Brian Leiter's Law School Reports

Gordon-Reed from New York Law School to Harvard

Annette Gordon-Reed, the legal historian at New York Law School and the History Department at Rutgers University-Newark, whose work has won a Pulitzer Prize, among other honors, has accepted a senior offer from Harvard Law School.   I will guess, though I may be wrong, that this is the first time Harvard Law School has ever hired someone directly from the faculty of New York Law School, indeed, directly from the faculty of any law school not in the top 25 or so in the United States.  It's nice to see someone achieve this kind of professional success based on the merits of their work!

Everything you wanted to know about tax professor moves for 2010-11

Here.

Four Law Professors Elected to American Philosophical Society

They are:  Martha Minow (Dean of Harvard Law School); Geoffrey Stone (University of Chicago Law School); Cass Sunstein (serving in the Obama Administration, on leave from Harvard Law School); and Laurence Tribe (Harvard Law School).  Judge Boudin of the 1st Circuit was also elected.  The full list of new members is here.

Adam Kolber from San Diego to Brooklyn

Professor Adam Kolber, a criminal law, neurolaw and bioethics scholar, will be moving to a tenured position at Brooklyn Law School beginning next fall.  He leaves the University of San Diego after six years on their faculty. 

Score One for Legal Positivism

From The New York Times:  "Whether the transaction was legal or not, there’s a difference between what’s legal and what’s right."  (Take that Lon Fuller!)

Edward Cheng from Brooklyn to Vanderbilt

Professor Edward Cheng, of Brooklyn Law School, has accepted a tenured faculty offer from Vanderbilt Law School.  Professor Cheng is an evidence scholar.  He has been at Brooklyn Law since 2003. 

Top Corporate & Securities Articles for 2009

Robert Thompson (Vanderbilt, moving to Georgetown) has sent me the articles chosen in this year's Corporate Practice Commentator poll.  Schools with the most authors with winning articles are:  Penn (T. Baker, W. Bratton, M. Wachter, J. Fisch, E. Rock), NYU (S. Choi, M. Kahan [twice]), Berkeley (Bartlett, Talley), and Georgetown (Langevoort, Thompson).  Other authors on law faculties are from Fordham (Griffith), Yale (Romano), USC (Kamar), Indiana (Nagy), and Vanderbilt (Edelman).

The Top 10 Corporate and Securities Articles of 2009

The Corporate Practice Commentator is pleased to announce the results of its sixteenth annual poll to select the ten best corporate and securities articles.  Teachers in corporate and securities law were asked to select the best corporate and securities articles from a list of articles published and indexed in legal journals during 2009.   More than 500 articles were on this year’s list and more than 120 received votes.  Because of the vagaries of publication, indexing, and mailing, some articles published in 2009 have a 2008 date, and not all articles containing a 2009 date were published and indexed in time to be included in this year’s list.

The articles, listed in alphabetical order of the initial author, are:

Baker, Tom and Sean J. Griffith. How the merits matter: Directors’ and officers’ insurance and securities settlements. 157 U. Pa. L. Rev. 755-832 (2009).

Bartlett, Robert P. III. Going private but staying public: Reexamining the effect of Sarbanes-Oxley on firms' going-private decisions. 76 U. Chi. L. Rev. 7 (2009).

Bhagat, Sanjai, Brian Bolton and Roberta Romano. The promise and peril of corporate governance indices. 108 Colum. L. Rev. 1803-1882 (2008).

Bratton, William W. and Michael L. Wachter. Shareholder primacy’s corporatist origins: Adolf Berle and The Modern Corporation, 34 J. Corp. L. 99-152 (2008).

Choi, Stephen J., Jill E. Fisch and Marcel Kahan. Director elections and the role of proxy advisors. 82 S. Cal. L. Rev. 649-702 (2009).

Kahan, Marcel and Edward Rock. How to prevent hard cases from making bad law: Bear Stearns, Delaware, and the strategic use of comity. 58 Emory L.J. 713-759 (2009).

Kamar, Ehud, Pinar Karaca-Mandic and Eric Talley. Going-private decisions and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002: A cross-country analysis. 25 J.L. Econ. & Org. 107-133 (2009).

Langevoort, Donald C. The SEC, retail investors, and the institutionalization of the securities markets. 95 Va. L. Rev. 1025-1083 (2009).

Nagy, Donna M. Insider trading and the gradual demise of fiduciary principles. 94 Iowa L. Rev. 1315-1379 (2009).

Thompson, Robert B. and Paul H. Edelman. Corporate voting. 62 Vand. L. Rev. 129-175 (2009).

"Gordon Liu: Wrong Man for the 9th Circuit" (real headline)

Indeed, especially since no Gordon Liu has been nominated.  I like the quote from Professor Painter of Minnesota:  "There are real left-wingers in the" academy.  That sounds scary.  Happily, Professor Painter assures us that Professor Liu is not one of them. Whew!

(Thanks to Diane Amann for the pointer.)

UPDATE:  Alas, they finally caught the mistake!

University of Oregon General Counsel "Reassigned" to the Law School

University of Oregon General Counsel, Melinda Grier, has been at the center of swirling controversy regarding Mike Bellotti, the Ducks departing athletic director.  There has been uproar regarding both the terms of Bellotti's compensation deal and the school's lack of transparency regarding the contracts.  There would be nothing particularly interesting about this - to me at least - but for the most recent turn of events.  We learn today that UO President Richard Lariviere "reassigned" Grier to the law school.  She will teach classes there as an instructor, through June 2011, after which her contract will not be renewed.

I can't imagine folks at the law school can be too pleased about this.  I'm not sure which part is most disturbing: that the President considers the law school a site for reassignment of non-academic university employees; that the President considers the law school a site for reassignment of employees who aren't working out; or that the President thinks it's appropriate to reassign her from the GC position to a law school teaching slot.  I wonder if the faculty, or even the dean, was consulted about this reassignment.

Meanwhile, Dean Margie Paris isn't totally on the sidelines.  She's been asked to chair the search for Grier's replacement as GC.  That's service for you - the law school is a one-stop-shop for solving the university's lawyer problems.  And all of this brought to you by the same institution that refused to defend one of its law professors in a lawsuit over her scholarship! 

Sounds to me like UO ought to do for Grier what schools do for coaches all the time: buy out the rest of her contract. 

"Above the Law" Blog Hits New Low

I realize most reader will consider this unremarkable, but even I was stunned when a supporter of Professor Liu called this one to my attention:  David Lat actually called attention to a hatchet job by the crypto-fascist "journalist" Michelle Malkin regarding Goodwin Liu.  Really.  What's next?  "Above the Law" links to Michael Savage?  David Duke?