Brian Leiter's Law School Reports

Looking back on 50 years of legal education

Via my colleague Will Baude on Twitter, I came across this interesting conversation between Louis Michael Seidman (Georgetown) and Mark Tushnet (Harvard) reflecting on their half-century in legal education.  Tushnet, unsurprisingly, overstates the significance of Critical Legal Studies (which has had no discernible longterm impact, unlike legal realism), but that's a quibble.  Do see the discussion at pp. 24 ff. about "corruption" in the legal academy.

Blast from the past: on the uselessness of ranking law reviews by Google Scholar metrics

Back in 2016.

"I wish for a world without lawyers"

New peer-reviewed "Journal of Free Speech Law"

The lead editors are Jane Bambauer (Arizona), Ashutosh Bhagwat (UC Davis), and Eugene Volokh (UCLA).  Professor Volokh says more about the journal here.  A welcome development.

In Memoriam: Phillip Blumberg (1919-2021)

An expert in corporate law, Professor Blumberg spent ten years as Dean at the University of Connecticut School of Law, a transformative period in the history of the school.  He retired from teaching at UConn in 1990. The UConn memorial notice is here.

(Thanks to Patricia McCoy for the pointer.)

In Memoriam: Peter Gerhart (1945-2021)

An expert on antitrust and international trade, Professor Gerhart served as Dean at Case Western for a decade, and before that taught at Ohio State.  More recently, he wrote widely in private law theory.  The Case Western memorial notice is here.

 

$34 million in gifts to Georgetown Law...

...including $24 million to endow 20 new professorships.

Blast from the past: Simkovic v. McEntee on employment data and law schools

Back in 2015.  Unsurprisingly, Professor Simkovic had the better of the argument.

"I'm not a cat," lawyer assures judge

Just in case any readers missed this, here's the NYT account of this funny Zoom mishap.  Here's the video clip of the hearing:

 

Harvard Law professor writes article about Japanese "comfort women"...

...which is generating quite a bit of controversy in South Korea as well as back home (see also).  The article at issue is here and a more popular summary here (and here is an online resource about the general topic).   Fortunately, no one is calling for Professor Ramseyer, a leading expert on Japanese law, to be "cancelled."

(Thanks to Jonathan Adler for first calling this to my attention.)

UPDATE:  Law professor Jonathan Klick (Penn) writes:   "As one of the editors of the International Review of Law and Economics (though not the one who specifically handled Mark’s article), I can assure you, we’re getting lots of emails calling for Mark to be cancelled.  Luckily though, I don’t think any of them are coming from academics (and, quite frankly, most of them are incoherent)." 

ANOTHER:  I've now heard that some academics are calling for the paper to be retracted, which is wholly inappropriate absent plagiarism or fraud, neither of which are even alleged here.   Not considering evidence that others think relevant is never grounds for retraction; what is called for are responses that also go through the peer review process.

JULY 22, 2021:   It's been brought to my attention that Professor Richard Painter (Minnesota)--who served as the "ethics" lawyer in the Bush Administration in 2005-2007 (so after the illegal war of aggression against Iraq)--is seriously indignant about Professor Klick's comments and mine.  Alas, he neglects to demonstrate which claims in Ramseyer's article are "demonstrably false," as opposed to dubious, ill-supported, or contestable:   the motives of actors in historical events admit of interpretation, as historians know.  Perhaps Professor Painter's unsuccessful foray into electoral politics and the world of pandering soundbites has impaired his capacity for scholarly judgment and his understanding of academic freedom, which includes the freedom to be wrong in one's interpretation of historical events.