Brian Leiter's Law School Reports

Which areas of law deserve more attention/investment from law schools...

...in the form of more full-time faculty doing research in the area.  It's our topic du jour, so perhaps a poll of readers will prove informative.  No lobbying for votes by blogs in particular areas!  The poll only includes areas about which one hears with some regluarity concern that they are under-treated by law schools (so no constitutional law, corporate law, tax, criminal law, which almost all law schools are well-represented in or try to be).

When the results are in, I'll open them for discussion next week.

UPDATE:  Unfortunately, the Workplace Law blog linked to the poll, which resulted in a surge for employment law.  I've asked  them to remove the link, otherwise we will have to drop employment law from the results, which would be unfortunate.

Is hiring of labor and employment law professors disproportionately down?

I'm skeptical.

Columbia's Trevor Morrison to be New Dean at NYU

I'm a bit late on this one, but it happened while I was on the road.  Like Stanford's new Dean, Liz Magill, Professor Morrison is unusually young to be taking over leadership of a major law school.  A new trend, perhaps?

Job Placement

Blog Emperor Caron has a useful set of links to the NLJ compilation of recent data about which schools had the best long-term employment rates, big firm placement, federal clerkship placement, and so on.

U of Arizona Law Cuts Official Tuition Rate

Story here.  The reality, of course, is that actual tuition is being cut across the country, as I have heard repeatedly from Deans at a wide variety of law schools, all of which are spending more on financial aid to attract the students they want.  (I am surprised in the linked article by the comment attributed to Brian Tamanaha [Wash U/St. Louis], who is quoted as pronouncing that U of Arizon's tuition has to be even lower.)

Bales Named Dean of Ohio Northern

Professor Rick Bales of Northern Kentucky University School of Law has been named the new law dean at Ohio Northern University.  

SSRN Downloads

Haven't mentioned them in awhile, but I see Lawrence Cunningham (George Washington) compiled a list.  As we've noted before, SSRN downloads are affected by area (corporate, intellectual property, and law and economics folks make more use of SSRN than scholars in other fields), and extraneous factors (like having a blog!).

Guernsey Named Dean of Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Guernsey, the former dean of Albany Law School and Southern Illinois University School of Law, and a current member of the Albany Law faculty, has been named the new dean and president of Thomas Jefferson Law School. 

Ideological diversity in law schools...

...the non-issue that just won't die.  For my earlier take, see this exchange with Yale's Peter Schuck.  (I should disclose that I was invited to the Federalist Society event, but was already committed to a conference during those days; I would have declined in any case, since I don't think the topic is intellectually substantial.)

April Fool's Day at Legal Theory Blog

Larry Solum always has some very funny parodies.  This is my favorite from yesterday's batch.  Several years ago, Solum published such a good April Fool's parody of me that for two years afterwards I would get e-mails from overseas asking for copies of the paper!