MOVING TO FRONT FROM OCT. 20 IN LIGHT OF UPDATES AND CORRECTIONS (originally posted Oct. 16)
Which of the more "regional" law schools (those whose graduates mostly practice in the region where the school is located) have a particularly good eye for faculty talent? As a measure of "faculty talent," we looked at faculty at the school over the last decade-and-a-half (roughly) who ended up being hired by top 20ish law schools. The results conform reasonably well to the "common wisdom." Here are the regional schools with really notable eyes for faculty talent; the school where the faculty member ended up being recruited is listed in parentheses after his or her name:
Cardozo Law School/Yeshiva University: Barton Beebe (NYU); Daniel Crane (Michigan); Susan Crawford (Michigan); Lawrence Cunningham (George Washington); John Duffy (George Washington); David Golove (NYU); John McGinnis (Northwestern); Scott Shapiro (Yale), Kevin Stack (Vanderbilt).
Case Western Reserve University: Olufunmilayo Arewa (Northwestern); Rebecca Dresser (Wash U/St. Louis); Michael Heise (Cornell); Andrew Morriss (Illinois); Ann Southworth (UC Irvine); Wendy Wagner (Texas).
Chicago-Kent College of Law: Randy Barnett (Georgetown); Graeme Dinwoodie (Oxford); Daniel Hamilton (Illinois); Cheryl Harris (UCLA); Christopher Leslie (UC Irvine); James Lindgren (Northwestern); Richard McAdams (Chicago).
Florida State University: Amitai Aviram (Illinois); Steven Bank (UCLA); Jonathan Klick (Penn); Gregory Mitchell (Virginia).
University of Arizona: David Adelman (Texas); Mark Ascher (Texas); Lynn Baker (Texas); Katherine Franke (Columbia); David Golove (NYU); Bernard Harcourt (Chicago); Dalia Tsuk (George Washington).
University of San Diego: Stuart Benjamin (Duke); David Law (Wash U/St. Louis); Cynthia Lee (George Washington); Brian Leiter (Chicago); Arti Rai (Duke); Sai Prakash (Virginia); Emily Sherwin (Cornell); Steven Walt (Virginia).
Of course, one data point unavailable from the AALS directories is offers from top 20ish schools turned down; this would help Florida State and San Diego, I know, and might put schools like Wake Forest into the mix as well.
UPDATE: A reader points out that St. Louis University, while not having as many as some of these other schools relative to its size, still has an impressive faculty alumni group for the time period in question, including two legal historians (Barry Cushman, now at Virginia; and Daniel Hulsebosch, now at NYU) and the international law scholar Derek Jinks, now at Texas. St. Louis may have a special eye for legal historians, since, as it happens, Lawrence Friedman (Stanford) began his career there in the 1950s!
ANOTHER: A couple of readers called my attention to the University of California at Davis, whose recent faculty alumni include Jennifer Chacon (UC Irvine), Holly Doremus (Berkeley), Rob Mikos (Vanderbilt), Angela Onwuachi-Willig (Iowa), Spencer Overton (George Washington), and Tobias Wolff (Penn) (and that does not include a number of current faculty who have declined offers from similar schools). I had not listed Davis becuase I did not really think of it as a "regional" school (though I am told most graduates do stay in Northern California) and because it is, itself, fairly close in faculty quality to some of the top 20ish schools I've been using as benchmarks.
SIMILAR TO THE UC DAVIS situation is George Mason University whose faculty alumni since 1993 include Michael Abramowicz (George Washington), Barry Adler (NYU), Margaret Brinig (Iowa, now at Notre Dame), Claire Hill (Minnesota), Eugene Kontorovich (Northwestern), William Kovacic (George Washington), Erin O'Hara (Vanderbilt), Francesco Parisi (Minnesota), and Larry Ribstein (Illinois).
AND MAYBE ONE MORE? Loyola Law School, Los Angeles is perhaps just a notch below those on the original list, buts its roster of faculty alumni include Catherine Fisk (USC, Duke, and now UC Irvine), Larry Helfer (Duke), Robin Kar (Illinois), Kurt Lash (Illinois), and Larry Solum (Illinois).
THIS ONE SHOULD HAVE BEEN ON THE LIST TOO: American University has sent on Jamie Boyle (Duke), Adrienne Davis (Wash U/St. Louis), James Salzman (Duke), and Leti Volpp (Berkeley)--and that's just since 2000.
I should note that we did not look at moves to Emory (just an omission), which would have added a few more names to these lists.
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