The former Texas Southern students say their D on Contracts was arbitrary and capricious. [Houston Chronicle] Per @tedfrank, “Doesn’t it sort of prove you deserve the bad law-school grade when you bring a frivolous lawsuit over it?”
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Posts tagged as:
law schools
My new post at Cato at Liberty is on Italian labor law professors Pietro Ichino and Carlo Dell’Aringa, who live under police protection because of their support for liberalization of the job market; two other professors, Massimo D’Antona and Mario Biagi, have been killed by Red Brigades gunmen. More: Coyote.
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The New York Times reporter whose series on law schools has set off a furor lately talks with Bloomberg’s Lee Pacchia about the schools’ high cost, the role of the ABA as accreditor, and the competition for prestige that shapes many of the schools’ actions.
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I’ve got a new piece up at Minding the Campus, the higher education reform site, with more to say about Teresa Wagner’s lawsuit against the University of Iowa College of Law charging ideological discrimination because of her conservative beliefs. Earlier here.
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Update: Adam Liptak covers this case today in the New York Times and generously quotes me:
Walter Olson, a fellow at the Cato Institute, the libertarian group, and the author of “Schools for Misrule: Legal Academia and an Overlawyered America,” said there was nothing unusual about the number of Republicans on Iowa’s law faculty.
“What would count as freakish would be to find two dozen registered Republicans on a big law faculty,” Mr. Olson said. “Law schools are always setting up committees and task forces to promote diversity on their faculty, which can serve to conceal an absence of diversity in how people actually think.”…
Mr. Olson said he had mixed feelings about the Eighth Circuit’s decision, saying it may have identified an instance of a real problem while allowing it to be aired in the wrong forum.
“I have serious misgivings about asking the courts to fix this through lawsuits,” Mr. Olson said. “It threatens to intrude on collegiality, empower some with sharp elbows to sue their way into faculty jobs, invite judges into making subjective calls of their own which may reflect their assumptions and biases, all while costing a lot of money and grief.”
“At the same time,” he added, “there’s a karma factor here. Law faculties at Iowa and elsewhere have been enthusiastic advocates of wider liability for other employers that get sued. They’re not really going to ask for an exemption for themselves, are they?”
(& Althouse, Leef/Phi Beta Cons, Horwitz, Instapundit, State Bar of Michigan, Bainbridge, Elie Mystal/Above the Law, Kent Scheidegger/Crime and Consequences, Andrew Kloster/FIRE and earlier, Federalist Society blog, earlier)
[Original post:]
“A woman who alleges she was denied a job at the University of Iowa College of Law because of her conservative politics can proceed with a discrimination lawsuit against the school’s former dean, a federal appeals court ruled [last month].” [WSJ Law Blog, Ryan Koopmans/On Brief: Iowa Appellate Blog, Risch/PrawfsBlawg, Ilya Somin/Volokh (arguing "that ideological discrimination in faculty hiring by state universities doesn't violate the Constitution")] The court found it significant that of approximately fifty professors who vote on faculty hiring matters at the school, per the lawsuit’s allegations, “46 of them are registered as Democrats and only one, hired 20 years ago, is a Republican.” (Who was the one?)
In Schools for Misrule last year, I made the case that prominent law schools suffer from an egregious ideological imbalance, to the point where their own declared mission suffers in a number of ways. Beyond that, I agree that there is a particular logic in asking government-run institutions, such as the University of Iowa, to be open to a plurality of legitimate viewpoints. Even so — as readers who remember an earlier book of mine, The Excuse Factory, will have guessed — I have severe doubts that lawsuits by disappointed job applicants will really do much to improve fairness in the workplace and counteract arbitrariness in hiring decisions. Such lawsuits seem equally likely to provide a legal weapon to contentious applicants whether or not their talents are clearly superior, invite outside arbiters to apply subjective standards of their own, and take a great toll in collegiality, time, expense and emotional wear and tear, all while encouraging defensive employment practices that help no one. Still, this is not the view of law faculties at places like Iowa, which have tended to cheer on the expansion of employer liability year after year with great enthusiasm. So it may be rather hard for them to mount a convincing complaint when they are made to drink from the cup they have prepared for the rest of society.
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Another law professor finds the hot-coffee and obesity lawsuits admirable, and Ted Frank once more begs to differ.
Legal academia is in mourning for one of its most distinguished and multitalented figures, Larry Ribstein, a key scholar in corporate law and a provocative and rigorous exponent of law and economics thinking. Larry was an early blogger (at Ideoblog and more recently Truth on the Market), an influential critic of prosecutorial and regulatory excess, and a key voice in the debate on what law schools should do. He was also, I am grateful to say, an important friend of this site over many years. Like so many others, I had reason to appreciate his generous gifts of time and engagement, most recently in February when he helped arrange my U. of Illinois speech on Schools for Misrule, for which he served as the friendly counter-speaker, and led me around Champaign-Urbana, to which he was the perfect guide.
Some samplings of the outpouring around the blogosphere: Geoffrey Manne and Paul Caron (with tribute roundups), Steve Bainbridge, Tom Kirkendall (“a teacher who understood precisely what his life’s purpose was and pursued it with an endearing combination of intellectual curiosity, vitality, humanity and good humor,” Dave Hoffman (“a galvanic force… a great and unique voice”), Ted Frank, Henry Manne, Andy Morriss (“I suspect he’s already been named Associate Archangel for Research in heaven and doubled scholarly output there.”). A memorial service is planned at George Mason.
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“You see, law professors — and I should disclose here that I am one — very nearly run the world” [Harvard Law School's Noah Feldman, Bloomberg View] More responses to the New York Times front-pager critical of legal education, as the furor continues: Tim Baran, Daniel Solove vs. commenter. Will Congress hold hearings on law schools? [WSJ Law Blog] Related: David Lat (Federalist Society panel on law school accreditation)
“I only dabble in family law with my reproductive technology work, but my experience with the various conferences I attend has led me to believe that the number of heterosexual men who primarily write and teach in the area and have joined the academy in the last 10 years or so is extremely small, and even when I teach family law topics I can feel myself performing my sexuality to some extent as if it were a ritual to get access or credibility.” [Glenn Cohen, Prawfsblawg]
The story, by David Segal, is here, and yes, I did get there first earlier this year in chapter 3 of my book Schools for Misrule (which you can now take a closer look at through Amazon’s “Look Inside the Book” feature). Reaction from legal academia to Segal’s piece has been largely negative (Matt Bodie/Prawfs, Adler roundup), but Orin Kerr argues:
there’s an underlying point that I think is both important and correct: Law professors, at especially the “top” law schools, are becoming less connected to the legal profession. As a result, over time, they are less likely to know — and therefore less able to teach — the perspective an experienced lawyer would bring to legal problems.
And here is John Steele in the comments section at Prawfs:
Guys, lighten up. The article goes a little overboard here and there but for a general audience readership covers a lot of ground accurately. If “man bites dog” is what makes for news, the fact that students rack up $150,000 in debt and have no clue about mergers get done is news. It’s not news for those of us in practice or law schools or an in-house law departments, but it’s certainly news for the general audience.
Gideon Kanner sees an ideological angle.
P.S. So does Hans Bader. And John Steele amplifies his comments, while Rick Garnett weighs in on the anti-Segal side. Further: Erik Gerding.
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A staffer at Suffolk Law School in Boston solicited “much needed supplies to put in care packages to be sent to deployed troops” in Afghanistan, including a Suffolk student serving there. That didn’t sit well with Prof. Michael Avery, whose letter deploring the request, as well as the display of a large American flag at Suffolk, has been stirring discussion among Michael Graham listeners and Above the Law readers ever since.
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- Blog feature at National Law Journal on future of law schools stirs discussion with contributions by William Henderson, Brian Tamanaha and more, James Moliterno, followups here and here, plus a profile of renegade lawprof Paul Campos;
- Richard Fallon: when should scholars sign amicus “scholars’ briefs”? [via Kenneth Anderson]
- “If law school isn’t miserable, you aren’t doing it right.” [@Popehat]
- “Chicago’s View on the Future of Law and Economics” [Josh Wright] Vanderbilt Law Review publishes tributes to Prof. Richard Nagareda [ConcurOp]
- White House awards ceremony for Legal Left broadcast to >100 law schools [BLT]
- “U of Illinois Law School Admits To Six Years of False LSAT/GPA Data” [ABA Journal]
- Life in legal academia: 10/22 Temple confab on “Aging in the US: The Next Civil Rights Movement?” [via Post, Volokh]
- “All law is public law.” No, not really [Solum on 10/21 HLS conference]
- Thanks to Northwestern’s Federalist Society for inviting me to speak on Schools for Misrule this week as part of my Chicago visit. And thanks to Declan McCullagh for saying “all prospective law school students should” listen to the related Cato podcast. Why not book me for the spring semester to speak at your institution?
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One in twelve residents of the District of Columbia is an attorney, but if you think that seems ample, there are those who disagree:
“It sounds like a lot of lawyers, but it’s not nearly enough,” said Matthew Fraidin, a law professor at the University of the District of Columbia. “There are just an immense number of people who go unrepresented every year. The need for legal service attorneys has increased and the funding for them has decreased.”
I’m quoted in the piece too. [Brian Hughes, Washington Examiner]
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Welcome Prof. Bainbridge readers: The Washington, D.C. Office of Human Rights is investigating Catholic U. for, among other alleged offenses, “not providing [some Muslim students] rooms without Christian symbols for their daily prayers.” Like a legal complaint against the same institution for reinstating single-sex dormitories, this one has been advanced by inveterate publicity hound and George Washington U. lawprof John Banzhaf, whose antics we have discussed often in the past (though not much recently, since he actually seems to like the attention); a few highlights here, here, and here.
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“People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is accusing the SeaWorld parks of keeping five star-performer whales in conditions that violate the 13th Amendment ban on slavery. SeaWorld depicted the suit as baseless.” The action may further an “ongoing, intense debate at America’s law schools over expansion of animal rights.” [AP; related on that academic background, including the role of star lawprofs like Cass Sunstein and Larry Tribe, here, here, here, and here]
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