Brian Leiter’s Law School Reports

Did USNews.com miscalculate employment rates or did the schools misinterpret the data reported?

April 24, 2023

Derek Muller argues, plausibly, it was the latter.
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Will the USNews.com law school rankings for this year ever appear?

April 21, 2023

Hopefully not! It appears that without the free labor supplied by law schools of reporting data, the thinly staffed USNews.com operation has been having trouble transcribing data from the ABA into its ranking formula. Among the problems: the ABA corrected some of its initial data, but that may have been missed; and USNews.com may not…
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Six law professors elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

April 19, 2023

They are: Danielle Citron (Virginia), Matthew L.M. Fletcher (Michigan), James Forman, Jr. (Yale), William C. Hubbard (South Carolina [also former President of ABA], Gillian Metzger (Columbia), Carol Steiker (Harvard).
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Yale lawprof Tracey Meares (UChicago Law ’91) goes back to high school in Springfield, Illinois…

April 12, 2023

…where they are making up for injustices done to her many years ago. A nice story!
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Nearly $1000/hour for 2nd-year associates in NYC?

April 10, 2023

Yikes!
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Three law professors win 2023 Guggenheim Fellowships

April 7, 2023

They are: Scott Cummings (UCLA), Edward Foley (Ohio State), and Mary Ziegler (UC Davis).
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Professor Shugerman on the Trump indictment

April 6, 2023

Here. Curious to hear from knowledgeable law professors whether they agree with Professor Shugerman's assessment. (Submit your comment only once, it may take awhile to appear. Use a full name and valid email address [the latter will not appear].)
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SCOTUS clerks now have a lot more prior clerkship experience than in the past

April 3, 2023

Lawprof Derek Muller (Iowa) looks at the data. I suppose this is a bit like the "credential inflation" that has affected all areas of life in the affluent capitalist societies in recent decades.
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Professor Lawsky’s “Entry-Level Hiring Report” for the 2022-23 season…

March 30, 2023

MOVING TO FRONT FROM MARCH 8–PLEASE SUBMIT YOUR INFORMATION! …is now open and collecting information. When you accept an entry-level position this year, submit your information to Professor Lawsky please.
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“The Epistemology of the Internet and the Regulation of Speech in America”

March 27, 2023

When I first posted this paper on SSRN, it generated a lot of interest; for those still interested, it's now out in a symposium issue of Georgetown Journal of Law & Public Policy.
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Stanford Law Dean Martinez’s letter to the SLS community about the disruption of Judge Duncan’s talk

March 22, 2023

It's a very methodical and substantial letter, worth reading by Deans and other academic administrators faced with situations like this. The Associate Dean who contributed to the disruption of the event is currently on leave. Individual students will not be disciplined because of the difficulty of identifying the perpetrators, and because the administrator present exacerbated…
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Blast from the past: where U.S. law faculty went to law school

March 22, 2023

Back in 2008. The main change since is that I would expect Michigan to be lower, and NYU to be higher.
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NY Times catches up with the Amy Wax case at Penn…

March 20, 2023

…but doesn't understand academic freedom, in ways that are typical. The reporter says that Dean Ruger's move to sanction Wax threatens "one of tenure’s key tenets — the right of academics to speak freely, without fear of punishment, whether in public or in the classroom." That "or" conceals a world of difference!
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Stanford law students protest the apology to Judge Duncan

March 15, 2023

That's the story according to this journalist (with a somewhat selective interest in free speech matters in my experience). I'd be curious to hear from those at Stanford, faculty or students, whether this is accurate. Please use a valid email address, which will not appear. (Submit your comment only once, it may take awhile to…
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CEO of company that makes its $$$ by peddling consumer misinformation to students…

March 14, 2023

…is morally indignant that schools won't cooperate with his enterprise. This is some real chutzpah! They don't provide information, they collect data, don't audit it for accuracy, and then throw it into a nonsensical and inexplicable formula to produce an illusion of precision regarding supposed "qualitative" differences. It's precisely because they are not providing information…
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The Stanford Law disaster involving a FedSoc event with Judge Duncan

March 11, 2023

UPDATE: The Stanford President and Dean Martinez in the law school have now issued an appropriate apology for this fiasco, including an acknowledgment (unlike in Dean Martinez's letter to the SLS community) that Dean Steinbach's conduct was inappropriate. =======original post follows========== The video online gives a sense of the chaos and heckling which disrupted the…
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Academic freedom and diversity

March 6, 2023

Rutgers lawprof Stacy Hawkins argued in the Chronicle of Higher Education that "Sometimes Diversity Trumps Academic Freedom," and I point out some errors in her analysis.
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More on gaming the USNews.com rankings via “median” LSAT and GPA

March 2, 2023

UPDATED: A reader sent along the site to which my colleague, below, is referring. A colleague at a proverbial "top ten" law school writes with some interesting observations a propos yesterday's topic (esp. the issue raised in the "Update"): Because US News ranks schools based on *median* GPA and LSAT, many schools game admissions to…
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These are *not* the “choosiest” law schools, these are the ones most busy gaming USNews.com rankings

March 1, 2023

This is, alas, fairly gullible "reporting": No. 1 for the highest median undergraduate grade point average is the University of Alabama School of Law, which accepted students with a 2022 median undergrad GPA of 3.95. Yale Law’s undergrad GPA was 3.94, putting it in a tie with the University of Virginia School of Law and…
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The debate over requiring the LSAT (or some other admissions test) continues…

February 27, 2023

…despite the last proposal being rebuffed. As the NYT notes: The association is considering dropping that requirement, and letting each law school decide for itself whether tests are necessary. Opponents and supporters of the change both make arguments on behalf of diversity — a sensitive subject in the field of law, which is disproportionately white.…
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Best American judges of the 20th century?

February 21, 2023

The earlier poll got nearly 200 responses, though since Professor Kerr (Berkeley) linked to it from his popular Twitter account, the responses probably came from more than just the regular blog readers. Of the write-ins (some of whom were not eligible, like Roger Taney [!]), the only one that got traction, rightly so, was Robert…
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Who were the best American judges of the 20th-century?

February 17, 2023

Here's a poll with I hope most of the likely choices for the "top 10". You can write-in others. Only judges no longer serving were eligible. Have fun!
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Another law school faces demands for compensation from descendants after removing the name of slaveholding namesake

February 15, 2023

This time it's the University of Richmond, with the descendant estimating they are owed $3.6 billion! No lawsuit filed yet.
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We’re about 2/3rds of the way through the law school application season…

February 14, 2023

…and total applicants are down just slightly from last year, about 3.5% according to LSAC data–but that's off 12% from two years ago. If we continue to see slippage the next couple of years that will almost certainly start to have an adverse effect on the job market for new law teachers.
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In Memoriam: Lauren Edelman (1955-2023)

February 10, 2023

A lawyer/sociologist, Professor Edelman was a leading law & society scholar, with a particular interest in workplace issues. She taught at Wisconsin for a decade and then, since 1996, at Berkeley. A brief Berkeley memorial notice is here. (Thanks to Anita Bernstein for the pointer.)
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Blast from the past: What an “Ad Hominem” argument is and isn’t

February 9, 2023

Back in 2011, and still relevant given how "ad hominem" is routinely misused.
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ABA House of Delegates rejects proposal to eliminate LSAT (or other admissions test) requirement for law school admissions

February 7, 2023

Here. The proposal was driven by a desire to promote "diversity," but as critics point out, it might not have that effect. (See for example.)
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In Memoriam: Michael J. Kelly (1938-2023)

January 31, 2023

Professor Kelly, an expert in legal ethics and the legal profession, was also a longtime Dean of the law school at the University of Maryland. The Maryland memorial notice is here. (Thanks to Robert Condlin for the pointer.)
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Professor Wax files grievance against Penn Law Dean Ruger

January 26, 2023

…according to Blog Emperor Caron, who has been keeping track. Most of those joined after USNews.com announced it would utilize only public data and its own survey data. According to the Blog Emperor, 53 schools have officially declined to join the boycott, while the rest are either hedging or not telling! An informative report from…
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Sudden “resignation” of Pitt Law Dean

January 25, 2023

The Provost's cryptic announcement. Perhaps the Dean had compelling personal reasons for resigning (but then why did the statement not say so?), but more likely, from what I can gather, is that the Dean had conflicts with the Provost: since Provost Cudd took over in fall 2018, a half-dozen Deans have resigned or been terminated. …
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ChatGPT goes to law school at the University of Minnesota

January 24, 2023

Oy veh: How well can AI models write law school exams without human assistance? To find out, we used the widely publicized AI model ChatGPT to generate answers on four real exams at the University of Minnesota Law School. We then blindly graded these exams as part of our regular grading processes for each class.…
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So what might the new USNews.com ranking look like?

January 19, 2023

We know what the criteria will be, and we know most (but not all) of the inputs, what we don't know is the new arbitrary "weightings." Professor Muller (Iowa) charts the possibilities on various reasonable assumptions about weightings. (I'm not sure those schools boycotting the rankings will do worse in the reputational surveys, but we'll…
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Levit & Rostron’s guide to submitting to law reviews…

January 17, 2023

…has been updated.
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Blast from the past: “Triumph of the JD/PhDs”

January 10, 2023

Back in 2016, and as Professor Lawsky's data on entry-level hiring has revealed, the triumph continues.
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UC Law San Francisco (formerly Hastings) joins the USNews.com ranking boycott

January 9, 2023

Dean Faigman's statement is here. I'm not sure what joining the boycott at this point means, since USNews.com has indicated it will use public data, plus its own survey data.
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“Politics by Other Means: The Jurisprudence of ‘Common Good Constitutionalism’”

January 5, 2023

This forthcoming essay may interest some readers; the abstract: Adrian Vermeule proposes an alternative to the two dominant schools of constitutional interpretation in the United States: originalism and “progressivism” (i.e., “living constitutionalism”). Against these approaches, he argues courts (and other institutional actors) should explicitly interpret the text of the Constitution, statutes, and administrative decrees with…
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Big changes coming to USNews.com rankings

January 2, 2023

USNews.com has written to law school Deans announcing some significant changes, as a result of the boycott initiated by Yale. Here are the highlights: 1. USNews.com will give full credit in the employment metric to "school-funded full-time long-term fellowships where bar passage is required or where the JD degree is an advantage," as well as…
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Cal Western joins USNews.com ranking boycott

January 2, 2023

Statement here. I'm not sure what the import is of joining the boycott at this point, since I believe reporting to USNews.com was due before this announcement. In any case, we now have, I believe, about 20 schools boycotting which will not make much difference to USNews.com's annual mischief.
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Probably not much new here until the New Year

December 22, 2022

I wish everyone a pleasant holiday break!
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In Memoriam: Herbert Morris (1928-2022)

December 20, 2022

A longtime UCLA faculty member, there are more details here.
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