The Columbia press release is here. Columbia’s last Dean, David Leebron, is now President of Rice University and, like Schizer, was a member of the Columbia faculty, though not as young as Professor Schizer at the time of his ascension. Professor Schizer, who only recently got tenure, is also regarded as one of the top tax scholars of his generation in the legal academy.

It is striking that top law schools almost always pick “insiders” (i.e., current faculty members) as Deans–in recent years, this has been true at Yale, Harvard, Chicago, NYU, Michigan, Virginia, Texas, Cornell, Georgetown, and (going back a few years) Northwestern and Duke. Only Stanford and Berkeley have gone for “outsiders” in recent years.