Brian Leiter’s Law School Reports

News and views about law school and law

  • Tom Bell: Some Recommended Reforms for US News

    Here; an excerpt: Earlier this summer, I began a series of posts about the U.S. News & World Report’s law school rankings. (Please see below for links to each post in the series.) My research uncovered many interesting and troubling things about the rankings. I discovered errors in the data that USN&WR used for the…

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  • Hiring Practices, Voting Rules, and Delegation of Authority at Law Schools

    A law professor writes: I am the new chairman of my school’s hiring committee and would find benchmarking on several issues helpful.    Here are my questions: 1.    Is the selection ever delegated to a committee?  If so, why?2.    Which categories of faculty do not vote on hiring decisions?  LR&W? Clinical?3.    With…

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  • Lempert on “Empirical Legal Studies”

    Richard Lempert (Michigan) has apt comments here; an excerpt: I have concerns about the quality of some of the empirical work being done and how empirical work, even good scholarship, is used.  To put it bluntly too much empirical scholarship is being deployed normatively, downplaying caveats that should be attached to findings, and some research,…

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  • The “Socratic Method”: The Scandal of American Legal Education

    With a new school year soon upon us, it might be timely to revisit this topic.

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  • From the Annals of Global Warming

    A law professor in Ottawa (Canada) writes: Today, in the world’s second coldest capital (Moscow is warmer but Ulan Bator, Mongolia is apparently slightly colder) it was 117 F with humidity. I think there won’t be much left of humanity by 2075. Or sooner if the Republicans get re-elected. Hotter in Ottawa, Canada than in…

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  • Voiceless No More!

    Andrew Chin (North Carolina), that is. Will there come a point when every law professor in America has a blog?   Every law student too?

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  • Submitting to Law Reviews

    Daniel Solove and Scott Moss have put together useful information here and here.

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  • Religious Reasons and State Power

    Against my better judgment–but since folks have been e-mailing me their comments in this debate–I’m going to say something about the rather unsatisfying discussion going on at several law-related blogs prompted by Geoffrey Stone’s comments about President Bush’s veto of funding for stem cell research.  Professor Stone wrote: In vetoing the bill that would have…

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  • USC’s Dudziak Wins ACLS Fellowship

    The legal historian Mary Dudziak at the University of Southern California Law School was the only law professor to win a Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies for 2006.  The ACLS will support her project on "Exporting American Dreams:  Thurgood Marshall and the Constitution of Kenya."

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  • Alito Clerks for 2006 Term?

    I know that Justice Alito has at least two clerks for the 2006 term lined up:  Mike Lee (BYU ’97) and Chris Paolella (Harvard ’99).  Does anyone know who his other two clerks are, and where they went to law school?  You can either e-mail me or post that information below (preferably with a source). …

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  • Some Realism about the U.S. Supreme Court

    Nicely put by Judge Posner: The supreme court is a political court. The discretion that the justices exercise can fairly be described as legislative in character, but the conditions under which this "legislature" operates are different from those of Congress. Lacking electoral legitimacy, yet wielding Zeus’s thunderbolt in the form of the power to invalidate…

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  • Some New Law Blogs

    Everything you wanted to know about credit and bankruptcy here. Everything you wanted to  know about "the interplay between legal responses to exogenous change and the law’s own endogenous capacity for adaptation" here.

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  • Is There a Correlation Between Scholarly and Teaching Success?

    No.  Of course, there are questions (to put it mildly) about the measure of teaching success.  But this is an interesting piece of work.

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  • Sextonism Watch: Wake Forest University

    At least this bit of wild hyperbole was internal puffery, but here it is (thanks to an anonymous informant): Robert K. Walsh, dean of the Wake Forest University School of Law, announced recently that he plans to retire as dean next summer. Walsh, who will complete 18 years as dean in 2007, will remain at…

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  • Osgoode’s McCamus Elected to Royal Society of Canada

    John McCamus, an internationally recognized authority on the law of restitution at Osgoode Hall School of Law of York University, Toronto, was the only legal scholar elected to the Royal Society of Canada this year.  Details here. 

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  • Faculty Uprising at Michigan State

    Moving to the front from Sunday:  see the latest update, below. They want the Dean out (and more details here). UPDATE:  An informed observer from another law school suggests to me that the "uprising" may have more to do with senior faculty from the Detroit College of Law days resisting the academic turn of the…

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  • Love and Fun are not “things of value” in Illinois

    An associate at a Chicago law firm writes with the following amusing observations about a peculiarity of Illinois law: The definition of prostitution or the nature of the proscribed conduct varies with the governing law of the jurisdiction where it is unlawful. In Illinois, the definition is. Any person who performs, offers or agrees to…

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  • Not much real news in the dog days of summer…

    …so time for more fun with SSRN downloads, from the July stats. The top 20 law schools with the most downloads in the last 12 months (total # of downloads): 1.  Harvard Law School (42,319) 2.  Columbia Law School (30,156) 3.  University of Chicago Law School (29,253) 4.  University of Texas School of Law (28,914)…

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  • Why so few female Supreme Court clerks?

    Tom Smith (San Diego) makes some sensible (and characteristically amusing) points; an excerpt: The assumption behind the question is, in my limited experience, if not false, at least unproven.  That is, that the smartest law students go on to be Supreme Court clerks.  That is rather like saying the smartest politicians go on to be…

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  • Who is America’s Worst Law Professor?

    This weighty matter is debated here.

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  • The Final Tolling of (Tom) Bell for the University of Florida

    Here.

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  • On-Line Bullying and Defamation by Law Students

    Interesting post on this subject here.  The author focuses mostly on harassment and "bullying" of students on blogs, though the issue is at least as serious in on-line "chat" rooms.  One putatively prelaw discussion board–memorably described in the comments here as the place where "the amount of racism, anti-semitism, and extreme aggression borders on psychotic"…

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  • Georgetown Faculty Blog

    First Chicago, now Georgetown (which includes Mark Tushnet, though he’s departed for Harvard).  Is this a trend?  If all law schools set one up, and include stat counters, then we cank rank law schools by the number of visits to their blog…which is likely to be as meaningful as ranking by SSRN downloads.

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  • The Final Tolling of (Tom) Bell on Baylor

    Here.

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  • For Whom (Tom) Bell Tolls, Again: University of Florida

    Here.

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  • Not Much Real News in the Dog Days of Summer…So Time for Fun with SSRN Downloads (as of June 1)

    From the June 1 data: Top 25 authors with most downloads in the last 12 months: 1.  Lucian Bebchuk (Harvard; Corporate, L&E:  14,748) 2.  Bernard Black (Texas; Corporate, L&E:  12,564) 3.  Stephen Bainbridge (UCLA; Corporate:  9,312) 4.  Cass Sunstein (Chicago; Constitutional, Public Law:  7,426) 5.  Mark Lemley (Stanford; Intellectual Property:  7,317) 6.  Brian Leiter (Texas;…

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  • Three More Lateral Hires for Virginia: Bagley, Brown-Nagin, and Collins

    In addition to hiring Gregory Mitchell (behavioral law & economics) from Florida State University (noted earlier), UVA has announced three more lateral hires with tenure:  Margo Bagley (intellectual property) from Emory University; Tomiko Brown-Nagin (legal history) from Washington University in St. Louis; and Michael Collins (federal courts) from Tulane University.  This has otherwise been a…

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  • For Whom (Tom) Bell Tolls: Baylor!

    Details here.  Some explaining needs to be done. MOVING TO THE FRONT from June 18:  more info here.

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  • “Yalies and Their Fake Scholarships”

    A graduate of Yale Law School who is now a law professor asked me to post the following observations (sent under the title, above): As the next faculty recruitment season begins in "quiet search" mode, I have come across a CV from yet another candidate who lists on his or her resume a "scholarship" from…

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  • Schwartz from Brooklyn to Berkeley

    Paul Schwartz, a leading expert on information law and privacy at Brooklyn Law School, has accepted a senior offer from Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley.

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  • Triantis from Virginia to Harvard

    George Triantis (law & economics, corporate law) at the University of Virginia has accepted a senior offer from Harvard Law School. I’ll be posting next week a summary of gains and losses at the leading law schools over the last three years.

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  • The So-Called “New Legal Realism Project

    The Empirical Legal Studies blog is running a series of posts about what is called "The New Legal Realism Project," which is centered at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and which aims "to develop rigorous, genuinely interdisciplinary approaches to the empirical study of law."  As some commenters have already pointed out, it is not entirely…

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  • Glenn Reynolds, a.k.a., “Instapundit,” Reviewed

    His book Army of Davids, lauding bloggers like himself, is reviewed In The New Republic; an excerpt: Glenn Reynolds is an unlikely visionary. Before he emerged as the "InstaPundit," he was just a law professor at the University of Tennessee, writing on administrative law and the Second Amendment [for law reviews]…. These outlets, however, didn’t…

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  • Pointed Objections to the ABA’s Change in Reporting Requirements for LSAT Scores

    Sam Stonefield, Associate Dean for External Affairs and Professor of Law at Western New England College of Law, has kindly given me permission to share the powerful objections he has sent to the ABA regarding the recent decision to permit schools to report only the highest LSAT of multiple scores:  Download stonefield_letter.rtf.  The whole letter…

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  • ABA Changes LSAT Reporting Requirements: Only Highest Score Need Be Counted

    Blog Emperor Caron has the details.

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  • Everything You Ever (or Never) Wanted to Know about SSRN

    Here.

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  • San Diego Vacation

    There are many lovely things about living in Austin…but the relentless summer heat is not one of them!  In consequence, we like to flee for a bit during the summer to the place that is both easy to get to and has a perfect climate:  San Diego.  If anyone has advice about a nice hotel/resort…

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  • UC Riverside Makes Bid for a 5th UC System Law School

    The UC Riverside proposal is here.  The proposals by Riverside and UC Irvine were rebuffed a few years ago, but now UC Riverside is renewing the proposal.  Three of the four UC law schools are in Northern California; only one (UCLA) is in Southern California. 

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  • Modelling US News

    Who else, but Tom Bell!  He’s found some intriguing discrepancies…

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  • New Developments in Alternative Dispute Resolution

    UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT MIDDLE DISTRICT OF FLORIDA ORLANDO DIVISION Case No. 6:05-cv-1430-Orl-31JGG AVISTA MANAGEMENT, INC., d/b/a Avista Plex, Inc., Plaintiff, -vs- WAUSAU UNDERWRITERS INSURANCE COMPANY, Defendant. ______________________________________ ORDER This matter comes before the Court on Plaintiff’s Motion to designate location of a Rule 30(b)(6) deposition (Doc. 105). Upon consideration of the Motion the latest…

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