Brian Leiter's Law School Reports

New "Journal of Law Teaching and Learning"

Lawprof Emily Grand (Washburn) asked me to share the following announcement:

The Institute for Law Teaching and Learning is thrilled to be launching a new scholarly journal.  The Journal of Law Teaching and Learning will publish scholarly articles about pedagogy and will provide authors with rigorous peer review. We hope to publish our first issue in Fall 2023. 

If you have a scholarly article that might fit the needs of The Journal of Law Teaching and Learning, please consider submitting it directly to us via email at mcolatrella@pacific.edu or through the Scholastica platform. 

Blast from the past: Phyllis Schafly has a friend in Rick Hills

Some amusement, from way back in 2008!

Legal realism and the Supreme Court

I talk with Prof. Eric Segall (Georgia State) on his podcast "Supreme Myths" (also available on Spotify and other podcast platforms).

Kilborn v. UIC John Marshall redux

UIC John Marshall, of course, moved to dismiss Professor Kilborn's lawsuit over its misconduct.   Professor Kilborn's reply brief is here:  Download Kilborn_Opposition to motion to dismiss wExhibit A

UCLA Law Dean Jennifer Mnookin to become the new Chancellor of the University of Wisconsin at Madison

Wisconsin got very lucky!  I feel for my friends at UCLA, who know they are losing an excellent Dean.  And I'm very happy for my friends in Madison.

Professor Lawsky's Entry-Level Hiring Report for 2021-22

The report is now available here.  Professor Lawsky recorded 106 hires, the most in a good number of years, although nothing like the numbers before 2010, when 150 or more was the norm.  Inevitably some rookie hires are missed:  Chicago had three grads on the market, all three of whom received tenure-track offers, but it looks like one did not report to Professor Lawsky.  Some misses are inevitable, but I'm confident her overall picture is quite informative.

As Professor Lawsky also notes, we don't have data on how many graduates of each school were on the market.   You can see past "success rate" data from some prior years here and here.

UPDATE:  Professor Lawsky very kindly updated her report to include the missing Chicago candidate. Thank you, Professor Lawsky!

Per student value of law school endowments

A colleague elsewhere sent me data on law school endowments in 2019 (most probably went up in 2021, although they're probably back down now).   We divided the total endowment by the total JD and non-JD student enrollment based on the 2021 ABA disclosures to determine the per student value of the endowments.  Endowments, of course, are not the only source of income beyond tuition:  public law schools, for example, get substantial amounts of money from the state, while some law schools get substantial annual gifts (for more than a decade, for example, Chicago has benefitted from renewable three-year gifts supporting the Rubenstein Scholarships in an amount that would be equivalent, by my estimate, to another $125,000,000 in endowment!).  There is, of course, a striking if hardly perfect correlation between per student value of endowments and US News.com rankings, in part because per capita expenditures account for all the differences between otherwise comparable schools.

Interestingly, several of the very wealthy law schools (e.g., Yale, Stanford, Harvard, and Notre Dame) actually have lower per student endowments than their parent universities as a whole; while others (like Virginia and Michigan) have far more.

In any case, here are the top 20 law schools by the per student value of their endowments (schools with an *asterisk outside the top 10 have a gross endowment greater than $100 million; all the schools in the top ten have gross endowments greater than $100 million).

1.  Yale University ($2,033,106)

2.  Stanford University ($1,422,512)

3.  Harvard University ($1,060,304)

4.  University of Notre Dame ($670,157)

5.  University of Chicago ($623,318)

5.  University of Virginia ($623,923)

7.  Columbia University ($496,710)

8.  University of Michigan ($480,237)

9.  University of Pennsylvania ($403,714)

10. Duke University ($352,594)

11.  *Brigham Young University ($348,600)

12.  *Vanderbilt University ($317,029)

13.  *Northwestern University ($305,673)

14.  *University of Richmond ($294,406)

15.  *University of Texas, Austin ($291,626)

16.  Pennsylvania State University-Dickinson School of Law ($283,208)

16.  *University of California, Berkeley ($281,781)

16.  *Washington & Lee University ($282,322).

16.  *Baylor University ($240,589)

20.  *Cornell University ($234,735)

Other schools we checked (these are not rank ordered, since we may have missed some--although Mercer and Minnesota are very likely 21 and 22):

Mercer University ($221,930)

*University of Minnesota ($216,480)

*Brooklyn Law School ($191,723)

*Southern Methodist University ($181,132)

University of Missouri, Columbia ($178,861)

University of Cincinnati ($178,783)

*New York University ($173,251)

*University of California, Los Angeles ($168,918)

*University of Georgia ($168,067)

*University of Southern California ($167,609)

*University of Washington ($160,887)

University of Colorado, Boulder ($158,713)

*Case Western Reserve University ($152,900)

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill ($147,414)

University of Iowa ($146,764)

Ohio State University ($144,252)

University of St. Thomas (Minnesota) ($139,940)

*University of Florida ($139,130)

University of Utah ($135,701)

Drake University ($130,041)

University of Kansas ($129,795)

University of Maryland ($97,150)

Indiana University, Bloomington ($93,984)

Boston University ($80,892)

Wayne State University ($79,108)

Lewis & Clark College ($78,610)

*Georgetown University ($71,533)

*Fordham University ($68,985)

*George Washington University ($65,435)

Emory University ($61,853)

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign ($60,759)

University of California, Hastings ($51,606)

University of California, Irvine ($44,910)

University of California, Davis ($18,636)

ABA Committee recommends dropping the requirement of standardized testing (e.g., the LSAT) for law school admission

Here.  While the ABA has some power, the real power rests with USNews.com:  if they still want LSAT scores, law schools will still use them.  If USNews.com drops the LSAT scores, then the race to get the highest median GPA, regardless of the difficulty of the undergraduate course of study, will accelerate, since that will be the only numerical measure left for student admissions.  That would be a disaster.  Comments are open for thoughts from readers on this development and what it portends; submit your comment only once, it may take awhile to appear.

On growing up outside the gender binary

A nicely written essay by lawprof Katherine Franke (Columbia).

If you've accepted a tenure-track law teaching job...

...submit your information to Professor Lawsky's annual report on entry-level hiring.