Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

Conservative Hate-Mail...

...from an attorney!  Eric Muller (Law, North Carolina) received it and, quite correctly, posted it.  Someone should contact the ethics committee of the Illinois Bar Association about this pathetic creature.

Corporate Practice Commentator

Can someone send me the full list of "the top 10" articles for 2004?

Law School Deans Defend an Independent Judiciary Against Recent Attacks

The letter is here.  Deans of all the major law schools signed, with the exceptions, it appears, of Stanford's Larry Kramer, Chicago's Saul Levmore, and Northwestern's David van Zandt.  (Does anyone know why?)  Also absent from the list of signatories are the Deans at conservative religious law schools like Pepperdine, Regent and Ave Maria.  Shame on them!

UPDATE:  Other readers point out that there are no signatures from the Deans at Georgetown (Alex Aleinikoff) and George Mason (Daniel Polsby).  Bear in mind, of course, that some of these omissions (both those mentioned in the Update and the original posting) may have been accidental, a result of bad timing, and not a decision by the Deans in question not to support the statement.

ANOTHER UPDATE:  A young legal scholar writes:  "I don't know about Alenikoff, but Larry Kramer's book is all about curbing the judiciary through funding and impeachment threats - he could hardly sign a letter protesting the same."  I had thought it was primarily about mob violence as a tool of constitutional interpretation, but perhaps this is right.

American Philosophical Society Elects New Members

The American Philosophical Society, the nation's oldest learned society (though not as well-known, perhaps, as the American Academy of Arts & Sciences or the National Academy of Sciences), has announced the election of new members.

Philosophers elected are Stanley Cavell (emeritus, Harvard), Allan Gibbard (Michigan), and Richard Rorty (emeritus, Stanford). 

Scholars well-known to philosophers also elected this year include Peter Galison (History of Science, Harvard) and Amy Gutmann (President of Penn).

Other philosophers elected to the APS from prior years include Nancy Cartwright (LSE & UC San Diego), Saul Kripke (CUNY & emeritus, Princeton), Hilary Putnam (emeritus, Harvard), and Onora O'Neill (Cambridge).

Only one legal scholar was elected this year:  Larry Kramer (now Dean at Stanford).  (Given the excruciatingly critical reviews of his book that have appeared just about everywhere, the timing here seems a bit odd.)  Other law professors elected to the APS from prior years include Kathleen Sullivan (Stanford, and former Dean), Randall Kennedy (Harvard), Kent Greenawalt (Columbia), Barbara Black (Columbia), Gerhard Casper (Stanford), and Guido Calabresi (emeritus, Yale & federal judge).

"The Professor of Torture's" Problems with the Truth

Tough times for Dershowitz, as more people hold his claims up to the light.

Torts Expert Bernstein Splitting Between Emory and New York Law School

Anita Bernstein (torts, products liability, feminist legal theory), currently the Sam Nunn Professor of Law at Emory University, has also accepted appointment as Wallace Stevens Professor of Law at New York Law School.  She will be splitting her time between the schools the next two years, though NYLS is hoping to recruit her full-time at the end of that period.

Emory Law Dean Arthur Resigns

Story here.

Stanford Making Bids for Philosophers Josh Cohen, Skyrms

Stanford University has made a senior offer to the distinguished political philosopher Joshua Cohen at MIT, which would have him jointly appointed in the Departments of Philosophy and Political Science and in the Law School (which has, historically, been a rather philosophy-unfriendly place, so this is a striking development).  In addition, the Philosophy Department at Stanford has offered a long-term (ten-year) part-time appointment to Brian Skyrms (decision and game theory, philosophy of science, metaphysics and epistemology) at the University of California at Irvine who, among his many other accomplishments and distinctions, is one of only two philosophers elected to the National Academy of Sciences (the other is Patrick Suppes, now emeritus at Stanford).

New Fellows of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences Announced

I'm on the run, but here, briefly, are the results:

Newly elected philosophers are Robert Fogelin (emeritus, Dartmouth), Gilbert Harman (Princeton), Charles Larmore (Chicago), Keith Lehrer (emeritus [though still teaching], Arizona), and Peter van Inwagen (Notre Dame).  In addition, philosopher Rebecca Goldstein (Trinity College) was elected in recognition of her literary works.

Newly elected legal scholars are Jack Balkin (Yale), Elena Kagan (Dean of Harvard Law School), Duncan Kennedy (Harvard), Sylvia Law (NYU), and Catharine MacKinnon (Michigan).  This was clearly the year for "the left" (in some suitably loose sense) at the American Academy!  For good measure, among the practitioners elected was Chief Justice William Rehnquist.

More later...

UPDATE:  Of local interest, Allan MacDonald (Physics) at UT Austin was elected, as was Eric Nestler from the UT Southwestern Medical School in Dallas (there is no medical school at the Austin campus).

Health and Disability Law Expert Crossley to be new Pitt Law Dean

The university press release is here.  She comes to Pittsburgh from Florida State University, which had recruited her away just a few years ago from a tenured post at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law.

Vanderbilt's Syverud to be New Law Dean at Wash U/St. Louis

A faculty member at Washington University just wrote to confirm that Kent Syverud, the very successful outgoing Dean of Vanderbilt's law school, has accepted the Deanship at Washington University School of Law in St. Louis.  More details later today.  Kudos to Wash U on having secured a very talented administrator and academic leader.

UPDATE:  Wash U's press release is here.  Syverud starts January 1, 2006 at Wash U.

ANOTHER UPDATE:  Syverud is moving from a solidly top 20 law school to one that aspires, and ought to be able, to achieve that status.  One big advantage will be that Washington University is such a significantly stronger research university than Vanderbilt--though still one that, oddly, underperforms its great wealth (Wash U is significantly wealthier, on a per capita basis, than places like Cornell and Brown, for example).  (The undergraduate program ranks well, but the graduate programs generally do not.)  The standout unit at the university is clearly the Medical School, which is by every pertinent measure one of the handful of top medical faculties in the United States and the world.  As typically happens, outstanding strengths in medicine have spillover effects in the biological sciences, where Wash U again ranks in the top 10, and always the top 20, in essentially all the various sub-fields of biology.  Outside biology, the hard sciences are relatively weak (almost none are in the top 20 nationally); and in the humanities and social sciences, only a handful of departments rank in the top 20 or higher nationally  (e.g., Anthropology, German, Political Science).  (Philosophy, which disappeared from the top 50 for awhile, has now been rejuvenated with fresh talent [it ranked 36^th in 2004], and is poised, with additional hires, to move towards the top 20.)  One of Joel Seligman’s astute moves during his Deanship—or, I should say, one of his astute moves visible to an outsider—was to bring Lee Epstein, one of the stars of Political Science at Wash U and one of the nation's preeminent political scientists studying the courts, on to the law faculty, and help establish an intellectual niche for the Law School as a leading center of empirical studies of the legal system, with not only Epstein, but also Pauline Kim, Margo Schlanger, and others.  Seligman had a few notable lateral recruitments during his tenure—e.g., John Haley (Japanese law) from Washington/Seattle, Schlanger and her husband Samuel Bagenstos (leading authority on disability law) from Harvard—as well as some strong junior hiring, but overall, he didn’t accomplish as much on the faculty recruitment front as Syverud did during his tenure at Vanderbilt.  If Syverud can duplicate his Vanderbilt success in St. Louis, Wash U could easily be one of the up-and-comers among top law schools in the next decade.

Top Producers of Law Teachers in the Last Two Years

Utilizing the data that Larry Solum has compiled for two years on where newly hired law teachers earned their first degree (here and here), I've compiled a list of all schools that sent at least three graduates in to law teaching during this time period.  Next to the name of each school appears the number of graduates who took tenure-track jobs in the last two years; and following that number is the number of students in a typical class (rounded to the nearest 50) based on the 2000 ABA Guide to U.S. Law Schools.  (Some schools have shrunk their class sizes since, but the 2000 Guide is probably more indicative of class size for those currently entering law teaching, since most of them earned their law degrees 3-8 years ago.)  Where there were ties in total number of graduates in teaching, I used class size to break the tie, ranking the smaller school higher.  Because the numbers that enter law teaching are so small, and because the sample size here (just two years), is also small, it's hard to know whether per capita measures would be informative, or just confusing.  (The reality of hiring, too, is that it helps to have a lot of graduates of your school in law teaching:  institutional loyalty and all that.)  Yet surely it is relevant when comparing, e.g., Harvard and Yale, that Harvard is two-and-a-half-times the size of Yale, yet Yale places almost as many graduates in teaching as Harvard.  So the figures on student body size in parentheses permit modestly useful comparisons for schools with roughly similar numbers of graduates in law teaching during this time period.  (Remember:  because the totals for most schools are small, another year's data could change the results significantly.)

The results are not significantly different from the results of earlier data I compiled.  Note, however, that Solum's data, and my aggregation of it here, do not control for quality of the school at which graduates are hired, or for the number of graduates who earned other degrees from other institutions prior to securing a post in law teaching.  (This is important, e.g., in the case of Kansas, perhaps the most surprising performer on the list.)

Top Producers of New Law Teachers, 2003-2005

1.  Harvard University (51) (550)

2.  Yale University (41) (200)

3.  Stanford University (15) (200)

4.  Columbia University (15) (350)

5.  University of Chicago (13) (200)

6.  New York University (10) (450)

7. University of California, Berkeley (9) (250)

8.  University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (9) (350)

8.  University of Virginia (9) (350)

10. University of Pennsylvania (7) (250)

11. Georgetown University (7) (600)

12. University of Texas, Austin (6) (450)

13. University of California, Los Angeles (5) (250)

14. University of Kansas (4) (150)

15. Duke University (4) (200)

16. Howard University (3) (100)

17. Cornell University (3) (200)

17. Northwestern University (3) (200)

UPDATE:  Law professor Chris Drahozal from the University of Kansas writes:

I'm happy that Kansas is finally getting some positive recognition (after our fall to 100 in U.S. News!). I do take some issue with the following remark from your post, however, which I think is a little unfair to KU:  "Note, however, that Solum's data, and my aggregation of it here, do not control for quality of the school at which graduates are hired, or for the number of graduates who earned other degrees from other institutions prior to securing a post in law teaching. (This is important, e.g., in the case of Kansas, perhaps the most surprising performer on the list.)"

Our four alums who entered teaching the past two years have gotten jobs at Cornell, Minnesota, St. Louis, and Akron - a better group of schools than the Duke alums are teaching at, for example. And only one of the four has a degree from somewhere other than Kansas (one other has an MBA from Kansas as well).   [Ed.-one grad earned an SJD at Yale, and is now at Cornell.] As I'm sure you know teaching at a state school, we get some really good students who don't want to pay out-of-state or private school tuition. As a result, our top graduates are really good, and, as this data suggests, competive with law graduates from anywhere. We just don't have as many students like that as some other schools do.

Of course, the same is presumably true at the University of Georgia and the University of Minnesota and the University of Iowa and so on, yet these schools didn't perform as well as Kansas in the last two years.  While I wouldn't suggest that students now head off to Kansas in order to enter law teaching, it's clear that they're doing something right in Lawrence to help their students fare well in this most competitive of job markets.  (And the U.S. News ranking of the school is obviously silly, needless to say.)

Business Law Expert Tung from Loyola/LA to Emory

Fred Tung, a specialist in both domestic and international corporate law and securities regulation, bankruptcy, and commercial law, at Loyola Law School, Los Angeles has accepted a tenured offer from the law school at Emory University, where he will start in the fall.

Harvard's "Professor of Torture": "shocking in [his] audacity"

Details here; an excerpt (footnotes omitted):

In a recent talk at York University in Toronto, Canada,..in the course of arguing that Israeli authorities no longer torture Palestinians, [Alan] Dershowitz claimed he had a long conversation with the Israeli human rights organization, Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI), in which PCATI not only conceded that there was no longer any torture for them to investigate, but that they refused to change their name because it helped them attract media attention....

First, I visited PCATI's website (www.stoptorture.org.il) and immediately found its July 2003 report containing 48 affidavits testifying to the continued use of torture against Palestinians by Israeli authorities. More than three years after Professor Dershowitz claims torture had stopped, PCATI reported: “Each month, the ill-treatment reaching the level of torture as defined in international law is inflicted in dozens of cases, and possibly more. In other words – torture in Israel has once more become routine.” And after Professor Dershowitz claims PCATI conceded torture had ended, PCATI was still reporting that “Instances of torture, abuse, prisoners held incommunicado and excessive violence against [Palestinian] detainees continue to grow in both numbers and severity”, while “interrogators and perpetrators of torture, their commanders and superiors enjoy impunity.”

These reports didn’t exactly corroborate Professor Dershowitz’s story so, next, I contacted PCATI to confirm his allegation. “Dershowitz’s claim that he had long conversations with PCATI and that we reported that there is no longer any torture in Israel,” I was told by PCATI’s Orah Maggen, “is totally false. We never met with him or spoke with him directly. I did meet him at the Knesset [Israel’s parliament] when he spoke at the Law and Constitution Committee [but] I, and representatives of other human rights NGOs challenged most of what he said about torture, the role of human rights NGOs and other issues.”

When I reported PCATI's denial to Professor Dershowitz, he replied: “During my conversation at the Knesset I asked the representative of the committee [Orah Maggen] why they kept their name, despite their acknowledgement that torture was no longer a significant issue? She responded – I remember clear as day – as follows: 'You have no idea how difficult it is to get attention to any human rights issues in this country. Maintaining our organizational name, with the word torture, is essential to getting needed attention.' I had an extensive argument with her about that tactic, focusing especially on the international implications and the misleading nature of the name outside of the country. I am certain she remembers the conversation because it was quite heated. It also took place in front of numerous witnesses.”

When I emailed PCATI Dershowitz's “clear as day” recollection, Ms. Maggen replied that it is true that there was a heated exchange with others present, but “All other statements made by Professor Dershowitz are blatantly false and utterly preposterous… Neither I nor any other representative of PCATI acknowledged, claimed or in any way stated that torture is no longer a significant issue. On the contrary, it is our claim that the systematic and large-scale torture and ill treatment of Palestinian detainees and prisoners continues to this day.” She further stated that, “Neither I nor any other representative of PCATI ever stated that we kept our name to ‘get attention’ for any reason whatsoever. Considering the fact that torture is still widespread and that PCATI has its hands full struggling against the torture and ill treatment of Palestinian detainees (and others) by Israeli authorities, the claim regarding statements we supposedly made about our organization's name is totally absurd.” Finally, she concluded that Dershowitz's claim was “shocking in its audacity.”

NYU Law Student Asks Justice Scalia: "Do you sodomize your wife?"

The basic story is here, and Orin Kerr (Law, George Washington) recounts other facts surrounding the recent incident at NYU here; and this site prints a letter from the student who asked the question in which he explains, rather plausibly, the grounds for his intentionally, but hardly gratuitously, rude question.

UPDATE:  Professor Kerr's posting has actually elicited a couple of interesting comments:  for example, here and here.  (Be forewarned, however, that the pathetically dumb Clayton Cramer is, alas, all over the comments section here.)

ANOTHER UPDATE:  Timothy Sandfeur has interesting comments here.

AND ANOTHER:  An NYU faculty member confirms that this is Dean Revesz's letter (and thanks also to NYU students who forwarded it).  The key part, commenting on the student question, is this:

First, during the student question-and-answer session, one student posed an extraordinarily rude, immature, and inappropriate question. Such a show of incivility to any individual invited to be a guest of the Law School, let alone to a Supreme Court Justice, has no place in our intellectual community. It is insulting not only to our guest but also to the law school community as a whole, and impedes the robust debate that events such as these are designed to promote. Questions can be asked--and should be asked--that are challenging, critical, and demanding.  But part of becoming a professional and an adult is learning to ask these questions, even of those we disagree with strongly on certain issues, in a serious and mature way that does not involve offensive and insulting language.

Deans are, of course, in impossible situations in cases like this, since they have institutional duties that must override their moral and political judgment and opinions.  Still, it strikes me as unfortunate to have made this an issue of "maturity," when it is plainly not.  (This reminds me, in an odd way, of the furor after 9/11 when Susan Sontag pointed out, of course correctly, that of the many things one might say about the hijackers, calling them "cowards" made the least sense.)  The question was clearly very rude, but asking it did not reflect "immaturity," rather the opposite:  namely, a maturity of conviction and purpose sufficient to empower the student to dramatically violate expected norms in a room full of his peers and teachers in order to make a political statement.  One may have different views about the appropriateness of such a political statement in this context, but it does not reflect poorly on the maturity of the student.  (If the student had asked the rude question gratuitously, or simply for titillation, then the charge of immaturity would make sense; but he obviously did not.) 

On a more minor point, I am struck by the suggestion that "a show of incivility to any individual invited to be a guest of the Law School, let alone to a Supreme Court Justice, has no place in our intellectual community."  Why special status for Supreme Court Justices?  They are obviously political appointees, chosen for their ideology and expectations about their behavior on the Court, not for their skill or competence or moral rectitude.  Why is incivility, for purposes of making a political statement, especially inapposite in this case as against any other guest of the Law School?  Curious.

AND ANOTHER UPDATE:  More thoughts in support of the student from Clayton Littlejohn here.  And there are also notable comments from "Steven" at the same site:

I think the format in which he was speaking plays a big part in the reaction he has been getting.  The President and, I imagine, Justice Scalia, appear in only tightly controlled affairs where their points are stressed and the views of anyone else are suppressed. There are tight screens for both the questions and questioners. So, both Eric or any critic can not expect the time or space to say completely what they would like, as Eric did in his long letter, to make his point "politely."

Given what's at stake, not just the bigotry, but the murders and thievery going on in Iraq, the intimidating attacks on the poor domestically, and the general lawlessness perpetrated by this adminitration, we all have cause to emulate Eric.

With the issues that face us in mind, put these questions to them. There is a point to civility in that reasonable people who desire a resolution to conflicts require it. However, I am persuaded Justice Scalia, among others, believes morality is more important, and civility for them is a useful ruse.

AND YET ONE MORE:  Stephen Bainbridge (Law, UCLA), in comments here, confuses, I think, the value of an independent judiciary (i.e., a judiciary whose decisions are independent of coercion from the other branches of government) with the fact that judges--especially appellate judges, and most especially Supreme Court Justices--are called on to make political and moral judgments with great frequency, and are increasingly appointed on the basis of expectations about the judgments they will make in that regard.  One may think, as I and many others do, that an independent judiciary is crucial to the values we associate with the "rule of law," and also believe that appellate judges are political actors in significant ways.  That they are political actors makes it unsurprising that they attract protests like that of the NYU student; that a judiciary independent of the other political branches is important to the rule of law makes it alarming when members of the legislative and executive branches threaten to coerce judges to do their bidding.

Two Lateral Appointments for Boalt: Sklansky from UCLA, Volpp from American

Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California at Berkeley has made two tenured appointments:  David Sklansky (criminal procedure, evidence) from UCLA and Leti Volpp (immigration law, law & culture, Asian-Americans and the law) from American University. 

In addition, Boalt has made tenured offers to a couple, Gillian Lester, who is a well-known expert in employment law, at UCLA and Eric Talley, who many consider to be one of the very top scholars in the country in his age cohort in corporate law and law & economics, at the University of Southern California; they will be visiting professors at Boalt next year.  (Earlier this year, Boalt lost Stephen Choi, in corporate law and law & economics, to New York University.)  A number of top schools, including Texas, were in the "hunt" for this scholarly couple this past year!  (A propos our earlier discussion of "look-see" visits, it is interesting to note that this is the second case I know of this year where top lateral prospects receive permanent offers, and then elect to visit to "look-see" the school, as it were, rather than the other way around.)

More details on some of the preceding, as well as information on a junior hire, is here.

UPDATE:  And a third case of the reverse "look-see":  Cynthia Estlund (employment law) at Columbia Law School has a permanent offer from New York University, and will visit before deciding.

Typical Teaching Loads at Some Top Law Schools

Gordon Smith (Law, Wisconsin) has compiled interesting information here.

NYU Law's Levinson to Harvard

Daryl Levinson (constitutional law) at New York University has accepted the offer from Harvard Law School reported here.

Constitutional Law Scholar Gerhardt from William & Mary to North Carolina

Michael Gerhardt (constitutional law) at the College of William & Mary has accepted a senior offer from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, turning down, in the process, an offer from the University of Minnesota at Twin Cities. 

2005 Guggenheim Fellowship Winners Announced

Here.  Only one law professor won support for his work this year:  M. Gregg Bloche (Georgetown).  (My sense is that not many law faculty apply for this support.)  Philosophers whose work is being recognized and supported are Eckart Forster (Johns Hopkins) and Gerald Postema (North Carolina).  (Having written in support of Professor Postema's application, let me add, on a personal note, that I am particularly pleased to see that his excellent work won support.)

Of local interest, UT Austin historian Alison Frazier also won a Guggenheim this year.

Two Major Appointments for Hastings: Hazard from Penn, Williams from American

The University of California Hastings College of Law in San Francisco has made two major senior hires:  Geoffrey Hazard, Jr., the nation's leading authority on legal ethics, is moving full-time now to Hastings from the University of Pennsylvania, where he had taught since retiring from Yale in 1994; and Joan Williams, a major figure in feminist legal theory, is moving to Hastings from American University in Washington, D.C.

Wall Street Journal Columnist Comments on Latest US News Rankings

Here. 

More Evidence of Top Law Schools "Gaming" the U.S. News Ranking System?

A student, whose name I'm witholding, writes:

With the new U.S. News rankings and most law school decisions for this cycle out, I would like to let you know about my experience with the application process and the way even elite law schools are manipulating the admissions process in order to increase their ratings.

I am a top candidate. I attended [a top liberal arts college in the Northeast], where my GPA was 3.82, and scored 178 on the LSAT. I have been accepted at NYU, Stanford, and Harvard; did not apply to Columbia; and am still waiting on a decision from Yale. Outside the U.S. News top 5, the situation changes dramatically. I have been accepted by Duke, Virginia, and Boalt, but been placed on glorified waitlists at Georgetown, Penn, Michigan, and Chicago. While the waitlists have different names, they all have one thing in common: I am expected to take positive action in order to remain in consideration. If I do not, my application will be rejected. ( Chicago claims that their form of positive action - writing extra essays - is "optional", but given the circumstances I do not find their claims credible.)

At just one or two schools, I would chalk it up to chance, but at this point it is clearly a pattern. The only explanation is that Georgetown, Penn, Michigan, and Chicago are trying to artificially inflate their U.S. News rankings by rejecting top candidates who are likely to turn them down for a more prestigious school. I feel as though my application fees have been stolen.

'Tis suspicious--also ridiculous, since the acceptance rate is a mere 2.5% of the overall score in U.S. News. 

UPDATE:  More stories coming in.  A professor of political science in the Northeast writes:

I don't know much about law school admission practices, but I know quite a lot about undergraduate practices, and there's a lot of "gaming" going on. It's not so much a matter of trying to lower the acceptance rate as it is to increase the yield rates [which are a factor in the US News undergraduate rankings]. My son was considering applying to Tufts (from which he will be graduating) but we were worried because the valedictorian of his school was wait-listed the previous year and she was much stronger than my son. My wife, who works in admissions, made an inquiry of a former colleague who then worked at Tufts, and he told us that this was a U.S News decision, that they were quite sure that the young woman wouldn't accept their offer (they were right). So they encouraged my son to apply, which he did. There are numerous institutions that play this game, and so it's entirely possible that law schools play it as well.

Aaron Dossett, a JD/MBA candidate at Indiana University, Bloomington, writes:

I applied to law schools two years ago, and had an interesting experience with a wait list. All of the schools that wait listed me required me to take some form of positive action, usually just faxing a form, to get on the wait list. I was happy with the offer I got from IU, so I decided not to go on any waitlists. One school, top 30 US News, contacted me several weeks after the deadline to accept a spot on the waiting list. The school informed me that even though the deadline had passed, I should contact them if I was still interested (I was not). I joked with my friends that I got a "constructive acceptance," but I'm sure it was a rejection for US News reporting purposes.

Another current law applicant writes:

I may be able to add a similar puzzle to that students' story. I applied to too many schools. Because I have a high LSAT combined with a mediocre GPA but good work experience, I didn't know where I'd fall. I've been accepted at Northwestern, Fordham, et al. I've still got some answers pending that may factor into the decision. I've been rejected by your 'horns and Stanford. The puzzle is that I've been waitlisted by UVA, Georgetown, Washington & Lee and George Mason. I can see the first two, but as a group I would assume, while they are all fine schools, that they do not compete for students with the same credentials. Maybe I just have weird numbers, and of course this admissions game is a strange cat. (Maybe it's a residency thing.) However, I would assume that a maybe from W&L would be a no at UVA, and a maybe from UVA would be a yes from W&L.

And so it goes in the wonderful world of US News-driven law school admissions practices.

New Blog by Newly Hired Assistant Professors of Law

Here.  The first two members are Ethan Lieb, who will be starting at Hastings in the fall, and Dan Markel, who will be starting teaching at Florida State.

Texas Making Bid for Leading Health Law Expert Sage at Columbia, Who Will Visit 05-06

William Sage, a JD/MD at Columbia Law School, who is widely considered the leading health law scholar of his generation in the academy, has a permanent offer from the University of Texas at Austin, and will be a visiting professor at the Law School during 2005-06.  In the past this strategy has worked well for us (in recent years, Jane Cohen from Boston University and Larry Sager from New York University both made the permanent move after visiting), and we are hopeful that Professor Sage will join our other recent recruits to the faculty.

Voting Rights and Procedure Expert Issacharoff from Columbia to NYU

Samuel Issacharoff, a leading authority on voting rights and civil procedure at Columbia Law School, has accepted the senior offer from New York University.  This marks the first time since roughly the late 1980s that there has been any lateral movement between the two New York schools, and the first time (ever, to my knowledge) that NYU has dislodged a senior faculty member from Columbia.  That's a big coup for NYU, which has suffered a number of significant losses in the last couple of years.  (NYU students will also be pleased to know that Issacharoff (who was my colleague here in the 1990s) is also a very popular and successful teacher.)

SSRN "Most Downloaded" Law Faculty Authors

That list is here (free registration required).  (I posted on the institutional list here.)  The list is updated each month.  Here are the 25 most-downloaded authors in the last 12 months, with institutional affiliation and primary area of publication in parentheses.  (You can click on other categories to re-rank by, e.g., downloads per paper, all-time downloads, and so on.)  As noted previously, SSRN is more heavily used by scholars in a few fields (corporate, law & economics, intellectual property), though perhaps the spectacle of a competition will increase usage in other fields! 

1.  Lucian Bebchuk (Harvard:  corporate, law & econ)

2.  Mark Lemley (Stanford:  intellectual property, law & econ)

3.  Bernard Black (Texas:  corporate, law & econ)

4.  Stephen Bainbridge (UCLA:  corporate)

5.  Francesco Parisi (George Mason:  law & econ, comparative)

6.  Cass Sunstein (Chicago:  constitutional, administrative, environmental, behavioral law & econ)

7.  William Landes (Chicago:  law & econ)

8.  John Coffee (Columbia:  corporate, procedure)

9.  Gregory Sidak (AEI:  telecommunications, Cyberlaw)

10. Orin Kerr (George Washington:  criminal)

11. Larry Solum (San Diego, moving to Illinois:  intellectual property, jurisprudence, procedure)

12. Ronald Gilson (Stanford/Columbia:  corporate, law & econ)

13. Jesse Fried (Berkeley:  corporate, law & econ)

14. Eric Posner (Chicago:  law & econ)

15. Reinier Kraakman (Harvard:  corporate, law & econ)

16. William Bratton (Georgetown:  corporate)

16. Allen Ferrell (Harvard:  corporate)

18. Lynn Stout (UCLA:  corporate)

19. Brian Leiter (Texas:  jurisprudence)

20. Timothy Wu (Virginia:  intellectual property)

21. Roberta Romano (Yale:  corporate)

22. Klaus Hopt (Max Planck Institute:  corporate)

23. Daniel Solove (George Washington:  Cyberlaw, privacy law)

24. Margaret Blair (Vanderbilt:  corporate, law & econ)

25. Patrick Ryan (Colorado/Louvain:  Cyberlaw, torts, procedure, comparative)

Word is that SSRN has a way of detecting those who download themselves, but so far, they aren't publishing the list of cheaters!  Ah, human vanity!

Harvard Law Makes Bid for NYU's Levinson

Harvard Law School has made an offer to Daryl Levinson (constitutional law) at New York University, as part of Harvard's general plan to expand the faculty.  (Harvard also has had an offer out for awhile to NYU's Richard Pildes [constitutional law, voting rights].)  NYU's Noah Feldman (constitutional law, Islamic law) has an offer from Yale currently, and is also visiting now at Harvard.  Other youngish "public law" scholars on Harvard's radar screen include Rick Hills (Michigan), Adrian Vermeule (Chicago), and Ernest Young (Texas). 

Strategies for "Moving Up" in Legal Academia

An assistant professor of law (not a UT grad) writes:

Your advice about the entry-level hiring process helped me at that stage of my career, and now I am interested in your advice in positioning oneself for a lateral move.  (In my case, from a fourth-tier school to -- with luck -- a second-tier one.)  I am finishing my first year in teaching and hope to move after my second or third.

The basics are sufficiently clear.  I should publish, do as well as possible in the classroom, and be a good colleague.  What is unclear for me is the publicity aspect.  Is the AALS market the way to go, again?  Or is it better to try to get one's name out to others in the profession in a less systematic way?  Are faculty workshops a good way to audition for a full-scale interview?

I've opened comments, and invite law faculty (no anonymous postings) to offer advice.  I will try to weigh in when I have a chance, but I'm sure others have lots of good insight in to this issue.

UPDATE:  A colleague elsewhere writes:  "Interesting that no one has responded to your very interesting post -- I suppose that anyone who is trying to move up doesn't want to seem over-eager or desparate, while those looking for laterals don't want to have every gunner flooding their inbox with e-mails.  I'll bet you would get tons of responses if you allowed anonymous comments."  Since then, Professor Brown has kindly posted an informative response, but I will, per my colleague's suggestion, permit anonymous postings here.  I will, however, delete or edit anonymous postings more vigorously if they aren't on point.  I'm also moving this to the front.

Intellectual Property Expert Tushnet from NYU to Georgetown

Rebecca Tushnet (intellectual property) at New York University School of Law has accepted an offer from the law school at Georgetown University, where she has been visiting.  Her father, the distinguished constitutional law scholar Mark Tushnet, has been a long-time member of the Georgetown faculty, though has recently visited at Harvard Law School.

More on the US News Rankings Echo Chamber

I've already remarked on some of the peculiarities of the new US News rankings, but now that they are "officially" out, I can offer a few more detailed observations.

There are the obvious injustices, from the standpoint of academic merit (i.e., actual faculty and student quality), in the overall rankings:  numerous schools are ranked too low (Chicago at 6th, Berkeley at 11th, Texas at 15th, USC at 18th, Illinois at 26th, Emory at 32nd, Hastings at 39th, George Mason at 41st, Florida State at 56th, San Diego at 63rd, Chicago-Kent at 65th are just a few that catch my eye right away); numerous others--benefitting from the criteria that usually favor small, private schools--are ranked more highly than they deserve on the academic merits (Northwestern at 10th and Duke at 11th are two obvious ones at the high end). 

In any case, grousing like this is old news, and is no doubt going on nonstop at faculty lounges around the country right now.  Students trying to make sense of the information (and misinformation) provided by US News should review the methodology and its weaknesses in order to get the most out of the data provided.

What I'm particularly struck by is the "echo chamber" effect noted in my earlier posting:  namely, that the academic reputation rank of at least the top schools is basically gravitating towards the typical overall US News rank of the school--a rank that is, itself, based in large part on that reputation!  (The lawyer/judge reputation rank fluctuates meaninglessly year in and year out, mostly because the response rate is so poor:  only 27% this year filled out the surveys!)

To check my sense that this is what's now happening, I looked at the reputation score of the top 15 schools in 2002, the reputation score in 2005, and then the overall US News rank of the school in the intervening period.  The pattern, alas, is unmistakable.

In 2002, for example, Columbia's reputation rank was tied at 4-5.  In the four intervening overall rankings, Columbia was always 4th.  Lo and behold, in the year 2005, Columbia's academic reputation is now 4th, by itself (no tie).

In 2002, Chicago was tied at 4th in academic reputation; after four intervening years of an overall ranking of 6th, Chicago's academic reputation slipped to 5th.

In 2002, NYU's academic reputation rank was tied at 8-9 (with Virginia).  In the four intervening years, NYU's overall rank was always 5th.  By 2005, NYU's academic reputation rank had moved up to a new cluster, 6-8 (tied with Berkeley and Michigan).

In 2002, Duke's academic reputation was tied at 10-11 (with Penn), this coming on the heels of several years when Duke, overall, was ranked in the top ten.  (Penn meanwhile had been ranked outside the top ten for a couple of years at this point.)  From 2002-2005, Duke's overall rank was 10th only once, 12th twice, and 11th once.  By 2005, Duke's academic reputation had slipped to the 11-13 cluster (tied with Cornell and Georgetown, and now behind Penn).

In 2002, Texas had an academic reputation tied at 12-15 (with Cornell, Georgetown, and Northwestern); in the four intervening overall rankings Texas was always ranked 15th.  Lo and behold, in the year 2005, UT's academic reputation rank is now 15th, behind Cornell, Georgetown, and Northwestern.

The pattern is the same across the top 15 (with only one partial exception--Georgetown):  schools consistently ranked higher (overall) than their academic reputation score saw their academic reputation score improve by 2005; schools consistently ranked lower (overall) than their academic reputation score saw their academic reputation score decline by 2005.

The problem here is that most of these changes are unrelated to anything other than the overall U.S. News ranking.  Duke's faculty in 2005 is clearly stronger than its faculty in 2002, yet its reputation score declined (of course, it was too high in 2002); the reverse was true at NYU, yet its reputation score improved even as faculty left.  Texas recruited leading senior faculty from Stanford, NYU, and Michigan (and improved the student body), and saw its academic reputation score decline in the same period.

The moral is clear:  to improve your academic reputation according to U.S. News improve your U.S. News ranking!  Improving your faculty or your student body doesn't matter.

If any law professor wants to see if this echo chamber effect extends more widely, please feel free to compile the data and send it to me.

Changes in Overall Strength of Graduate Programs in the Humanities & Social Sciences Among a Cluster of Competitive Research Universities

For the first time since 2001, U.S. News surveyed senior faculty on graduate program quality in several major areas of the humanities and the social sciences (not philosophy, though for that purpose we, of course, have more reliable data).  This provides an opportunity to look at how a cluster of very loosely competitive research universities fared during this period.  For reasons of immediate interest, I chose to look at research universities competitive with Texas, though I've thrown in two schools clearly stronger than the others in the cluster (UCLA and Chicago) and one weaker than the others in the cluster (Virginia) as a check on the reliability of the results.

Note that some of the schools in this sample are even stronger in the hard sciences and mathematics than in the social sciences and humanities (for example, Illinois, Texas, Washington and UC San Diego), while others are quite a bit weaker in those fields than in the social sciences and humanities (for example, Brown, Duke, North Carolina, and Virginia)

Nonetheless, strength in the humanities and social sciences is likely the information most relevant to law students, who, as graduate students, can take courses in cognate fields at the university.  (I didn't include here some schools with very good law schools--such as Georgetown, Southern California, and Vanderbilt--since their graduate departments in other fields simply aren't even close to being competitive, except in unusual cases, with the universities studied here.)

We calculated three scores for each university:  the net gain or loss in rank across the seven disciplines evaluated (English, Economics, History, Philosophy, Political Science, Psychology, and Sociology); the average rank of departments at each university in these seven fields; and the median rank.  In some cases where rankings did not extend beyond the top 25 or so, it was necessary to estimate a rank, and so the figure of 30th was used (in some cases that is an advantage for the school, in other cases a slight disadvantage).  In only one case, did we estimate a gain for a department for which the figure of 30th was assigned:  namely, Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania, which has made a series of high profile appointments to boost the standing of the department, which ranked far lower than 30th in the last National Research Council study.

The research universities most improved during this four-year period are:  New York University (plus 12); University of California at San Diego (plus 8); and University of Texas at Austin (plus 9).  No real surprises there:  each of these schools is in economically vibrant areas, attractive places to live, and each of these schools has been aggressive in the market for established faculty talent.

The research universities that lost the most ground during this four-year period are:  Johns Hopkins University (minus 13); Northwestern University (minus 25); University of Minnesota, Twin Cities (minus 24); and University of Washington at Seattle (minus 19).  The only surprise on that list, for me at least, was Northwestern.  I suspect it is simply a fluke of the time period evaluated, or the particular programs in question.  Minnesota and Washington, on the other hand, have had well-publicized troubles, mostly financial, and so the results in those cases are less surprising.  Johns Hopkins, meanwhile, is fighting a problematic urban location.

Among the universities studied, the ten with the highest average rank for departments in the humanities and social sciences were University of California, Los Angeles (9th), University of Chicago (10th), University of Wisconsin at Madison (12th), Cornell University (13th), University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (16th), University of Pennsylvania (17th), Duke University (18th), New York University (18th), University of Texas, Austin (18th), and University of California, San Diego (20th).  Those with the lowest average rank were Brown University and Johns Hopkins University (each 23rd), University of Virginia (26th), and University of Washington, Seattle (27th).

The ten with the highest median rank are University of Chicago (6th), University of California, Los Angeles (9th), University of Wisconsin, Madison (11th), University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (13th), University of Pennsylvania (13th), Cornell University (14th), Duke University (15th), University of California, San Diego (17th), Northwestern University (19th), and University of Texas, Austin (19th).  Those with the lowest median rank were the Universities of Virginia and Washington, Seattle (both 30th).

Below is the detailed data, reflecting the change in rank from 2001 to 2005 for each discipline, and also reporting the overall net gain or loss, and the average and median rank.

Brown University:  minus 8; avg. rank:  23rd; median rank:  21st

Economics:  21st to 21st

English:  14th to 15th

History:  15th to 15th

Philosophy:  16th to 17th

Political Science:  not in top 25 to not in top 25 (est. 30)

Psychology:  30th to 36th

Sociology:  not in top 25 to not in top 25 (est. 30)

Cornell University:  minus 3; avg. rank:  13th; median rank:  14th

Economics:  17th to 17th

English:  6th to 6th

History:  10th to 11th

Philosophy:  9th to 12th

Political Science:  20th to 18th

Psychology:  15th to 16th

Sociology:  14th to 14th

Duke University:  plus 2; avg. rank:  18th; median rank:  15th

Economics:  21st to 21st

English:  15th to 12th

History:  15th to 15th

Philosophy:  30th to 29th

Political Science:  8th to 8th

Psychology:  24th to 28th

Sociology:  16th to 14th

Johns Hopkins University:  minus 13; avg. rank:  23rd; median rank:  22nd

Economics:  24th to 24th

English:  8th to 8th

History:  10th to 9th

Philosophy:  31st to 44th

Political Science:  not in the top 25 to not in the top 25 (est. 30th)

Psychology:  24th to 22nd

Sociology:  19th to 22nd

New York University:  plus 12; avg. rank:  18th; median rank:  22nd

Economics:  19th to 15th

English:  25th to 23rd

History:  24th to 22nd

Philosophy:  1st to 1st

Political Science:  not in top 25 (est. 28th) to 18th

Psychology:  30th to 36th

Sociology:  22nd to 22nd

Northwestern University:  minus 25; avg. rank:  21st; median rank:  19th

Economics:  8th to 8th

English:  18th to 19th

History:  15th to 17th

Philosophy:  37th to 51st

Political Science:  20th to 21st

Psychology:  17th to 22nd

Sociology:  9th to 11th

University of California, Los Angeles:  minus 2; avg. rank:  9th; median rank:  9th

Economics:  11th to 11th

English:   11th to 10th

History:  9th to 9th

Philosophy:  8th to 9th

Political Science:  8th to 10th

Psychology:  6th to 5th

Sociology:  7th to 8th

University of California, San Diego:  plus 8; avg. rank:  20th; median rank:  17th

Economics:  17th to 10th

English:  not in the top 25 to not in the top 25 (est. 30)

History:  not in the top 25 to not in the to 25 (est. 30)

Philosophy:  17th to 17th

Political Science:  7th to 7th

Psychology:  17th to 16th

Sociology:  not in the top 25 to not in the top 25 (est. 30)

University of Chicago:  plus 2; avg. rank:  10th; median rank:  6th

Economics:  2nd to 1st

English:  5th to 6th

History:  5th to 4th

Philosophy:  17th to 17th

Political Science:  8th to 8th

Psychology:  30th to 28th

Sociology:  3rd to 4th

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign:  minus 7; avg. rank:  22nd; median rank:  22nd

Economics:  not in the top 25 to not in the top 25 (est. 30)

English:  18th to 19th

History:  22nd to 22nd

Philosophy:  49th to 54th

Political Science:  23rd to 22nd

Psychology:  3rd to 5th

Sociology:  not in the top 25 to not in the top 25 (est. 30)

University of Minnesota, Twin Cities:  minus 24; avg. rank:  22nd; median rank:  22nd

Economics:  11th to 15th

English:  not in the top 25 to not in the top 25 (est. 30)

History:  19th to 22nd

Philosophy:  31st to 36th

Political Science:  15th to 18th

Psychology:  3rd to 12th

Sociology:  22nd to 22nd

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill:  minus 3; avg. rank:  16th; median rank:  13th

Economics:  not in the top 25 to not in the top 25 (est. 30)

English:  18th to 19th

History:  13th to 13th

Philosophy:  12th to 12th

Political Science:  15th to 13th

Psychology:  17th to 22nd

Sociology:  5th to 4th

University of Pennsylvania:  plus 5; avg. rank:  17th; median rank:  13th

Economics:  9th to 9th

English:  10th to 10th

History:  13th to 13th

Philosophy:  26th to 31st

Political Science:  not in top 25 to not in top 25 (est. up 10, est. 30)

Psychology:  15th to 16th

Sociology:  11th to 10th

University of Texas, Austin:  plus 9; avg. rank:  18th; median rank:  19th

Economics:  21st to 25th

English:  18th to 19th

History:  22nd to 19th

Philosophy:  17th to 11th

Political Science:  23rd to 25th

Psychology:  17th to 12th

Sociology:  16th to 14th

University of Virginia:  minus 4; avg. rank:  26th; median rank:  30th

Economics:  not in the top 25 to not in the top 25 (est. 30th)

English:  11th to 12th

History:  15th to 19th

Philosophy:  42nd to 34th

Political Science:  not in the top 25 to not in the top 25 (est. 30th)

Psychology:  17th to 28th

Sociology:  not in the top 25 to not in the top 25 (est. 30th)

University of Washington, Seattle:  minus 19; avg. rank:  27th; median rank:  30th

Economics:  not in the top 25 to not in the top 25 (est. 30th)

English:  23rd to not in the top 25 (est. 30th)

History:  not in the top 25 to not in the top 25 (est. 30th)

Philosophy:  31st to 36th

Political Science:  23rd to 25th

Psychology:  17th to 22nd

Sociology:  16th to 17th

University of Wisconsin, Madison:  minus 4; avg. rank:  12th; median rank:  11th

Economics:  10th to 11th

English:  17th to 16th

History:  10th to 11th

Philosophy:  24th to 22nd

Political Science:  11th to 16th

Psychology:  9th to 9th

Sociology:  1st to 1st

Slight Change in US News Law School Ranking Methodology--First Change Since Late 1990s

The US News law school (and other graduate program) rankings will be officially released tomorrow (and I'll have a few additional comments then on some of the particulars of the results for law and for the humanities and social science programs), but it's worth noting that US News changed the way it calculates the "median" LSAT and GPA which is what it factors in to the overall ranking (the magazine has only printed, this year and prior years, the 25th/75th data).  The American Bar Association collects the 25th/75th data from the schools, and, as I've noted before, schools that might fudge with US News are far less likely to fudge with the ABA, since the ABA also plays an accreditation role.  This means that when private schools, in particular, report the median to US News, there is simply no way to verify the accuracy of the numbers being reported. 

This year, for the first time, US News "calculated" the median, and ignored the self-reported medians.  Of course, what they "calculated" wasn't really a median, but simply the mid-point between the verifiable 25th and 75th percentile data.  So, to take an example, our fall 2004 median LSAT was 165, but the 25th/75th spread was 162 to 167, meaning that the figure US News employed for ranking purposes was not 165, but 164.5. 

My own opinion is that this is a constructive change, from the standpoint of the reliability of the underlying data.  It's true, as I've written elsewhere, that there's still a real problem with the accuracy of a lot of the data that goes in to the ranking, but at least in this case they've increased reliability.  The median data that goes in to the ranking is no longer manipulable through fraud.  (It's still the case that the use of median data advantages smaller schools:  e.g., Washington & Lee will have had the same mid-point LSAT as Texas for rankings purposes, though Texas will have recruited at least three times as many students with those credentials.)

On the other hand--and this is how I first heard about this from colleagues elsewhere (and then confirmed it with Bob Morse, the Director of Data Research for the rankings issues at US News)--many are worried that this is going to negatively impact "alternative admissions" programs (affirmative action, preferences for alumni children, and so on), since these programs typically involve admitting students with lower numerical credentials, which is far more likely to affect the 25th percentile scores than the median.  That risk is real, though it may require law schools to show a little fortitude in their commitment to their institutional missions, and not cede all their decision-making to US News ranking criteria. 

Here, in any event, is what Mr. Morse had to say about these changes (and he gave permission to share his comments); I had forwarded to him some e-mails from other legal academics worried about the implications of the change and wondering whether it had been made.  Mr. Morse wrote:

[I]t's true that we are using a new way of calculating the midpoint LSAT and GPA score.  Our intent wasn't to hurt minorities or change law school admission office behavior or set up new incentives or disincentives. It was to use verifiable ABA required data and to prevent misreporting of the median. All schools were treated the same. We had heard reports that schools were using a different calculation system for the median than then they did for their ABA 25th and 75th.  If it become clear that the unintended consequences are highly negative, we will surely reconsider this move. 

Mr. Morse subsequently forwarded the following interesting information about the impact of this change:

More factual information to circulate if you want. To us this means in bold [below], that the difference was very very little between calculated midpoint for almost 90% of the schools in terms of LSAT. This also means for the vast % of schools this had virtually no impact on their rankings. I'm not commenting on how this will or will not change behavior.  You can cirulate this if you want, too.

There were 178 schools that reported medians for both the LSAT and
undergraduate GPA for fall 2004 entering FT class. Not all of these were ranked schools.

The calculated median [i.e., midpoint] undergraduate GPA was, on average, about .02 less than the reported median.

The calculated LSAT was, on average, .25 less than the reported median.

For the LSAT,  27.5% of the schools had a reported median that was the same as their calculated median. 69.7% had a difference that ranged from -.5 to +.5.  88.8% had a difference that ranged from -1 to +1.

For the undergraduate GPA, 5.1% had the same calculated and reported median.  80.3% had a difference that ranged from -.05 to +.05.  95.5% had a
difference than ranged from -.1 to +.1.

The undergraduate GPA didn't have as many with the same calculated and
reported medians probably due to the larger scale. We also don't know if some schools just reported it to 1 decimal place while other schools reported it to 2. On the LSAT, there were 4 schools that had a difference greater than or equal to 2 LSAT points.

UPDATE:  William Henderson (Law, Indiana-Bloomington) makes some good points in response:

Thanks for researching this US News methodology issue.

With all due respect, the new change is not constructive.  Your point on fraud is well-taken.  For the last several years, my colleague, [name omitted], waged a fierce battle with the director of the ABA Legal Education section to make sure the ABA continued to collect the 50th percentile.  His point was simple -- if you don't have this data to root out false numbers reported to US News, then US News will gravitate toward the 25th / 75th percentiles since they have greater assurances that this data is accurate.  Since the ABA dropped the median as part of the collection process, [my colleague] has had repeated conversations with Bob Morse asking him to stick to the 50th percentile.  Finally the specter of gaming drove Morse to the very outcome [my colleague] predicted.  The solution here is simple.  The ABA should collect 25th, 50th, and 75th percentile data, and US News should return to is former practice.

Morse's observation that the new averaging technique produced numbers very similar to the reported medians is NOT a basis for relief.  Admissions directors, much to their chagrin, are operating under a new set of rules.  The 25th and 75th become the key benchmarks, making the whole admissions process even more LSAT-centric than it has been to date.  Your comments on "fortitude" are not realistic in light of the complete lack of fortitude the current rankings game has produced.  When you have a systemic temptation to err on the side of higher LSATs, you can't count on 180 law schools to stay on the fortitude wagon. As some fall off, others follow. This is a big collective action problem.

By the way, my deep-seated skepticism of the LSAT as the be-all and end-all of the admissions process is informed by empirical research.  This article on the LSAT was published in the Texas Law Review last year.    http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=465381  Your blog is very influential--and most of the time I agree with you.  But I think your endorsement of this change in the US News methodology is a mistake.

Updating the 2003-04 Law School Rankings

Various students have been writing recently asking about whether I plan to update the faculty quality rankings, based on the Spring 2003 survey.  I had planned to do so, but plans are one thing, and time is another.  Right now, I hope to do it in the early fall.  The truth is there haven't been that many significant changes in overall faculty quality since the Spring 2003 surveys that students interested in this data should be too concerned.  (In fact, no purpose is served by yearly rankings of law schools, since they change at a rather glacial pace; one indication of the unreliability of the US News rankings is that the rank of some schools--such as Emory this year--change dramatically in a single year.  Such changes inform us only about the stupidity of the ranking methodology, not about the academic or educational quality of the schools in question.)

On the overall rankings for faculty quality, the top clusters are pretty much the same:  Yale dominates; Harvard, Chicago, and Stanford form the next cluster; then Columbia and NYU (though NYU has lost perhaps a bit of ground).  Boalt and Virginia have taken some hits since 2003, while Texas and Penn have made some gains, but overall it's still the Boalt/Michigan/Texas/Virginia/Penn cluster.  Cornell, Duke, Georgetown, Northwestern, USC, and UCLA are not much changed, though I'd guess that Duke and UCLA would fare a bit better, and Cornell, Northwestern, and USC a bit worse.  But I'm fairly confident that it's uncontroversial among knowledgeable insiders that these 17 schools still dominate in faculty quality, with Vanderbilt, as before, on the cusp of the top group.

For the remainder of the top 40, my best (reasonably informed) guess is that a few schools have clearly improved in the interim (Illinois, Emory, Ohio State, William & Mary) and a few schools have weakened (Minnesota in particular, maybe others).  (UPDATE:  Although Minnesota has taken some significant hits in the last two years [Donald Dripps, David McGowan, etc.], there were more additions than I had recalled, including Peter Huang, Brad Karkkainen, and Kevin Reitz, among others.  So it may be more of a wash since 2003 than I had originally thought.)

There would probably be more differences in the various specialty areas that were ranked in 2003.  The ones worth flagging for prospective law students would probably be these:

(1)  In the broad "Business Law" area, faculty strength at Yale, Texas, and Ohio State is improved, faculty strength at Cornell is weaker.

(2)  In "Constitutional Law," Berkeley and Southern California are a bit weaker than in 2003.

(3)  In "International and Comparative Law," Harvard, Michigan, and Duke are all improved, while Virginia and Chicago are a bit weaker.

(4)  In "Law and Philosophy," Penn and UCLA are improved, and NYU slightly less dominant than in 2003. 

UPDATE:  Roger Alford (Law, Pepperdine) points out to me that the overall ranking in the new US News is here.  Unfortunately, this listing includes none of the underlying data (such as the 25th/75th LSAT and GPA scores of the entering class and the bar passage rates), which is the only information that has some utility for students.   The most worrisome aspect of the new US News data (which should be on-line by Friday) is that it is now clear that the academic reputation survey component of the ranking is completely unhinged from any actual change in either faculty or student quality at the law schools in question.  (A stunning example:  UCLA, which made several significant faculty appointments last year, saw no change in its academic reputation score.  Other schools in similar situations even saw their academic reputation scores decline!  In general, the pattern is clear:  the "peer reputation" scores among academics are basically gravitating towards the typical overall US News rank of the school, i.e., the "reputation" is being determined by the typical US News ranking which, itself, purports to be based in significant part (25%) on reputation.  Talk about an echo chamber!)  Orin Kerr (Law, George Washington) also comments here.

ANOTHER UPDATE:  Even my esteemed friend Stephen Bainbridge (Law, UCLA) knows in his heart, of course, that Texas still has a better faculty than UCLA!  UCLA was flat in academic reputation despite all their good appointments (ridiculous!), but we actually went down .1!  Why?  Clearly because we added Bernard Black in corporate law from Stanford and because my colleague Philip Bobbitt was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.   No good achievement goes unpunished in US News!

AND ANOTHER UPDATE:  More on the U.S. News "echo chamber" here.

Congratulations to Ian Farrell...

...one of our graduates (the first graduate to have been actively involved in the Law and Philosophy Program) who took up in January a position as Lecturer on the law faculty at the University of Wollongong in Australia.  He is missed in Austin.

Environmental Law Scholar Wyman Decides to Stay at NYU...

...instead of going to the University of Toronto.

New SSRN Download Rankings--by Scholar, and by School

The Social Science Research Network has published two new rankings of both schools and individual scholars (this will be released soon) by the total number of downloads their papers have received from the SSRN site.  As a measure of scholarly output and quality, this one has many limitations:  SSRN, for example, is utilized disproportionately by scholars working in just a few areas (corporate law, law & economics, intellectual property), and it is utilized by some schools (typically those that excel in corporate law and law & economics) more than others.  Papers that are "surveys" or "overviews" of an area often tend to have much higher levels of downloads, presumably because they attract both scholars in other fields and students. 

The rankings of downloads-per-school are here (you must be an SSRN subscriber to view this); the top 25 in total downloads in the last year (which is how the SSRN data initially appears) are as follows:

1.  Harvard University

2.  Stanford University

3.  University of Chicago

4.  Columbia University

5.  University of California, Los Angeles

6.  University of Texas, Austin

7.  George Mason University

8.  University of California, Berkeley

9.  University of Virginia

10. Yale University

11. George Washington University

12. Georgetown University

13. Vanderbilt University

14. New York University

15. University of San Diego

16. University of Pennsylvania

17. Boston University

18. University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

19. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

20. Fordham University

21. Florida State University

22. University of Bonn

23. Duke University

24. Cornell University

25.  Boston College

Note that Larry Solum's move from San Diego to Illinois will surely change the relative rankings of those two schools.

The ranking of downloads-per-scholar will be reposted; it turns out the data on-line earlier today was actually out-of-date.  I'll repost on it here when the new data has been processed.

Note that you can reorder the rankings by clicking on the various columns:  e.g., you can rank individuals and schools by downloads per paper; by total downloads since the inception of SSRN; and so on.  As I understand it, these rankings will also be continuously updated as papers are downloaded.

Michigan Law Makes Bid for Legal Philosopher Shapiro

The University of Michigan Law School has made a tenured offer to my friend Scott Shapiro, a first-rate legal philosopher at Cardozo Law School/Yeshiva University.   Students thinking about JD/PhD programs will want to keep an eye on what happens here, since the Law School at Michigan has always been the weak link in Michigan's joint-degree program, and Shapiro's moving there would almost certainly change that.

Two More Lateral Hires for Illinois Law: Robbennolt, Solum

The University of Illinois College of Law, under Dean Heidi Hurd, continues to be a law school "on the move":  the latest additions to the tenured ranks are Jennifer Robbennolt (law & psychology) from the University of Missouri, Columbia and Larry Solum (intellectual property, jurisprudence, civil procedure) from the University of San Diego.

UNC Law Dean Nichol to be New President of William & Mary

Gene Nichol, Jr., Dean of the law school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (and before that Dean of the law school at the University of Colorado at Boulder--and, as it happens, a 1976 graduate of UT Law), has been appointed the new President of the College of William & Mary (where he was, previously, a law professor).   The College's press release is here.  Nichol (whose academic specialties are constitutional law and federal courts) appears (to an outsider) to have been a successful Dean at both schools, significantly improving the faculty at each institution during his tenure.

Two New Lateral Hires by UT Law (and other Texas news)

Mechele Dickerson, an expert in bankruptcy and commercial law who is the Cabell Professor of Law at the College of William & Mary, and Derek Jinks, a rising young star in international law at Arizona State University, have both accepted offers from the University of Texas School of Law, to start in the fall. 

Professor Dickerson will join my colleagues Ronald Mann (recruited laterally from Michigan two years ago) and Jay Westbrook to form one of the strongest bankruptcy and commercial law groups in the country.  (In addition, UT students reading this will be pleased to know that Professor Dickerson had the strongest teaching evaluations I can ever recall seeing from a lateral candidate, and we have hired some very strong ones over the last decade.)

Professor Jinks, who visited at the University of Chicago Law School last year and recently turned down an offer from Tulane, will, in effect, be replacing my former and esteemed colleague Steven Ratner, who moved to Michigan last year.  Jinks will join a large group of faculty at Texas with interests in international law, private and public, including Sarah Cleveland and Karen Engle.  (Jinks, by the way, has also been a very popular teacher at his prior places of employment.)

Also visiting next year will be the best youngish public law scholar in any Political Science Department in the United States, Keith Whittington, recently tenured at Princeton University.  We will also be joined by two outstanding new assistant professors, Jens Dammann, a German-trained lawyer with a Yale SJD who specializes in corporate law, domestic and comparative, and Emily Kadens, a Chicago JD with a PhD in History from Princeton, who works in legal history, comparative law, and commercial law, among other areas.

Thanks in large part to an extraordinarily good Dean, Bill Powers, Texas has had unparalleled success in lateral recruitment in the last five years ("unparalleled" both in terms of our past history, and in terms of how other public and private schools have done recently at recruiting top faculty from peer and better institutions).  During Dean Powers's tenure, for example, we have recruited tenured faculty away from Stanford, NYU, Michigan, Northwestern, George Washington, and BU, among many other places.  Of course, anyone who recalls that NYU saw its academic reputation scores in US News decline during a time in the mid-to-late 1990s when its faculty and student body actually improved, will know that all these good developments can not go unpunished by our masters at US News!

Environmental Law Expert Grodsky from Minnesota to George Washingtgon

Jamie Grodsky (environmental law, natural resources law, law of science and technology) at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities has accepted a lateral offer from George Washington University.

Congratulations to Sir Basil Markesinis

Details here.  I am honored to count him as both a colleague and a friend.

Tenure-Track Hires in Law Schools during 2004-05

As he did last year, Larry Solum (Law, San Diego) has graciously undertaken the burden of collecting the information.  I assume most of my law readers have already seen this, but in case not...do contact Professor Solum if you have information to submit.

Major New Empirical Study of Medical Malpractice and Medical Costs

This important new study--which has already been featured in The New York Times and The Washington Post in the last two days--ought to set the terms of the debate about so-called "tort reform" if facts are to have any bearing on the policy decisions.  The authors--my colleagues Bernard Black and Charles Silver, Illinois law professor David Hyman, and Columbia law professor Bill Sage--include three of the leading scholars nationally in the health law field, and they hold well-known views across the political spectrum (though tilting, overall, to the right).  What they found in studying malpractice claims in Texas over a 15-year period is stunning:

Recent spikes in medical malpractice premiums in Texas were not caused by rising payouts on claims or rising jury verdicts, according to a study released today by the Center on Lawyers, Civil Justice, and the Media at The University of Texas at Austin School of Law....

Using a unique, comprehensive dataset maintained by the Texas Department of Insurance that includes all insured closed medical malpractice claims for 1988-2002, the authors found that, adjusted for general inflation and population, claim rates, payments, total costs, and jury verdicts were all stable. Only defense costs rose significantly, at just over 4% per year. Their findings, with these adjustments, are as follows.

• The number of large paid claims (>$25,000 in 1988 dollars) per year was roughly constant. The number of small paid claims (<$25,000 in 1988 dollars) declined sharply.
• Mean and median payouts per large paid claim were $528,000 and $200,000, respectively, in 2002 and were roughly constant over time.
• Roughly 6% of large paid claims involved payouts over $1 million, with little time trend in this percentage.
• In 2000-2002, there was an average of 4.6 paid claims per 100 practicing Texas physicians per year, down from 6.4 paid claims per 100 practicing physicians per year in 1990-1992.
• The total number of closed claim files averaged 25 per 100 practicing Texas physicians per year in 2000-2002. Of these, about 80% involved no payout.
• In 2002, payouts to patients were about $515 million, while Texas health care spending was about $93 billion, so payouts on insured claims equaled 0.6% of health care spending.
• Mean and median jury verdicts in trials won by patients were $889,951 and $300,593, respectively, in 2002 and showed no significant time trend.
• The sum of payouts and defense cost rose by about 1% per year. Defense costs, which grew 4.4% annually, drove this increase.

The article will be published in the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies.

Penn Law Student, Anthony Ciolli, Admits to Running Prelaw Discussion Board Awash in Racist, Anti-Semitic, Sexist Abuse

UPDATE:  If you are coming here from the delusional and defamatory "response" ("Why Brian Leiter Hates Us") of Anthony Ciolli and Jarret Cohen, the administrators of the xoxohth/autoadmit discussion board, please click here to learn the facts.  The original posting, to which they fail to respond, appears below.

UPDATE 2007:  The denoument for Mr. Ciolli and his involvement in the disgraceful Autoadmit site.

========================ORIGINAL POSTING========================

Here.  We encountered this discussion board once last year, in connection with the student frenzy over the annual US News law school rankings.  But it turns out the board may be more notable (now, notorious) for being a massive forum for bizarre racist, anti-semitic, and viciously sexist postings, mixed in with posts genuinely related to law school.  Mr. Ciolli and his co-administrator of the site, Jarrett Cohen (who may also be a law student, it's not clear) claim, somewhat disingenuously, that the racist and anti-semitic "threads are a very small fraction of the site, and even in those threads the overwhelming majority of posters are responding to the racists harshly."  A quick perusal of the site suggests neither claim is true.

(STOP READING:  BRACE YOURSELF FOR A LOT OF VULGAR LANGUAGE IF YOU CONTINUE ON!) 

There appear to be, for example, roughly 250 threads with the word "nigger" in the subject line (double that number if you include "blacks"), including an average of 1 or 2 such threads every single day for the last couple of months!  Contrast that with a mere 150 threads discussing "UCLA" and only 100+ on "clerkships" and "Georgetown", all topics one might have expected to command as much or more attention on a prelaw discussion board than racist abuse.

There are, in addition, some 350 threads about Jews, and while some are benign, the majority appear to be of the variety "Are Jews Smarter, or Just Craftier?" and "Did jew bitches give blowjobs in Auschwitz for the protein?," the latter of which introduces another feature of the site perhaps even more prevalent than the racism and anti-semitism, its vulgar and abusive sexism, evident, for example, in the more than 300 threads about "bitches" and another nearly 300 with "cunt" in the subject line, not to mention dozens of links to pornographic sites.  (This just scratches the surface of the sexist abuse on the site, as perusal of a single day's threads will reveal.)  And the racism, anti-semitism, and sexism wouldn't be complete, of course, without abusive remarks about homosexual men, as in the 200+ threads about "fags."

Messrs. Ciolli and Cohen's response to these facts:  "We are very strong believers in the freedom of expression and the marketplace of ideas. This is why we allow off-topic discussion and almost never censor content, no matter how abhorrent it may be."  True enough, this is all constitutionally protected speech, but that isn't the issue, since Messrs. Ciolli and Cohen are not the state.  My commitment to the "marketplace of ideas" doesn't require me to turn my blog over to racist psychopaths once a month, nor does it require a Penn law student to run a web site which is littered with the kind of garbage noted above.  As Eugene Volokh (Law, UCLA) remarked in publicizing the racism and anti-semitism on the site:

Nongovernmental entities may and often should do things that the government may not; and their ethical rights and obligations are often more complex and context-sensitive than what we'd expect from the law.

Also, if the discussion board decided to filter out rude statements in order to make the discussions more valuable, or even to filter out evil ideas because they don't want their property used to promulgate such ideas, I wouldn't object: I think they're ethically entitled to do this, and there's no reason to condemn them for it.

Put aside ethical obligations, and let's just consider good taste and decency:  how hard can it be for Messrs. Ciolli and Cohen to delete all the threads with certain words?  And if they did that a few times, no doubt the infantile morons responsible for most of this garbage would give up and go elsewhere.

The Ciolli/Cohen discussion board styles itself, somewhat comically, as "the most prestigious prelaw discussion board in the world," but it is so "prestigious" that everyone posts anonymously, and for obvious reasons.  (It is curious the faith people have in anonymity on the Internet:  the identity of the most vile racists on that board is roughly two subpoenas away from discovery, and the consequences for, e.g., employment prospects and bar admission [where judgment and maturity are relevant factors pertaining to "fitness" to practice law] could be serious if these folks were "outed.")

It is hard to tell what volume of traffic the site actually gets:  one may hope, not much!  My blog, for example, gets nearly double the volume of hits from this prelaw discussion site than from the Ciolli/Cohen board (and in both cases we are talking just a few hundred hits per month), which is some hopeful evidence that other prelaw sites command more of the market for prospective and current law students.  I give Messrs. Ciolli and Cohen real credit for owning up to their responsibility for this travesty, even if they have been pretending, to date, that their failure to supervise the content of the site somehow contributes to the quality of "discussion."  It is striking, as one correspondent pointed out to me, that one doesn't see the same amount of racist, sexist, and anti-semitic garbage on sites frequented by aspiring graduate students in philosophy or other disciplines (even at the Ciolli/Cohen board).  For the sake of the reputation of law students, let's hope that in the wake of the unflattering publicity given the Ciolli/Cohen site by Professor Volokh (and now this blog), that they will "clean up their act." 

UPDATE:  Thanks to the various current and former Ciolli/Cohen board readers who expressed appreciation for mine and Volokh's airing of this issue, and thanks also to those who sent yet other examples of pornographic links, abusive posts directed at other students (including other Penn law students and Penn faculty!) and other charming items from this board.  I had seen a good deal of this, but saw and see no value in posting additional links, since the basic point is clear enough with the handful of examples I gave.  Two students did write to make something like this point expressed by Scott Sanderson, a Northwestern law student:

I am writing to let know that I believe you have characterized the xoxo [Ciolli/Cohen] board unfairly.  Like many other xoxo posters, I believe the objectionable posts are there for shock value.  You didn't even raise this possibility in your blog post.  Further, it was unfair to attempt to besmirch [sic] Anthony's reputation without even commenting on his law school study.  Especially since it was more thorough than your own attempt to rank law schools [based on national job placement at elite firms].

I didn't, however, advance any hypothesis about the motivations or actual views of those who litter the site with the garbage noted above.  No doubt Mr. Sanderson is correct that many of them aren't "really" racists or anti-semites, they're just folks who think derisive remarks about "niggers" and "crafty Jews" are amusing and who take pleasure in shocking others.  That would raise, however, the very same questions about maturity and judgment, and doesn't change the fact that, as various correspondents put it, the posts are "embarrassing" and "distracting." 

I'm not sure I follow the relevance of Mr. Sanderson's reference to Mr. Ciolli's "law school study"--which I take it means the item referenced in his post on Volokh's site on Friday.  I have only glanced at this lengthy document, but it appears to be not only more "thorough" than anything I've done, it looks more "thorough" than anything I've ever seen on this topic.  Without having studied the methodology carefully, I can say that it strikes me as an especially useful feature of this survey that it breaks down job placement success at elite firms by region of the country, which may ultimately be far more useful information for prospective law students than "national" placement per se.  So kudos to Mr. Ciolli for his hard work on this project, which will no doubt be appreciated by many law school applicants. (UPDATE:  A reader points out that a perhaps serious methodological problem in the study is identified here.  I have no idea whether this is correct, or whether it vitiates the utility of the data collected and analyzed.)

A FINAL UPDATE:  A moderator at another more grown-up prelaw site writes with some interesting perspective:

You’re probably sick of comments about the autoadmit.com/xoxohth.com debate by now, but as one of the moderators at Nontradlaw.net, I’d like to offer a perspective from the other end of the law school discussion board spectrum to that of Mr. Ciolli and Mr. Cohen, the administrators of autoadmit/xoxo.

At Nontradlaw, we start with the simple fact that we’re billing ourselves as a law school discussion site.  Based upon this fact, some very simple policies have been put in place.  First, the scope of acceptable topics is those related to law.  This is a large universe of acceptable posts, and registered users can also post almost anything they choose, law-related or not.  Nontradlaw has nothing against off-topic, non-offensive posts.  More importantly, however, it allows us to gladly delete any offensive content, be it racist, anti-Semitic, sexist, or related to sex.  Of course, not everything is deleted - as long as it has an anchor of relevance to law school, it often stays.  This anchor is given significantly less weight as the inflammatory nature of the post increases, and we make it very clear that certain types of posts will not only be removed instantly, but will also cause the user to be banned.

Second, the site is moderated.  I believe that many users of autoadmit/xoxo, in the infinite legal wisdom that most pre-law and 1L types often exhibit, think that moderation and censorship are one and the same thing, and that both are, by default, bad.  I believe that many users of autoadmit/xoxo also believe that the First Amendment applies to private online discussion boards.  There is a great difference between moderation and censorship - moderation allows deletion of material that is outside the universe of acceptable posts (i.e. law school, no matter how vague).  We censor nothing, and by that, I mean that we don’t delete any law-related information that we don’t agree with.

A little moderation goes a long way.  Sure, it ‘frightens’ off a fair number of people who believe that they have the right to post what they like, where they like, and have it remain for all to see.  Quite honestly, they are not welcome at Nontradlaw, and it’s no significant loss to us - in our experience, those who shy away from moderated areas do so because they want to post inappropriate content and get away with it.  But while it cuts down on traffic (which, in itself, is not significant, since it’s not traffic we court), it increases quality.  As you mention in your recent blog entry, there is little quality information at autoadmit/xoxo relative to the number of posts.  A brief glance at Nontradlaw will reveal a very large database of posts spanning many years, with no offensive material and very little irrelevant material.  Yes, we don’t have the traffic that autoadmit/xoxo has, but in terms of quality information, I have no doubt that Nontradlaw holds its own against such places.

Nontradlaw stands by its policy of requiring users who wish to post in the main area to register, have their registration information approved by hand, and to have no users registered from anonymous e-mail accounts (e.g. Hotmail, Yahoo!) And once again, while this decreases the number of posts, I have no doubt that most who do not wish to register are intent on causing trouble.  For the small handful of genuine users who simply do not wish to register, we also offer a board for unregistered users.

The strange thing is that even our unregistered user board (where anyone can post with no registration) stays clean, racism-free, and pleasant to read.  To be fair, when things get out of hand on the unregistered side (which is rare), posts are deleted.

Autoadmit/xoxo appears to believe that traffic is the be-all and end-all of
success on the Internet.  To some extent, this is true.  While Nontradlaw
struggled with low numbers of users in its early days, the quality information now contained within the site and the reputation it has developed for being on-point, friendly, and non-intimidating has increased traffic.  Even so, who cares?  Nontradlaw is not competing with any other site - it offers a niche community for nontraditional law students and applicants (and has picked up many regular applicant users who are sick of wading through the offensive content at autoadmit/xoxo in search of good information.)  If high traffic brings high numbers of unstable characters, then Nontradlaw is happy to have moderate traffic and to not become a magnet for inappropriate content.

Nontradlaw also has a policy that the content of the site should be able to be read comfortably in the workplace (where many nontraditional applicants are), and should be able to be read comfortably at home (where many nontraditional applicants may be using the Internet with their children in the same room.)  Prudish?  Perhaps.  But again, it all boils down to quality over quantity, and showing a little responsibility to society at large by not providing another forum for unnecessary hatred, disturbing content, and obscenity.

Continuing the sermon, Nontradlaw also believes that a person’s entry to the legal profession starts the moment they decide to attend law school, not the moment they pass the Bar exam.  Following this, we expect our users to act professionally from the word go.  We all know that the legal profession has a disgraceful reputation (undeserved in my opinion, although looking at autoadmit/xoxo, you would be forgiven for thinking otherwise), and Nontradlaw doesn’t want to have anything on the site that would give the general public any more ammunition to fuel this belief.  I personally find it irresponsible that the ‘most prestigious’ law discussion site ‘in the world’ allows such vile content to be posted day after day after day, giving anyone who stumbles upon the site the impression that our future lawyers are racist, anti-Semitic, and perverted.  What a great way to boost the stature of the legal profession.

On a final note, many people find it hard to trust information coming from
people with extreme beliefs, regardless what that information relates to.  If, for instance, you were to stand up in front of your class one day and tell your students, “I hate black people.  I hate Jews.  I have enormous genitals, and I also had sex with all of your mothers last night after snorting more cocaine than I have ever had before.  Here’s a picture of one student’s father, and my god, is he the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen.  I’d like to kill him.  Now, how about we study some philosophy?” (of course, substituting my somewhat clean words with the filthiest and most offensive you can muster), would you expect your students to place any trust in you as a source of academic information?  You would, of course, still possess the same academic knowledge whether or not you held such beliefs, but the fact that you even aired those beliefs will cause many students to distrust you more widely, and this distrust will spill over into the remainder of the classtime.  Information forums are not places where the uninhibited exchange of ideas and beliefs are acceptable and beneficial - they are places where the uninhibited exchange of relevant ideas and beliefs are acceptable and beneficial.  Big difference, and one that autoadmit/xoxo appears to be unaware of.

Thanks for standing up and stating that the autoadmit/xoxo emperor has no clothes.

Demand for Feminist Legal Theory, Critical Race Theory?

Gillian Hadfield (Law, Southern California) writes:

I'm wondering if you have any stats to back up my impression that the heyday for hiring of feminist legal scholars was in the late 80s - early 90s and this has basically died off. (Is it now the heyday for any kind of critical theory hiring? Critical race?)

My anecdotal sense is that there is not much demand for, or hiring, in feminist legal theory in recent years, and that there is a bit more related to Critical Race Theory.  But I have nothing more than these vague impressions.  I'm opening comments, for other views, data, and information.  No anonymous posting, of course.

Legal scholar Fenton from Wayne State to Miami

Zanita Fenton (family law, constitutional law, critical race and feminist theory) at Wayne State University has accepted a tenured offer from the law school at the University of Miami.

Illinois Law Makes Senior Offers to Barnett, Solum

The University of Illinois College of Law--which had a busy year of lateral recruiting last year (hiring, among others, Ralph Brubaker [bankruptcy] from Emory, Lee Fennell [behavioral law & economics] from Texas, David Hyman [health law] from Maryland, and Richard Ross [legal history] from Wisconsin--continues to be a school "on the move," having now extended senior offers to Randy Barnett (contracts, constitutional law) at Boston University and Larry Solum (intellectual property, jurisprudence, civil procedure) at the University of San Diego.  Barnett will be a visiting professor of law at Georgetown in fall 2005, and so won't be deciding about the Illinois offer before then.

This is plainly part of a plan by Illinois to corner the market on legal bloggers!

Where to go to law school (esp. with a view to teaching law)

David Bernstein (Law, George Mason), and his co-blogger Orin Kerr (Law, George Washington), have been discussing considerations related to choosing a law school.  I want to focus on one particular comment of Professor Bernstein's:

if you want to be a law professor, you MUST try to go to a top 15, and preferably top 5, law school.

As Larry Solum (Law, San Diego) remarks here (and as data Solum has collected and I have collected in the past confirm), it's really not the case that "top five" is the relevant parameter:  per capita, Yale Law School leads everyone by a wide margin in producing new law teachers (not a good thing for the legal academy, but that's a subject for a different day); after Yale, Harvard and Stanford lead everyone else, again by substantial margins (Harvard leads in gross numbers, but per capita, Harvard and Stanford are largely neck-and-neck).  "Top 3" not "top 5" is probably the more relevant parameter.

And even there some caveats are needed.  For "law and philosophy," it wouldn't make much sense to go to Harvard or Stanford; for "law and empirical social science," Cornell, Berkeley, and Northwestern are extremely attractive (not more attractive than the top 3, necessarily, but a better choice than most others in the top 15); for "law and economics," someone not in to one of the top schools strong in that area ought to be choosing George Mason over many other schools more highly ranked overall by U.S. News and by reliable measures.

In any case, do read Solum's remarks.  And students may also find this material useful which, though prepared for Texas students, has much information of general applicability.