- The first hard copies of Schools for Misrule have arrived from the printer and they look fantastic. You can order here (and benefit me Amazon-commission-wise as well as through royalties) at very favorable pre-publication prices;
- “Can NY Support Any More Law Schools? Doubts Stall Plans for Three New Campuses” [ABA Journal]
- Professional rigor without Tiers: how Canada’s law school scene differs from ours [Above the Law]
- Villanova “knowingly” fiddled scores to improve law school rating [Paul Caron roundup] By creative use of such measures as library seatage, Michigan’s Cooley contrived to name itself nation’s number 2 law school [AtL] Malcolm Gladwell notes that US News rankings “reward Yale-ness” [New Yorker, Ribstein/TotM] A “good way to distinguish yourself from other law schools is to tell the truth to prospective students” and Washington & Lee has shocked competitors with a significant gesture in that direction [AtL] “Applying SOX (or something like it) to law schools” [Tung Yin, PrawfsBlawg] Morriss/Henderson: “law schools have a special moral obligation to tell the truth about themselves.” [Pope Center]
- Mark Tushnet on academic fads and “mere” doctrinal scholarship [via Boyden, PrawfsBlawg]
- Some law reviews admit their circulation has plunged, others don’t admit it [Ross Davies, Green Bag via Caron] “Girls under trees” deprecated as element in law school web design [Lowering the Bar]
- On lawprof interest disclosures [Gerding/Conglomerate, Salmon, Weiser/SALT]
- Legal academy during World War II mostly silent on government overreach [Sarah Ludington, SSRN via Orin Kerr]
Posts Tagged ‘law schools’
Senator Leahy spares Professor Fried…
…from having to explain what many law professors (not including himself) actually think about constitutional interpretation [Ann Althouse]
Law schools roundup
Just four weeks to official publication date (now March 1) for my book, and it seems as if everyone’s talking about the state of the law schools:
- Bruce Antkowiak (Duquesne): “Why Law Schools Must Reform” [Dan Hull, WSJ Law Blog] “Law Schools: Tournaments or Lotteries?” [Kevin Carey, Chronicle of Higher Ed] Law schools still reluctant to grapple with oversupply problem [George Leef, Pope Center] Oregon joins trend toward restoring mentorship/apprenticeship as part of legal training [AtL] “…because there was no compelling need for additional law graduates” [1985 Missouri decision via AtL]
- Study: free representation from Harvard legal clinic actually worsened outcomes for jobless claimants [Greiner/Pattanayak via Ayres/Freakonomics (“Iatrogenic legal assistance?”), Hoffman/ConcurOp, more, yet more]
- Critical Race Theory makes good? Noted CRT-er Angela Onwuachi-Willig in line for possible appointment to Iowa high court [Wenger, ConcurOp]
- “The rise and fall of law faculty blogs” [Kerr]
- Too much heed paid to “consent,” “autonomy”? Noted feminist Prof. Robin West praises Ohio State’s Marc Spindelman for proposal to have more lawsuits over HIV transmission [Jotwell] Some high-profile lawprofs call for less online freedom in pages of new book [“The Offensive Internet”; Citron, Greenfield, Ron Coleman]
- All publicity is good dept.: along with the glowing advance notices, my forthcoming Schools for Misrule has also drawn brickbats [Brian Leiter; some ABA Journal commenters].
A law school for Alaska?
Don’t Do It Dept.: Alaska is the only remaining state without a law school, so (it’s argued) it must need one. Right? [ABA Journal] Because of the absence of a law school in the Last Frontier, the Alaska Law Review has been published at academic institutions in the Lower 48, first UCLA and more recently Duke.
“Law degree, never used, for sale on eBay”
If they were really transferable, we’d all be in trouble. [Stephanie Landsman, CNBC “NetNet”]
Related: Sunday’s New York Times has a long article asking whether law schools are adequately disclosing the high likelihood that their costly offerings will turn out to be a poor investment for many heavily indebted students. Should U.S. News law-school rankings, like cigarette packs, carry warnings? [Above the Law]
Federalist Society videos online
The Federalist Society has posted numerous videos from its recent National Lawyers’ Convention, including sessions on the aggressive regulatory stance of today’s Environmental Protection Agency, the constitutionality of Obamacare, anonymity and the First Amendment in media and campaign-regulation law, NYU’s Richard Epstein debating Yale’s Bill Eskridge on the court battle over California’s Prop 8, recusal and campaign rules for judges, Dodd-Frank, and the Christian Legal Society v. Martinez case on accreditation of student groups, among other topics. And civil procedure/Iqbal-Twombly buffs may be interested in a luncheon panel held just yesterday in D.C. (I was in the audience) in which four law professors (Don Elliott of Yale, Martin Redish and Ronald Allen of Northwestern, and Rick Esenberg of Marquette) outlined ideas for reforming the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure to reduce discovery costs and improve screening of cases in the earliest stages of filing.
The video above is of the Society’s 10th annual Barbara Olson Memorial Lecture, in which Second Circuit Chief Judge Dennis Jacobs provocatively criticizes legal academia and other precincts of influential legal thinking for misunderstanding the role of the military and its relation to the law.
Law schools roundup
- Making waves in the law blogs: critique of elite law schools’ continuing tendency to elevate theoretical over practical forms of scholarly work [Brent Evan Newton (Georgetown), SSRN, forthcoming in South Carolina Law
Review; some reactions from Steve Bainbridge and, at Prawfsblawg, from Rick Garnett, Kristen Holmquist, and Paul Horwitz]. I argue along similar though not identical lines in the earlier chapters of my forthcoming book. - Law schools inflate placement statistics by only interviewing alums who are employed [Above the Law] And does sheer spending dominate the U.S. News algorithm for ranking top law schools? [same]
- Calls grow for disclosing academic economists’ conflicts of interest [Salmon]. Will lawprofs’ be next?
- Rutgers-Newark law school clinic pursues long-shot lawsuit seeking to hold Iraq war unconstitutional [Jonathan Adler/Volokh]. If you’re a New Jersey taxpayer with doubts about whether you should be obliged to support such lawsuits, you may be one of those horrid meanies guilty of “‘kneecapping’ academic freedom” according to one not especially temperate defense of clinics’ work [Robert R. Kuehn and Peter A. Joy, AAUP] More: Adam Babich, “Controversy, Conflicts, and Law School Clinics” [SSRN via Legal Ethics Forum, and thanks for kind mention in latter]
- “Should Conservative and Libertarian Law Students Consider a Career in Legal Academia?” [David Bernstein/Volokh; some further thoughts from Paul Horwitz, Prawfs]
“Law Schools Overwhelmingly Hire Liberals as Law Professors”
Pretty much confirming all the other numbers out there. It’s a bit too late for me to work it into Schools for Misrule — the text of which is ready to go to the printer any day now — but it’s not as if there’s much real dispute anyway about the leftward leanings of the contemporary American law lectern. [TaxProf; James Phillips and Douglas Spencer, “Ideological Diversity and Law School Hiring”]
Law schools roundup
- Yale Law School “a cult of the 14th Amendment… that happens to have a registrar’s office.” [Elizabeth Wurtzel, Above the Law]
- Admitted applicants up, near-term job prospects down: “The irresponsibility of law schools” [Brian Tamanaha, Balkinization; Annie Lowrey, Slate] Not new, but relevant to debate over unaffordable nature of law education: George Washington University law school trims night program so as to improve its U.S. News rankings [WSJ Law Blog]
- While serving as chief Congressional scold publicly blasting the banking industry, Harvard lawprof Elizabeth Warren also had a $90,000 consulting contract with class-action lawyers suing banks; with the notable exception of Richard Painter, few in the Washington conflict-of-interest industry or legal ethics community seem much bothered [Business Week, Examiner, Wash. Times] Should academics publicly disclose their consulting relationships? [Lawrence Cunningham, ConcurOp]
- Other protections for client confidentiality remain intact, of course: “N.J. Court Says Public Law-School Clinics Aren’t Immune From Open-Records Law” [Chronicle of Higher Education] “Federal employees volunteering for law clinics: What could go wrong?” [Wood, PoL]
- Egalitarian trappings aside, modern academia essentially embodies an older aristocratic ethos [Nate Oman, ConcurOp]
- Great news: several of the highest-profile names in public debates about our legal system have indicated their interest in providing blurbs for Schools for Misrule, now nearing publication.
Mark Osler on RICO
Prof. Mark Osler, who specializes in criminal law at University of St. Thomas Law School in the Twin Cities, interviewed at Abnormal Use:
The pairing of civil and criminal RICO was one of the worst ideas a law professor ever had (yes, one of us dreamed that one up). The extensive rule-making by courts in civil RICO cases has made interpretation and use of the statute so confusing and inefficient that prosecutors avoid it if they can, preferring to charge money laundering or something under the fraud statutes. Given the current state of the law, in which civil RICO is used to tie people up in endless litigation, we would be better off without RICO in the federal code.