the Zealous

Forty percent of ABA-accredited law schools are in severe financial distress. Another 30% are in considerable difficulty. If you went to law school, there's a decent chance your alma mater is struggling to keep the lights on.

Paul Campos, a professor at the University of Colorado Law School who has been tracking law school economics with unusual candor for over a decade, just posted a data-heavy SSRN paper that puts hard numbers on the slow-motion collapse. As he describes it on his blog, what he calls "Peak Law School" hit in 2010, when total JD tuition revenue reached its all-time high. Since then, "JD tuition revenue is down 41% - 24% per capita, with the rest of the decline attributable to falling enrollment."

The culprit, in Campos's telling, is the three-decade pursuit of U.S. News rankings:

PayPal has upgraded its class action waiver and arbitration provisions for the mass-arbitration era. The result is one of the most heavily fortified consumer arbitration clauses out there - supercharged to meet the mass arbitration threat that PayPal has faced in recent years.

Before you can file anything, you or PayPal has to mail the other side a completed Notice of Dispute by certified mail, signed with your original handwritten signature and your counsel's if you have one. A 60-day good-faith negotiation window follows, with an optional settlement conference you must personally attend. Completing this is a "condition precedent to initiating arbitration," and a court can enforce it by staying your arbitration and freezing fees.

This from the company that built itself on taking friction out of payments. This is a filter, aimed at mitigating the onrush of thousands of identical demands.

In 1923, a young Boston lawyer named Archibald MacLeish, who finished first in his class at Harvard Law, was made partner at his firm. He resigned the same day to move himself and his family to Paris.

This is why.