Brian Leiter's Law School Reports

Cook from MSU to Georgia

Julian A. Cook III (criminal law and procedure), currently an Associate Professor at Michigan State University College of Law, has accepted a tenured offer from the law school at the University of Georgia.

How Not to Start Your Legal Career

Unless you're a spoiled rich kid, in which case it won't matter.

Brandon from Vanderbilt to Alabama

Mark Brandon (constitutional law), who is Professor of Law and Political Science at Vanderbilt University (and who was, before that, a tenured faculty member in the top-ranked Department of Political Science at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor) has accepted a Chair in the law school at the University of Alabama.  That's a major appointment for Alabama, which has done a lot of strong hiring at the untenured level, but has not made many senior, lateral appointments.

Kinports & Ross from Illinois to Penn State

Kit Kinports (criminal law & procedure, constitutional litigation) and Stephen Ross (antitrust, statutory interpretation), a couple who are professors at the University of Illinois College of Law, have accepted offers to join the law faculty at Pennsylvania State University/Dickinson School of Law at the new University Park campus (the main campus of PSU).

Congratulations to law professors...

Regina Austin (Penn), Derrick Bell (NYU), David Cole (Georgetown), and Mari Matsuda (Georgetown) who have been recognized as among "the 100 most dangerous academics" in America by crypto-fascist hatchet man David Horowitz in his newest book, part of his general campaign to destroy American universities.  You know you must be doing something right when the lunatic fringe singles you out for your work.

Three Offers by Georgetown

The law school at Georgetown University has voted out three lateral offers, two senior, one junior.  The senior (i.e., tenured) offers are to Randy Barnett (constitutional law, contracts) at Boston University and Rosa Brooks (international law) at the University of Virginia; the junior offer (with a short fuse on the tenure decision, so it is de facto a tenured offer) is to Derek Jinks (international law), who is currently Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Texas at Austin.

Ten Highest Paid University of California Law Faculty

Via Law Blog Emperor Caron, I learn that a San Francisco paper has made available rather striking salary data on the highest paid University of California employees during the 2004-05 academic year.  The listing is based on "total pay" for that academic year, which includes not only salary, but also "overtime, bonuses, housing allowances, relocation allowances, administrative stipends, revenue sharing and more than a dozen other types of cash compensation."  It did not include benefits.  "Total pay" tended to be noticeably higher for those recruited to the UC system recently; long-time faculty are presumably not getting the same kinds of housing allowances and the like.  Note that he data also does not indicate the extent to which these "total pay" figures are stable or once-off or of fixed duration.

The ten highest paid law faculty, in terms of "total pay" during 2004-05, were (small differences [e.g., one or two thousand dollars] were treated as ties):

1.  Michael Schill (Dean, UCLA)

2.  Neil Netanel (UCLA)

3.  Mark Grady (UCLA)

4.  Daniel Farber (Berkeley)

5.  Katherine van Wezel Stone (UCLA)

6.  Christopher Edley (Dean, Berkeley)

7.  Daniel Rubinfeld (Berkeley)

8.  Robert Cooter (Berkeley)

8.  Melvin Eisenberg (Berkeley)

8.  Rachel Moran (Berkeley)

Netanel, Grady, and Stone were all very recent recruits to UCLA; Farber is a relatively recent recruit to Berkeley.

In terms of 2004-05 salaries, if we exclude the two Deans who made the list (Christopher Edley at Berkeley, who earned $280,000, and Michael Schill at UCLA who earned $266,000), here are the ten law professors with the highest salaries in the UC system (rounded to the nearest thousand):

1.  Mark Grady (UCLA) (225)

2.  Stephen Yeazell (UCLA) (220)

3.  Richard Abel (UCLA) (215)

3.  Joel Handler (UCLA) (215)

5.  Grant Nelson (UCLA) (210)

6.  Robert Hillman (UC Davis) (208)

7.  Melvin Eisenberg (Berkeley) (201)

7.  Daniel Rubinfeld (Berkeley) (201)

9.  Jesse Choper (Berkeley) (198)

9.  Daniel Farber (Berkeley) (198)

Knowing something about salaries at Texas, and at Virginia (where the data is also public), I must say that I was surprised that salaries were not generally higher at Berkeley and UCLA.  Perhaps some of the surprising disparities in compensation, especially at UCLA, were known previously; but if not, I also imagine the publication of this data will be sending a lot of folks to the Dean's office!

UPDATE:  Rosa Brooks (Virginia) is surely right about the likely political ramifications of publishing this data.

More Lateral Hires and Offers by Illinois

The University of Illinois College of Law has made two more lateral appointments (in addition to the hiring of Christine Hurt (corporate) from Marquette reported earlier):  they have hired Amitai Aviram (antitrust, business associations, law and economics), currently an Assistant Professor of Law at Florida State University; and Robert Lawless (corporate, bankruptcy), currently holder of a Chair in the law school at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, and prior to that a faculty member for almost a decade at the University of Missouri, Columbia (Lawless is also an Illinois Law grad).

In addition, Illinois has made senior offers to the lawyer/economist Andrew Morriss, who is the Galen J. Roush Professor of Business Law and Regulation and Associate Professor of Economics at Case Western Reserve University (and who is well-known for empirically informed work in a variety of areas); and to Erin O'Hara at Vanderbilt University, who also works in economic analysis, and behavioral law and economics, in a variety of areas, including choice of law and criminal law.

Two observations.  First, I am hard-pressed to think of a law school more completely transformed in the last few years than Illinois.  From a school that had almost no presence in interdisciplinary legal scholarship (other than longtime distinguished faculty member, Thomas Ulen), Illinois has built up a large cohort of junior and senior scholars working in law and economics (broadly construed) and law and philosophy (broadly construed).  Second, Florida State has to be acknowledged as a traditionally regional law school that has established itself--much like San Diego did in the 1990s, or Cardozo, Chicago-Kent and George Mason before that--as having a very good eye for junior talent, as reflected in the schools now raiding FSU.  Aviram's move to Illinois follows Virginia's recruitment of Gregory Mitchell this year as well.  FSU has warded off recruitment efforts of some other faculty by top 25ish schools as well.

Fun with SSRN Downloads Again

We haven't played this game in awhile.  Here is some download data for the last 12 months, as updated on February 1, 2006.

Ranking of Schools by Total Downloads (# of downloads; # of new papers, # of downloads per paper for all papers in the last 12 months)

1.  Harvard Law School (39,148 downloads; 93 papers; 77 downloads per paper)

2.  University of Chicago Law School (29,162 downloads; 73 papers; 89 downloads per paper)

3.  Stanford Law School (26,818 downloads; 42 papers; 101 downloads per paper)

4.  UCLA School of Law (25,708 downloads; 75 papers; 82 downloads per paper)

5.  George Washington University Law School (24,981 downloads; 73 papers; 132 downloads per paper)

6.  Columbia Law School (24,648 downloads; 46 papers; 103 downloads per paper)

7.  University of Texas School of Law (24,293 downloads; 68 papers; 121 downloads per paper)

8.  Yale Law School (22,600 downloads; 72 papers; 92 downloads per paper)

9.  University of Illinois College of Law (17,324 downloads; 62 papers; 78 downloads per paper)

10. Georgetown University Law Center (17,178 downloads; 46 papers; 73 downloads per paper)

Ranking of Faculty by Total Downloads (# of downloads; # of new papers; # of downloads per paper for all papers in the last 12 months)

1.  Lucian Bebchuk (Harvard) (15,205 downloads; 10 new papers; 131 downloads per paper)

2.  Bernard Black (Texas) (10,492 downloads; 11 new papers; 210 downloads per paper)

3.  Stephen Bainbridge (UCLA) (8,558 downloads; 5 new papers; 165 downloads per paper)

4.  Cass Sunstein (Chicago) (7,176 downloads; 15 new papers; 98 downloads per paper)

5.  Daniel Solove (George Washington) (7,149 downloads; 6 new papers; 397 downloads per paper)

6.  Mark Lemley (Stanford) (7,073 downloads; 8 new papers; 150 downloads per paper)

7.  Francesco Parisi (George Mason) (6,155 downloads; 7 new papesr; 104 downloads per paper)

8.  John Coffee, Jr. (Columbia) (5,972 downloads; 1 new paper; 351 downloads per paper)

9.  Brian Leiter (Texas) (5,648 downloads; 5 new papers; 565 downloads per paper)

10. Larry Ribstein (Illinois) (4,302 downloads; 10 new papers; 151 downloads per paper)

11. Orin Kerr (George Washington) (5,249 downloads; 4 new papers; 375 downloads per paper)

12. Roberta Romano (Yale) (4,911 downloads; 6 new papers; 378 downloads per paper)

13. Ronald Gilson (Columbia & Stanford) (4,835 downloads; 3 new papers; 242 downloads per paper)

14. Richard Posner (Chicago) (4,533 downloads; 3 new papers; 181 downloads per paper)

15. Jesse Fried (Berkeley) (4,073 downloads; 6 new papers; 145 downloads per paper)

16. Reinier Kraakman (Harvard) (4,034 downloads; 3 new papers; 212 downloads per paper)

17. Randy Barnett (BU) (3,703 downloads; 6 new papers; 247 downloads per paper)

18. Steven Shavell (Harvard) (3,672 downloads; 10 new papers; 44 downloads per paper)

19. Brian Cheffins (Cambridge) (3,635 downloads; 6 new papers; 145 downloads per paper)

20. Lynn Stout (UCLA) (3,624 downloads; 5 new papers; 145 downloads per paper)

A few other notable stats:

Michigan State University's College of Law (with 28 new papers) had a strong 109 downloads per paper over the last 12 months.  Two other U.S. schools with at least ten new papers also had at least 80 downloads per paper:  Rutgers-Camden (11 new papers); Miami (10 new papers).  Loyola-Chicago had 8 new papers and 116 downloads per paper.

Among faculty with at least five new papers, those with strikingly high numbers of downloads per paper were Christopher Yukins [George Washington) (216 downloads per paper) and Max Schanzenbach (Northwestern) (264 downloads per paper). 

What does it all mean?  Write in corporate law or IP to increase downloads?  Get a blog?  Who knows?

New Blog on Antitrust Law

Here.