Law School

Average and Marginal

Posted on October 29, 2008
I 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, 2008
It'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, 2008
Why 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, 2008
Rick 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...

To access this complete feed in the blog feed reader login or register for free.

Profs playing poker

Posted on October 25, 2008
In 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, 2008
Philadelphia 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, 2008
For 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, 2008
As 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, 2008
In 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, 2008
Fullback 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, 2008
I 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, 2008
UCLA! 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, 2008
Als 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, 2008
I 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, 2008
Like 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, 2008
The 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, 2008
Over 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, 2008
October 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, 2008
Tonight 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, 2008
By 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, 2008
It 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, 2008
I 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...

You missed again

Posted on September 29, 2008
Sorry, Mets. You missed again:

The Elite Beast of Burden

Posted on September 26, 2008
The 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, 2008
The 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, 2008
MoneyLaw 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, 2008
One 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, 2008
You 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...

Bloggers, promote your law blog by nominating your blog for inclusion in USLaw.com's Law Blog Directory and RSS Reader. Benefits described.