The U.S. News & World Report law school rankings were officially released Thursday. I say “officially” because Above the Law noted the results had been leaked in a Tuesday afternoon blog post. (Apparently I wasn’t paying as close attention to the leaks as I did last year.)

Here’s what I gleaned:

• The University of Maryland School of Law is tied for 48th with law schools at American, Southern Methodist and Tulane University. UM Law was tied for 43rd last year.
• The University of Baltimore School of Law returned to third tier after a year in the fourth tier.
• UM Law is No. 2 for health care law, No. 9 for clinical training and tied for 10th for environmental law
• UM Law is No. 5 for part-time law students; UB Law is tied for 57th
• 13 percent of UM Law students are black; 6 percent of UB Law students are black
• UB Law is No. 6 on the list of public schools that give the most financial aid

The two schools also placed relatively low on this list, which I think is the one list where a lower ranking is better.

Another beautiful day in Maryland! Let’s remember this come July, when it becomes unbearable. For now, here are a few law links to start your day if you’re unfortunate enough to be inside:

• Baltimore County Circuit Court Judge Susan Souder, she of the 2007 fingerprint evidence-disallowing opinion, finally speaks publicly about the decision.
• A former Hopkins applied systems engineer convicted of traveling to engage in unlawful sex (with someone he thought was a 13-year-old girl) can’t be totally banned from computers for 30 years, D.C. Circuit says.
• The New York Times makes a trend piece out of the University of Maryland-Perdue flap. (Get it? Chickens? Flap? Oh, never mind.)
• Here’s how prosecutors should not use Facebook/MySpace content in court.
• Don’t give your employer too much information on why you’re out of the office, the anonymous Hiring Partner writes.
• A woman is embroiled in a legal dispute with her former landlord, which she says evicted her for refusing to remove Peeps from her door last Easter. The landlord says she was evicted for not paying rent. I can’t believe I missed this when the suit was first filed.

Happy gorgeous Monday! Spring is in the air.

• House Judiciary chair Joe Vallario was disrespectful to Frederick Bealefeld at a hearing on automatic trials for people who don’t pay their tickets, The Sun’s Michael Dresser reports. The underlying bill, which would put the onus on people who want trials to request them, is very interesting as well.
• UM law student/blogger Moshe Glickman on the Shatzer 14-day Miranda ruling: “I under­stand that the police prac­ti­cally require a bright-line rule when they’re in the field. I respect the dif­fi­culty in for­mu­lat­ing such a rule. I seri­ously ques­tion whether this rule makes any sense whatsoever.”
• Above the Law weighs in on the Supreme Court’s cert grant in the Westboro Baptist Church case, which, of course, comes out of our own federal district. Elie Mystal writes, “So, if I’m a liberal that loves the First amendment and gays, what am I supposed to do?”
• The Charlotte Observer ran a heartwarming story over the weekend about a politician there who discovered that he was adopted and found his birth parents. His birth father, it turns out, is a politician too–a Maryland state delegate.
• Should the next SCOTUS justice be a Protestant? Does it matter? Is it OK to even discuss religion and the court?

During my days in College Park, I accumulated a pile of free Terps T-shirts that I would wear to football and basketball games. Some may have been a little big, and roughly 5,000 other students would be wearing the exact same shirt, but hey, they were free.

I say this because we all probably did something similarly resourceful while in school to save a few bucks. Two recent stories about law school students have reinforced my point.

First is Julia Neyman, a student at Columbia Law School. Neyman has a blog, the cleverly-titled “Buns of Steal,” in which she chronicles her attempt to work out at health clubs in New York City for an entire year without paying once.

Neyman found gym memberships too expensive upon moving to New York to start law school but soon noticed gyms around the city gave out free passes and coupons. Enter her blog and her goal.

“Most people aren’t cheap enough to do this for a whole year,” she told The New York Daily News. “But I am.”

Next is University of Baltimore School of Law student Burke Miller, who posted an ad on Craigslist seeking tickets to Wednesday night’s Duke-Maryland basketball game in exchange for providing a certain number of billable hours to the seller upon passing the bar.

Miller told The Baltimore Sun one ticket seller contacted him but declined the offer.

“I’m still hopeful,” he said. “I’d sit down with [a seller] and make a contract and look at the standard billable rate for a young attorney. I’ve got full faith that I’d be a good attorney.”

I wish them both the best. (Incidentally, I’d be willing to part with some of my Terps T-shirts for a ticket to the game.)

I mentioned in my story in Wednesday’s paper a letter written by the Board of Visitors at the University of Maryland School of Law concerning former Dean Karen H. Rothenberg and the recent audit of the University of Maryland, Baltimore.

Here is the letter in entirety. The board’s chairman, Paul D. Bekman, said the seven judges and one elected official (Sen. Ben Cardin) who are members were ethically precluded from endorsing the letter because of their positions. Otherwise, the letter represents the board’s unanimous position.

Caroline Farrell did not meet David Gaudin while in Mississippi earlier this month with the Maryland Law Katrina Project. But when a foreclosure attorney from the Mississippi Center for Justice shared with her Gaudin’s story, Farrell knew she needed to help a stranger.

Gaudin has terminal cancer; doctors give him less than six months to live. His illness forced him to stop working, and he subsequently fell behind on his mortgage. Wells Fargo, Gaudin’s bank, threatened to foreclose on his home. Gaudin and his foreclosure lawyer rejected the bank’s proposed loan modification late last year – three months’ forbearance followed by a large, balloon payment.

The bank now wants to move forward with foreclosure proceedings against Gaudin after rejecting his request for a loan modification because of an outstanding balance of $650 on his account.

“This is so heartbreaking,” Farrell said. “It seems so egregious that the bank can’t be flexible.”

That the sticking point was a couple hundred dollars also bothered Farrell, a 3L and president of the Katrina Project.

“I said, ‘We could raise this in an hour,’” she said.

She’ll have three hours to do it Friday night beginning at 9 p.m. at Quigley’s Half-Irish Pub near the law school. All proceeds from the $10 admission fee will go toward erasing Gaudin’s outstanding account balance. Farrell and her classmates have been spreading the word through listservs and Facebook, and Farrell is confident the event will raise more than enough money for Gaudin.

(Farrell said donations can also be made online by writing “The campaign to save David’s house” in the comments section.)

As for the beneficiary, Farrell said Gaudin cried upon learning what the Maryland students were doing for him. He’s now in regular contact with Farrell, a stranger no more.

The University of Maryland School of Law soon might be able to add “location for an Academy Award-winning film” to its promotional materials.

“The Response,” written by alum Sig Libowitz and filmed at the school in February 2008, is one of 10 films in the running for Best Live Action Short.

The 30-minute movie is based on the Guantanamo Bay tribunals and follows a trio of military judge advocate generals as they decide on a detainee’s guilt or innocence. The law school has an executive producer credit.

The shortlist will be pared down to no more than five next month, and the nominees will be announced Feb. 2. The Academy Awards will air March 7.

Anyone who’s gone to law school in the past five years or so knows the Internet-fueled distraction of the final exams period when it’s just you, some books and a computer for days at a time. Read outline. Check Facebook. Read outline. Refresh gossip blog. Read outline. Write e-mail to the law school listserv about your pet rock.

Ok, so some people get more batty than others. Or should I say, catty. Above the Law reports that law students at the University of Maryland started sending fake e-mails about pet-sitting after a visiting professor and two students solicited cat-sitters on the student listserv.

One student wrote:

Hey everyone-

I swear this is the last one of these. I’ve got this pet rock, George, that will need taking care of while I’m out of the country for a few months. He’s a 19 lb. granite rock that I pasted a mustache and googly eyes on, and I’m sure he’ll fall in love with whoever is kind enough to take care of him. He’s easy going—don’t worry about leaving him alone for a few hours at a time. My only request is that you fill his water bowl three times a day, and take him outside for fresh air in the morning and before his bed time, which is typically 7:30—I always let him watch Jeopardy with me! Of course, I’ll provide his bed, calcium pills, mustache comb, and extra glue (just in case).

After “Cat Lady” responded with her post about her 17 cats that need a sitter, another student responded as if she were law school dean Phoebe Haddon, saying, “I can understand a come-back e-mail, but if you’re going to risk your academic standing, at least make it funny.”

She ended with the disclaimer:

- this email was made for the express intent of scaring the crap out of the abovementioned individuals, and to show that law students can be funny but you, unfortunately, are not.

Ouch. Apparently we’ve moved beyond the good old bar exam lolcat for entertainment.

Law students: what else is going on over at UM law? Lawyers: what did you do during finals time?

Sorry, University of Maryland and University of Baltimore law school students – you don’t have a shot of clerking for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

An ABA Journal story about the composition of current and past clerks at the highest court in the land quotes Scalia telling an American University Washington College of Law student earlier this year she should look elsewhere for a clerkship: 

By and large, I’m going to be picking from the law schools that basically are the hardest to get into. They admit the best and the brightest, and they may not teach very well, but you can’t make a sow’s ear out of a silk purse. If they come in the best and the brightest, they’re probably going to leave the best and the brightest, OK?

(The real chutzpah of the quote is that Scalia said it on AU’s campus after being invited by the law school.)

For this upcoming term, the Harvards and Yales of the world still dominate the clerkships, although Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. “caused a stir” by picking a Seton Hall alumnus as his one of his clerks, according to the story. The universities of Georgia and Texas and George Washington University are also represented this term.

One former justice who didn’t automatically gravitate to top-10 law schools was Byron White, who hired ”interesting people,” including a man who worked in a coal mine.

“Look, there are a hundred people a year that could to the job adequately,” the NFL-player-turned-justice told biographer Dennis Hutchinson. “I might as well have someone who’s interesting, and that doesn’t mean the ones that the fancy law profes­sors recommend.”

I was driving on Charles Street by our office this morning when I saw a woman walking across the street with the help of a cane and what I thought was a full cast on her left leg. Upon closer inspection, I thought the woman was Phoebe Haddon, dean of the University of Maryland School of Law.

Turns out I was half right. The woman was in fact Haddon, but she was wearing a brace, not a cast, according to Jamie Smith, a law school spokesman. Haddon has been rehabbing from a summer leg injury, he said, and part of the treatment is to wear the brace.

Haddon is on her way to her goal, incidentally, of a full recovery by Saturday, when she will deliver her first address since becoming dean in July. Ron Kirk, the U.S. Trade Representative, will give the keynote address at the program, titled “Justice & the Global Economy”  but designated on the school’s Web site as “an event celebrating [Haddon's] appointment.” Registration for the event had to be closed after 500 people signed up, Smith said.