Brian Leiter's Law School Reports

Popular Baltimore Law Dean Closius Forced Out by University Admin...

...which apparently didn't appreciate his objecting to the university capturing 45% (!!!) of law school tuition for non-law school purposes.   C.J. Peters, one of a number of faculty recruited laterally to Baltimore by Dean Closius, writes:

If you look at the two key measures of a law school’s quality – faculty and student body – you’ll see that in both areas UB is a very different, and much better, school than it was just four years ago when Phil took over.  Under Phil’s guidance, our faculty hiring has produced perhaps the most dynamic group of junior and mid-career faculty I’ve seen at a non-top-20 law school (and I’ve taught at more than a few).  Across the board, Phil has motivated the faculty to work harder at, and think more carefully about, our teaching and scholarship than most of us had ever done before.  The student body is as motivated and energized as any I’ve ever taught.  The alumni love Phil because he’s a straight shooter who cares about the legal community and the realities of legal practice....

I can add that I personally would not have moved half way across the country to join UB’s faculty were it not for Phil’s leadership.  And as chair of our appointments committee for the past two years (and a member for the past three), I can report a noticeable and steady increase in the number and quality of candidates (entry-level and lateral) who display genuine enthusiasm about the prospect of joining our faculty.  Some mention Phil by name; most comment on UB’s growing reputation as a dynamic place to be.

I think we’ll manage to continue most of this momentum, because we now – thanks largely to Phil – have a critical mass of hard workers who care about the school among the faculty, staff, alumni, and student body.  But losing Phil Closius is a significant blow.

ABA Adopts Changes in Employment Data It Will Collect

The official announcement is here.  U.S. News is certain to change its formula in light of this, though how remains to be seen.  The results should be revealing, assuming the traditional reluctance of law schools to lie to the ABA continues to hold. 

Updated Information on Submitting to Law Reviews

Courtesy of Professors Rostron and Levit.

UT's Rodriguez to be the New Dean at Northwestern

My esteemed former colleague at the University of Texas School of Law, Daniel Rodriguez (administrative, public law, positive political theory) has accepted appointment as the new Dean at Northwestern University School of Law, effective January 1, 2012.  As noted last week, Rodriguez was very successful in his last Deanship, at San Diego.  This seems to me an excellent appointment for Northwestern.  I'll add a link to the official university announcement as soon as it is on line.

UPDATE:  The Northwestern press release.

Three Cheers for On-Line Publication!

Richard Danner (Duke) and colleagues have undertaken to gauge the attitudes of law professors towards exclusively on-line or electronic publication; Professor Danner kindly offered the following useful summary of their findings (I responded to the survey--my publication decisions would have been unaffected by print publication):

Increasingly, U.S. law journals post current articles in freely accessible PDF format on their web sites. Yet,  they also continue to publish print issues despite evidence that new legal scholarship is read not in print, but online in SSRN or the journals’ own postings.  Subscriptions to print are declining, and law libraries  are no longer preserving journals in print.  Yet, law review editors, who themselves rarely use print in their research, fear the impacts of ending print publishing on their journal’s reputation and ability to attract the best authors.  Does it matter to law journal authors whether their work is published in print?  We surveyed 464 authors of articles published in the last two completed volumes of the lead journal at the law schools ranked in the top fifteen by US News in March 2010.  Over 51 percent replied. 

Sixty eight percent of the respondents indicated that continuing publication of print issues would not have affected their decision to publish the particular article in the journal where it appeared.  Yet, when asked more generally what they would do if they had had offers from more than one of the journals on the list, other than those they considered  to be the most prestigious, 51 percent of the authors  said that a journal’s continuing publication of print issues would be the deciding factor in choosing which offer to accept.    When broken down by years teaching, however, only 38  percent of authors who had been teaching for six or fewer years said that print would be the deciding factor in their decision.  Although the survey results suggest that print remains important to law journal authors, it will become less important over time.

The paper also provides demographic information about authors who publish in the lead journals of top ranked law school.

The Repeal of DOMA and "Full Faith and Credit"

Tobias Barrington Wolff (Penn) has an instructive discussion.

Columbia's Jane Ginsburg Elected a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy

The Academy's announcement is here.  As we have noted before, it is quite rare for U.S. legal scholars to be so honored.

Which law schools graduate the most lawyers at the nation's biggest law firms?

Some business school professors examine the data.

Dean Matasar's Reply to the NY Times "Hatchet Job"

Here.

Nine Transformative Deans in the Last Decade

Below are short profiles of nine Law School Deans who can be credited with "transforming" the institutions they led.  (I omit from eligibility any of my current or former Deans--Bill Powers and Larry Sager at Texas, and Saul Levmore and Mike Schill at Chicago--though I do think even an observer more objective than I am would want to include one or more of them on this list.)  Being clever at tricking U.S. News is not a criterion for inclusion, though arguably a few of the Deans noted below also excelled at that.  What counts is changing the school, meaning especially, changing its intellectualy identity and scholarly profile, the aspects of an institution one can most reasonably adjudge without being an insider.   Here are the nine who, it seems to me, stand out for the work they did during roughly the last decade:

Michael Fitts at the University of Pennsylvania.  After a contentious and failed Dean search, in which several outside candidates withdrew amid faculty acrimony, Mike Fitts was chosen from the inside in early 2001.  His nearly decade-long tenure (now extended for a thrid term) has been marked by a remarkable increase in the Law School's endowment, which has funded an expansion of the faculty by about 40% (maybe a bit more), as well as an end to faculty acrimony.  Schools used to successfully raiding Penn now found Penn winning some of those battles (e.g., Stephen Perry [torts, jurisprudence] and NYU; Edward Rock [corporate law] and Columbia; Chris Sanchirico [evidence] and Chicago). 

Heidi Hurd at the University of Illinois.  Although she was made the "fall gal" for the dysfunctionality of Illinois politics after her tenure (aided and abetted by ignorant journalists), the fact is that in her single term as Dean she transformed Illinois from a fairly traditional (and certainly good) doctrinal school to one at the cutting edge of interdisciplinary work in multiple areas.

Elena Kagan at Harvard University.   She brought the famously dysfunctional "sleeping giant" of legal academia back to life, causing headaches for Deans everywhere else as HLS under Dean Kagan went on a lateral hiring spree that hadn't been seen in Cambridge in decades.  Her free spending apparently left even HLS in somewhat tighter straights, though the pace of lateral hiring has slowed everywhere the last couple of years, not only at Harvard.

Kenneth Randall at the University of Alabama.  Dean since 1994, he parlayed improved U.S. News rankings since 1999 into more resources for the Law School, which he then used shrewdly to improve the faculty and raise the national scholarly profile of the school with a series of strong junior and lateral hires.

Daniel Rodriguez at the University of San Diego.  During his seven years as Dean, he broke the deadlock on faculty appointments that had for a long time prevented USD from fully capitalizing on its attractive location and institutional resources.  USD went head-to-head with top law schools, like Northwestern, and won battles for faculty talent during his tenure, and USD solidified its status as one of the regional law schools from which top law schools regularly look for faculty hires.

Kent Syverud at Vanderbilt University.   With strong university support, Dean Syverud expanded the Vanderbilt faculty and rejuvenated it during his eight-year tenure (1997-2005), pushing the school into the "top ten" in some measures of scholarly impact.  He won faculty recruitment and retention battles against schools like Northwestern and Texas, and left Vanderbilt with a strong empirical legal studies presence as well. 

David Van Zandt at Northwestern University.  His 15-year tenure was controversial, as longtime readers know, and it got off to a rocky start with a large exodus of leading members of the faculty.  But in the end, Dean Van Zandt put a stronger imprint on his school than perhaps any of the Deans on this list, establishing Northwestern as a major center of empirical legal studies in particular.

Donald Weidner at Florida State University.  Dean or Interim Dean at FSU since 1991, he has been a succesful fundraiser and skilled navigator of Florida's choppy political waters, at the same time presiding over some of the best faculty hiring by any regional law school in the country, as reflected in periodic raids of FSU by top ten law schools.   Yet even with occasional losses, Dean Weidner has sustained the scholarly momentum of the law school

Patricia White at Arizona State University.   During her decade as Dean at Arizona State, Dean White displayed an eagle eye for faculty talent, bringing a host of prominent scholars to ASU (including Robert Clinton and Michael Saks from the University of Iowa, and Kenneth Abbott from Northwestern University, among others) and making the school competitive with the University of Arizona for the first time.  She also established strong relations with bench and bar, and conceived the brilliant idea of naming the school for esteemed Arizonan and former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. 

The Deans to watch in the coming years:  Erwin Chemerinsky at UC Irvine; Kevin Johnson at UC Davis; Larry Kramer at Stanford University; Kent Syverud at Washington University, St. Louis; William Treanor at Georgetown University; Patricia White, now at University of Miami; among others.