Brian Leiter's Law School Reports

The Best of 2010 Roundup

UPDATE:   Eugene Volokh is true to form (discussing the "ethics" of publishing legal correspondence does not require referring by name to a deranged cyber-stalker, but of course Volokh does), but some commenters actually make relevant responses (and here).  Tedious, but typical of Professor Volokh. 

*2010 began with an uproar about the AALS's rip-off registration fees for its annual conference, as well as some constructive suggestions for improving the annual meeting.   One year later, has anything changed?  Not to my knowledge, sigh.

*In March, Dan Filler (Drexel) joined the blog, bringing more frequent content, as well as a new perspective.

*The U.S. News charade  continued  without meaningful changes, alas.  Since U.S. News is no longer even a news magazine, but a vehicle for misinformation-by-ranking, there seems little prospect of it going away.

*On the other hand, this year's April's Fool post had a lot of folks taken in, at least initially.

*The scandal du jour for the Spring was the racist e-mail from a Harvard 3L, which brought forth the usual assortment of confused and know-nothing commentary from the right-wing end of the blogosphere.  Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.  (But the Volokh blog did offer a wide spectrum of amusement this past year.)

In Memoriam: Eric Schmertz

Eric Schmertz, the former dean of Hofstra Law School, passed away last week.  He was 84.  Schmertz was one of the five founding members of the Hofstra law faculty, appointed in 1969.  In 1982 he was named dean of the law school and served in that capacity for seven years. 

They weren't good enough for the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

The AAAS has now put on-line a list of all its members since its founding, searchable by subject.  The omissions in the "Law" category are just breathtaking--they include such giants of law and legal scholarship in the 20th-century as Karl Llewellyn, Leon Green, Jerome Frank, Milton Handler, William O. Douglas, W. Page Keeton, John Henry Wigmore, and William Prosser.  (Antipathy towards legal realists seems to be playing a role here, though doesn't explain all the omissions.)  This is probably a worse track record of misses than even the Nobel Prize in Literature's!

ADDENDUM:  Larry Garvin (Ohio State) identifies some other surprising omissions:  Robert Jackson, Louis Brandeis, Arthur Corbin, Allan Farnsworth, Thurman Arnold, Max Radin, Charles Warren.

Waldron Receives Phillips Prize in Jurisprudence from American Philosophical Society

Jeremy Waldron, University Professor at NYU and Chichele Professor of Social & Political Theory at Oxford, is this year's winner of the Phillips Prize in Jurisprudence (broadly construed).  A list of past winners is here.

Penn's Wolff on the Repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell"

Here.

Announcing the New Dean Three Days Before Xmas When No One Is Around Actually Is *Not* Normal...

...but that's what DePaul University has done.  The new Dean is Gregory Mark, from Rutgers University at Newark.  Now why the odd timing?  Blog Emperor Caron suggests it is because most of the faculty preferred an inside candidate, not Professor Mark.  That's a pretty plausible hypothesis under the circumstances, and given the generally high-handed misconduct of the DePaul Administration in this and other matters.  That being said, Blog Emperor Caron is getting a bit carried away, since Professor Mark and the inside candidate were both voted as "acceptable" by the faculty, and it is really not that uncommon for a University Administration to choose among the candidates approved by the faculty, without regard to the faculty's rank ordering.  It would have been prudent, of course, for the DePaul Provost to have deferred to the faculty preference in this instance, given the sordid history, but Provost Epp is not notable for his prudence or his judgment.  As Caron notes (and as we expected), several DePaul faculty are weighing outside offers.  Incoming Dean Mark will have his work cut out for him, to put it mildly.

San Diego Dean Finalists

Thanks to Paul Caron, we learn that the three law school dean finalists at the University of San Diego are Emory's Robert Ahdieh, Patton Boggs' Nicholas Allard, and GW's Lawrence Mitchell.

Former Maryland Law Dean Returns $300K Bonus

Former Maryland law dean Karen Rothenberg agreed, today,  to return $300,000 in bonus money to the State of Maryland.  The Attorney General concluded that she had received the money improperly - although for no fault of her own.  I discuss this matter in more detail over at the Faculty Lounge.

Nonsense in Cyberspace Watch

A student just forwarded to me a discussion thread from "Top Law Schools" in which someone claiming to be a law professor (and apparently was believed to be a law professor by the students asking question) posted the following:

To most professors, Georgetown is far more prestigious than, say, Duke or Michigan because of its location and (because of its location) it attracts many more heavyweight scholars than the more isolated schools.

The Internet:  it's still the nonsense and misinformation superhighway!

Law Profs Win Huge Punitive Damages Against West Publishing

Late last week, David Rudovsky, a Senior Fellow on the Penn Law faculty, and Len Sosnov, Professor of Law at Widener, won a $5 million dollar punitive damages verdict in a defamation case against West Publishing.  This from the Philadelphia Inquirer:

In 1991, West published their Pennsylvania Criminal Procedure: Law, Commentary and Forms. A second edition was published in 2001, and the men provided annual updates tracking changes in criminal court procedures.  But in 2008, West wanted to pay them only $2,500 each, so the two men ceased work on the addendum.  Nevertheless, West published an update bearing Rudovsky and Sosnov's names on the title page. The professors sued, contending that an inferior product - only three new cases were cited - damaged their professional reputations.

The Federal jury which issued this verdict awarded each man $90,000 in actual damages and $2.5 million in punitives - a juicy 28 to 1 ratio.  We can fairly assume that there will be a remittitur in this case, given those numbers.  But the case itself is interesting.  Apparently, the professors' contract allowed West to issue updates under their names if the authors wouldn't agree to produce them.  Consequently, this case was simply about whether the $50 update was such a sham - in this case, the company added only three new cases (compared updates prepared by the authors which typically added 150 new cass) - that the authors' reputations were badly harmed.  Apparently, the jury was convinced that they were.

How many of us are wondering whether we have $2.5 million dollars of  academic reputation to damage?  (I know, I know...these were punitives.)