Brian Leiter's Law School Reports

Hathaway from Yale to Berkeley

Oona Hathaway (international law), currently a tenure-track Associate Professor of Law at Yale Law School, has accepted a tenured offer from Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California at Berkeley.   Her husband Jacob Hacker, currently Professor of Political Science at Yale, will also join the Berkeley faculty as a Professor of Political Science and as co-director, with Boalt Dean Christopher Edley, Jr., of a new Boalt Center on Health, Economic, and Social Security.

Sharkey from Columbia to NYU

Catherine Sharkey (torts) at Columbia Law School has accepted a senior offer from New York University School of Law, where she visited last fall.  She is the fourth tenured professor to move from Columbia to NYU in the last two years.

NPR Covers the Autoadmit Lawsuit

Here.

Martha Nussbaum and Wikipedia: A Case Study in the Unreliability of Information on the Internet

Details here.

Finalizing Faculty Lists for Ranking Studies for 07-08

MOVING TO FRONT

Over the summer, I plan to carry out a new citation study, and in the fall, we may (finally) undertake a new on-line reputational survey.  To that end, we've compiled draft lists of faculty for 49 law schools that appear likely to rank in the top 35-40 by these different measures.  We may add a few more faculties to the mix, especially for purposes of a reputational survey.  The faculty lists include only academic faculty (an effort has been made to exclude clinical, adjunct, and legal writing faculty, since these studies will focus on scholarly output).  The ranking study will be per capita across the whole faculty, since many have worried that by looking only at the top quarter of the faculty in the past produced distorted results because of one or two very highly cited faculty at certain schools (e.g., Chemerinsky at Duke, or Delgado at Pittsburgh).  The draft faculty list is here:  Download law_faculty_lists_0708.rtf.  Please read the introductory paragraph explaining the criteria for inclusion in the list.  I invite faculty members at the schools in question to post corrections in the comments section below.  You must post under your name with a verifiable e-mail address and, again, post only about your own school.  Corrections would include things like faculty who are retiring or leaving, and so won't be teaching in 2007-08; new hires for 2007-08 not already included on the lists; the mistaken inclusion of clinical or adjunct faculty or the mistaken omission of regular academic faculty; and so on.  Please post only once, and be patient, as comments may take awhile to appear.  Thank you for your assistance.

Note:  the 49 faculties listed are:  Arizona, Arizona State, Berkeley, Boston Coll, Brooklyn, BU, Cardozo, Chicago, Chicago-Kent, Colorado, Columbia, Cornell, Duke, Emory, Florida, Florida State, Fordham, George Mason, Georgetown, George Washington, Harvard, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, Northwestern, Notre Dame, NYU, Ohio State, Penn, Pittsburgh, Rutgers-Camden, Rutgers-Newark, San Diego, Southern Cal, Stanford, Texas, UC Davis, UC Hastings, UCLA, Vanderbilt, Virginia, Washington & Lee, Wash U/St. Louis, William & Mary, Wisconsin, Yale.

UPDATE:  Do NOT e-mail me the corrections, post them in the comments please!  This way it will be a matter of public record what the corrections are, and I won't get multiple e-mails on the same point.  All changes, if they are to be incorporated, need to be posted here.  Thank you all very much for your help.

The Tenure Case of DePaul Political Science Professor Finkelstein

Ordinarily, I would not post on an academic freedom matter here, but the extraordinary, and extraordinarily irresponsible, involvement of Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz in smearing and maligning Professor Finkelstein--who has now been denied tenure by administrators, despite unanimous or lopsided majority votes in favor of tenure by his academic colleages--makes the case noteworthy for the legal academic community.  A Los Angeles attorney who examined Professor Dershowitz's criticisms of Finkelstein with some care found them wholly lacking in merit; and a faculty committee in the Department of Political Science at DePaul that examined Dershowitz's charges of "academic misconduct" against Finkelstein also found them misleading and without foundation.  (It turns out that even Dershowitz's most sensational charge, about an offensive cartoon portraying him ludely, was without merit, since Professor Finkelstein had nothing to do with the cartoon that some website independently appended to one of Finkelstein's articles.) 

I have more details about the case, and the response to it (including a link to a well-crafted letter calling for DePaul to revisit the decision, which I hope concerned law professors will sign), here.  Professor Dershowitz's misrepresentations of the work of a professional colleague have been so egregious that one may have some sympathy for the observation of John Gardner--the Professor of Jurisprudence at Oxford University, and a visiting professor of law, in recent years, at Yale, Texas, and Columbia--who, in signing the letter noted above, remarked:  "To my mind this business reveals only one person who should clearly not be enjoying the privileges and immunities of tenure, and that one person is not Norman Finkelstein."

National Law Journal Writes about Lateral Movement of Faculty among Top Schools

Story here.

International Readers...

...help out the Antitrust Blog with a poll about whether antitrust and competition law is taught in your country.

More Autoadmit News

I have updated the earlier post with more items related to the lawsuit against Autoadmit, including links discussing some rather peculiar comments by law professors on the case (some of whom obviously had not read the complaint).

UPDATE:  The latest news coverage, from Connecticut.  National Public Radio is also preparing a story.

ANOTHER:  Reuters picks up the story.

Wuerth from Cincinnati to Vanderbilt

Ingrid Brunk Wuerth (US foreign affairs law, comparative law, international law) at the University of Cincinnati has accepted a senior offer from the law school at Vanderbilt University, where she will start July 1.