Brian Leiter’s Law School Reports

News and views about law school and law

  • 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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  • Most cited legal philosophers by D-Index according to research.com

    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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  • 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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  • Blast from the past: They weren’t good enough for the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

    Back in 2019.

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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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  • 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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  • “From a Realist Point of View” exists!

    (UPDATE: Amazon is currently selling the hardcover at an 18% discount [I don’t know why, but I’m not complaining!] I received my copies the other day here in Chicago. More information. A couple of devoted souls even bought it on Amazon (despite the price!). (It was ranked about 8 million a week ago.) My thanks!…

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  • Most cited Anglophone scholarly monographs on corporate law (by law professors) since WWII (according to Google Scholar) (CORRECTED)

    Results rounded to the nearest 100, as usual. Only books with at least 1,000 citations are listed. Treatises are not included. Please email me with omissions/corrections.

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  • Being a law Dean in the age of AI

    Dan Rodriguez, the former Dean at Northwestern and San Diego, comments.

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  • AI generates Trump’s “state of the union” address

    Not bad, and probably more coherent than what he will say this evening. I do not plan on listening. UPDATE: Philosopher Peter Klein asked ChatGBT5.2 to write the Democratic response. It follows: Democratic Response to the 2026 State of the Union Delivered by Governor Abigail Spanberger Good evening. I speak to you not only as…

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  • “The finance industry is a grift”

    (MOVING TO FRONT, THIS MAY NOT HAVE PUBLISHED PROPERLY THE FIRST TIME) It’s not every day that the NYT publishes an article by an economist arguing that one of the main industries in NYC is a “grift.” Since many law professors study this “grift,” I’m curious to hear why the author is wrong or right.…

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  • How LLMs write

    This is a very apt diagnosis by philosopher Luciano Floridi; an excerpt: Hedging — compulsive softening to avoid commitment. “It’s worth noting,” “arguably,” “in many ways,” “to some extent,” “it could be said that,” “it’s important to remember,” “there’s a sense in which”…. Throat-clearing — long preambles before getting to the point. “Before we dive…

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  • Former Penn President and law professor Liz Magill named Dean at Georgetown Law

    Good for Georgetown! Liz Magill is a “natural” for this role (she had been Dean at Stanford Law School, Provost at UVA, and President at Penn, until forced out by neanderthals).

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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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  • Ambitious class action lawsuit against academic publishers dismissed

    Here. (Earlier coverage.)

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