Brian Leiter’s Law School Reports

The Duke Lacrosse Case: A Duke Professor Pens An Expose of KC Johnson

December 19, 2007

KC Johnson is the Brooklyn College history professor who became obsessed with the false charges filed against Duke lacrosse players (after an allegation of rape by an African-American stripper hired to entertain them at a party), and has since written a book on the subject with a journalist. Johnson attracted attention well before that in…
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Cornell’s Wippman Named Dean at Minnesota

December 17, 2007

David Wippman (international law) at Cornell Law School has been named the new Dean of the University of Minnesota Law School, effective July 1, 2008. Wippman, who was a finalist here at the time we chose Larry Sager as Dean in 2006, was an impressive candidate and will, no doubt, be a very good Dean…
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Demleitner Named Dean at Hofstra

December 17, 2007

Nora Demleitner (criminal, comparative, and immigration law), currently Interim Dean of the Law School at Hofstra University, has been named Dean, effective January 1, 2008.
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Don’t Be Fooled by the Picture!

December 16, 2007

A useful cautionary note: A paper published online in September by the journal Cognition shows that assertions about psychology — even implausible ones like “watching television improved math skills” — seem much more believable to laypeople when accompanied by images from brain scans. And a paper accepted for publication by The Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience…
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Ferejohn from Stanford Poli Sci to NYU (Law & Politics)

December 13, 2007

John Ferejohn, professor of political science at Stanford University and a regular half-time visitor at New York University for many years, will move full-time to NYU starting in 2009-10, where he will hold appointments in the Law School and the Department of Politics. Ferejohn is a leading scholar in the areas of positive political theory…
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$25 Million Gift to the Law School at Indiana/Bloomington!

December 12, 2007

Press release here.
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Some Originalism about Religion: A Lesson for Mitt Romney (and others)

December 11, 2007

From Geof Stone (Chicago).
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Memoir by USC Law Professor Saks Makes Time Magazine’s “Top Ten” List for 2007

December 11, 2007

Here.
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In Memoriam: Stanton Wheeler (1930-2007)

December 10, 2007

The Yale Law School memorial notice is here.
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Ham for Hanukkah?

December 10, 2007

This isn’t specifically legal humor, but it is still pretty funny. You would think a store in Manhattan, of all places, might have been a bit more attuned to, shall we say, "local" customs!
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Worse than Autoadmit?

December 9, 2007

Daniel Solove (George Washington) suggests a new site devoted to college gossip may well be worse than Autoadmit, that notorious cesspool of infantile morons, racists, and misogynistic freaks masquerading as a law school discussion board. One must agree with Professor Solove: until the disastrous Section 230 of the misnamed Communications Decency Act is repealed or…
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Fun (and short) Interview with Martha Nussbaum in The Guardian

December 6, 2007

Here.
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Changes on the Horizon at the University of Houston?

December 6, 2007

An interview with Acting Dean Raymond Nimmer.
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Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy

December 5, 2007

This may only be of interest to a limited number of readers, but…I’m delighted to announce that The Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy (edited by myself and Michael Rosen) has now been published. It’s an outstanding group of contributors from the U.S., Britain, Australia, Canada, and Continental Europe, including many of the leading senior and…
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Ian Ayres Has a Plan to Help You Lose Weight…

December 5, 2007

…and Eric Posner explains (amusingly) why it won’t work. ("Perhaps if you know that breaking your diet makes you complicit in genocide, you will resist that slice of chocolate covered cheesecake." Indeed!)
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Fellowships for Aspiring Law Teachers

December 4, 2007

Blog Emperor Caron has updated the helpful list (with links) that he maintains of Fellowship/VAP opportunities for aspiring law teachers.
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Three Senior Hires for Cornell: Colb, Dorf, and One More to Be Announced

December 3, 2007

Cornell Law School has made three senior appointments: Sherry Colb (criminal law and procedure) from Rutgers University, Newark and her husband Michael Dorf (constitutional law and theory) from Columbia University (both of whom will start in fall 2008). A third senior hire from a peer school has also been made, which I hope to be…
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Credit/Mortgage Crisis Hits the Big Law Firms

December 1, 2007

Story here.
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Ranking of Law Schools by Placement in Federal Appellate Court Clerkships

November 29, 2007

UPDATE: Please note that the data, below, is not entirely accurate, as the comments make clear–and some corrections have already been recorded at the Clerkship Blog–follow the links, below. ====================================== The Federal Appellate Clerkship Blog is reporting clerkship placement for the 2008-09 term. I don’t know if the statistics are reliable, though some of the…
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Rutgers’s Patterson Takes Up Part-Time Post at Swansea

November 26, 2007

Legal philosopher and commercial law scholar Dennis Patterson, Distinguished Professor of Law at Rutgers University, Camden, has taken up a part-time post as Professor of Jurisprudence and International Trade at Swansea University School of Law in the U.K., where he will teach for eight weeks each year as part of Swansea’s new LLM program in…
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South Carolina’s Bar Exam Scandal Gets Worse

November 24, 2007

Jim Chen (Louisville) has the latest details.
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Mary Dudziak isn’t happy with the new citation rankings

November 23, 2007

Her comments on the "Legal History" listing are here and she felt the need to post a link to her comments here as well after I linked to that post. Professor Dudziak was actually one of the runner-ups in "Legal History," so this isn’t just sour grapes on her part. But let’s see what she…
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Citation Rankings as a Monopoly Board

November 21, 2007

This is pretty funny (as well as revealing).
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How to Pass the South Carolina Bar Exam

November 21, 2007

Be related to someone politically powerful, it seems: The South Carolina Bar has called on the state’s high court to explain why it changed the grades of 20 people — including the children of a judge and legislator — from "fail" to "pass" on the state bar exam taken in July…. The Bar encouraged the…
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Most Cited Law Professors by Specialty–A Few More Corrections…

November 20, 2007

…are now on-line, including two scholars who were wrongly omitted from the prior top ten lists: Paul Finkelman (Albany Law School) in Legal History, and Steven Lubet (Northwestern) in Legal Ethics. An up-dated listing of the top 15 schools based on representation on these lists is being compiled. I’ve also added in "Other highly cited…
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The *Real* Reasons Some Canadian Law Schools Are Switching to the JD

November 20, 2007

My friend Leslie Green–a longtime faculty member at Osgoode Hall School of Law of York University, Toronto, who is now Professor of the Philosophy of Law at Oxford University–writes: Ms McNish shows a surprising lack of interest in the real reasons why a couple of Canadian law deans were eager to adopt the US label…
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Controversy at Queen’s in Canada: Switching from the “LL.B.” to the “J.D.”

November 20, 2007

The University of Toronto made the move in 2001, and now Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario is thinking of following suit, but not without controversy: JD. As in Juris Doctor. That’s the law degree introduced by U.S. schools in the 1960s to certify that graduates had successfully earned both a law degree and an undergraduate…
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On an Alleged “Contradiction” Between Justice Scalia’s Originalism and His Opposition to Considering Foreign Law

November 19, 2007

A philosophical discussion, with reference to a recent paper alleging the contradiction, here.
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UC Irvine Law School: The Fundraising Challenge

November 19, 2007

The Los Angeles Times reports.
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Revised Listing of Most Cited Legal Scholars by Specialty, 2000-2007

November 17, 2007

A corrected version of the study is here. There may be a few more corrections made before Thanksgiving, but I am now fairly confident that the top 10 and top 20 lists are accurate. For those who think they spot an error, please note that (1) the listings are limited to tenure-stream faculty (so, e.g.,…
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Most Cited Law Faculty by Specialty for the Period 2000-2007

November 15, 2007

Based on the July 2007 study of scholarly impact, we’ve compiled a new listing of the most cited legal scholars by specialty. 18 different fields are covered, from "Business Law" to "Evidence" to "Legal History" to "Wills, Trusts, & Estates." If you spot what appear to be surprising omissions of scholars in some specialty, please…
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The Blockbuster Legal Ethics Article of the Year?

November 15, 2007

MOVING TO FRONT–SEE NEW UPDATE —–originally posted Nov. 9—— This is not my field at all, but it seems to me that this new article by William Simon (Columbia) is bound to generate considerable discussion. Here is Professor Simon’s abstract: Clients demand bad legal advice when legal advice can favorably influence third-party conduct or attitudes…
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Far Right Talkshow Host Bill O’Reilly Trying to Get UVA Law Student Expelled

November 15, 2007

Story here.
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Why Most Associates at Big Firms Don’t Last

November 15, 2007

Sensible article here.
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The Fake Social Security Crisis

November 14, 2007

A bit off topic, but with behavioral law and economics all the rage these days, some attention surely might be given to the amazing amount of misinformation and irrationality surrounding the public discussion of social security: [Barack] Obama is no enemy of Social Security. But like most of the country, he is misinformed on this…
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Law Review Tables of Contents and Links to Articles

November 14, 2007

Here, courtesy of Solove.
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In Memoriam: Harold Berman (1918-2007)

November 13, 2007

Harold Berman, who taught for nearly 40 years at Harvard Law School and then more than twenty at Emory Law School, was a leading authority on Russian law, legal history, and law and religion. The Emory memorial notice is here.
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Humans, but not lawyers, are physiologically predisposed towards optimism

November 13, 2007

Details here.
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Interviews with Legal Philosophers

November 12, 2007

I have been posting some excerpts from the new book Legal Philosophy: 5 Questions over at my Legal Philosophy Blog, most recently, from the interviews with Jules Coleman and John Gardner. Some readers may find these of interest.
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So what did happen at Irvine with Chemerinsky and the Deanship?

November 12, 2007

The LA Times continues to dig.
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