Brian Leiter's Law School Reports

Standard & Poor's Downgrades Albany Law School's Rating

Of course, the track record of these agencies is sufficiently poor that it's hard to know what to make of this, but it is still a "sign of the times," as it were.

Post-graduation employment minus school-funded jobs

Interesting list here, though as we noted before, school-funded jobs are often the crucial route into public sector positions for many graduates, and schools with big investments in getting graduates into public interest will necessarily have a good number of these.  On the other hand, it is certainly true that in many other cases, school-funded jobs are make-work position meant to boost employment statistics, not help launch careers.

Which areas of law deserve more attention/investment from law schools...

...in the form of more full-time faculty doing research in the area.  It's our topic du jour, so perhaps a poll of readers will prove informative.  No lobbying for votes by blogs in particular areas!  The poll only includes areas about which one hears with some regluarity concern that they are under-treated by law schools (so no constitutional law, corporate law, tax, criminal law, which almost all law schools are well-represented in or try to be).

When the results are in, I'll open them for discussion next week.

UPDATE:  Unfortunately, the Workplace Law blog linked to the poll, which resulted in a surge for employment law.  I've asked  them to remove the link, otherwise we will have to drop employment law from the results, which would be unfortunate.

Job Placement

Blog Emperor Caron has a useful set of links to the NLJ compilation of recent data about which schools had the best long-term employment rates, big firm placement, federal clerkship placement, and so on.

U of Arizona Law Cuts Official Tuition Rate

Story here.  The reality, of course, is that actual tuition is being cut across the country, as I have heard repeatedly from Deans at a wide variety of law schools, all of which are spending more on financial aid to attract the students they want.  (I am surprised in the linked article by the comment attributed to Brian Tamanaha [Wash U/St. Louis], who is quoted as pronouncing that U of Arizon's tuition has to be even lower.)

Disclosing material/economic interests in scholarship

More law reviews should adopt this policy.

Law graduates' debt

Startling figures courtesy of Tamanaha.

Letter from law faculty to ABA Task Force on legal education

Here.  It's basically a precis of the arguments from Tamanaha's book.  It's a somewhat eclectic group of signatories (even including the person memorably described by Paul Horwitz as "essentially a journalist moonlighting as a law professor," but that's the nature of these letters, one often doesn't know who else is signing--Dick Posner told me Paul Carrington, former Dean at Duke, sent it to him, and he thought Carrington was one of the authors, which may be.)  Besides Judge Posner, notable signatories include my former colleague Gerald Torres, a past President of the AALS, Richard Epstein, Lawrence Friedman, Geoffrey Hazard, and Dean Dan Rodriguez from Northwestern (who will be President of the AALS this coming year).  It's pretty sensible, and hopefully the ABA will follow the main theme of the advice, which is less regulation, and thus more diversity, in legal education.

ADDENDUM:  As one of the more notable signatories wrote me, "The presence of one person’s name on the statement about the costs of legal education almost caused me to ask that mine be removed."  But the issue is, obviously, more important than one individual.

Northwestern Law to cut class size by 10%

Story here.

Georgetown's Report on the Legal Market 2013

We noted it here, and Milan Markovic (Texas Wesleyan) has some critical reactions.