Brian Leiter's Law School Reports

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.)

Law schools hiring in 2022-23 can announce their plans/needs...

...at the annual Prawfs thread, courtesy of Professor Lawsky.

The latest on the case of Professor Wax at Penn...

---including Dean Ruger's letter, the AFA letter, and my own comments on the academic freedom issues.

"Constitutional Law, Moral Judgment, and the Supreme Court as Super-Legislature" (2015)

Recent events are making this assessment ever more relevant, sad to say.

The Bluebook is awful as everyone knows...

...but it apparently rakes in millions of dollars for the law reviews at Columbia, Harvard, Penn and Yale!

Enrollments and LSAT scores, 2010-2021

Jerry Organ (St. Thomas) collects the data.  2021 applications and matriculations are still only 80% of what they were in 2010.

New "Journal of Law Teaching and Learning"

Lawprof Emily Grand (Washburn) asked me to share the following announcement:

The Institute for Law Teaching and Learning is thrilled to be launching a new scholarly journal.  The Journal of Law Teaching and Learning will publish scholarly articles about pedagogy and will provide authors with rigorous peer review. We hope to publish our first issue in Fall 2023. 

If you have a scholarly article that might fit the needs of The Journal of Law Teaching and Learning, please consider submitting it directly to us via email at mcolatrella@pacific.edu or through the Scholastica platform. 

Kilborn v. UIC John Marshall redux

UIC John Marshall, of course, moved to dismiss Professor Kilborn's lawsuit over its misconduct.   Professor Kilborn's reply brief is here:  Download Kilborn_Opposition to motion to dismiss wExhibit A

Professor Lawsky's Entry-Level Hiring Report for 2021-22

The report is now available here.  Professor Lawsky recorded 106 hires, the most in a good number of years, although nothing like the numbers before 2010, when 150 or more was the norm.  Inevitably some rookie hires are missed:  Chicago had three grads on the market, all three of whom received tenure-track offers, but it looks like one did not report to Professor Lawsky.  Some misses are inevitable, but I'm confident her overall picture is quite informative.

As Professor Lawsky also notes, we don't have data on how many graduates of each school were on the market.   You can see past "success rate" data from some prior years here and here.

UPDATE:  Professor Lawsky very kindly updated her report to include the missing Chicago candidate. Thank you, Professor Lawsky!

Per student value of law school endowments

A colleague elsewhere sent me data on law school endowments in 2019 (most probably went up in 2021, although they're probably back down now).   We divided the total endowment by the total JD and non-JD student enrollment based on the 2021 ABA disclosures to determine the per student value of the endowments.  Endowments, of course, are not the only source of income beyond tuition:  public law schools, for example, get substantial amounts of money from the state, while some law schools get substantial annual gifts (for more than a decade, for example, Chicago has benefitted from renewable three-year gifts supporting the Rubenstein Scholarships in an amount that would be equivalent, by my estimate, to another $125,000,000 in endowment!).  There is, of course, a striking if hardly perfect correlation between per student value of endowments and US News.com rankings, in part because per capita expenditures account for all the differences between otherwise comparable schools.

Interestingly, several of the very wealthy law schools (e.g., Yale, Stanford, Harvard, and Notre Dame) actually have lower per student endowments than their parent universities as a whole; while others (like Virginia and Michigan) have far more.

In any case, here are the top 20 law schools by the per student value of their endowments (schools with an *asterisk outside the top 10 have a gross endowment greater than $100 million; all the schools in the top ten have gross endowments greater than $100 million).

1.  Yale University ($2,033,106)

2.  Stanford University ($1,422,512)

3.  Harvard University ($1,060,304)

4.  University of Notre Dame ($670,157)

5.  University of Chicago ($623,318)

5.  University of Virginia ($623,923)

7.  Columbia University ($496,710)

8.  University of Michigan ($480,237)

9.  University of Pennsylvania ($403,714)

10. Duke University ($352,594)

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