Law Schools

Students at Loyola Law School in downtown Los Angeles have managed to boost their grade-point averages slightly -- and they didn't even have to study any harder. The 1,300-student school has adjusted its grading formula for current students and recent graduates to match the scales of other California schools, officials said Friday. But the move, which raised the average mark by a third of a grade, also prompted allegations of grade inflation. The change was intended to ensure that graduates compete for jobs on an equal footing with other law schools' graduates and are not hurt by what had been a slightly tougher grading system, said Loyola Law School Dean Victor J. Gold.

Authorities have deported the legal immigrant parents of more than 88,000 U.S. citizen children in the last decade, according to a report released Wednesday. The report, published by the UC Berkeley and UC Davis law schools, found that the majority of parents were deported for what it described as "minor criminal convictions" now classified as aggravated felonies, including nonviolent drug offenses, simple assaults and drunk driving. One parent was deported after selling $5 worth of drugs.

In his slate-blue suit and Republican-red tie, John Yoo stands out as discordantly formal among the denim- and turtleneck-clad faculty at Boalt Hall School of Law. Never mind how his politics play in what he derides as "the People's Republic of Berkeley." The former Bush administration lawyer who drafted what his critics call the "torture memos" is reviled by many in this liberal East Bay academic enclave, a feeling that is mutual though not, Yoo insists, wholly unpleasant. "I think of myself as being West Berlin during the Cold War, a shining beacon of capitalism and democracy surrounded by a sea of Marxism," Yoo observes, sipping iced tea in the faculty club lounge, a wan smile registering the discomfort of colleagues walking by en route to the bar. He sees his neighbors as the human figures of "a natural history museum of the 1960s," the Telegraph Avenue tableau of a graying, long-haired, pot-smoking counterculture stuck in the ideology's half-century-old heyday.

Kenneth Starr, the former special prosecutor who took on President Clinton over the Whitewater and Monica Lewinsky scandals, will be leaving his post as dean of Pepperdine University School of Law this spring to become president of Baylor University in Waco, Texas, the schools announced Monday. Starr has headed the Malibu law school since 2004. During his West Coast tenure, he also represented the supporters of Proposition 8, which bans same-sex marriage, during a challenge before the California Supreme Court last year.

Remember the old joke about 20,000 lawyers at the bottom of the sea being "a good start"? Well, in an interesting twist, thousands of lawyers now find themselves drowning in the unemployment line as the legal sector is being badly saturated with attorneys. Part of the problem can be traced to the American Bar Assn., which continues to allow unneeded new schools to open and refuses to properly regulate the schools, many of which release numbers that paint an overly rosy picture of employment prospects for their recent graduates.

Walt Disney Co.'s Preston Padden, who has been one of the entertainment industry's biggest lobbyists in Washington for more than three decades, is retiring as executive vice president of worldwide government relations at the media giant. Padden, 62, will leave his post in January to later become a senior fellow and adjunct professor at the University of Colorado Law School. He will continue to advise Disney on strategic issues in the interim. Disney didn't name a replacement and said it was hiring a search firm to identify candidates.

Go ahead. Break the chains. Stop paying on your mortgage if you owe more than the house is worth. And most important: Don't feel guilty about it. Don't think you're doing something morally wrong. That's the incendiary core message of a new academic paper by Brent T. White, a University of Arizona law school professor, titled "Underwater and Not Walking Away: Shame, Fear and the Social Management of the Housing Crisis." White contends that far more of the estimated 15 million U.S. homeowners who are underwater on their mortgages should stiff their lenders and take a hike.

  Dear SOS: Although it's no longer on the menu at the Hungry Cat in Santa Barbara, my friends from law school and I, in an unusual unanimous opinion, found the Coolidge to be the best cocktail of the summer. We know the ingredients, but we need expert testimony on the proportions and methodology used to prepare it. Michael J. DeNiro Santa Barbara Dear Michael: This cocktail, created at the Hungry Cat in Hollywood by bartender Danielle Motor for actress Jennifer Coolidge, combines interesting ingredients such as chiles and rice wine vinegar, making for a drink that almost has the feel of a deconstructed Bloody Mary.

David C. Kohler Attorney, law school professor David C. Kohler, 56, director of the entertainment and media law institute at Southwestern Law School, died of cancer Oct. 15 at the USC/Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center in Los Angeles, the law school announced. Kohler, who also was a law professor, came to the institute in 2003 after more than 25 years as a media attorney, including nearly a decade with TBS and CNN. He joined Turner Broadcasting System in 1991 and served as assistant vice president and deputy general counsel.