Legal Profession
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Illinois Institute of Technology declares “financial exigency” and begins firing faculty, including tenured faculty
Up to one-third of the faculty may be terminated, although in the law school, Chicago-Kent, it appears the number is lower (maybe one-fifth by some accounts). If readers have more details, please email me. The main source of the budgetary crisis is the decline in the enrollment of international students, no doubt due to Trump…
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Dear AALS: a suggestion for the FAR form
In the choices of positions for those currently in law teaching positions (e.g., “Professor,” “Lecturer” etc.), there is no provision for those who are “teaching” professors or “professors from practice” (or “professor of the practice”), which are increasingly common titles. Please think about adding those! Currently, I advise candidates to choose the closest title (e.g.,…
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Lawyers behaving badly…with AI…
…on both sides of a case! All were sanctioned by the court. And one of them is a repeat offender who has been sanctioned before for this in another court. Oy veh.
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For Class of 2025, total jobs and BigLaw jobs both declined
Lawprof Derek Muller (Notre Dame) looks at the latest ABA data.
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The American Bar Association needs to investigate Texas Tech Law School for violating the First Amendment rights of a student
A Texas Tech Law alum writes: Texas Tech, as you might know, is in the forefront of demolishing any semblance of academic freedom. Their new system Chancellor (Brandon Creighton) is the former state legislator who authored SB17, the legislation that outlawed DEI, requires Regent review of syllabi, and loosens tenure protections. A Texas Tech School…
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University of Kentucky chooses federal district judge as its new Dean…
…despite the opposition of a “substantial majority” of the faculty. Oddly, a Kentucky spokesperson suggests that the judge’s opinions constitute his record of “scholarship.”
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Trends in major gifts to law schools
Some interesting data from lawprof Sloan Speck (Colorado). Professor Speck references an earlier post of mine about whether “transformative” gifts really transform. It’s not clear to me that any of them “transformed” any of the affected schools. (Penn is ranked higher now in the silly USNews.com, but that’s due to a change in the formula…
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Someone once described SCOTUS as a “super-legislature”…
…and the recent NYT expose about the origin of SCOTUS’s “shadow docket” suggests he was right. As one reader put it to me in an email about the NYT article: Ultimate vindication of your “super legislature” moniker. Nothing in the story is particularly surprising, but it does establish that what we call the “shadow docket”…
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Speaking of the legal job market…
…no indication yet that AI is affecting hiring by large law firms.
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Is a law degree “worth” the cost in terms of return-on-investment?
The answer is still “emphatically” yes. Lawprof Sloan Speck reviews some recent research on the topic; an excerpt: Among eighteen graduate degrees, law provided the third-highest return to earnings (59%) and cost-adjusted returns (41%). Only medicine and pharmacy provided higher returns. Similar patterns held for gains in net present earnings (41% for law) and internal rate of return (22%).…
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Even judges cannot figure out whether lawyers are incompetent or using AI!
Philosophy graduate student Charles Bakker sends me this interesting article from Canada about an “Ontario lawyer [who] filed seven completely fake quotations from court cases to a judge while arguing in court, but claims it was human error and not artificial intelligence tools behind it. A skeptical judge wonders if the lawyer’s claim makes things…
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The rule of law in America hangs on (UPDATED)
Not in international affairs, of course, where it never did,but domestically: the Trumipistas are abandoning their efforts to coerce law firms in violation of the 1st and 5th Amendments of the Constitution. Kudos to Perkins Coie, Wilmer Hale, Susman Godrey, and Jenner & Block. And eternal shame to Paul Weiss, the first to capitulate. UPDATE:…
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AI developer warns the AI jobs apocalypse is closer than we realize
Here; an excerpt: [O]n February 5th, two major AI labs released new models on the same day: GPT-5.3 Codex from OpenAI, and Opus 4.6 from Anthropic (the makers of Claude, one of the main competitors to ChatGPT). And something clicked. Not like a light switch… more like the moment you realize the water has been…
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Texas ousts the ABA from any role in lawyer admissions
The Texas Supreme Court will create its own list of accredited law schools whose graduates may practice in the state. Admittedly, Texas has not in recent years been at the forefront of human progress, but in this case, they may be the canary in the coal mine. Perhaps this will encourage the ABA’s Council on…
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AI grades law school exams about as well as human law professors
Here. ADDENDUM: I joked with Professor Schwarcz (Minnnesota), one of the co-authors, that soon AI would be writing exam answers, and AI grading them! He replied, sensibly, as follows: The key difference is that students SHOULD not use AI to craft their exam answers. The purpose of a law school exam is to show their…
And the second paragraph?