Brian Leiter’s Law School Reports

News and views about law school and law

  • The Latest Study of the “Political Ideology” of Academics

    The Chronicle of Higher Ed story is here (subscription access only); and the InsideHigherEd story is here.  The study appears to correct for some of the deficiencies of earlier efforts, though also appears to have plenty of its own.  A commenter at the InsideHigherEd (a Canadian named Steven Downes) makes the key point: The only…

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  • ‘Tis the Season for Promotional Brochures from Law Schools…

    MOVING TO FRONT from August 22, 2006:  it seems to me that more schools are, happily, following this advice, judging from what’s been arriving in my mailbox.  There are a few schools still wasting money by sending out alumni magazines, but by and large I’ve found this year’s batch of mailings to be more informative…

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  • Texas Criminal Justice System a Disgrace to the United States

    My colleague Bill Allison called my attention to this story.  He adds the following bit of context: Some ten years ago I filed a writ of habeas corpus in a death penalty case.  The state had 30 days to respond.  They filed their answer 647 days late.  I filed a response simply asking that the…

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  • Kelsen and Anglophone Jurisprudence Redux

    Here.

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  • Bainbridge v. Novak re: Ave Maria Law School Crisis

    Here.  Professor Bainbridge rather clearly has the better of the argument.  It is fortunate for Mr. Novak that Professor Bainbridge is otherwise fond of his work.

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  • Knight from Wash U/St. Louis to Duke

    Jack Knight, a distinguished political science professor at Washington University, St. Louis (who has done  well-known work on courts and judicial behavior, especially with Lee Epstein [who, herself, left Wash U not long ago to join the law faculty at Northwestern]), has accepted a joint appointment at Duke University, where he will teach in law…

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  • Kelsen and Anglophone Jurisprudence

    A brief discussion of Kelsen’s relative neglect here.

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  • Justice Thomas in the News: Two Different Reactions

    One is from Sherrilyn Ifill (Maryland). The other is from readers of the right-wing Volokh Conspiracy blog, as reported by Orin Kerr (George Washington). I find Professor Ifill’s analysis rather compelling, yet, having seen most of the 60 Minutes interview with Justice Thomas, I can understand the reaction of the majority of the Volokh readers.…

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  • Advice for Dean Chemerinsky of the Bren School of Law at UC Irvine

    Blog Emperor Caron has been publishing "advice" (scroll down for all the examples) for the incoming Dean of the new UC Irvine Law School (what was that guy’s name?), some of it sensible, some of it weird, some of it silly, some of it rather hard to act on, even though it sounds good in…

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  • The Best (i.e., Most Prestigious/High Profile) Academic Publishers in Law?

    A couple of times in the last few months, scholars elsewhere have asked me my impressions as to the best presses with which to publish a scholarly monograph in law (not a casebook or treatise).  Having been asked enough, and not being entirely confident in my sense of things on this score, I thought it…

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  • The Challenges Facing a New Public Law School in California

    Vik Amar (UC Davis) comments.

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  • ASU Law Dean White to Step Down After Nearly a Decade

    The ASU press release is here, which includes an unusually impressive list of glowing appraisals of Patricia White’s accomplishments as Dean at Arizona State.  One thing that is certainly clear to an outsider is the quality and strength of faculty appointments during her tenure.

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  • Stone on Columbia, the Iranian President, and MoveOn’s Ad about “General Betray Us”

    This is about the most sensible (and principled) commentary I have seen on these issues; others may find Geof Stone’s remarks of interest. 

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  • The Most Productive Non-Elite Law Schools

    The folks at Roger Williams have completed the study of scholarly productivity for which they were soliciting feedback a couple of weeks ago.  They studied all schools in the 3rd and 4th tiers of U.S. News, plus (for comparative purposes) local schools in New England (Roger Williams is in Rhode Island). The results are, I…

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  • Is it Unethical for Law Schools to Lie to US News?

    Ann Bartow (South Carolina) is certain it is:  "lying to improve Useless News & World Distort rankings is despicable."  I’m not so sure it’s that simple. Let’s put to one side a position that seems to be Kant’s, namely, that lying is always immoral.  Sometimes, surely, lying is justified:  e.g., when you lie to the…

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  • Senator Obama Interviewed on ImmigrationProf Blog

    Here.  Kudos to Professor Johnson and his colleagues for getting the Senator to answer these questions about immigration law and policy.

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  • So what did happen at Irvine?

    The mystery continues.

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  • Speaking of Paranoia on the Right–

    –as we were just the other day–David Bernstein (George Mason) has now served up a remarkable example.  First there is the sheer weirdness of comparing being fired from a job with being disinvited to give a dinner speech to a Board of Regents.  (Even a commenter remarked on this:  "[Y]ou really think being disinvited from…

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  • “Nietzsche’s Theory of the Will”

    On the off chance that this topic interests some readers, there is more information on this paper of mine here.  Although it is a philosophical exegesis, it is done with an eye to general philosophical issues about free will and moral responsibility, and also shows how Nietzsche’s theory wins support from recent empirical psychology.

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  • The Realities of the Legal Job Market Outside the Ranks of Elite Law Schools

    Wall Street Journal story here.

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  • YLJ “Pocket Part” Symposium on Internet Harassment

    Anonymous threats of sexual violence and defamatory statements about female law students on the web site known as "Autoadmit"–about which we have written before–prompted a short symposium in the Yale Law Journal Pocket Part on legal responses to Internet harassment.  Bradley Areheart, an attorney with Jenner & Block, makes the most sensible proposal: Given its…

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  • Most Cited Scholars in Intellectual Property/Cyberlaw since 2000

    Earlier this month, I posted the 2007 scholarly impact study of the top 35 law faculties.  Using the same data, I’ll post next month lists of most-cited scholars in various fields, as I did a nmber of years ago.  Here’s another preview:  the "top ten" most cited list for Intellectual Property/Cyberlaw (broadly construed); after each…

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  • Ave Maria Law School Crisis Continues

    While the new law school at the University of California at Irvine has pulled back from the brink of catastrophe, the young Ave Maria Law School in Ann Arbor, Michigan continues its downward spiral.  The School’s Alumni Association has now called for both the Dean, Bernard Dobranski, and Tom Monaghan, whose (bad) pizza fortune was…

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  • It turns out I’m not the only one to “break” national news stories anymore…

    …since "the Dorf on Law" blog has just reported that "Chemerinsky to Serve As Prime Minister in Power-Sharing Accord With Musharraf."  I bet Chancellor Drake brokered this one!

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  • “Legal Philosophy: 5 Questions”

    An update on the book.

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  • In Fairness to Pepperdine

    Robert Pushaw, a highly-regarded federal courts scholar in the law school at Pepperdine University, has written to take me to task for my off-hand remarks in the course of discussing the Starr-at-Pepperdine/Chemerinsky-at-Irvine comparison; he writes: I was disappointed by your negative and factually incorrect comments about Pepperdine.  First, you claim that Ken Starr was "a…

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  • L’Affaire Chemerinsky and Paranoia on the Right

    There is a rather curious (though amusing) "round-up" of commentary on L’Affaire Chemerinsky courtesy of the LA Times.  It includes various right-wing bloggers congratulating themselves for being so much smarter and more knowledgeable about the law than Erwin Chemerinsky.  (Oddly, none of these individuals seem to be on anyone’s list for any real job of…

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  • Irvine Law School Fiasco, Part IV: Will They Undo the Damage?

    Perhaps (good thing they read this blog!)–and more details emerge confirming Professor Chemerinsky’s account of what transpired: UC Irvine officials on Friday were attempting to broker a deal to once again hire liberal scholar Erwin Chemerinsky as dean of its fledging law school, just three days after its chancellor set off a national furor by…

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  • The Irvine Law School Fiasco, Part III

    As predicted, there’s now talk about delaying the opening of the Irvine Law School (and also new details are emerging about what transpired): Officials said the turnaround on Chemerinsky could delay the opening of the law school — scheduled for 2009 — and so tarnish the institution that it would be difficult to assemble the…

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  • The Irvine Law School Fiasco, Part II

    Confronted with a public relations fiasco of the magnitude of "L’Affaire Chemerinsky," administrators have only a few choices:  they can offer a mea culpa, or they can come clean and defend themselves, or they can deny everything.  The UC Irvine Chancellor, Michael Drake, has now issued a new statement adopting the last strategy: Last week,…

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  • Group of Leading Catholic and Christian Law Professors Speak Out about the Crisis at Ave Maria Law School

    Their statement is here. UPDATE:  This is ironic–but the post immediately preceding the statement to which I linked, above, attacks me rather harshly for failing to acknowledge Postmodernism in my critique of Steve Smith’s ignorant paper about the state of jurisprudence.  The post is by Michael Scaperlanda, who quotes someone named Kevin Lee, who explains…

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  • Macleans Ranking of Canadian Law Schools

    Results in the four main components of the ranking (placement at elite law firms, national placement success, Supreme Court clerkship placement, and scholarly impact of the faculty), plus a discussion of the methodology and its rationale are now on-line.  The overall results are available in the printed version of the magazine, which is on newstands…

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  • New UC Irvine Law School Hires Chemerinsky as Dean, Then Fires Him for Political Reasons

    I have all of the following from a reliable source.  About a week ago, Erwin Chemerinsky, the well-known constitutional law scholar at Duke, signed a contract to be the inaugural Dean of the new law school at the University of California at Irvine. Yesterday, the Chancellor of the University of Cailfornia at Irvine flew to…

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  • “Why Tolerate Religion?”

    The penultimate version of this paper is now on-line; it will appear in Constitutional Commentary early next year.  This version can be cited and quoted. 

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  • The Coming Ranking of Canadian Law Schools

    Later this week, Maclean’s in Canada will release its first ever ranking of Canadian law schools.  The magazine retained me to design a ranking system, one that avoids the numerous pitfalls of U.S. News.  The result is a ranking system that can not be gamed, that does not depend on self-reported data, and is not…

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  • The worst jurisprudential article of the year?

    The winner is….

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  • Visiting Professors at the Top Law Schools for 2007-08

    MOVING TO FRONT FROM JULY 22 for benefit of those who missed it during the summer. As I did last year, I’m posting a list of the visiting professors at the top six law schools by almost all measures of faculty quality–which are the schools that also typically have the most visiting professors on a…

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  • Temple Dean Reinstein to Step Down After Nearly 20 Years!

    News item here.  Decanal tenures that long are quite unusual.

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  • Most Productive Law Faculties Outside the Top Law Schools

    Roger Williams University School of Law has posted a draft study here.  Professor Michael Yelnosky, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at Roger Williams, invited me to share this open letter to colleagues interested in the study which explains its methodology:   Download rogerwilliamsfacultyproductivitystudy.doc.  You may e-mail corrections to Professor Yelnosky.

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  • Salaries for the Class of 2006

    Bill Henderson (Indiana) has a striking chart illustrating the distribution.  Do see also Professor Henderson’s comments on the significance of these figures.

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