Law School

The "Future" of Legal Scholarship

Posted on August 04, 2008
By 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, 2008
In 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, 2008
Ever 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, 2008
Deadwood: 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...

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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, 2008
I 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, 2008
Jeff 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, 2008
There 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, 2008
I 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, 2008
It'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, 2008
From 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, 2008
I 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, 2008
Jason 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, 2008
I'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, 2008
I'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, 2008
I'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, 2008
Jim'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, 2008
When 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, 2008
I 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, 2008
By 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, 2008
Awake! 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, 2008
One 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, 2008
A 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, 2008
Now 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, 2008
Kudos 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, 2008
I'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, 2008
Just 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, 2008
The 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, 2008
William 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...

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