Brian Leiter's Law School Reports

Rookie hiring summary courtesy of UCI's Sarah Lawsky...

...here.  As a percentage of candidates on the market, here's how the schools fared in terms of tenure-track placement of their alumni (Lawsky's numbers are a bit different, at least in part due to a failure to count tenure-stream jobs in non-US law schools; I list only schools that had at least five candidates on the market):

1.  University of Chicago (58%)

2.  University of Virginia (57%)

3.  Yale University (49%)

4.  Duke University (39%)

4.  New York University (39%)

6.  University of Michigan (31%)

7.  Harvard University (30%)

8.  University of California, Los Angeles (25%)

9.  Cornell University (21%)

9.  Northwestern University (21%)

11. University of Texas, Austin (18%)

12. Georgetown University (17%)

13. Stanford University (15%)

13. University of California, Berkeley (15%)

15. Columbia University (11%)

The Stanford and Columbia performances seem anomalously low--maybe due to underreporting, and maybe due to a fluke this year.

Professor Lawsky's numbers, even allowing for the limits of self-reporting, also clearly show the steep drop-off in hiring this year, on the order of almost one-third fewer hires than in recent years.

UPDATE:  Professor Lawsky's percentage chart, but just for US tenure-track hires.

Is law school tuition going up or down?

No one really knows, but given the data from private universities and colleges, the answer is very likely "down."

MEANWHILE an uptick in employment for new lawyers.

Another Employment-Outcome Rankings

From the University of Denver--it depends on self-reported data by the schools, of course, but it does provide a simple way to see the import of that data.

Is the job market for new lawyers, even from lower-ranked schools, really that bad?

Some interesting contrarian evidence from Ben Barros (Widener).

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.

Is hiring of labor and employment law professors disproportionately down?

I'm skeptical.

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.)

Michigan Law's Debt Wizard

Looks useful.  Other schools with good LRAP should replicate this, so students can see how their school's LRAP affects their debt.