Brian Leiter's Law School Reports

Trends in Law Blog Readership

Blog Emperor Caron has, of course, collected the facts!  Traffic stats are, in one sense, misleading, since there are huge differences in visit length between blogs as well.  The average length of a visit to this blog tends to be over one minute and forty seconds most of the time; the average length of a visit to the right-wing Instapundit blog, by contrast, tends to be about four seconds.  So how does one combine these two data points--number of visits and length of visit--for a meaningful gauge of readership?  Who knows?

The Hopeless Association of American Law Schools

With another meeting on the horizon, I thought I'd flag my post on the AALS meetings from a few years ago.  Whether it is the meetings of the American Law & Economics Association, or the annual Analytic Legal Philosophy conference, or the newer Empirical Legal Studies conferences, my sense is that specialist meetings of scholars have completely displaced the AALS as the destination of choice for those looking for conferences with intellectual content.  Am I wrong?  (As usual, unsigned comments are unlikely to appear.)

Students Suing Their Law Schools: A Trend?

Curious National Law Journal story here.

The Duke Lacrosse Case: A Duke Professor Pens An Expose of KC Johnson

KC Johnson is the Brooklyn College history professor who became obsessed with the false charges filed against Duke lacrosse players (after an allegation of rape by an African-American stripper hired to entertain them at a party), and has since written a book on the subject with a journalist.  Johnson attracted attention well before that in connection with his battle for tenure at Brooklyn College, where his department tried to deny him tenure on the notoriously slippery "collegiality" grounds--deeming him "immoral, dishonest, disrespectful, and arrogant"--notwithstanding a strong record of teaching and scholarship.  In the end Johnson prevailed in his bid for tenure, becoming at the same time a poster boy for conservative media looking for victims of "political correctness" in the universities.

Perhaps because of his bitter experience with tenure, Johnson has not been content merely to write an expose of the corrupt Durham prosecutor responsible for the Duke lacrosse travesty, but has launched a jihad against any Duke faculty member he deems to be associated with the case (some of whom report, in turn, being viciously harassed by the large stable of right-wing readers of Johnson's blog site devoted to the case--naturally, Johnson denies having anything to do with that).  His ire is particularly aimed at those he dubbed "the Group of 88," Duke faculty (not "organized" as a "group" as far as I can gather) who signed an ad in a campus newspaper after the allegations of rape first surfaced.  You can see the ad here.  The ad, quite explicitly, uses the occasion of the rape allegations to call attention to problems of racism and sexism at Duke unrelated to these allegations; it makes fairly clear that there are issues about racism and sexism at Duke that are independent of the guilt or innocence of the accused players.

Alas, KC Johnson doesn't read too well, and like most misreaders with an agenda, he misreads with a vengeance.  This misrepresentation is typical:

I first noticed this case because of the Group of 88’s ad. Published on April 6, 2006, it unequivocally declared that something happened to Crystal Mangum [the stripper] and publicly expressed thanks to protesters who had carried “castrate” banners and blanketed the campus with “wanted” posters. Such a document betrayed the signatories’ duties as professors to defend due process and seek the dispassionate evaluation of evidence.

Read the ad for yourself, and see if you can find compelling evidence for these claims.

Not content simply to misrepresent the ad the faculty took out, Johnson has also moved on to deride their intellectual work, about which it is not apparent he knows very much other than that it concerns topics he deems unworthy, like race and gender (scroll down to the section on "The Academy" in this long post for a good example; this post is also representative, both of his attacks on faculty and misrepresentation of the ad).  When the Volokh blog, which often runs hatchet jobs on faculty whose politics are to its left, invited Johnson to blog there, he naturally continued his attacks on Duke faculty, not just for their role (real or imagined) in the Duke lacrosse scandal, but also on their scholarship.

In any case, a Duke faculty member has finally taken the time to write a systematic expose of this individual and his jihad against Duke faculty (pp. 162-163 are particularly striking).  Since many law blogs have not only covered the prosecutorial misconduct that is central to the case, but also called attention to Johnson's campaign of vengeance against the "political correctness" he believes the Duke faculty to embody, some law faculty may want to read this expose.

UPDATE:  A partner at a Washington, D.C. law firm writes:

Cornell's Wippman Named Dean at Minnesota

David Wippman (international law) at Cornell Law School has been named the new Dean of the University of Minnesota Law School, effective July 1, 2008.  Wippman, who was a finalist here at the time we chose Larry Sager as Dean in 2006, was an impressive candidate and will, no doubt, be a very good Dean for Minnesota.

Demleitner Named Dean at Hofstra

Nora Demleitner (criminal, comparative, and immigration law), currently Interim Dean of the Law School at Hofstra University, has been named Dean, effective January 1, 2008.

Don't Be Fooled by the Picture!

A useful cautionary note:

A paper published online in September by the journal Cognition shows that assertions about psychology — even implausible ones like “watching television improved math skills” — seem much more believable to laypeople when accompanied by images from brain scans. And a paper accepted for publication by The Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience demonstrates that adding even an extraneous reference to the brain to a bad explanation of human behavior makes the explanation seem much more satisfying to nonexperts.

Eric Racine, a bioethicist at the Montreal Clinical Research Institute, coined the word neurorealism to describe this form of credulousness. In an article called “fMRI in the Public Eye,” he and two colleagues cited a Boston Globe article about how high-fat foods activate reward centers in the brain. The Globe headline: “Fat Really Does Bring Pleasure.” Couldn’t we have proved that with a slice of pie and a piece of paper with a check box on it?

The way conclusions from cognitive neuroscience studies are reported in the popular press, “they don’t necessarily tell us anything we couldn’t have found out without using a brain scanner,” says Deena Weisberg, an author of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience paper. “It just looks more believable now that we have the pretty pictures.”

This reminded me of some of the misuses of evolutionary biology by law professors that Michael Weisberg and I discussed in a recent paper.

Ferejohn from Stanford Poli Sci to NYU (Law & Politics)

John Ferejohn, professor of political science at Stanford University and a regular half-time visitor at New York University for many years, will move full-time to NYU starting in 2009-10, where he will hold appointments in the Law School and the Department of Politics.  Ferejohn is a leading scholar in the areas of positive political theory and the study of political institutions and behavior.

$25 Million Gift to the Law School at Indiana/Bloomington!

Press release here.

Some Originalism about Religion: A Lesson for Mitt Romney (and others)

From Geof Stone (Chicago).