Brian Leiter's Law School Reports

Amy Wax, academic freedom and Penn, once again

As I've noted before (also here), most of Penn's case against Amy Wax involves trying to punish her for her lawful extramural speech, and is thus a flagrant violation of the University's contractual commitment to her academic freedom. 

But the student newspaper now reports that Professor Wax has once again invited Jared Taylor--an actual white supremacist, with no scholarly or intellectual merit--to speak in her class on conservative political and legal thought.   Whether this invitation is protected by academic freedom depends on whether scholarly experts in conservative political and legal thought would deem this an appropriate invitation (I very much doubt they would).  Academic freedom, recall, imposes significant limits on classroom conduct and choices, namely, those that are imposed by the standards of the discipline in question.  You can't invite a geocentric crank to lecture in your astronomy class, and it's arguable you can't invite a racist crank to lecture in any class, even one on "conservative political and legal thought."  Here Penn may be within its rights to act.

 

 

Article on whether U.S. legal system is ready for "the challenges of AI to human values" includes citations that appear to have been made up by Chat GPT (link fixed)

Law professors may find this amusing. (Link fixed)

Bigelow Fellowship at Chicago now accepting applications

Those interested in law teaching with strong qualifications can apply here.   Bigelow Fellows are fully immersed into the intellectual culture of the Law School and receive excellent mentoring.   The Bigelow is the most powerful credential on the law teaching market, and Bigelows are in demand every year.  Every Bigelow in the last twenty years has received one or more tenure-track job offers.  Recent placements include Harvard, Chicago, Penn, Berkeley, Stanford (twice), Virginia, and Georgetown, among other leading law schools.  You can see a full list of Bigelow alumni here.

Heads up: some schools with automated application systems are asking for letters of reference *now*

In the past, most recommendations were over the phone or via email, and were less formal than a letter of reference, which usually came later in the process, when a school was serious about a particular candidate.  That started to change a bit a few years ago, but now some schools, which require candidates to apply online, are asking recommenders for letters now (before the FAR is even out!).   (The case brought to my attention is the University of Utah.)   This is an unhappy development for recommenders, but they need to be aware!

The Stanford Law disaster involving a FedSoc event with Judge Duncan

UPDATE:  The Stanford President and Dean Martinez in the law school have now issued an appropriate apology for this fiasco, including an acknowledgment (unlike in Dean Martinez's letter to the SLS community) that Dean Steinbach's conduct was inappropriate.

=======original post follows==========

The video online gives a sense of the chaos and heckling which disrupted the event.  F.I.R.E. offers a summary of the events, as well as a transcript of the peculiar and inappropriate remarks of Dean Steinbach, the DEI Associate Dean at the Law School.

Stanford is a private university, so the Law School could, of course, adopt the rule that they will not permit Republican-appointed judges to speak on campus, and they will not permit a student chapter of the Federalist Society.  They do not do that, I assume for a mix of reasons of principle and prudence.  Moreover, they have a free speech policy that specifically prohibits disrupting speakers invited to campus.

SLS Dean Martinez's letter to the community is posted below the fold.  I do not think it is a particularly good response (it is in the "mistakes were made, but we have good intentions" genre), but readers will judge for themselves.  A better response would have been simpler:

On March 9, students disrupted a speech by a federal judge invited by a student group.  This violates law school policies, and a disciplinary investigation has commenced, and students found to have participated in the violation will be subject to the appropriate disciplinary procedures.  We apologize to Judge Duncan for the disruption of the event, and administrative staff will receive training about how to manage situations like this to insure that an invited speaker may address students.

Dean Martinez's actual email in response to these events is below the fold:

Continue reading

Levit & Rostron's guide to submitting to law reviews...

...has been updated.

A new "Creative Commons" license that permits users to "remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially"

Some academics are concerned; law professors should feel free to weigh in on the discussion in the comments at the link.

Is US News an "authoritative" ranking of law schools?

I know this question will make readers of this blog laugh, even as they recognize the pernicious influence the USNews.com rankings have on legal education and the decisions of applicants.   But I was struck when having lunch this past Spring with some talented LLM students from Japan and China that they seemed to assume the answer to the question was "yes."  In a way, that sums up the problem confronted by American legal education.   USNews.com is undoubtedly perceived as authoritative by many students, who lack the knowledge and resources to assess the nonsensical ranking stew (reputation, library resources, expenditures per capita, self-reported employment data and on and on) used by USNews.com. 

Continue reading

Leading student-edited law reviews issue statement on new requirements for data and code transparency in empirical legal scholarship

Here.

(Thanks to Andrew Granato for the pointer.)

Florida lawyers take position in court that public university faculty curricula and classroom speech are "government speech," so regulable by state

Those thinking about taking jobs in the Florida public university system will want to watch this case.  If it makes it to SCOTUS, we may find out if Garcetti extends to faculty at public universities; if it does that will be the end of academic freedom at public universities.