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August 31, 2022
Michigan lawprof sues university, law school, and Dean West...
...for discrimination on the basis of race, gender, disability, and family status. Some of the allegations about discriminatory conduct are very vague and conclusory, and hard to assess; others are quite specific, such as about deviations from an allegedly lockstep salary structure to the disadvantage of plaintiff, and allegations about shockingly inappropriate emails sent by Dean West to the plaintiff. Paragraphs 50, 65 ff., 71, and 74 of the complaint make clear that there was considerable tension between plaintiff and the Law School over a period of years, with the Law School alleging misconduct by the plaintiff on more than one occasion, while the plaintiff claims these were retaliatory actions by the school for protected conduct (such as advocating for diversity). If this gets to discovery, it will be extremely embarrassing either for the Law School or the plaintiff, and perhaps both.
Posted by Brian Leiter on August 31, 2022 in Faculty News | Permalink
August 29, 2022
Should the ABA eliminate a required admissions test (like the LSAT) for law school admission?
Dean Kevin Washburn (Iowa) makes an interesting case for keeping the test.
Posted by Brian Leiter on August 29, 2022 in Legal Profession, Of Academic Interest | Permalink
August 26, 2022
Where did aspiring law teachers in the first FAR graduate law school? (And why are there so few candidates in the first FAR?)
MOVING TO THE FRONT FROM AUGUST 22--MANY INTERESTING COMMENTS, MORE WELCOME
The AALS has implemented a better search engine, which allows one to identify where candidates received their JD (thus excluding LLM and SJD graduates from the picture, which makes for a cleaner comparison between schools). Here is the distribution in the first FAR for the 16 schools that produce the most law teachers: Harvard (24), Yale (21), NYU (10), Michigan (9), Columbia and Georgetown (8 each), Berkeley (7), Stanford (6), UCLA (4), Chicago, Virginia, Penn, Cornell, and Duke (3 each), Northwestern and Texas (2 each). Recall, of course, that the success rates of candidates varies quite a bit by school, and does not track the number of applicants. And this year's first FAR is unusually small.
One puzzle is why so many fewer graduates of elite law schools are entering the FAR. I have a couple of hypotheses, but would be glad to hear from readers as well. First, the private sector market is strong right now, with salaries having risen signifcantly, and lawyers with some experience are particularly in demand. Second, the barriers to successful entry to the tenure-track market have risen significantly over the last 25 years, and even over the last ten years. 25 years ago, plenty of folks got good tenure-track jobs on promise. Now, of course, one needs publications in most cases, and often the kind of profile one would associate with a graduate of a PhD program (one reason JD/PhDs are increasing their share of the market). I suspect it is harder now for even the typical very strong JD from an elite law school to contemplate the moves (e.g., to VAPs or Fellowships), or carve out the time (for writing), that is now required.
Thoughts from readers? Signed comments preferred, but all comments must include a valid email address (which will not appear). Submit your comment only once, it may take awhile to appear.
Posted by Brian Leiter on August 26, 2022 in Advice for Academic Job Seekers, Faculty News, Of Academic Interest | Permalink | Comments (20)
August 25, 2022
In Memoriam: Sherry Colb (1966-2022)
I'm very sorry to report the untimely passing of Professor Sherry Colb, a longtime member of the Cornell Law faculty, who wrote widely on criminal procedure, evidence, feminist jurisprudence, and animal rights, among other areas. There is a memorial notice from her husband, the law professor Michael Dorf, here.
UPDATE: An here's a nice example of Professor Colb's suitably angry and scathing assessment of the Dobbs opinion and Justice Alito (which Professor Dorf alludes to in his memorial).
Posted by Brian Leiter on August 25, 2022 in Memorial Notices | Permalink
Chicago alumni and fellows on the law teaching market, 2022-23
MOVING TO FRONT FROM AUGUST 18
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 to get a copy of the narrative profiles of our candidates, including hyperlinks to their homepages. All these candidates are in the first FAR distribution.
We have a small but outstanding group of five candidates this year, who cover a wide range of curricular areas, including privacy, intellectual property, law & technology, federal courts, civil procedure, election law, state and local government law, criminal law and procedure, administrative law, corporate law, securities regulation, environmental law, torts, Islamic law, law and economics, employment discrimination, race and the law, and analytical methods for lawyers.
Our candidates include former federal appellate clerks; Law Review editors; JD/PhDs; and accomplished practitioners as well as scholars. All have publications, sometimes multiple publications, and all have writing samples available upon request. All also have teaching experience.
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.
Posted by Brian Leiter on August 25, 2022 in Faculty News, Of Academic Interest | Permalink
August 23, 2022
Acadmic Freedom Alliance calls for an end to the use of mandatory "diversity" statements in hiring and promotion...
...as a violation of academic freedom. (Randall Kennedy [Harvard] was one of the drafters of the AFA statement.)
We discussed this issue previously in connection with some related ABA proposals, as well as the recent AALS decision to encourage applicants to submit diversity statements.
Posted by Brian Leiter on August 23, 2022 in Of Academic Interest, Professional Advice | Permalink
August 18, 2022
The first FAR is out...
...and there are only 272 applicants for law teaching positions! Since this year is, I expect, going to have even more schools searching than last year, this will be a great year to be a job seeker. I do wonder whether the second FAR distribution won't have more resumes than usual. 272 is very low.
UPDATE: Professor Lawsky has the comparative data. This is an all-time low since I've been in law teaching (1993), so even further back than Professor Lawsky's data. In the 1990s, it was not uncommon for there to be 1,000 applicants in the first FAR, although back then, at least half were not really serious candidates. As more information has become readily available about entering law teaching, and as the requiremnts for being a viable candidate have risen, the number of applicants has declined. But this year's number really is astonishingly low.
Posted by Brian Leiter on August 18, 2022 in Advice for Academic Job Seekers, Of Academic Interest | Permalink
Canadian judges covering for other Canadian judge excorciated
Leslie Green (emeritus, Queen's & Oxford) comments. (Earlier coverage here and here.)
Posted by Brian Leiter on August 18, 2022 in Legal Profession, Of Academic Interest | Permalink
August 17, 2022
Law professors ranked by h-index (Google Scholar) (CORRECTED)
MOVING TO FRONT, ORIGINALLY POSTED AUGUST 1--CORRECTED (three errors of omission from the first version: Bernard Black, Martha Fineman, and Nuno Garoupa)
I recently came across a ranking of 1,000 living chemists (link fixed) based on something like their h-index ("The h-index, or Hirsch index, measures the impact of a particular scientist rather than a journal. 'It is defined as the highest number of publications of a scientist that received h or more citations each while the other publications have not more than h citations each.' For example, a scholar with an h-index of 5 had published 5 papers, each of which has been cited by others at least 5 times" [source, footnote omitted].) Note that an author can have a lot of citations, but a relatively low h-index, if the author is not very prolific and the other work is not cited much.
Many of the most-cited faculty in the United States do not, alas, have Google Scholar pages (e.g., Erwin Chemerinsky, Richard Epstein, William Eskridge, Thomas Merrill, Catharine MacKinnon, and Martha Nussbaum, among others), and many of them would, I expect, have h-indices that would place them among the top 100 law professors based on the h-index. As a result, we list below only the "top 75" law professors, among those who who currently have Google Scholar pages, based on their h-index. (Only law faculty with their primary appointment in the law school were counted.) Perhaps this little exercise will encourage more law professors to create Google Scholar pages, so in a year or so we'll look at the top 100 (and hopefully most of the 75 below will remain in the top 100.) The data was collected on July 20, 2022.
Citations practices vary by discipline, and that is reflected in the h-indices of interdisciplinary scholarship in law as well. Economics, medicine (including medical ethics, or what is usually called "health law" in the legal academy) and psychology are high citation fields, for example, in the sense that every articles cites lots of other literature; history and philosophy are the opposite.
Here are the top 75, below the fold:
Rank |
Name |
Institution |
H-Index |
Area(s) |
Age in 2022 |
1 |
Cass Sunstein |
Harvard University |
171 |
Constitutional, Admin, Behavioral Law & Economics |
68 |
2 |
Tom Tyler |
Yale University |
138 |
Law & Psychology |
72 |
3 |
W. Kip Viscusi |
Vanderbilt University |
105 |
Law & Economics, Torts |
72 |
4 |
Lawrence Gostin |
Georgetown University |
97 |
Health |
73 |
Mark Lemley |
Stanford University |
97 |
Intellectual Property |
56 |
|
6 |
Lucian Bebchuk |
Harvard University |
93 |
Corporate, Law & Economics |
67 |
John Monahan |
University of Virginia |
93 |
Law & Psychology |
76 |
|
8 |
Alan Auerbach |
University of California, Berkeley |
90 |
Tax, Law & Economics |
71 |
9 |
Eric Posner |
University of Chicago |
87 |
Law & Economics, International, Commercial |
57 |
10 |
Richard Delgado |
Seattle University |
80 |
Critical Race Theory, Civil Rights |
82 |
11 |
Charles Sabel |
Columbia University |
77 |
Law & Social Science |
75 |
Frederick Schauer |
University of Virginia |
77 |
Constitutional, Law & Philosophy, Evidence |
76 |
|
13 |
Jonathan Macey |
Yale University |
74 |
Corporate, Law & Economics |
67 |
14 |
Bernard Black |
Northwestern University |
72 |
Corporate |
69 |
15 |
Jack M. Balkin |
Yale University |
70 |
Constitutional, Cyberlaw |
65 |
16 |
Daniel Farber |
University of California, Berkeley |
69 |
Constitutional, Environmental |
72 |
17 |
Michelle Mello |
Stanford University |
68 |
Health |
50 |
18 |
Ian Ayres |
Yale University |
67 |
Law & Economics |
63 |
19 |
Bruce Ackerman |
Yale University |
66 |
Constitutional |
79 |
Herbert Hovenkamp |
University of Pennsylvania |
66 |
Antitrust, Legal History |
74 |
|
21 |
Robert Cooter |
University of California, Berkeley |
65 |
Law & Economics |
77 |
Daniel Rubinfeld |
New York University |
65 |
Law & Economics, Antitrust |
77 |
|
23 |
Dan Kahan |
Yale University |
64 |
Law & Psychology, Criminal |
59 |
24 |
James Hines |
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor |
63 |
Tax |
64 |
25 |
John Ferejohn |
New York University |
62 |
Law & Social Science |
78 |
26 |
Lee Epstein |
University of Southern California |
60 |
Law & Social Science |
64 |
Tom Ginsburg |
University of Chicago |
60 |
Constitutional, International, Law & Social Science |
54 |
|
28 |
Philip Alston |
New York University |
59 |
International |
72 |
Jonathan Simon |
University of California, Berkeley |
59 |
Law & Social Science, Criminal |
63 |
|
30 |
Carrie Menkel-Meadow |
University of California, Irvine |
58 |
ADR, Legal profession, Critical Theories |
73 |
Franklin Zimring |
University of California, Berkeley |
58 |
Criminal |
80 |
|
32 |
Samuel Issacharoff |
New York University |
57 |
Voting rights/election law, civil procedure, behavioral law & econ |
68 |
33 |
Lawrence Lessig |
Harvard University |
56 |
Constitutional, Law & Technology |
61 |
Robert MacCoun |
Stanford University |
56 |
Law & Psychology |
63 |
|
35 |
Dorothy Roberts |
University of Pennsylvania |
55 |
Law & Race, Law & Social Science |
66 |
Pamela Samuelson |
University of California, Berkeley |
55 |
Intellectual Property |
74 |
|
37 |
Akhil Amar |
Yale University |
54 |
Constitutional |
64 |
J.B. Ruhl |
Vanderbilt University |
54 |
Environmental |
64 |
|
Alan Sykes |
Stanford University |
54 |
International |
68 |
|
40 |
Stephen Bainbridge |
University of California, Los Angeles |
53 |
Corporate |
64 |
41 |
Richard Bonnie |
University of Virginia |
52 |
Criminal, Law & Psychiatry, Health |
77 |
Donald Langevoort |
Georgetown University |
52 |
Corporate |
71 |
|
Joan Williams |
University of California, Hastings |
52 |
Feminist Legal Theory, … |
70 |
|
44 |
Ronald Gilson |
Columbia University |
51 |
Corporate |
76 |
Henry Greely |
Stanford University |
51 |
Health |
70 |
|
Beth Simmons |
University of Pennsylvania |
51 |
International, Law & Social Science |
64 |
|
John Yoo |
University of California, Berkeley |
51 |
Constitutional, National Security |
55 |
|
48 |
Scott Burris |
Temple University |
50 |
Health |
66 |
Steven Shavell |
Harvard University |
50 |
Law & Economics |
77 |
|
Eugene Volokh |
University of California, Los Angeles |
50 |
Constitutional |
54 |
|
51 |
Brian Leiter |
University of Chicago |
49 |
Law & Philosophy |
59 |
52 |
Grainne de Burca |
New York University |
48 |
International |
|
Steven Schwarcz |
Duke University |
48 |
Commercial |
73 |
|
Randall Thomas |
Vanderbilt University |
48 |
Corporate |
67 |
|
55 |
Steve Charnovitz |
George Washington University |
47 |
International |
68 |
Symeon Symeonides |
Wilamette University |
47 |
Conflicts, International, Comparative |
73 |
|
Robin West |
Georgetown University |
47 |
Feminist Legal Theory, Constitutional |
68 |
|
58 |
Shari Seidman Diamond |
Northwestern University |
46 |
Law & Psychology |
75 |
Valerie Hans |
Cornell University |
46 |
Law & Psychology |
71 |
|
Marcel Kahan |
New York University |
46 |
Corporate |
60 |
|
Lawrence Solum |
University of Virginia |
46 |
Constitutional, Civil Procedure, Law & Philosophy |
68 |
|
Peter Yu |
Texas A&M University |
46 |
Intellectual Property |
51 |
|
63 |
Curtis Bradley |
University of Chicago |
45 |
International, Foreign Affairs |
58 |
John Donohue III |
Stanford University |
45 |
Law & Economics |
69 |
|
Martha Fineman |
Emory University |
45 |
Family Law, Feminist Legal Theory |
79 |
|
Richard Hasen |
University of California, Los Angeles |
45 |
Election law |
58 |
|
67 |
Ronald J. Allen |
Northwestern University |
44 |
Evidence |
74 |
Naomi Cahn |
University of Virginia |
44 |
Family |
64 |
|
Cary Coglianese |
University of Pennsylvania |
44 |
Administrative |
58 |
|
Daniel Solove |
George Washington University |
44 |
Law & Technology |
50 |
|
71 |
Dan Burk |
University of California, Irvine |
43 |
Intellectual Property |
60 |
G. Mitu Gulati |
University of Virginia |
43 |
Contracts, Critical Theories, International Trade |
54 |
|
Laurence Helfer |
Duke Univiersity |
43 |
International |
57 |
|
Thomas Lyon |
University of Southern California |
43 |
Law & Psychology |
61 |
|
75 |
Jonathan Baker |
American University |
42 |
Antitrust, Law & Economics |
67 |
Orin Kerr |
University of California, Berkeley |
42 |
Criminal |
51 |
|
J. Mark Ramseyer |
Harvard University |
42 |
Corporate, Japanese law |
68 |
|
G. Edward White |
University of Virginia |
42 |
Legal History |
81 |
Just outside the “top 75” were Richard Revesz, James Jacobs, Nuno Garoupa, Ugo Mattei, I. Glenn Cohen, Franceso Parisi, Bruce Green, David Faigman, and Gregory Shaffer.
Posted by Brian Leiter on August 17, 2022 | Permalink
August 12, 2022
Japanese "comfort women" and the North Korean connection
The discussion continues. The long abstract gives a good overview of the argument. (Earlier coverage here and here.)
Posted by Brian Leiter on August 12, 2022 in Of Academic Interest | Permalink