Brian Leiter’s Law School Reports

Ways Trump could stay in office beyond 2028

November 3, 2025

Law professor Michael Dorf reviews the possibilities.
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In Memoriam: Thomas Carbonneau (1950-2025)

October 30, 2025

Professor Carbonneau was a leading expert on arbitration–domestic, comparative, and international–and taught for many years at Tulane University and, most recently, at Pennsylvania State University. There is an obituary here.
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What do you need to find out now that you’ve gotten a tenure-track offer?

October 28, 2025

MOVING TO FRONT, SINCE SCHOOLS ARE MAKING OFFERS (ORIGINALLY POSTED NOVEMBER 24, 2009–I HAVE UPDATED CERTAIN NUMBERS)–SEE ALSO THE COMMENTS, WHICH HAVE HELPFUL ADDITIONAL SUGGESTIONS With luck, some of you seeking law teaching jobs will have gotten offers of tenure-track positions. What then? Here’s roughly what I tell the Chicago job candidates we work with…
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Are the latest “tariffs” on Canada legal? Of course not

October 27, 2025

Law professor Paul Horwitz comments.
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Lawsky’s Law School Hiring Information

October 20, 2025

Professor Lawksy has created a website with all the information she has been helpfully collecting over a number of years now. Definitely bookmark it if you’re an aspiring legal academic.
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Donna Adelson gets life in prison for her role in the murder-for-hire of lawprof Dan Markel

October 16, 2025

Also convicted was her son, and those who actually killed Professor Markel. His ex-wife, Wendi Adelson, and his ex-father-in-law, Harvey Adelson have not been indicted. Professor Markel was murdered more than 11 years ago.
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It’s not every day that a law professor is on the front page of the NY Times…

October 14, 2025

…but it’s UVA’s Caleb Nelson’s turn. I don’t bet on his scholarship affecting the super-legislature, but one may hope!
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In Memoriam: William Twining (1934-2025)

October 13, 2025

Professor Twining, who was the emeritus Quain Professor of Jurisprudence at University College London and also taught for a number of years at the University of Miami, was well-known for his intellectual biography of Karl Llewellyn (with whom he studied at Chicago in the 1950s) and for his work on evidence law, among other topics.…
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Will the current authoritarian administration in Washington DC be appeased….

October 13, 2025

…if universities adopt a non-discrimination principle regarding political ideology? Universities obviously cannot agree to the administration’s outrageous demand to hire based on “conservative” political ideology and to shut down programs hostile to “conservative ideas.” But universities could, consistent with academic freedom, endorse a “statement of non-discrimination based on political ideology”: All candidates for faculty positions…
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Supreme Court of Texas tentatively recommends removing the ABA’s authority to determine which law school graduates can sit for the Texas bar

October 13, 2025

Here. The ABA brought this on itself with its continued heavy-handed attempts at regulating law schools to pursue the goals of the special interests that have captured the Council on Legal Education.
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MIT responds to Trump “compact”: no thanks

October 10, 2025

The full response from the MIT President is here, and is worth reading. She makes the correct point that scientific funding should be awarded based on scientific merit. Unfortunately, prior administrations have not always observed that principle (recall, e.g., when “diversity” was a criterion [or strong desideratum] for federal science funding), but the Trump proposal…
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“The United States is now sliding towards authoritarianism”

October 9, 2025

From my law colleague Curtis Bradley: I’m usually cautious in making assessments like this, but it now seems difficult to deny that the United States is sliding towards authoritarianism. How else can one describe, among other things, using the military to suppress dissent and punish Democratic cities and employing the Justice Department and FBI to…
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Illinois sues to enjoin Trump’s military deployment

October 6, 2025

The complaint.
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Harvard student newspaper profiles Adrian Vermeule…

October 6, 2025

….but manages never to note that his feeble book Common-Good Constitutionalism (aptly dubbed “Twitter constitutionalism” by some colleagues) is full of jurisprudential claims that are either mistaken or unargued for. Vermeule’s repeated reference to “the classical tradition” is a reference to something that does not exist.
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A government-wide impeachable offense!

October 6, 2025

Law professor Paul Horwitz comments.
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Book authors may be entitled to compensation in the settlement with Anthropic…

October 3, 2025

which used pirated copies of books to train its LLMs. Details here, including how to look up to see whether your books were used, and also how to file a claim. In my case, Why Tolerate Religion? (Princeton, 2013) was used.
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Chemerinsky on Trump’s latest attempted “extortion” of the universities

October 3, 2025

A propos yesterday’s post, Erwin Chemerinsky weighs in at the NYT. (Thanks to Gregory Mayer for the pointer.)
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New blog URLS, for Prawfs, Legal Theory Blog

October 1, 2025

The new Prawfs site is here, and at the link they collect new URLs for other law blogs which had to migrate from Typepad. Feel free to add other new URLs for law-related blogs in the comments.
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Thank God for judges, redux

October 1, 2025

A federal judge lambasts the authoritarian Trump for his violation of the First Amendment rights of non-citizens.
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LSAT scores aren’t what they used to be, and schools need not obsess about them

September 29, 2025

I missed this illuminating analysis by Derek Muller (Notre Dame) from several months ago, but it is worth reading!
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To follow this blog via RSS

September 27, 2025

Use https://leiterreports.com/leiterlawschoolreports/feed (Thanks to Michael Risch for the information.) UPDATE: A couple of readers report the link above goes to “comments” on this blog, not to the main posts. I’ve asked my web design person to look into this and will post what I learn.
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This is a more plausible “ranking” of law reviews…

September 3, 2025

…based on an aggregation of various metrics. I would disregard the ordinal order entirely, and think solely in terms of "clusters." This is certainly more sensible than the bizarre Washington & Lee ranking of law reviews (which is part of this aggregation, but whose weirdness is neutralized by some of the other metrics used here).
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Federal court dismisses Amy Wax’s discrimination claims…

August 29, 2025

…and declines to take up the state law breach of contract claims, which are certainly the strongest ones as I noted originally. I would assume she will file a breach of contract action against Penn in state court.
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Law school applicants increase

August 28, 2025

Blog Emperor Caron collects the details from LSAC, but as he notes the Trump changes to federal student loans may change this situation significantly. If students cannot get federal loans for the total cost of three years of legal education, they will have to turn to the private loan market, which will no doubt price…
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Chicago Alumni & Fellows on the law teaching market, 2025-26

August 25, 2025

MOVING TO FRONT, ORIGINALLY POSTED AUGUST 6 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 to get a copy of the narrative profiles of our candidates who are on the entry-level market this year and participating in the…
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ABA Council on Legal Education tables proposal on doubling experiential credit hours (for now)

August 22, 2025

That doesn't mean it's gone for good, but it's a hopeful development! My earlier post got rather a lot of traction on social media, including among practitioners, so one may hope the Council is rethinking its approach. And, of course, they must in light of the latest research.
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Experiential legal education: what does the evidence really show?

August 22, 2025

This new empirical study by my colleague (and Dean) Adam Chilton, Peter Joy (Wash U/St. Louis), and Kyle Rozema (Northwestern) could not be more timely. And if the ABA Council is actually responsive to evidence (that's a big "if") this would get them to change course. The paper uses data from ABA disclosures to study…
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ABA Council on Legal Education ignores critics, offers no substantive responses, and says “full speed ahead” with disrupting legal education at most of the nation’s law schools

August 18, 2025

I take it that's the upshot of this. The contempt for law schools and legal educators in this memo is palpable, given the devastating (and still unanswered) criticisms of the proposal to double experiential credit hours required for graduation. The two small concessions are: (1) the Council now recommends that 3 of the 12 required…
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406 candidates in the first FAR distribution for 2025-26…

August 15, 2025

…which is the highest number since before the pandemic, and an increase of almost 15% since last year.
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“From a Realist Point of View” now delivered to the press and should be out in Spring 2026…

August 12, 2025

…in the "Oxford Legal Philosophy" series. Here's the official OUP blurb: From A Realist Point of View combines new essays with revised versions of the most important recent work of preeminent legal realist Brian Leiter. This collection offers a systematic and philosophically ambitious account of legal realism and links it, for the first time, to…
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18% decline in jobs in first AALS jobs bulletin compared to last year

August 8, 2025

These are individual postings for entry-level, tenure-track law teaching jobs: 143 to 118. I had expected a "tightening" last March due to the Trump war on the universities, but it looks like the countervailing force (strong applicant pools and law school enrollments) may have helped avert a total collapse. One unknown is how many, if…
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14 lateral moves during 2024-25 that made law professors take notice

August 4, 2025

Based on conversations with colleagues here and elsewhere, here are 14 lateral moves this past year that were thought to be particularly significant/notable: *Jonathan Adler (environmental law, administrative law) from Case Western Reserve University to the College of William & Mary. *Katharine Baker (family law, property) from Chicago-Kent College of Law/Illinois Institute of…
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Lateral hires in law with tenure or on tenure-track, 2024-25

July 30, 2025

These are non-clinical/non-LRW appointments that will take effect in summer or fall 2025 (except where noted); (new additions will be in bold.) Last year's list is here. This is the final iteration of the 2024-25 list; a 2025-26 list will begin in August. *Christine Abely (property, contracts, international business transactions) from New England Law…
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How to increase citations to your scholarship and improve article placement?

July 22, 2025

Join Twitter! As one suspected… Professors Nyarko and Pozen write: [T]he abnormally large Twitter bump that we detect in law [compared to other fields] deserves further inquiry. The discrepancy is not driven by differences in citation rates across disciplines, because we benchmark our results against typical citation rates within the field. Two hypotheses strike us…
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How new restrictions on student loans affect prospective law students

July 16, 2025

Here, from the ABA Journal.
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In Memoriam: Richard Fallon, Jr. (1952-2025)

July 15, 2025

A leading expert on constitutional law and federal courts, Professor Fallon spent his career at Harvard Law School. There is a news report from the Harvard Crimson here. (Thanks to Michael Naft for the pointer.) UPDATE: The HLS memorial notice.
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Another penetrating critique of the ABA proposal to double the number of experiential credit hours required

June 26, 2025

This one from Notre Dame lawprof Derek Muller, which is worth reading in its entirety. If the Council does not withdraw this ill-considered and inadequately justified proposal, then it really will be time to seek alternative accreditation agencies for law schools, ones that respect both law students and the academic freedom of law faculties to…
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Excellent letter by Marquette Law Dean Kearney in opposition to the terrible ABA proposal to double the required number of experiential hours

June 25, 2025

The full letter is here (earlier coverage). As Dean Kearney writes: [T]he Council’s proposal would mandate a startling redirection of resources. Given the integrated nature of a program of legal education, the proposal would constitute an unprecedented invasion into the upper-level curricula of law schools, diminish substantially the schools’ appropriate autonomy, and impair their ability…
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If this report is correct, then everyone should boycott the Harvard Law Review

June 20, 2025

Is this for real? [Harvard Law Review] Editors complained that a piece had cited "A LOT of old white men," attempted to guess whether a scholar was "Latina," complained that an author was "not from an underrepresented background," and praised an article for citing "predominantly Black singers, rappers, and members of Twitter." Another article was…
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Faculty hiring freezes?

June 18, 2025

At my philosophy blog, I'm collecting information, please contribute there.
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