Brian Leiter's Law School Reports

"Do the U.S. News rankings rely on dubious data?"

CHE actually posted this as a question, and not a rhetorical one!

More on expenditures and the USNews.com ranking stew

Derek Muller (Iowa) comments.

Lateral hires with tenure or on tenure-track, 2021-22

These are non-clinical appointments that will take effect in 2022 (except where noted); I will move the list to the front at various intervals as new additions come in.   (Recent additions will be put in bold.)  Last year's list is here.

 

*Michelle Adams (civil rights, constitutional law, law & race) from Cardozo Law School/Yeshiva University to the University of Michigan.

 

*Aziza Ahmed (health law,  constitutional law, law & gender, law & race) from the University of California, Irvine to Boston University.

 

*Lisa Alexander (corporate, contracts, housing & urban development law) from Texas A&M University to Boston College.

 

*Michele Alexandre (civil rights, constitutional law, law & gender, critical race theory) from Stetson University (where she is Dean) to Loyola University, Chicago (to become Dean).

 

*Jonas Anderson (intellectual property [esp. patents], property) from American University to the University of Utah.

 

*Julian Arato (international law, international trade) from Brooklyn Law School to the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

 

*Mario Barnes (constitutional law, criminal law, national security law, race & the law) from the University of Washington, Seattle (where he is Dean) back to the University of California, Irvine (effective January 2022).

 

*Jeannine Bell (criminal law and procedure, law & society) from Indiana University, Bloomington to Loyola University, Chicago.

 

*Kristen Boon (international law) from Seton Hall University to the University of Ottawa (to become Dean).

 

*John R. Brooks (tax law & policy) from Georgetown University to Fordham University.

 

*Dorothy Brown (tax) from Emory University to Georgetown University.

 

*Lonnie T. Brown, Jr. (legal ethics) from the University of Georgia to the University of Tennessee (to become Dean).

 

*Kara Bruce (bankruptcy, commercial law) from the University of Toledo to the University of Oklahoma, Norman.

 

*Christopher Buccafusco (intellectual property) from Cardozo Law School/Yeshiva University to Duke University.

 

*Sarah Burstein (patents, copyright) from the University of Oklahoma, Norman to Suffolk University.

 

*Courtney Cahill (constitutional law, law & sexuality) from Florida State University to the University of California, Irvine.

 

*Emily Cauble (tax) from DePaul University to the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

 

*Kami Chavis (criminal law & procedure) from Wake Forest University to the College of William & Mary.

 

*Ming Hsu Chen (administrative, immigiration, and constitutional law; law & society) from the University of Colorado, Boulder to the University of California, Hastings.

 

*Miriam Cherry (employment law) from Saint Louis University to St. John's University.

 

*Blanche Bong Cook (criminal law and procedure) from the University of Kentucky to Loyola University, Chicago.

 

*Geoffrey Corn (criminal law & procedure, military law) from South Texas College of Law to Texas Tech University.

 

*Diane Lourdes Dick (bankruptcy, tax) from Seattle University to the University of Iowa.

 

*Raff Donelson (criminal law & procedure, jurisprudence) from Pennsylvania  State University-Dickinson School of Law to Chicago-Kent College of Law/Illinois Institute of Technology.

 

*Doron Dorfman (health & disability law, employment discrimination, empirical legal studies) from Syracuse University to Seton Hall University.

 

*Tabrez Y. Ebrahim (law & technology, patent law, property) from California Western School of Law to Lewis & Clark (untenured lateral).

 

*Taleed El-Sabawi (health law & policy) from Elon University to Florida International University (untenured lateral).

 

*Seth Endo (civil procedure, professional responsibility) from the University of Florida, Gainesville to Seattle University (untenured lateral).

 

*Lee Epstein (empircal legal studies, law & social science) from Washington University, St. Louis to the University of Southern California.

 

*Sam Erman (legal history, constitutional law, citizenship & nationality) from the Universitiy of Southern California to the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

 

*Brenner Fissell (criminal law, local government law, military law) from Hofstra University to Villanova University (untenured lateral).

 

*Dallan Flake (civil procedure, employment discrimination) from Ohio Northern University to Gonzaga University (untenured lateral).

 

*Matthew L.M. Fletcher (Federal Indian law) from Michigan State University to the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

 

*Amanda Frost (immigration law, constitutional law) from American University to the University of Virginia.

 

*Jacob Goldin (tax, empirical legal studies, law & economics) from Stanford University to the University of Chicago.

 

*David Grenardo (sports law, legal profession) from St. Mary’s University to University of St. Thomas (Minnesota).

 

*Leah Chan Grinvald (intellectual property) from Suffolk University to the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (to become Dean).

 

*Woodrow Hartzog (law & technology) from Northeastern University to Boston University.

 

*Richard Hasen (election law, voting rights) from the University of California, Irvine to the University of California, Los Angeles.

 

*Margaret Hu (national security law, immigration law, civil rights, law & technology) from Pennsylvania State University-University Park to the College of William & Mary.

 

*Blake Hudson (natural resources law, land use, environmental law) from the University of Florida, Gainseville to Cumberland School of Law, Samford University (to become Dean).

 

*Christine Hurt (corporate law, securities regulation) from Brigham Young University to Southern Methodist University.

 

*Tonja Jacobi (empirical legal studies, criminal procedure, judicial behavior) from Northwestern University to Emory University.

 

*Marissa Jackson Sow (property, contracts, law & race) from St. Johns University to the University of Richmond (untenured lateral).

 

*Sharon Jacobs (environmental law, energy law) from the University of Colorado, Boulder to the University of California, Berkeley.

 

*Jalila Jefferson-Bullock (criminal law & procedure) from Duquesne University to Wayne State University.

 

*Linda Jellum (administrative law, legislation, tax) from Mercer University to the University of Idaho.

 

*Christine Kim (tax) from the University of Utah to Cardozo Law School/Yeshiva University.

 

*Shani King (family law, education law) from the University of Florida, Gainseville to Rutgers University.

 

*Alexandra Klass (energy law, environmental law) from the University of Minnesota to the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

 

*Steven Koh (international & comparative criminal law) from Boston College to Boston University (untenured lateral).

 

*Michelle Layser (tax) from the University of Illnois, Urbana-Champaign to the University of San Diego (untenured lateral).

 

*Daryl Lim (intellectual property, antitrust) from the University of Illinois, Chicago John Marshall Law School to Pennsylvania State University-Dickinson School of Law.

 

*Shirley Lin (employment law, antidiscrimination law, law & gender, law & race) from Pace University to Brooklyn Law School (untenured lateral).

 

*Lynn LoPucki (commercial law, corporate law) from the University of California, Los Angeles (where he will take emeritus status) to the University of Florida, Gainesville.

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Congratulations to the Chicago Alumni and Fellows on the law teaching market who secured tenure-track jobs this year

All our candidates received offers this year (including those that only searched selectively), and several received more than one offer.  They are:

 

Adam A. Davidson’17, who will join the faculty at the University of Chicago.  He is currently a Bigelow Fellow at the Law School.  He graduated with Honors from the Law School where he was Articles Editor of the Law  Review and a Rubenstein Scholar all three years.  He clerked for Judge James Gwin in the Northern District of Ohio; for Judge Diane Wood on the the Seventh Circuit; and for Judge Guido Calabresi on the Second Circuit.  His areas of teaching and research interest include criminal law and procedure, constitutional law, federal courts, and race and the law. 

 

Aneil Kovvali, who will join the faculty at Indiana University, Bloomington.  He is currently a Bigelow Fellow at the Law School.  He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School in 2012, clerked for Judge Christopher Droney on the Second Circuit, and was a litigation associate at Wachtell, Lipton for six years before coming to Chicago.  His areas of teaching and research interest include corporate law, contracts, securities regulation, bankruptcy, and antitrust.  

 

Abigail Moncrieff ’06, who will join the faculty at Cleveland-Marshall School of Law at Cleveland State University, where she will also be Co-Director of the Health Law and Policy Center and have a courtesy appointment in the Department of Political Science.  She graduated with Honors from the Law School, where she served on the Law Review.  She clerked for Judge Sidney R. Thomas on the Ninth Circuit, before joining the law faculty at Boston University, where she taught for several years.  She is presenting finishing a PhD in Government at the University of Texas at Austin, with a focus on constitutional theory.  Her areas of teaching and research interest include constitutional law, administrative law, health law, legislation, and torts.

 

Joe Schomberg '17, who will join the faculty at Drake University.  Since graduating from the Law School, he has been a bankruptcy associate at Sidley Austin in Chicago.   His teaching and research interests include bankruptcy and commercial law

 

Daniel Wilf-Townsend, who will join the faculty at Georgetown University.  He is currently a Bigelow Fellow at the Law School.  He earned his J.D. from Yale in 2015, where he was a Coker Fellow.  He clerked for Judge Marsha Berzon on the Ninth Circuit and then for Judge Jeffrey Meyer of the District of Connecticut.  He practiced law for three years with Gupta Wessler in Washington, DC, focusing on class actions and complex litigation on behalf of consumers, workers, and government entities.  His areas of teaching and research interest include civil procedure, federal courts, contracts, consumer law, and administrative law.  

All about law school Deans...

...from the AALS.  A couple of striking data points:  "Most successful dean candidacies are initiated by someone else (62%)" and "More than one-half (59%) of deans are selected after a search that involves a search firm."  The latter is particularly surprising, given how clueless these search firms usually are, at least in my experience.

On the other hand, polling the Deans themselves about what helps them succeed in their role as Dean seems like an unsound methodology:  my impression is that a majority of Deans do not succeed and are not very good at the job (it's a rather difficult and often unpleasant job, or so it seems to me!).  It would be more interesting to poll just those Deans whom others (e.g., faculty, alumni, students) judge to be successful!

Yale Law melodrama continues: Professor Stith disagrees with Dean, says student protest violated the Law School's Free Speech Policy

Story here (prior coverage--and earlier examples of the clearly dysfunctional institutional culture).  Despite the continued bad press, and even as its USNews.com reputation score falls to 3rd, its #1 scholarly impact positions depends increasingly on an ageing faculty, and its younger faculty increasingly live in New York City (or decamp to NYC schools), the per capita expenditures metric will still keep Yale at #1 in USNews.com.

Ristroph v. Sklansky

Here and here.  I've not read enough of the work of either of these authors to have an opinion on the merits.

USNews.com compared to other metrics of school quality

 

Here's the USNews.com "top ten", with other data on these schools.

US News overall rank	School	Overall scholarly impact rank	Scholarly impact rank for faculty under 60	SCOTUS “per capita” placement rank	Academic reputation rank in US News	Avg. rank across all metrics
1	Yale University	1	3	1	3	1.8
2	Stanford University	6	10	3	1	4.4
3	University of Chicago	2	1	2	3	2.2
4	Columbia University	5	9	9	3	6.0
4	Harvard University	3	2	3	1	2.6
6	University of Pennsylvania	8	14	15	8	10.2
7	New York University	4	5	5	3	4.8
8	University of Virginia	9	5	5	8	7.0
9	University of California, Berkeley	6	7	9	7	7.6
10	University of Michigan, Ann Arbor	13	13	5	8	9.8

Law Schools Unfairly Ranked by U.S. News

MOVING TO FRONT (ORIGINALLY POSTED OCT. 3 2011, SLIGHTLY REVISED IN THE INTERIM), SINCE IT IS TIMELY AGAIN

I've occasionally commented in the past about particular schools that clearly had artificially low overall ranks in U.S. News, and readers e-mail me periodically asking about various schools in this regard.   Since the overall rank in U.S. News is a meaningless nonsense number, permit me to make one very general comment:   it seems to me that all the law schools dumped into what U.S. News calls the unranked lower tiers--indeed, all the law schools ranked ordinally beyond the top 25 or 30  based on irrelevant and trivial differences-- are unfairly ranked and represented.  This isn't because all these schools have as good faculties or as successful graduates as schools ranked higher--though many of them, in fact, do--but because the metric which puts them into these lower ranks is a self-reinforcing one, and one that assumes, falsely and perniciously, that the mission of all law schools is the same.  Some missions, to be sure, are the same at some generic level:  e.g., pretty much all law schools look to train lawyers and produce legal scholarship.  U.S. News has no meaningful measure of the latter, so that part of the shared mission isn't even part of the exercise.  The only "measures" of the former are the fictional employment statistics that schools self-report and bar exam results.  The latter may be only slightly more probative, except that the way U.S. News incorporates them into the ranking penalizes schools in states with relatively easy bar exams.  So with respect to the way in which the missions of law schools are the same, U.S. News employs no pertinent measures. 

But schools differ quite a bit in how they discharge the two generic missions, namely, producing scholarship and training lawyers.  Some schools focus much of their scholasrhip on the needs of the local or state bar.  Some schools produce lots of DAs, and not many "big firm" lawyers.    Some schools emphasize skills training and state law.  Some schools emphasize theory and national and transnational legal issues.   Some schools value only interdisciplinary scholarship.  And so on.  U.S. News conveys no information at all about how well or poorly different schools discharge these functions.  But by ordinally ranking some 150 schools based on incompetently done surveys, irrelevant differences and fictional data, and dumping the remainder into a "second tier", U.S. News conveys no actual information, it simply rewards fraud in data reporting and gratuitously insults hard-working legal educators and scholars and their students and graduates.

Yale Law School's public relations disaster continues

David Lat (who went to YLS, subsequently founded the abysmal online tabloid Above the Law, and then wisely bailed from that) shares on his substack a recent letter from a current Yale Law student:

Students here seem unwilling to have their beliefs and actions challenged. Many of my peers see the expectation of rigor and precision in classroom discussions and in community deliberation alike as somehow distracting from the normative urgency of their ends (many of which I share).

 

I’ve heard students deride decidedly liberal professors Dan Kahan and [former YLS dean] Tony Kronman as conservative or bigoted for clearly articulating challenges to student intuitions for pedagogical purposes in classroom discussions. In some cases, student commentary has become absurd in its near-purposeful missing of the point. For example, several classmates accused Kahan of hating women, even as he took pains in the classroom to demonstrate where the law incorporates misogynistic norms.5

 

Even as a progressive, I’ve felt uncomfortable sharing even friendly amendments to certain student views in the classroom. I have a lot of folk explanations for why the intellectual climate is like this (students are increasingly coming back to law school after spending time away from challenging academic environments, the teaching at YLS has never been exactly renowned for its excellence, etc.), but it’s nevertheless frustrating to see truth be treated as unimportant here.

Blast from the past: Per capita expenditures is the tail that wags the US News ranking dog

Back in 2009, and it's still true.

USNews.com makes more arbitrary changes to the ranking formula...

...and one can rest assured that U.S. legal education-- which is run by a defunct news magazine with a website--will adjust accordingly.  One change will be a boon for law libraries:  1% of the score (why 1%?  no one knows, not even Bob Morse) now consists in the ratio of full-time law librarians to students at a school.  That metric will also exacerbate the general bias in many aspects of the USNews.com formula that favors smaller schools over larger ones, due to economies of scale.  Bar passage rates will also account for 3% rather than 2.25% (why not 10% or 15%?  no one knows, and certainly not Bob Morse), but will take into account how a school's graduates perform across jurisdictions.  If one is going to count bar passage rates, then that at least makes some sense, even if the relative weighting is inexplicable.

Unknown at the time of this writing is which other factors in the ranking stew had their weight reduced.

Professor Stith to Yale law students: "Grow up"

Story here.  The "Alliance Defending Freedom" is awful, no dispute about that, but in an academic institution a lawyer for that organization gets to speak if invited; indeed, in this case, the lawyer was matched with a speaker opposing her views.   The law students can protest, but they don't get to disrupt and derail the event.