Brian Leiter's Law School Reports

Notre Dame Law's "run" on admissions deposits

A curious story, no doubt reflecting what an unusual admissions season this is.   I imagine this is going to lead to a run on deposits at other schools too, even those who don't issues these kinds of announcements.

Seven Chicago alums clerk on SCOTUS for second year in a row

I hope readers will indulge my sharing some local good news.

The big increase in applicants to law schools this year (and the big increase in high-end LSAT scores)

Informative piece at the ABA Journal.  This bodes very well for the law teaching market in 2021-22, as does the impending end of the pandemic.  I wouldn't be surprised if next academic year more than 100 new tenure-track faculty were hired, a figure we haven't seen in a decade.

What explains the significant increase in law school applications this year?

Dean Vik Amar (Illinois) offers some plausible explanations.

Blast from the past: Simkovic v. McEntee on employment data and law schools

Back in 2015.  Unsurprisingly, Professor Simkovic had the better of the argument.

Violation of academic freedom at UIC John Marshall Law School

IMPORTANT UPDATE BELOW:   PROFESSOR KILBORN WAS NOT SUSPENDED BECAUSE OF THE EXAM QUESTION

Last month, we noted UIC John Marshall Dean Darby Dickerson's suggestion "that law schools should be 'transformed' into 'anti-racist institutions' [as distinct from being non-racist ones that comply with equal opportunity laws]," observing that it "would portend a massive violation of the academic freedom of all faculty (for example)."   Alas, this proved more prophetic than we realized.

Professor Jason Kilborn gave a civil procedure exam last month involving an employment discrimination hypothetical, in which one worker used racist and sexist epithets.   As the petition denouncing Professor Kilborn reports:

The question at-issue contained a racial pejorative summarized as follows: “‘n____’and ‘b____’ (profane expressions for African Americans and women).” The fact pattern involved an employment discrimination case where the call of the question was whether or not the information found was work product.

Just to be clear:   the exam neither used nor mentioned the actual offending words, just the first letters of those words followed by the underline, as quoted above.  Professor Kilborn has actually used variations on this hypothetical, with the n- and b-words (as above), for a decade without any incident!

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A statement by law school Deans about last week's events at the Capitol

A fine statement.

Ratio of median debt of law school graduates to their median income

Another interesting study from Professor Derek Muller (Iowa).

How have law schools been teaching?

More than half are offering in-person classes, at least partially, while roughly 40% are fully online.

Non-JD enrollment in law schools continues to grow

Derek Muller (Iowa) documents the trend.   Non-JD students (mostly LLM students, but also some undergradutes [especially at Arizona], as well as non-degree candidates) have the virtue of generating revenue while being invisible in the U.S. News rankings.