Unpersuasive Scholar Trolling

Will: And that might actually hurt Yale's reputational ratings significantly, because there might be at this point, the people who think Yale is the best law school are heavily concentrated at Yale. And then, the other thing they provide is they provide data to U.S. News on how much money they spend, because U.S. News gives you a lot of money if you spend-- gives you a higher ranking if you spend lots of money on your students, [unintelligible Yale and Harvard do very well.
Will: Berkeley Law School files cases in front of the court. And maybe again, nobody [unintelligible but seems weird to me. Obviously, we could talk about the Federalist Society, which actually does not file briefs in front of Supreme Court, unlike a lot of these other organizations, but people see that as an advocacy organization as well.
Will: Yeah. I'm [unintelligible would that be so crazy? You occasionally hear these people who get a job as a lawyer, but made up whether they went to law school, or just something totally out of nowhere, work for years under false pretenses. Is it obvious that shouldn't be bad?
Will: Right. I mean, [unintelligible likely.
Dan: Yeah. Then, got back to the Supreme Court, and Supreme Court didn't really weigh on this for a very long time. It got back to the Supreme Court the year I was clerking. This was October term 2009, in a case that was being argued by Michael Dreeben. Actually, it was a couple of cases, and then the court granted a third case, Skilling. But in the first two cases, the court was confronted with all this honest services stuff that had been going on to the federal lower federal courts, and was kind of like, "What? Really? This is out there. This doesn't seem okay." And you could see-- Dreeben actually-- I thought he got visibly upset at the argument once he realized that this whole huge weapon in the prosecutorial arsenal was about to fall apart in the first two cases, Black and [unintelligible . And so, the court then granted this other case that actually presented the question of not just what the statute should mean, but whether this statutory provision is unconstitutionally vague. Whether it just has such unclear content that it can't constitutionally be applied at all.