Brian Leiter's Law School Reports

Trasviña Named Dean of USF

John Trasviña, the Assistant Secretary for Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity in the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, has been appointed dean of the University of San Francisco School of Law.  He holds a JD from Stanford and previously headed up the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

Brooks from Yale to Columbia

Richard Brooks, a leading contracts and law & economics scholar at Yale Law School, has accepted a senior offer from Columbia.  He's the second senior faculty member to move from Yale to Columbia in recent years (the other being tax scholar Michael Graetz).

UPDATE:  Jonathan Adler (Case Western) points out that technically Brooks is the third, since Thomas Merrill moved from Columbia to Yale a few years ago, but then moved back to Columbia about a year later.

Corporate Practice Commentator's "Top 10" Articles for 2012

The full list is here; the authors of the 11 articles are:  (1) John Armour (Oxford), Bernard Black (Northwestern), and Brian Cheffins (Cambridge); (2) Oren Bar-Gill & Ryan Bubb (both NYU); (3) Robert Bartlett (Berkeley); (4) Michal Barzuza (Virginia); (5) William Bratton & Michael Wachter (both Penn); (6) Matthew Cain (Notre Dame, Business) & Steven Davidoff (Ohio State); (7) Cheffins (Cambridge), Armour (Oxford), & Black (Northwestern) again, for a different piece; (8) Jill Fisch (Penn); (9) Edward Rock (Penn); (10) Richard Squire (Forhdam); and (11) Randall Thomas (Vanderbilt) & Robert Thompson (Georgetown).

Columbia's Jane Ginsburg Elected to the American Philosophical Society

More here and here.

AALS Executive Susan Prager Becoming Dean at Southwestern

Susan Westerberg Prager, the former dean of UCLA Law and current Executive Director and Chief Executive Officer of the AALS, will become Southwestern Law School's new Dean and Chief Executive Officer effective this fall.  Needless to say, this is a major hire.

Six law faculty elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

They are:  T. Alexander Aleinikoff (Georgetown; currently on leave at the U.N. High Commission for Refugees); Tom Ginsburg (Chicago); Christine Jolls (Yale); Dan Kahan (Yale); John Manning (Harvard), and Pamela Samuelson (Berkeley).

ADDENDUM:  As we have had occasion to note before, there are sometimes surprising errors of omission in who is and is not elected to the AAAS, usually explicable in terms of institutional affiliations or intellectual (sometimes personal) animosities (as in the case of the non-election of most of the major American Legal Realists a half-century ago--Harvard dominated in the Academy then, and Harvar was the bastion of anti-Realist reaction).   While faculty are usually elected later in their careers, it really is quite astonishing at this point not to find all of these fairly senior faculty (60 or older) already elected (this is off the top of my head, and is hardly an exhaustive list; some of the prior omissions were rectified in the interim):   Bernard Black (Northwestern), R.A. Duff (Minnesota), Michael Moore (Illinois), Stephen Perry (Penn), Paul Robinson (Penn), and Larry Sager (Texas), among others.

Dean Search List Updated

I've posted an update of my annual law school dean search list here.  There isn't any new news, for readers who watch these matters regularly, but I've compiled all the hires - and the new openings - for those who don't. 

Lateral Hiring List Updated

I've updated my lateral hiring list here.  It includes both junior and tenured hires.

Constitutional law scholar Eisgruber named Princeton President

Christopher Eisgruber, the current Provost at Princeton, a graduate of the University of Chicago Law School, a law professor at NYU for more than a decade, and a leading scholar of constitutional law, especially the law of religious liberty, has been named the new President of his alma mater, Princeton University.

Kloppenberg to Lead Santa Clara

University of Dayton law professor Lisa Kloppenberg has been named the new dean of the Santa Clara University School of Law.  Kloppenberg was Dayton's dean from 2001 to 2011.