Brian Leiter's Law School Reports

UMass - Dartmouth Law Receives Provisional Accreditation

The Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar of the American Bar Association announced yesterday that it has granted provisional accreditation to UMass - Dartmouth School of Law.  The law school operated as the Southern New England School of Law until its acquisition by UMass in 2010. 

Bilek Named Dean of UMass - Dartmouth Law

Mary Lu Bilek, Associate Dean and Professor of Law at CUNY School of Law, has been appointed Dean of the University of Massachusetts School of Law-Dartmouth.  She takes over  next month.  Bilek is a graduate of Harvard Law and has been on the CUNY faculty since 1985.

ASU to Create "Residency"-Style Program for Recent Law Graduates

ABA Journal story here.

On the history of constitutional objections to Obama's healthcare plan

Andy Koppelman (Northwestern) has an interesting overview.  The objections were latecomers, and they went viral not because of their merits (they're awful arguments, that you couldn't get away with in class) but because of an energetic political movement in the United States devoted to thwarting human progress and well-being--which is basically what Jack Balkin (Yale) says, though more politely!

Congratulations to the University of Chicago Law School Class of 2012!

It's been a pleasure and a privilege to teach such talented young men and  women, and I am sure I speak for all of my colleagues in wishing you much professional success and personal happiness in the years ahead!

"Legal Realisms, Old and New"

I've posted a new draft paper on-line.  The abstract:

“Legal Realism” now has sufficient cachet that scholars from many different fields and countries compete to claim the mantle of the "Realist program": from political scientists who study judicial behavior, to the "law and society" scholars associated with the Wisconsin New Legal Realism project, to philosophers interested in a naturalized jurisprudence. But what does it mean to be a “legal realist”? What unites the two most famous “old” Legal Realisms—the American and the Scandinavian—with the “new legal realism” invoked, variously, by sociologists, anthropologists, and political scientists, among others? There are, of course, other “legal realisms,” old and new, from the “free law” movement in Germany more than a century ago, to the Italian realism of the Genoa School today. My focus, however, shall be on the old and new Realisms that are probably most familiar. Is there anything they all share?

I argue that (1) American and Scandinavian Realism have almost nothing in common--indeed, that H.L.A. Hart misunderstood the latter as he did the former, and that the Scandinavians are closer to Hart and even Kelsen than they are to the Americans; (2) all Realists share skepticism about the causal efficacy of legal doctrine in explaining judicial decisions ("the Skeptical Doctrine") (though the Scandinavian skepticism on this score is not at all specific to the legal domain, encompassing all explanation in terms of norms); (3) American Realism almost entirely eschewed social-scientific methods in its defense of the Skeptical Doctrine, contrary to the impression given by much recent work by "new" legal realists; (4) the myth that the American Realists were seriously interested in social science derives mainly from two unrepresentative examples, Underhill Moore's behaviorism and Llewellyn's work with the Cheyenne Indians. Moore's case is a cautionary note in taking au courant social science too seriously; and Llewellyn's work was necessitated by the fact that the "primitive" peoples he wanted to study did not write their judicial opinions down. For any modern legal culture, such "field work" would be unnecessary on Llewellyn's view.

 

 

NALP Report on the Job Market for the Class of 2011

Here.   There are some indications that the market is improved for the class of 2012.

A resource for those interested in studies of the judiciary and jurisprudence more generally

Here.

More sacrifice of academic freedom and independence at Ave Maria

Not surprising, but still they might have tried to do better after the earlier bad publicity.  But maybe this tells us something important about what the school is really about.

"Why the Capital-Managed Firm Rather than the Labor-Managed Enterprise is the Predominant Organizational Form in Market Economies"

Far afield of my main areas, but this struck me as an impressive piece of work that makes a real innovation in the literature.