A Big Year of Retirements at Michigan

I was perusing the homepage of my law school alma mater, when I noticed that the list of emeritus faculty has a lot of new additions, including many of the mainstays of the school when I was there in the mid-1980s:  Richard Lempert, a leading figure in law and sociology for the past forty years; Philip Soper, the distinguished legal philosopher; Peter Westen, the criminal law expert and legal theorist (perhaps most famous for his critique of the 'empty idea' of equality); and James Boyd White, probably the leading figure in law and literature.  With the loss this year of Scott Shapiro (legal philosophy) to Yale, on top of Soper's retirement, that's a big setback for law and philosophy at Michigan.  (Michigan also lost their key senior law and economics scholar, Omri Ben-Shahar, to Chicago this year, and Robert Howse [private international law] to NYU.) Of course, just two years ago, Michigan had a banner faculty recruitment year, adding Douglas Laycock and Margaret Jane Radin, among others.  So it goes...