Brian Leiter's Law School Reports

Rapoport on Law Student Debt Crisis

Here.

Dudziak from Southern Cal to Emory

Mary Dudziak, a leading legal historian at the University of Southern California, has accepted a senior offer from the law school at Emory University, where she will direct a new Project on War and Security in Law, Culture and Society.

Schapiro Named Dean of Emory

Emory University School of Law has announced the appointment of Robert Schapiro as the school's permanent dean.  He  has been serving as interim dean since last July.  Schapiro is a graduate of Yale Law School and clerked for Justice Stevens.  He is a constitutional law and civil procedure scholar and has been on the Emory faculty since 1995.  

William Carter To Lead Pitt Law

The University of Pittsburgh has named William "Chip" Carter, Professor of Law at Temple, as its new dean, effective July 1, 2012.  Carter previously taught at Case Law, where he also received his JD.  

Answer: "Be a right-wing crazy or blog about philosophy"

Question:  how do you get a "law" blog into the "top five"?

Ronald Weich Named Dean of Baltimore Law

The University of Baltimore School of Law has named Washington D.C. attorney Ronald Weich as its new dean.  Weich is currently the assistant attorney general for legislative affairs in DOJ.  He previously served as chief counsel to Senators Ted Kennedy and Harry Reid.   He holds a JD from Yale.

Tamanaha v. LSAC

Tamanaha has the better of the argument, I think.

Hulett Askew Leaving Position as ABA Consultant on Legal Education

Hulett "Bucky" Askew, the Consultant on Legal Education to the American Bar Association, has announced that he will be leaving the position this summer.  He has been the consultant since 2006.  Former deputy consultant, Barry Currier, will serve in an interim capacity until the position is filled.

Faculty Quality Based on Per Capita American Academy Membership--Updated for 2012

Here.  Be sure to read the introduction and the caveats.

UPDATE AND CLARIFICATION:  The criterion for inclusion is tenure status on the law faculty, which sometimes results in some surprising inclusions and exclusions.  So, for example, I had mistakenly excluded Larry Kramer, because of his new position, but in fact he will remain a tenured member of the Stanford law faculty for at least the next two years and will do some teaching.  So, too, Richard Epstein is excluded from the Chicago listing, since he is technically emeritus, though he, in fact, teaches here each Spring (indeed, he's teaching two courses this Spring!).   Since it's not possible to monitor who is teaching and who is not, I rely on tenured status as an imperfect proxy for active presence at the school.

Our Dynamic Lexicon

Northwestern's Peter Ludlow, a leading philosopher working at the intersection of semantics and linguistics, gives a brief sketch of an important, contemporary line of thought about language and meaning that is also relevant to questions of interpretation in the law.  (His column appears in a blog series at the New York Times ostensibly devoted to philosophy, though I should warn readers that many of the entries are quite bad, largely due to the fact that the moderator for the series is an incompetent.  But every now and then, work by substantial philosophers does appear.)