Brian Leiter's Law School Reports

Roithmayr from Illinois to USC

Daria Roithmayr (Critical Race Theory) at the University of Illinois College of Law has accepted a senior offer from the law school at the University of Southern California.

From the Bowels of Cyberspace Again

I am no longer surprised, but continually amused, at the misinformation that circulates in Cyberspace, misinformation posted with complete confidence by (almost always) anonymous posters.  A student e-mailed me the other day to ask about this item:

[Leiter] rails against the "T14" as an arbitrary concept with no grounding in reality, yet when he talks about the top law schools he talks about "the top 14" with Texas replacing Duke.

What evidence was cited for this odd assertion?  None, of course.  The only thing I could come up with that was even remotely related was from the 2002 edition of the Philosophical Gourmet Report, where in the section on studying philosophy in law schools, I gave a list of the 14 strongest law schools in terms of faculty quality, and only that (since faculty quality is what matters in terms of prospects for getting into law teaching).  Is this what the anonymous poster menat?  Perhaps.  But by 2004, Duke had begun improving its faculty, and the 2003 reputational survey suggested the need for a new appraisal, so the Philosophical Gourmet Report for 2004-06 listed 17 top schools in terms of faculty quality.  (A sidenote:  USC may no longer be in this group, after losing two of its top faculty--Chemerinsky and Talley--in the last two years.)  So much for "top 14," even limited to questions of faculty quality.

I did get a good deal of correspondence in response to my earlier posting about the nonsense category "top 14," some from law professors puzzling as to how any students could be so easily conned by U.S. News (answer: most aren't), and some from students insisting the category was meaningful--though oddly no one could cite any actual information undermining my point that "top 14" does not pick out the best faculties, the best student bodies, the best job placement, the best prospects for law teaching, or anything else.  The closest one correspondent came was to reference this informative, though very different, study of job placement (which appeared in Jurimetrics this past summer) which, itself, undermines "the top 14" talk, since it finds Vanderbilt in "the top 14" for national placement, and Georgetown outside the "top 14."  Like all studies (mine included), this one has its own methodological peculiarities; as I noted in the article on "How to Rank Law Schools":

This is a quite interesting and  informative study...but the reader must approach with care what its results mean.  Its regional placement results (the most interesting part of the study) are affected by the number of graduates of each school seeking to find work in that region; hence, for example, in the region that includes New York and Philadelphia, it turns out that North Carolina ranks ahead of Penn and Cornell!  This plainly doesn’t mean a student looking to work in these Northeastern legal markets ought to go to North Carolina instead of Cornell or Penn; rather, the result is an artifact of the very small number of UNC students seeking work in these markets, combined with the fact that they will be a self-selected few with unusually good credentials (the average UNC student presumably doesn’t bother to try to land a job a firm in New York City).  This limitation of the regional results, however, would be apparent to anyone who reads the ranking methodology carefully.  More problematic is the way the author aggregates the regional results into a ranking of schools by “national placement....”  [The author] opts to aggregate regional placement results based on each region’s share of the market for elite law firms.  But since student geographic preferences play an enormous role in where students choose to work (as the author elsewhere notes), any school located in a geographic region with fewer “elite” firms will fare less well by this aggregation method.  Moreover, since “elite” firms are determined in part by revenues, and since revenues are, in part, a function of cost-of-living in different regions of the country (which affects fees charged), the results will also be skewed in favor of schools located in higher cost-of-living areas.

Whatever its own virtues and limitations, this study, like all the other data points I referenced originally, confirms that "top 14" correlates with nothing in the real world:  not job placement, not faculty quality, not student quality, not clerkships, and so on (see here for lots of data).  Like so much on the misinformation superhighway known as the Internet, it flourishes mainly in obscure corners of Cyberspace, though with some leakage here and there into the real world.

Minnesota Law Dean to Step Down at End of Academic Year

Alex Johnson, Jr., Dean of the University of Minnesota Law School since 2002, will step down at the end of this academic year.  Looks like Minnesota will be undertaking a Dean search during 2006-07.

The "Over-Hyped Law School Press Release of the Year"?

A colleague elsewhere sent a link to this under the heading, above.  The title of the press release from the Thomas M. Cooley Law School conveys the flavor:  "Cooley’s Astounding Record-Breaking Pace Continues."  Astounding, indeed.

UNC Dean Search Redux--and the Texas Dean Search

MOVING TO THE FRONT FROM APRIL 12 IN LIGHT OF CORRECTION, BELOW.

The new candidates are Jack Boger, a UNC faculty member and alumnus; Maureen O'Rourke, Interim Dean at Boston University; Rex Perschbacher, Dean at UC Davis; and Kenneth Randall, Dean at Alabama.  O'Rourke is also a finalist in the Texas Dean Search, as are Jody Kraus (Virginia), Larry Sager (Texas), and David Wippman (Cornell).

UPDATE:  A faculty member at Alabama tells me that Dean Randall has withdrawn from the UNC Dean search.

CORRECTION:  Dean Randall is still a candidate at North Carolina, contrary to what one of his faculty members at Alabama explicitly told me.  I regret the error.

World's Fastest Article Rejection by a Law Review

One of our alums in law teaching, Christopher Fairman (Ohio State), reports that the Kansas Law Review, which prides itself on promptness, rejected this article of his only 25 minutes after he submitted it!  It seems they read the title.  Who knew the Kansans were so sensitive?

Gerken from Harvard to Yale

Heather Gerken, a specialist in voting rights and election law at Harvard Law School, has accepted a senior offer from Yale Law School.  Quite apart from Professor Gerken's merits, this is notable in two other ways:  first, there is rarely movement between Yale and Harvard; and second, when there has been movement in recent decades, it has mostly (maybe exclusively?) been from New Haven to Cambridge.

Bibas from Iowa to Penn

Stephanos Bibas (criminal law and procedure) at the University of Iowa has accepted a tenured offer from the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where he joins one of the largest and very strongest criminal law faculty cohorts in the nation (including Claire Finkelstein, Leo Katz, Stephen Morse, and Paul Robinson).

Oregon Dean Search Comes Up Empty-Handed

Story here; an excerpt:

Three finalists were named in the University’s search for the new dean, but the University was unable to secure any of the candidates.

Two of the candidates, Hiram Chodosh, currently the associate dean for academic affairs at Case Western Reserve University, and Gail Agrawal, currently the interim dean of the University of North Carolina Law School, were offered the position, but both accepted offers at other universities.

The third candidate, Kevin Johnson, currently the associate dean for academic affairs at the University of California-Davis, declined the position.

As reported previously, Chodosh became Dean at Utah, and Agrawal at Kansas.

UNC Dean Search Makes MSNBC

Not a welcome development!  An excerpt:

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is spending millions of dollars less to operate its law school than some of its peers - a financial drawback that has stymied attempts to hire a new dean.

UNC has been forced to reopen its search for a dean after it offered the job to Duke University law professor Erwin Chemerinsky, an academic star who said no.

Chemerinsky set off alarm bells, not mincing words in explaining his reason. "I think it's a terrific school, but it's a very underfunded school," he says. "I think any candidate will be concerned over money."

Chemerinsky isn't talking about the dean's salary. In fact, he was happy with the school's "generous" contract offer. What troubled him is the dearth of resources available for necessities such as financial aid, salaries and clinics.

Chemerinsky thinks the financial situation is causing the UNC law school serious problems and that the school needs to raise more money by increasing tuition or by lobbying the General Assembly.

He says the alternative is having to accept not being a top law school.

The law school's budget reveals that the school plans to spend about $15 million in the 2005-06 school year. The school has 39 permanent faculty members, 36 adjunct faculty members and two visiting faculty members.

UNC's law school...has endowed funds totaling $33 million.

Those numbers don't stack up well when compared to law schools at some other public universities.

• The University of Virginia's law school spends more than $50 million each year and has an endowment of $250 million.
• The University of Michigan's law school boasts a $60 million budget and has a $252 million endowment.
• The law school at UCLA has an operating budget of $37 million and an endowment of $44 million.
• The law school at the University of Georgia has a budget of $19 million and an endowment of $48 million.

I'm surprised, I confess, at how small the UCLA endowment is (it's roughly one-quarter UT Law School's, for example), though given the relative youth of the school, I guess that should not be so surprising.