It was a BAD week for …
A MERCER LAW SCHOOL GRAD, after Stephen Mark McDaniel was indicted by a grand jury for the murder of his neighbor and fellow Mercer grad Lauren Giddings.
Jurors also indicted McDaniel on 30 counts of sexual exploitation of children, reported the Macon Telegraph, related to a string of images found in his apartment during the investigation. McDaniel’s lawyer, Floyd Buford, told the Macon Telegraph that his client wants a trial.
Giddings was at the Macon, Ga. school studying for the bar earlier this summer when she went missing. Her dismembered body was found five days later, wrapped in plastic in a garbage bin.
It was a GOOD week for …
PIMPING OUT LAW SCHOOLS, after waves of glossy and glitzy law school marketing materials landed in the hands of U.S. News & World Report just in time for its ranking season.
Administrators dump heavy dollars into the materials — branded by legal insiders as law school “porn” — in hopes of scoring higher on the pub’s reputation survey, according to a 2009 report partially funded by the Law School Admission Council.
It might be money well spent; the reputation survey, voted on by law professors, lawyers and judges, makes up a whopping 40 percent of a law school’s influential U.S. News ranking score.
Some critics think schools should put those funds to better use (say, on education or scholarships). Others, like University of Alabama School of Law professor Paul Horwitz, say the over-the-top printouts have some informational value when it comes to finding out about new faculty members and other institutional updates.
“On the whole, unlike many, I would rather receive these materials than not receive them,” wrote Horwitz on the PrawfsBlawg. “That’s true even if, as is generally the case, they’re ridiculously fulsome, as long as they’re also informative. As long as a school wants to tell me more about who it’s hired and what its folks are writing, I’ll be happy to read its mailers.”
