Brian Leiter's Law School Reports

Four law professors win Carnegie fellowships in 2017 (Michael Simkovic)

 Winners of Carnegie Fellowships for 2017 include:

• Katerina Linos (U.C. Berkeley)

• Polly Price (Emory)

• Emily Ryo (USC)

• Mila Versteeg (University of Virginia)

The Andrew Carnegie Fellows Program provides fellowships advancing research in the social sciences and humanities.  35 winners are selected from among hundreds of candidates.

Ignorant bloviating about Whittier

I could not agree more with Northwestern Dean Dan Rodriguez:

Whittier's sudden closing is obviously a tough thing for current students and faculty.  Perhaps the decision will be unraveled in the face of public pressure or via littigation.  Yet there seems precious little basis to jump into a matter whose complex issues are essentially private, despite the efforts of many in and around the school to make this into a public spectacle.  Perhaps bloggers should neither aid nor abet these efforts.

The hubris of the unknowing. 

Sometimes Stephen Diamond (Santa Clara) has been a voice of reason amidst the mindless blather about law schools in most of cyberspace (and I have linked to him on a number of occasions over the years), but here he has completely missed the boat:  the general legal market has been improving, true, but it is hardly mysterious why an institution would close a law school where far fewer than half the graduates even pass the bar.  Diamond just politely ignores all the relevant facts about how this school's graduates have been faring, and, of course, is ignorant of the actual finances of the school.

But far more egregious is the presumptuous intervention of Robert Anderson, Associate Professor of Law at Pepperdine.  Faculty members at Whittier are going to lose their jobs, and some may never work again as law teachers or work again at all.  Yet Anderson has the audacity to scold them for not having taken an early retirement in the financial interest of the school.   Seriously?  Does Prof. Anderson pay the bills for any members of that faculty, does he know about their college-age children or their elderly parents or their chronic medical conditions that require a salary and a health insurance plan?  Does he know that a job is not just a paycheck for many people (maybe not Robert Anderson), but a focal point of purpose and meaning in a life?  Does he know that many did take early retirement a few years ago, and that others might have quite reasonably believed that the school's fortunes, now that both its faculty and student body were smaller, would rebound?

I'm sure Anderson doesn't know any of these things, he's just another blogging blowhard who has decided to use someone else's misery as an opportunity to attract some attention to himself.  Anderson is guilty of far worse than unknowing hubris.

UPDATE:  Some choice quotes from Prof. Anderson's posts:

"The reason Whittier is closing is because of intransigent, highly paid, unproductive law professors hang around for decades even when they haven't published anything or updated their courses since they were doing the Macarena."

 

"The unfortunate truth of this story [about Whitter] is that none of this needed to happen..... The number of retirement-age faculty was (and is) enormous, likely larger than it has ever been. If faculties had looked beyond their own personal financial self interest they could have easily contracted to meet the market demand and avoided the disastrous effects that have afflicted law students and now law schools. Sadly, the very faculty members whose institution provided them an outrageously rewarding career over many decades seemed the least likely to 'pay it forward' by helping to reduce expenses....Thus, the story of Whittier is a story of generational wealth shifting that is seen throughout tuition dependent law schools, and indeed throughout our country."

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau may monitor Student Loan Servicers more closely (Michael Simkovic)

Kathleen Engel (Suffolk), Jonathan Glater (U.C. Irvine), and 13 more legal scholars and economists who study higher education and consumer finance have submitted a comment letter supporting a recent proposal by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to monitor student loan servicers more closely.  The scholars have also suggested that anonymized versions of the resulting data should be shared with researchers who can help analyze it.

Although the federal government originates and holds most student loans, it contracts with non-profits, state agencies, and private lenders to service those loans--that is, to interact with borrowers, send statements, and collect payments. The scholars expressed concerns that some servicers might not be adequately informing borrowers of the various repayment plans available to them, and could thereby be driving up defaults or financing costs for borrowers. 

Three law professors win Guggenheim Fellowships in 2017 competition

They are:  Heidi Kitrosser (Minnesota), Adriaan Lanni (Harvard), and Hiroshi Motomura (UCLA).

Ousted Cincinnati Law Dean Jennifer Bard sues the university and the interim Provost

Blog Emperor Caron, who used to teach at Cincinnatti, has the complaint.

How sustainable is elite law firms' competitive advantage? (Michael Simkovic)

Elisabeth de Fontenay at Duke argues that elite law firms' expertise in sophisticated corporate transactions is self-sustaining and resistant to competition.  This is in part because firms with that do the lions share of negotiation and drafting for specific kinds of transactions create, manage and retain private information about the current market for terms.

Judge rejects Whittier faculty's request for TRO on closure of law school

We'll see what comes next.

Whittier in California to close its law school

This, I believe, is the first genuine closure of an ABA-accredited not-for-profit law school since the economic collapse of 2008 and the subsequent downturn in law school applications.

(Thanks to Rick Hasen for the pointer.)

UPDATE:  Whittier law faculty are suing to stop the closure of the school, basically on breach of contract grounds (the complaint takes the position that the faculty contracts incorporate the faculty handbook provisions on academic freedom and tenure, and that no financial exigency exists which would justify terminating their employment, that no educational reasons exist for doing so, and that faculty in any case have not been included in the decision-making process, as they should have been under the AAUP rules in the handbook).

The 10 most cited health law scholars, 2010-2014 (Michael Simkovic)

Mark Hall and Glenn Cohen have extended Brian Leiter's approach to ranking faculty by scholarly citations (based on Sisk data) to the field of health law.

According to Hall and Cohen, the most cited health law scholars in 2010-2014 (inclusive) are:

Rank	Name	School	Citations		Approx. Age in 2017
1	Larry Gostin	Georgetown	510	67
2	Mark A. Hall	Wake Forest	480	62
3	David A. Hyman	Georgetown	360	56
4	I. Glenn Cohen	Harvard	320	39
5	John A. Robertson	Texas	310	74
6	Mark Rothstein	Louisville	300	68
6	Michelle M. Mello	Stanford	300	46
6	Frank Pasquale	Maryland	300	43
9	Lars Noah	Florida	280	52
10	George J. Annas	Boston U	270	72

 

The full ranking is available here.

UNC's Gene Nichol blasts politically motivated attack on Civil Rights Center, as well as university leadership

A searing indictment, and an embarrassment for the university and the state.