Donald Dripps, a well-known and prolific expert on criminal procedure at the University of Minnesota Law School, has accepted an offer from the University of San Diego School of Law, the non-elite law school that is surely “the most on the move” school in the country now. In the last few years, San Diego has made senior, tenured appointments of:

Karen Burke (tax) also from the University of Minnesota.

Yale Kamisar (criminal procedure) from the University of Michigan.

Grayson McCouch (wills & estates) from the University of Miami.

Larry Solum (constitutional law and theory, jurisprudence, intellectual property) from Loyola Law School, Los Angeles.

Steven Smith (constitutional law and theory) from the University of Notre Dame (who, in the process, turned down an offer from Northwestern).

In addition, San Diego retained Frank Partnoy (corporate) in the face of an offer from Emory University and Tom Smith (also corporate) in the face of an offer from Ohio State University.

No school that is listed in the “second tier” in the U.S. News & World Report law school rankings has a track record of hiring like that–which speaks volumes, of course, about the unreliability of U.S. News.

Dripps joins an already strong group in criminal law and procedure–including Kamisar and long-time USD faculty member Larry Alexander–which already ranked in last year’s faculty quality survey 17th in the country in that area, tied with Minnesota. Dripps’s move to San Diego should surely push USD in to the top 15, or higher, in criminal law and procedure. (Michael Tonry, a leading international authority on prisons and penal reform, remains at Minnesota in the criminal law area.)

Although I haven’t examined this systematically, my (informed) impression is that San Diego also has a better track record of hiring junior faculty who end up at elite schools than any other school, except perhaps the University of Arizona. (During the last decade, junior faculty at Arizona include Katherine Franke [now at Columbia], David Golove [now at NYU], and Bernard Harcourt [now at Chicago].) San Diego junior faculty over the last decade (roughly) included Steven Walt (now Virginia), Stuart Benjamin and Arti Rai (now Duke), and a guy with a blog now at Texas.

In addition, San Diego Dean Dan Rodriguez (formerly of Berkeley), who has been most responsible for the school’s transformation, has strengthened ties with the University of California at San Diego, which doesn’t have a law school, but which does have many distinguished scholars in cognate fields, such as the philosophers Richard Arneson and David Brink, and the political scientist Matthew McCubbins, all of whom are now involved, in some cases teaching, at USD Law.

Most importantly, of course, San Diego faculty run two famous–or at least infamous!–blogs: Solum’s Legal Theory Blog and The Right Coast, home to my favorite right-wing kooks in the legal academy!