Brian Leiter's Law School Reports

Lateral hires in law with tenure or on tenure-track, 2024-25

These are non-clinical/non-LRW appointments that will take effect in summer or fall 2025 (except where noted); (new additions will be in bold.)  Last year's list is here.

 

*Amna Akbar (criminal law & procedure, social movements) from Ohio State University to the University of Minnesota.

 

*Oren Bar-Gill (commercial law, contracts, law & economics) from Harvard University to New York University.

 

*Devon Carbado (criminal procedure, constitutional law, Critical Race Theory) from the University of California, Los Angeles to New York University (effective January 2025).

 

*Grant Christensen (Federal Indian law, civil procedure) from Stetson University to the University of Alabama (untenured lateral).

 

*Avihay Dorfman (torts, property, legal and political theory) from Tel Aviv University to University of Texas at Austin.

 

*Myriam Gilles (civil procedure, torts, civil rights) from Cardozo Law School/Yeshiva University to Northwestern University.

 

*Jonathan Gould (legislation, constitutional law, administrative law, law & politics) from the University of California, Berkeley to New York University.

 

*Sergio Gramitto Ricci (corporate law) from the University of Missouri, Kansas City to Hofstra University (untenured lateral) (effective January 2025).

 

*Jill Horwitz (health law & policy) from the University of California, Los Angeles to Northwestern University.

 

*Orin Kerr (criminal procedure, computer crime law) from the University of California, Berkeley to Stanford University (effective January 2025).

 

*Anne Maria Lofaso (labor & employment law) from West Virginia University to the University of Cincinnati (effective January 2025).

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Amy Wax threatens to sue Penn if the sanctions are not lifted

Here's the lawyer's letter.  The breach of contract claim is straightforward, and she should prevail on it given the AAUP principles to which the university has committed itself:  as I've noted before, the University has made clear they are punishing her for her lawful but offensive extramural speech.   The letter's claim of race discrimination strikes me as bizarre, but perhaps someone can explain the theory and why Wax has standing to pursue it.  Signed comments (full name, valid email address [which will not appear]) will be strongly preferred.  Submit your comment only once, it may take awhile to appear.

Trends in lateral hiring, 2019-2024

Lawprof Derek Muller analyzes data from this blog.  It would be interesting to see how the lateral numbers compare to faculty size.  Bear in mind, too, that a school like Harvard, which had "zero" lateral moves from Harvard to another school in the last five years, did have many retirements, and sometimes lateral hires are meant to replace retiring faculty.

NY law firm drops client, Columbia lawprof Katherine Franke, when her views attract public criticism...

...and the partner who was representing Professor Franke quits the firm, while Profesor Frank has filed an ethics complaint with the NY Bar.  Pretty slimy way to treat a client!

JD/PhDs by PhD field

Andrew Granato, a JD/PhD student at Yale, has compiled data from PrawfsBlog about all PhDs hired in law schools over the last 15 years, more or less.   This includes folks hired into non-US law schools. Here's the breakdown by PhD discipline:

Political Science (71)

Economics (65)

History (59)

Philosophy (48)

Sociology (32)

STEM fields (19)

Literature (18)

Psychology (14)

Anthropology (12)

Among the 48 philosophy PhDs (one person on Granato's list did not take a job in a law school), I was happy to see six students I worked with.

(Mr. Granato also has a category for "Law/Jurisprudence" PhDs, which seems to include a fair number of Berkeley JSP folks, which would bolster the social science numbers, above.) 

 

Academic freedom abolished at Penn

The University of Pennsylvania has sanctioned Amy Wax for her offensive extramural speech, even though it is clearly protected under the applicable AAUP standards governing extramural speech (earlier coverage).  (The sanction does not involve revocation of tenure, but rather a substantial financial penalty.  I assume Professor Wax will sue for breach of contract.)   As the FIRE statement correctly puts it:

After years of promising it would find a way to punish professor Amy Wax for her controversial views on race and gender, Penn delivered today — despite zero evidence Wax ever discriminated against her students.

Faculty nationwide may now pay a heavy price for Penn's willingness to undercut academic freedom for all to get at this one professor. After today, any university under pressure to censor a controversial faculty member need only follow Penn’s playbook. 

But academic freedom is designed to protect controversial faculty from being punished for their speech or opinions. In an era when political forces right and left are all too eager to sanitize campuses of voices and views they dislike, faculty nationwide must be able to rely on the time-tested principles of academic freedom.

UPDATE:  The Academic Freedom Alliance statement on Penn's sanction of Wax.

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More controversy at Berkeley Law

Students are protesting a class on "anti-semitism and law" by leading corporate law expert Steven Davidoff Solomon, primarily because of an op-ed he wrote encouraging employers not to hire his "anti-semitic" students.  Let me comment on this purely from the standpoint of the academic freedom rights of faculty:  (1) Davidoff's op-ed was inappropriate:  as we noted in the Amy Wax case, faculty have no academic freedom right to destroy the professional prospects of their students based on gross generalizations; (2) students at a public university have a constitutional right to protest a class, but not in the class itself; disruption of the class itself should be grounds for discipline.

Michigan Law wins summary judgment in discrimination lawsuit brought by faculty member

We noted the case two years ago, and it has now been resolved in favor of the University of Michigan Law School and its former Dean Mark West.  The court describes emails from Dean West to Professor Beny "as immature, awkward, and unprofessional, but likely not harassing," but also held that, "The undisputed facts in this record show that the defendants took disciplinary action against the plaintiff because of her disruptive and unprofessional conduct, and not because of her race or sex or because she engaged in protected activity."  (For some examples, see the emails described at pages 9-10.)  The complaint airs a lot of other dirty laundry, as seemed inevitable given that Professor Beny alleged differential treatment of her compared to other faculty who were alleged (or found) to have engaged in unprofessional conduct.

Chicago Alumni & Fellows on the law teaching market, 2024-25

MOVING TO FRONT, ORIGINALLY POSTED AUGUST 12

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 who are on the entry-level market this year and participating in the FAR.

We have an excellent group of ten candidates this year, three Bigelow fellows, one Behavioral Law & Economics Fellow, and seven JD alumni (one of whom is also a Bigelow).  They cover a wide range of curricular areas, including administrative law, antitrust, bankruptcy, business organizations/corporate law, civil procedure, commercial law, constitutional law, contracts, criminal law, criminal procedure, environmental law, European Union law, evidence, family law, federal courts, First Amendment, human rights, immigration law, intellectual property, international law, international organizations, labor & employment, law & politics, law, law & religion, law & psychology, law & technology, legal history, legal profession/professional responsibility, patents, professional responsibility, property, regulated industries, state & local governnment law, and torts. 

Our candidates include former judicial clerks (at all levels, from state Supreme Courts to the U.S. Supreme Court); former Law Review editors; JD/PhDs (in history) and a JSD; current and former VAPs and Fellows; and accomplished practitioners as well as scholars, some with multiple publications, and all have writing samples available upon request.

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.

Ten most cited law faculty in the U.S., 2019-2023

Based on the latest Sisk data, here are the ten most-cited active law professors in the U.S. for the period 2016-2020 (inclusive) (remember that the data was collected in late May/early June of 2024, and that the pre-2024 database did expand a bit since then).  Numbers are rounded to the nearest ten.  (Law professors not teaching in 2024-25--e.g.,those who are now retired, in government service, etc.--are not included [faculty merely on sabbatical are counted].)

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