Brian Leiter's Law School Reports

In Memoriam: Thomas Buergenthal (1934-2023)

A leading expert on international law and human rights, Professor Buergenthal was emeritus at George Washington University and also served as a judge on the International Court of Justice.  As a child, he survived the concentration camps, which he he wrote a book about.  I will add links to memorial notices as they appear.

 

Three law professors elected to the American Philosophical Society

They are:   James Forman (Yale), Catharine MacKinnon (Michigan), and Dorothy Roberts (Penn).

Given the new (inexplicable) USNews.com ranking stew...

...Derek Muller (Iowa) predicts what next year's ranking will look like.  There is always the possibility that the reputational scores will fluctuate (arbitrarily), but my guess is this won't be far off what the 2024 rankings look like!  Note some of the dramatic changes predicted!

Lawsky's entry-level hiring report for 2023

It's here!  Very informative, as always.  A few quick observations. Over the last five years, we've seen a decline in job applicants submitting FAR forms, from 344 five years ago, to 334, 297, 328 last year, and an all-time low of 272 this year.  At the same time, there's been an increasing number of hires:  82 five years ago, 119 last year, 113 this year.  Last year 76 schools were hiring, this year 79.  Five years ago, only 60 school were hiring.  I expect it will be a good year to be on the job market this fall (unless the Republicans force a default, in which case all bets are off!).   

The data on the law school attended by newly hired faculty is informative, but not as informative as the relative success rate of candidates from each school would be.  100% of Chicago graduates on the market got tenure-track jobs.  But I don't have the data on other schools, although you can see prior success rates here and here and here.  My guess is schools with the largest number of graduates taking jobs this year had somewhat higher placement success rates this year than in the past, but I doubt any were at 100%.

Why did Yale's academic reputation score plunge from (tied for) 3rd to (tied for) 6th this year?

Was it because Yale led the charge on the boycott of USNews.com?  Was it the accumulated effect of various embarrassing events, from judges boycotting Yale over free expression issues to the Amy Chua melodrama?  Was it a reflection of a widely perceived decline in the strength of Yale's younger faculty compared to their elders?   Was it all of these?  What's clear is the drop this year was pretty dramatic by historical standards for USNews.com reputation surveys, and of course this year is way down from a decade or so ago when Yale was usually tied for 1st or 2nd in academic reputation.

More on the new USNews.com ranking stew

Prof. Derek Muller (Iowa) breaks it down.   Basically, the editors chose to downgrade the importance of "input" metrics (like LSAT and GPA), and dramatically increase the weight for output measures (like bar passage and employment), which now count for more than 50% of the overall score.  In a way, this is salutary, since it will incentivize schools to improve those metrics (or fudge more aggressively!).  The whole formula still of course makes no sense, and is inexplicable in terms of the weightings.  What is clear is that the results are even more detached from traditional criteria of excellence, like faculty quality.  The rankings will also now be much more volatile, for reasons Professor Muller explains.

USNews.com has outdone itself: it has made its law school rankings even more absurd than before!

There's not much to say about what is essentially a random ordering of law schools within tier groups.  Any student who made a decision on the basis of small (and, in some cases, even large) ordinal differences in this year's travesty really should have a cause of action against USNews.com.  (Some of the swings in overall rank are beyond bizarre!  UC Davis and Arizona dropped from the top 50?  Emory and George Washington dropped out of the top 30?  Is this a joke?)   I won't belabor the obvious, and will just repost an updated version of something I posted a year ago.  If anyone extends it beyond "the top 10," please let me know.

US News overall rank	School	Overall scholarly impact rank	Scholarly impact rank for faculty under 60	SCOTUS “per capita” placement rank	Academic reputation rank in US News	Avg. rank across the last four metrics [rank]
1	Stanford University	6	10	3	1	5 [5]
1	Yale University	1	3	1	6	2.75 [3]
3	University of Chicago	2	1	2	3	2 [1]
4	University of Pennsylvania	8	14	15	9	11.5 [outside top 10]
5	Duke University	12	8	9	11	10 [10]
5	Harvard University	3	2	3	2	2 [1]
5	New York University	4	5	5	3	4.25 [4]
8	Columbia University	5	9	9	3	6.5 [6]
8	University of Virginia	9	5	5	9	7.0 [7]
10	Northwestern University	15	17	9	12	13.25 [outside top 10]
10	University of California, Berkeley	6	7	9	6	7.0 [7]
10	University of Michigan, Ann Arbor	13	13	5	6	9.25 [9]

 

How to de-escalate confrontations...

...for lawyers and citizens, via lawprof Walter Effross (American).  Some good techniques!

Purdue has been runnning "Concord Law School" online in Indiana since 2017, and wants to avoid ABA oversight (UPDATED)

A concerned Indiana law professor writes:

Purdue's [Concord] law school enrolled 798 students last year.

 

Only 8 [out of 17 first-time takers] passed the bar exam. 

 

These facts are not mentioned in the Indiana Supreme Court's proposed rule change to exempt Purdue from ABA oversight, nor the working group report behind it.

 

If the exemption passes, Purdue will be free to advertise itself as "Indiana approved," with no obligation to continue disclosing its lackluster attrition bar passage and attrition rates.

 

The Indiana State Bar Association opposes the exception.

 

Locals expect the court to approve the exception as a favor to Purdue, whose outgoing President, Mitch Daniels, appointed Chief Justice Loretta Rush in his prior role as Governor.

 

Concord Law School is part of Purdue University Global, Mitch Daniels' flagship initiative. The online arm has an F rating from the Better Business Bureau, due to persistent complaints of fraud.

 

There is no public outcry in Indiana, where the legislature is busy debating transgender policy and criminal penalties for librarians who distribute banned books.  Indiana University's general counsel has discouraged its faculty from engaging in "activism."

UPDATE (MAY 4):  A colleague elsewhere (not Indiana) writes:

               The Concord bar exam pass rate document linked to is only for the California Bar Exam.  8 students passed in 2022 as first-time takers, but it was not out of 798 as the Indiana law professor implies, but out of 17 sitting for the exam for the first time.  That’s a 47% passage rate.  That’s dismal, but on par with Elon and Cooley, and better than a few ABA accredited schools.  

               The real issue is that only 17 students took the California bar.  Perhaps others took the bar in other jurisdictions, but that generally requires an ABA-accredited JD.  And yet Concord only seems to graduate 25-40 students per year.  Most of the students who matriculate never make it to graduation—the attrition is crazy high:  In 2021 there were 535 1Ls.  In 2022 there were 122 2Ls.  That’s 78% attrition after 1L year.  Where did the other 413 former 1Ls go?