Brian Leiter's Law School Reports

$10 million gift for environmental law at Case Western

Wow!

Congratulations to Chicago Alumni and Fellows who secured tenure-track jobs this year on the teaching market (UPDATED)

MOVING TO FRONT FROM APRIL 22

Another strong year for Chicago alums and Fellows on the teaching market.  Although there were clearly more schools hiring this year, demand was remarkably weak in certain areas, like intellectual property.  Happily, almost all our candidate secured offers, and several secured multiple offers.  Here they are (with one omission [a Fellow] that will be added later when the decisions can be made public):

 

Ilya Beylin '08, who will join the law faculty at Seton Hall University.  He graduated from the Law School with Honors and Order of the Coif, where he was Articles Editor of the Law Review.  He clerked for Judge Stephen Williams on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, and was an associate at Sullivan & Cromwell and then Sidley Austin, both in New York, as well as General Counsel of AngelList.  He was a VAP and a postdoctoral scholar at, respectively, NYU Law School and Columbia Law School.  His teaching and research interests include corporate law and finance, securities regulation, derivatives and other financial regulation, and bankruptcy.

 

Gregory Buchak '19, who will join the faculty of the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University.  He will earn his J.D. and his Ph.D. in Finance both from the University of Chicago in June.  At the Law School, he was a member of the Law Review and a Kirkland & Ellis Scholar.  His teaching and research interests include corporate and consumer finance, law & economics, banking, and financial regulation.

 

Courtney Cox’14, who will join the law faculty at Fordham University.  She graduated with Highest Honors and Order of the Coif from the Law School, where she was also a member of the Law Review, a Rubenstein Scholar and a Kirkland & Ellis Scholar.  Before coming to Chicago, she earned her D.Phil. in Philosophy from Oxford University.  Upon graduation from the Law School, she clerked for Judge Lynch on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, and was then an associate focusing on intellectual property litigation at Ropes & Gray in Boston.  Her teaching and research interests include intellectual property, copyright, trademarks, trade secrets, jurisprudence, civil procedure, and property.  

 

Stephanie M. Didwania '09, who will join the law faculty at Temple University.  She graduated with Honors from the Law School, where she was the Comment and Development Editor of the University of Chicago Journal of International Law.  She clerked for Judge Paez on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and earned a Ph.D. in Managerial Economics and Strategy from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University in 2016. Most recently, she was a Bigelow Fellow at the Law School.  Her teaching and research interests include criminal law and criminal justice, intellectual property, torts, and antitrust.

 

Emma Kaufman, who will join the law faculty at New York University.  She is currently a Bigelow Fellow at the Law School.  She graduated from Yale Law School in 2015, where she was Comments Editor of the Yale Law Journal.  Prior to law school, she earned a D.Phil. in Criminology as a Marshall Scholar at Oxford University.  Before coming to Chicago, she clerked for Judge Tatel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and for Judge Oetken on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.  Her teaching and research interests include criminal law and procedure, immigration law, administrative law, and remedies.

 

James (Jamie) Macleod ’12, who will join the faculty at Brooklyn Law School.  He graduated with High Honors and Order of the Coif from the Law School, where he was an editor of the Law Review and a Kirkland & Ellis scholar all three years. He clerked for Judge Lohier on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and was a litigation associate, first at Williams & Connolly in D.C. and then at Gibson Dunn in New York, before joining Columbia Law School as an Associate-in-Law in 2017.  His teaching and research interests include criminal law, torts, evidence, criminal procedure, legislation, and experimental jurisprudence.

 

Manisha Padi, who will join the law faculty at the University of California, Berkeley.  She is currently a Bigelow Fellow at the Law School.   She received her J.D. from Yale and her Ph.D. in Economics from MIT, both in 2017.  Her teaching and research interests include contracts, bankruptcy, financial institutions, corporate law and finance and empirical legal studies.

 

Kyle Rozema, who will join the law faculty at Washington University, St. Louis.  He is currently the Behavioral Law & Economics Fellow at the Law School.  He received his J.D. in 2011 from Washington University, St. Louis and his PhD in Economics from Cornell University in 2015, with a dissertation on tax policy.  He was a post-doctoral Fellow in Empirical Legal Studies at Northwestern before coming to Chicago in 2017. His teaching and research interests include federal income taxation, tax policy, law & economics, empirical legal studies, patents and torts.

 

Emily Winston '10, who will join the law faculty at the University of South Carolina.  She is currently the Jacobson Research Fellow in Law & Business at New York University School of Law, where she was previously a Clinic Fellow and Supervising Attorney in the Business Law Transactions Clinic from 2014-16.   Prior to joining NYU, she was a corporate associate at Dewey & LeBoeuf and then Paul Hastings, focusing on cross-border securities and corporate finance transactions involving Latin American companies.  Her teaching and research interests include corporate law, securities regulation, contracts, international business transactions, and nonprofit and philanthropy law.

You can see a complete list of the several hundred alumni in teaching here.

New study finds little evidence that federal student loan limits drive tuition at professional schools (Michael Simkovic)

Robert Kelchen, Does the Bennett Hypothesis Hold in Professional Education? An Empirical Analysis, Research in Higher Education 1-26 (2019):

"Policymakers have been debating the Bennett Hypothesis—whether colleges increase tuition after the federal government increases access to student loans—for decades. Yet most of the prior research has focused on studying small changes to loan limits or Pell Grants for undergraduate students. In this study, I examine whether business schools (the most popular master’s program) and medical schools (one of the most-indebted programs) responded to a large increase in federal student loan limits in 2006 following the creation of the Grad PLUS program by raising tuition or living expenses as well as examining whether student debt burdens also increased. Using two quasi-experimental estimation strategies and program-level data from 2001 to 2016, I find little consistent evidence to support the Bennett Hypothesis in either medical or business schools."

Hat tip Frank Pasquale.

Pro-billionaire, anti-education populism comes to France (Michael Simkovic)

In the United States, both Democratic and Republican politicians sometimes attempt to bolster their populist credibility by going after easy targets--attacking pharma companies, or doctors, or insurance companies or banks or universities--while being elitists where it really counts: cutting taxes for billionaires and raising taxes on the middle class.

French president Emmanuel Macron, who recently faced angry protests after making France's tax system more regressive, is taking a page out of the American playbook by threatening to close ENA, an elite institution that trains the upper echelons of the civil service and corporate managers. 

In knee-jerk populist logic, making civil servants less well-educated and less competent somehow makes up for taxing the middle class more heavily to provide tax relief to the wealthy.

Five law professors elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

They are:  Anita Allen (Penn, elected in the Philosophy category), Rachel Barkow (NYU), Tracey Meares (Yale), Nathaniel Persily (Stanford), and James Ryan (President of the University of Virginia, and a member of the law faculty).  Judge Merrick Garland of the D.C. Circuit and Justice Goodwin Liu of the California Supreme Court were also elected.

ADDENDUM:  I just noticed that Jody Freeman (Harvard Law) was also elected, but in the Public Affairs and Policy section.

"Please reject me: an Open Letter to the Harvard Law Review"

Mark Lemley (Stanford) kindly shared this quite amusing open letter:

                                                    Please Reject Me

                                An Open Letter to the Harvard Law Review

            The Harvard Law Review has rejected my articles in the past.  A lot.  Indeed, they may have rejected me more than anyone else in the legal academy.  I’m 0 for 140 or so at Harvard.

            Several years ago, though, they stopped rejecting me.  I’m not saying they accepted my papers.  They haven’t, and probably they never will.

            No, what I mean is that they just stopped responding at all.  Oh, I get automated notices acknowledging that I’ve submitted a paper, vaguely hinting that they might read it.  And I get acknowledgements when I expedite my article after getting an offer elsewhere.  But it’s been at least seven years since I’ve gotten even an automated rejection, much less contact from a human being. 

            Every law professor knows the automated rejection form.  There are the nice ones, assuring me that they really liked my paper and just “couldn’t come to consensus.”  There is the everpresent “we have carefully considered your paper, but we get so many good submissions that we couldn’t take yours.”  There is the more dispassionate “unfortunately we can’t publish your paper.”  But from Harvard?  Nothing. 

            And they’re not alone.  In the last couple of years more top reviews have been ignoring papers altogether rather than giving us the bad news.

            As an author, this sucks.  Would I like you to accept my paper?  Sure I would.  But even more than that, I’d just like to know.  Did you read it and decide it wasn’t good?  Did you just not get to it in time?  Did you take a look at the title, realize it’s about patent law, and read no further?  [As far as I can tell the Harvard Law Review has never in its history published a patent law article.  Certainly it hasn’t done so in the 31 years I’ve been in law].  Fine.  I’m a big boy; I can take it.  Just tell me, please. 

            Yes, I know you’re busy.  But you’ve already got an automated system; it can’t be that much more work to generate an automated email telling me what I already suspected. 

            For starters, it would be the polite thing to do.  [Think how you’d feel if authors didn’t withdraw their papers when they’d accepted offers elsewhere].

            But you’re not just being rude to me.  You’re being rude to every other law review editor in the country.  We law professors have all submitted our papers to you, and we all harbor the secret hope that maybe this time you’ll publish our paper.  And so we lobby for the longest possible expedite window and wait until the last possible moment to accept our offers, because we haven’t yet heard back from you, and maybe, just maybe, that’s because you’re furiously discussing whether to accept it before the deadline.  You’re not.  Of course you’re not.  But hope springs eternal.  Thus does your unwillingness to reject us gum up the works for everyone else, slowing acceptances and making it harder for reviews to find authors. 

            So please, Harvard Law Review, reject me.  Save the ghosting for parties. 

                                                                        Mark

Mark A. Lemley
William H. Neukom Professor, Stanford Law School
Director, Stanford Program in Law, Science, and Technology

Senior Fellow, Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research

Affiliated Professor, Stanford Symbolic Systems Program
partner, Durie Tangri LLP

co-founder, Lex Machina Inc.

In Memoriam: Kenneth Karst (1929-2019)

Professor Karst, a distinguished constitutional law scholar and longtime professor of law at UCLA, has passed away.  I will add links to memorial notices as they appear.

UPDATE:  The UCLA memorial notice is here.

New study sheds light on why female law firm associates are less likely to make partner (Michael Simkovic)

A rigorous new study by Ghazala Azmat and Rosa Ferrer finds that much of the difference in employment outcomes between male and female law firm associates is attributable to men billing more hours (not simply working more hours; doing more work that is billable), bringing in more revenue, and having greater aspirations to make partner. (Summary available here).

After controlling for these differences, there is still evidence consistent with some sex discrimination (albeit directional and no longer statistically significant), but discrimination appears to be far less severe than many earlier studies had suggested.  Those earlier studies had less information about differences in employee performance. Questions remain about whether discrimination could lead female law firm associates to have fewer opportunities to do billable work or to network and generate business, although Azmat and Ferrer find some evidence against this.  Consistent with previous studies, child-rearing has a more negative impact on women than on men through greater reductions in work hours and revenue generation.

The results suggest that ambitious associates--of either sex--can increase their chances of making partner by prioritizing billable work and revenue generation over other uses of their time.

New report finds criticisms of GradPlus federal student loans "overblown" (Michael Simkovic)

AccessLex Institute released a new report, Examining Grad PLUS: Value and Cost, showing the primary criticisms of the Grad PLUS loan program—unchecked rises in tuition and the potential cost to the federal government—are either nonexistent or substantially overestimated.

New multi-year "Originalism Conference" at Yale funded by Rosenkranz Foundation...

...set up by the father of Georgetown constitutional law expert Nicholas Rosenkranz, a Yale Law alum.  The project will be led by Yale Law professor Akhil Amar and regular Yale visiting professor Steven Calabresi, who also teaches at Northwestern.