Brian Leiter's Law School Reports

ABA's law school accreditation power under scrutiny from Dept. of Education

An article surveying the back-and-forth.   If the ABA's accreditation power were revoked, then, as I understand it, law students would not be able to access federal loans for education at ABA-approved schools.  This would be so disruptive for thousands of students that it's hard to imagine the Dept. of Education taking that step.  I suppose they are looking for signs that, e.g., the ABA will enforce its own bar passage requirements for accreditation.

"Theoretical Disagreements in Law: Another Look"

A new paper forthcoming from OUP in Ethical Norms, Legal Norms:  New Essays in Meteaethics and Jurisprudence (edited by Plunkett, Shapiro & Toh); the abstract:

In "Explaining Theoretical Disagreement" (2009), I defended an answer to Dworkin's argument that legal positivists can not adequately explain disagreements among judges about what the criteria of legal validity are. I here respond to a variety of critics of my answer, in particular, Kevin Toh. I argue that Toh misrepresents Hart's own views, and misunderstands the role of "presupposition" in both Hart and Kelsen. I argue that a correct reading of Hart is compatible with the error-theoretic interpretation of theoretical disagreement I defended in 2009.

Citations to faculty scholarship by federal and state courts

Courtesy of the good folks at St. Thomas.  The number of cites are remarkably few, even for those in "the top ten."  

UPDATE:  A colleage elsewhere writes with an explanation for why the numbers are artificially low:  "They only counted citations in the Supreme Court, the U.S. Court of Appeals, and state supreme courts. Also, they only counted citations to traditional law review articles: Citations to books, treatises, etc were not counted." 

Law schools with the highest percentage of "most-cited" tenured faculty, 2010-2014 (CORRECTED 8/24)

Over the last several months, we've compiled "top ten" or "top twenty" lists of "most-cited" faculty (based on the Sisk data) in the following areas of scholarship:   Constitutional & Public Law; Administrative and/or Environmental Law; Criminal Law & Procedure; Commercial Law; Corporate Law/Securities Regulation; Torts; Property; Civil Procedure; Evidence; Tax; Antitrust; Legal Ethics/Legal Profession; International Law; Intellectual Property/Cyberlaw; Family Law; Law & Economics; Legal History; Law & Philosophy; Law & Social Science (excluding economics); and Critical Theories of Law.

Below, any school with at least three faculty on these lists are ranked by the percentage of tenured faculty (based on the Sisk count) who appeared in some "most cited" list (each faculty member is counted but once, even if they appeared on more than one list). 

 

Rank	School	Tenured Faculty in Sisk study	# of Highly-Cited Faculty	% faculty highly-cited
1	University of Chicago	29	14	48%
	Yale University	46	22	48%
3	Harvard University	82	30	37%
4	University of California, Berkeley	53	18	34%
5	New York University	82	26	32%
6	Columbia University	73	22	30%
7	Stanford University	49	14	29%
8	University of Pennsylvania	43	11	26%
9	Duke University	40	10	25%
	University of California, Irvine	24	6	25%
	Vanderbilt University	32	8	25%
12	University of California, Los Angeles	54	13	24%
13	Cornell University	35	8	23%
14	Northwestern University	34	6	18%
15	University of Michigan, Ann Arbor	47	8	17%
	University of Minnesota	46	8	17%
17	George Washington University	66	9	14%
	Georgetown University	81	11	14%
19	Case Western Reserve University	23	3	13%
	George Mason University	31	4	13%
21	University of California, Hastings	38	4	11%
	University of Southern California	28	3	11%
	University of Texas, Austin	65	7	11%
	University of Virginia	66	7	11%
	Wake Forest University	28	3	11%
26	Brooklyn Law School	33	3	9%
27	Boston University	36	3	8%
	Fordham University	53	4	8%
	Ohio State University	36	3	8%
	University of San Diego	37	3	8%

Other schools with at least two tenured faculty on the most-cited lists were:   American University; University of Hawaii; University of California, Davis; Arizona State University; University of Arizona; Emory University; University of Illinois; Washington University, St. Louis; Cardozo Law School/Yeshiva University; Indiana University/Bloomington; Temple University; University of North Carolina/Chapel Hill.

10 Most-Cited Family Law Faculty, 2010-2014 (inclusive) [CORRECTED; first posted 7/27]

MOVING TO FRONT:  Turns out family law has evolved quite a bit since the last time we looked at the field more than a decade ago, hence several wrongful omissions, now hopefully all fixed!

Once again, this draws on the data from the 2015 Sisk study:    

Rank	Name	School	Citations	Age in 2016
1	Martha Fineman	Emory University	580	66
2	Naomi Cahn	George Washington University	540	58
3	Elizabeth Scott	Columbia University	520	71
4	Lynn Wardle	Brigham Young University	380	69
5	Mark Strasser	Capital University	360	61
6	June Carbone	University of Minnesota	340	62
	Nancy Polikoff	American University	340	64
	Robin Wilson	University of Illinois	340	48
9	Joanna Grossman	Southern Methodist University	310	48
	Melissa Murray	University of California, Berkeley	310	41
		Runners-up:
	Kerry Abrams	University of Virginia	260	45
	Susan Appleton	Washington University, St. Louis	260	68
	Jill Hasday	University of Minnesota	250	44
	Carol Sanger	Columbia University	250	68
		Other highly-cited scholars who work partly in this area
	Martha Minow	Harvard University	1160	62
	Janet Halley	Harvard University	420	64
	Katharine Bartlett	Duke University	380	69
	Mary Anne Case	University of Chicago	330	59
	I Glenn Cohen	Harvard University	320	38

 

 

Sandy Baum challenges media sensationalism and political hype about student loans

NPR:

"There's a new book out about the student loan crisis [Student Debt: Rhetoric and Realities of Higher Education], or what author Sandy Baum suggests is a "bogus crisis." Baum, a financial aid expert and senior fellow at the Urban Institute, claims it has been [sensationalized and exaggerated] by the media in search of a spicy story and fueled by politicians pushing "debt free college" proposals. . . . "

Sandy Baum:

"People who earn bachelor's degrees, by and large, do fine.

The problem is that we have a lot of people actually borrowing small amounts of money, going to college, not completing [a degree] or completing credentials that don't have labor market value. They tend to be older. They tend to come from disadvantaged or middle-income families and they're struggling. [But] not because they owe a lot of money. . . .

Its not realistic to say we're going to pay people to go to college [for free]. Someone has to pay. We can have everyone pay much higher taxes. But short of that, it's not clear how we would pay. . . . 

There are some people who borrowed under fraudulent, deceptive situations and their debt should be forgiven. There are people for whom education did not work out through no fault of their own and their debt should be forgiven.  . . . We don't give people very much advice and guidance about where [and] when to go to college, how to pay for it, what to study. . . .

[[There are facts that]  get little or no attention because they don't fit the "crisis" narrative:

• A third of college students who earn a four-year degree graduate with no debt at all. Zero.
• A fourth graduate with debt of no more than $20,000.
• Low-income households hold only 11 percent of all outstanding [student] debt.
• Almost half of the $1.3 trillion in student loan debt is held by 25 percent of graduates who are actually making a pretty high income.]

This is an investment that pays off really well. The median earnings for young bachelor's degree recipients is about $20,000 a year higher than the median earnings for high school graduates.

Student debt is really creating a lot of opportunities for people. People wouldn't be able to go to college otherwise."

Baum notes that many graduates with high debt levels (>$100,000) have advanced degrees, high expected incomes, and low default rates.

"The highest debt levels are for those earning professional degrees . . .  Despite high debt levels, default rates among graduate borrowers are very low."  However, Baum expresses some concern about those pursuing expensive master's degrees in fields "that rarely lead to the kind of earnings that doctors, lawyers, and MBAs can expect."

Baum's findings are broadly consistent with recent research by Beth Akers and Matthew Chingos, reviewed by David Leonhardt for the New York Times.  Akers and Chingos have a new book coming out this fall.

Only 382 resumes in the first (and most important) FAR distribution...

...which is down at least fifty or more 28 from last year (I can't find the number, if someone has it, please shoot me an e-mail).  That's good news for the job seekers, as I think early indications are that, like last year, we will see at least 80 new tenure-track academic hires as we did last year (up from roughly 65 each of 2014-15 and 2013-14).

UPDATE:  Thanks to Roger Ford (New Hampshire) for flagging this useful chart courtesy of Sarah Lawsky (Northwestern), which shows the drop off from 2015-16 is not as great as I remembered (I was probably confusing it with 2014-15).

ANOTHER:  58% of the candidates took their law degree from one of the sixteen law schools that produce the most law teachers (i.e., Yale, Harvard, Chicago, Stanford, Columbia, Michigan, NYU, Berkeley, Virginia, Penn, Northwestern, Cornell, Georgetown, Duke, Texas, UCLA); almost 20% earned a degree from the first four (Yale, Harvard, Chicago, Stanford).

Must be a slow news day

New York Times journalist Elizabeth Olson recently reported that the law school graduating class of 2015--which was very close to the size of the class of 1996--had about the same number of private sector jobs 9 months after graduation as the class of 1996.  That's a pretty good outcome considering that the economy-wide employment population ratio in February 2016 was 3.6 points lower than in February 1997.  Olson puts a negative spin on the non-story.

UPDATE:  Casey Sullivan at Bloomberg provides more balanced coverage, noting the smaller class size at the outset of his story and focusing on overall earnings rather than job counts in one segment of the market.

For previous coverage, see 

Smaller or Larger Law Class Sizes Don’t Predict Changes in Financial Benefits of Law School, Feb. 2, 2016

and

Timing Law School (forthcoming in JELS)

 

Berkeley Chancellor Dirks to resign after just three years

I have no inside knowledge or informed opinion about whether this is a good development, but I do wonder whether it is not symptomatic of the political meddling of Napolitano.

(Thanks to Rick Hasen for the pointer.)

Philosophy of law in the Encyclopaedia Britannica

This is the first new essay commissioned on the subject in more than fifty years (the last one was by Julius Stone, also a legal realist!).  I had the privilege of co-authoring the new essay with a former student, the legal philosopher Michael Sevel (not a legal realist, but like Stone, at the University of Sydney!).  Alas, you need to access it from an institution that subscribes to read this essay in full.

UPDATE:  After I posted a similar announcement at my philosophy blog, an editor at EB wrote:  "in fact anyone can read the entire article for free if he/she comes to it through a Google search. I believe we are fourth or fifth in the hit list returned by searching on 'philosophy of law'. Clicking on the link should provide access to the full article. (Obviously, searching on "philosophy of law Britannica" would make it even easier.) Likewise any other article in Britannica."  Useful information, I didn't realize that!