Law School

Moneyball, Volleyball, and Faculty Productivity

Posted on December 09, 2009
Here.

"Exploding Offers"

Posted on December 09, 2009
Complaints about offers with deadlines perceived as short often ignore the realities facing non-top-tier schools and candidates.Early in the hiring season, top-tier candidates begin getting offers from mid- to upper-level schools. Often, such schools have a ranked list of candidates to whom their deans are authorized to make offers...

Hey Harvard

Posted on December 04, 2009
I read that Harvard has abandoned its program that waived tuition in the third year for students committing to five years of public interest work.I appears that economic hardship required the change but the Harvard President is also quoted as saying they did not know how easy it would be to get Harvard students to go into public interest work...

Big Law in Los Angeles

Posted on December 02, 2009
Top 20 Suppliers of Partners to theTen Largest Law Firms in Los AngelesOver the Most Recent 25 and 10 Year Periods Most Recent 25 Years Most Recent 10 Years Loyola-L.A. 51 9UCLA 51 7Harvard 48 8USC 38 6Boalt 31 5Southwestern 26 6Stanford 19 1Hastings 18 2Columbia 16 1Georgetown 15 1NYU 15 3Yale 12 1Chicago 10 1San Diego 10 1BU 8 0Pepperdine 8 0Santa Clara 8 0Boston College 7 2Michigan 7 0Virginia 7 1MethodologyNumber of partners in the 10 largest law firms in Los Angeles (Los Angeles Countyoffices only) admitted to the bar in 1984 or thereafter or 1999 or thereafter,respectively...

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Paging Billy Beane: Scholarly Productivity Lowers Reputation But Raises Salary

Posted on November 30, 2009
Details here.

Bill Belichick, Moneyball Savant?

Posted on November 18, 2009
Here.

2010 Princeton Review Law School Rankings

Posted on October 21, 2009
Over 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, 2009
It 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, 2009
This 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, 2009
In 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, 2009
Graduate 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, 2009
When 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, 2009
Part 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, 2009
The 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, 2009
It'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, 2009
In 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, 2009
How 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, 2009
I 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, 2009
As 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, 2009
When 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, 2009
If 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, 2009
I 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, 2009
As 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, 2009
I posted my latest thoughts on possible alternative rankings systems here. Would love your comments. Thanks, and happy 4th!

Moneyball: The Movie

Posted on June 22, 2009
Details here.

Bill Gleason: Excellence within our means

Posted on June 21, 2009
Bill 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, 2009
Least 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, 2009
In 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, 2009
Of 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...

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