Brian Leiter's Law School Reports

A prediction about the law teaching job market for 2012-13

Although the general economic situation, since the collapse of the global capitalist system in 2008, has largely stabilized in the United States (though obviously events in Europe could have repercussions here in the coming months), there are forces specific to the market for new law teachers that will, I expect, make this coming year a more difficult one.  This is based mainly on anecdotal evidence, but enough of it to suggest there's going to be a real effect.  The significant downturn in applications to law school is going to put significant financial pressure on 50-75% of all law schools in the country, and one way many schools will respond is by doing less faculty hiring or no faculty hiring at all, until they see how their enrollment situations stabilize (if they do).

For your amusement...

Knowing my affection for law professor blogs by right-wing crazies, several different readers sent me this link, so I dutifully post it for your amusement.

Michael McConnell Embarrasses Himself

Sam Bagenstos (Michigan) comments.

DeFranco for Senate

I was interested to learn that Elizabeth Warren (Harvard) has a challenger for the Democratic nomination for Senate in Massachussetts, whom I would gladly vote for given her stands on actual issues relevant to human well-being.  Of course, Professor Warren is preferable to any Republican, but Ms. DeFranco seems the better candidate on the issues.

Law School Dean Searches - Final Update

I've posted my final update to this year's dean search list here.  There were roughly 25 searches by existing law schools, which suggests that the oft repeated rule of thumb - the average law dean lasts five years - is probably a canard.  Based on this year, at least, that the average tenure appears more like eight years and this seems about right to me.

For UK readers interested in the debate about gay marriage

Don't miss this event, there's nobody better or smarter than Les Green thinking about this topic.

Lateral Hires with Tenure Since August

MOVING TO FRONT FROM LAST WEEK--WITH CORRECTIONS AND ADDITIONS

Here are faculty who have moved laterally to a tenured position since the report on this blog last August; I imagine Dan Filler will update his more comprehensive listing (including lateral moves without tenure) before too long:

Matthew Adler (constitutional law, administrative law, law & economics, law & philosophy) from the University of Pennsylvania to Duke University.

Karima Bennoune (international law) from Rutgers University at Newark to the University of California at Davis.

Anu Bradford (international trade) from the University of Chicago to Columbia University.

Charles H. “Chip” Brower II (international law) from the University of Mississippi to Wayne State University.

Tomiko Brown-Nagin (legal history) from the University of Virginia to Harvard University.

Paul Butler (criminal law, civil rights, race & the law) from George Washington University to Georgetown University.

Allison Christians (tax, international tax) from the University of Wisconsin at Madison to McGill University.

Barry Cushman (legal history) from the University of Virginia to the University of Notre Dame.

Scott Dodson (civil procedure) from the College of William & Mary to the University of California, Hastings.

Mary Dudziak (legal history) from the University of Southern California to Emory University.

Nita Farahany (criminal law, law & neuroscience) from Vanderbilt University to Duke University.

Ward Farnsworth (torts, restitution) from Boston University to the University of Texas at Austin (as Dean).

James Gathii (international law) from Albany Law School to Loyola University, Chicago, where he will hold the Wing-Tat Lee Chair in International Law.

Adam Gershowitz (criminal procedure) from the University of Houston to the College of William & Mary.

Leslie Griffin (constitutional law, law & religion, legal ethics) from the University of Houston to the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Deborah Hellman (constitutional law, antidiscrimination law, bioethics, law & philosophy) from the University of Maryland to the University of Virginia.

Jennifer Hendricks (family law, feminist legal theory) from the University of Tennessee to the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Jill Horwitz (health law) from the University of Michigan to the University of California, Los Angeles.

Corporate Practice Commentator: Top Articles of 2011

You can access the full list via Professor Thompson's homepage (at the bottom).  The winning articles are by Afra Afsharipour (UC Davis); Stephen Choi (NYU); Marcel Kahan (NYU) and Edward Rock (Penn) (they had two co-authored articles this year!); Donald Langevoort (Georgetown); Donna Nagy (Indiana); Hillary Sale (Wash U/St. Louis); Randall Thomas (Vanderbilt) and Harwell Wells (Temple); Andrew Tuch (SJD candidate, Harvard); and Charles Whitehead (Cornell).

Law school commencement speakers

What a curious assortment throughout the land, ranging from the natural choices to the surprising!

Todd Zywicki Jumps the Shark on his Elizabeth Warren Obsession

This (from yesterday) is bizarre.  (I know, in cyber-time, I'm late!)

Zywicki says, falsely, that "in the past Warren identified herself as a Native American in order to put herself in a position to benefit from hiring preferences (I am certain that Brian knows this now too)."  Since I don't know this, indeed don't even believe it, I have no idea how he can be "certain" about it.  I hope he'll retract it quickly or explain how he is "certain" that I "know" something I believe is false.  Evidence please?

He says, "[I]f a very prominent conservative law professor (say, for example, John Yoo) had misrepresented himself throughout his professorial career in the manner that Elizabeth Warren has would Brian still consider it to 'the non-issue du jour'? Really?"  Yes.  Here's the proof:  many people thought John Yoo should be put "on trial" by Berkeley for his alleged war crimes during the Bush Administration, and I stated clearly, and to my mind (still) quite correctly, that there were no grounds for Berkeley to proceed against him.  Perhaps Zywicki thinks allegations of war crimes are not as serious as allegations of misreporting one's ethnic status.

Zywicki is puzzled why I compared him to the Stalinists of yesteryear.  Here's why:  (1) everything is political for him; (2) he's motivated by ideology and nothing else; and (3) he wants to destroy his political enemies, no matter what.  He's now proved the point even more clearly.  What an embarrassment for George Mason.  What an embarrassment for the legal academy.

UPDATE:  And since the non-story du jour is back on top here, I'll just repost the link to this sober commentary by Carl Bogus (Roger Williams), which is consistent with all the evidence I've reported, and with what her former colleagues at both Texas and Penn have told me--as well as being consistent with the crucial fact, namely, that elite law schools are not out looking for Native Americans.  Will the ideological zealots let it rest?  I doubt it.

Congratulations to my colleague Martha Nussbaum...

...on this major recognition of her work from Spain.

Law School Salaries and U.S. News Rank

Alfred Brophy (North Carolina) examines some recent SALT data.  Since per capita expenditures on instruction play a huge role in the U.S. News ranking formula, the results are hardly surprising, but it's useful to see it laid out systematically.

Observations on lateral hiring with tenure during 2011-12

A few random thoughts related to this list:

(1)  A lot of lateral moves by scholars in international law, legal history, and constitutional law.

(2)  Wisconsin lost three productive, mid-career senior faculty--not good!

(3)  Three senior hires by Nevada!

(4)  UCLA recruited two faculty from Michigan, a notable coup.

(5)   The "top ten" moves of the year (in terms of significance for the hiring and/or the losing school) might include:  Adler from Penn to Duke; Cushman from UVA to Notre Dame; Dudziak from USC to Emory; Morrison from Columbia to Chicago; Nourse from Wisconsin to Georgetown; Powell from GW back to Duke; Rossi from FSU to Vanderbilt; and Sykes from Stanford to NYU.  But that list no doubt reflects mainly the limits of my knowledge of all the work being done by those who moved this year.

 

Rookie hiring during the 2011-12 Season

Sarah Lawsky (UC Irvine) has compiled some useful charts (and follow the links therein for others) about the recently concluded rookie hiring season.  As she notes, the charts are based on incomplete data; they also track only tenure-track hires across all law schools.  However, what they do reveal is consistent with my imperssion that, as in the job market generally, it was a difficult year to get hired as a law professor.

Salkin Named Dean of Touro Law

Touro Law Center has named Patricia Salkin, the Associate Dean at Albany Law School, as its new dean.  Salkin, who holds her JD from Albany, is a land use scholar and has served on transition teams for Eliot Spitzer, Andrew Cuomo, and Eric Schneiderman.

CHE Write-up on Tamanaha's Forthcoming Book on Law Schools

It's here; the book includes a lot of the material that we have often linked to over the last year.  The quote from me in the article sounds much more lukewarm than what I sent to CHE when asked for comments, so I'll just reprint what I wrote to Ms. Mangan when she asked me for comment on the book:

First, in case you haven't seen it, here's something I wrote awhile back about reform in legal education:
http://leiterlawschool.typepad.com/leiter/2012/03/four-changes-to-the-status-quo-in-legal-education-that-might-be-worth-something.html

As you will see, most of these put me on the same page as Tamanaha.  If there's one theme that runs through his book it is that we need more *kinds* of law schools out there, that the "Chicago model" or the "Harvard model" shouldn't be the only one.  And that will require the ABA to loosen up some of its accreditation requirements.    Given the neoliberal paradigm in which we live, the only 'solutions' are going to come through the marketplace--no one can just mandate that faculty teach more and write less.   Some institution has to show that there's an actual market for a cheaper law degree delivered by faculty who emphasize teaching over research.

A lot of the book is clearly a fair description of the current state of legal education in America, and a useful compendium of data.  He does harp more on the negatives than the positives, and is obviously too generous in his treatment of some of the critics, for example, saying little about the numerous errors in David Segal's NY Times articles.    (There are also minor errors in the book, but not too many--for example, he's mistaken about the amount of 'merit' aid schools like Yale and Harvard award.)  

Although he gives sustained attention to the perverse influence of the U.S. News rankings, in some ways he still understates their impact.  For example, he notes, correctly, that schools have been expanding their faculties, but notes that this is unlikely to improve academic reputation as measured by U.S. News.  But that's not the issue:  the issue is that, all else being equal, the U.S. News rank of a law school is a function of per capita expenditures, and almost nothing else.  The most profligate spender per capita is the "best" law school--that's why Yale always tops Harvard.  While many of the trends in legal education are just part of broader trends in higher education over the last generation (as he sometimes notes), there's no doubt that the U.S. News "incentives" have pushed law schools further in the wrong directions.

I would certainly encourage a prospective law student, especially one not likely to get into one of the very top schools, to read this book.

UPDATE:  Orin Kerr (George Washington) also has a favorable write-up of the book.

In Memoriam: Louis Pollak

Judge Louis Pollak, former dean of both Yale and Penn Law, passed away yesterday.  I've posted a bit more length here.

BU's Farnsworth to be the New Dean at Texas

Profile here.  Farnsworth is author of a wonderful book that I often recommend to incoming law students looking for summer reading:  The Legal Analyst.  The jurisprudence chapter is quite thin, but the other chapters are terrific introductions to different intellectual and disciplinary tools for analyzing legal issues.

On "faculty productivity" studies

Tamara Piety (Tulsa) writes:

On the Roger Williams study, I don’t think it is “a good snapshot of more regional law schools with highly productive faculties”  for a number of reasons. My first objection is that the report does not really count “productivity.” Rather it counts only productivity in certain selected journals.  At the heart of my critique is a concern about whether what is included and what is left out of that selection can be justified as validly discriminating between the various journals on the basis of quality. The study is entitled,  “Per Capita Productivity of Articles in Top Journals, 1993-2011: Law Schools Outside the U.S. News Top 50.” The words “top journals” modifies the word “productivity” and clearly signals the limitations of the study.  However, the report is commonly referred to as simply “the productivity study” by both RW and others. I understand that calling it “the productivity study” is shorthand, but if faculty are published in journals not captured by the study, that productivity is not reflected and thus makes it impossible to distinguish between those who are publishing below the somewhat arbitrary cut-off and those who are not publishing at all. That seems unfair and I think all would agree that there is a big difference between these two conditions. There are quite a few respectable journals not captured by RW’s methodology. 

Yet more on Liz Warren

MOVING TO THE FRONT FROM MAY 4--UPDATED

My former Texas colleague Mark Gergen, now at Berkeley, and who was also at Texas when Liz Warren was there (unlike me) writes:

Thanks for the two posts on Liz. If you revisit the subject consider making two points. One is that the most striking thing about Warren's career path is that she is a graduate of Rutgers Newark Law School. The elite law faculties have very few graduates from non-elite schools. Not surprisingly, they tend to be very able.

The other point goes to the diversity listing. There are numerous examples of faculty being listed as within a diversity category who are not perceived as diversity hires by proponents of diversity in hiring. The identification of Liz as part American Indian was in 1986. This was at a time when the institution wanted to increase the numbers for reporting purposes. The institution's purposes may have been cynical. I have no reason to think that Liz was acting cynically in identifying her Indian heritage. Unlike some others I could name, she never joked about the matter. No internal constituency that favored diversity hiring ever perceived her as filling this role. Certainly she never claimed to fill this role.

UPDATE MAY 6: I see that the obsessed are still afflicted with the non-issue du jour. Two observations about this most recent display: (1) Professor Zywicki, a law professor at George Mason who has never participated in hiring at an elite law school (like Texas, Penn or Harvard, all schools where Warren was hired), declares it "obvious...why Elizabeth Warren self-identified as Native American all those years...which was to get an edge in hiring." As we have noted previously, Professor Zywicki is sensitive about why he is not at an elite law school, and no doubt the fantasy that elite law schools are falling over themselves to find Native Americans (in his own field nonetheless!) offers some consolation, but for anyone ever involved in hiring at any of the elite law schools at issue in Professor Warren's case, the assumption is a bit silly. For 11 of my 13 years at the University of Texas, I was on the appointments committee, several times running lateral and/or rookie hiring, and only once did I ever hear the "Native American" heritage of a candidate mentioned, and it was met with a general shrug. Given how right-wing crazies hate affirmative action, it is surprising how naive they are about its actual operation at elite law schools. (The embarrassing quote from Larry Sabato, a political science professor at UVA, tells us more about political science departments than anything else!) (2) Bizarrely, Professor Zywicki is concerned that "a credentials snob like Leiter doesn’t raise an eyebrow at Harvard’s lone Rutgers grad." The reason not to "raise an eyebrow" is the one, noted above, by Professor Gergen, but even some commentators at the Volokh blog were puzzled by the accusation that I, of all people in legal academica, is a "credentials snob"! I will plead guilty to being an egregious smarts snob, which is why anyone who has ever been on appointments with me can name many superbly credentialed candidates that I opposed on the reasonable grounds that they were, in reality, "f-----g morons." Credentials can sometimes be good proxies, but they tend to be easily defeasible in legal academia, a lesson that some elite law schools learned the hard way. Nothing I've ever written or done would suggest otherwise.

All of which is to say that the answer to this commenter's question may well be 'no.' (This comment is also amusing, and suggests the Bernstein-Zywicki show is getting to be a bit much for the regular readership.)

ANOTHER:  Adam Levitin, a bankruptcy and commercial law scholar at Georgetown, writes:

One point to add to your coverage of the Elizabeth Warren heritage non-issue.  Todd Zywicki has a long history of bad blood with Elizabeth Warren.  Todd was the only academic who supported the 2005 Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act [BL:  the "No Credit Card Company Left Behind Act"].  He and Elizabeth locked horns repeatedly in the multi-year legislative fight leading up to the Act, which Todd testified was so perfect that he wouldn't change a single word of the statute (this for a statute with missing words and incomplete sentences!).  Todd has never hesitated to take a swing at Elizabeth since, be it on Volokh or on the WSJ op-ed page, and while their disagreement is fundamentally political some of Todd's writing does have a personal edge to it.  Therefore I don't know if this is simply score settling for Todd, but it is notable that he of all law professors is leading the charge, even though the underlying issue isn't one to which he has devoted particular attention in the past.  Perhaps the best test is this:  does anyone think Todd would have written anything on the topic if the candidate had been someone else? 

I appreciate the context supplied by Professor Levitin, though I don't know the answer to his final question.  The George Mason folks increasingly remind me of the Stalinists of yesteryear, obsessed with ideological purity and relentless in pursuit of their ideological enemies.  Perhaps this is personal, and perhaps it is just "pure politics" as it were.

AND ONE MORE:  The observations of Carl Bogus (Roger Williams) are pretty much what anyone who actually knows how law schools work would have concluded, but he sets it out well.

Chen Guangcheng Offered Visiting Scholar Slot at NYU

The WSJ is reporting that Chinese activist Chen Guangcheng  has been offered a position as a visiting scholar at New York University.  NYU Law Professor Jerome Cohen seems to have engineered the deal.  

More on Liz Warren, Harvard, and Affirmative Action

Andrew Strom, Harvard Law School class of 1993, writes:

I saw your post about Elizabeth Warren, and while you make good points, what is missing (not surprisingly) is evidence about what actually occurred at Harvard.  I attended Harvard Law School from 1990 to 1993.  While I was there the single biggest issue on campus was the absence of women of color on the faculty.  At that time, there were zero women of color on the Harvard Law School faculty.  This was such a big issue that nine students occupied the Dean's office to protest the school's hiring practices.  Elizabeth Warren was a visiting professor at Harvard from 1992 to 1993.  I know from my own experience that students who were part of the diversity movement never thought of her as a woman of color, and the administration never identified her to students as a woman of color when it was defending its hiring practices.  When Harvard did have women of color as visiting professors there was often pressure from students for the administration to extend offers to those professors.  Elizabeth Warren's name was never floated during any of those conversations. 

I can also say that I took bankruptcy law with Professor Warren and she was an excellent professor.  She had total mastery of the subject matter and she did a great job of conveying it to students.

Hardly surprising, to me at least, but a useful additional bit of evidence.

In Memoriam: Ann Richardson

Professor Ann Bishop Richardson, the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at the University of the District of Columbia School of Law died on April 17.  She joined UDC in 1994 and taught for a number of years in the school's Public Entitlements clinic.    Richardson was 71.

Hastings Takes Dramatic Steps to Boost Its US News Ranking

MOVING TO FRONT FROM EARLIER TODAY--SEE THE UPDATE

Though, remarkably, that isn't mentioned until the very end (and merely in passing) in this story about the decision to cut the student body by 20%.  Hastings, like many large publics, suffers from the per capita expenditures measure in U.S. News, which is the tail that wags the ranking dog.  This kind of move, especially when instructional spending remains unaffected, is literally guaranteed to improve its ranking dramatically once its full effect is incorporated in the data reported to U.S. News.

UPDATE:  Evan Lee, a longtime professor of law at Hastings and the Associate Dean for Research, writes:

I understand that our class size cut looks completely U.S. News driven, but in fact it’s not.  Since the late 1990s, Hastings developed an unusual seriousness about pedagogy that I think was largely a reaction to the pointless cruelty of some 65-Club members in the ‘60s and ‘70s.  Nobody here thought we could really do a first-rate job of teaching 425 students per class.  In particular, we have one faculty member who had two kids graduate from Hastings and he was really bitter about the lack of attention they got here.  Just about everyone on the faculty felt guilty about the situation.

The second big driver was the fact that our graduates were having to wait so long to get jobs.  This does play back into U.S. News, of course, but we were getting a huge volume of complaints from students and grads.  So some of it was just squeaky wheel politics.

The third big driver was that an outside management consulting firm told us we were very fat on the fiscal operations side, personnel-wise.  We needed to consolidate a lot of positions in that part of the operation, and this gave us an opportunity to reduce revenues somewhat. 

And, of course, U.S. News was a driver.  You and others have proved that it has a small-school bias.  But our internal calculations actually show only a modest ceteris paribus increase – maybe 6 to 8 overall ranking slots over 3 years.  There were much cheaper ways of increasing our rankings

California Bar May Mandate Certain "Skills Training" for New Lawyers...

...which would have nationwide ramifications for law schools.

Right-Wing Crazy Obsession Du Jour: Elizabeth Warren Claimed to be Native American

The usual suspects are on the case, but I can't figure out why.  I assume she self-identified in the AALS Directories as Native American because she is (it was news to me, I should add).  Is someone denying that?  It's hard to tell. 

Perhaps, though, the implication is that she got hired for affirmative action reasons, and not because of her work.  (UPDATE:  Here's some right-wing crazies making that argument.) That strikes me as dubious for two reasons

(1) First, there is no pressure to hire Native Americans for affirmative action reasons, except, perhaps, at some law schools in states with large Native American presences (I have this only anecdotally about Arizona and New Mexico).  For affirmative action purposes, all law schools care about are African-Americans and Latinos, and even in those two categories, law school commitment to affirmative action usually varies by region of the country.  On the other hand, because the AALS aggressively polices the racial and ethnic diversity of law faculties, law schools are careful to make sure anyone who could count as an under-represented minority is so-listed (thus, I can recall a faculty member who was the proverbial "Jewish kid from New York" but with some South American ancestry being listed as "Hispanic," though no one would have ever so identified him).

(2) Second, her record of scholarship in bankruptcy is clearly sufficient to get her appointed at Harvard.  She is, after all, one of the three most-cited scholars in the bankruptcy/commercial law field, and she is the only woman in the top ten.  (I could imagine being the top woman in the field might have played more of a role than her being Native American, which surely was irrelevant.)  The other scholars in her field cited as often or more than her--Bob Scott at Columbia, Alan Schwartz at Yale, and Douglas Baird at Chicago--are all obviously appointable at Harvard, despite their lack of Native American ancestry. 

So the bottom line--as it usually is with right-wing craziness--is that this is all silly.

UPDATE:  Still more here.

Law professors: not so "irrelevant" to the Bench after all

Take that, C.J. Roberts!