Brian Leiter's Law School Reports

How will the Trump Administration's attack on the universities affect next year's law teaching market?

A prospective candidate elsewhere asked me about this, in light of the various financial pressures universities are under due to the Trump Administration's actions (many of which are illegal, but we'll see--Columbia's capitulation certainly didn't help). 

The only law schools that are fiscally autonomous are free-standing law schools (like Brooklyn Law School, for example).  Most law schools are part of universities, and almost all law schools send some of their tuition revenue to the university, even if they keep much of the revenue for law school operations.  But the relationship between the law school budget and the university budget varies school by school.  What we are seeing already, due to the NIH business, is universities taking across-the-board cost-cutting measures, some of which involve across-the-board hiring freezes.  That can affect law schools too.  (The Univeristy of California has imposed a system-wide hiring freeze, for example, which will affect the law schools at Berkeley, Los Angeles, Davis, and Irvine, and maybe also San Francisco.)  The effect has the potential to be most serious at schools that get a lot of NIH money (I expect the NSF to follow suit by the way on limiting indirect research costs):  those are the schools that may be staring at $100 million dollars-and-up holes in their budgets.  Under those circumstances, I would not be surprised to see universities wanting more of their law school’s tuition revenue and freezing hiring by all units.

So right now,  my prediction will be that next year’s law teaching market will be tighter than this year’s.  The only countervailing force is that there was a big uptick in law school applications this year (20% here, for example, and that is not atypical), and since almost all law schools depend on a steady stream of tuition revenue, this enables them to hire.

Here's a federal judge who might be an actual candidate for impeachment...

...and he was, of course, nominated by Trump.

Paul Weiss capitulates...

...to "the mob boss," while Williams & Connolly defends Perkins Coie.  Paul Weiss has disgraced itself, and Williams & Connolly, along with Perkins Coie and Covington & Burling, are the clear destinations of choice for the best law students who believe in the rule of law.

Columbia law professors explain why Trump's "Title VI" demand letter to Columbia...

...violates both Title VI and the Constitution.  One may hope this forms the basis for the legal action the university needs to file against Trump this week.

Victory for UIC law professor Jason Kilborn in the 7th Circuit

Here.  As Prof. Keith Whittington explains, this is a significant victory for academic freedom rights of faculty.

 

Covington & Perkins Coie should now be the top choices for the best law students...

...in light of Trump's abuse of executive power to target those firms.

Political hack serving as Interim U.S. Attorney for D.C. threatens Georgetown Law...

...that his office will not hire their graduates if DEI is part of their curriculum, and Dean William Treanor responds forcefully and wholly correctly:  Download Treanor letter.  This is a good model for how educators should respond to the petty tyrants in Trump's orbit.

 

Can AI hold office hours?

Not yet!

AI and legal practice

From the abstract:

While AI models like GPT-4 improve the efficiency with which legal work can be completed, they can at times make up cases and “hallucinate” facts, thereby undermining legal judgment, particularly in complex tasks handled by skilled lawyers. This article examines two emerging AI innovations that may mitigate these lingering issues: Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), which grounds AI-powered analysis in legal sources, and AI reasoning models, which structure complex reasoning before generating output. We conducted the first randomized controlled trial assessing these technologies, assigning upper-level law students to complete six legal tasks using a RAG-powered legal AI tool (Vincent AI), an AI reasoning model (OpenAI’s o1-preview), or no AI. We find that both AI tools significantly enhanced legal work quality, a marked contrast with previous research examining older large language models like GPT-4. Moreover, we find that these models maintain the efficiency benefits associated with use of older AI technologies. Our findings show that AI assistance significantly boosts productivity in five out of six tested legal tasks, with Vincent yielding statistically significant gains of approximately 38% to 115% and o1-preview increasing productivity by 34% to 140%, with particularly strong effects in complex tasks like drafting persuasive letters and analyzing complaints. Notably, o1-preview improved the analytical depth of participants’ work product but resulted in some hallucinations, whereas Vincent AI-aided participants produced roughly the same amount of hallucinations as participants who did not use AI at all. These findings suggest that integrating domain-specific RAG capabilities with reasoning models could yield synergistic improvements, shaping the next generation of AI-powered legal tools and the future of lawyering more generally.

Will US News or the ABA audit these 10-month out employment statistics?

Some are certainly plausible, but many "stink to high heavens" as my Grandmother used to say.  When someone who has Trump's ear is calling for fraud on US News to be grounds for sending University Presidents to prison, this is probably not the time to push the envelope!

UPDATE:  Professor Derek Muller (Notre Dame) writes:

It's worth remembering that when "full weight" employment categories are listed by USNWR, these are five categories (up from two since the Yale/Harvard "boycott" began): full-time, long-term, bar passage-required and J.D. advantage jobs, both those jobs "funded" by law schools and those that are "unfunded"; and students enrolled full-time in a graduate degree program.

There was a spike in funded jobs  placement last year: https://excessofdemocracy.com/blog/2024/5/which-law-schools-saw-the-biggest-changes-in-employment-placement-after-usnwr-gave-full-weight-to-new-categories-of-jobs