Half Sigma

Law schools and the job market for recent law school graduates

People keep emailing me about a blog post about the bimodal distribution of law school graduates’ salaries. I haven’t felt compelled to blog about it because it covers ground previously discussed here.

I’d like to point out that the charts from that blog post are falsely presenting the true story, because those statistics are based on faulty law school career placement office reports. As I explained last month, nearly half of law students don’t respond to a job survey, and it’s likely that only a miniscule number of non-responders have one of those plum jobs because law schools make sure that the people with good jobs respond so the schools can use the statistics in their marketing.

The law school job statistics need to be reported according to uniform standards, and audited by independent auditors, just like the financial statements issued by public corporations. The financial statements are used by investors to determine if they should invest in the corporation. The law school placement statistics are used by prospective students to determine if they should invest in law school. The same standards should apply.

A JD in two years

The NY Times “The Board” blog has a post about a plan at Northwestern Law School to offer a two-year JD program. This is a great idea. I wrote the following comment regarding this plan:

The third year of law school is just a scam that pays the salary of law professors. You certainly don’t need it to pass the bar exam. One year of law school would be enough for that. BARBRI instruction is far superior to law school instruction. If BARBRI expanded its program from 2 months to 4 months, anyone could easily pass the bar exam with no law school education at all.

The clinical program in my law school was a waste. Maybe Top Fourteen law schools offer first-rate clinical programs, but those are exactly the schools where such programs are not needed because their graduates get scooped up into high paying BIGLAW jobs no matter what they do.

Sure, it’s theoretically possible to learn interesting things in the third year, like the history of legal theory, or law and literature, and that’s fine for kids with rich parents or guaranteed BIGLAW jobs, but it’s cruel and unusual punishment for middle class students who are borrowing out the wazoo to attend law school and are among the 90% of law students who do not have BIGLAW jobs. Anyway, didn’t every law student already have 4 years of undergraduate work to take interesting courses?

These people talking about the glories of the third year are probably liberal elites with rich parents who have no idea what it’s like to be middle class, and don’t really care to know.

In the first paragraph, I really meant that anyone smart enough to get into a decent law school in the first place could easily pass the bar exam with just 4 months of BARBRI style instruction instead of law school. But why complicate the message?

Regarding the clinical program at my law school, it was actually quite fun, but it was a waste because it didn't help me find a job as a lawyer—law firms didn’t respect it as real work experience—and finding a job as a lawyer was the whole point of going to law school in the first place.

Law and literature was also quite fun, but once again, it didn't help me find a job as a lawyer. I sure wish I could get my money back for the third year of law school.

Hot girls get fewer speeding tickets

Via Marginal Revolution, I came across a resarch paper about traffic citations.

The paper is analyzing what happens after a traffic stop. In other words, after the police officer, at his discretion, can issue a ticket, who does he issue a ticket to, and who does he decide to let off the hook.

I honed in on the most interesting part: "young females have the lowest probability of receiving a speeding ticket."

The women weren't rated for attractiveness, but one assumes that attractive young females had a lower probablility of receiving a speeding ticket than unattractive young women.

So we see that justice isn't blind, and the police officer is often writing tickets with his penis instead of his pen.

Yet another privilege which pretty young women have that the rest of us don't.

Black associates less likely to make partner

According to an article in today's NY Times, major law firms (aka BIGLAW) hire a lot of black associates, but few of them make partner.

One thing the article points out is the massive affirmative action taking place:

Black students, who make up 1 to 2 percent of students with high grades (meaning a grade point average in the top half of the class) make up 8 percent of corporate law firm hires, Professor Sander found. “Blacks are far more likely to be working at large firms than are other new lawyers with similar credentials,” he said.

But black lawyers, the study found, are about one-fourth as likely to make partner as white lawyers from the same entering class of associates.

Although there is a huge random element to law school grades that can't be overstated (it's not just a simple correlation with intelligence and how hard you work at it), I have no doubt that the primary reason that blacks are so underrepresented in the top half of the law school class is because black students are generally accepted with an LSAT score of approximately one and a half standard deviations less than white students.

But is this really the reason why fewer blacks make partner? I've never worked at BIGLAW (despite graduating in the top 10% of the class) so I have no idea if high intelligence helps you to shine in that environment. It's easy to imagine that a not so bright associate who showed good ability to shmooze clients would be more likely to make partner than a nerdy legal genius. On the other hand, the law firm partners I've encountered in life have generally been pretty nerdy and not at all salesman types. It seems to be an environment with an unusually high respect for intellect.

In any event, I don't see why I should feel sorry for the black associates who still make six figure salaries despite the fact that a white student with the same grades would be stuck with a $40K salary working for the government or for some small-time ambulance chasing firm. A black student in the bottom half of the class has a much better chance of making partner than a white student in the bottom half of the class because the white student would never even get an associate job in the first place.

Does pornography prevent rape?

Via Sixteen Volts I discovered this story which reports that rape has declined by 85% since the 1970s. That's a whoppingly huge drop.

The author suggests pornography as the reason for the decline:

One theory about the causes of rape, however, has been thoroughly demolished. Among religious conservatives and left-wing feminists, it's an article of faith that pornography leads inexorably to sexual abuse of women and children. But while hard-core raunch has proliferated, sexual assaults have not. Could it be that pornography prevents rape?

This kind of makes sense. Would be rapists are sexually satiated by masturbating while viewing pornography on the internet, so they are less likely to go out and rape a woman.

This is the opposite of the conventional wisdom which holds that viewing pornography sends men into a sexual rage which results in increased incidents of rape.

Debt collection: a negative sum game

There's an article about aggressive debt collectors in today's New York Times. Here are my thoughts about this disreputable enterprise:

(1) Debt collection is a negative sum activity. A collection agency will spend $99 in order to transfer $100 from the debtor to the agency.

(2) Collections agencies rely on asymmetry of information to make their profits. Most debtors, if they truly understood their rights, would be better off filing for bankruptcy than paying their debts.

I'm sure there are some moralists who will disagree with my take. Presumably they see debt collectors as performing the good deed of punishing those who bought stuff that they couldn't afford. But who punishes the credit card companies for continually trying to tempt people to get into more debt than is good for them?

Wall Street Journal agrees with me: law school is a big lie

Cameron Stracher, author of Double Billing: A Young Lawyer's Tale of Greed, Sex, Lies and the Pursuit of a Swivel Chair, writes the following in today's Wall Street Journal (free link), which is the only time I've ever seen a mainstream publication tell the real truth about law school:

The legal profession is really two professions: the elite lawyers and everyone else. Most of the former start out at big law firms. Many of the latter never find gainful legal employment. Instead, they work at jobs that might be characterized as "quasi-legal": paralegals, clerks, administrators, doing work for which they probably never needed a J.D.

Although hard data about the nature of these jobs is difficult to come by (and relies on self-reporting, which is inherently unreliable), the mean salary for graduates of top 10 law schools is $135,000 while it is $60,000 for "tier three" schools. It's certainly possible that tier-three graduates tend to gravitate toward lower-paying public-interest and government jobs, but this lower salary may also reflect the nonlegal nature of many of these jobs and the fact that these graduates are settling for anything that will pay the bills.

At $38,000 a year for law school, plus living expenses, law-school graduates certainly have a lot of debt ($60,000 on average, upon graduation). For this price, college students and their parents should be thinking harder about their choices. When I went to law school, nearly everyone tried to convince me that doing so would "keep my options open." All this really means is: "You can still be a lawyer."

If I wanted to be a screenwriter, waiting tables would have kept my options open, too. In fact, many wannabe screenwriters find themselves going to law school, misled by adults into thinking that it will help them get into the movie business. It won't. Sure, you can be a talent agent or a movie producer with a law degree, but you can be one without a degree, too. Most of the skills you learn in law school (and legal practice) won't help you make a movie, and the few that will may not be worth the cost (more than $120,000, including tuition, living expenses, as well as three years of forgone experience and salary). Rather than keeping options open, the crushing debt of law school often slams doors shut, pushing law students to find the highest-paying job they can and forever deferring dreams of anything else.

It's time those of us inside the profession did a better job of telling others outside the profession that most of us don't earn $160,000 a year, that we can't afford expensive suits, flashy cars, sexy apartments. We don't lunch with rock stars or produce movies. Every year I'm surprised by the number of my students who think a J.D. degree is a ticket to fame, fortune and the envy of one's peers -- a sure ticket to the upper middle class. Even for the select few for whom it is, not many last long enough at their law firms to really enjoy it.

There's something wrong with a system that makes a whole lot of people pay a whole lot of money for jobs that are not worth it, or that have no future. If we wanted to be honest, we would inform students that law school doesn't keep their options open. Instead, we should say that if they work hard and do well, they can become lawyers.

This is the same thing I explained in my famous blog post, Law school, the big lie.

The only thing I'd disagree with is that alleged $60,000 mean salary for tier three schools, because the law schools employ sneaky use of statistics to inflate salaries. Arizona State University reported the salary of "graduates who had jobs at private law firms at graduation," which is basically reporting the salaries of the luckiest 10% of the graduating class. We see public companies getting caught lying on their financial results all the time; I wouldn't be surprised if the law schools aren't also doing some outright lying--their results aren't even audited by CPAs like the financial results of public companies.

Another proposal to ban gay marriage

Bush is pushing for a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage.

I previously explained why I’m opposed to gay marriage. But does that mean I support Bush’s latest proposal?

Gay marriage is a dumb state law, but it’s only the tip of a huge iceberg of dumb state laws. If we needed a constitutional amendment to reverse every dumb state law, then the constitution would have hundreds of amendments.

So long as every state in the union isn’t forced to accept gay marriages based on some dubious application of the Full Faith and Credit Clause, I don’t see why the federal government needs to get involved here at all. It was the intent of the Founders that the states have autonomy to run their own affairs.

I wish that Bush would ask Congress do something useful such as lower government spending, reduce government regulations, or simplify the tax code, but instead the only thing Bush cares about is advancing the Christian agenda.

There is absolutely no chance that two thirds of Congress will approve this amendment, but that doesn’t mean that there are no consequences. Bush knows exactly what he is doing, which is further positioning the Republican party as the Christian party.

Big Bronx cheer to Major League Baseball

Here's another example of an outrageous intellectual property lawsuit. Major League Baseball is suing a fantasy sports league for using baseball players' names and statistics without licensing them.

The courts have already ruled that player information is in the public domain. It's printed in the newspapers every day.

What a greedy money-grubbing industry. As if baeball isn't already making enough money, with the help of publicly subsidized stadiums,

Digital libraries and copyright

There is an article in today’s NY Times Magazine about digital libraries and the problem of copyright.

We are lucky that bricks and mortar libraries were invented a long time ago. If someone came up with the idea today, and they didn’t already exist, you can be certain that publishing companies would be all outraged that their copyrights were being violated and people could read books for free.

I wrote before about copyright and the music industry, and pretty much the same applies to books. Authors would have adequate incentive to keep writing books if their copyright only lasted a decade, so it’s absolutely outrageous that their copyright extends until 70 years after their death.

Congress ought to do something about it, but the problem is that Congress has been doing just the opposite. Every few years, in order to help the publishing industries (which I imagine are donating big money to politicians’ reelection campaigns), Congress keeps extending the copyright period.

It’s interesting to note that the entertainment and publishing industries are heavily Democratic, and the Democrats who are supposedly the anti-big business party have no moral qualms with helping their big business friends in the entertainment and publishing industries by granting them practically perpetual copyrights at the expense of poor people who can’t afford to buy books and CDs.

The moral justification for bankruptcy

A lot of people seem to feel that filing bankruptcy is a moral failing and for this reason many people who would benefit from bankruptcy foolishly refuse to take advantage of it. This also explains why anti-bankruptcy laws favored by lending institutions have recently been able to get through Congress.

Bankruptcy is best compared to auto insurance. You can purchase insurance that will pay for damages to your car and yourself even if the accident was your fault. Few people would have moral issues with collecting on this insurance money, because they paid in advance for a comprehensive policy.

Now imagine that, when applying for a loan, you are given two options. The first option has a lower interest rate. The second option offers a higher interest rate, but the loan has a clause that states that, in case you get into economic trouble and are unable to pay the loan, the loan will be forever forgiven. When framed this way, I doubt that people would have moral issues with avoiding payment of the loan, because they paid extra for this loan insurance.

In essence, Congress has determined that the first type of loan is illegal, and all loans by default include this loan insurance. This insurance is calculated into the interest rate that lenders charge. The banks and the credit card companies make money despite the fact that a certain percentage of loans are lost to bankruptcy. There is no need to feel sorry for them. People who are eligible for bankruptcy should have no moral issues with taking advantage of it, they already paid for the insurance.

Now some would say that people should be given the freedom to enter into the first type of loan and thereby lower their interest rate. The problem here is that some people would foolishly enter into loans that they have no business getting involved with, and unscrupulous lenders would take advantage of such individuals. Bankruptcy laws create a moral check on the activities of lenders. Society is better off if people are given a fresh start rather than be forced into an unproductive life of quasi-indentured servitude.

Oregon not about federalism

Professor Bainbridge has a post about Scalia and federalism as it relates to the Gonazales v. Oregon case (which I blogged about two days ago).

Based on the Raich case, I agree that Thomas is really the only friend of Federalism left on the Court. Hopefully Alito will join him, but who knows?

But Oregon is not a case about federalism, it is a case of statutory interpretation, and what it really stands for is the rule that, in the case of vaguely worded statutes, judges will interpret the statute in a manner consistent with their personal policy preferences. Roberts and Scalia oppose assisted suicide for religious reasons, and presumably Souter, Ginsburg and Stevens are anti-religious and want to stick it to the Christian Right.

Clarence Thomas, most brilliant Justice

Thomas has been on a tear lately, making himself stand out as the true thinker on the Court and relegating Scalia to the role of ideaological hack.

A few months ago, the Supreme Court decided Gonzales v. Raich in which the majority held (with Scalia being part of the majority) that the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) gave a regulatory agency the power to overrule a state's decriminalizaton of marijuana for medical purposes.

Thomas dissented based on ennumerated powers issues. He said that growing marijuana for personal use was an intrastate issue and outside the reach of the interstate commerce clause.

Today, Thomas dissents in Gonzales v. Oregon in which the Supreme Court ruled that the CSA does not grant the authority to prohibit doctors from prescribing medicine for suicide purposes if state law permits it.

Has Thomas somehow flip-flopped on the issues? Not at all! If you read Thomas' dissent, it's clear that he's dissenting in order to call out the hypocrisy of the majority who interpret the CSA based on their idealogical whim and not on sound legal principles. Basically he's saying to the majority, "hey you morons, you decided in Raich that that the CSA gives the government power to do whatever it wants with regards to regulating drugs, you're a bunch of hypocrites to suddenly change your mind here. I'm just agreeing with your first dumb decision because of stare decisis."

If you read the comments over at the The Volokh Conspiracy, you'll see that other people agree with my take.

Samuel Alito blogs from BlackBerry

Samuel Alito has been updating his blog from his BlackBerry during the hearings.

Anti-law school blog post

I randomly discovered an anti-law school blog post, and such posts are always worth linking to.

The same blogger has a post about internet sex photos posted by students attending my alma mater.

Defending Alito on Christmas Eve

The NY Times Christmas Eve anti-Alito editorial is a big vicious lie and a distortion of Alito’s record.

The take on the editorial is that Alito believes that Presidents have infinite power, and because of this you should be very afraid of him. This is utter bull. As a lawyer working for the executive branch, he did his job writing memos supporting the positions his superiors told him to. That’s what lawyers do, advocate for one side or another.

There is one particular case the NY Times editorial mentions, saying “The Supreme Court flatly rejected Judge Alito's view of the law. In a 1985 ruling, the court rightly concluded ...” The blog Confirm Them points out that in the case in question, the Supreme Court decision was 4-3, so Alito's memo could hardly be said to be out in left field.

The only specific judicial decision of Alito’s that the Times editorial comes up with to demonstrate its point is in the following quote:

In his judicial opinions, Judge Alito has shown a lack of respect for Congressional power - notably when he voted to strike down Congress's ban on machine guns as exceeding its constitutional authority.

The above decision points us to the opposite conclusion. As a judge, Alito believes the federal government has only limited powers, making him exactly the kind of justice that freedom loving Americans would want on the Court.

Is the Supreme Court pathetic?

Yes says Jason Mazzone:

Last term, the Supreme Court issued opinions in just 74 cases. That’s pretty pathetic. It means there are many areas of the law that are unsettled or unreviewed; many important issues in which the Supreme Court could helpfully weigh in but it doesn’t; many issues that, once decided, will not reach the Court again for decades, if ever.

A low number of cases does not, however, mean light reading. Many of these 74 cases produced multiple opinions by sub-groups of justices. It’s not hard to see why this is true. Divide 74 up among nine justices and 30-plus law clerks and the temptation to write separately is irresistible.

He also says:

Brown v. Board of Education (1954), one of the Court’s most important decisions ever, was unanimous and ran just seven pages.

Brown v Board of Education was an opinion that sucked for many reasons (and one day maybe I'll write about it), so that's a bad example.

However, I certainly do observe that over the course of two centuries, the trend with the Supreme Court has been towards ever longer cases with more dissents and concurring opinions. Once upon a time, dissents were rare, and there were many dissents that consisted entirely of "I respectfully dissent." Justices were loathe to write anything negative about their fellows.

My theory is that word processors have resulted in much longer court decisions. Writing used to be difficult when it had to be done with pen and paper, but now when it can be typed on a computer, the result is extremely long opinions.

However, these modern opinions are fun to read, especially the dissents which add much flavor to an otherwise dull subject. In law school, I always loved to read Scalia's brilliant wording and his attacks on fellow justices. Besides a few rare exceptions (such as the rarely read but frequently condemned Dred Scott case), old cases are pretty boring reads.

O.J. the legal scholar

The front page story at Yahoo:

O.J. Simpson on Friday questioned the system that allowed both him and actor Robert Blake to be found liable for murder after being acquitted in criminal court, calling it "double jeopardy."

"I still don't get how anyone can be found not guilty of a murder and then be found responsible for it in any way shape or form," Simpson said in a phone interview from his Florida home. "... If you're found not guilty, how can you be found responsible? I'd love to hear how that's not double jeopardy."

Later the article says:

Simpson said he hopes that someone eventually will go the U.S. Supreme Court to challenge the system that allows double trials.

The problem with this article is that nowhere does it say that O.J. is just a plain moron. The average American reading this might think O.J. has a point, especially that part of the population who, against all logic, thinks that O.J. is actually innocent.

However, in case O.J. is reading this, the murder victim's family and the state are two different parties,and each party is entitled to their "day in court." Criminal juries don't find a defendant "innocent," they find him "not guilty beyond a reasonable doubt." Even though a person isn't guilty beyond a reasonable doubt he may still be more likely guilty than not, which is the burden of proof for civil trials.

The Supreme Court has been a lot more lenient than that, treating separate state and federal crimnal prosecutions as not violating the Double Jeopardy Clause because the two governments are different sovereigns. That I don't buy at all, but it's an issues separate from the O.J. issue.

O.J. the murderer should be thankful he didn't have to spend the rest of his life in prison instead of complaining about how the legal system was "unfair" to him.

Abortion and the Constitution

It looks like the liberals are going to make abortion a big issue in the Alito confirmation hearings, and they are going to fund a big anti-Alito advertising campaign.

The average American thinks that the Constitution is a great and wonderful document even though he/she has never actually read it and has certainly never read any actual Supreme Court cases or otherwise studied constitutional law in a serious manner.

The left has convinced the modern woman that abortion is a very important right, and she has been taught to say, with much righteous indignation, "no man in Washington DC has the right to tell me what I can do with my body." But she doesn't seem bothered by the fact that men in the Food and Drug Administration make a career out of telling members of both sexes what's legal to put into the body and what's not.

The distinction between the judiciary and the legislature is lost. People think that Supreme Court justices can just go and make abortion illegal. But in fact it's legislatures, voted for by the majority of the public, who would make abortion illegal. Supreme Court justices just determine if such a law violates the Constitution.

Samuel Alito parody blog

Someone has already started a Samuel Alito parody blog. I wish I thought of that.

Justice Alito

Finally a Supreme Court apointment I can support. Alito was Ivy League educated and has a long career of public service including fifteen years of experience as a federal appellate judge. Alito is the kind of man that presidents should be appointing and not "stealth" candidates. If the slimy Democrats oppose him, they demonstrate everything I hate about Democrats.

Judge Easterbrook for Supreme Court

Half Sigma nominates Judge Frank Easterbrook of the 7th Circuit for Supreme Court. When I was a law student, I was extremely impressed by cases I read that he authored. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it), I haven't been reading many cases since I graduated so I haven't followed his career much since then, but I understand that he's regarded by some as the most brilliant federal judge along with Posner. But Posner is a little too old to be nominated. Easterbrook, born in 1948 is the perfect age.

Too bad no one is paying attention to me.

Read Ted Frank's post about clerking for Judge Easterbrook.

Goodbye Harriet

I'm glad something finally worked out in Washington the way it should. Harriet Miers was completely unqualified for the job; she was only appointed because she was an evangelical Christian.

I hope Bush will now go outside the inner circle of Washignton, DC and pick an accomplished scholarly jurist with a genuinely conservative legal philsophy. A conservative legal philosophy has absolutely nothing to do with being a religious nut. Ideally, I'd like to see a conservative atheist nominated.

Harriet Miers not Order of the Coif!

That's right, not only did she go to a mediocre law school, she didn't even graduate Order of the Coif. For those not in the know, Order of the Coif is the honor granted to those who graduated in the top ten percent of the class.

Check out her profile at Findlaw. It mentions bogus honors like "Moot Court Board" and "Kappa Beta Pi" (a legal sorority), both of which sound like activities that anyone could do if they volunteered. But there is no mention of any honors that would indicate high grades. No mention of Cum Laude, no mention of Order of the Coif, no mention of any other academic awards.

How did she manage to make law review? Is there somemone out there in blog-land who knows what it took to make law review at SMU in 1969?

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Meanwhile, a majority of Professor Bainbridge's readers oppose the Miers nomination.

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In case it's not clear, I oppose the Miers nomination.

Harriet Miers, pro-affirmative action

This excellent post at Protein Wisdom documents Harriet Miers' history of being pro-affirmative action.

She is looking more and more like a David Souter. They are even both subject to rumors that they might not be heterosexual.

Harriet Miers and "Warren"

I think the biggest knock against Miers is that "Warren" is her favorite Justice. (See the post at Volokh.)

I think it's pretty weird that anyone would refer to a Justice by his first name. All laywers are trained to say "Chief Justice Warren" which would refer to evil liberal Chief Justice Earl Warren.

My favorite Justice is Scalia.

I'm more qualified to sit on the Supreme Court than Miers. Unlike Miers, I was a card carrying member of the Federalist Society (but didn't renew because I was too cheap to pay the dues). And unlike Miers, I have a track record of thinking about these issues in my blog.

We don't need a Justice who understands "real people"

In an opinion column in todoay's Wall Street Journal, Texas Senator writes that Harriet Miers understands real people:

Harriet Miers's background as a legal practitioner is an asset, not a detriment. She has spent her career representing real people in courtrooms across America. This is precisely the type of experience that the Supreme Court needs. The court is full of justices who served as academics and court of appeals judges before they were nominated to the bench. What the court is missing is someone who understands the consequences of its decisions on the American people.

I strongly disagree with these sentiments. The Senator is confusing the duties of the judiciary with the duties of the legislature. The legal system works best when appellate judges base their decisions on reading the laws and legal precedents.

Harriet Miers: disapointing

I'm extremely disappointed with the Harriet Miers pick. Normally, the president would want to pick someone with a track record of distinguished legal reasoning such as an appellate judge or a law professor. Miers' experience is as a corporate attorney and a politician.

Apparently she is also a strong Christian, and this is why Bush likes her. Bush, a guy who is anti-intellectual and has maybe never read a single Supreme Court decision, figures that if she believes in Jesus then she's qualified to sit on the nation's highest court.

This is pathetic.

Justice O'Connor retires

Sandra Day O’Connor’s retirement is surprising because, well darn it, it’s the Supreme Court! And everyone was expecting Rehnquist to retire first. Rehnquist might still retire this summer, creating the unusual situation of two simultaneous nominations.

I think the Republicans will wish they took my advice to end the filibuster. Conservatives hope for a strict constructionist like Thomas to be nominated, but there’s a good chance that Bush will be scared by Democrats into nominating a “stealth justice” who will become another Souter.

Unfortunately, the Supreme Court “battle” will probably be about abortion. That’s all that anyone seems to care about. The average person on the street thinks that the Supreme Court’s most important job is to make up abortion law.

Ten Commandments everywhere

Within hours of yesterday's Supreme Court decision allowing a Ten Commandments monument on the grounds of the Texas Capitol, Christian groups announced a nationwide campaign to install similar displays in 100 cities and towns within a year.

"We see this as an historic opening, and we're going to pursue it aggressively," said the Rev. Patrick J. Mahoney, director of the Washington-based Christian Defense Coalition, which organized vigils outside the Florida hospice where Terri Schiavo died this year.

Washington Post.

This is the Supreme Court’s fault for making fuzzy “rules.” Christian groups now see this as a cat and mouse game where they can win a “victory” if they can sneak in some more religious statuary in public places.