then, war and berger, would punish you and we used to have a little betting pool as to which would be the worst case and he would go to congress and say, i am going to try and get that one for you. Brian your book, called the trouble with lawyers, published by oxford, um, whats the point . The trouble with lawyers. You are one deborah i think our profession is we have deep troubles. The trouble on the top of my list is the access to justice. You know, we have the worlds highest concentration of lawyers in one of the least accessible and one of the most expensive systems in the world. 4 5 of the legal needs of poor people and middle income people are being met. Are not being met. When you look at world rankings, we are 67th, right there with uganda, in terms of access to justice. You know, we price law out of the pockets for ordinary americans. Brian here is the former attorney general eric holder back in 2010. Eric holder today, despite the decades that have gone by, many cases have yet to be fully translated into reality. That is a fact. But you already know this. All of you have read the reports and all of you know the data. Many of you have learned this truth in the hardest of ways i by experiencing it on the ground. You have seen how to many of our counties and into many of our communities, some people accuse us of crimes, including juveniles, they may never, may never have a lawyer. Brian how did the public defender system work . Deborah if you are indigent, and about 2 3 of the defendants in criminal cases are too poor to afford a lawyer, you get one assigned, and it can either be a public defender which is paid for by the state, or a can be someone who is contracted to provide a service for low income individuals, and you get a statutory fee, which is typically capped at ludicrous levels so that effective representation is a recipe for financial disaster for most practicing criminal attorneys. So they have to cut corners. Brian who is or who will be a public defender . Deborah people who care about justice. I worked as an intern in the public defender service. I thought that was maybe what i would do with my life and i have the greatest respect for people who work under very difficult circumstances. Huge caseloads, and they do as good a job as they do, but they we dont provide nearly anywhere near enough lawyers to cope with the rising number of individuals who are entitled to lawyers. Brian you say in your book that there should be more government funding for lawyers. Deborah yes. Brian who that would be entitled to it . If somebody committed a crime, would they get a free lawyer . Deborah no, we would still have the same test for indigency, but there wouldnt be 5000 cases on the caseload docket. You could pay lawyers at a rate that would work out at the minimum wage per hour if he put a serious amount of time into the investigation of the case. Brian what are the chances that you will see more money coming from the taxpayers to lawyers . Deborah we are moving in the wrong directions on that. The appropriation vote for criminal defense has dropped and the only way i think to seriously change it is for the courts to step in and to demand more resources for effective representation in criminal cases and more context in which people can get appointed lawyers in civil cases. Brian the latest statistic that i have seen about washington, d. C. , is that about one in 12 people here are lawyers. There are people here who make over 1000 per hour. What is the average public defender paid for doing that kind of work . Deborah now, you know i havent looked at that recently, but it is a small fraction of that amount. Brian are you talking 10 an hour . Deborah no, it is a living wage, but the disparity between people make in the corporate sector and the Public Sector has widened in the last decade. Brian you are here in washington, one in 12 people here in town are lawyers. Deborah i think it gives congress a deluded sense about how much law is readily available to americans, but there are plenty of counties in america where there are no lawyers. Brian plenty of counties . Deborah yeah, we are radically underrepresented in Rural America. Brian what do you do in Rural America . Deborah you go to the next county. Brian do you deserve a public defender . Deborah yes, you do. Brian when you were here as a clerk, at some point he became a staff person up on capitol hill during the impeachment proceedings of bill clinton. When did you do that and why did you do that and where were you right before that . Deborah well, i was a law professor at stanford and my two areas of specialties were gender and law and apparently someone did a search and the thought that two things that they were going to need during the impeachment proceedings were people who were good at ethics and gender. Nobody wanted a repeat of the anita hill situation in which liberal congressmen were thought to have allowed her to go on the stand and people will worried about that with Monica Lewinsky. They wanted a better process. So they wanted somebody with some expertise in ethics and gender. I took a leave. I had to refuse an opportunity how could i refuse an opportunity like that . Brian who did you work for . Deborah i worked for the house judiciary committee. It was for the committee but i was on the democratic side. Brian who was the top democrat . Deborah uhhh brian or who did you answer to when you were there . Deborah i answer to the chief counsel for the democrats more than the but conyers was the ranking democrat at the time. He was great. Brian what did you think of close when you saw this . Where were you deborah i was really shocked at how political it was all the way down. I had majored in Political Science as an undergraduate and what i saw and what played out were just so vastly different. I will give you one illustration. We spent a lot of time during the first few weeks reading the tapes of the interviews, and the appropriations for the committee were controlled by the republicans. And so the republican staff had offices and secretaries and, you know, all of the comforts that you would expect to go with this investigation. And we had half as many people as they did and no office, and a secretary, no telephone and we were all outside of the little secure room where the tapes were being held, and it was some night when we are going through this. We were sitting on the floor and we were on our cell phones and one of the members of the committee came by and saw us there and said, what are you all doing on the floor . And the chief counsel looked at him and said, i wish you guys would win some elections so you could get us some chairs. And that was just how tough it was and the hearings were just so politicized that hyde would call witnesses and we would hear about it on television from cspan, you know, rather than getting any kind of formal notice. Brian what was your feeling than about the issue itself and the Monica Lewinsky versus bill clinton . Did there seem to be any reason to have the impeachment process . Deborah no, there was no reason for it. I mean, it was all political. Totals all the way down, as they say. Turtles all the way down, as they say. You know, there was a lot of his conduct there was not to like, but it was not an impeachable offense. Brian i saw something today and i wanted to get your take on it because of your involvement in all of this. This is what is coming up now in this political season. You no doubt have heard about a writer who has been writing for salon over the years. Camille paglia. This is an interview that i saw today for the first time. She said that the horrible truth is that the feminist establishment in the u. S. , led by gloria steinem, did in fact apply a double standard to bill clintons behavior, because he was a democrat. The democratic president and administration supported abortion rights, and therefore it didnt matter what his personal behavior was. What are your thoughts on this . Deborah i dont think it mattered as to behavior, but what it did for womens issues is something that certainly rallied people to his defense when he was called upon to answer for conduct that a lot american president s had carried on in private. So, you know, as i say, there was a lot not to like in his conduct, but it wasnt an impeachable offense. Brian and you deal with this generational the time, and she suggest that things have changed dramatically from the attitude back then to the attitude now. What is your opinion on that . Deborah well, you know, 80 of americans were polled and they wanted to know whether the president had an affair or not, and my own view is, yeah, there are some context in which the conduct is so egregious, very hard to follow a womanizer in the media and one person said, there is nothing here and you wont find a thing. And of course, they did find a few things. So that is i think, disqualifying. There is poor judgment that you dont want in the leader of the free world, but there was absolutely no correlation between fidelity in marriage and effective presidencies. I mean, Richard Nixon was by all accounts an ideal husband and he lied about watergate. Fdr lied to his wife about his affairs and was one of the nations greatest president s. So i think we should just kind of get over the notion that all politicians private lives should be fodder. Unless it reaches a level of conduct and it calls into question a persons judgment, and ability to serve as a role model for the nation, i dont think it is relevant. Brian in your book, you have another suggestion that you talk about and you put it into the words of president obama. Here is a little thing that he had to say about this back in 2013. President obama this is probably controversial to say, but what the heck. I am in my second term so i can say it. [laughter] president obama i believe, for example, that law schools would probably be wise to think about being two years instead of three years. Because by the third year, in the first two years, people are learning in the classroom, and by the third year, they would be better off clerking or practicing in a firm, even if they wont get paid that much. If you could maintain good professors and sustain themselves, my suspicion is that if they thought creatively about it, i think that they could. Brian what do you think . Deborah well, as you know, i quoted him in the book. I think it could be a wonderful program. We could have to your programs for people who wanted to do something specialist in the third year and three or four years. But you know, it is crazy to train in the same way somebody who is doing routine divorces in a small town in the midwest compared to somebody who is doing mergers and acquisitions on a wall street. We have this onesizefitsall model in the Education System of law school, and it is not working. This assumes that people can afford this. Brian so if i wanted to go to stanford, what would it cost me for three years to get my law degree . Deborah oh god. I should know that figure but i am going to take a wild guess and say somewhere around 400,000 . Brian three years . And that is the average . Deborah yep. Brian what is the normal wage that a stanford graduate would get . Deborah it depends a what kind of practice that they are going into. If they are going to wall street is not atypical. 50,000. Profit, brian are there scholarships to law school . Deborah it is kind of a reverse robin hood. It is not a costeffective way to deal with our nations access problems. Brian 500 students at Stanford Law School . About 180 in the first year . Deborah yes. Brian you teach what . Deborah i teach legal ethics and smaller courses in advanced comm law class and gender law and policy and leadership. Brian what do you tell your students on the first day . Deborah i think what i tell them on the last day is more critical. I tell them not to settle. Their diploma from one of the worlds leading law schools opened a lot of doors and they may need to settle in the short term because of law school debts or geographic constraints, but in the long term, they should pursue their passion and find a job that is a true match for their interests and skills, and not to settle for something secondbest just because it pays well or confers status. Brian when it comes to ethics, can you describe what is unethical in the law . Deborah we talk a lot about confidentiality, conflicts of interest, and failures of the regulatory process. The poor job the bar does around discipline and admissions and regulation of competition. I talk a lot about the lawyerclient relationship and conditions of practice and what makes for a satisfying life in the law. Diversity in the profession. Access to Pro Bono Service and the importance of lawyers doing Public Interest work, not just because it is good for the nation, but for many lawyers it is their most valued professional experience. Brian explain what pro bono law is. Deborah it is lawyers working for free to provide services to underserved populations. Persons, but also social classes that are under represented. Brian how much of it is done by these large law firms . Deborah not nearly as much as you would like. The American Bar Association has an aspirational norm of 50 hours per year, which is essentially 10 hours a week. Most of the nations largest law firms dont match that and when i crunched the numbers, it was around less than an hour a day. Brian should there be a requirement for more . Deborah i think there should be a requirement that lawyers either provide the service or have a financial buyout. If youre really not competent to provide services and you dont want to learn to be competent in areas that are underserved, then make a contribution to a legal aid organization. Brian who should require that be the case . Deborah it would probably come from the courts but you can also have bar organizations as a condition of membership propose a rule that would be then adopted by the court. When the American Bar Association was last drafting its ethical code, its considered a mandatory pro bono requirement. Brian i will show you another video. This is robin west at Georgetown Law Center talking about the number of lawyers that there is in a society. It is clearly the case that law schools are graduating so too many lawyers. Graduates. Over the last few years, we have graduated somewhere around double the number of law graduates as there are law jobs to be absorbed. This has created a serious crisis of underemployment and unemployment for our recent law graduates, many of which are now competing with lawyers who have been squeezed out of firms and have been unemployed. This is the biggest crisis facing law schools right now. Deborah she is right. We are overproducing, which is ironic because we are under producing the lawyers that we need for poor people and low to moderate income americans. In terms of those who can afford it, we have vastly more lawyers chasing the deep pockets than any one can absorb. Law schools need to adjust to that new reality. Brian how much of a decline has there been in people applying or going to law school . Deborah it has been about 12 during this postrecession economy. Brian what is causing it . Deborah more jobs are being outsourced, more jobs are being done through technology, clients are less willing to pay for the training of new lawyers so they expect nothing but experienced lawyers who already know the business to be working on their cases. Brian what is going to happen to these law schools around the country . I have heard talk about some law schools that are in serious financial trouble because of this. What are they going to do to survive . Deborah i think a few of them wont make it. I think others are cutting the numbers in their class and shrinking their faculty. Brian in a place like stanford, how many law professors are there teaching the 500 . Deborah we have a faculty of over 50 fulltime faculty members and then we have a large number of adjuncts who just teach one class. Schools like stanford arent feeling it. Stanford is either number 1 or 2 in the rankings 2 or 3 depending on the year that you look. If you move down the pecking order, you see schools struggling. Brian the chief justice of the United States, back in 2011, talked about legal scholarships. Lets watch. Chief Justice Roberts pick up a copy of any law review that you see and the first article is likely to be the influence of Immanuel Kant in 18thcentury bulgaria, which are sure was of much interest to the academic who wrote it. If the academy wants to deal with the legal issues at a particularly abstract and philosophical level, that is great and that is their business. But they shouldnt expect that it would be of any help or interest to members of the practicing bar or judges. Brian you quote him in the book. Why . Deborah i think he has taken some Poetic License there. I am not aware of an article on the topic he described or anything close to it. He is trying for a laugh. That said, there is an overproduction of legal scholarship as i suggest in the book. I think peoples talents that are being wasted on articles that no one reads would be better spent in time teaching students a higher law professorstudent ratio, or doing work that would affect the needs of poor and low income individuals. Brian how important is the stanford law review . Deborah in terms of world peace and world justice, not very. In terms of helping people get jobs on the academic market, very. Brian you go into a law firm and you want the job. Doesnt matter to them that you are law review . Deborah sure. They say that they care about practical training. When they look at the resumes, they dont hire the students who took a lot of clinical courses, it is the students who were on law review. Brian what is your approach to a classroom and your students . Deborah i expect them to be well prepared. I have them do weekly reflection papers on the readings. I teach, especially in the legal ethics class, it is easy to bullshit your way, so i want there to be an informed dialogue. That is my way of making sure that they are not just responding off the top of their heads. Brian what do have them read . Deborah reported cases, ethical rules, commentary by law professors. There is even some journalism articles. All of the cases are built on real, ethical problems that have happened. When something blows up in the American Lawyer that might be the subject of a problem they have to solve, and that there will be readings and rules that they have to resolve it. Brian the trouble with lawyers is your 20th . Why so many books . Deborah i dont have a rich leisure life. I am hoping to write for the general public, not just academics. I think it is hard to get a lawyer to buy a book that is critical about them. They hear enough from cabdrivers. I think this will influence the debate, certainly among legal academics and in law schools, and i hope around Public Policy issues surrounding access to justice and so forth that i talk about in the book. Brian the trouble with lawyers, gender and law, managing pro bono. Pretty. E towards the beauty bias. Of all the books you have written, with one sold the most . Deborah probably the beauty bias. Brian why . Deborah it appeals to the largest number of people. It got a lot of play on the New York Times book review, in the washington post, the boston globe, and other places. It affects people on a daily basis. We are a society that is preoccupied with appearance, and that preoccupation really spills over in ways that are, i argue, extremely costly economically and psychologically. Brian walter olson of the Cato Institute has a point on this in march of 2011 i tell the story in the excuse factory, my book about workplace law, about the novel idea that the law should combat looksism. Looksism is the highest where employers are hiring better looking people and paying them more and send the rest of us who are homely. It is unfair. Yes, it is unfair, but not until around the time that the harvard law review ran an 80 or 90page student note about the need for the law to combat looksism. Brian doesnt seem to agree with you i dont think. Deborah i think he trivializes the issue. Even to take it on his terms, why should a lawyer and there are welldocumented studies to indicate that lawyers who are more attractive are paid more, are more likely to be promoted. In our profession, look bears no relationship to competence. Why should it matter . To many people, the notion that you consume because of it is ludicrous, but a number of other jurisdictions. They are not awash in litigation. I dont think law is the major answer. I think the major answer is our cultural to try to combat the serious discrimination that people who arent attractive, are seriously overweight, face our society. I think the law can help in raising consciousness about the issues and it can provide a lowcost dispute resolution mechanism in egregious cases. Brian what drew you to that thesis in that book that you wrote . Deborah oddly enough, womens shoes. I watched as women tottered in footwear that was clearly designed for anything other than appropriate travel. I was with a number of women who were hostage to their footwear, couldnt get to the next meeting. A cabdnt get qa and couldnt manage to walk. I wrote an oped, which the New York Times published. I got more responses to that oped then anything i have ever written. I thought, there is something more going on here. I got interested in the topic. It was partially a response to conservatives who are constantly ridiculing the notion that lawyers that employers generally should be held accountable for discrimination. It made me think, somebody needs to take the other side of this issue. Brian have you ever worn those big high spiked heels . Deborah some were given to a Charitable Organization after i began getting notes from a podiatrist saying, thank you for raising this issue. 80 of womens foot and back problems are attributed to womens heels. Brian what kind of reactions did you get to the book and the article . Deborah i got some really vitriolic emails and i was surprised that so many people not just to the book but to the coverage in the times and the post. My favorite one was, why dont we take up a collection around stanford and buy the professor a burqa so no one has to experience her looks. There wasnt a picture on the book cover so where he got the notion that i needed a burqa wasnt clear. But i think its these volumes about the fact that you can get hate mail for just suggesting that appearance bias is a problem. Brian this is not quite connected but it is close. Here is Sandra Day Oconnor around 2010. How would you recommend that people deal with the Old Boys Club . Justice oconnor the old boys what . I think that young women know what im talking about. How do you deal with that in government, private practice, academia. Justice oconnor i think you do the best you can. Get out there and put on a good show, it will help. I think everyone will recognize good work when they see it. There may be some initial belief that she is a woman, she will do a good job. If you do a good job, they can recognize it. I dont know what else to say. Brian what do you think . Deborah i am all for women trying to do a good job, but i do think there is a lot of unconscious bias out there in the world, and i am not the only what it thinks that. There has been a Cottage Industry of work done on the devaluation of womens confidence and the continued pervasiveness of the Old Boys Network and the preference that people feel for individuals that are like them. We need structural remedies to deal with that. It is not enough to tell women to pull up their socks and soldier through. It worked really well for her but it doesnt work so well for a lot of other women. Brian more than half the students in law school are women now. What impact does that have on the Old Boys Network . Deborah it is changing. Certainly in terms of differences between now and when i went to law school. I had a partner tell me that there was no women problem that his firm. They had one woman partner and she had just given birth to her first child. It happened on a friday in the following monday she was back at work. Those stories arent occurring anymore. We have made enormous progress. Although they are half of recent law graduates, 17 of the partners in major firms. We do have a Glass Ceiling issue in law as we do in other areas of the economy. Brian what do you say to young women in your class to teach that are going out to practice law . What is your advice . Deborah sometimes i quote madeleine albright, there is a special place in hell for women who dont help other women. Go and do your bit to try and make the profession a level Playing Field for women. Brian where are women having the biggest impact in the law . Deborah they are well represented in the nonprofit sector. There certainly well represented in some, especially Nonprofit Leadership positions. We have a woman of color attorney general. That wouldnt have happened when i went to law school. We should celebrate the progress but it is partial. Change this to happen before we are truly at a place where People Justice under law applies to lawyers as well as everyone else. Brian in your book, you have the statistic that in 1960, 1 of the lawyers in this country were black, hispanic. One third of the population today comes from that segment, but only 1 5 of the lawyers come from that segment. What is the reason . Deborah poor educational preparation. Then we have standardized tests and a way of assessing interest for law school that doesnt really match up with all of the qualities that are important as a lawyer. We put too much emphasis on grade point average and lsat scores. Brian has stanford done anything to get around this . Deborah we are still pretty reliant on the numbers, in part because our rankings depend on. Brian you dont seem to like the u. S. News rankings. Last i checked, stanford was number 2. Deborah those who live by the board, die by the board. Th\ey are very flawed systems of ranking. 40 of the ranking is based on reputation. No one has good information about the quality of an education that you get different law schools relative to each other, which is why in some experimental surveys, president and m. I. T. Law schools have done very well even though they dont have law schools. Brian what do you see stanford doing that you dont like in order to stay number 2 or even become number 1 . Deborah i think a lot of assiduity admission. I think the curriculum i think a lot has to do with admission. The curriculum can be problematic. Attention to practical skills, access to justice. I think we are probably producing more legal scholarship that is not read them needs to be used in more that comes out of our collective work could probably be used in better ways. The expense of the law school is shocking. If i had one chance to make, it would be to increase the level of Financial Aid and repayment programs for students who go in to Public Interest law. Brian you have been very active in the American Bar Association over the years. If my successes are accurate, there are about 1. 2 million lawyers in the country. Why should, when over two thirds of the lawyers arent represented by the aba, should they have that much power in our society . Deborah i dont think they should. On the whole, on many issues, they have not been out in front in terms of Regulatory Reform in ways that i would like to see them. I dont think they should have as much of a lock of the regulatory process as they do. Brian what have you done for them . Deborah i chaired their commission on women in the profession. I cosponsored a National Summit on access to justice in legal education. I have been chair of their litigation section, ethics committee. Brian why have you spent so much time with the aba . Deborah what did they say, why do you rob banks . That is where the money is. That is where the power to change things is. On many issues they are on the right side of the ledger. Im very proud with the work i did in the commission on women in the profession and the reports that we produced on lingering discrimination, sex harassment in the profession. There is a lot that they do that is good. I got the pro bono award from them that i treasure. They have been very good around pro bono issues. Brian you write about pro se, translated to latin as on behalf of themselves. How often does that happen in this society . Courts, moreome often than not. In divorce courts, more than half of the litigants dont have a lawyer. In landlordtenant cases, almost none of the tenants have lawyers. Bankruptcy court, a lot of individuals are unrepresented. In immigration matters, it is scandalous. Deportation hearings, a lot of those people dont have counsel. Brian doesnt happen very often at the Supreme Court . Deborah they appoint lawyers for any case they get there. I am teaching a course on equal possession. Brian our guest has been deborah l rhode. She is the author of the book the trouble with lawyers. Thank you very much for joining us. Deborah thank you so much. [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2014] for free transcripts, or to give us your comments about this program, visit us at qanda. Org. Programs are also available as cspan podcast. Cspanou liked this program, here are some others you might like. By laws are interpreted congress. Katzmann. And tomh nader goldstein. Here on cspan, washington journal is next with todays headlines. Then, help embassy is being privacy and data collection. Later, a conversation with a newspapers executive editor. On this mornings washington journal, we look at the impact right to work laws have in states across the United States. Also, a discussion on issues facing the selfemployed. 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