As the dean of a lower-ranked law school that benefited from the Bush administration's hiring practices, Jeffrey Brauch of Regent made no apologies in a recent interview for training students to understand what the law is today, and also to understand how legal rules should be changed to better reflect "eternal principles of justice," from divorce laws to abortion rights.

And here's part 2 of the stategery, plant your own grass. This is something that the religious right has tried doing to education. They get their people in at a local level to push creationism/untelligent design in state or local school boards, so when someone starts asking about church/state separation, their response is it reflects the local community and how could anything be wrong with that?

The mission of the new justice department is to create that permanent republican majority Karl Rove so wants, and doesn't care how he gets. These are the same sorts of tactics being employed by the opposition in Iraq, that were employed by the opposition in Vietnam, by the Maoists in China, by the Bolsheviks in Russia and by (let's invoke Godwin's Law right off the bat) the brownshirts in Germany. The idea is, you insert your people into key positions at the low levels and when there is opposition, use them to crush it. It gives the appearance that things are happening at a local level, a grassroots operation, when nothing could be further from the truth.

Not only that, but their methodology can be predicted. Let's take a likely event, Hillary gets the Democratic nomination. What can we expect if my analysis is correct? A reopening of Whitewater, the Rose Law questions, travelgate, and anything else Hillary may have done. Ignore that fact that millions were already spent on all of those with absolutely nothing of any legal issue coming from it, the point is to make political hay to win the election, then it can all go away again.

Update So to put this in better perspective, here's the USNews assessment of the law school enrollment. 461 full time students with an attrition rate of 9.1% first year and 4.3% year two gets us 401 out of those 461 who will graduate or about 130 per year. That matches up roughly with their website's statement of a class size of 161. ABA accreditation was not granted until 1996. According also to USNews, it is considered a Tier 4 law school, or bottom quartile.

Let's really go inside the numbers on this, here is a comment from Slate over the weekend.

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