Brian Leiter's Law School Reports

Chicago Alumni and Fellows on the teaching market, 2020-21

This post is strictly for schools that expect to do hiring this year.

In order to protect the privacy of our candidates, please e-mail me at bleiter@uchicago.edu to get a copy of the narrative profiles of our candidates, including hyperlinks to their homepages.  All these candidates will be in the first FAR distribution.

We have an excellent group of ten candidates this year (six alumni, three Bigelows, and one Dickerson Fellow), who cover many curricular areas including legal profession/professional responsibility, constitutional law, corporate law and finance, contracts, health law, food law, administrative law, legislation, torts, immigration law, criminal law, criminal procedure, comparative law, financial regulation, tax law (including corporate and partnership law), First Amendment, evidence, Indian law (both Federal and Tribal), federal courts, race & the law, civil procedure, law & economics, empirical legal studies, law & technology, civil rights, energy law, legal history, and international law.  Our candidates include former federal appellate clerks; Law Review editors; JD/PhDs in History, Economics, Health Policy & Management and Political Science; current Fellows and VAPs, and accomplished practitioners as well as scholars.  All have publications, sometimes multiple publications, and all have writing samples available upon request.

If when you e-mail, you tell me a bit about your hiring needs, I can supply some more information about all these candidates, since we have vetted them all at some point in the recent past.

Penn State-Dickinson and Pepperdine law deans donate 125k each to help students at their schools with "emergency needs"

Wow!

Hiring committees for 2020-21...

MOVING TO FRONT--ORIGINALLY POSTED JULY 29

...you can announce yourselves and your hiring plans here.

Lateral hires with tenure or on tenure-track, 2020-21

These are non-clinical appointments that will take effect in 2021 (except where noted); I will move the list to the front at various intervals as new additions come in.   (Recent additions are in bold.)  Last year's list is here.  Feel free to e-mail me with news of additions to this list.

*Robin Kundis Craig (environmental law, water law) from the University of Utah to the University of Southern California.

 

*G. Mitu Gulati (contracts, sovereign debt, law & economics, empirical legal studies, race/gender & law) from Duke University to the University of Virginia.

 

*Kimberly Krawiec (corporate) from Duke University to the University of Virginia.

 

*David S. Law (comparative constitutional law, law & social science) from the University of California, Irvine to the University of Virginia.

 

*Darren Rosenblum (corporate, international business transactions) from Pace University to McGill University.

Ten lateral moves that made law professors take notice during 2019-20

Based on my in-box and conversations with others, these were the ten moves that transpired this past year that were thought to be the biggest hiring coups (I omit any lateral moves my school was part of and those that won't officially happen until 2021):

*Kimberly Kessler Ferzan (criminal law, law & philosophy) from the University of Virginia to the University of Pennsylvania.

 

*Tara Leigh Grove (federal courts, constitutional law, civil procedure) from College of William & Mary to the University of Alabama.

 

*Alexandra Natapoff (criminal law & procedure) from the University of California, Irvine to Harvard University.

 

*Michael Pardo (evidence, law & philosophy, law & neuroscience) from the University of Alabama to Georgetown University.

 

*Frank Pasquale (law & technology, cyberlaw, privacy, health law) from the University of Maryland to Brooklyn Law School.

 

*Christopher Robertson (health law, bioethics, torts) from the University of Arizona to Boston University.

 

*Lawrence Solum (constitutional law & theory, civil procedure, law & philosophy) from Georgetown University to the University of Virginia.

 

*A. Benjamin Spencer (civil procedure, federal courts, military law) from the University of Virginia to the College of William & Mary (to become Dean).

 

*Karen Tani (legal history) from the University of California, Berkeley to the University of Pennsylvania.

 

*Hannah Wiseman (energy law, environmental law, administrative law) from Florida State University to Pennsylvania State University, University Park.

Bloomberg: Demand for Corporate Bankruptcy lawyers surges (Michael Simkovic)

See here.

Large U.S. law firms are scrambling to address a ballooning need for bankruptcy and corporate restructuring expertise.

The Covid-19 pandemic has unleashed an unprecedented severity and speed of corporate distress, as Chapter 11 filings pile up and fire-sale assets garner interest. Law firms are scouring the field to hire experienced restructuring attorneys, counter to what has otherwise been a declining attorney job market.

Bankruptcy is a niche area where many law schools have few full time faculty and instead rely on adjuncts (Chicago, NYU, Columbia, and USC are exceptions in terms of having a reasonably deep bench in this area).  With bankruptcy practitioners and judges overwhelmed with work, it may be difficult for schools that do not have full time bankruptcy faculty in place to meet student demand.

 

Update: Additional schools with relatively deep benches in bankruptcy include UCLA, Illinois, Texas, Georgetown, and Penn.  Apologies for any omissions.

Diamond & Cain on online vs. hybrid legal education during COVID (Michael Simkovic)

Steven Diamond and Patricia Cain discuss tradeoffs between online and hybrid legal education during the COVID pandemic and argue in favor of online based on health risks and concerns about diversity and inclusion.

An early sign about this year's job market for law teachers

According to a widely circulated list of hiring chairs at different law schools in the U.S., 117 have already named appointments chairs, compared to 138 last year.  That's not as big a drop-off as I had feared we might see.  Bear in mind that last year's 138 hiring chairs yielded 88 rookie hires at 66 law schools according to Professor Lawsky's data (of course, some schools hired laterals, not rookies).   Still, while this will definitely be a tighter job market, it may be somewhat better than many had feared.