This is the time of year when law professors are deluged with publications from law schools announcing their new faculty hires. I think I’m one of the 8 or 9 law professors in America who actually reads these things (well, given my avocation, I have to, you know). Every now and then an interesting gem turns up, as happened when Washington University’s law school alumni magazine arrived.

Now schools that send alumni magazines to law professors are generally wasting their money: what law professors wants to read about the alumni of some other school? (NYU has definitely been wasting its money: its nationwide mailings of its ludicrously hyperbolic alumni magazine have coincided with a steady decline in its academic reputation in U.S. News–not for any good reason, mind you (the faculty keeps getting better), but presumably because academics find it so offensive they mark NYU down in the US News surveys.) Law professors are keen to read about other law professors, which is why the short brochure featuring new faculty makes so much more sense for a mailing to academics. But this issue of the Wash U magazine talks about new faculty hires, so I read it.

Wash U had a number of quite decent tenure-track hires, including of candidates who came across our radar screen, but for one reason or another didn’t pan out for us. But the really big news was the senior hire, who will

start in the fall of 2004: Matthew McCubbins, a political scientist, formal theorist, and expert on the American political process (including the legislative process), from the top 10 poli sci department at the University of California at San Diego. McCubbins will hold a joint appointment with law and political science at Wash U. (Poli Sci is one of the handful of top 20 departments at Wash U.) Since Wash U already has another major public law scholar, Lee Epstein, this is a brilliant addition to their ranks, and gives them a distinctive (if somewhat controversial) approach to the poli sci study of law and legislative processes. (My colleagues who believe that legal doctrine plays a significant role in the explanation of judicial behavior tend to think less of this approach than do legal realists like myself.)

My sense–and I’m an outsider to this field, so my sense may be off–is that adding McCubbins puts Wash U up there with the other major centers of public law in the US, like Berkeley and Texas. More importantly, it makes them a center of a distinctive approach to the field–probably the leading center.