Brian Leiter's Law School Reports

Valparaiso Law School to close

IHE has the details.  Good wishes to the students and the faculty.  Hopefully some other law schools will hire some of the excellent and experienced faculty there.

89-year-old prisoner murdered upon transfer to a new prison

There are many threats to the "rule of law" these days, but notorious prisoners being murdered while in state custody should feature among the threats law professors are taking seriously.

Chicago's Martha Nussbaum wins $1 million Berggruen Prize in Philosophy for 2018

Announcement here.

Michigan State College of Law to actually become part of Michigan State University

I had not realized they weren't already!

More on the allegations against Yale's Jed Rubenfeld

A more detailed account from Slate.  This passage sums up the accounts pretty well:

These students, alumni, and faculty all had slightly different reads on exactly how out of line Rubenfeld’s alleged behavior was (and some faculty members had no firsthand knowledge of it at all). Some described Rubenfeld as flirtatious and line-crossing; others called his behavior harassment. The picture we got from these conversations is not one of straightforward abuse but rather a fraught and uncomfortable situation full of insinuation and pushed boundaries that can make learning difficult and has the potential to push women out of the pipeline for the most prestigious and competitive areas of the law. This type of behavior, which is frequently dismissed as “borderline” or “creepy” and not worth making a formal fuss over, can have very real consequences.

If the allegations about this pattern of conduct are confirmed, then Yale would be within rights to fire him after an appropriate process.  This wouldn't be the first time Yale Law has ousted a faculty member over allegations of sexual harassment and misconduct.

(A sidenote:  the article does wildly overstate how important Supreme Court clerkships are.  The one thing they do guarantee are huge signing bonuses (on the order of 300K these days) from the top law firms!)

 

University of Illinois law professor Jay Kesan found to have violated Univeristy's Code of Conduct, but not to have violated sexual harassment rules

Details of the case, which dates from 2015, are here.  A colleague at Illinois asked me to share a statement issued by the law faculty protesting the insufficient sanctions imposed in this case: Download JOINT STATEMENT OF LAW PROFESSORS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS

I've never before seen such a damning statement issued by law professors about a colleague's misconduct.

 

$25 million gift to Stanford Law School...

...to fund the "Global Law Program."

Schools with the highest percentage of tenured faculty on one or more of the most-cited lists by specialty, 2013-2017 (CORRECTED)

Since August, and drawing on the Sisk data, I have produced lists of the most-cited tenured faculty in 20 areas of specialization:  corporate law & securities regulation; constitutional law; commercial law (incl. contracts and bankruptcy); tax; property; torts & insurance; civil procedure; family law; legal history; law & economics, law & philosophy; law & social science (other than economics); election law; public law other than constitutional (including, e.g., administrative, environmental, legislation, telecommunication and regulatory law), critical theories of law:  feminist and critical race; legal ethics/legal profession; intellectual property & cyberlaw; evidence, antitrust; international law & security; and criminal law & procedure.  Some of these were "top 10" lists, some bigger, depending on the breadth (how many scholars working in it) and depth (i.e., volume of citations) of the field.  Obviously different choices (e.g., top 10 rather than top 15 or vice versa) would have made some difference to the number of tenured faculty represented on different lists.  Some excellent faculties (Virginia is the clearest example), partly in virtue of size and partly in virtue of other factors, didn't have a high percentage of tenured faculty on these most-cited lists (other factors in UVA's case include that some of their first-rate faculty [e.g., Goluboff in legal history, Mahoney in corporate] are just not identified by citation counts, while many highly productive and influential faculty [e.g., Prakash, C. Nelson] are in fields where citation counts overall are VERY high, and so just didn't make the lists).  With those caveats in mind, here are law schools with at least four faculty on the most-cited lists ranked according to what percentage of the tenured faculty in the Sisk study made one of the lists.   The "top 24" list is followed by a list of law schools that had three faculty on the "most-cited" lists and those that had two.

This concludes the citation rankings for the 2013-2017 period studied by Professor Sisk and colleagues at St. Thomas.

Rank	School	Percentage	# tenured faculty on most-cited lists	Total tenured faculty in Sisk study
1	Yale University	52%	27	52
2	University of Chicago	38%	12	32
3	Harvard University	37%	31	85
4	New York University	36%	30	83
5	Columbia University	34%	23	68
6	University of Pennsylvania	33%	13	40
7	University of California, Berkeley	30%	16	54
8	Stanford University	26%	13	50
9	University of California, Irvine	24%	6	25
	Vanderbilt University	24%	9	37
11	Duke University	21%	9	42
12	University of California, Los Angeles	20%	12	60
13	Cornell University	18%	7	39
14	University of Minnesota	17%	7	41
15	George Washington University	16%	9	57
16	George Mason University	15%	5	34
	Northwestern University	15%	6	40
18	University of Michigan	14%	7	49
19	University of Texas, Austin	13%	8	61
20	University of San Diego	12%	4	33
21	Boston University	11%	4	38
	Georgetown University	11%	10	94
23	Fordham University	9%	4	47
	University of Virginia	9%	6	65

 

Schools with three faculty each in the “most-cited” lists were:  University of Hawaii; University of Illinois; University of Southern California; Arizona State University; Cardozo Law School/Yeshiva University; University of California, Hastings; and University of California, Davis.

Schools with two faculty each in the “most-cited” lists were: Case Western Reserve University; Wake Forest University; Ohio State University; Washington University, St. Louis; Santa Clara University; Brooklyn Law School; University of Alabama; and University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Average salaries and indebtedness

Interesting stats, but bear in mind three things:  first, this includes only students who refinanced their law school loans; second, schools continue to be a bit slippery about how they report average starting salaries; and third, average starting salaries are sensitive to region of the country (any school that primarily places in NYC "big law" will come out with higher average salaries, all else equal).  The strong performance by major regional schools--like BYU and Georgia--is striking.

Law schools ranked by *median* scholarly impact of the tenured faculty, 2013-2017

After reading an article about Duke Law School's strong performance in the Sisk study of scholarly impact, which emphasized its strong median score, I thought I'd take a look at how the schools rank by median citations.  Here's the top 25, with the median number in parentheses, followed by the overall rank based on mean and median (treating differences of one as ties):

1.  Yale University (394) (#1 overall)

2.  University of Chicago (331) (#3 overall)

3.  Harvard University (318) (#2 overall)

4.  New York University (281) (#4 overall)

5.  Columbia University (242) (#5 overall)

6.  Duke University (231) (#8 overall)

     Stanford University (230) (#6 overall)

8.  Cornell University (220) (#13 overall)

9.  University of California, Berkeley (193) (#7 overall) 

10. University of Pennsylvania (188) (#9 overall)

11. University of California, Los Angeles (182) #11 overall)

12. University of California, Irvine (174) (#12 overall)

13. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (172) (#14 overall)

14. Vanderbilt University (169) (#10 overall)

15. University of Notre Dame (145) (#26 overall)

      University of Texas, Austin (146) (#19 overall)

17. Northwestern University (142) (#14 overall)

18. George Washington University (137) (#16 overall)

19. Georgetown University (135) (#16 overall)

20. George Mason University (133) (#19 overall)

      Washington University, St. Louis (133) (#21 overall)

22. College of William & Mary (130) (#28 overall)

      University of Minnesota, Twin Cities (129) (#21 overall)

24. St. Thomas University (Minneapolis) (122) (#23 overall)

      University of Virginia (122) (#16 overall)