Law School

Modeling Citation and Download Data in Legal Scholarship

Posted on October 04, 2020
James Ming Chen, Modeling Citation and Download Data in Legal Scholarship, http://ssrn.com/abstract=905316: Impact factors among law reviews provide a measure of influence among these journals and the schools that publish them. Downloads from the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) serve a similar function...

Weighted-Average Methodologies for Evaluating Bar Examination Passage Rates

Posted on December 02, 2014
James Ming Chen, Weighted-Average Methodologies for Evaluating Bar Examination Passage Rates, available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=2532800: There are few truly ?national? law schools in the United States. Most American law schools in the United States have a ?dominant? state bar...

Teaching law, without a care in this world

Posted on March 28, 2014
Titian, Girolamo and Cardinal Marco Corner Investing Marco, Abbot of Carrara, with His Benefice (ca. 1520) As the legal academy debates tenure, Fortune magazine takes notice: When businesses run into trouble, managers move to reduce salaries and expenditures...

Self-Adjusting Weighted Averages in Standard Scoring

Posted on February 18, 2014
Herewith a methods paper for the benefit of law professors and other university instructors who seek a sensible alternative to all-or-nothing final exams: James Ming Chen, Self-Adjusting Weighted Averages in Standard Scoring, available at http://ssrn...

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Cnidarians and academic life

Posted on February 16, 2014
O cnidarians! Cnidaria are the phylum of invertebrates including jellyfish, coral, and hydroids. They lack spine, but they sting. Their name is derived from the Greek word ?????, which means nettle. Many cnidarians — namely, those in subphylum Anthozoa — are sessile...

New Directions in Law Faculty Signatures

Posted on June 27, 2013
Dear Phillip:Please find enclosed a reprint of my latest article, "Special Pasta Recipes: Law, Culture, and Subordination: Is There A Way Out of Here." 34 Oklahoma State City Law School Just a Few Yards South of the McDonand's Law, Policy and Cooking Review, 345 (2013)...

The Venns of Faculty Governance

Posted on March 07, 2013
I see that Professor Campos is finished with his effort to expose the Law School Scam.  I read his blog once or twice but felt like I knew and agreed with most of what he was saying so I did not keep up.  Judging by some of his enemies, how wrong could he be?Frankly, I am pretty much out of gas on my far more modest Classbias blog too...

Measuring the downside risk of law school attendance

Posted on February 09, 2013
I am very grateful for the opportunity to present comments to the American Bar Association?s Task Force on the Future of Legal Education, in a session at at the midyear meeting of the ABA in Dallas, Texas, on February 9, 2013. The task force has been "charged with making recommendations to the American Bar Association on how law schools, the ABA, and other groups and organizations can take concrete steps to address issues concerning the economics of legal education and its delivery...

Take The Classroom Back

Posted on December 15, 2012
Newberry College in Columbia, South Carolina, will offer a major in social media. The college, for its part, explains that this is one of the first interdisciplinary social media majors. It says it blends graphic design, communications, business, marketing, psychology, and statistics, and that social media is such a vital part of marketing and other business habits that it'll be a valuable qualification with a likely career path ahead of it...

National Jurist's 25 most influential people in legal education

Posted on December 03, 2012
The National Jurist has named its 25 finalists for the title of the most influential person in legal education. I am honored and humbled to have been named as a finalist. These are the finalists, in alphabetical order: Catherine Carpenter, Professor, Southwestern Law SchoolPaul Campos, Professor, University of Colorado Law SchoolErwin Chemerinsky, Dean, University of California Irvine School of LawJim ChenHiram Chodosh, Dean, University of Utah S...

Say sayonara to "Spidey sense"

Posted on November 09, 2012
A CBS News profile of Nate Silver, author of 538. Not that we should expect law professors, a group whose political sensitivities vastly exceed its collective quantitative talent, to have taken close note, but the 2012 election staged "a pitched battle between two self-assured rivals: those who relied on an unscientific mixture of experience, anecdotal details and 'Spidey sense,'and those who stuck to cold, hard numbers...

Money Law Question?

Posted on October 22, 2012
I can provide a reason for why it is appropriate to ask this of moneylaw readers but let's just assume I have and get right to the question.Many schools have increased their number of transfer students. We all know why. Typically when they enter their slates are clean as far a GPA and their final GPA and class rank will be based on the last two years...

ARM-twisting "A Degree of Practical Wisdom": A one-year readjustment of legal education's debt-based stress test

Posted on October 20, 2012
Roughly a year ago, I posted what was then the preliminary version of A Degree of Practical Wisdom: The Ratio of Educational Debt to Income as a Basic Measurement of Law School Graduates? Economic Viability, 38 Wm. Mitchell L. Rev. 1185 (2012) (available online at http://ssrn...

Big law firm suicide

Posted on October 19, 2012
In The better angels of our profession, I sorted law professors into three camps according to their reaction to recession and industry-wide restructuring in the legal profession. Because the revolution in legal education and law practice has not abated, I believe that the time has come to perform a little triage...

Cranes and skyhooks

Posted on September 11, 2012
In his latest contribution to MoneyLaw, Jeff Harrison minces no words in expressing disdain for legal skyhooks: Monroe Freedman describes some writing about legal ethics as comparable to engineers writing about sky hooks. . . . In short, it is completely irrelevant to anyone but about 10 people who are genuinely intrigued or building resumes...

Sky Hook -- One or Two Words?

Posted on September 10, 2012
That actually may be the title of an 80 page law review article with 300 footnotes.  That article has not been written but, if it were, it might be more interesting than most of what is published.It has been some time since I wrote to complain about the surplus of law review articles...

Scholarships at Risk: The Mathematics of Merit Stipulations in Law School Financial Aid

Posted on August 20, 2012
I have posted the following article to my SSRN page — Jim Chen, Scholarships at Risk: The Mathematics of Merit Stipulations in Law School Financial Aid, available for download at http://ssrn.com/abstract=2133018 or http://bit.ly/MeritStipulations: Many law schools in the United States condition financial aid grants on the recipients? maintenance of a certain grade point average...

Punt baby punt

Posted on August 19, 2012
The shocking conclusion to the 1972 Iron Bowl (Auburn 17, Alabama 16), better known by the name, Punt Bama Punt. Readers who have patiently stayed with this forum through the years know that MoneyLaw loves sports metaphors. And why ever not? How many people do you know who not only can decipher the market participant exception to the dormant commerce clause but also can explain why the play action pass is the mirror image of the draw play? In law as in football, punting is the most cowardly play...

Just enjoy the show

Posted on July 12, 2012
For nearly six years, MoneyLaw has asked us to pause in law's pleasures and count its many fears. The All-Star Break is the annual eye of the storm in the ecclesiastical calendar of the Church of Baseball. These moments provide the perfect occasion for reflection and introspection...

The Linda Hypothetical and Testing

Posted on July 11, 2012
Most readers are familiar with the Kahneman and Tversky  classic Linda hypothetical which involves this fact pattern and the follow-up question: "Linda is thirty-one years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in antinuclear demonstrations...

The Guilded Age

Posted on July 04, 2012
From The Guilded Age (a.k.a. The End of the American Lawyer's Guilded Age), my contribution to the The Online Library of Law and Liberty: In our time, the free movement of labor, capital, and information has created a global economy that moves by the gigahertz...

Accuracy of Model of the 2013 USN&WR Law School Rankings

Posted on June 12, 2012
As in every year since 2005, I?ve again built a model of the U.S. News & World Report ("USN&WR") law school rankings. This latest effort generated a record-high r-squared coefficient: .998673. More about what that means?and more about the one law school that doesn?t fit?below...

Failing law schools

Posted on June 12, 2012
I am proud to have provided a jacket blurb for Brian Z. Tamanaha's eagerly awaited book, Failing Law Schools (U. Chicago Press, 2012): Legal education is a broken, failed, even corrupt enterprise. It exalts and enriches law professors at the expense of lawyers, the legal profession, and most of all the students whose tuition dollars finance the entire scheme...

U.S. News & World Report Improves Transparency of Law School Rankings

Posted on May 22, 2012
Huzzah for U.S. News and World Report! The most recent edition of its law school rankings includes the median LSAT and GPA of each school?s entering class. Finally. I have long argued that USN&WR should publish all of the data that it uses in its rankings...

The right families

Posted on May 11, 2012
I look behind my ears for the greenEven my sweat smells cleanGlare off the white hurts my eyesGotta get out of bed get a hammer and a nailLearn how to use my hands, not just my headI think myself into jailNow I know a refuge never growsFrom a chin in a hand in a thoughtful poseGotta tend the earth if you want a rose...

Pants Up

Posted on April 01, 2011
I am sincerely sorry if the last post on this blog somehow spelled the end of any contributions. To try and make up for it, I want to try to get those pants pulled back up. The problem is that it is probably only a wishful thinking pants up. One of the things that stood out in the US News and World Report rankings this year was the decline of the University of Missouri Law School...

Pants Down

Posted on January 16, 2011
I guess I did not see it when it came out but now I have come across the Leiter ranking (or is an effort to allow others to rank) the top 40 law schools. As I understand it, 331 respondents ranked 57 law school that are arguable in the top 40. The eventual ranking was then determined by taking each school and seeing how it did in head to head combat with each other school...

Class Participation: How and Why?

Posted on January 12, 2011
I have been rethinking my approach to class participation, and invite your suggestions about how to grade that aspect of student performance, if at all.Last semester, in Property I, I based 10% of the students' grades on class participation. They won points for class participation in a variety of ways, including serving on review teams, filling out short ungraded quizzes, and signing an "on deck" sheet for Socratic questioning...

Z-Scores in Model of 2011 USN&WR Law School Rankings

Posted on December 16, 2010
recent U.S. News and World Report ("USN&WR") law school rankings. This year's model matched the publishing rankings very nicely; comparing the model's scores with the published ones generated an r-squared of .997 (where 1 would indicate perfect correspondence)...

Can Empiricism Go to Law School?

Posted on November 24, 2010
Most readers know the cautionary "Be careful what you wish for . . . ." There is a comparable concern for those doing empirical research -- you may not find what you are looking for. By "what you are looking for" I do no mean that you will find no answer but that you may not confirm what you hoped to confirm...

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