Oh. My. God! I have got to stop being so sarcastic! I have in the past referred to some of His Lowness’ legal representation as having having graduated from Jim Bob’s Bait Shop and Law School. When it comes to Michael Cohen, it turns out that I was damn near RIGHT!
Politico took a good, long look at Michael Cohen’s alma mater, the Thomas M Cooley Law School, and found that if Cohen isn’t the rule, he is by no means the exception. The school has long been the brunt of jokes in the legal community, and has been dubbed “the worst law school in America.”
The school isn’t very old, it’s only been in operation for 46 years, but in that short time, it appears to have become the “Portrait of Dorian Gray” for law schools, the place where all of the blemishes and cankers of schools like Yale and Harvard collect in secret.
Now, just like in a public school, there can be many reasons why an institution may be troubled, but with Cooley, it starts right at step one, with their admission practices;
The school accepts almost anyone who can pay the $51,000 annual tuition bill—more than 85 percent of its applicants were admitted last year. Fewer than half of its graduates manage to pass a bar exam on their first try; among all law school graduates in the country, about 75 percent pass on their first attempt. The 46-year-old school has had to go to court over the past year to fight for its accreditation from the American Bar Association, which found that the school was out of compliance on basic admission standards for a time. Last year, the National Advisory Council for Law School Transparency gave Cooley a ranking no school wants: It was No. 1 on the group’s list of “the 10 least selective law schools in the country.”
See what I mean? And actually, I think I’d prefer my law degree from Jim Bob’s, since I can at least pick up a twelve pack while I’m there, and I highly doubt that it will cost me $51,000 even once. But, just so you don’t think that I’m being unfair about this, you know, picking nits, Politico chronicled another Cooley winner who went there because she couldn’t figure out how to get one of Jim Bob’s worms on the end of a hook;
Several tweets connect Cohen and the school to embarrassing headlines about another Cooley alum—Pennsylvania state judge Elizabeth Beckley, who graduated a year after Cohen. Recent news reports revealed that Beckley, asked to preside over a marriage late last year, instead called in federal immigration agents because she suspected the Guatemala-born groom was in the United States illegally. The 22-year-old groom, who had in fact been a legal resident of the U.S. since his adoption by an American couple when he was eight months old, was fingerprinted and faced with arrest by immigration agents on what was supposed to be his wedding day.
OK, so I’m going to put on my Nostradamus hat for a moment here, and predict that if another SCOTUS justice retires in the next two years, we now all know whose name the Senate Judiciary Committee will be getting in nomination to fill the vacancy. It might not surprise you to find that, even before Michael Cohen dumped his personally monogrammed Walmart bag of shit on their heads, Cooley was seeing their admissions numbers go down the toilet. Funny how a combination of stiff tuition, low bar passage rates, and court battles over whether or not your sheepskin is worth wiping your ass with, will bring a low turnout on “open campus” day.
More and more people are starting to compare the Trump administration to an organized crime family. If that’s what it is, then it must be the “Kid Sally Palumbo” family from Jimmy Breslin’s iconic “The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight” novel. Most mobsters with something more than arugula between their ears hire attorneys to keep them out of the spotlight. Only Don Cornholeone hires lawyers that sell tickets to their clients impromptu “one man shows.”
It’s funny when you think about it, but Cohen has actually achieved perfect symbiosis with his numbnuts client. When asked about their most (in)famous alumni, the Wharton School of Business mumbles, “Trump? Trump? Oh yeah, we accepted that clown under the affirmative action program, for someone with a brain disability.” When the name of Mikey “The Mope” comes up, Cooley spokesmen scratch their heads and say, “Michael who? Cohen? Oh yeah, that bozo. He used to empty wastebaskets for us back in the early 90’s, we think he stole a diploma from a file cabinet somewhere.”
But believe it or not, there is actually one piece of good news for Cooley in all of this. If they can manage to stay in operation until the fall, I think they just found a new Professor Emeritus. Rudy Giuliani should be looking for a new gig by then, and he’d fit that place like a fucking glove.
