The folks at Mercer Law are feeling very pleased, I imagine. They've hired Gary Simson, the Joseph C. Hostetler-Baker and Hostetler Professor of Law at Case Western Reserve University, as their new dean. Simson came to Case in 2006 to be dean and he served through 2008. He stepped down several months after publishing a strong condemnation of US News rankings. Simson started his teaching career at the University of Texas and was on the faculty of Cornell for 26 years.




The discussion here assumes an institutional context where returning to supervised in-person assessment is at least theoretically feasible, a reasonable…