Brian Leiter’s Law School Reports

Thompson from UCLA to Penn State

July 17, 2007

Via Blog Emperor Caron, I learn that tax scholar Samuel Thompson at UCLA has accepted a senior offer from the Dickinson School of Law at Pennsylvania State University. That’s a significant catch for Penn State!
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US News to Change Measure of Job Placement

July 16, 2007

Via Blog Emperor Caron, I learn that U.S. News will change how it measures job placement, to reflect changes made by the ABA: On this year’s questionnaire (for the 2007-2008 year), when asking about the Feb. 15, 2007, job status of a law school’s 2006 graduates, the ABA combined the three categories of unemployment it…
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Garoupa from Portugal to Illinois Part-Time (*Corrected*)

July 16, 2007

Nuno Garoupa (comparative law and economics, institutional economics), Professor of Law and Economics at Universidade Nova de Lisboa in Portgual., will join the law faculty at the University of Illinois this August on a half-time basis; the rest of the time he will be on the law faculty at the University of Manchester in the…
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Advice for Those Interested in Law Teaching

July 15, 2007

Mary Dudziak (USC) has helpfully collected links to a variety of blog and Internet postings on this subject.
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Updated and Corrected Faculty Lists for 2007 Citation Study

July 13, 2007

The new (and I hope penultimate) list is here: Download law_faculty_lists_0708.rtf. Wake Forest has been added to the study, based on data the school supplied. Note that the definition of part-time faculty has been altered to deal with some difficulties that arose with the earlier categorization: part-time faculty now means non-tenure-stream academic faculty (e.g., judges,…
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A New Law School in the Works for Maine?

July 13, 2007

The Adjunct Law Prof Blog has details.
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Gee from Vanderbilt to Ohio State

July 12, 2007

Gordon Gee, Chancellor of Vanderbilt University where he is also a professor of law, will become President of Ohio State University, a post he held more than a decade ago. The Vanderbilt announcement is here.
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Henderson and Morriss Reply Regarding U.S. News

July 11, 2007

I invited Professors Henderson and Morriss to reply to my criticism of their defense of U.S. News; their comments follow: As Brian notes, many of the underlying inputs used by U.S. News, including the employment numbers (which are supplied by the schools to the ABA), are remarkably unreliable. This is an embarrassing problem that only…
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Harvard Faculty Launch New Peer-Edited Journal

July 11, 2007

The Journal of Legal Analysis it will be called; the Harvard announcement is here. Given the editorial board, it seems vaguely like the Journal of Legal Studies, but the latter is so well-established it’s hard to see why authors would prefer the former to the latter. And in an era when faculty edit Legal Theory,…
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A Separate Blog on Issues in Legal Philosophy

July 10, 2007

I have not generally tried to "do philosophy" on my blogs, though I have often linked to jurisprudential work by myself and others. But, as an experiment, I’ve created a new blog in which I’m going to work through some issues in legal philosophy. The posts will not be aimed at a generalist audience, but…
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ABA Moves to Tighten Bar Pass Expectations for Law Schools

July 10, 2007

Story here; an excerpt: For schools already accredited but undergoing a periodic review, the proposal would require them to meet one of two criteria. Under the first, they would need to show that in at least three of the most recent five years, first-time test takers passed at no more than 10 points below the…
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Is There Really a “Liberal” Wing of the Current Supreme Court?

July 10, 2007

Cass Sunstein (Chicago) comments. Terms like "liberal" and "conservative" function, in public discourse, like indexical terms: what they pick out depends on who the speaker is and where s/he stands.
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Longtime DOJ Attorney Protests “Politicization” of the Department

July 9, 2007

Here.
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Updated Student (Numerical) Quality Ranking

July 6, 2007

Here. Some readers, I learned, had been looking only at the 75th percentile ranking, and not the 25th. The new aggregate ranking, when compared to the others, should help make clear that some schools with high 75th percentile LSATs have relatively low 25th percentile scores.
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In Memoriam: Robert Keeton (1919-2007)

July 5, 2007

Robert Keeton, the retired federal judge, longtime Harvard Law School faculty member, preeminent insurance law expert, and younger brother of torts giant W. Page Keeton, has died. The Harvard memorial notice is here.
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Henderson and Morriss Rise (Wrongly!) to the Defense of U.S. News

July 3, 2007

William Henderson (Indiana) and Andrew Morriss (Illinois) have been doing quite interesting scholarly work on law school rankings, that I have had occasion to note before. But their recent "summary" of some of their work in the American Lawyer, cast as a "defense" of U.S. News, strikes me as misleading. They write: U.S. News is…
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South Korean Cyber-bullies to be Stripped of Their Anonymity

July 1, 2007

Story here. In the US, of course, there exist only private remedies against Internet sociopaths and misogynistic freaks who hide behind anonymity. I suppose time will tell which is the better approach.
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Why Don’t More Elite Law Schools Teach Consumer Law?

June 30, 2007

So asks the Consumer Law & Policy Blog; comments are open there for those who have ideas.
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Slate Looks Back at Liberal Lawyers Who Supported Nomination of C.J. Roberts

June 29, 2007

Interesting piece here. It turns out that an obscure philosopher was closer to the mark on Roberts! Meanwhile, Brian Tamanaha (St. John’s) has provocative remarks on the Supreme Court Term just concluded, as does Geoffrey Stone (Chicago).
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Howrey Law Firm to Pay Associates Based on “Merit” Rather than Seniority

June 29, 2007

Story here. This could have huge, and not necessarily welcome, ramifications if it becomes widely adopted. My guess is that, in the short-term, Howrey is going to have real trouble recruiting new associates, and that will discourage other firms from following suit. On the other hand, if the Howrey partners find their profits-per-partner going up…
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Some Interesting Commentary on Today’s School Segregation Case

June 28, 2007

Lior Strahilevitz (Chicago) Jack Balkin (Yale) Mark Graber (Maryland) Eric Muller (North Carolina)
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Law Schools Unlikely to Follow Lead of Liberal Arts College and Boycott US News

June 28, 2007

So reports The National Law Journal. Nothing is to be gained from such a strategy, in my view, since U.S. News has shown its willingness in the past to simply "fill in the blanks" with their best guess for data schools won’t provide (this is what the magazine has done for years with Reed College,…
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Faculty Hiring/Appointments Chairs for 2007-08: Make Yourselves Known!

June 27, 2007

Here.
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Wall Street Journal Article on Law School Rankings Besides US News

June 25, 2007

Here. Two interesting excerpts. One: Before deciding which law school to attend this fall, Eric Singer flipped through the latest U.S. News & World Report law-school rankings. He eventually chose the University of Chicago over New York University, even though NYU is ranked higher overall. Instead of relying on U.S. News, Mr. Singer scanned independent…
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ABA/LSAC Makes 2008 Data Available in Spreadsheet Formats

June 25, 2007

The Empirical Legal Studies blog has details.
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3rd Annual On-Line Junior Scholars Workshop Hosted by Conglomerate Blog

June 25, 2007

Here.
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Brian Leiter Links Page

June 24, 2007

Your (nearly) complete Brian Leiter links page, which some readers may want to switch out for their current links to this or my other pages. (I’ve got another Brian Leiter links page as well, which I may fill out further, though the Naymz site was a bit easier to use I thought.)
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Hathaway from Yale to Berkeley

June 23, 2007

Oona Hathaway (international law), currently a tenure-track Associate Professor of Law at Yale Law School, has accepted a tenured offer from Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California at Berkeley. Her husband Jacob Hacker, currently Professor of Political Science at Yale, will also join the Berkeley faculty as a Professor of Political…
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Sharkey from Columbia to NYU

June 22, 2007

Catherine Sharkey (torts) at Columbia Law School has accepted a senior offer from New York University School of Law, where she visited last fall. She is the fourth tenured professor to move from Columbia to NYU in the last two years.
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NPR Covers the Autoadmit Lawsuit

June 21, 2007

Here.
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Martha Nussbaum and Wikipedia: A Case Study in the Unreliability of Information on the Internet

June 18, 2007

Details here.
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Finalizing Faculty Lists for Ranking Studies for 07-08

June 17, 2007

MOVING TO FRONT Over the summer, I plan to carry out a new citation study, and in the fall, we may (finally) undertake a new on-line reputational survey. To that end, we’ve compiled draft lists of faculty for 49 law schools that appear likely to rank in the top 35-40 by these different measures. We…
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The Tenure Case of DePaul Political Science Professor Finkelstein

June 16, 2007

Ordinarily, I would not post on an academic freedom matter here, but the extraordinary, and extraordinarily irresponsible, involvement of Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz in smearing and maligning Professor Finkelstein–who has now been denied tenure by administrators, despite unanimous or lopsided majority votes in favor of tenure by his academic colleages–makes the case noteworthy…
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More Autoadmit News

June 14, 2007

Story here. I have updated the earlier post with more items related to the lawsuit against Autoadmit, including links discussing some rather peculiar comments by law professors on the case (some of whom obviously had not read the complaint). UPDATE: The latest news coverage, from Connecticut. National Public Radio is also preparing a story. ANOTHER: …
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Wuerth from Cincinnati to Vanderbilt

June 13, 2007

Ingrid Brunk Wuerth (US foreign affairs law, comparative law, international law) at the University of Cincinnati has accepted a senior offer from the law school at Vanderbilt University, where she will start July 1.
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On Law Professors Misrepresenting Rorty and Philosophy: Comments on Luban and Tamanaha

June 12, 2007

David Luban (Georgetown), in remembering Richard Rorty (1931-2007), writes: Rorty argued that academic philosophy, especially analytic philosophy, is a pointless discipline that we should simply ignore. This view appeared in his 1979 masterpiece Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, but it became increasingly spirited and blunt in the essays he wrote over the next twenty…
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Anthony Ciolli and Other Autoadmit Posters Sued…

June 12, 2007

…finally and deservedly so. Given the horrendous nature of the defamation, sexual harassment, and/or threats of sexual and criminal violence for which these individuals are responsible it is a reasonable bet that, as their identities become public, Mr. Ciolli will not be the only person unemployable in the legal profession. (The link, above, also includes…
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Richard Rorty (1931-2007)

June 11, 2007

Some readers may be interested in the information and links about Professor Rorty that I have collected over at my philosophy blog.
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UT Law Grads Thinking About the Teaching Market

June 7, 2007

Any graduates of the University of Texas School of Law who are thinking about the law teaching market for this fall: please contact me (if you have not done so already) so we can begin preparing our materials on the UT candidates. Thanks.
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NetworkWorld Covers the Autoadmit Fiasco

June 7, 2007

Stories here and here.
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