Thanks for cleaning all that up Karak, it was getting brutal

Yes. I hate it when arguments get contentious. Hopefully Karak will be a judge some day and strike the arguments that don't please him.

I don't really care that it was deleted but my post really wasn't trying to start anything itt (I believe it had already started between Dead and a few others).

I don't think it was the arguing, as much as the fact that there was blatant trolling.

Dead revealed (or asserted in a trolling manner) that he was a complete phony, had never been to law school and didn't work for a law firm. In essence, he implied the entire argument was constructed for his own entertainment. Beyond that, it had gone way too far and was just blatant trolling, fake or not. That's why everything was removed and he was tempbanned. If you have any further questions, PM me. This is the end of it.

edited to make clearer why i did what i did. transparency to a certain degree is important imo.

I thought dead's retraction was the sarcastic part.

Whether it was sarcastic or not doesn't really matter. Either one is a phony and either one is a troll. That's the point

Obviously this was all interpreted with his history in mind, which some of you may not have been around long enough to remember.

Right now the Income Contigent Plan(or whatever it's called, the better of the two 25 year plans) caps annual loan payments at 15% of your disposable income, which is defined by some formula I don't feel like looking up. I think AGI-(1.5*federal poverty level)? The new rules will reduce that cap to 10%.

.

guess i missed the stunning conclusion, but i think i get what happened with that dead dude. which is interesting. personally i think he pulled it off really well, i never doubted for a second that he was legit. of course, i'm probably a little naive

Ok yeah that's how I originally understood what you were saying. The way I read your post initially was that this was a bad thing, hence why I wanted some clarification.

I think that's pretty significant for us who want to do the 10 year plan. I used an online calculator a while back, and for me (around 200k in debt) my monthly payment would be ~$750 a month assuming a $53k salary. Dropping that down by 1/3 would be pretty significant, although I'm not 100% sure that's how the math would work out.

So then the rest would just be forgiven at the end of those 10 years? Where does the money go? Is Mr. Obama picking up the rest of the tab?

Right, it's not a pro rated situation. You work for Public Interest for 10 years, and (it's a separate program) you pay whatever they decide your Income Based Repayment amount is. At the end of 10 years whatever is left goes away.

It's not a new program this year with respect to the bill that was passed over the weekend. It was available for the first time for May 09 grads, and I believe 08 people can get it too but they have to be more careful about how they go about it (the way they consolidate loans etc).

I'm pretty sure the program isn't just for law students, med students etc get it too. Probably anyone who does public interest in any capacity. In the grand scheme of congressional budgeting the amount that the government is swallowing is probably not all that much (especially when you consider inflation), but yeah that's the idea. It's a federal education subsidy.

It's also not a new program, the forgiveness system has been around for a few years, the student loan reforms in the news lately are just the decrease in payment cap.

I'd like to get some advice on an issue in my legal writing class.

My appellate brief assignment was directly copied from another schools Spring 2009 moot court competition. My professor only changed the dates on the brief, which had no relevance to the issues assigned. The assignment was literally word for word copied from the other school. That school has a copyright on the fact pattern. I'm not sure if this is important because it is being used for educational purposes and I'm not a copyright lawyer (obv.).

Additionally, copies of the briefs from that moot court competition were posted online. All of this was easily found using a google search with one of the party names. Two people in my section of ~40 had access to this before the brief was due.

I'm not really sure how to proceed. It seems obvious that the professor should have known that there were briefs available on our exact issues and that students might find them. I think these students had a huge advantage writing the brief. But mostly, I think the professor is to blame for using a fact pattern that was easily found and had briefs available online.

Thoughts?

What's the best of these 3 options:

1) paying sticker price at a top 14 school
2) paying 1/2 price at a ~25th ranked school
3) full ride at at a ~80th school

I don't have any strong inclination as to what sort of law I'm interested in as of yet.

All pretty subjective imo.

Thanks for the response Auto (not being sarcastic)

follow up question - if I go to the ~25th school and do well, say, top 10% of my class in my first year, how hard is it to transfer to a T14 school? Also, what are the determining factors in a transfer app? Do GPA and LSAT still matter?

you've seen this forum right? http://www.top-law-schools.com/forum...forum.php?f=27
theyd know.
i would not pay sticker anywhere but i don't have my heart set on the legal profession and i got a full ride in state. unless it's top14, where you graduate tends to be where you will work.
that's the conventional wisdom .

A professor pulled this at my school. It was one reason, among many, that she was fired. Take it up with the dean.

I have a number of concerns about going to the dean. It seems like most of my classmates are not bothered by this. They're more concerned with not having to write the brief again, which is what everyone thinks will happen if this gets out.

I'm also worried about some form of retaliation from the school. I can't decide if they'd be happy to know about something like this, or if they would be pissed that people "rocked the boat".

I highly doubt they'd make you write another brief. I also doubt that you'd get any grade change. The only thing I think will happen is that the professor will come under fire.

At my school they copied the 1L Moot Court problem from a real case and left it essentially identical changing only the names of people and places.... and 1 small but material fact that changed everything in the case, haha. I don't know if that is cruel or brilliant.

I had a "fact pattern" where the professor copy-pasted the first few paragraphs of a published opinion. Lazy people stay lazy their whole lives.

One of the MC questions on my Torts final was straight out of a Kaplan PMBR book I used to prep for the exam.