Brian Leiter's Law School Reports

More on UIC John Marshall Law School and the case of Professor Kilborn

Law professor Andrew Koppelman (Northwestern) offers a critical (and fair) assessment of the case we noted last week.

In Memoriam: Deborah L. Rhode (1952-2021)

MOVING TO FRONT (ORIGINALLY POSTED JANUARY 9:  UPDATED

A leading scholar of legal ethics and the legal profession, as well as gender and the law, Professor Rhode spent her academic career at Stanford Law School.  I will add links to memorial notices as they appear.

UPDATE:  The Stanford memorial notice is here.

ANOTHER UPDATE:  The NY Times obituary is 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.

 

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

 

*Ifeoma Ajunwa (law & technology, race & law, labor & employment law, health law) from Cornell University (Industrial & Labor Relations School) to the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (effective January 2021).

 

*Shyamkrishna Balganesh (intellectual property, private law theory) from the University of Pennsylvania to Columbia University (effective January 2021).

 

*Nancy Chi Cantalupo (civil rights, human rights, sex discrimination) from California Western School of Law to Wayne State University (untenured lateral).

 

*Guy-Uriel Charles (constitutional law, election law, race & law) from Duke University to Harvard University.

 

*Danielle Citron (privacy, civil rights, freedom of expression, Internet law) from Boston University to the University of Virginia (effective January 2021).

 

*Kimberly Clausing (public finance, tax, international trade) from Reed College (Economics) to the University of California, Los Angeles.

 

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

 

*Deborah Dinner (legal history, employment discrimination, family law) from Emory University to Cornell University.

 

*Tonya Evans (intellectual property, trusts & estates, entertainment law) from the University of New Hampshire to Pennsylania State University-Dickinson School of Law.

 

*Joseph Fishkin (constitutional law, employment discrimination, election law, equal opportunity) from the University of Texas, Austin to the University of California, Los Angeles.

 

*Cary Franklin (constitutional law, antidiscrimination law, legal history) from the University of Texas, Austin to the University of California, Los Angeles.

 

*Michael Z. Green (labor & employment law) from Texas A&M University to Chicago-Kent College of Law/Illinois Institute of Technology.

 

*Kevin Greene (intellectual property, entertainment law) from Thomas Jefferson School f Law to Southwestern Law School (effective January 2021).

 

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

 

*Osamudia James (administrative law, race & law, education law) from the University of Miami to the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

 

*Kristin Johnson (financial regulation, securities regulation) from Tulane University to Emory University (effective January 2021).

 

*Michael J. Kaufman (civil procedure, education law) from Loyola University, Chicago (where he is Dean) to Santa Clara University (to become Dean).

 

*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.

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Violation of academic freedom at UIC John Marshall Law School

IMPORTANT UPDATE BELOW:   PROFESSOR KILBORN WAS NOT SUSPENDED BECAUSE OF THE EXAM QUESTION

Last month, we noted UIC John Marshall Dean Darby Dickerson's suggestion "that law schools should be 'transformed' into 'anti-racist institutions' [as distinct from being non-racist ones that comply with equal opportunity laws]," observing that it "would portend a massive violation of the academic freedom of all faculty (for example)."   Alas, this proved more prophetic than we realized.

Professor Jason Kilborn gave a civil procedure exam last month involving an employment discrimination hypothetical, in which one worker used racist and sexist epithets.   As the petition denouncing Professor Kilborn reports:

The question at-issue contained a racial pejorative summarized as follows: “‘n____’and ‘b____’ (profane expressions for African Americans and women).” The fact pattern involved an employment discrimination case where the call of the question was whether or not the information found was work product.

Just to be clear:   the exam neither used nor mentioned the actual offending words, just the first letters of those words followed by the underline, as quoted above.  Professor Kilborn has actually used variations on this hypothetical, with the n- and b-words (as above), for a decade without any incident!

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A statement by law school Deans about last week's events at the Capitol

A fine statement.

Ratio of median debt of law school graduates to their median income

Another interesting study from Professor Derek Muller (Iowa).

In Memoriam: David Dolinko (1948-2020)

MOVING TO FRONT FROM DECEMBER 31--UPDATED

Emeritus at UCLA, where he spent his entire career (and earned both his J.D. and Ph.D. in philosophy), Professor Dolinko was an important contributor to criminal law theory and many topics in substantive criminal law and procedure.  Professor Dolinko succumbed yesterday to COVID.

I will add links to memorial notices when they appear.

UPDATE:   The UCLA memorial notice.

Dickerson Fellowship at the University of Chicago Law School

Applications are open.

This didn't age well

How have law schools been teaching?

More than half are offering in-person classes, at least partially, while roughly 40% are fully online.

Non-JD enrollment in law schools continues to grow

Derek Muller (Iowa) documents the trend.   Non-JD students (mostly LLM students, but also some undergradutes [especially at Arizona], as well as non-degree candidates) have the virtue of generating revenue while being invisible in the U.S. News rankings.