Brian Leiter's Law School Reports

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.

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.

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.

 

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).

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.

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.

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.

Canadian judges covering for other Canadian judge excorciated

Leslie Green (emeritus, Queen's & Oxford) comments.  (Earlier coverage here and here.)

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.

 

 

 

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.)