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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