Brian Leiter’s Law School Reports

Law professor Thomas W. Mitchell (Texas A&M) is a 2020 MacArthur Foundation Fellow…

October 13, 2020

…along with 20 others. It's a big award, $625,000 over five years! (As I noted a number of years ago, these awards were, back in the 1980s, known informally as the genius" awards, until it became obvious that that wasn't the selection criterion. What is the selection criterion? No one is really sure, since both…
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“Farmer’s intent”

October 12, 2020

That's not a typo. Important insights from legal philosopher Leslie Green (Oxford & Queen's U).
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600 law students pledge to boycott Paul Weiss because of its representation of Exxon and its role in thwarting action on climate change

October 12, 2020

Their press statement is here: Download Press Release–Six hundred law students pledge not to work for law firm defending Exxon's role in the climate crisis. I asked Mr. Hirschel-Burns, a Yale law student and one of the organizers, for a list of the signatories, which he kindly provided but did not give permission to share. …
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Where did those teaching in “top” law schools go to law school?

October 9, 2020

You can guess the answer, but I recently came across this systematic study by law professor Eric Segall (Georgia State) and a political scientist. Faculty at the top ten law schools graduated from the following law schools (I'm going off a graph in the paper that is a little hard to read): Yale (more than…
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Some jurisprudential articles

October 8, 2020

"The Roles of Judges in Democracies: A Realistic View" is now out in Journal of Institutional Studies, and will also be reprinted in P. Chiassoni & B. Spaic (eds.), Judges and Adjudication in Constitutional Democracies: A View from Legal Realism (Springer, 2021). From the abstract (taken from the penultimate SSRN version): What are the “obligations” of…
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Big jump in law school applicants at the start of the 2020-21 admissions season

October 6, 2020

Blog Emperor Caron has the details. If this holds, that will bode well for law faculty hiring in 2021-22, and may even lead to some late entries to the hiring market this year.
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A new legal scholarship podcast, “Digging a Hole”…

October 5, 2020

…hosted by Samuel Moyn and David Schleicher (both Yale Law School). It prompted this amusing reaction on Twitter from Rick Hills (NYU).
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Former Alabama Law Dean Ken Randall to become the new Dean at George Mason

October 2, 2020

GMU's press release is here. He did oversee the transformation of Alabama from a solid but sleepy regional law school to one of the nation's best state flagship law schools.
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3rd AALS Placement Bulletin came out the other day…

October 1, 2020

…and it actually has new job ads from about ten schools, including Akron, Kentucky, McGeorge, Rutgers, South Carolina, and Stanford, among others.
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Blast from the past: the mystery of SSRN e-journal classifications

September 29, 2020

Back in 2016.
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Harvard’s Noah Feldman thinks his friends and former co-clerks are “brilliant” and should be on SCOTUS

September 26, 2020

That's the short version, I think. (I could count on one hand the number of "brilliant" people I've met in the legal academy, but maybe I don't use it in the hyberbolic way Yale graduates do!) Joking aside, there's no doubt Judge Amy Coney Barrett is a smart and capable lawyer. But Professor Feldman knows…
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Faculty at the top five schools in scholarly impact who began their careers outside the top 18

September 23, 2020

MOVING TO FRONT FROM SEPTEMBER 21–CORRECTED Following up on an earlier post, I thought it would be interesting to look at where tenure-stream academic faculty at top law schools began their academic career. I'll limit this round to the top five law schools in scholarly impact; I'll expand the list to the top ten or…
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Non-elite business programs boost earnings more than most assume (Michael Simkovic)

September 22, 2020

A popular narrative is that business school is not worth the time and money, especially outside of a handful of elite programs. This narrative closely echoes earlier critiques of legal education that have since been thoroughly debunked. (See here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here). As was the case with legal education, the…
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What is court packing?

September 21, 2020

Since my e-mail "interview" with NPR is showing up in lots of stories, let me say a bit more. "Court packing" is typically used to refer to FDR's proposal in the 1930s to expand the size of the Supreme Court, which had been holding New Deal legislation unconstitutional. The idea was that FDR would add…
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Toronto Law scuttles search after sitting judge (and major donor) criticizes the final candidate on political grounds

September 19, 2020

MOVING TO FRONT FROM SEPTEMBER 17–UPDATED What an embarrassment. If these allegations are borne out, the Dean of the Law School there will have to resign. UPDATE: The University of Toronto's Students' Law Society has written a public letter to the Dean. And various faculty, at Toronto and elsewhere, have apprently called for an ethics…
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Cass Sunstein reviews books describing the mass appeal of ultra-nationalism (Michael Simkovic)

September 19, 2020

In the NY Review of Books (recently republished online): Nazism was so horrifying and so barbaric that for many people in nations where authoritarianism is now achieving a foothold, it is hard to see parallels between Hitler’s regime and their own governments. Many accounts of the Nazi period depict a barely imaginable series of events,…
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The Supreme Court is about to become more conservative (Michael Simkovic)

September 18, 2020

With the passing of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Republican control of the White House and Senate, the Supreme Court will likely soon become more conservative. Given Republicans' penchant for increasing the value of appointments by choosing relatively young appointees, the court's conservative shift is likely to persist for decades unless Democrats achieve sufficient electoral…
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Statement in defense of “Critical Race Theory” by the five Deans of University of California law schools

September 17, 2020

This is in response to recent bluster by the monster-child who is President of the United States. What the Deans say is fair, but it's predicated, I suspect, on a mistaken assumption that the President's reference to "critical race theory" was a reference to the academic literature known to law professors, which I've seen no…
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Today in falsehoods about Nietzsche, courtesy of the “Jurisprudence & Legal Philosophy ejournal” from SSRN…

September 16, 2020

…which is one of the handful I subscribe to, even though about a quarter of the content is not "jurisprudence & legal philosophy" (authors self-select categories, and the ejournal editors are rather too tolerant). Yesterday's ejournal included a piece by Professor Nicholas Aroney (Queensland), whom I do not know, writing about "The Rise and Fall…
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Regional law schools that do strong hiring… (MOVING TO FRONT FROM YESTERDAY–CORRECTED)

September 15, 2020

…as measured by the number of faculty from the 2006-07 academic year that were subsequently hired by a top 18 law school (i.e., Berkeley, Chicago, Columbia, Cornell, Duke, Georgetown, Harvard, Michigan, Northwestern, NYU, Penn, Stanford, Texas, UCLA, USC, Vanderbilt, Virginia, Yale). This is a propos the discussion I had with Orin Kerr noted the other…
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How to hire a strong scholarly faculty (and a sidenote about status anxiety)

September 9, 2020

As part of the very enjoyable discussion on "The Legal Academy," Orin Kerr (Berkeley) asked me about how a school can hire strong scholarly faculty. I made a variety of observations related to this topic. A school must constitute a good hiring committee, meaning one with faculty who are engaged in scholarship and have good…
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Best of the summer blog

September 8, 2020

I didn't blog a lot this summer, but here are few highlights since June you might have missed: "Contemporary Legal Realism" (June) Supreme Court Clerkship Placement, 2013 through 2019 terms (June) Demand for corporate bankruptcy lawyers surges (Simkovic) (July) Yale law professor Rubenfeld suspended for two years after sexual harassment investigation (August)…
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8 more accredited law schools advertise in 2nd AALS jobs bulletin…

September 3, 2020

…bringing the total number of schools advertising up to 40 (this includes some of the law schools which I alluded to previously that weren't in the first bulletin). A number of highly ranked law schools are looking selectively this year, although they have not advertised in either bulletin.
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Chicago Alumni and Fellows on the teaching market, 2020-21

September 2, 2020

MOVING TO FRONT FOR LAST TIME–ORIGINALLY POSTED AUGUST 12 This post is strictly for schools that expect to do hiring this year. In order to protect the privacy of our candidates, please e-mail me at bleiter@uchicago.edu to get a copy of the narrative profiles of our candidates, including hyperlinks to their homepages. All these candidates…
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“Legal Positivism as a Realist Theory of Law”

September 1, 2020

The penultimate version is now online; main change was in the final section, discussing Raz's "Service Conception" of authority.
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I talk with Orin Kerr (Berkeley) on “The Legal Academy”…

August 31, 2020

…about law school hiring trends, rankings, the effect of COVID on the teaching market, and other topics. (Link now added!)
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Bad news for Alan Dershowitz in his various legal disputes with Epstein accusers and their lawyers

August 31, 2020

Virginia Guiffre, one of Jeffrey Epstein's accusers who has implicated Dershowitz in misconduct, has sued Dershowitz for defamation–as has her former lawyer David Boies. This development is bad news for Dershowitz.
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Yale law professor Jed Rubenfeld suspended for two years as outcome of sexual harassment investigation

August 26, 2020

Story here; an excerpt: On Monday morning, members of the Yale Law School faculty received a terse message from their provost informing them that Professor Jed Rubenfeld “will leave his position as a member of the YLS faculty for a two-year period, effective immediately,” and that upon his return, Rubenfeld would be barred from teaching…
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The first Faculty Appointments Registry is out…

August 25, 2020

MOVING TO FRONT FROM AUGUST 20–UPDATED …with only 297 candidates, down from just under 400 last year. That's good news, given that there are also fewer jobs. The new format, however, is a bit harder to search than last year's. Last year, for example, it was quite easy to search by subjects a candidate was…
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Blast from the past: when Forbes opiner Mark A. Cohen didn’t know what he was talking about

August 20, 2020

Which is pretty much always. The guy is a parody of management-speak.
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With no “meat market,” how soon will interviews be scheduled?

August 18, 2020

The first FAR distribution occurs this week, but with the traditional "meat market" in Washington, DC cancelled, I expect that schools may start scheduling Zoom interviews to occur before August is over. I've advised our job candidates to be prepared for that possibility in any event. Thoughts from readers on hiring committees at their schools? …
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AALS jobs bulletin is out

August 14, 2020

I count 32 AALS-member schools that are advertising, in several cases for multiple positions (roughly half the number last year, if my memory is correct). As noted earlier, more than 100 schools have constituted appointments committees, but some are only looking at laterals I've learned, while others are probably constituted in case it's possible to…
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Penn State-Dickinson and Pepperdine law deans donate 125k each to help students at their schools with “emergency needs”

August 11, 2020

Wow!
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Hiring committees for 2020-21…

August 11, 2020

MOVING TO FRONT–ORIGINALLY POSTED JULY 29 …you can announce yourselves and your hiring plans here.
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Ten lateral moves that made law professors take notice during 2019-20

August 3, 2020

Based on my in-box and conversations with others, these were the ten moves that transpired this past year that were thought to be the biggest hiring coups (I omit any lateral moves my school was part of and those that won't officially happen until 2021): *Kimberly Kessler Ferzan (criminal law, law & philosophy) from the…
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Bloomberg: Demand for Corporate Bankruptcy lawyers surges (Michael Simkovic)

July 30, 2020

See here. Large U.S. law firms are scrambling to address a ballooning need for bankruptcy and corporate restructuring expertise. The Covid-19 pandemic has unleashed an unprecedented severity and speed of corporate distress, as Chapter 11 filings pile up and fire-sale assets garner interest. Law firms are scouring the field to hire experienced restructuring attorneys, counter…
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Diamond & Cain on online vs. hybrid legal education during COVID (Michael Simkovic)

July 24, 2020

Steven Diamond and Patricia Cain discuss tradeoffs between online and hybrid legal education during the COVID pandemic and argue in favor of online based on health risks and concerns about diversity and inclusion.
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An early sign about this year’s job market for law teachers

July 20, 2020

According to a widely circulated list of hiring chairs at different law schools in the U.S., 117 have already named appointments chairs, compared to 138 last year. That's not as big a drop-off as I had feared we might see. Bear in mind that last year's 138 hiring chairs yielded 88 rookie hires at 66…
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July blogging hiatus

July 1, 2020

I'm taking a break from the blog in July in order to make progress on a book and deal with some other matters. If there's something absolutely time-sensitive, I may put it up, but otherwise please don't send news items until very late July. Thanks, as always, for reading.
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In Memoriam: Edward Kleinbard (1951-2020)

June 30, 2020

A leading tax scholar and practitioner, Professor Kleinbard had taught at the University of Southern California since 2009. USC Dean Guzman's memorial announcement is here. Blog Emperor Caron has collected some memorials here.
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