Just out: one of the most serious and wide-ranging podcasts yet on my new book, Schools for Misrule: Legal Academia and an Overlawyered America. I’m interviewed by James Haynes of the Society’s Professional Responsibility & Legal Education Practice Group Executive Committee and Baltimore Federalist Society Lawyers Chapter. It’s 53:25 minutes in length and you can listen here. Thanks also to the 100+ Facebook users so far who’ve “liked” the podcast.
Posts Tagged ‘law schools’
Rude metaphor dept.
The law school process compared to a cattle chute [AtL]
“Cost of a Law Review Article: $100,000; Student Debt to Pay for it: Priceless”
A point I make in Schools for Misrule: in part through accreditation rules, law schools are artificially pressured to channel faculty energy into published scholarly work, despite evidence that much of it will be little read or consulted [Richard Neumann/NLJ via Paul Caron, Kenneth Anderson, Volokh, Scott Greenfield]
Schools for Misrule roundup: Chronicle of Higher Ed, NBN podcast
At his Chronicle of Higher Education blog, Peter Wood of the National Association of Scholars takes a look at ideologically adventurous law school clinics and has this to say along the way (another version):
The hard-left politicization of law schools is surely the larger matter. Walter Olson’s new book, Schools for Misrule: Legal Academia and an Overlawyered America, covers the matter so well that I don’t see much to add.
Hudson Institute scholar Tevi Troy interviewed me 
for the New Books in Public Policy podcast series and you can listen to the results here. Also online now is my appearance on Ronn Owens’ San Francisco-based radio show last month. And this recent Nielsen roundup of Hardcover Law bestsellers had Schools for Misrule at #9, down from #8 the week before.
“Served: How law schools completely misrepresent their job numbers”
If law schools were viewed in the same light as for-profit vocational training schools, there’d probably be a big movement to shut them down:
Many law schools all but explicitly promise that, within a few months of graduation, practically all their graduates will obtain jobs as lawyers, by trumpeting employment figures of 95 percent, 97 percent, and even 99.8 percent. The truth is that less than half will.
Schools use a variety of shabby dodges to undercount jobless graduates while straining to count others as employed, all of which serves little public purpose beyond “the defense of a professional cartel from which law professors benefit more than almost anyone else.” [law professor Paul Campos at the University of Colorado, in the new issue of New Republic] When I spoke recently at Colorado on Schools for Misrule, Prof. Campos was kind enough to be the commenter, and I agreed with pretty much everything he had to say then and afterward.
P.S.: More generally from Alex Eichler, Atlantic Wire. And law school “merit scholarships” aren’t always quite as attractive as they seem.
Law schools roundup
- ABA proposes retreat from use of accreditation as leverage for faculty tenure, AALS practically passes out on floor [Caron/TaxProf, Dave Hoffman/ConcurOp and more]
- “Law professor calls for ban on Koran burning” [Volokh; Liaquat Ali Khan]
- “Are Law Profs ‘Selfless’ Teachers and Scholars Engaged in ‘Public Service’?” [Tamanaha, Balkinization]
- Behavioral law-and-econ has vanquished neoclassical economics? Not so fast, buster [Josh Wright, TotM]
- Left-tilting legal academy? Perish the thought: conference simply aims to combat “spread of laissez-faire ideology” [ClassCrits]
- Concurring Opinions symposium examines forthcoming Yale Law Journal study questioning whether clinic representation makes a difference in client outcomes [LEF, earlier] Hey, watch out, you’re giving ammunition to critics of legal services [Udell]
- Schools for Misrule has spent a lot of time in recent weeks as #1 in the Amazon category of “One-L – Legal Profession.” Thanks for your support!
Washington Times review; Yale Daily News
Attorney Ray Hartwell of Hunton & Williams reviews a certain “excellent,” “wide-ranging” and “richly informative” volume. It’s one of my 
favorite reviews so far; among its other virtues, it gets into the conflicting institutional pressures on law schools that underlie some of the ideological drift. For other reviews, see our posts here, here, and here. Why not order your copy — or a gift copy for a graduate or favored relative — today?
More: Today’s Yale Daily News is out with a story by reporter Nikita Lalwani on the cycle of inbreeding in high-end legal academia: top law schools draw heavily on a few elite undergraduate colleges for their student body, and in turn supply most of the future law faculty for law schools around the country. I’m quoted:
“Harvard and Yale graduates like complicated law more than the general public,” [Olson] said. “Legal academics like these complications because they are intellectually stimulating, but most lawyers just want to be able to advise their clients to either do or avoid doing something.”
And Chicago’s Brian Leiter is quoted saying something with which I’d fully agree:
In an email to the News Apr. 13, Leiter said he finds it troubling that just six schools control so much of the legal academic world.
“It is not a healthy situation, and no doubt accounts for a lot of what ails legal scholarship and explains the legal academy’s susceptibility to intellectual fads,” he said. “As long as the fad takes hold at a couple of feeder schools to legal academia, it’s guaranteed to spread.”
“US News Weighs Request to Add Diversity Measure to Law School Rankings”
The state bar of California is described as being the main proponent of the idea. [ABA Journal] Ann Althouse regards the measure of “diversity” as something “freakishly manipulable.”
Law schools roundup
- ABA accreditors may tighten disclosure rules for law schools [TaxProf, Hoffman, Mystal]
- Did Chicago-Kent vault in rankings just by getting US News to present its name differently? [ATL] More on strangeness of rankings [Bernstein, Somin] Law schools ranked on “diversity,” coherence of concept questioned [John Gordon, Commentary]
- Update: charges pressed against Widener prof over hypotheticals in crim law class [Kerr and more, Thorne/NAS, Reynolds, earlier]
- Applications plunge, perhaps providing a good occasion for rethinking what law schools do [ABA Journal]
- “NLRB Chairman Joins St. John’s Conference on the Evils of Business” [ShopFloor]
- Why lawprofs’ daydreams of power differ from other academics’ [Jay Greene] And my law school travels continue as I discuss Schools for Misrule this week at Colorado, Wyoming, and McGeorge (University of the Pacific).
A right to pursue harassment complaints anonymously?
Scott Greenfield thinks some legal academics may stand in need of a civil liberties refresher course.