It's time to check in on what's happening at the nation's law schools. This time, we are all over the map.

1.  Is Yale Law being redundant? Just when other (mortal) law schools are focusing on teaching practical skills, Yale Law School is going in the other direction. Yale just announced a Ph.D. program for students who want to pursue an academic career in law.

Whoa—isn't Yale already churning out more than its fair share of tweedy law profs? How much more theory can that place take?

2. Judge to Cooley Law grads: Too bad, so sad. We can't say we're surprised by the decision. A federal judge in Michigan has dismissed a class action brought by graduates of Cooley Law School for misrepresenting job placement statistics. Basically, the judge in the Cooley case applied the same reasoning as the judge in a similar suit by graduates of New York Law School: caveat emptor. (See "Smart Enough to Be Dumb.")

The plaintiffs should have known better than "to rely on two bare-bones statistics in deciding to attend a bottom-tier law school with the lowest admission standards in the country," wrote the judge.

3. Where are the beauty queens at the top ten law schools? Texas Tech Law School might not be anywhere close to the top of the U.S. News & World Report law school rankings (it ranked 101), but who cares? After all, it does have a bona fide beauty queen in its ranks: DaNae Couch, a rising 3-L at Texas Tech, just got crowned Miss Texas.

Couch told Above the Law's Staci Zaretsky that she has a "passion" for litigation and that she's on the national mock trial team at school. She also said that she interned at the Texas Supreme Court and will be interning at the U.S. attorney’s office in Fort Worth this summer.

ATL adds: "Couch will move on to compete in the Miss America pageant in January 2013. We bet that Texas Tech will be pleased if she wins the crown, because she’d probably be counted as employed upon graduation."

Now, now, let's not pick on Texas Tech. I think it's super that one of its students is thinking outside of the same old box. I mean, isn't having a shot at being Miss America a fine alternative career?

  4. Oops, we didn't mean to be that generous. The University of Louisville Louis D. Brandeis School of Law made a big boo-boo: It offered incoming students more than twice the scholarship money than the school had budgeted. Reports The National Law Journal:

The school had allocated $550,000 for scholarships, but awarded an additional $800,000 to the incoming class of 140 students. . . . That means the school’s unintended scholarship burden will be an estimated $2.4 million during the three-year lives of the scholarships.

Don't worry, the school says it won't be taking the money back from students who were promised scholarships. It's just that there's no money left for anybody else.  So you can cross Louisville off your list.

5. USC law prof and Wachtell lawyer explain Romney's tax returns (or lack thereof). Are you confused about the controversey over Mitt Romney tax returns? Well, USC law professor Edward Kleinbard and Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz  tax head Peter Canellos wrote a very sharp piece on this issue for CNN. (Hat tip: TaxProf Blog.)

Among other issues, Kleinbard and Canellos discuss Romney's Swiss bank accounts, his low tax rate, and his remarkable $100 million IRA account. One explanation for that $100 million IRA, writes the authors, "is that a truly mighty oak sprang up virtually overnight from relatively tiny annual acorns because of the unprecedented prescience of every one of Romney's investment choices."

Anyway, it's a lively, informative read. And I don't usually say that about articles on tax issues.