Brian Leiter's Law School Reports

In Memoriam: Norman Lefstein (1937-2019)

Professor Lefstein taught for many years at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill before serving nearly fifteen years as Dean at the McKinney School of Law at Indiana University, Indianapolis, where he was emreitus.  The McKinney memorial notice is here.

Law professor twitter census for 2019-20

Here.

Chicago Alumni and Fellows on the law teaching market, 2019-20

MOVING TO FRONT--ORIGINALLY POSTED AUGUST 7

This post is strictly for schools that expect to do hiring this year.

In order to protect the privacy of our candidates, please e-mail me at bleiter@uchicago.edu to get a copy of the narrative profiles of our candidates, including hyperlinks to their homepages.  All these candidates will be in the first FAR distribution.

We have an excellent group of nine candidates this year (four alumni, three Bigelows, one Olin Fellow in Law & Economics, and one Dickerson Fellow), who cover many curricular areas including legal profession/professional responsibility, election law, civil procedure, constitutional law, administrative law, legislation, evidence, employment discrimination, race and the law, contracts, consumer law and finance, property, law & economics, empirical legal studies, corporate law and finance, securities regulation, international trade law, international business transactions, bankruptcy, commercial law, alternative dispute resolution, Chinese law, torts, energy law, anti-discrimination law, law & psychology, experimental jurisprudence, and bioethics.

Our candidates include former Supreme Court and federal appellate clerks; Law Review editors; JD/PhDs in Psychology, Finance, Economics, Sociology and Political Science, as well as SJDs; and accomplished practitioners as well as scholars.  All have publications, sometimes multiple publications, and all have writing samples available upon request.

If when you e-mail, you tell me a bit about your hiring needs, I can supply some more information about all these candidates, since we have vetted them all at some point in the recent past.

New Rambler Review...

....is back.

Law schools by number of graduates (JD, LLM and SJD) in the first FAR, 2019

There were 335 total applicants in the first FAR; here are the candidates by law school attended (for JD, LLM, and/or SJD):

Harvard University (36)

Yale University (35)

Georgetown University (22)

New York University (20)

Stanford University (17)

Columbia University (13)

University of Michigan (13)

University of California, Berkeley (11)

University of Pennsylvania (11)

University of Chicago (7)

Duke University (5)

Cornell University (4)

University of Virginia (4)

Northwestern University (3)

University of California, Los Angeles (3)

University of Minnesota (3)

University of Texas, Austin (3)

Vanderbilt University (3)

These eighteen schools account for two-thirds of the applicants for law teaching positions.

Free college proposals should include private colleges (Michael Simkovic)

From an essay I recently published at "The Conversation":

"Students can use federal financial aid to attend any college they want, whether public or private.

But the “free college” proposals floated by some 2020 presidential candidates would increase federal funding only for community colleges or state-run universities. Private nonprofit universities would be excluded. . . .

It would be easier to fulfill campaign promises to make higher education “free” by covering only public institutions, which tend to charge lower tuition and to spend less educating each of their students.

But cost and quality tend to go together, and this relationship holds true for higher education. . . . 

Four-year completion rates at public institutions trail those at private non-profits by as much as 20% for students of the same race and sex.

Colleges and universities with more funding and higher tuition – typically private institutions – not only graduate students faster, but their graduates go on to earn higher salaries than their peers who graduate from less well-funded colleges, after accounting for differences in student characteristics and selectivity. Several studies have come to similar conclusions: Educational resources affect earnings. . . . 

Poorer outcomes at public institutions can be explained by lower spending. . . . But the resource problems at colleges won’t get better if federal money merely pays the same tuition that students are paying now. Many state governments prohibit state colleges and universities from increasing tuition, even as states have cut the amount of money they spend per student. Tuition caps would prevent public colleges from obtaining the additional resources they need to improve quality.

These price ceilings worsen problems such as high student-to-faculty ratios, low instructor pay and restricted course offerings. They also mean schools must turn away qualified students and allow facilities and equipment to fall into disrepair.

Without tuition caps, price would still be limited by market competition. Private nonprofits compete with each other for students and offer education across a range of prices and quality levels.

. . . . Some state governments might turn down federal funding for higher education if it requires states to spend more. The same thing happened when many states turned down Medicaid expansion.

 . . . Restricting . . . students to public institutions would limit their choice of academic programs and quality. For example, in some parts of the country, only private institutions offer programs like business economics or electromechanical engineering. Including private institutions would mean a wider range of choices

What could a federal subsidy look like that would empower students to choose the college they believe is best for them?

One option would be a voucher that would fund costs at a school of the student’s choice. For instance, a voucher could cover between 30% and 80% of tuition, fees, books and reasonable living expenses at any accredited public or nonprofit college or university. . . .

Some might argue that making education funding available to private institutions would divert funding from public universities. But respecting student choice might make these programs more popular and build broader political support for increased funding for higher education."

Faculty appointments committees for 2019-20...

MOVING TO FRONT (ORIGINALLY POSTED JULY 18)

...you can announce yourselves (and your school's hiring priorities) here.

A memorable commencement address

Many readers will, I think, enjoy the commencement address to the Law School's Class of 2019 delivered by my colleague David Weisbach.  At the preceding link, you'll find a transcript and also a link to a video of the talk.  It produced a spontaneous standing ovation, a first in the history of commencement addresses at Chicago as far as anyone can recall.

Ten lateral moves that made law professors take notice during 2018-19

Based on my in-box and conversations with others, these were the ten moves this past year that were thought to be the biggest hiring coups (I omit any lateral moves my school was part of!):

 

*Albert Choi (law & economics, contracts, corporate) from the University of Virginia to the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

 

*Danielle Citron (privacy, civil rights, freedom of expression, Internet law) from the University of Maryland to Boston University.

 

*G. Marcus Cole (bankruptcy, law & economics) from Stanford University to the University of Notre Dame (to become Dean).

 

*Jonah Gelbach (law & economics, civil procedure, empirical legal studies) from the University of Pennsylvania to the University of California, Berkeley.

 

*David Grewal (international trade, law & technology, political economy, political theory) from Yale University to the University of California, Berkeley.

 

*Orin Kerr (criminal procedure, computer crime law) from the University of Southern California to the University of California, Berkeley.

 

*Catherine Kim (civil procedure, administrative and immigration law) from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill to Brooklyn Law School.

 

*David S. Law (comparative constitutional law, law & social science) from Washington University, St. Louis to the University of California, Irvine.

 

*Rachel Moran (education law, civil rights, race & the law) from the University of California, Los Angeles to the University of California, Irvine.

*Patricia J. Williams (critical race theory, civil rights) from Columbia University to Northeastern University.

Rostron & Levit's guide to submitting to law reviews updated

I am happy to share the following announcement from Professors Rostron & Levit:

Dear Colleagues,

We  just updated our charts about law journal submissions, expedites, and rankings from different sources for the Spring 2019 submission season covering the 203 main journals of each law school. 

We have created hyperlinks for each law review to take you directly to the law review’s submissions page. Again the chart includes as much information as possible about what law reviews are not accepting submissions right now and what months they say they’ll resume accepting submissions. 

There has been some change in law reviews’ submission preferences:  Now 82 schools prefer or require Scholastica as the exclusive avenue for submissions, 40 law journals prefer direct emails, and 39 law reviews prefer or require submission through ExpressO, with 37 accepting articles submitted through either ExpressO or Scholastica. Seven schools now have their own online web portals.  Ninety-three schools permit email submissions even if they prefer submission through a service.

The first chart contains information about each journal’s preferences about methods for submitting articles (e.g., e-mail, ExpressO, Scholastica, or regular mail), as well as special formatting requirements and how to request an expedited review.  The second chart contains rankings information from U.S. News and World Report  (overall, peer, lawyers and judges), as well as data from Washington & Lee’s law review website (citation count, impact factor, and combined ratings).

Information for Submitting Articles to Law Reviews and Journals:  http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1019029 

We would welcome your forwarding of this link to your faculty.   We appreciate any feedback you might have.

Happy writing!

All the best,

Allen and Nancy

Professor Allen Rostron

Associate Dean for Students and William R. Jacques Constitutional Law Scholar and Professor of Law

rostrona@umkc.edu

Professor Nancy Levit
Associate Dean for Faculty and Curators' Distinguished Professor and Edward D. Ellison Professor of Law

levitn@umkc.edu             

UMKC School of Law
500 E. 52nd St.