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2010 Princeton Review Law School Rankings
Posted on October 21, 2009Over on TaxProf Blog, I have published a series of rankings based on data extracted from the individual profiles of the 172 law schools in the 2010 edition of the Princeton Review's Best 172 Law Schools (with the University of Cincinnati College of Law on the cover)...
Blind Salarying
Posted on October 10, 2009It annoys me when people create new verbs like the radio ad we have down here announcing the dealership is "clearancing." But now I have my own -- salarying, which means making decisions about salaries.At my school we blind grade which does not mean we cannot see the papers but that we do not know whose they are...
Huh?
Posted on September 18, 2009This is more properly a comment but since Moneylaw is close to dormant I decided to upgrade to an actual post. I read with interest the most recent posts about tax faculty rankings. I did this even though I have complained about drawing any inferences from the rankings other than SSRN may be pretty good at counting...
Are We Worse than Thieves? What Rents are Law Professors and Law Schools Seeking?
Posted on September 18, 2009In his classic 1967 article on rent-seeking (which does not actually use the term because it had not been coined at that time) Gordon Tullock explained that the cost of theft was not that one person's property was taken by another. In fact, that transaction in isolation may increase welfare...
New Tax Faculty Rankings
Posted on September 17, 2009Graduate Tax Faculty Rankings (Michigan is #1)Tax Professor Rankings (Louis Kaplow & Reuven Avi-Yonah are #1)Tax Faculty Rankings (Michigan is #1)Tax Faculty Metropolitan Area Rankings (Los Angeles is #1)
66% of the Time, Every Time
Posted on September 07, 2009When I began teaching economics something struck me during the first week. I knew a fair amount about economics -- much less than I thought -- but I had received not even a minute's worth of instruction on teaching. All I could think to do was read the book, more or less explain it in my own words using examples not in the book, and answer questions...
How Top-Ranked Law Schools Got That Way, Pt. 3
Posted on August 31, 2009Part one and part two of this series focused on the top law schools in U.S. News and World Report's 2010 rankings, offering graphs and analysis to explain why those schools did so well. This part rounds out the series by way of contrast. Here, we focus on the law schools that ranked 41-51 in the most recent USN&WR rankings, those that ranked 94-100, and the eight schools that filled out the bottom of the rankings...
Best Value Law Schools
Posted on August 27, 2009The National Jurist has released its ranking of the Best Value Law Schools in the September 2009 issue:The National Jurist identified 65 law schools that carry a low price tag and are able to prepare their students incredibly well for today's competitive job market...
"Annual" Multiple Choice Testing Post
Posted on August 26, 2009It's been nearly two years since my "annual" post opposing multiple choice examinations for law students. The last one generated some good comments and can be found here. I still find the question intriguing. Before going on a bit, some basics. First, I am writing about machine graded exams; not multiple choice or true/false with explanation questions which are actually short essays that focus the students on specific topics...
How Top-Ranked Law Schools Got That Way, Pt. 2
Posted on August 23, 2009In the first post in this series, I discussed the mysterious distribution of maximum z-scores in the top two tiers of law schools in U.S. News & World Report's 2010 rankings, and focused on the top-12 schools to solve that mystery. In brief, among the very top schools, employment nine months after graduation" ("Emp9") varies too little to make much of a difference in the schools' overall scores, whereas overhead expenditures/student ("Over$/Stu") varies so greatly as to almost swamp the impact of the other factors that USN&WR uses in its rankings...
How Top-Ranked Law Schools Got That Way, Pt. 1
Posted on August 20, 2009How do law schools make it to the top of the U.S. News & World Report rankings? USN&WR ranks law schools based on 12 factors, each of which counts for a certain percentage of a school's total score. Peer Reputation counts for 25% of each law school's overall score, for instance, whereas Bar Passage Rate counts for only 2%...
Transfer Fees
Posted on August 17, 2009I have not read Why England Lose: and other Curious Football Phenomena Explained by Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski but this excerpt of a review of the book in the August 13th issue of the Economist caught my eye:"A third myth is that clubs cannot buy success...
Reforms Suggested by Modeling the Law School Rankings
Posted on August 04, 2009As I recently observed, the close fit between law schools' scores in U.S. News & World Report's rankings and the scores of those same schools in my model of the ranking "suggests that law schools did not try game the rankings by telling USN&WR one thing and the ABA ...
MoneyBall MoneyLaw
Posted on July 29, 2009When I heard they were making a movie based on MoneyBall I could not sleep just thinking about who would play the key roles in the obvious sequel, MoneyLaw. Would some of us have bit parts? Alas, the MoneyBall movie has been deeply back burnered and, I think this means the MoneyLaw movie is similarly delayed but probably only for a millennium or two...
Z-Scores in Model of 2010 USN&WR Law School Rankings
Posted on July 23, 2009If you want to know how U.S. News & World Report's law school rankings work, you'll want to know about z-scores. In very brief, z-scores measure how well each school performed relative to its peers, thereby establishing its rank. (See here for a fuller explanation...
Accuracy of the Model of the 2010 USN&WR Law School Rankings
Posted on July 22, 2009I earlier offered a snapshot comparison of the scores generated by my model of the 2010 U.S. News & World Report law school rankings and the original. After Robert Morse, director of data research for USN&WR, asked me if I could quantify the fit between the two data sets, I realized that others might share his curiosity...
A Model of the 2010 USN&WR Law School Rankings
Posted on July 16, 2009As in every year since 2005, I this year again built a model of the law school rankings published by the U.S. News & World Report ("USN&WR"). Figuring out the latest rankings?the "2010" rankings, as USN&WR's calls them?proved especially trying this time around...
A fresh take on rankings, redux
Posted on July 04, 2009I posted my latest thoughts on possible alternative rankings systems here. Would love your comments. Thanks, and happy 4th!
Bill Gleason: Excellence within our means
Posted on June 21, 2009Bill Gleason of the University of Minnesota is the author of The Periodic Table and The Periodic Table, Too. He is an impassioned advocate for access, value, and integrity in higher education and — this must be said in the interest of full disclosure — an on-the-record fan of MoneyLaw...
Least complicated
Posted on June 08, 2009Least complicatedSome long ago when we were taughtThat for whatever kind of puzzle you gotYou just stick the right formula inA solution for every fool— Indigo Girls, Least Complicated, Swamp Ophelia (1994)Yes, there is a connection to law. Read all about it in The Cardinal Lawyer.
Follow J.C. Redbird on Twitter
Posted on June 05, 2009» Adapted from The Cardinal Lawyer «Twitter is a lightweight online platform that blends blogging and social networking. Its users "tweet" by answering a simple question: "What are you doing?" All answers are limited to 140 characters — the length of an SMS text message, minus 20 characters...
With medium power comes no responsibility
Posted on June 03, 2009In his celebrated New York Times Magazine piece, The case for working with your hands, Matthew Crawford makes observations about middle managers that apply with full force to those of us who live academia's so-called "life of the mind":Often as not, [craftsmen's workplace] crises do not end in redemption...
Frank: "So Far So Good"
Posted on May 23, 2009Of the people reading this, no more than a handful will have heard of Frank McCoy. He was my faculty colleague who passed away last night. He had not been active in some years but until the last few months he reported daily to his small cubby by of an office about ten feet from mine...
U.S. News to Correct Data, Not Rankings, of Brooklyn, Hawaii, and Nebraska
Posted on May 08, 2009See here.
2010 U.S. News Law School Rankings
Posted on April 27, 2009Academic Peer ReputationLawyer/Judge Reputation
Law Schools on Steroids
Posted on April 26, 2009The annual USN&WR rankings and the inevitable controversy that follows, steroid use by baseball players, and a recent article in the New Yorker ("Brain Gain," April 27, 2009) have made me realize that I am not sure what it means to cheat. It's not that I do not regard lying as cheating but things get very blurry after that...
The SSRN blog
Posted on April 25, 2009Not every coblogger at MoneyLaw necessarily agrees, but I do appreciate SSRN. And now we can follow the SSRN blog.
Get a "Gift Certificate"
Posted on April 23, 2009My goodness! It is rating season already. This year the students at my School find that they are not at the tied-for-46th rated school but at the 51st. And since we are reducing the class size, next year's will likely find they are back in the 40s. In the meantime, the teaching is the same, the scholarship the same and, I suspect, job placement will not change...
Early Release of 2010 U.S. Law School Rankings
Posted on April 20, 2009Although the 2010 U.S. News Law School Rankings are scheduled for release on Thursday, April 23, the Internet is abuzz with early copies -- these scans of the Top 100 (via The Faculty Lounge) appear legitimate. TaxProf Blog lists the biggest moves among the Top 50 and 51-100.
Wilkins Micawber, dean and professor of law
Posted on April 11, 2009Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.— Wilkins Micawber in Charles Dickens, David CopperfieldI've held the title "dean and professor of law" for nearly a thousand days, long enough to make me chuckle whenever I'm introduced as "the University of Louisville's new law school dean...
That don't impress me much
Posted on April 09, 2009Chatting with a friend elsewhere in legal academia reminded me: Shania Twain, That Don't Impress Me Much, Come on Over (1997), is an anthem for all seasons. Enjoy!
The University of Louisville's law alumni magazine
Posted on March 19, 2009The vast majority of MoneyLaw's readers will never see the University of Louisville's law alumni magazine. I don't believe in law porn. Even if I did, I don't have the money to transmit any substantial amount of law porn in interstate commerce. But I am proud of the magazine and invite you to download the 2008-09 edition.
Sun deviled
Posted on March 17, 2009Arizona State University Research ParkArizona State University, under president Michael Crow, aspired to become the New American University. ASU would enroll 100,000 students by 2020. It would eliminate disciplinary boundaries, spur research, fuel the economy, and serve the deserving and the underserved...
"The best and the brightest"
Posted on March 15, 2009AIG has gotten more than $170 billion in bailout money from the Treasury and the Federal Reserve. And now AIG has paid about $165 million in bonuses to the executives who brought the company to its knees.A more politically foolish use of 0.1 percent of available cash can scarcely be imagined...
Testing the complete lawyer
Posted on March 12, 2009Being a lawyer is more than "thinking like a lawyer." So much more.The LSAT at best tests certain aspects of "thinking like a lawyer."So why not devise a test to assess the rest of what it means to think and act like a lawyer, what it really means to be a lawyer?Sheldon Zedeck and Marjorie M...
Breaking away
Posted on March 08, 2009It's the thirtieth anniversary of one of my all-time favorite movies, Breaking Away. As this musical tribute suggests, it's an extremely sentimental movie about growing up, intergenerational conflict, class warfare, and an underdog who (in the parlance of European pop music) ultimately gets everything but the girl — and doesn't crash and burn over that outcome...
Is There Any Dog There?
Posted on March 07, 2009The tail wagging the dog idea -- getting your ends and means reversed -- has made it into Moneylaw on a number of occasions. I am beginning to wonder what the dog is. USN&WR rankings determine what law schools do ranging from admitting transfer students, lowering class size, and employing their students, at least temporarily...
Quiet man on campus
Posted on February 26, 2009It's almost time for the NCAA men's basketball tournament, an event I've often milked for MoneyLaw material. I usually cheer against the Ivy League representative, because of and not in spite of my Harvard degree. This year, though, I might make an exception if Cornell makes the field...
The Caroline Kennedy rule
Posted on February 21, 2009An otherwise obscure political confession forms the basis of a bedrock principle of academic governance. Witness this February 20, 2009, revelation by David A. Paterson, governor of New York:For the first time, Gov. David A. Paterson acknowledged Friday that he personally ordered his staff to contest Caroline Kennedy?s version of events in the hours after she withdrew from consideration to be United States senator...
Unexceptional
Posted on February 17, 2009In what has become a de facto series, MoneyLaw has spotlighted some recent posts by Stanley Fish on academic freedom and the tendency of some professors to stretch that concept. Fish now helps us to think more clearly about academic freedom by offering this simple reminder: academics, far from being unique, much less entitled to unique legal protection, are simply unexceptional...
Rocket man
Posted on February 15, 2009One of MoneyLaw's recurring themes is the search for gritty, unglamorous faculty members who elevate an entire school's performance. In the context of teaching, we laud the utility law teacher. In the never-ending quest to neutralize destructive faculty members — Arschlöcher habt Ihr immer bei Euch — we've also turned to plus-minus, a crude but revealing hockey statistic...
But Will You Love Me Tomorrow?
Posted on February 13, 2009This is rightly a comment but Jim's post below was so thought provoking that I used my Moneylaw hall pass to elevate it to a post. But you should read Jim's first.I think the possible tension between what the humanities professor wrote, what I wrote, and possibly Jim is thinking is actually pretty thin...
You like me
Posted on February 13, 2009You like me! You really, really like me!Jeff Harrison's recent post, Ready, set, punt, has all the hallmarks of a MoneyLaw classic. It exposes one of the abiding pitfalls in academic governance: the tendency to approach faculty hiring with criteria better suited to choosing a partner for a drink after school hours...
Rankings and discipline: A two-part MoneyLaw series
Posted on February 12, 2009The road to hell is paved with good intentionsDo the U.S. News & World Report rankings hurt law schools? Yes, according to Michael Sauder and Wendy Nelson Espeland, The Discipline of Rankings: Tight Coupling and Organizational Change, American Sociological Review (February 2009):Using a case study of law schools, we explain why rankings have permeated law schools so extensively and why these organizations have been unable to buffer these institutional pressures...
Ready, Set, Punt
Posted on February 10, 2009From time to time a law professor at another school writes to me rather than comment on a post. Here is part of an email from what I assumed to be a first or second year law professor. He or she had just come from an appointments meeting at which a number of candidates were discussed...
Better to reign in academia than serve in business
Posted on February 10, 2009Hell . . . Hell is for studentsStanley Fish is on a roll, and MoneyLaw is making the most of it. Having just posted Fish's observations on a new book on academic freedom, I now have occasion to reprint the brilliant opening to Fish's latest column on this subject, The Two Languages of Academic Freedom:Last week we came to the section on academic freedom in my course on the law of higher education and I posed this hypothetical to the students: Suppose you were a member of a law firm or a mid-level executive in a corporation and you skipped meetings or came late, blew off assignments or altered them according to your whims, abused your colleagues and were habitually rude to clients...
Defining academic freedom
Posted on February 09, 2009Although this item first appeared in the New York Times nearly three months ago, it warrants notice here and now. Stanley Fish praises a new book about academic freedom, Matthew W. Finkin & Robert C. Post, For the Common Good: Principles of American Academic Freedom (2009):The authors? most important conclusion is presented early on in their introduction: ?We argue that the concept of Academic freedom ...
The University of Louisville seeks visitors
Posted on February 05, 2009The University of Louisville School of Law anticipates hiring visiting professors, both entry-level and experienced, for the 2009-10 academic year. Our curricular needs may include (but are not limited to) civil procedure, torts, trusts and estates, property, legal writing, and other subjects...
Are Law Schools Part of the University?
Posted on January 28, 2009Long ago Jim promised a series on law schools as public utilities. It's a great idea and current budget crunches make the parallel even clearer. One basic comparison is that in regulated industries, regulators are not that interested in how much a utility spends...
Is the Law Professor Gravy Train Over?
Posted on January 20, 2009New York Times (Jan. 18, 2009): The Last Professor, by Stanley Fish:I have argued that higher education, properly understood, is distinguished by the absence of a direct and designed relationship between its activities and measurable effects in the world...
U.S. News on Track for April Release of New Law School Rankings
Posted on January 17, 2009Robert Morse, Director of Data Research at U.S. News & World Report, announced on his blog yesterday that the U.S. News law school rankings are on track for the annual April publication:The law school statistical and peer assessment data collection is now complete...
There are no neutrals there
Posted on December 20, 2008div style="background:#334422; color:#dddd99; padding:16px"div align="center"Natalie Merchant, a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3z2f63Njto" target=_blank style="font-style:italic; color:#eeeeaa"Which Side Are You On?/a, emon/em a href="http://www...
The wonders of a pitiful, dreadful life
Posted on December 19, 2008a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/19/movies/19wond.html" target=_blankimg src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/12/19/arts/19wonderful.xlarge1x.jpg" style="display:block; margin: 0px auto 0px; text-align:center; width:479px" alt="It's a Wonderful Life" title="It's a Wonderful Life"/abr /Almost precisely a year to the day after the publication of a href="http://www...
Orchestrating the university: Leon Botstein strikes the right note
Posted on December 15, 2008Yes, times are tough in the American academy. But before panicking, let alone doing anything as drastic (and foolish) as freezing all hiring till further notice or raising tuition beyond levels that are already skyrocketing out of many families' reach, let us consider the wisdom of Leon Botstein, president of Bard College and director of the American Symphony Orchestra...
Curtains on cowboy philanthropy: a cruel lesson from the Madoff scandal
Posted on December 15, 2008From Margaret Soltan's excellent coverage of the Bernard Madoff scandal comes this tip regarding the impact of Madoff's $50 billion scam on Jewish philanthropy around the world.According to Jonathan Sarna of Brandeis University, an expert on Jewish history, Madoff's swindle represents "an unprecedented loss to the 'Jewish economy' — the networks of Jewish institutions, donors and charities that include universities, schools, hospitals and community centers...
Today Is Final Day to Comment on ABA's Proposal to Eliminate Student-Faculty Ratio Data
Posted on December 15, 2008Today is the final day to submit comments to the Council of the ABA Section of Legal Education & Admission to the Bar on the proposal of the Standards Review Committee to eliminate computation of the student-faculty ratio in connection with the accreditation of law schools (Standard 104 and Interpretations 402-1 and 402-2)...
When the lights dim and the crowd fades
Posted on December 13, 2008Portraits of shameScandal scored a trifecta this week, as heavyweights from the worlds of politics, business, and law were accused of fraud. Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich has been arrested for offering to sell Barack Obama's open Senate seat to the highest bidder...
Looking for Help on SSRN
Posted on December 10, 2008I do not want to jump to conclusions and may be the last to know so I'd like to understand the SSRN business plan. I have in the past expressed my suspicions about what numbers of downloads mean and why there appears to be a top ten list for virtually everything...
Beyond IRAC: Law Exam Taking Tips
Posted on December 07, 2008Visit my official grading procrastination site over at Legal Profession Blog for a few choice but undoubtedly useless words to students on taking exams.
Hot Topics Panel: The Financial Crisis
Posted on December 06, 2008The Financial Crisis: Hot Topics Panel, AALS Annual MeetingFriday, January 9, 8:30-10:15 am.A discussion of the causes, short-term solutions, and longer-term implications of the current financial crisis.Moderator: Theodore P. Seto (Loyola Law School ? LA)Speaker 1: Lauren E...
Mad Dogs and terrific trios
Posted on December 05, 2008Any careful reader knows that the Atlanta Braves are the official Major League Baseball team of MoneyLaw. Just look at the banner atop this blog.It's worth a MoneyLaw post, then, to note the impending retirement of Greg Maddux. Some of the key numbers: A lifetime 355-227 record...
College football deserves the BCS
Posted on December 04, 2008On good days I wouldn't wish the BCS on Division I-A college football. No serious fan prefers that lousy, irrational system over a real playoff. But December 3, 2008, was not a good day in college football.Auburn fires a good coach in Tommy Tuberville, while Notre Dame clings to Charlie Weis, who is quite possibly the worst football coach in the universe...
Viscous and vacuous
Posted on November 28, 2008This post serves notice to once, current, and future educational administrators: If you write fatuous prose from your perch, critics such as the Scathing Online Schoolmarm (Margaret Soltan of University Diaries) and the Gopher Gadfly (Bill Gleason of The Periodic Table) will expose the flaws in your reasoning and your rhetoric, in your sense and your syntax, for the world to enjoy...
Real genius
Posted on November 23, 2008Once again Jeff Harrison has lamented, in ways I appreciate, that the legal academy seems to hire a significant number of professors who are neither intellectually interesting enough (as a static matter) nor intellectually curious enough (as a dynamic matter) to make better teachers and smarter colleagues of themselves...
Searching for Outliers
Posted on November 22, 2008I'd like to say there is a debate about the fascination law school hiring committees have with candidates with elite credentials. I am not sure it is a debate, however, if no one is listening to one side of the argument. If it is a debate, it is one that I and the six or seven people who agree with me (and I do not mean at my school but in the world) always lose...
Beetles, Frogs, and Lawyers
Posted on November 20, 2008I think and write a lot about models and their limits, and what is "Moneyball" or "Moneylaw" if not a model?That's my lame connection to a piece I have just posted on SSRN, Beetles, Frogs, and Lawyers: The Scientific Demarcation Problem in the Gilson Theory of Value Creation...
Mythical law school rankings
Posted on November 20, 2008Pallas Athena and the PigskinAs the college football season winds down, it bears remembering that the NCAA recognizes no official champion for the Football Bowl Subdivision (which real fans will forever call Division I-A). Even if this season's BCS National Championship Game manages somehow to reprise the 2006 Cotton Bowl with a rematch of Alabama versus Texas Tech (this time with zero rather than two losses apiece), major college football will stage a mythical national championship:A mythical national championship ...
Harvard Law's second United States President
Posted on November 16, 2008On a tip from a blog post written by my history-loving colleague, Kurt X. Metzmeier, and featured in the University of Louisville's law faculty blog, I looked it up:Yes, Barack Obama will be the second United States President with a law degree from Harvard...
An elegant bibliographical solution
Posted on November 15, 2008The chambers of a nautilus are arranged according to an approximate logarithmic spiral that can be calculated in polar coordinates according to this simple formula:r = aebθwhere r represents the radial coordinate, θ represents the angular coordinate, e is the base of natural logarithms, and a and b are constants that (1) are arbitrary in modeling and (2) are empirically determined in real-world applications of logarithmic spirals...
Yes to SSRN
Posted on November 14, 2008I've shared my views on what SSRN downloads mean but the story is not all negative. This occurred to me (probably later than to most) when a friend noted that some schools in sending out their reports of faculty scholarship include only SSRN cites. He thinks the objective is to drive up downloads or possibly to make it more convenient for attorneys to access the articles...
The Ex-Donald Bren School of Law
Posted on November 13, 2008The U.C. Irvine School of Law recently announced that it will not carry the name, "Bren," contrary to an earlier agreement honoring a $20 million gift by philanthropist Donald Bren, chairman of the Irvine Company. Why the change of plans? According to an Irvine Company spokesman, "part of the reason to drop the name was to avoid confusion with other schools that are named after Bren on the campus of UC Irvine" (emphasis added)...
Are We Done Yet?
Posted on November 07, 2008I worry that the posts to Moneylaw seem to have fallen off (in quantity, not quality). I really enjoyed reading the views of the original core of writers. So, what's up?But, by asking "are we done yet" I am not referring to Moneylaw and other blogs remaining from the "blog boom...
The powerlessness of faculty politics
Posted on November 04, 2008On Election Day 2008, MoneyLaw takes a quick look at faculty politics. By "faculty politics," if only for this day, I mean the electoral preferences of college professors.Do professors' political proclivities influence their students' views? According to April Kelly-Woessner and Matthew Woessner, authors of Investigating the Impact of Politics in the Classroom: Considering Whether Students Recognize and React to Faculty Politics, the answer appears to be "no...
False Applause
Posted on November 02, 2008This poem by Donald Burness from his collection, Brutal Like All Olympics Are, makes my cynicism about legal academics look positively Pollyannaish.MY ENEMIES gnathonic toads infesting fleasthis is the tribe of my enemiesjoyless drones self-righteous fraudsthey honor each other with false applausejealous knaves consumed by hateever eager to extirpatedull lifeless they cannot soaron winds of dancing metaphorswhat a paltry pathetic thingto honor Mediocrity as your kingand when the king lets out a fartthey love the smell with all their heartI wish them scrofulous days aheadand may they rightly be rememberedas zeros when they're deadThe brush is a bit broad even for me but the phrases "false applause," strikes a chord...
Underdogs and wonderdogs
Posted on November 01, 2008Underdogs and WonderdogsFew days in this year's college football season will be more decisive than November 1. And the two games that dominate today's agenda — #8 Georgia against #5 Florida and #6 Texas Tech against #1 Texas — offer in tandem a glimpse at managerial traits that matter, in higher education as in football...
Up in smoke
Posted on October 31, 2008In pursuit of a simpler life, a Harvard Law graduate burns his diploma:Hat tip: The ABA Journal Weekly and Legal Blog Watch.
Distributive Justice in Law Schools
Posted on October 30, 2008Sometimes I feel like it's Bill Henderson's world, and I'm just living in it and trying to help connect the dots. So when John McCain talks about "spreading the wealth," I start thinking about distributive justice, specifically who gets what in the law schools that employ some of us, collect tuition from others, and ask still others for money every once in a while...
Average and Marginal
Posted on October 29, 2008I think being a scholar and being a good teacher overlap. I am not convinced that writing and being a good teacher overlap. I have a small sample on this but some of the brightest and most insightful law professors I have known do not write very much...
Introducing the First Voter's Guide to U.S. News
Posted on October 28, 2008It's the final days of the election for many law professors: that is, the U.S. News survey asking voters to assess the quality of each school's JD program is due on Thursday. The Race to the Top project, which Dave Fagundes and I started a few months ago, just put out our first Voters' Guide in time for the final voting from the academy, and in advance of the lawyers/judges survey next month...
Law Schools Competing On Quality
Posted on October 28, 2008Why should anyone care about the stupid U.S. News survey anyway? According to a commonly held view, the rankings are silly, and the thing to do is ignore them. But I think this view is quite misguided. It turns out ? and this is the basic premise of the Race to the Top project that I helped start recently -- that a major obstacle to the improvement of legal education generally is the lack of competition on quality among peer institutions, and that this lack of competition also leads to other bad consequences for law schools like spending lots of money on buying LSAT scores and shifting full-time students into "part-time" programs...
Why legal writing matters
Posted on October 27, 2008Rick Garnett contests a point that Jason Solomon made recently on MoneyLaw: legal writing is too important to consign to third-year law students. In commentary on Rick's Prawfsblawg post, Larry Rosenthal makes some powerful points:Legal writing is an awfully important skill...
Profs playing poker
Posted on October 25, 2008In academic life, nothing is certain except death, taxes, and strategic voting on faculty appointments. The emergence of a strong candidate poses a serious dilemma for incumbent faculty members who approach prospective appointments with a strictly selfish agenda of maximizing private utility...
The University of Louisville's law faculty SSRN aggregator page
Posted on October 21, 2008» Reprinted from The Cardinal Lawyer «The University of Louisville is justifiably proud of its law faculty and of the high-impact academic work generated by this community of scholars. In earlier posts (like this and this and this), The Cardinal Lawyer has made much of SSRN...
Smoot
Posted on October 21, 2008» Reprinted from The Cardinal Lawyer «October 2008 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the night that immortalized the name of Oliver R. Smoot. In 1958, Smoot was a freshman at M.I.T. and a pledge in the Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity...
Small ball
Posted on October 20, 2008Philadelphia Phillies general manager Pat Gillick has long been a MoneyLaw favorite, and not simply because his team has passed the New York Mets on the last day of regular-season play two years in a row. As Gillick's Phillies prepare to face the Tampa Bay Rays in the 2008 World Series, MoneyLaw can learn some lessons from one of baseball's wiliest, quietest assemblers of talent on the cheap...
Bar Passage: A Key Factor to Look To in USN Voting
Posted on October 16, 2008For those filling out the U.S. News survey rating the academic quality of JD programs across the country, one logical question is what kind of information one ought to look at to make such determinations. Here's one key piece of data: bar passage rates relative to entering credentials...
Penn's Rankings Problem
Posted on October 16, 2008As U.S. News voters figure out what rating to give each school, and start focusing more on educational quality, Penn Law seems to be quite well-positioned -- sky-high student satisfaction ("academic experience" rating of 96 in Princeton Review), great bar passage rates, on curriculum, we'll have to see what they submit for their "Best Practices" survey today (thanks to all who have submitted so far!)...
Voter Fraud in U.S. News Surveys?
Posted on October 15, 2008In ranking law schools, U.S. News and World Report weights peer reputation more heavily than any other measure of quality. A school's reputation among its peers counts for 25% of its overall score in the rankings (the next-most important measure, in contrast, counts for only 15%)...
Mike Alstott: An all-MoneyLaw fullback
Posted on October 15, 2008Fullback is a football position that MoneyLaw simply has to admire. It lacks glamor — fullbacks are usually asked to block, and most of them weigh less than other blockers, let alone would-be tacklers. When fullbacks run the ball, they leave glamor behind in their pursuit of yards...
The Next Front in the Rankings War: Paying Admitted Students to Retake the LSAT?
Posted on October 15, 2008I previously blogged the rankings implications of the new early admission programs at Illinois and Michigan for admitting their undergrads without taking the LSAT. Today's Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed bring news of the next front in the rankings war: paying admitted freshmen to retake the SAT and offering large financial rewards for those whose scores go up by certain levels...
And the Winner of the "Best Law Porn" Award is...
Posted on October 15, 2008UCLA! We can judge "law porn" -- the glossy brochures that arrive in the mailboxes of of law professors, lawyers and judges this time of year -- on any number of dimensions: aesthetics, weight, ability to convey excitement, number of articles in top journals per square inch, etc...
The accidental administrator
Posted on October 14, 2008Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheueren akademischen Verwalter verwandelt.** As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous academic administrator...
Schattenfreude: Endlich ein juristischer Ausdruck
Posted on October 13, 2008I owe a debt of gratitude to Hubert Humphrey, Pete Townshend, Mick Jagger, Allen Tate, and William Wordsworth. Schattenfreude, an idea that has obsessed Jurisdynamics in image and in word, has finally found an explicitly legal expression. I invite you to read about the legal treatment of Schattenfreude at The Cardinal Lawyer.
Are SSRN and USN&WR All That Different?
Posted on October 13, 2008Like many others I make use of SSRN. But then again I also read the USN&WR rankings. Now I think they may be equally meaningful or meaningless. Recently a friend and I coauthored an article and posted it. In a few days we were receiving the top ten for recently submitted articles...
U.S. News Survey: Vote Quality, Not Reputation
Posted on October 13, 2008The U.S. News surveys -- the primary determinant of the overall rankings -- are now in the boxes of hundreds of law professors around the country, due in a few weeks. Next month, it's the lawyers' turn. Discussion in the blogosphere and elsewhere have referred to these as "reputation" surveys, which is misleading -- so let's stop doing so...
What IS a good part-time program?
Posted on October 12, 2008Over on my own blog, I've talked a bit about the new part-time program rankings that USNWR is proposing and the new part of this year's questionnaire that asks voters to name up to 15 "good" part-time programs (see here). Setting aside the misnomer--most of the students in the part-time programs work about full-and-a-half-time, between their "day jobs" and studying for law schools--I have to wonder what constitutes a "good" part-time program...
Fall guys
Posted on October 03, 2008October is the cruelest month, especially if you spend foolishlyHail October, once again, and in 2008 as in 2007, the Mets' pain is MoneyLaw's gain. For the first time in 15 years, Major League Baseball will conduct a postseason blissfully devoid of New York teams...
Law and Collective Responsibility
Posted on October 02, 2008Tonight the PSU Law and Philosphy Society will meet to take up the question of collective responsibility for the current financial crisis. I regret I cannot attend the meeting set for 6:00 PM at Webster's Cafe on Allen Street. My role in collective responsibility for kids, dinner and laundry interfere with my freedom to sip coffee and talk about philosophical implications of just about anything...
Tenure: Use it (on behalf of those who don't have it) or lose it
Posted on October 01, 2008By way of Erin O'Connor's Critical Mass comes Andrew Ross's very interesting twist on tenure in the most recent issue of Academe, the magazine of the American Association of University Professors:For those who still see tenure primarily as a form of job security, the larger economic context should be plain...
Student evaluations, revisited
Posted on September 30, 2008It has been some time since MoneyLaw explored the issue of student evaluations. The Chronicle of Higher Education's On Hiring blog has just published a very brief two-part series. The discussion there, though focused on Rate My Professors, a tool with wider application in undergraduate settings than in law school, has generate some interesting comments...
The Financial Crisis: What Went Wrong?
Posted on September 30, 2008I have posted my current understanding of what went wrong on my tax blog, http://understandingtax.typepad.com/understanding_tax/ If I've missed something important, please let me know. This is very much a work-in-progress.It is not too early to be thinking about implications for law schools...
The Elite Beast of Burden
Posted on September 26, 2008The following three paragraphs are taken from The Disadvantages of An Elite Education by William Deresiewicz. It is from the Summer 08 issue of American Scholar."Elite schools pride themselves on their diversity, but that diversity is almost entirely a matter of ethnicity and race...
LSAT-Free Law School Admissions
Posted on September 24, 2008The University of Michigan School of Law recent announced an innovative program to admit 1L law students who have never taken an LSAT exam. Under the Wolverine Scholars program, potential admits with especially good undergraduate records from the University of Michigan?Ann Arbor campus may apply for admission to the law school without having taken the LSAT...
Utility player
Posted on September 24, 2008MoneyLaw loves utility players. From the New York Times' profile of the Chicago Cubs' any-position factotum, Mark DeRosa:DeRosa, 33, is the major leagues? only former all-Ivy League quarterback and the only player with a degree from the University of Pennsylvania?s Wharton School of Business...
New York, New York
Posted on September 23, 2008One New York team has been mathematically eliminated from postseason play in 2008:O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!Now it's time to focus on eliminating the other one.
Want Your School to Rise in the Rankings? A Best Practices Survey For Law Schools
Posted on September 19, 2008You might not want your school to rise, I don't know. But if you do, you might encourage your dean or associate dean to fill out this survey on your school's use of best practices in legal education, which along with information on bar passage rates relative to entering credentials, and student satisfaction, will be used to compile a list of law schools that provide exceptional "value added" for students...
The Stakeholder Impact Statement
Posted on September 18, 2008Since before joining the Moneylaw group my individual beef (most specifically with public schools) has been the disconnect between faculty governance and the interests of law school stakeholders -- the people who pay the bills and for whom a Law School exists...
For Law and Fun
Posted on September 16, 2008All sorts of "law and" movments have popped up over the years?law and economics, law and literature, law and sociology, and so forth. Each has its merits, and each has its acolytes. Were I to choose a "law and" movement, though, I think I'd opt for law and fun...
Creating Disabilities
Posted on September 15, 2008Within the last month the following have occurred to me or to others including some at other schools who have shared their concerns with me:1. A student asked to have a 2 year old grade changed in order to improve his class rank.2. A mother called to complain about her son's grade in a class...
Raw intelligence is overrated
Posted on September 15, 2008Awesome insights from Jonah Lehrer on the New York Times' "football for smarties" feature:Three and a half seconds: That?s approximately how long a quarterback has to decide where to throw the ball. How does he survey the options while a swarm of humongous, angry men seek to pancake him? It seems obvious: a quarterback needs to think, to look at each of his receivers and make a calculation...
Georgia 14, South Carolina 7
Posted on September 13, 2008Georgia 14, South Carolina 7It's always satisfying when the Bulldogs win, but the victory tastes sweetest in Columbia, South Carolina. I celebrated this evening with a meal of curried Gamecock.
Scholars, Scholarship, and Teaching
Posted on September 10, 2008It is common to hear the claim that good scholars are good teachers. That may be true, but that is not the same as saying those who produce scholarship are good teachers. Some of the most interesting, well informed, and analytical law professors I know are infrequent writers or do not write at all...
Social networking for legal academics
Posted on September 10, 2008Jim Chen's Facebook profileJim Chen's social networksLegal academics are among the slowest to adopt new forms of information technology. Then there are those among us who have not only dipped into Law 2.0, but affirmatively dived into blogging and social networking...
Closing time
Posted on September 05, 2008Sometimes, perhaps at the end of a short week that feels paradoxically long, or perhaps when you're feeling strangely fine, the office whispers to you in semisonic tones: "You don't have to go home but you can't stay here." That's when you know it's closing time:Semisonic, Closing Time , Feeling Strangely Fine (1998)Closing time — time for you to go out, go out into the world...
Good sports
Posted on September 03, 2008This morning's New York Times profiles Ben Dogra, "maybe the best football agent attracting the least attention."Dogra, working alongside Tom Condon (at right in the picture), Jim Steiner, and Ken Kremer, has led Creative Artists Agency's football division to dominance in the fast and powerful game of representing players in the National Football League...
Post Tenure Review
Posted on September 01, 2008A friend on my faculty alerted me to this article, "Post Tenure Review as If It Mattered," by Jane W. Barnard. I do not agree with some portions of it but the importance of its subject matter and the common sense appeal of many of its proposals should not be overlooked...
Juniority: The political version
Posted on August 30, 2008The 2008 presidential election so far, like the institution of serial marriage, represents the triumph of hope over experience. With the designation of Sarah Palin as the Republican candidate for Vice President, each of the major tickets will include one member under the age of 50...
Billable Hours and Law Professors
Posted on August 29, 2008This letter was sent to me and I thought it deserved publication. For some, that will mean that the author, Concerned, has written a peer reviewed "essay."Dear Jeff,From a money law perspective is the Fall article submission season more like the annual flooding of the Nile or a recurrent infestation of love bugs?At my law school it seems likely that implementation of one money law principle (encouraging and rewarding productivity in publication) is backfiring...
nominees for best foundational administrative law articles?
Posted on August 28, 2008Because I am very excited about learning administrative law, and because learning is best when it's a collaborative enterprise, I would very much appreciate tips and recommendations for great survey articles on administrative law, the non-delegation doctrine, and deference/review...
Z-Scores in Model of 2009 USN&WR Law School Rankings
Posted on August 26, 2008U.S. News & World Report publishes scores for each of the hundred or so schools that it ranks highest, and offers some of the data that goes into calculating those scores. To really understand how each of those schools fared relative to its peers, however, you need to know its z-score in each category of data that USN&WR measures...
Pride and Shame
Posted on August 20, 2008One of Jim Chen's recurring themes is good vs. evil. It is expressed, at least in my opinion, most eloquently in his instant classic Three Deans. Although written obviously about deans, I think the three prototypes can be adapted to fit law faculty as well...
Ithaka: Legal education as an odyssey
Posted on August 18, 2008Thalia-Flora Karavia, Portrait of C.P. Cavafy (1926)Like all other journeys, legal education has a fairly well defined end. Like the best of journeys, legal education at its best does not set its destination in advance, but rather refocuses along the way...
Michael Sauder on U.S. News as the Interloper In Legal Education
Posted on August 18, 2008Great paper! Brayden King reviews Michael Sauder's paper at OrgTheory.Net:Michael has an article in the latest issue of Administrative Science Quarterly, ?Interlopers and field change: The entry of U.S. News into the field of legal education.? The paper uses in-depth interviews to examine the effect that the entry of the U...
AALS Annual Meeting: Correction and Apology
Posted on August 18, 2008A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.I had assumed, based on the AALS's decision and press release, that the problem towards which the proposed boycott was addressed was solved.Dan Rodriguez, former dean at San Diego, points out that the two hotels are both owned by the same guy...
Proposed Boycott of AALS Annual Meeting Succeeds
Posted on August 18, 2008By earlier post, I explained why I would support a proposed boycott of the AALS annual meeting. Many of the most important events were to be held at the Manchester Grand Hyatt, whose owner is one of the principal sponsors of a California initiative to ban gay marriage...
Model of 2009 USN&WR Law School Rankings
Posted on August 16, 2008As I have every year since 2006, I this year again tried to duplicate the law school rankings published by the U.S. News & World Report ("USN&WR"). Although it took me longer than usual to model the most recent rankings?the "2009" rankings, as USN&WR styles them?I ended up getting the best fit, yet...
a post on norms and bullying in the blogosophere
Posted on August 14, 2008A (very long) post concerning a big blawg kerfuffle over at Scatterplot. Please read and comment there.
Freak, minus economics
Posted on August 13, 2008Steven Levitt is freakishly smart. But his reaction to the Coase theorem in action at NYU Law is simply freakish:Class assignments are made by lottery. There are no waiting lists for classes. This gives students an incentive to sign up for the most popular classes, even if they don?t want to take them...
Goodbye to all that
Posted on August 13, 2008The objects of this autobiography . . . are simple enough: an opportunity for a formal good-bye to you and to you and to you and to me and to all that; forgetfulness, because once all this has been settled in my mind and written down and published it need never be thought about again; money...
Henderson on Faculty Free Agency (and Lipshaw's Comments)
Posted on August 13, 2008Bill Henderson (Indiana-Bloomington) has posted his assessment of the problems and solutions to the "faculty free agency" issue provoked by the recent article by Clayton Gillette (NYU). You can find not only Bill's post over at Legal Profession Blog, but my comments on it as well.
Name that Law School
Posted on August 12, 2008Law schools don't seem to care very much about staking out original names. Consider two Orange County law schools: Irvine University College of Law (founded in 1993), and the University of California, Irvine School of Law (which should start accepting student applications this fall)...
OrgTheory.net Book Forum: The Rise of the Conservative Movement by Steven Teles
Posted on August 11, 2008Excellent stuff. Introductory post by Prof. Fabio Rojas (Indiana) here (along with great questions):Over the next week or so, we?ll have a back and forth with Steve Teles, whose 2008 book chronicles the emergence of the conservative legal establishment...
the coase theorem in action is a terrible idea
Posted on August 11, 2008Oh come on now, surely you see the problems with this idea:The Coase Theorem says that ? absent large transaction costs ? resources will end up being efficiently allocated, regardless of who holds the initial property rights. NYU Law School is providing its students valuable real world experience with the Coase Theorem, according to this ABA Journal article...
Why I Will Honor the AALS Boycott
Posted on August 09, 2008The owner of the Manchester Grand Hyatt, at which the AALS Annual Meeting is now scheduled to be held, has funded an initiative to ban gay marriage in California. Four groups ? the Society of American Law Teachers, the Legal Writing Institute, the AALS Section on Legal Writing Research and Reasoning, and the AALS Section on Teaching Methods ? have called for a boycott of sessions held at his hotels...
Why Bother?
Posted on August 09, 2008A great deal of attention is focused on the USN&WR rankings of JD programs. Whatever errors exist in those ranking pale in comparison to the LLM rankings. The last time I checked, LLM rankings were 100% reputation -- no accounting for LSAT of students, law school GPAs, rank of JD program of applicants, number of applicants, acceptance rate, etc...
Practicing Practicing the Law
Posted on August 05, 2008After teaching Contracts for ten years, I'm giving it up to teach Torts. I recall the best law profs of my 1L year cycling through the "Big Three" common law courses (Contracts, Torts, and Property), and I've long wanted to emulate that example. Unlike those, my academic heros, however, I plan to put my students to work practicing practicing the law...
The "Future" of Legal Scholarship
Posted on August 04, 2008By the type of fluke that characterizes too much of what I read and even my scholarship at times, I ended up reading a 1981 article by Bruce Ackerman, "The Market Place of Ideas," 90 Yale L. J. 1131 (1981). I recall reading it years ago but just barely...
Hockey goons and law school Arschlöcher: A multimedia hat trick for MoneyLaw
Posted on July 23, 2008In blogging, if not in legal scholarship, one sometimes gets the feeling that one has scored a hat trick. So it is with Plus/minus and the problem of measuring Arschlochkeit. To celebrate the success of my post suggesting the use of hockey's plus/minus statistic as a basis for measuring goon-like behavior in law teaching, and to thank my readers for some very useful comments, I'm posting the following hat trick of YouTube videos:1...
Wood
Posted on July 23, 2008Ever since Jim Chen started on the dead wood idea I cannot get it out of my mind. (You may interpret that sentence however you like.) As I understood the term when I started teaching it referred to people who did not write whether or not they had ever written...
What Concurring Opinions gets wrong about MoneyLaw
Posted on July 22, 2008Deadwood: It isn't so much about the place as it is about the cast of characters.Dave Hoffman of Concurring Opinions asserts: "The Moneylaw movement is decidedly anti-tenure." Jeff Harrison has his own view, of course, but I come neither to praise nor to bury tenure...
LSA: Job Market Risk Index
Posted on July 22, 2008(Cross-posted to Law School Almanac)It's not news that the job market is tough for new lawyers right now. But how bad is it? And how bad will it get? Lets look at some recent figures. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 761,000 lawyers working in America in 2006...
Plus/minus and the problem of measuring Arschlochkeit
Posted on July 22, 2008I misspoke when I asserted recently that MoneyLaw strongly prefers baseball and football to hockey. It turns out that hockey maintains a statistic that may hold the key to an ongoing exchange between this forum and Concurring Opinions over the impact of tenure on the intellectual and social behavior of professors...
Lawyers versus Clients and Lawyers versus Professors
Posted on July 21, 2008Jeff Harrison's post just below on how lawyers versus economists frame the same problem provides a nice segue to a thought piece I just posted on SSRN - but this is about how normal people versus lawyers versus law professors go about making judgments...
Auction Approach v. No good Deed Approach
Posted on July 21, 2008There is a story I tell to law and economics students to illustrate a difference between the economist's perspective and the law professor's perspective. It is about an experience I had at my first law teaching job. I visited the economics department and learned that the economists had decided who got which office in a new building by using an auction...
LSA: Law School Clusters
Posted on July 19, 2008(Cross-posted to Law School Almanac)After pointing out the more severe flaws in the Legal Education Value Added Rankings, I spent some time reading Linda Wightman's LSAC National Longitudinal Bar Passage Study (based on a cohort of students who started law school in 1991)...
LSA: Legal Education Value Added
Posted on July 18, 2008I mentioned in writing about my work on alumni networks that we would look at some problems with the Legal Education Value Added Rankings in a future post. So, this is that post -- and in the context of Jason Solomon's recent series on this topic, this seems a perfect time for it...
The blog post of the year
Posted on July 18, 2008It's only July, and MoneyLaw strongly prefers football and baseball to hockey, but the triumphant lifting of the Stanley Cup sets the right tone. Bill Henderson has written what I consider to be the most important blog post of the year: How the "Cravath system" created the bi-modal distribution...
Bright Knight
Posted on July 18, 2008From the National Law Journal and the ABA Journal comes news that legal academia should take to heart in its own domain.Holland & Knight is a big firm. It operates 22 offices throughout the United States and in China and Mexico. Its 1100 lawyers make Holland & Knight the 18th largest law firm in the country...
Did Tenure Fail?
Posted on July 17, 2008I have tenure and am happy about it. But when you think about it, isn't tenure pretty crazy? It may not be as crazy as voting yes, as many Venezuelans did, on the issue of whether to have a permanent president but it is similar. In both cases, people (in the public law school case, taxpayers with faculties acting as their agents) give up options about the future and get precious little in return...
Value-Added Law Schools
Posted on July 16, 2008Jason Solomon (Georgia) has an interesting series of posts on PrawsBlawg on taking back the U.S. News law school rankings and producing a "Voters' Guide" to assess the "value added" for students at different law schools:Preparing to Vote...for U.S. News (7/7/08)What Are We Voting About in US News? (7/8/08)What Would Leiter Do? (7/9/08)Do We Need to Further Incentivize Scholarship, Not Education? (7/10/08)The Legacies of U...
Demystifying the SSRN process
Posted on July 14, 2008I'm pleased to promote a blog post and a PowerPoint presentation by my colleague, Susan Hanley Duncan:SSRN is one of the key places scholars post academic papers. My presentation will introduce participants to SSRN, explain the benefits of SSRN, and provide step-by-step instructions for using SSRN...
Leadership from the top down
Posted on July 13, 2008I've been proud to work for the University of Louisville and its law school. Never more than now. The following news item will explain why.From the Lexington Herald-Leader, by way of University Diaries and The Periodic Table, Too:The University of Louisville board of trustees Thursday approved the school president?s request to forgo the triple-digit pay raise or bonus he could have received...
LSA: Alumni Network National Reach
Posted on July 13, 2008I'll begin here by talking about my work on alumni networks, for several reasons: 1) The data that I assembled for the Alumni Network National Reach (ANNR) study is not, as far as I know, available elsewhere; 2) This topic seems generally overlooked by most rankings and by many prospective law school students; and 3) A deep and broad alumni network seems to me one of the most important assets of a law school for those who will one day be its graduates...
Painless Budget Cuts
Posted on July 13, 2008Jim's post immediate beneath this one (in position only) made me realize that many people may equate budget cuts with belt tightening. This is not the case in higher education or in the context of public utilities generally. All it means is that the state itself (or ratepayers) are not forking over the money...
Leaving on a Jet Plane
Posted on July 12, 2008When I opened my email this morning there was, as there usually is, an email from Jim and the Jurisdynamics network. The email included an interesting post by Josh Fershee over on the Ag Law blog. I have a hunch we think alike about airlines. The post made me recall a story I saw while trapped on the treadmill at my local gym...
Picking the Moneylaw Professor
Posted on July 09, 2008I wonder how many law schools have huge differences in teaching responsibilities from professor to professor that are unrelated to scholarly productivity (not that I think there should be a relationship, but I added this to recognize that some readers will think it is and it is a matter for reasonable disagreement...
Classroom 2.0
Posted on July 09, 2008By way of Red Lion Reports and TaxProf, I've learned about, and am now pleased to rebroadcast, the following lecture:Professor Michael WeschA Portal to Media LiteracyUniversity of Manitoba, June 17, 2008Dubbed ?the explainer? by popular geek publication Wired because of his viral YouTube video that summarizes Web 2...
Truth and beauty: A legal translation
Posted on July 09, 2008Awake! for Morning in the Bowl of NightHas flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight:And Lo! the Hunter of the East has caughtThe Sultán?s Turret in a Noose of Light.— Edward FitzGerald, The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (1859)Truth and Beauty: A Legal Translationhttp://ssrn...
What Do Law Firms Want?
Posted on July 09, 2008One of the things you have to admire about Brian Leiter is his willingness to put a position out there (usually with more than a bit of rhetoric aplomb) and let it be fired upon from all angles. If you haven't caught it yet, the current discussion revolves around whether Northwestern's new two-year program will succeed in making it a, if not the, school of choice for employers...
A dean for all seasons
Posted on July 08, 2008A Man for All Seasons (1966)More. I have one question to ask the witness. (Rich stops.) That's a chain of office you are wearing. (Rich reluctantly faces More.) May I see it? (Norfolk motions Rich to approach and he moves to More. He examines the medallion...
Who's your doggie? In praise of the shaggy J.D.
Posted on July 08, 2008Now that Nancy Rapoport and Jeff Harrison have used the inverted canine metaphor (tail wagging the dog) to describe craven educators who make academic decisions on the basis of U.S. News rankings, I think we should remind ourselves: "Who's your doggie?" This image, from Wikipedia's pack of border collies, provides a good role model...
More on Night School
Posted on July 08, 2008Kudos to Nancy and more on the possible reaction of Law Schools to including part timers in the rankings over on Classbias. All of this makes me think that we should begin to praise USN&WR. Without intending to do so they have exposed the cravenness of many law school deans, faculties and alums who are the dogs to the USN&WR tail...
Guest Blogger: Law School Almanac
Posted on July 08, 2008I'm Michael Shaffer, the author of Law School Almanac. Jim Chen seems to think that my fetish for strange new law school rankings will make fun reading for the regulars at MoneyLaw, so I'll be posting a few things and taking questions here for the next couple of weeks...
Some ranting about the proposed changes to the USNWR rankings
Posted on July 07, 2008Just couldn't help myself--over at my own blog (here), I react to some of the pushback about the proposed inclusion of part-time students' median LSAT and UGPA scores in the USNWR rankings. It's not that I think that including the scores will make that big a difference (although I think that any way to reduce the gaming of the rankings is good)...
Memo to Will Shortz
Posted on July 06, 2008The answer to 66-Across in the July 6, 2008 Sunday New York Times Crossword Puzzle ("What the H?") is wrong. You are excused, however, because this is a common misconception.
Crossing the bar
Posted on July 06, 2008William McTaggart, Crossing the Bar (ca. 1883-86)Whew. My recent post regarding bar exam preparation now represents merely one link in a very long string of blog posts. Nancy Rapoport has responded to Ilya Somin's latest thoughts on the bar exam. With approval (more or less) Nancy summarizes Ilya's main points:(1) figure out your own, best way of studying and key your bar prep to that, (2) try not to overstress, (3) be disciplined in your studying, and (4) remember that failing the bar exam is not the end of the world...
It?s (Some) Man?s World
Posted on July 05, 2008In the last few months both Marie and Belle have written feminist oriented posts. I agree completely with Marie about sexism and the Clinton campaign. I am somewhat less sympathetic to Belle?s for the reasons stated in a comment. Since reading those, two related ideas have come to mind...
Jesse Helms, Racism, Manners, Law, and Cognitive Dissonance
Posted on July 05, 2008(Cross-posted at Legal Profession Blog)Jesse Helms, the former North Carolina senator, described by the New York Times as having a "courtly manner and mossy drawl," died. He was also an unrepentant and nasty racist and segregationist with a courtly manner...
Is Law School Graduate School?
Posted on July 04, 2008My sense is that on most campuses, law schools are not regarded a quite up to par as far as other graduate programs. I was discussing this with a close faculty friend (really) who said part of the reason is that legal scholarship only seems to rise to graduate school level when it is combined with another discipline and involves empirical work...
The Fear Factor
Posted on July 04, 2008It would be easy enough to sit back in my virtual Barca-Lounger and chuckle as Ilya Somin dukes it out with Jim Chen and Nancy Rappaport over the best way to win the Bar Exam game. After all, I took the "very difficult New York" bar exam and passed it easily...
Litigation or Transactional Law Career: Some Advice to Law Students
Posted on July 01, 2008An incoming law student sent me an interesting question about choosing between a litigation and a transactional career in law, and I've offered up some thoughts over at Legal Profession Blog.
A lawyer walks into a bar
Posted on June 30, 2008By way of Prettier Than Napoleon and The Volokh Conspiracy comes this news flash: There is a documentary about the bar exam. The moviemakers' MySpace page contains this preview of A Lawyer Walks into a Bar:The MoneyLaw point, however, doesn't lie so much in the movie as it does in Ilya Somin's commentary on The Volokh Conspiracy:I think many law school graduates get overly stressed out and obsessed about taking the bar, and spend too much time studying...
Summer wages
Posted on June 26, 2008In honor of Deven Desai's post, Summer reading, which in turn lauds Patrick O'Donnell's fantastic bibliographies, which we may and should contemplate even as "the years are gambled and lost / like summer wages," I offer this rendition of Ian Tyson's classic cowboy tune:Never hit seventeenWhen you play against the dealerYou know that the oddsWon't ride with youAnd never leave your woman aloneWith your friends around to steal herShe'll he gambled and goneLike summer wagesOther versions:Emmylou Harris joins Ian and Sylvia Tyson in a 1986 performance of Summer Wages (1986) (YouTube video — embedding disabled by request)Nanci Griffith, 1998 cover, on Other Voices, Too (A Trip Back to Bountiful)And we'll keep rolling onTill we get to VancouverAnd the woman that I loveShe's living thereIt's been six long monthsAnd more since I've seen herYears have gambled and goneLike summer wagesChorus:In all the beer parlorsAll down along Main StreetThe dreams of the seasonsGet all spilled down on the floorAll the big stands of timberJust waiting for the fallingAnd the hookers standing watchfullyWaiting by the doorSo I'll work on the towboatsWith my slippery city shoesWhich Lord I swore I would never do againThrough the gray fog-bound straitsWhere the cedars stand watchingI'll be far off and goneLike summer wages[Repeat chorus]Never hit seventeenWhen you play against the dealerYou know that the oddsWon't ride with youAnd never leave your woman aloneWith your friends around to steal herShe'll be gambled and goneLike summer wagesAnd the years are gambled and lostLike summer wages
Rating Law Schools
Posted on June 25, 2008As some of you know from reading classbias, I have had a wonderful experience teaching in Rio for the past month. Today I was chatting with some Brazilian law professors who know about the ratings madness in the U.S. What one told me was particularly interesting since I have always felt that the best law school is the one that takes a group of students and moves them along in terms of knowledge, skill and analytical ability more than other schools...
Mentally gifted, emotionally stunted
Posted on June 24, 2008Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Narciso (ca. 1598)Two tales of the mentally gifted but emotionally stunted, from different corners of a law school:From the admissions office:Our heavily recruited 1L is exceptionally gifted, scored 178 on the LSAT, and sports a 4...
So you want to be a law clerk?
Posted on June 23, 2008Behold So You Want to Be a Law Clerk?, which touts itself as "[a] place to find the latest federal law clerk openings, advice about the application and interview process, and, in general, how to land that coveted offer."As an example of this site's content, consider this poll currently on its front page:If presented with two offers, which would you accept, a clerkship with a federal district judge in the S...
Some recent developments in legal education
Posted on June 23, 2008For Northwestern Law's new two-year JD curriculum, see here, here, here, here, and here (among others).For Thomas Sowell's take on the rankings, see my post here.
At the pit of hell lives a Blue Devil
Posted on June 22, 2008In addition to its immense wealth, Duke University enjoys a rich sports tradition. There's the basketball program, to be sure, but don't forget Bull Durham and the 1942 Rose Bowl. Despite all that, Duke has the gall to argue — with factual but not legal accuracy — that its football team is so bad that Duke University owes the University of Louisville no damages for breaching a contract to pit the Blue Devils against the Cardinals...
You're no good: An ongoing MoneyLaw series
Posted on June 21, 2008You're no goodLinda Ronstadt, You're No Good, Heart Like a Wheel (1974):Feeling better now that we're throughFeeling better 'cause I'm over youI learned my lesson, it left a scarNow I see how you really areMany things in academic life are simply no good...
Silver threads, golden needles, and ClassBias
Posted on June 20, 2008As homage to Class Bias in Higher Education and the proletarian rage that Jeff Harrison so eloquently expresses, I offer one of the many versions of Silver Threads and Golden Needles now playing at Danzig U.S.A.:I grew up in faded gingham where love is a sacred thingYou grew up in silk and satin where love's the passing gameI know now you never loved me, and I know I was a foolTo think your pride would let you live by the golden rule
How The University Works
Posted on June 18, 2008All MoneyLaw readers should be reading Prof. Marc Bousquet (media studies, Santa Clara), editor of How The University Works (and currently guesting at The Valve, a literary studies blog).Of particular interest might be his suggested Academic Labor Bookshelf, and the posts Teach the University! and High Noon for Academic Freedom.
The Quiet Desperation of Academic Women
Posted on June 17, 2008That's the title to this article in Inside Higher Ed, on a new study by Kristen Monroe (who happens to be a former professor of mine when I was a political science major at UCI). Here's the abstract of the paper (full article available with academic subscription)...
Almost purgatory
Posted on June 16, 2008Ending a tenure as brief as it was tumultuous, West Virginia University president Michael Garrison will resign, effective September 1. After six weeks of shielding Garrison from outraged faculty, students, and alumni, WVU's Board of Governors swiftly accepted Garrison's resignation on June 6...
MoneyLaw: The art of winning an unfair academic game
Posted on June 16, 2008» Cross-posted from The Cardinal Lawyer «I presented MoneyLaw: The art of winning an unfair academic game on June 14, 2008, at the University of Louisvlle's Weekend College event in Los Angeles. The presentation summarizes many of the things I have articulated in this forum...
What Homo academicus can learn from Pan troglodytes
Posted on June 11, 2008Homo academicusPan troglodytesThe December 2007 issue of Philosophy of Science contains a fascinating article with important implications for complex social organizations, including universities:Game theory has played a critical role in elucidating the evolutionary origins of social behavior...
The rise and fall of the American Jewish Ph.D.
Posted on June 10, 2008Daniel Sokol recommends the following paper:Barry R. Chiswick, The Rise and Fall of the American Jewish Ph.D..Daniel Libeskind's Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco.This paper is concerned with trends over the post-WWII period in the employment of American Jews as College and University teachers and in their receipt of the PhD...
Rock, Paper, Scissors, Shoot
Posted on June 10, 2008It's the ultimate alternative dispute resolution technique. Hands down.Penn State Student, Derek Hines, knows it. He's won the right to represent Penn State University in the Rock Paper Scissors National Championship in Las Vegas, June 20-22. The winner will pick up $50,000 and will travel to Bejing for the inaugural International Rock Paper Scissors Federation Championship (IRPSF) to face Rock Paper Scissors champions from Canada, Guam, Hong Kong, Ireland and Malaysia...
Sexism or Something Else?
Posted on June 06, 2008As Hillary Clinton's presidential bid sinks into the horizon, pundits contemplate what went wrong. The Telegraph reported that as Clinton's campaign workers were leaving headquarters Tuesday night, a Japanese television camera crew offered them the chance to express their views as to what went wrong by placing a sticker on a board next to the reason of their choice...
Anna Karenina and the art of academic management
Posted on June 01, 2008Ivan Nikolaevich Kramskoi (???? ?????????? ????????), Portrait of an Unknown Woman (1883)??? ?????????? ????? ?????? ???? ?? ?????, ?????? ???????????? ????? ??????????? ??-??????.— ??? ?????????? ???????, ???? ???????? (1877)Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way...
Another brick in the wall
Posted on May 28, 2008To be watched only on those days regrettably wasted on dark sarcasm in the classroom:Another brick in the wall
Elite trappings
Posted on May 26, 2008?Over the last 20 years, every president has been a graduate of Yale.?— Elizabeth Bumiller, The snare of privilegeThe race for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination has been as bizarre as it has been long. The battle between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, perhaps because it has stressed symbol and style over substance, has shed powerful light on one MoneyLaw point: the political and practical impotence of elite educational credentials...
The instruction of youth and the welfare of the state
Posted on May 22, 2008The University of MinnesotaNorthrop Auditorium, 1929Founded in the Faith that Men are Ennobled by UnderstandingDedicated to the Advancement of Learning and the Search for TruthDevoted to the Instruction of Youth and the Welfare of the StateLet's read that again: Devoted to the Instruction of Youth and the Welfare of the State...
Law's double helix
Posted on May 19, 2008?Beauty is truth, truth beauty,? ? that is allYe know on earth, and all ye need to know.John KeatsOde on a Grecian Urn (1819)The concluding couplet in John Keats's Ode on a Grecian Urn (1819) — ?Beauty is truth, truth beauty,? — that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know...
Innovative Thinking: From the ABA to the "G-Man"
Posted on May 19, 2008[My apologies for the delay in posts, but I have a good excuse. We added a new baby to the family, which required some time off.]Innovative thinking often comes from unlikely sources. With March Madness behind us and the excitement of the NBA playoffs hitting its peak, it is time to pay tribute to the ABA...
Classroom Access and the "5 Whys"
Posted on May 17, 2008(Cross-posted at Legal Profession Blog)I considered giving this post an Onion-like title, something to the effect of "UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO LAW SCHOOL PROPOSES LEAD DOME OVER HYDE PARK; DEAN LEVMORE DERIDES CITY-WIDE WIRELESS HOT SPOT AS 'ANTI-INTELLECTUAL...
Legal Education from the Demand Side
Posted on May 15, 2008We law professors spend a great deal of time thinking about how to help our students graduate and pass the Bar?how to supply the market with lawyers, in other words. We spend far less time thinking about the demand side of the equation?whether our students will find jobs...
Se7enth heaven
Posted on May 13, 2008"GrumpyLaw"? Hardly. Unwarranted name-calling aside ? ? ? , Geoffrey Rapp deserves the highest praise for his Prawfsblawg post on the reasons that some tenured law professors give for not writing. As Lynn Baker once told me, joining issue is the highest form of intellectual flattery...
Teaching Evaluations Again
Posted on May 08, 2008I have written before about teaching evaluations but have not done an in depth study of what they tell us. As a economist many years ago all of us teaching the basic course did use a common exam and compared student evaluations with how the students did and found no correlation...
Forget about Memorization
Posted on May 07, 2008A recent article in Wired, Want to Remember Everything You'll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm, offers both a fascinating sketch of Piotr Wozniak's single-minded pursuit of memorization and all that you need to know if you want to match his incredible achievements...
Writing, Talking, and Anonymity
Posted on May 06, 2008The exchange on anonymous posts made me think of another small discussion on this blog about written and spoken messages. (I am not talking about the series on the (not) New York Times rule.) I took the position that a written message ? even an argument ? is sometimes preferable because it forces the other person to ?listen? before responding...
MoneyBall 101 for managers
Posted on May 05, 2008During the InterACT San Francisco conference in May 2007, managerial consultant James Taylor nicely summarized the tenets of MoneyBall, as presented by Michael Lewis himself:Michael [Lewis] said that writing about sports is a way to tackle broader issues...
The Law of Rock
Posted on May 04, 2008By way of the Daily Californian, Jurisdynamics and MoneyLaw have learned a matter of earthshaking importance in legal education:Josh Keesan, a law student at the University of California-Berkeley, has recorded The Law of Rock, Volume 1. To the best of my knowledge, this album represents the first, full-length, studio-recorded effort to express legal doctrines as works of rock 'n' roll...
Law, Finance, Accounting, and the J.D.-M.B.A.
Posted on May 04, 2008(Cross Posted at Legal Profession Blog)Over at PrawfsBlawg, Adam Levitin (Georgetown, left) provoked a discussion on the value of the JD-MBA degree, as well as the general shortcomings of business law education. Let me throw in my two cents' worth.We need to distinguish between the value of the skills and the value of the degrees...
My Best Teacher
Posted on May 04, 2008Professors hear a great deal about good and bad teaching. Virtually every teacher I know has a group of students who think he or she is the greatest and virtually all of them have some students who feel just the opposite. In reality most of us know practically nothing about what goes on in the classrooms of colleagues...
The Student Loan Bubble
Posted on May 02, 2008Andrew Gillen of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity thinks the next US financial crisis will be the popping of the student loan bubble. In a recent report, Gillen draws parallels between the conditions leading up to the current housing crisis and those in the market for higher ed...
The Future of the Legal Academy - Some Thoughts
Posted on May 01, 2008(Cross-posted at Legal Profession Blog)A recent blog post by Josh Wright on the future of law and economics has prompted responses from Larry Ribstein and Larry Solum. In a nutshell, Wright discusses the relationship between the basic skills underlying expertise in law versus expertise in economics, and, in particular, the increasing sophistication and inaccessibility of the the economic modeling and econometric work as L&E comes to be dominated by economists rather than lawyers...
Majoring in Not Teaching
Posted on April 29, 2008Commenting on Jeff Harrison's April 27 MoneyLaw post,"Majoring in Not Law," Anonymous Yale Grad Turned Law Professor writes:You assume that law professors should teach the law -- as declared by the courts. But as every Yalie knows, what courts do is often wrong; judges' words are not "the law...
Graduation Day
Posted on April 29, 2008All good things must come to an end, and so it goes for law school. The big day is almost upon us for the Class of 2008. Mom and Dad are beaming, particularly at the thought of not having to pay any more tuition bills. Law students are exercising their right arm, ready to flip that tassel to the side of worldliness...
More Thoughts on Art
Posted on April 29, 2008In Thoughts on Art, on Red Lion Reports Kelly Bozanic asked: What is art? Kelly offered an answer to her own question partly in response to a story in the Yale Daily News. The story reported that a Yale art student inseminated herself "as often as possible" and used an abortifacient drug to abort multiple pregancies...
Der amerikanischen Bevölkerung
Posted on April 29, 2008Hans Haacke, Der Bevölkerung (1999/2000)Hans Haacke's bold transformation of an interior courtyard dedicates the German Reichstag to Der Bevölkerung. A play on the Reichstag's original dedication, Dem Deutschen Völke (To the German People), Der Bevölkerung pledges the symbol of new German democracy "To the Population...
Majoring in Not Law
Posted on April 27, 2008I guess by now most have seen or read the empirical study byRoyce de Rohan Barondes showing that the higher the percentage of Yale grad clerks a judge has the higher the likelihood that a decision by the judge will run into trouble on appeal. The correlation between other elite clerks and appellate problems is equivocal...
The Foolish Decision Safety Commission
Posted on April 26, 2008(Cross-posted at Legal Profession Blog)Just to prove, I guess, that even Harvard law professors, and distinguished ones at that, can get carried away with analogical reasoning, Elizabeth Warren has proposed a Financial Product Safety Commission, on the theory that, if government regulation can protect you from an unsafe toaster, it ought to be able to protect you from an unsafe mortgage...
Let Me Count the Ways
Posted on April 26, 2008As I have noted before sometime in the mid to late eighties or early 90s legal scholarship took a shift to a race for lines on resumes. In think it roughly coincides with the ratings chase and the full development of symposia issues. I think it was June 17, 1991 but that could be off a day or two...
Beware the dreaded Gopher Jacket!
Posted on April 23, 2008François Sainfort is the head of the University of Minnesota's Division of Health Policy and Management. Julie Jacko, his wife, serves as director of Minnesota's Institute for Health Informatics and holds double appointments in that university's schools of nursing and public health...
A Hard Day's Night
Posted on April 22, 2008The Beatles, A Hard Day's NightDigging into the MoneyLaw mailbag, I'm pleased to share this note from Jessica Silbey:I am writing to recommend a new article by my colleage Michael Rustad and his co-author Thomas Koenig. It?s in a Syracuse Law Review symposium devoted to lawyering in the 21st century (volume 58, number 2, 2008)...
Evaluations
Posted on April 22, 2008A recent experience and thoughts of a departed colleague led me down the path of thinking about how to evaluate teaching. The event was a conversation with a student who noted that a certain teacher left him in stitches everyday as though this meant it was good teaching...
Is Moneyball Passé?
Posted on April 22, 2008Dan Drezner suggests that the Moneyball phenomenon may be a victim of its own success -- Winning Strategy Loses Its Edge (Marketplace):Dan Drezner, Team's winning strategy loses its edge (April 18, 2008)Some baseball traditionalists are delighted by the A's woes...
a seat at the (conference) table
Posted on April 22, 2008Part of being a good institutional citizen of your school/university is attending paper talks. No, not just those free food ones sponsored by this and that student org or law firm. Go to those too, although you will get sick of pizza. If you are the type that goes just to get food but not from interest, well, that's a little mercenary of you, but who am I to parse and judge motives?No, I am talking about the true test of intellectual interest and commitment: the brown bag paper talk...
Satisfied by simple things, like breathing in and breathing out
Posted on April 21, 2008As the academic year comes to a close, it is time to take stock and look forward. If, like me, you often walk between the twin shadows of despair and defiance, perhaps a little musical validation is in order. Herewith Natalie Merchant, Not in This Life, on Motherland (2001):Not in This LifeLately I've been walking all aloneThrough the wind and through the rainBeen walking through the streetsFinding sweet relief in knowing that it won't be longLately it's occurred to meThat I've had enough of thatAnd lately I've been satisfied by simple thingsLike breathing in and breathing outNever again, not in this lifeWill I be taken twiceNever again, not on your lifeWill I make that same mistakeI can't make it twiceLately it's occurred to meExactly what went wrongI realized I compromised, I sacrificedFar too much for far too longNever again, not in this lifeWill I be taken twiceNever again, not on your lifeWill I make that same mistakeI can't make it twiceStarting out from here todaySwear I'm gonna change my waysOnce mistaken in this lifeBut never twiceNever again, not in this lifeWill I be taken twiceNever again, not on your lifeWill I make that same mistakeNever again, not on your lifeWill I make that same mistakeCan't make it twiceStarting out from here today ...
Birthday as (Athletic) Destiny
Posted on April 21, 2008Growing up in Boston, my goal was to play first base for the Red Sox. After a mediocre high school and college career, I hung up the spikes for good. It turns out the my failing owed more to my July 27 birthday than to my inability to hit a curveball: The Boys of Late Summer: Why Do So Many Pro Baseball Players have August birthdays? (Slate), by Greg Spira:Since 1950, a baby born in the United States in August has had a 50% to 60% better chance of making the big leagues than a baby born in July...
Law School Rankings by 1L Attrition Rates
Posted on April 18, 2008LawSchoolNumbers.com ranks the 195 law schools by 1L attrition rates. (The ABA Section on Legal Education publishes aggregate attrition rates, and each school's attrition rate is available on its official ABA data sheet.) TaxProf Blog lists the 25 law schools with the highest and lowest attrition rates, along with the school's 2009 U...
Vega: Star power and earthly reality
Posted on April 16, 2008Vega, also known as ? Lyrae, is a zero-magnitude star in the constellation Lyra. The fifth brightest star in the night sky and the second brightest in the northern celestial hemisphere, Vega forms, with Deneb and Altair, the Summer Triangle. Suzanne Vega — well, she's just a star, plain and simple...
John Yoo and Tenure
Posted on April 13, 2008I am not a first amendment lawyer nor am I well-qualified to write about academic freedom, but I have been intrigued by the discussion of whether John Yoo can or should be fired in connection with his authorship of the infamous torture memo.The National Lawyer's Guild, which opposed efforts to fire Ward Churchill at the University of Colorado, has called for Yoo to be fired...
Fidelity in translation
Posted on April 11, 2008Cross-posted at Madisonian.netWith apologies to Larry Lessig, whose classic law review article title I am snagging and translating quite faithlessly, and with kudos to Al Brophy, who has stated the financial realities as bluntly as anyone in this mobblog has...
Class is in
Posted on April 10, 2008At law schools there tend to be three divisions. One is between faculty and staff. And then there is the tenure track/non tenure track faculty division. Finally the high paid and low paid tenure track people. This last division is not necessarily between tenured and untenured people...
And then there are those who prefer Pottersville
Posted on April 09, 2008The classic movie, It's a Wonderful Life, has its fans on MoneyLaw, most vocally Marie Reilly and me. Stumbling across an old Salon article reminds me that there are those who prefer Pottersville to Bedford Falls.Why does this matter? Because the market for academic labor is fickle and heavily populated with players who tend to prefer big-city entertainment over quieter settings with greater intensity than the broader pool of educated professionals, let alone the American population as a whole...
Legal Education Overvalued?
Posted on April 09, 2008You can become a Supreme Court Justice without having taken Bankruptcy in law school. But it helps to have gone to Yale. Justice Samuel A. Alito gave the keynote address to at the American Bankruptcy Institute's Spring Meeting in D.C. last Monday. He conceded that he never took a course in bankruptcy as a law student but explained that bankruptcy courses were not offered at Yale...
Madame X et des succès de scandale
Posted on April 09, 2008I wish to revive a theme I raised eighteen months ago in Puny Anonymities: Why are academics, generally speaking, such cowards? Aside from a commission as a federal judge, an academic appointment (at least in theory) may be the only way you can make a bourgeois living without fear of ideologically driven retribution...
MobBlog at Madisonian.net: What Kind of Institution Do We Want a Law School To Be?
Posted on April 08, 2008Deven Desai kindly emailed me the following (as if I wasn't reading Madisonian.net religiously, but I appreciate each and every personal email and link tip):As you have followed and pondered the way in which legal education works, I wanted to let you know that Madisonian...
A mobblog on legal education
Posted on April 08, 2008You might want to check out the mobblog on legal education, over at Madisonian.net (here). There are a lot of intriguing posts there. Enjoy!
MoneyLaw in an altogether different sense
Posted on April 07, 2008GREED I$ GOODThis news item went almost entirely unnoticed, but three Big Ten universities' student newspapers were on the story and took proper notice. (Going east to west: Penn State, Illinois, and Minnesota.) According to a survey of recent MCAT and LSAT takers by Kaplan Test Prep and Admissions, premedical and prelaw students differ noticeably in their motivations...
How To Announce Your (Positive) Tenure Decision
Posted on April 07, 2008Brian Donovan is so awesome. His book looks very interesting, too.Heck, I'd do this just for landing a tenure-track job! Maybe with slightly less fanfare. Maybe with only one squad of cheerleaders. I have to learn some cool moves though, like Brian's...
I can has tenure now?
Posted on April 04, 2008With thanks to the LOLCats of I Can Has Cheezburger? , by way of Historiann
Nancy Rapoport and the ABA Journal
Posted on April 04, 2008MoneyLaw's Nancy Rapoport appears in the cover story of this month's ABA Journal. True to her talents as a scholar, a dancer, and a movie star, Nancy performed brilliantly. Congratulations, Nancy!
USN&WR Un-Ranks Tiers 3 & 4
Posted on April 02, 2008Prof. Geoffrey Rapp recently noted that this year, for the first time, U.S. News & World Report's website revealed the rankings of law schools in the 3rd and 4th tiers. He and his commentators wondered whether that was deliberate or a fluke. When I discovered today that the website no longer offered that feature, I wrote to Bob Morse for an explanation...
Slamming the door, part II: Who needs the Ivy League?
Posted on April 02, 2008Slamming the door:Restricting access to elite education and why it might not matterA two-part MoneyLaw seriesPart II: Who needs the Ivy League?Slamming the door: Restricting access to elite education and why it might not matter, a two-part MoneyLaw series, examines College Admissions: A Game of Privilege?, a Justice Talking program that "takes a look at the ugly side of the economics of higher education...
Slamming the door: Restricting access to elite education and why it might not matter
Posted on April 01, 2008Slamming the door:Restricting access to elite education and why it might not matterA two-part MoneyLaw seriesBy way of Luke Gilman, one of my blogging affiliates at First Movers, I've learned about College Admissions: A Game of Privilege?. In this production by the National Public Radio program, Justice Talking, host Margot Adler "takes a look at the ugly side of the economics of higher education...
Relative Wages and How to Get There
Posted on March 29, 2008If anyone has any doubt that, above a certain level, it is all about relative wages as opposed to absolute wages, visit a law faculty in the days after someone has acquired the salary list and distributed it. I have been around law faculties on 4 occasions when this has happened and it can get emotional and often for good reason...
Buffalo, Iowa, Minnesota & UNC Deans React to Decline in U.S. News Rankings
Posted on March 28, 2008David Lat collects school-wide emails sent by these deans in response to their school's decline in the just-released U.S. News rankings: Buffalo (#100, down from #77), Iowa (#27, down from #24), Minnesota (#22, down from #20), and North Carolina (#38, down from #36)...
Putting my money where my mouth is....
Posted on March 27, 2008Over at my own blog, I muse a bit about possible improvements to the USNWR rankings (here).
Maximizing the audience / Motives for writing
Posted on March 27, 2008Wim Mertens, Maximizing the AudienceWith apologies to Tom Petty, any serious scholar knows that the writing is the hardest part. As spring deadlines mount, I offer a little musical distraction. A nine-minute video of Maximizing the Audience appears above; samples from Motives for Writing appear below...
Cool for cats
Posted on March 26, 2008MoneyLaw's feline theme continues . . . .Freedom to say whatever you want! Bourgeois salaries! Lifetime tenure! Accountability to no one!What sort of business gives all this to its employees, plus the opportunity to conduct "self-governance" without regard to the company's real stakeholders? This is why many people call law teaching "the best job in the world...
Can a Dean Make You Do It?
Posted on March 25, 2008So here is the problem. The Dean or Associate Dean at your School is making up the schedule for the fall. Nearly everyone wants to teach in the time period from 10-2 on Tuesday - Thursday and so indicate on a form that asks for their preferences. There are not enough rooms and, even if there were, there would be conflicts that mean students would have to make choices...
Cat Hatter II
Posted on March 24, 2008Meow! Roar!Ever fond of cats, Jeff Harrison asks, "What's a dean to do?" Jurisdynamics answers: And a jaguar shall lead you.[T]hink deeply about what is right and then put all [your] energy into doing it.— Murray Gell-Mann, The Quark and the Jaguar (1994)
A MoneyLaw move by Murray Gell-Mann
Posted on March 23, 2008Physicist Murray Gell-Mann, along with George Zweig, predicted the existence of quarks. For this feat Gell-Mann won the Nobel Prize in Physics. He also demonstrated his affinity for literature by drawing the name quarks from a passage in Finnegans Wake: "Three quarks for Muster Mark!"A Jurisdynamics post describes how Gell-Mann's autobiographical and lyrical book, The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in the Simple and the Complex, spans this broader weblog network's subjects of interest...
Nike: Goddess of victory, marketing, and academic management
Posted on March 22, 2008???? was the Greek goddess of victory, a connection made more obvious by the name of her Roman counterpart (Victoria) and her contemporary corporate namesake. These days she serves primarily as the goddess of marketing, whose feast day is Super Bowl Sunday...
Being Who You Are
Posted on March 19, 2008I am in Vienna right participating in one of the best things my Law School or any law school can do for its students. The event is the annual Willem C. Vis International Commercial Arbitration Moot. Over 200 teams are here from over 50 countries. For many students it is life changing, magical if there is such a thing...
It's tournament time
Posted on March 19, 2008March madness! It's time for the NCAA men's basketball tournament, and I'll be pulling for three teams: the Louisville Cardinals, the Georgia Bulldogs, and the Belmont Bruins.Louisville is my present; Georgia represents my past...
With pug all things are possible
Posted on March 18, 2008Any dog owner knows that this is a very serious disturbance in the canine Force:Here in the world of MoneyLaw, what might be as implausible as a dog volunteering to be vacuumed? Here's a suggestion from my Saint Patrick's Day correspondence: The idea that law schools might actually fulfill their "fiduciary duty to their constituents (students and alums and the public)," as opposed to exploiting the legal academy's "monopoly position as an entry-point to the profession to preserve high [faculty] salaries...
Lay Down, Sally
Posted on March 17, 2008Okay, so Eric Clapton can't conjugate. But Lay Down, Sally is still one of the coolest songs ever, and shockingly simple in its underlying musical structure. Enjoy!Lay Down, SallyThere is nothing that is wrongIn wanting you to stay here with me.I know you've got somewhere to go,But won't you make yourself at home and stay with me?And don't you ever leave...
Industry 1, intelligence 0
Posted on March 15, 2008How often do you see something like this? The 1L from a compass-point state college beats the Ivy League alumna. The C-average graduate, not the law review's editor in chief, eventually donates $1 million. The tier-four law school graduate becomes the faculty star, while the Supreme Court clerk hired the same year is grudgingly voted tenure and becomes an unproductive curmudgeon dedicated to guarding his sinecure...
Reverse auctions for entry-level law professors
Posted on March 14, 2008At the end of a spring break that I spent, in significant part, staring at budget numbers and thinking about law school finances, I've finally come around to responding to a neat post by Rick Bales called Getting what you pay for.Rick made good MoneyLaw use of Michael Dorff's newly posted article, The Rational Choice Myth: The Selection and Compensation of Critical Performers:Some positions within an organization wield unusual impact over the entity's success...
Everyday I write the book
Posted on March 12, 2008If Every Day Is a Winding Road is academic administration's theme song, then Everyday I Write the Book should be the research faculty's response:Elvis Costello, Everyday I Write the Book, Punch the Clock (1983):Don't tell me you don't know what love isWhen you're old enough to know betterWhen you find strange hands in your sweaterWhen your dreamboat turns out to be a footnoteI'm a man with a mission in two or three editionsAnd I'm giving you a longing lookEveryday, everyday, everyday I write the bookChapter One we didn't really get alongChapter Two I think I fell in love with youYou said you'd stand by me in the middle of Chapter ThreeBut you were up to your old tricks in Chapters Four, Five and SixThe way you walkThe way you talk, and try to kiss me, and laughIn four or five paragraphsAll your compliments and your cutting remarksAre captured here in my quotation marksDon't tell me you don't know the differenceBetween a lover and a fighterWith my pen and my electric typewriterEven in a perfect world where everyone was equalI'd still own the film rights and be working on the sequel.
I'z the Cat Hatter
Posted on March 10, 2008I'z the Cat Hatter. I wearz 3 hatz!Click here to read about me @ ClassBias!» With apologies to the LOLCats of I Can Has Cheezburger? «
NY Times: Moneyball and Charitable Giving
Posted on March 10, 2008Interesting article in the Sunday New York Times Magazine: What Makes People Give?, by David Leonhardt:What makes people give their money away? [John List and Dean Karlan] considered the usual answers (to make the world a better place, to see your name printed in the back of an annual report and the like) too pat, too simple ? and sometimes just wrong...
Then face to face
Posted on March 08, 2008Top: Edgar Degas (French, 1834?1917), The Dancing Class (ca. 1870). Bottom left: Ernst Ludwig Kirchner(German, 1880-1938), Woman at the Mirror (1912). Bottom right: Pablo Picasso (Spanish, 1882-1973), Girl Before a Mirror (1932).I am fresh off a weekend in Washington and Baltimore, where I took part in University of Louisville alumni events in connection with a shootout for the Big East men's basketball regular season title and in the University of Maryland's Constitutional Law Schmooze...
Padding
Posted on March 07, 2008I am a big sports fan but not that knowledgeable about ways to pad sports statistics. Of course, in basketball, total rebounds is not very useful. Offensive rebounds are critical. Points without much attention to attempts is pretty worthless. In baseball, I am not sure...
Liar's Poker Revisited
Posted on March 06, 2008Lest we forget our literary inspirator's first book, the debacle with Roger Clemens and Brian McNamee illustrates key differences between practicing law and attending law school. As the next wave of law graduates approach entry into the market, this case helps to show why practicing law can sometimes be deflating to graduates after the law school experience...
Law School Advice Wiki
Posted on March 06, 2008I have created a wiki to collect links of advice pro/contra/useful for aspiring law students.The link is here. To remember it, think anti-troll: http://lawschooladvicewiki.wikispaces.com/I have made this public, so that anyone can edit this wiki and do whatever it is that people do on wikis...
Good riddance
Posted on March 03, 2008Herewith an open letter to Michael Stokes Paulsen, Distinguished University Chair and Professor at the University of Saint Thomas School of Law.Dear Mike,I just got around to reading your piece, Good Riddance, Jim Chen, You No-Good Lousy So-and-So, 24 Const...
Is T.O. on Your Team?
Posted on March 03, 2008Two posts below, Jim Chen has noted the importance of playing for the team as opposed to oneself. He is writing about the Louisville basketball team but suggests the question can be applied to other university units. No doubt, he is thinking about law schools...
Teaching (commercial) law
Posted on March 03, 2008Editor's note: Overnight I posted this item on the new Jurisdynamics Network blog, Commercial Law. Given the post's connection to Beyond ratings: Actually doing our jobs, an item published on this forum in August 2006, I thought I'd post it here at MoneyLaw as well...
The name on the jersey
Posted on March 02, 2008University of Louisville Men's BasketballSenior Class, 2008#43 Terrance Farley#4 David Padgett#3 Juan PalaciosSunday, March 2, was the home finale for the University of Louisville's men's basketball team. I was privileged to attend. The pregame ceremony honored three seniors who played their final game at Freedom Hall: Terrance Farley, David Padgett, and Juan Palacios...
Faking it
Posted on March 01, 2008Looking back over the years I've served in some form of educational administration, I must confess that this was the single most effective pep talk I've given:I know you're hurting. For that I'm sorry. But for your sake and the school's as well, you must be cheerful...
A new blog: Commercial Law
Posted on February 28, 2008The Jurisdynamics Network is pleased to announce a new member of its family of weblogs, Commercial Law. The law of sales, leases, payments, finance, and lending has manifested some of the most dramatic responses by the law to social, economic, and technological change...
The Ensemble Factor
Posted on February 27, 2008Apropos of Jim's post on rookie legal academic talent, an underexplored aspect of talent assessment might be called the ensemble factor. A new hire, even a "best athlete," inescapably fits into an existing faculty ensemble. Some candidates present interesting possibilities to change the ensemble for the better...
There's a new sheriff in town--thanks, Green Bag!
Posted on February 27, 2008Thanks to the Green Bag, there's going to be a new rankings system to compete with the USNWR rankings. Various blogs (including mine, here) have mentioned Green Bag's new Deadwood Report: see Inside Higher Education and Brian Leiter, along with the original article in the Green Bag...
Doing what comes naturally: Learning university administration on the job
Posted on February 26, 2008The University of Colorado has named Bruce Benson as its president, and Stanley Fish's observations on this appointment are right on the money. A university "which dismissed controversial professor Ward Churchill because of doubts about his academic qualifications, has appointed a president who doesn?t have any...
Legal academia's rookie combine
Posted on February 26, 2008First the Super Bowl, then the NFL combine. Mike Madison imagines how legal academia might emulate the drills by which National Football League scouts evaluate rookie talent:Passionate followers of professional football know that the National Football League is just now concluding its annual ?combine,? the camp where would-be draftees get timed, tested, and measured by pro scouts in anticipation of draft day...
The equalizer
Posted on February 26, 2008Does the word equalizer (semi)automatically conjure images of the Colt .45? Or does The Equalizer mean Edward Woodward playing Robert McCall, hero of the mean streets? Scott Greenfield makes a strong case that blogging is the real equalizer:They say the Colt ...
Advice for New Assistant Professors
Posted on February 25, 2008This may come from a sociology academic blog (Scatterplot), but I think the tips offered by "Olderwoman" are very instructive for new professors of any discipline. I am excerpting the ledes from the first five tips, but do go to the link above for the entire post--and the very good comments:1) Don?t take anything personally, especially not at first...
Sometimes They Make Your Point For You
Posted on February 24, 2008Previously I posted a MoneyLaw approach to brief writing that my firm uses with success. Scott Greenfield took issue with my position and wrote a Conanesque response. Lacking authority or a Moneylaw thesis, Greenfield went with hyperbole: he claims never to have practiced in a world with smart, unbiased judges, and maintains that the judge will laugh at you if you submit an understated, even-keeled brief...
Faust's midlife crisis
Posted on February 24, 2008Eugène Delacroix, Méphistophélès apparaissant à Faust (1827)Feeling all four or five or six of your decades? Ready to sell your soul, or at least to hear the terms you might be offered? Gut! Die Seelenmarkt ist Tag und Nacht geöffnet und wartet geduldig auf Dich...
Naked I came into the world
Posted on February 21, 2008At the intersection of two posts, Julius Caesar was wrong and The lawful responsibility of time, lies the opening to the fictional journal of Cass Mastern, the spiritual gravity of center in Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men (1946):I was born in a log cabin in north Georgia, in circumstances of poverty, and if in later years I have lain soft and supped from silver, may the Lord not let die in my heart the knowledge of frost and of coarse diet...
Punditry In A Perfect World
Posted on February 20, 2008One of the things that blawgers (myself excepted, of course) like to do is give broad advice to others about how to be the best lawyer you can be. Yes, it can be a bit pedantic, but if you can't be pedantic on a blawg, where can you be?Since I want to be the best lawyer possible too, I paid close attention to the newest addition to the MoneyLaw crew, who likes to call himself "MoneyLawyer...
Work and Identity
Posted on February 20, 2008No one is their job, you say. People are more than the sum of their professions. What a limited view of humanity. Blah blah blah. This is certainly true. But then why do people introduce themselves as their professional roles? "Hi, I'm a doctor." "I'm a lawyer...
Hire no one
Posted on February 19, 2008I am very flattered that Paul Horwitz thinks that I would have written Microcosmographia Academica if only I "traveled back in time and space to England in 1908." Thanks to Paul, the entire legal academy can now read F.M. Cornford's satire, free of charge, at sites in Kent and in Kentucky...
Job opportunities at the University of Louisville
Posted on February 18, 2008The University of Louisville School of Law anticipates hiring visiting professors, both entry-level and experienced, for the 2008-09 academic year. We also anticipate hiring one or more visiting professors of legal writing; again, entry-level and experienced professors are invited to apply...
Word, ugh. What is it good for?
Posted on February 17, 2008Betsy McKenzie has provided the world of legal blogging a fantastic service: she has compiled a definitive list of websites trashing Microsoft Word. Bill Gates's word processor probably delivers more anger in our verbally intense profession than any other computer application...
Is the Socratic Method Hiding in Your Closet?
Posted on February 16, 2008Putting aside the arrogance of a title like ?Best Practices for Legal Education,? this book is no doubt motivated by good intentions and includes many good, albeit often obvious, ideas. I was cruising along reading it and agreeing with most until I hit the chapter on ?delivering instruction...
Julius Caesar was wrong: A two-act post
Posted on February 15, 2008Let me have men about me that are fat;Sleek-headed men and such as sleep o' nights:Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look;He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.— William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, act I, sc. 2Act IThe historic Julius Caesar was star-crossed; he died one week short of the vernal equinox and one civil war short of full-blown, de jure empire...
Too cruel anywhere
Posted on February 15, 2008To the Northern Illinois University community, in sympathy and shared grief.
Soul journey: A trip to an enigma at the heart of legal education
Posted on February 14, 2008This is a very long and ambitious post. Because MoneyLaw enjoys the services of Gil Grantmore, the legal blogosphere's finest disembodied webmaster, it will contain extraordinary amounts of visual and audio information. I will proceed in three steps:An introduction to Gillian Welch, one of my favorite musiciansA psuedo-synesthetic presentation of Wrecking Ball , the final cut on Gillian Welch's 2003 album, Soul JourneyA discussion of an enigma at the heart of contemporary legal educationI hope you enjoy it...
Don't Ask the Judge for an Emotional Investment
Posted on February 13, 2008It may be hard to quantify, but we can easily define a lawyer's job in MoneyLaw terms: make best efforts to bring about a favorable outcome for the client. To accomplish this job, we spend much of our time writing to the judge in the form of pre-trial and post-trial motions...
We Have Met the Enemy . . .
Posted on February 13, 2008I was sitting with a few colleagues recently and the issue of student performance was the topic. One on the people there produced a list of things the students cannot do: 1) read and follow directions, 2) carefully read fact patterns, 3) apply the law to the facts (this is a big one, they seem to not understand what legal analysis is or why the facts are important), 4) spot large issues...
The tyranny of the clock
Posted on February 12, 2008[T]he monosyllable of the clock is Loss, loss, loss, unless you devote your heart to its opposition.— Tennessee Williams, The Catastrophe of SuccessI had occasion of late to send two slim volumes of American literature. I sent a dear friend a set of short stories by Carson McCullers, including The Ballad of the Sad Café...
Do Law Schools Undervalue Their Graduates?
Posted on February 05, 2008Yes, because of their steadfast commitment to the metric "average starting salary" (I will avoid the more fun acronym and go with AS). In theory, AS is an objective metric that counters the most objective metric of obtaining a J.D.--cost. In practice, AS has proven itself an unreliable metric...
No MoneyLaw Here
Posted on February 04, 2008I may work for a living, but I'm no MoneyLawyer. Since Jim Chen told me that he left the key to MoneyLaw under the back door mat, I decided to sneak in and see if I could add my 2 cents to the mix. Two cents may be overstating my worth.As a criminal defense lawyer, foolish enough to blawg under my real name, chances are that there's not much I have to say that will interest a bunch of scholarly folk like lawprofs...
Law Schools in Jeopardy of Failing ABA's New 75% Bar Passage Accreditation Standard
Posted on February 04, 2008On Saturday, I blogged on TaxProf Blog the ABA's expected approval, at its meeting this week in Los Angeles, of a new objective bar passage standard for law school accreditation. Under the proposal, over a five-year period, 75% of a school's graduates must have passed the bar and the school's annual first-time bar passage rate in its home state must not be more than 15 percentage points below the average first-time bar passage rate in that state...
Lagadeild Háskóla Íslands
Posted on February 04, 2008In commentary on Wrath versus envy, an "anonymous bad speller and horrible typist" observed:Law is often a profession for the ambitious but undirected or risk-adverse ("I really want to create my own internet dog grooming business but am scared of failing so I will go to law school instead")...
Wrath versus envy
Posted on January 31, 2008In commentary on Bliss, an anonymous but wise reader observed:I am a recovering lawyer working at the law school where I took my degree (I am staff, not faculty). I couldn't help but think how one makes a law school more like Iceland and less like Moldova...
Both sides now
Posted on January 31, 2008Jesse the Utah Law student tells it both ways:Hat tip: TaxProf Blog.
The cathedral, the bazaar, and the School of Law
Posted on January 30, 2008Editor's note: This column is reprinted from the January 2008 edition of Bench and Bar, the official newsletter of the Louisville Bar Association, and draws heavily from Law 2.0 and The cathedral and the bazaar, posts previously published in The Cardinal Lawyer...
It's happening here
Posted on January 29, 2008It's happening here, courtesy of the University of Louisville's new branding campaign. Come see how a university-wide marketing campaign looks on the official weblog of a law school dean.
Introducing MoneyLawyer
Posted on January 29, 2008And so a practicing lawyer joins the ranks of MoneyLaw. I practice in a litigation boutique where I represent a broad range of clients. Frequently my firm is local counsel for major companies, which gives me the benefit of working against and with law firms of all sizes on a daily basis...
Bliss
Posted on January 28, 2008Bliss, by Eric Weiner, is the title of a book about happiness. It is the pop psychology version of the much more serious work being done by economists, psychologists and neurologists.Reading it reminds me of the recent discussion about unhappy law professors...
Mission: Impossible?
Posted on January 26, 2008Cinematic experience notwithstanding, Bill Henderson is far, far hotter than Tom Cruise. In a thoughtful and persuasive blog post, Benchmarking Law School Performance: Why Law Professors and Deans Should Care, Bill makes a compelling case that law schools should use the Law School Survey of Student Engagement (LSSSE) as a key tool in educational administration...
Senate Asks Why Colleges Earn 17.6% on Endowments But Spend Only 4.6% on Students
Posted on January 25, 2008The Senate Finance Committee yesterday sent a letter to the 136 U.S. colleges and universities with endowments of $500 million or more, requesting the schools to respond within thirty days to more than fifty questions dealing with finances and tuition...
Ranking of Online Colleges
Posted on January 24, 2008Online Education Database has released a ranking of 41 online colleges, which equally weights eight variables: Acceptance Rate, Financial Aid, Graduation Rate, Peer Web Citations, Retention Rate, Scholarly Citations, Student-Faculty Ratio, and Years Accredited...
The market for deans ... and two markets for deans
Posted on January 23, 2008By way of MoneyLaw stalwart Paul Caron's home blog, I had the pleasure of reading Daniel B. Rodriguez, The Market for Deans, 16 J. Contemp. Legal Issues ___ (2007). Using "a loose admixture of anecdote, polemic, and preliminary data," Professor Rodriguez reaches the "especially vexing" conclusion "that the market for deans is — and will likely continue to be — more bear than bull...
Be true to your school
Posted on January 22, 2008After almost exactly 52 weeks in Kentucky, I've learned a few things. To be a "real" Kentuckian, you need a home county. Besides Jefferson. Boone barely counts, but Boyd is bona fide. And to be a Louisvillian, you need the "right" answer to this question: "Where did you go to school?"My answer doesn't appear on my curriculum vitae...
Interdisciplinary Stuff
Posted on January 21, 2008It's been fun reading the various posts on this topic but, for me, some of the analysis is a little fuzzy and some not fuzzy enough. Still, most of what follows may just reflect not being up to speed on what is happening in legal education at non elite schools (other than my own) so I am beginning this post with a preemptory "never mind...
Everything You Ever Wanted to Know/Read on Interdisciplinary Legal Scholarship
Posted on January 21, 2008(Posts in bold are the "must read" posts)1. Original Post by Brian Tamanaha at Balkinization.2. Brian Leiter asks for comments . Read Matt Lister's and John Oberdiek's comments and Tamanaha's response.3. Dan Solove has a thoughtful response at Concurring Opinions about the benefits that do accrue to students from having interdisciplinary teachers...
Interdisciplinary legal education: the overt costs
Posted on January 21, 2008Brian Tamanaha's Balkinization post, Why the Interdisciplinary Movement in Legal Academia Might Be a Bad Idea (For Most Law Schools), is an instant classic. I sincerely wish I had written it. Since I didn't, I'll be content (if only for the moment) to join the chorus of commentators who have chimed in...
Responses to Tamanaha on Interdisciplinary Legal Studies
Posted on January 17, 20081. Original Post by Brian Tamanaha at Balkinization.2. Brian Leiter asks for comments . Read Matt Lister's and John Oberdiek's comments and Tamanaha's response.3. Dan Solove has a thoughtful response at Concurring Opinions about the benefits that do accrue to students from having interdisciplinary teachers...
Tamanaha on Interdisciplinary Scholarship
Posted on January 16, 2008I'm an avid reader of Balkinization, which offers such incredible legal analysis that I wonder if I should be paying for the privilege. But while I would have eventually caught this on my RSS feed, Brian Tamanaha was nice enough to alert me to his post expressing skepticism about the current trend of interdisciplinary legal scholarship, at least with respect to the benefits that would accrue to non-elite law schools and their students (and thus the future legal profession)...
Stats For Poets
Posted on January 16, 2008I have decided to take a refresher course in quantitative methods, designed for legal academics and lawyers. It's designed to be a basic intro to multiple regression analysis and to teach me how to use STATA.The last time I took a statistics course I did pretty well, but it was seven years ago, from Fall 2000-Spring 2001...
The Blind Side
Posted on January 15, 2008I just finished MoneyLaw Icon Michael Lewis's book "The Blind Side" which describes an outstanding high school left tackle and the evolution of the position for which nature has ideally suited him. It's a great and quick read for those interested in race and class in the United States, the state of intercollegiate athletics, or, most relevant to readers of this blog, the evaluation of untested talent...
The Unbearable Lightness of Rankings
Posted on January 15, 2008We are all familiar with experiments in which subjects cannot tell the difference between a high priced wine and and low priced one. Now comes a study showing that knowing the price ahead of time affects the ranking. Not surprisingly, subjects rank a wine as better if it is more expensive...
Steven Pinker on morality and on academic culture
Posted on January 14, 2008Anything Steven Pinker writes is worth reading and heeding. When you've finished reading what Jurisdynamics has to say about Pinker's latest, an essay on "The Moral Instinct," come back to MoneyLaw to watch the adjacent video summarizing Pinker's thoughts about academic culture.
Bees
Posted on January 13, 2008A reader sent this letter to me and I think it is more of a moneylaw than classbias issue and almost certainly something about which people have different views.Prof. Harrison,I'm a reader of your Class Bias blog, as well as your posts on Moneylaw (which is where I found you first)...
So Much for The Wisdom of Crowds
Posted on January 12, 2008A lot has been made, in James Surowieicki's The Wisdom of Crowds and elsewhere, about the power of futures markets (such as the Iowa Electronic Market or IEM) to outperform polls in predicting the outcomes of elections. For example, in his book, Suroweicki wrote: "The IEM has generally outperformed the major national polls, and has been more accurate than them even months in advance of the actual election...
The Itinerate Law Professor: So What's Wrong with That?
Posted on January 11, 2008For a long time I have thought that being a law professor is only the second best job in the world. The first is the traveling lecturer. This person is paid a salary and wanders from state to state and school to school and drops in on any class anywhere to give a lecture or just to say what is on his or her mind...
Take the long way home
Posted on January 10, 2008In times hard and good, but especially the hard ones, it's worth reminding ourselves that we do this not because of the money, but in spite of it:I've put food on the tableAnd a roof overheadBut I'd trade it all tomorrowFor the highway insteadNorah Jones, The Long Way Home, on Feels Like Home (2004)Well I stumbled in the darknessI'm lost and aloneThough I said I'd go before usAnd show the way back homeIs there a light up aheadI can't hold on very longForgive me, pretty baby, but I always take the long way homeMoney's just something you throwOff the back of a trainGot a headful of lightningAnd a hat full of rainAnd I know that I saidI'd never do it againOh, and I love you, sweet baby, but I always take the long way homeI've put food on the tableAnd a roof overheadBut I'd trade it all tomorrowFor the highway insteadWatch your back if I should tellYour love's the only thing I've ever knownOne thing for sure, sweet baby, I always take the long way homeYou know I love you babyMore than the whole wide worldI?m your womanYou know you are my pearlLet's go out past the party lightsWhere we can finally be aloneCome with me and we can take the long way homeCome with me, together we can take the long way homeCome with me, together we can take the long way home
New Hampshire Recap -- Your Depressing Thought for the Day
Posted on January 09, 2008So as a bandwagon-jumping Obama supporter, I was trying to figure out how things went so wrong so fast for my guy. Both Obama's and Clinton's polls had her losing by double-digits in New Hampshire last night. Yet, as we now know, Hillary won and is re-energized heading into South Carolina and Super-Duper Tuesday...
How Surfing Saved My Sabbatical
Posted on January 08, 2008What motivates tenured law professors to write? I suppose that some do so as second nature, as automatically as lesser scholars breath. Perhaps other law profs write out of a heroic sense of duty, confident that what they publish will change the world for the better...
The keystone state
Posted on January 07, 2008In electoral terms, at least, America's keystone state isn't Pennsylvania. It's South Carolina. Scarcely anyone becomes President who doesn't win here. Ask John McCain.It has been a while since I've commented on South Carolina's bar exam scandal. PBS's documentary, Dirty Politics 2008, depicts South Carolina politics in the heat of presidential battle:
From AALS in NY
Posted on January 05, 2008Proof that law professors were once law students:They can't sit still for an entire 90 minutes. They must get up for water, a bathroom break, to stretch their legs, or because they suddenly remember a pressing engagement elsewhere.If there are seats in the back of the room, they will sit in the back of the room...
Blowouts
Posted on January 02, 2008Blowouts!The BCS is supposed to deliver college football's five finest postseason games and to resolve, beyond reasonable dispute, the question of the sport's best team. Its first two games advanced neither goal.Southern California 49, Illinois 17.Georgia 41, Hawaii 10...
Happy Law Professors and the Matrix
Posted on January 01, 2008I have followed the law professor unhappiness posts hoping to find some empirical evidence that it is true or not true. So far no luck and I think most seem quite happy. In fact, even though I am oft times unhappy, it is not for any of the three reasons Paul lists...
Why Are Law Professors So Unhappy? -- Part Three
Posted on December 31, 2007My post last Friday on Why Are Law Professors So Unhappy? -- Part Two has attracted a lot of commentary in the law prof blogosphere:Stephen Bainbridge (UCLA), Are Law Professors Unhappy? And, If So, Why? (Business Associations Blog)Peter Black (Queensland), Are Legal Academics Miserable? (Peter Black's Freedom to Differ)Eric Fink (Elon), Taking Stock, and Finding a Bull Market (Debris)Dave Hoffman (Temple), Bainbridge on Law Professor Well-Being (Concurring Opinions)Brian Leiter (Texas): Are Law Professors Unhappy? (Leiter's Law School Reports)Glenn Reynolds (Tennessee), Are Law Professors Unhappy? Not This One! (InstaPundit)Tom Smith (San Diego), Why Are Law Professors (and Everybody Else) Unhappy? (The Right Coast)Ilya Somin (George Mason), Are Law Professors Miserable, and If So Why? (The Volokh Conspiracy)Ilya Somin (George Mason), Some Evidence on Law Professors' Relative Job Satisfaction (The Volokh Conspiracy)Much of the commentary argues that law professors have a great job and that most are happy with their jobs...
Why Are Law Professors So Unhappy? -- Part Two
Posted on December 28, 2007I previously blogged Tax Prof Michael Livingston's answer to the question Why Are Law Professors So Edgy?: A friend of mine has come up with a novel explanation as to why law professors, who would seem to have a pretty privileged life, are so persistently uneasy...
A Scandal Explained
Posted on December 23, 2007Over at Slate.com Adam Perer and Chris Wilson have created the Mitchell Report Social Network, a visual depiction of the connections revealed by last week's steroid report. I think Tufte would approve. (Also, is it just me or does Edward Tufte, king of the beautiful graphic, have a pretty ugly web page?)Happy holidays, all...
Stagnation in the Law Prof Blogosphere?
Posted on December 20, 2007See the commentary by Scott Greenfield, Brian Leiter, Glenn Reynolds, and Dan Solove sparked by Orin Kerr's post. For some traffic stats, see my post at TaxProf Blog.
It's A Wonderful Life
Posted on December 19, 2007I love It's A Wonderful Life (Frank Capra, 1946). It's a gorgeous film and a moving story of conflict and redemption. And it's utterly free. Just click here to start the credits rolling in black and white on your laptop. The film was not particularly successful when it opened in theaters...
More on Law School Competition
Posted on December 16, 2007In a previous post I questioned whether competition among law schools increases the quality of legal education and the Moneylaw/Moneyball analogy. In reality, I only question one version of the analogy. The version that I think is misguided is the one that focuses on building or advancing a law school in order to ?win? in a competition with other law schools...
Multiple choice? Let it snow!
Posted on December 14, 2007Jeff Harrison questions the motivations behind multiple-choice, machine-graded exams. Dr. Lionel Gift, the economics professor in Jane Smiley's classic novel about academic life, Moo, provides a complete answer:Dr. Lionel Gift was all set. His summer-weight suits were packed, as were his Egyptian cotton dress shirts, undershorts, and socks...
SSRN Enters Citation Count Game
Posted on December 13, 2007As readers of this blog know, citation counts are one of the four methods used to rank law faculty scholarly performance (along with reputation surveys, publication counts, and SSRN download counts). (We discuss all four methodologies in our recent article, Ranking Law Schools: Using SSRN to Measure Scholarly Performance, 81 Ind...
None of the Above: Multiple Choice, Machine Graded
Posted on December 13, 2007Grading 190 essay contracts exams gets me riled up about multiple-choice-machine-graded (MCMG)-test-giving law professors. I am not talking about a few MCMG questions to get the students warmed up. And, I am not talking about multiple choice with and explanation ? essentially short essay questions...
Moneylaw, Macro-Style
Posted on December 10, 2007I cannot help but think once in awhile about the 72,000 law review articles that have been published in the last ten years. This does not count, of course, books by law professors (many of which should not count since they are recycled old articles) chapters, submissions to books of readings, casebooks, encyclopedia entries and so on...
Why I'll be cheering for three Southern land grant schools, and so should you
Posted on December 10, 2007This year's bowl season includes Mississippi State against South Florida in the Liberty Bowl and a fantastic Peach Bowl matchup, Clemson versus Auburn. I will cheer for Mississippi State, Clemson, and Auburn (though at least one of them must lose). In MoneyLaw terms, here's why:Michael Lewis explains the sociology of Southern college football in The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game 243-44 (2006):A football game between Ole Miss and Mississippi State [is] more than just a football game — but then that was thought to be true of many Ole Miss football games...
Law School Leadership Strategies From 15 Deans
Posted on December 10, 2007Law School Leadership Strategies: Top Deans on Benchmarking Success, Incorporating Feedback from Faculty and Students, and Building the Endowment (Aspatore Books):Law School Leadership Strategies is a smart and intriguing volume that outlines the role of today's educational leaders and discusses the current state and future shape of law school management...
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