Brian Leiter’s Law School Reports

News and views about law school and law

  • Good Advice on Interviews at the “Meat Market”

    Sensible advice about the "ideal" interview for asprising law teachers, from Daniel Solove (Law, George Washington).

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  • Pathological Liar David Horowitz Claims Registered Democrats Outnumber Republicans 8:1

    Well-known enemy of academic freedom and pathological liar David Horowitz (for details and documentation of this man’s history of malfeasance, go here and keep scrolling down) has produced a new study purporting to show that registered Democrats outnumber Republicans 8 to 1 at leading law schools.  Some observations: 1.  Given Mr. Horowitz’s partisan dishonesty about…

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  • Scholarly Rankings and What Goes on in the Classroom

    A graduate of Cornell Law School now practicing with a leading law firm in New York City writes: I was reading the Law School Reports blog (which is great, by the way), and I saw that you mentioned that NYU did not provide a better education in social scientific approaches to law than Cornell.  I…

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  • Public Law Scholar Vermeule from Chicago to Harvard

    Adrian Vermeule (constitutional law, legislation, statutory interpretation) at the University of Chicago has accepted the offer from Harvard Law School.  Harvard’s dramatic expansion of its faculty in the last couple of years has led it on an aggressive raid of highly regarded younger legal scholars at a variety of schools, in addition to Vermeule:  most…

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  • Public Attitudes Towards Judiciary Quite Unfavorable According to New Study

    Details here: More than half of Americans are angry and disappointed with the nation’s judiciary, a new survey done for the ABA Journal eReport shows. A majority of the survey respondents agreed with statements that "judicial activism" has reached the crisis stage, and that judges who ignore voters’ values should be impeached. Nearly half agreed…

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  • More Naughty Judges in Trouble

    First it was the Oklahoma judge masturbating in court, now its the Kansas judge viewing pornography from his office computer: The Kansas Supreme Court on Friday ousted a county judge for viewing Internet pornography on his office computer. Saline County District Judge George R. Robertson, 56, had been on the bench for 10 years and…

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  • The Case of the Judge Who Masturbated in Court

    Apt commentary here. UPDATE:  A law student from a top law school (not Texas) writes:  "The ‘masturbating judge’ story you link to has, for a while, provided a new way of ranking nuttiness among judges.  When I’ve spoken with some colleagues about judges they’ve worked for they can now say things like, ‘well, he was…

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  • Opting Out of the US News Rankings

    Interesting essay by Colin Diver (Reed College’s current President and former Dean of the University of Pennsylvania Law School) about Reed College’s decision not to participate at all in the U.S. News college rankings.  Penn, of course, has taken the art of gaming the rankings, across the boards, to quite remarkable heights:  in both law…

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  • L&E Scholar Huang from Minnesota to Temple

    Peter Huang (law & economics, securities regulation), who moved from Penn to the University of Minnesota not long ago, has now taken up a Chair in the law school at Temple University.

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  • Visiting Profs at the Super Elite Law Schools, 2005-06

    Although law schools are increasingly hiring faculty without requiring visiting stints first, a handful of the very top law schools still have sufficient appeal and market clout to require those visits in almost all instances.  Now that law school website are updated, here are the visiting faculty at Yale, Harvard, Stanford, and Chicago for this…

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  • New On-Line Resource about Public Interest/Public Service Opportunities at U.S. Law Schools

    Here.  Prospective and current law students will no doubt find this site very useful.

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  • Advice for those on the Law Teaching Market

    Several postings (some with comments by others) from the other site may be relevant this time of year:  see especially here and many other items under this category, some of which are specific to the law market, some of which address issues that come up in other academic job markets as well.

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  • An Interesting Canadian Perspective on Appointing Supreme Court Justices

    Here, courtesy of Allan Hutchinson, noted legal theorist and Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, who teaches at Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto.

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  • A First? A Law School Faculty Blog…

    …from the University of Chicago, of course.

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  • Fewer People of Color Being Tenured at U.S. Law Schools

    MOVING TO FRONT FROM Sept. 22 Devon Carbado (Law, UCLA) writes:  "The last data I looked at suggested that we are experiencing a downward trend with respect to the number of people of color being tenured at American law schools. What is the cause of this trend and how are we going to fix it?" …

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  • LawDragon’s List of 500 Leading Lawyers in America

    What better way to attract attention to a new magazine than to produce an idiosyncratic list, based on no discernible criteria, of the top 500 lawyers in America?  That’s what the new LawDragon magazine has done.  Most of those on the list are practitioners and jurists, of course, though two dozen or so academics make…

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  • Sextonish Watch: New York University School of Law (Again!)

    The Sextonism Watch goes back to the source, as it were, with this week’s nomination from a professor who asked not to be named.  From the NYU Law School’s announcement of its new capital campaign, the nominator singled out two remarks: "The funds will be used to increase the size of the faculty by continuing…

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  • Merrill on Kelo (the Eminent Domain case from last term)

    You presumably knew that Thomas Merrill at Columbia Law School (whom Chicago, Texas, Penn, and others all tried to hire when it became clear he would leave Northwestern a couple of years ago)  was a first-rate legal scholar.  Here’s an illuminating example of his work, which corrects a variety of misunderstandings that have swirled around…

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  • On the History of the Socratic Method

    Interesting remarks posted by my colleague Emily Kadens in an earlier thread deserve a wider audience: [T]he Socratic method as it has been used since about the 1940s is not how it was originally designed by Langdell and James Barr Ames. Originally, the professor used Socratic method to get the students to test whether the…

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  • In Memoriam

    M. David Gelfand (1949-2005) This message from Tulane Dean Lawrence Ponoroff reports the information presently available about this tragic loss to the Tulane and wider academic communities.

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  • U.S. News to Resume Using Medians, Instead of Mid-Points, on LSAT and GPA Data

    In the rankings published last Spring, U.S. News used the mid-point of the 75th/25th LSAT and GPA for each school, rather than the median that the school reported.  This had the virtue of being public and thus reliable information, since the ABA also collects that data, but not the medians.  However, the mid-point approach produced…

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  • AALS Annual Meeting Moving from New Orleans to Washington, D.C.

    Information here.  Hopefully, the AALS will have the decency to put the 2007 annual meeting back in New Orleans.

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