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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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Lateral hires in law with tenure or on tenure-track, 2025-26
These are non-clinical/non-LRW appointments that will take effect in summer or fall 2026 (except where noted); (new additions will be in bold.) Last year’s list is here. (Link fixed.) *Ted Afield (tax) from Georgia State University to Stetson University. *Yonathan Arbel (commercial law, consumer law, law & economics, AI & law) from the University of…
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Congratulations to the University of Chicago Law School Class of 2026
It was a pleasure and privilege to teach such talented young men and women. I join all my colleagues in wishing you much happiness and success in the years ahead!
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The end of SSRN
Professor Bainbridge comments.
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Lawsky’s Entry-Level Hiring Report for 25-26
So the final results are in, and since my earlier post, there have (happily) been many more reports of rookie hires that came in, and the total this year is over 100, but still down from last year. (There have also been additions to my laterals list, but the total is still half of what…
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“The Wit and Wisdom of Douglas Laycock”
A nice tribute by his (and my) former student, Christopher Lund, who has established himself as a major scholar in the law & religion field. (Laycock was a member of the legendary Class of 1973 from the University of Chicago Law School [which also included Frank Easterbrook, Douglas Ginsburg, and the late George Priest, among…
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In Memoriam: Ran Hirschl (1963-2026)
A leading scholar of comparative constitutional law, Professor Hirschl spent much of his academic career at the University of Toronto. The Toronto memorial notice is here.
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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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AI prefers to hire resumes written by AI
Oy veh. Pretty pathetic.
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Most cited legal philosophers by D-Index according to research.com (CORRECTED & UPDATED)
We’ve noted the “D-index” (an h-index for discipline-specific journals) calculated by research.com previously. (Their rankings of universities in law are pretty silly, since the faculty lists include deceasd faculty, retired faculty, and faculty who are not law professors.) They clearly don’t count law reviews for D-index, only faculty-edited journals, which is appropriate for legal philosophy.…
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In Memoriam: G. Robert Blakey (1936-2026)
Professor Blakey, emeritus at Notre Dame (where he spent most of his academic career), was perhaps best-known for his work on (and scholarship about) RICO. The Notre Dame memorial notice is here. (Thanks to Sean Seymore for the pointer.)
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Reduced summer blogging schedule
Although most Northern Hemisphere readers are already done with the academic year, at Chicago (on the quarter system) we still have teaching and grading, the latter into early June. I’ll be reducing the frequency of posting starting now, to help me have the time for the latter obligations. But I will continue to post through…
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The collapse of the lateral market in law schools during 2025-26
This year, the laterals list has about thirty moves, while last year there were more than 100! I assume this is an effect of the Trump war on universities, and the funding uncertainties it created, so that there was less money for hires. Professor Lawsky’s spreadsheet shows about 50 rookie hires as of now, but…
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Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Law, volume 6 will be published…
…in May 2026 (not January 2027 as the website still says), with new essays by Hasan Dindjer (Oxford), Amanda Greene (UC Santa Barbara), Gabe Mendlow (Michigan), Sophia Moreau (NYU), James Penner (NUS), Ralf Poscher (Freiburg), Sabine Tsuruda (Toronto), and Daniel Viehoff (Berkeley), and covering a wide range of topics in general and normative (or specific)…
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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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Six law professors elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences
They are: William Baude (Chicago), Alison LaCroix (Chicago), Angela Riley (UCLA), Elizabeth Scott (Columbia, emerita), Patricia Williams (Northeastern), and Gideon Yaffe (Yale [elected in the “Philosophy” section]).
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Top 10 Corporate & Securities Articles of 2025…
…via Corporate Practice Commentator: Teachers in corporate and securities law were asked to select the best corporate and securities articles from a list of articles published in legal journals during 2025. More than 440 articles were on this year’s list. Because of the vagaries of publication and indexing, some articles on the 2025 list have…
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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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Good landlord-tenant lawyer in Somervile or Cambridge, MA to represent a tenant whose landlord is in material breach of the lease
Please email me (bleiter-at-uchicago-dot-edu) any recommendations. Many thanks!
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In Memoriam: Marc Galanter (1931-2026)
Professor Galanter, one of the most important figures in law & society scholarship over the past half-century, was emeritus at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he had taught since the late 1970s. Here is the memorial notice from the UW Madison Dean: It is with great sadness that I write to inform you…
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Four law professors win Guggenheim Fellowships
They are: Justin Driver (Yale), Dov Fox (San Diego), Rick Hasen (UCLA), and Gerard Magliocca (Indiana/Indianapolis).
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Louis Michael Seidman and Mark Tushnet have a podcast!
They disagree more than you might expect!
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Does AI degrade human comprehension and reasoning?
Law professors at the University of Minnesota investigated, and came up with a somewhat more optimistic answer than a lot of research–although careful structuring of how and when it’s used is probably needed to avoid negative effects. Comments from readers who actually read the paper are welcome.
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Law school applicants up 10.6% this year (and the season is almost over)
That compares to early on when applicants were up more than 33%. The applicant pool has a significant impact on law school hiring, since almost all law schools are almost entirely dependent on tuition. That bodes well for next year’s job market for new law teachers, but even more important will be how things look…
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If you got a rookie tenure-track job in law this year…
…please submit your information to Professor Lawsky’s Entry-Level Hiring Report!
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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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Whittington v. Moyn
Here and here. Round 1 to Whittington.
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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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Law Schools Unfairly Ranked by U.S. News
MOVING TO FRONT (ORIGINALLY POSTED OCT. 3 2011, SLIGHTLY REVISED IN THE INTERIM), SINCE IT IS TIMELY AGAIN I've occasionally commented in the past about particular schools that clearly had artificially low overall ranks in U.S. News, and readers e-mail me periodically asking about various schools in this regard. Since the overall rank in U.S. News is a…
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Texas A&M Law “on the move”
I’m not talking about its much-improved USNews.com rank, which may help with student recruitment, but doesn’t mean anything. I’m talking about the faculty hiring bonanza that has seen the recruitment in recent years of William Sage (health law) from UT Austin, Neil Siegel (constitutional law) from Duke and, most recently, Larry Solum (constitutional law &…
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Law professors write to the dishonorable Brendon Carr…
…the FTC Chair who is neither a public servant nor a good faith actor, or this letter would not be necessary.
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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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Berkeley law touts its rankings
And they should, given that they are badly treated by USNews.com. The fatal problem, of course, with HeinOnLine rankngs is that they only record citations to articles in the Hein database that are cited by articles in the Hein database, which is to say that a huge amount of important legal scholarship vanishes as a…
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Which AI-writing detector is best?
A reader calls my attention to this article about Pangram. Curious to hear from readers about their experiences with AI-writing detection programs, whether Pangram, or others.
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“General jurisprudence” in U.S. law schools
Anyone working in legal philosophy who has spent time in Europe or other civil law countries (especially) is aware that most law faculties there typically have entire departments of jurisprudence, with multiple faculty. The historical explanation for this enviable state of affairs is no doubt complex, although the huge influence of Hans Kelsen, the Austrian…
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New in online scams: “book clubs” that want to feature your recently published academic book (UPDATED)
I received the following regarding my new book: From: Heather Podruchny <info.sf.bestseller.book.club@gmail.com>Sent: Sunday, March 8, 2026 5:56 PMTo: Brian Leiter <bleiter@uchicago.edu>Subject: Invitation: Analyzing the “Realist Point of View” with the SF Bestseller Book Club Dear Brian Leiter, I hope this finds you well. My name is Heather Podruchny, and I’m the organizer of the SF…
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36% decline in student visas issued under Trump…
…during May and June 2025 (crucial months) according to CHE. The decline was even higher in some countries, like India. This is probably a combination of foreign students rethinking their interest in studying in the U.S., given the serial violations of the free speech rights of foreign students by the Trump Administration, and more vetting…
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