First graders doing yoga sparks religious protest. Yeah, you read that right. Paul Ecke Central Elementary School, a public school in Encinitas, California, offers a 30 minute yoga class that children can opt out of. Some parents of those children believe that this half-hour workout is a “transparent promotion of Hindu beliefs.”

Yeah, you read that right, too. The kids can opt out of it, and since the kids are in first grade, the parents can opt out on behalf of their children. In the words of the district’s superintendent, “If your faith is such that you believe that simply by doing the gorilla pose, you’re invoking the Hindu gods, then by all means your child can be doing something else.” At least someone around there has some sense.

So if yoga is a transparent promotion of Hindu beliefs, is dodge ball a transparent promotion of the “if you can dodge a wrench you can dodge a ball” belief? Oh, right. No dodge ball in schools anymore. What about T-ball? Transparent promotion of swinging until you miss at a stationary object? At least they’re not yet to preaching the more controversial “there’s no crying in T-ball” philosophy.

More directly, if doing yoga is a transparent promotion of Hindu beliefs, and that’s a problem, how do these parents feel about class Christmas parties? Aren’t those more of a transparent promotion of Christian beliefs than a half-hour workout? So isn’t that hypocritical?

Well, if it is, they probably don’t care. According to one of the parents, this yoga class is equivalent to “a charismatic Christian praise and worship physical education program,” with which he expressed no qualms. Quick question: would yoga still be equivalent if the program wasn’t charismatic?

Peculiar word choice aside, there may be an even more upsetting aspect of these classes. According to another parent, this class isn’t “just teaching physical poses, they’re teaching children how to think and how to make decisions. They’re teaching children how to meditate and how to look within for peace and for comfort. They’re using this as a tool for many things beyond just stretching.”

Pretending that we believe a 30 minute yoga session actually teaches that kind of thing to the typical 6-7 year old, since when are those qualities negative? Who wants independent thinkers or decision makers or kids who don’t whine about everything? Good thing you’re here to protest, parents, because those things sound absolutely awful.

Further, what kind of decisions are first graders typically making? Your average first grader is “stressing out” over decisions like: where should I sit on the bus, do my socks match, what should I eat first at lunch, have I gotten gyped in my snack trade?

And if yoga can keep your kid from crying about not having a Snack Pack in the lunch you made him while talking on the phone with your other friends about how God-awful his yoga class is, then that’s probably for the best. Because from the sounds of things, all these parents are teaching kids is to throw a fit when they don’t get their way.

[BL1Y sides with the parents on this one. Click here to see his take.]

It's that time of the year where you have to dress your best, drink your worst, and talk to the folks who write your paychecks. That's right, it's office holiday season, and so to help you navigate the dangerous waters of the How Slutty Is Okay? Sea, BL1Y and Lawyerette provide some much needed tips in this newest episode of Law Blah Blah.

You can use the fancy smancy player on the left, as always, or click here to download it.

And of course, follow Lawyerette on Twitter, and check out her blog, Snarky at Law.

If you've followed the debates about law school reform, then you've probably seen this conversation before:

Reform: Only half of graduates are able to become lawyers. You're taking in too many students.

Deanaling: A JD opens many doors, not just legal practice.

Reform: First, it really doesn't. But even if it did, that's not why people are paying $150,000 in tuition. They're paying to become lawyers.

Deanaling: Not everyone wants to be a lawyer!

And under Deanaling Logic, that's a perfectly reasonable argument. All you have to do is say that some law student somewhere doesn't go to law school planning to be a lawyer, and then it doesn't matter how many similar people there are. It'd be okay if not a single law student became a lawyer so long as one person didn't want to be a lawyer.

The rest of us know this is ridiculous, and now we have some numbers backing it up. In a survey on r/lawschool nearly 600 students answered questions about their law school experience, and how many said they wanted to be a lawyer but would be okay with an alternative career?

46%. (The survey says 42%, but that's of all takers, and some people did not answer this question. 46% is the percentage of those answering.)

The question didn't specify what the alternative job would be, and it's easy to imagine a lot of alt jobs that these 42% wouldn't be okay with, like doc review supervisor, or paralegal.

Almost as many, 42%, said they wanted to be a lawyer and would be disappointed in any other career path. Only 8.5% planned to work in an alternative career from the start. That last number matches with our own survey where 6.6% said they went to law school in order to get a non-law job.

If we assume there is no real difference between students who want law and would be disappointed with non-law and those who want law but would be okay with non-law (ie: no real difference in school, grades, job searches, etc), then we would expect that about 17.5% of law grads are going in to alternatives careers, and are not okay with that. Compared to the 8% who prefer non-law.

Deanaling: But not everyone wants to be a lawyer!

Reason: 9 out of 10 law students do.

Deanaling: Fuck you, pay me!

David Greenbaum, a 1976 graduate of Chicago Law, and his wife Laureine, have made a $1 million donation to the school in order to endow an academic chair. Specifically, the endowment will be used to bring a visiting professor from Israel to teach at Chicago for at least one quarter each year.

Nothing particularly objectionable about that, unless you take a very hard line against any sort of nationalism. But, with law such distinctions make sense, because legal boundaries and national boundaries tend to match up pretty closely.

Where things will get tricky for Chicago is in the actual implementation of the award. This is a visiting professor position, so we would expect a different face each year at Chicago. ...And 20% of Israel's population are Arabs, most of whom are Sunni Muslims.

There would likely be a firestorm of controversy at Chicago if the first visiting Israeli professor was a Muslim. And probably a good bit of controversy if at any point the endowment is used to bring in a Muslim professor, especially a professor who takes a strong pro-Palestinian point of view (aka: intellectual diversity).

We just can't imagine a dean ever wanting to go through the battle of using the Israeli professor fund to give a voice to a Muslim academic. But if that's how it does play out, don't we have an Israeli Jewish endowment, rather than an Israeli endowment?

Might be slightly problematic for Chicago to accept money that has discriminatory strings attached, whether explicit or just strongly implied. It's a bit like giving someone a horse as a gift. It's a beautiful, majestic animal, and expensive to boot ...but at some point you've got to deal with the fact that it's a freaking horse.

Jackie Chan hates freedom.

There, we said it. Though to be fair, he said it first. In a comment about anti-government protests in Hong Kong, Chan stated, "There should be regulations on what can and cannot be protested."

He didn't go in to what should and should not be protestable, but it doesn't take more than a few seconds in Western Civ 101 to realize why it might be a bad idea for a government to limit what its citizens can complain about.

"We do not like repression. We like freedom. But you cannot do whatever you want."

Basically, he wants to be free to do whatever he wants, but would like everyone else to be quiet and stop complaining when they don't get what they want, because really, it's hard for Jackie Chan to enjoy himself with all your complaining going on.

And you know what? None of that matters.

It's Jackie Chan. He's an actor and martial artist, not a politician or journalist or someone who's opinion on these things we should give two shits about.

Though, if we don't care about what he says, why bother writing about it?

Because we're in the middle of holiday season, which means spending time around relatives who are going to say some pretty damn ignorant things. You have to learn to pick your battles. How hard is it to ignore Jackie Chan's comments on freedom? Pretty damn easy. Maybe harder if you live in Hong Kong, but for us in America, it's no big deal. Rush Hour is still a good movie. And if you can deal with Jackie Chan's extremist position on liberty, you can survive the holidays.

"I just don't see why the Muslims can put a mosque where ever they want in our country."

"THESE MASHED POTATOES ARE REALLY GREAT, MOM!"

[Washington Times]

The weather outside is frightful, but the fire is so BAH! HUMBUG!

That's right mofos, Blind Drunk Justice is back and in force with a whole new hot mess for you. For the holiday season, BL1Y and The Namby Pamby are getting drunk and reading the Charlie Dickens classic, A Christmas Carol.

With drunken, ill-informed commentary!

Download it, listen, enjoy, whatever, take it with you when you travel over the holidays, or just play it as background music while making love by the fire. Whatever you want to do.

Right now we're only through Staves 1 and 2, because this thing is taking a lot longer than expected, but fear not, we will (try to) get this all finished before Christmas.

You can use the handy-dandy imbed player on yo left there as always, or click here for Stave 1 and here for Stave 2 (right click and Save As to download).

Homer: Aw, twenty dollars! I wanted a peanut!

Homer's Brain: Twenty dollars can buy many peanuts!

Homer: Explain how!

Homer's Brain: Money can be exchanged for goods and services!

Between the recent election, the Secretary of Defense nomination debacle, and the impending financial cliff, there has been a lot of talk about political capital lately. AKA: Diane Rehm was talking about political capital this morning, and so I assume someone somewhere is talking about it also. When political capital is discussed the one thing missing from the equation is just what the hell political capital is.

Unlike regular money, political capital is an abstract concept. But money is an abstract concept as well! Your dollars don't represent anything real, and the Federal Reserve can just--

Okay, slow down there skippy. Look at your bank account and in your wallet. That's the shit you can spend, and that's real enough. The President doesn't have a bank account representing how much political capital he has, regardless of whether it's backed by gold or not.

When political capital is discussed, there's always some idea of the President having a limited quantity, and he can use it to get certain things done, but he has to be careful, ration it, and pick his fights. How exactly does that work though?

The President doesn't go to members of the opposition party and say "Look, I think I've got about 8 Standard Political Units left to spend, and I'm going to use 2 of them now to get this new EPA standard through." And the opposition isn't forced to accept his tender of 2 SPUs, but it's not like they can demand he pay more either.

However, anyone with a lot of experience in negotiations will know that you do have a bit of psychological negotiation capital. When you make a concession you put the other side in a position where they feel as if they also have to make a concession. Political capital might be a bit like the other side feeling as though they, by virtue of losing, have to give the President 3 free concessions.

But of course they don't, and the GOP seems to understand this quite well. They're not required to accept Obama's SPUs on any issue, and are as entrenched as ever.

Doesn't mean this understanding of political capital is wrong though. It just means the GOP is refusing to recognize the currency.

There is another way political capital can be understood though. Politicians need to get reelected. Not a second-term President, but we can presume even outgoing politicians have an interest in advancing their party in the long term. We can look at political capital in terms of a party not negotiating with the other party, but managing their constituents. You can only make so many decisions your party disagrees with before you start to lose support. It's a bit nebulous though, because what might alienate moderates could increase support among your base.

Where this sort of political capital gets weird though is that it seems to work in the exact opposite manner as the intra-party capital. Pushing forward with the agenda you ran for office on is what the opposition doesn't want, but is generally exactly what your supporters do want, even a lot of the moderates. So when we hear about the President "spending" political capital to get concessions from the opposition, he's quite likely bolstering the position of his party when it comes to the next election, and that increased support is immediately valuable, because the next election is never more than 2 years away. So by spending capital we'd get this weird effect of generating more capital.

If that's how it works though, the President shouldn't pick and choose his fights. He should fight hard, and as often as possible, and continuously re-invest his growing political capital.

Or, political capital is just a meaningless term that the news media throws around because it's too hard to understand or explain what's actually going on in the political process, and it's a convenient way to make yourself sound like you have an intelligent opinion about political strategy.

Everybody panic. The NALP has announced that the representation of women in the law continues to fall. In absurdly small print, the press release details tons of statistical data on women in law firms.

The press release states that the overall representation of women increased by a small amount (.06 percent from last year), and all of this gain can be attributed to increases in women among the partnership rank, while associate numbers dropped. The net effect was that, for lawyers as a whole, representation of women remains lower than in 2009. 0.3 percent lower than 2009, to be precise. (32.67% in 2012 compared with 32.61% in 2011 and 32.69% in 2010 and 32.97% in 2009). Wow. Those numbers are staggering.

What about that drop among associates? Was that more significant? Yes. Almost doubly so, for a hard-hitting total of .59 percent over 3 years (45.66% in 2009 to 45.05% in 2012). That’s less than .2 percent each year, which is 1/100 of what you should tip your server provided he or she keeps your beverage full and doesn’t spill it on you. So sound the alarm. Law is kicking out women.

Oh wait. This data only reflects law firms- not government offices, not in-house counsel, not legal education, not clerkships. Could these drastic numbers be explained by women going into those fields? Sure. Could they also be explained by Big Law Mom’s epic departure memo? Maybe. Could the “missing” women be caught in Mitt Romney’s binders? We can’t rule anything out.

Government law jobs typically provide better benefits, better hours, better job security, and a salary above the median, even if they don’t have the highest earning potential. We can’t discount clerkship numbers either, since they can affect recent grads before they become associates.

Speaking of recent grads, averaged over the last four years, women make up 46.9% of total JD enrollment, making the difference in JD enrollment and private firm the biggest gap of them all …at 1.5%. We’re barely raising an eyebrow.

For all we know, female associates are being promoted or leaving the position for better jobs and that explains the “gap” completely. Or maybe they’re all hole punched in to a 3 ring binder somewhere. The point is that we don’t have an explanation for the number drop, so why try to ruffle feathers with headlines about it? Maybe it really means women have made better career choices or are taking advantage of better opportunities.

This, in a nutshell, is the women in the law problem. As soon as someone can identify a “problem” with law data as it relates to women, a panicked piece full of ominous or outraged comments about the “problem” is quick to follow, usually proffering cotton candy solutions to wrap up the piece in a nice pink bow.

What’s really missing is a discussion of what’s missing. Any explanations for this number gap? This press release is just another women in the law problem: providing just enough data to be eye catching and not enough to be meaningful.

Hey, look, over there, to the right. There's a new poll.

Pretty straight forward, we're interested in learning (for no particular reason) whether our readers use an ad blocker, and if so if you use it both at home and in the work place. (We assume no difference between home and school for students, since you're showing up to a desk with a school provided computer on it.)

Also, if you don't use an ad blocker, is it because you just hate yourself? Or because you're technologically impaired? Because, it's like the easiest thing you can do to make the internet less annoying.

The UCLA Law Review has a new short essay out by St. Thomas Law professor Jay Sterling Silver (yes, that's his real name), attacking the calls for reform in Brian Tamana-Montana's (not his real name) book Failing Law Schools.

While the essay is short in law review terms, it's too long to comment on point by point, so we're going to just point out some of the high lights. Or, as the case may be, low lights.

[After explaining the rise in law school tuition rates.] Faculty salaries, according to Tamanaha, were simply one of the spots where the revenues landed. As law school administrators know only too well, however, most law teachers take a sizable pay cut when they join the academy from practice, and the bulk of any alleged windfall ends up in university coffers rather than in faculty salaries.

This is the common mantra of the over-paid law professor. "We could make more in practice, you know!"

Oh yeah? Well then go fucking make more in practice if that's what you want to do.

Plenty of grads from top schools who could have gone in to Big Law choose to take low paying positions working for the government, non-profits, or doing largely pro bono work. A public defender doesn't get to say to his client "Better pony up $200/hr, because I could be earning $500/hr in Big Law right now." Nope, he recognizes that there is good to be had in providing low cost services, and that pursuing this good means giving up his six figure salary. Law professors on the other hand want to bite the apple from both sides, getting the job and lifestyle that they want, while maintaining a high income. Plus, while the income of law profs might be lower than Big Law, the job security that comes with the position may very well make up for it. Someone who washes out as a mid-level associate can easily end up earning far less than the average law prof.

The solution?  For starters, all law schools, particularly lower-echelon schools, must tighten their belts, reducing the size of incoming classes, cutting administrative costs, and forgoing faculty hiring for a while. In the process, however, we must not forget, as Professor Tamanaha has, that legal scholarship enriches teaching as it refines the practice of law and advances justice and that the traditional emphasis on scholarship requires the academic freedom provided by tenure and the time furnished by customary teaching loads.

Cutting administrative costs is definitely a winning idea. So is reducing class sizes, and of course if you're taking in fewer students you won't need to hire as many new professors. That all works. But look at who is the only party in Sterling Silver's plan that doesn't have to make any sacrifice: current professors. They're not asked to teach more classes, or take pay freezes or even pay cuts. No. They must be preserves, and no harm must come to the holy scholarship. And why is that scholarship so important to protect?

Indeed, all of the rights we enjoy today or are struggling to achieve were once just ideas. The immediate, real-life impact of legal scholarship—whether the author advocates a particular change in law or policy or provides a new theoretical paradigm—can be immense.  (Recall Kurt Lewin’s remark that “[t]here is nothing so practical as a good theory.”)  And who will replace the law professor—protected by tenure and unbound to clients or special interests—to reflect on and identify abuses of power and solutions to perplexing social problems from the Archimedean point of the academy?

Yes, the rights we enjoy today were once just ideas. Does Sterling Silver show how any of the rights enshrined in the Bill of Rights were the product of academic legal scholarship? No. Can legal scholarship have an immediate, real-life impact? Yes, in theory. Does it? Sterling Silver certainly provides no example of this.

And who will replace the law professor as the great legal thinkers of our time? Maybe practicing lawyers? Yeah, they're busy doing practice stuff, but they also spend time thinking about the law as they do it. They face serious legal issues in their work, and often try to formulate doctrinal changes tat would improve the legal system. And then there are PhDs in history, and political science, and sociology, and philosophy, all of whom can pick up the burden of reflecting on and identifying abuses of power and finding solutions to perplexing social problems.

Stripping law faculties of the time to contemplate the weaknesses of the law and the injustices of the legal system, and discarding the tenure necessary to instill meaning in the words “academic freedom,” reduces a vital social resource to a cog in the current structures of power. Under the guise of fiscal management, law professors willing to take on the wielders of power in the public and private sectors would be silenced.

Want to fight against injustices in the legal system? Get a job as a public defender. Volunteer for the ACLU. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education takes on wielders of power in the public and private sectors, yet FIRE isn't a group of ivory tower academics.

Tamanaha touts his “differentiated” legal education, where a handful of elite law schools remain three-year research institutions and the rest morph into cut-rate, two-year trade schools, as a means by which “[p]rospective students will be able to pick the legal education program they want at a price they can afford.” He adds, tellingly, that “[a] law graduate who wishes to engage in a local practice need not acquire, or pay for, the same education as a graduate aiming for corporate legal practice.” Law students, in other words, would no longer be able to select freely among the various career paths within the profession after exposure to the different areas of law in law school. Instead, based on their ability to pay, they’d either attend a school from which they might emerge onto Wall Street or one where they’d have no choice but to hang up a shingle on Main Street.

Yes, having specialized law schools would remove from of the freedom to choose your career path. But young graduates often don't have that freedom to begin with. Especially in a tight economy, you take whatever job you can get, practicing whatever area of law someone will pay you to practice. Sterling Silver is apparently worried that someone attending a third tier local school will forgo the chance to work on Wall Street, but that was never an option in the first place. He was always going to end up in a small Main Street shop, but under Tamanaha's model, he wouldn't be forced to pay for the production of legal scholarship only read by people on Washington Square West.

The real benefit of specialized law schools though would be that it forces prospective to really sit down and consider their goals in law school and what career path they want. No longer would law school be some default generalized liberal arts education for people with a degree in history or philosophy. It'd be a school where you go because you want to practice criminal law, or because you want to practice tax law. That'd be a good thing for students, and for their future clients.