Brian Leiter's Law School Reports

Interested in University of Chicago Candidates on the Teaching Market?

We have an excellent pool this year, and a Placement Committee at the Law School that stands ready to assist hiring schools by providing additional information on the candidates (both Chicago grads and Bigelows).  The Chair is Douglas Baird, and the other members are Lisa Bernstein and myself.  Feel free to e-mail or phone any of us if you want more information on the Chicago candidates.

Smith from Yale to Harvard

Henry E. Smith, a leading property scholar at Yale Law School, has accepted a senior offer from Harvard Law School, where he will start January 1. 

Five or six years ago, I think most informed folks would have said that Yale Law School had the strongest law faculty in the U.S., and that Harvard was, at best, second.  But with the slew of generally high-quality appointments HLS has made in recent years--including several successful raids on Yale--I think it's fair to say now that Yale is, at best, tied for having the best law faculty in the U.S. along with Harvard, and maybe the edge even now goes to Harvard.   

Meanwhile, Yale has had the very unusual experience--I can't recall any similar period in the last 15 years or more--of seeing multiple departures of senior faculty in the space of just two or three years:  Anne Alstott, Yochai Benkler, and now Smith to Harvard; Michael Graetz to Columbia; Kenji Yoshino to NYU.

O'Kelley from Georgia to Seattle

Charles O'Kelley (corporate law) at the University of Georgia has accepted a senior offer on the law faculty at Seattle University.  The Seattle press release is here.  Seattle has had a busy year of senior hiring!

WSJ Covers Possible Change to US News Ranking Formula Involving Part-Time Student Credentials

Here.  Of course, with respect to 'gaming' the rankings, this is the mere tip of the iceberg, as we have noted previously.   We still await Mr. Morse's promised response to the more serious problems that now discredit the results of the annual exercise.

Visiting Professors at the Very Top Law Schools, 2008-09

MOVING TO FRONT FROM JULY 17, FOR THOSE WHO MAY HAVE MISSED IT DURING THE SUMMER

As I did last year, I'm posting a list of the visiting professors (who hold university appointments elsewhere) at the top six law schools, the schools that are "top six" by almost all measures of faculty quality--which are also the schools that also typically have the most visiting professors on a regular basis.  While many visiting stints are made with an eye to possible permanent appointment, not all are; some are so-called "podium" visits, which aim to fill an immediate teaching need at the school.   By my calculation, for example, less than 25% of the visits last year resulted in (or are in process of resulting in) offers of permanent employment--but a somewhat higher percentage of the non-podium visits resulted in such offers.  Often visitors from local schools in the area are invited for podium visit purposes--though some "locals" may also be "look-see" visitors, i.e., under consideration for appointment.  NYU also has a fair number of "enrichment" and "global" visitors, well-known senior folks who are keen to spend some time in, but who aren't necessarily interested in, or being considered for, lateral moves.  (Columbia gets some of these folks too.)  From the outside, of course, it's very hard to tell all these apart, so here, without further comment, are the visiting professors for 2008-09; please e-mail me about omissions or corrections, and I will update the list at various intervals over the next couple of months and move it to the front.

UPDATE (5:30 pm July 16):  Just to be clear--since several folks have e-mailed about this--not every visit, below, is for the entire academic year; indeed, my guess is at least half are not, meaning students can expect many of these faculty to *also* be teaching at their home institution.  In the case of HLS, many of the visitors come in the Winter Term, i.e., just the month of January.

Yale Law School

Howard Abrams (Emory University)

Dapo Akande (Oxford University)

Albert H. Choi (University of Virginia)

Anne C. Dailey (University of Connecticut)

Ryan Goodman (Harvard University)

Peter Lindseth (University of Connecticut)

Frank Pasquale (Seton Hall University)

Claire Priest (Northwestern University)

Jedediah S. Purdy (Duke University)

Dan Simon (University of Southern California)

Alex Stein (Cardozo Law School/Yeshiva University)

Lior Strahilevitz (University of Chicago)

Gerald Torres (University of Texas, Austin)

Patrick Weil (University of Paris I)

Harvard Law School

Philip Alston (New York University, University College London)

Akhil Amar (Yale University)

Brian Arnold (Emeritus, University of Western Ontario)

Rachel Barkow (New York University)

Lily Batchelder (New York University)

Hanina Ben-Menahem (Hebrew University, Jerusalem)

Bethany Berger (University of Connecticut)

Lisa Schultz Bressman (Vanderbilt University)

Corey Brettschneider (Brown University)

Tomiko Brown-Nagin (University of Virginia)

Daniel Coquiilette (Boston College)

Lori Fisler Damrosch (Columbia University)

Grainne de Burca (Fordham University)

Walter Dellinger III (Duke University; O'Melveny & Myers)

Bala Dharan (Rice University)

Jeffrey Dunoff (Temple University)

Cynthia Estlund (New York University)

David Estlund (Brown University)

Liufang Fang (China University of Political Science & Law)

William Forbath (University of Texas, Austin)

Jacob Gersen (University of Chicago)

Dieter Grimm (Humboldt University, Berlin)

Samuel Issacharoff (New York University)

John L. Jackson, Jr. (University of Pennsylvania)

Derek Jinks (University of Texas, Austin)

Dan M. Kahan (Yale University)

Michael S. Kang (Emory University)

David Kennedy (Brown University)

Richard Lazarus (Georgetown University)

Gillian Lester (University of California, Berkeley)

John Leubsdorf (Rutgers University, Newark)

Sanford Levinson (University of Texas, Austin)

Lynn LoPucki (University of California, Los Angeles)

Elizabeth Magill (University of Virginia)

Anup Malani (University of Chicago)

John A.E. Pottow (University of Michigan)

Claire Priest (Northwestern University)

Jim Rossi (Florida State University)

Tanina Rostain (New York Law School)

Frederick Schauer (University of Virginia)

Kirk J. Stark (University of California, Los Angeles)

Michael Stein (College of William & Mary)

Eric Talley (University of California, Berkeley)

Randall Thomas (Vanderbilt University)

Daniel P. Tokaji (Ohio State University)

Aain Verbeke (University of Leuven; University of Tilburg)

Daniel R. Williams (Northeastern University)

David A. Wirth (Boston College)

Benjamin Zipursky (Fordham University)

University of Chicago Law School

Gregg Bloche (Georgetown University)

Anupam Chander (University of California, Davis)

Daniel Crane (Cardozo Law School/Yeshiva University)

Jens Damann (University of Texas, Austin)

Takeshi Fujitani (Hokkaido University)

Leslie J. Green (Oxford University)

Paul Heald (University of Georgia)

Hideki Kanda (University of Tokyo)

Ariel Porat (Tel-Aviv University)

Laura Rosenbury (Washington University, St. Louis)

Madhavi Sunder (University of California, Davis)

Cass R. Sunstein (Harvard University)

Elimelech Westreich (Tel-Aviv University)

Stanford Law School

Barton Beebe (Cardozo Law School/Yeshiva University)

Eric Feldman (University of Pennsylvania)

Robert Gordon (Yale University)

Elizabeth Joh (University of California, Davis)

Laura Rosenbury (Washington University, St. Louis)

Adam Samaha (University of Chicago)

Columbia Law School

Matthew Adler (University of Pennsylvania)

Robert Ahdieh (Emory University)

John Armour (Oxford University)

G.A. Cohen (Emeritus, Oxford University)

Simon Deakin (Cambridge University)

Daphne Barak Erez (Tel-Aviv University)

Franco Ferrari (Verona University)

Williiam M. Gentry (Williams College)

Risa L. Goluboff (University of Virginia)

Gillian Hadfield (University of Southern California)

Vicki C. Jackson (Georgetown University)

John Jeffries (University of Virginia)

Alon Klement (Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya in Israel)

Greg Lastowska (Rutgers University, Camden)

Robin A. Lenhardt (Fordham University)

Jacqueline Ross (University of Illinois)

Elizabeth Schneider (Brooklyn Law School)

Richard Schragger (University of Virginia)

Brian Tamanaha (St. John's University)

Sudhir Venkatesh (Columbia Sociology Dept)

Gerharhd Werle (Humboldt University, Berlin)

James J. White (University of Michigan)

Charles Yablon (Cardozo Law School/Yeshiva University)

Benjamin Zipursky (Fordham University)

New York University School of Law

Albert Alschuler (Northwestern University)

Jose Alvarez (Columbia University)

John Baker (Cambridge University)

Sara Sun Beale (Duke University)

Barton Beebe (Cardozo Law School/Yeshiva University)

Sujit Choudhry (University of Toronto)

Adam Cox (University of Chicago)

David Dyzenhaus (University of Toronto)

Mitchell Engler (Cardozo Law School/Yeshiva University)

Richard Epstein (University of Chicago)

Mitchell Gans (Hofstra University)

Risa Goluboff (University of Virginia)

Pasquale Pasquino (CNRS, Paris)

Eric Posner (University of Chicago)

R. Anthony Reese (University of Texas, Austin)

Daniel Rubinfeld (University of California, Berkeley)

Peter Schuck (Yale University)

Christopher Serkin (Brooklyn Law School)

Howard Shelanski (University of California, Berkeley)

Geoffrey Stone (University of Chicago)

Philip J. Weiser (University of Colorado, Boulder)

Bainbridge Skewers the So-Called "Socratic Method"

Rightly so, of course!

Why So Few Female Authors in the Top Law Reviews?

Minna Kotkin (Brooklyn) documents the phenomenon here and canvasses a variety of possible explanations.

Adelman from Arizona to Texas

David Adelman, Associate Profesor of Law at the University of Arizona and a leading young scholar working on issues at the intersection of environmental law, law and science, and patents, has accepted a tenured offer from the University of Texas at Austin, where he will join the faculty in fall 2009.

The Differences Between "Liberals" and "Conservatives"

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt (University of Virginia) and experimental philosopher Joshua Knobe (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) discuss the topic here.

UVA's Walt to Take Up Half-Time Post at Ohio State

Steven Walt (commercial law, jurisprudence) at the University of Virginia has accepted a half-time post at the Moritz College of Law at Ohio State University, where he will teach each fall semester.  That's a nice pick-up for OSU!