Brian Leiter's Law School Reports

Observations on lateral hiring with tenure during 2011-12

A few random thoughts related to this list:

(1)  A lot of lateral moves by scholars in international law, legal history, and constitutional law.

(2)  Wisconsin lost three productive, mid-career senior faculty--not good!

(3)  Three senior hires by Nevada!

(4)  UCLA recruited two faculty from Michigan, a notable coup.

(5)   The "top ten" moves of the year (in terms of significance for the hiring and/or the losing school) might include:  Adler from Penn to Duke; Cushman from UVA to Notre Dame; Dudziak from USC to Emory; Morrison from Columbia to Chicago; Nourse from Wisconsin to Georgetown; Powell from GW back to Duke; Rossi from FSU to Vanderbilt; and Sykes from Stanford to NYU.  But that list no doubt reflects mainly the limits of my knowledge of all the work being done by those who moved this year.

 

Rookie hiring during the 2011-12 Season

Sarah Lawsky (UC Irvine) has compiled some useful charts (and follow the links therein for others) about the recently concluded rookie hiring season.  As she notes, the charts are based on incomplete data; they also track only tenure-track hires across all law schools.  However, what they do reveal is consistent with my imperssion that, as in the job market generally, it was a difficult year to get hired as a law professor.

Salkin Named Dean of Touro Law

Touro Law Center has named Patricia Salkin, the Associate Dean at Albany Law School, as its new dean.  Salkin, who holds her JD from Albany, is a land use scholar and has served on transition teams for Eliot Spitzer, Andrew Cuomo, and Eric Schneiderman.

CHE Write-up on Tamanaha's Forthcoming Book on Law Schools

It's here; the book includes a lot of the material that we have often linked to over the last year.  The quote from me in the article sounds much more lukewarm than what I sent to CHE when asked for comments, so I'll just reprint what I wrote to Ms. Mangan when she asked me for comment on the book:

First, in case you haven't seen it, here's something I wrote awhile back about reform in legal education:
http://leiterlawschool.typepad.com/leiter/2012/03/four-changes-to-the-status-quo-in-legal-education-that-might-be-worth-something.html

As you will see, most of these put me on the same page as Tamanaha.  If there's one theme that runs through his book it is that we need more *kinds* of law schools out there, that the "Chicago model" or the "Harvard model" shouldn't be the only one.  And that will require the ABA to loosen up some of its accreditation requirements.    Given the neoliberal paradigm in which we live, the only 'solutions' are going to come through the marketplace--no one can just mandate that faculty teach more and write less.   Some institution has to show that there's an actual market for a cheaper law degree delivered by faculty who emphasize teaching over research.

A lot of the book is clearly a fair description of the current state of legal education in America, and a useful compendium of data.  He does harp more on the negatives than the positives, and is obviously too generous in his treatment of some of the critics, for example, saying little about the numerous errors in David Segal's NY Times articles.    (There are also minor errors in the book, but not too many--for example, he's mistaken about the amount of 'merit' aid schools like Yale and Harvard award.)  

Although he gives sustained attention to the perverse influence of the U.S. News rankings, in some ways he still understates their impact.  For example, he notes, correctly, that schools have been expanding their faculties, but notes that this is unlikely to improve academic reputation as measured by U.S. News.  But that's not the issue:  the issue is that, all else being equal, the U.S. News rank of a law school is a function of per capita expenditures, and almost nothing else.  The most profligate spender per capita is the "best" law school--that's why Yale always tops Harvard.  While many of the trends in legal education are just part of broader trends in higher education over the last generation (as he sometimes notes), there's no doubt that the U.S. News "incentives" have pushed law schools further in the wrong directions.

I would certainly encourage a prospective law student, especially one not likely to get into one of the very top schools, to read this book.

UPDATE:  Orin Kerr (George Washington) also has a favorable write-up of the book.

In Memoriam: Louis Pollak

Judge Louis Pollak, former dean of both Yale and Penn Law, passed away yesterday.  I've posted a bit more length here.

BU's Farnsworth to be the New Dean at Texas

Profile here.  Farnsworth is author of a wonderful book that I often recommend to incoming law students looking for summer reading:  The Legal Analyst.  The jurisprudence chapter is quite thin, but the other chapters are terrific introductions to different intellectual and disciplinary tools for analyzing legal issues.

On "faculty productivity" studies

Tamara Piety (Tulsa) writes:

On the Roger Williams study, I don’t think it is “a good snapshot of more regional law schools with highly productive faculties”  for a number of reasons. My first objection is that the report does not really count “productivity.” Rather it counts only productivity in certain selected journals.  At the heart of my critique is a concern about whether what is included and what is left out of that selection can be justified as validly discriminating between the various journals on the basis of quality. The study is entitled,  “Per Capita Productivity of Articles in Top Journals, 1993-2011: Law Schools Outside the U.S. News Top 50.” The words “top journals” modifies the word “productivity” and clearly signals the limitations of the study.  However, the report is commonly referred to as simply “the productivity study” by both RW and others. I understand that calling it “the productivity study” is shorthand, but if faculty are published in journals not captured by the study, that productivity is not reflected and thus makes it impossible to distinguish between those who are publishing below the somewhat arbitrary cut-off and those who are not publishing at all. That seems unfair and I think all would agree that there is a big difference between these two conditions. There are quite a few respectable journals not captured by RW’s methodology. 

Yet more on Liz Warren

MOVING TO THE FRONT FROM MAY 4--UPDATED

My former Texas colleague Mark Gergen, now at Berkeley, and who was also at Texas when Liz Warren was there (unlike me) writes:

Thanks for the two posts on Liz. If you revisit the subject consider making two points. One is that the most striking thing about Warren's career path is that she is a graduate of Rutgers Newark Law School. The elite law faculties have very few graduates from non-elite schools. Not surprisingly, they tend to be very able.

The other point goes to the diversity listing. There are numerous examples of faculty being listed as within a diversity category who are not perceived as diversity hires by proponents of diversity in hiring. The identification of Liz as part American Indian was in 1986. This was at a time when the institution wanted to increase the numbers for reporting purposes. The institution's purposes may have been cynical. I have no reason to think that Liz was acting cynically in identifying her Indian heritage. Unlike some others I could name, she never joked about the matter. No internal constituency that favored diversity hiring ever perceived her as filling this role. Certainly she never claimed to fill this role.

UPDATE MAY 6: I see that the obsessed are still afflicted with the non-issue du jour. Two observations about this most recent display: (1) Professor Zywicki, a law professor at George Mason who has never participated in hiring at an elite law school (like Texas, Penn or Harvard, all schools where Warren was hired), declares it "obvious...why Elizabeth Warren self-identified as Native American all those years...which was to get an edge in hiring." As we have noted previously, Professor Zywicki is sensitive about why he is not at an elite law school, and no doubt the fantasy that elite law schools are falling over themselves to find Native Americans (in his own field nonetheless!) offers some consolation, but for anyone ever involved in hiring at any of the elite law schools at issue in Professor Warren's case, the assumption is a bit silly. For 11 of my 13 years at the University of Texas, I was on the appointments committee, several times running lateral and/or rookie hiring, and only once did I ever hear the "Native American" heritage of a candidate mentioned, and it was met with a general shrug. Given how right-wing crazies hate affirmative action, it is surprising how naive they are about its actual operation at elite law schools. (The embarrassing quote from Larry Sabato, a political science professor at UVA, tells us more about political science departments than anything else!) (2) Bizarrely, Professor Zywicki is concerned that "a credentials snob like Leiter doesn’t raise an eyebrow at Harvard’s lone Rutgers grad." The reason not to "raise an eyebrow" is the one, noted above, by Professor Gergen, but even some commentators at the Volokh blog were puzzled by the accusation that I, of all people in legal academica, is a "credentials snob"! I will plead guilty to being an egregious smarts snob, which is why anyone who has ever been on appointments with me can name many superbly credentialed candidates that I opposed on the reasonable grounds that they were, in reality, "f-----g morons." Credentials can sometimes be good proxies, but they tend to be easily defeasible in legal academia, a lesson that some elite law schools learned the hard way. Nothing I've ever written or done would suggest otherwise.

All of which is to say that the answer to this commenter's question may well be 'no.' (This comment is also amusing, and suggests the Bernstein-Zywicki show is getting to be a bit much for the regular readership.)

ANOTHER:  Adam Levitin, a bankruptcy and commercial law scholar at Georgetown, writes:

One point to add to your coverage of the Elizabeth Warren heritage non-issue.  Todd Zywicki has a long history of bad blood with Elizabeth Warren.  Todd was the only academic who supported the 2005 Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act [BL:  the "No Credit Card Company Left Behind Act"].  He and Elizabeth locked horns repeatedly in the multi-year legislative fight leading up to the Act, which Todd testified was so perfect that he wouldn't change a single word of the statute (this for a statute with missing words and incomplete sentences!).  Todd has never hesitated to take a swing at Elizabeth since, be it on Volokh or on the WSJ op-ed page, and while their disagreement is fundamentally political some of Todd's writing does have a personal edge to it.  Therefore I don't know if this is simply score settling for Todd, but it is notable that he of all law professors is leading the charge, even though the underlying issue isn't one to which he has devoted particular attention in the past.  Perhaps the best test is this:  does anyone think Todd would have written anything on the topic if the candidate had been someone else? 

I appreciate the context supplied by Professor Levitin, though I don't know the answer to his final question.  The George Mason folks increasingly remind me of the Stalinists of yesteryear, obsessed with ideological purity and relentless in pursuit of their ideological enemies.  Perhaps this is personal, and perhaps it is just "pure politics" as it were.

AND ONE MORE:  The observations of Carl Bogus (Roger Williams) are pretty much what anyone who actually knows how law schools work would have concluded, but he sets it out well.

Chen Guangcheng Offered Visiting Scholar Slot at NYU

The WSJ is reporting that Chinese activist Chen Guangcheng  has been offered a position as a visiting scholar at New York University.  NYU Law Professor Jerome Cohen seems to have engineered the deal.  

More on Liz Warren, Harvard, and Affirmative Action

Andrew Strom, Harvard Law School class of 1993, writes:

I saw your post about Elizabeth Warren, and while you make good points, what is missing (not surprisingly) is evidence about what actually occurred at Harvard.  I attended Harvard Law School from 1990 to 1993.  While I was there the single biggest issue on campus was the absence of women of color on the faculty.  At that time, there were zero women of color on the Harvard Law School faculty.  This was such a big issue that nine students occupied the Dean's office to protest the school's hiring practices.  Elizabeth Warren was a visiting professor at Harvard from 1992 to 1993.  I know from my own experience that students who were part of the diversity movement never thought of her as a woman of color, and the administration never identified her to students as a woman of color when it was defending its hiring practices.  When Harvard did have women of color as visiting professors there was often pressure from students for the administration to extend offers to those professors.  Elizabeth Warren's name was never floated during any of those conversations. 

I can also say that I took bankruptcy law with Professor Warren and she was an excellent professor.  She had total mastery of the subject matter and she did a great job of conveying it to students.

Hardly surprising, to me at least, but a useful additional bit of evidence.