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In Memoriam: Stephen R. Munzer (1944-2025)
Professor Munzer, a longtime member of the law faculty at UCLA, where he was recently emeritus, wrote widely on topics in jurisprudence, especially the philosophical foundations of property, as well as other legal and bioethical topics. Comments are open for remembrances from those who knew Professor Munzer or for those who would like to comment…
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Richard Stillman on the problem of theoretical disagreements
This will only interest my legal philosophy readers, but I do want to commend to their attention this paper by Richard Stillman, who trained as a philosopher of language with Stephen Neale before coming to Chicago to study law (and jurisprudence). He has identified something important about at least one subset of theoretical disagreements in…
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In Memoriam: George C. Christie (1934-2025)
A longtime professor at Duke Law School, where he was emeritus, Professor Christie wrote widely on topics in jurisprudence, torts, criminal law, and international law, among others. There is an obituary here.
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The coming, and very consequential, change to Federal student loans for post-graduate study
We touched on this before, but CHE offers this update: According to the consensus definitions, approved Thursday after two rounds of negotiated rulemaking, a degree will be considered professional if the field requires skills beyond those needed to receive a bachelor’s degree. The distinction matters: Professional students will be able to take out $50,000 in…
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A framework for preserving authorship and trust in the AI era
Philosopher Eli Alshanetsky has been writing about “how we might verify human authorship and accountability in AI-mediated work without shifting the burden onto already overstretched faculty.” A short version of his ideas are available at The Conversation. A longer version is here. Professor Alshanetsky welcomes comments, and intends to reply here. Be sure to at…
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“From a Realist Point of View”: coming in March
That’s Thucydides on the cover! Readers will know some of the distinguished scholars kindly endorsing the book, but may not know the first two: Michel Troper is the preeminent French legal realist, who also introduced legal philosophy to French legal education in the 1970s (and was, I learned, a visiting professor here at Chicago a…
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Advertising update
Top spots are booked for December, but there is one available in each of January and February. There is at least one second spot open in the coming months, and I may also open third from the top spots given the inquiries I’ve ad. Same pricing structure as noted previously. Email me with questions and…
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Trump’s authority to issue random tariffs goes to the Supreme Court
Cornell law professor Michael Dorf reviews the issues.
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Ways Trump could stay in office beyond 2028
Law professor Michael Dorf reviews the possibilities.
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In Memoriam: Thomas Carbonneau (1950-2025)
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?
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
Law professor Paul Horwitz comments.
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Lawsky’s Law School Hiring Information
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
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…
…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)
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….
…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
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
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”
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
The complaint.
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Harvard student newspaper profiles Adrian Vermeule…
….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!
Law professor Paul Horwitz comments.
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Book authors may be entitled to compensation in the settlement with Anthropic…
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
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
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
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
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
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…
…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…
…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
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
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)
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?
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
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…
…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…
…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
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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