Law Librarian Blog

Is HLS Really the First School?

As LLB posted previously, HLS recently announced:

In a move that will disseminate faculty research and scholarship as broadly as possible, the Harvard Law School faculty unanimously voted last week to make each faculty member's scholarly articles available online for free, making HLS the first law school to commit to open access [emphasis added].

A number of people have recently noted, including John Palfrey, that Duke Law School has made its journals available on the web since 1997 and has hosted an open access repository of its faculty's school since December 2005.  Dick Danner has an excellent paper on the issue, Applying the Access Principle in Law: The Responsibilities of the Legal Scholar, at http://eprints.law.duke.edu/1698/. 

Duke is not alone.  Other numerous other law schools are offering open access to their scholarhip, often with the help of their libraries, although this author is unaware whether these schools have an official open access policy.  Check out via BePress:

• University of Georgia Law School
• University of Maryland School of Law

Who else has an official law school policy to make all their scholarly articles freely available online? 

Hat tip to Melanie Dunshee. 

[JJ]

Congratulation to Simon Canick

Simon Canick, Associate Director for Library Services at the University of Connecticut School of Law Library, has been appointed Associate Dean for Information Resources and Assistant Professor of Law at William Mitchell College of Law. He will be joining the College this summer to direct knowledge management and information technology development. Read more about it: press release. [JH]

1L Attrition Rates Range from 51 to 0 Percent

LawSchoolNumbers.com reports some shockingly high 1L attrition rates for individual law schools. Shocking to me because my gut-check says anything above 10% is way too high and 78 of the 195 listed law schools have attrition rates above 10%. Of course admissions professionals may view this threshold as being too low, but even if it is doubled to 20%, 24 law schools have a reported attrition rate of 20% or more. Click on the pie chart image (below) to view a distribution of law schools in 5 percentage point increments.

From the data provided, 5,005 out of 49,013 first-year students nationwide left law school. That's 10.2% so I don't think my gut-check threshold is unrealistic. Whittier ranked first on a percentage basis with a whooping 51.5% attrition rate (95 drop outs in an entering class of 184) while Thomas M Cooley Law School ranked first in number of students: 531 out of a 1L class 2,042 (26%).

Both schools are exceptional cases, not representative of the legal academy as a whole. Whitter Law School's very strict (dare one say "old school") grading scale and mandatory distribution curve are probably responsible for the law school's high 1L attrition rate. Whitter has been on probation since 2005 for failing to comply ABA Standard 301, the bar passage rule (Interpretation 301-6). It now looks like the Whitter will be removed from its probationary status. [Dean Cogan's Letter to the Whittier Law School Community]. Will Whitter's grading scale and distribution curve survive?

Cooley Law School's admissions policy is very liberal and can be characterized (fairly, I believe) as "give law school a shot here." Some might criticize Cooley (some have for grabbing tuition monies from students who might not be prepared for law school) but I think at least one law school in this country ought to give aspiring lawyers the opportunity they might not get anywhere else. I've met several Cooley students who have nothing but praise for the school's admission policy.

13 schools reported no 1Ls leaving law school:

• Arizona
• Case Western Reserve
• Charleston School of Law
• Charlotte School of Law 
• Loyola University Chicago 
• Montana
• New Mexico
• Ohio State
• Oregon
• Pittsburgh   
• South Dakota
• Stanford University 
• Yale   

One problem with the report is that it is difficult to make much sense out of the data because the reasons why students left are not quantified. As noted by Michael Froomkin (Miami):

If I were trying to make sense of this number, I’d not only want to know why people left (especially flunking vs. transfers), and where they left to, but also how many transfers IN the school had. Although there too, the number would need to be treated with care. A school that loses large numbers to transfers out and gains few is a place people want not to be (or a great feeder school). A place that is more or less in balance seems to make the transfers figure something of a non-issue. A place that is a huge net gainer is probably a place people want to be — but it’s also a place that likely is gaming its US News stats, which a student might think reflects poorly on its general ethical climate, or at least suggests the number has even less meaning than usual.

[JH]

Harvard Law School Votes for Open Access

The Harvard Law School faculty  has unanimously voted to make each faculty member’s scholarly articles available online for free, making HLS the first law school to commit to open access. From the press release:

Under the new policy, HLS will make articles authored by faculty members available in an online repository, whose contents would be searchable and available to other services such as Google Scholar. Authors can also legally distribute the articles on their own websites, and educators here and elsewhere can freely provide the articles to students, so long as the materials are not used for profit.

See also the Law School Innovation Blog post.

Hat tip Michelle Pearse, Bibliographer for Anglo-American Law, Harvard Law School Library, who is joining LLB as a contributing editor. [JH]

Roy M. Mersky, Dead at 82

Professor Roy M. Mersky died yesterday from complications of a recent fall. A member of the University of Texas-Austin School of Law faculty and the director of its law library since 1965, Mersky held the Harry M. Reasoner Regents Chair in Law. He was also a professor in the University's graduate School of Information.

Professor Mersky received his B.S. in 1948, J.D. in 1952, and Master's degree in Library Science in 1953 from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He was a member of the Bars of New York, Texas and Wisconsin. He served in the US Army during World War II and was awarded a Bronze Star.

Mersky's first law library position was at the University of Wisconsin Law Library, working as U.S. Government Documents Cataloger from May 1951 to June 1952. He served as Director of the Washington State Law Library, 1959–1963, and Professor of Law and Law Librarian at University of Colorado, 1963–1965, before his Texas appointment.

Mersky's many accreditation visits and law library consultancies are the stuff of legends as was his mentoring of Texas's professional library staff, many of whom became law library directors around the country. He was named a “Mover and Shaker 2003,” by the Library Journal, as one among the more than 50 of the most innovative librarians working today in libraries across the U.S. and Canada. Other honors include being inducted as a Life Member of the Fellows of the American Bar Foundation in 2002, receiving AALL's 2005 Marian Gould Gallagher Distinguished Service Award in 2005, AALL's Presidential Certificate of Merit in 2006, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Library and Information Studies Alumni Association’s Centennial Celebration Alumnus of the Year Award in 2006.

2008 marks the 50th anniversary of his first professional publication: Bibliographic Organization in Law Libraries: A Panel, 51 Law Library Journal 338 (1958). Of course, everyone knows his Fundamentals of Legal Research, first published in 1975 (with J. Myron Jacobstein), Spirit of Librarianship (with Richard Leiter), and his many works on Supreme Court history. He was working on Unknown Justices with William Bader at the time of his death.

During his 40-plus years, Professor Mersky developed the University of Texas law library into one of the preeminent research facilities in the nation, a legacy few achieve.

Like many others, I thought Roy would outlast all of us. Our deepest sympathy and thoughts are with the family, friends and colleagues of Roy M. Mersky today. [JH]   

See also Brian Leiter's (Texas) post.

Updates: In Memoriam: Roy M. Mersky (University of Texas-Austin School of Law). A funeral service for Professor Mersky’s family and close friends will be held at 2:30 pm on Sunday, May 11, at the Weed-Corley Fish Funeral Home, followed by a reception at the Law School.

In lieu of flowers, gifts in Roy’s memory may be sent to:

The Roy M. Mersky Memorial Fund
University of Texas Law School Foundation
727 East Dean Keeton St.
Austin, TX 78705

Online Comments Page hosted by the School of Law: Roy Mersky Remembered: Friends and Colleagues Reflect

Memorial Service. The Law School would host a memorial service early in September, after classes have resumed.

See also: AALL Statement, and Austin Statesman article with the newspaper's guest book.

Pace Law School Receives $1 Million Grant for ADR Center on Environmental Interest Disputes

From the press release:

"The Pace University School of Law ... announced establishment of the Kheel Center on Resolution of Environmental Interest Disputes. The Center will provide educational programs for law students and lawyers in the techniques of discovery, fact-finding and other means of alternative dispute resolution to resolve environmental “interest disputes,” those that do not lend themselves to resolution by litigation.

The Center is being established with a $1 million grant to Pace Law School from Theodore W. Kheel, the famed mediator, through the Nurture Nature Foundation that he established and chairs. The grant will be supplemented by additional funding obtained through a fund raising campaign.

The Center will have a focus on using alternative dispute resolution techniques to resolve the many issues surrounding global warming. The Center also plans to assist law firms in establishing legal practices in this field."  [RJ]

National Law Journal's Employment Trends Study

The National Law Journal has published a special issue on employment trends, finding to no one's surprise that higher ranked law schools send more graduates to the NLJ Top 250 law firms. Chart of Placement of Graduates from the Top 100 Law Schools [pdf].

Featured articles:

• Hiring more deeply into top schools
  Twenty law schools sent 54.9% of their 2007 graduates to NLJ 250 law firms, more than in 2006.
• What rankings don't say about costly choices
  Some students should consider lower-ranked schools that offer more grants, better opportunities.
  By William D. Henderson (indiana) and Andrew P. Morriss (Illinois)

Hat tip to Adjunct Law Prof Blog. [JH]

John Palfrey, New Associate Dean, Library and Information Resources at HLS

John Palfrey has been appointed Associate Dean, Library and Information Resources and a tenured professor of law at Harvard Law School. Bios here, here and here. John's name should ring a bell. He is Executive Director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society and an accomplished author. Among his many works are Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering (MIT Press, 2008)(co-editor and contributor)[LLB post] and Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives (with Urs Gasser)(Basic Books, forthcoming August 24, 2008)[Amazon]. About technology in the law school curriculum, see his What is Technology's Role, an op-ed that was published in The National Law Journal on November 8, 2006. [JH]

2008 Law School Summer Boot Camp for Students of Color

The  Summer Boot Camp is an online distance learning program designed to provide that intense preparation for law students of color.  The Boot Camp teachs students to study effectively for law school, introduces students to the writing, thinking and test-taking skills needed to excel on law school exams, and builds a network of academic support that crosses school boundaries.  The participants will work on the study skills, strategies and techniques they will need to achieve their goals as law students.  This is a 100 hour online program (fee: $600). Admission is on a rolling basis until the program is filled.  Because of the intense nature of this program it is important that students start as early in the summer as possible, preferrably by June 1st.

The Summer Boot Camp is part of the The JD Project which is committed to increasing the number of black and Latino law students. For more information about the Summer Boot Camp, contact Ms. Brenda Randall, Volunteer Director and Admission Coordinator. [email]. [JH]

Dean Smolla Podcast on Washington & Lee's New 3L Curriculum

Washington & Lee's Dean Rodney Smolla discusses the law school's transformation of its 3L curriculum on the Legal Broadcast Network [mp3 podcast link]. The school is changing the curriculum to focus on professional development through simulated and actual practice experiences. See our earlier post: Washington and Lee Reinvents 3L Curriculum.

Reflecting on the new 3L curriculum, Brian Leiter (Texas) writes:

It is clearly very risky:  if it succeeds, it will transform Washington & Lee into a leader in legal education, to which the top firms will flock for new hires; if it fails--because, for example, good students and faculty choose to go elsewhere--Washington & Lee may never recover as a top 30-35 law school with a quasi-national status.  The risk, put simply, is that within the legal academy, interdisciplinary scholarship is the coin of prestige in the realm, which is why one finds schools like Stanford, under Dean Larry Kramer, touting initiatives like more JD/PhD programs, and why elite law schools hire almost exclusively interdisciplinary scholars.  Washington & Lee is ... going to have to do very different faculty hiring in order to staff this ambitious new program.  If it succeeds, students and ultimately employers will be the beneficiaries, and other schools will no doubt follow suit.

For more, check out Leiter's blog post and follow the post's comment trail. [JH]

Ohio Law School Rankings, 2000-2009

Law school competition in the Buckeye State is pretty fierce. Nine schools in Ohio are competing for law students, law faculty, and law librarians: Akron, Capital, Case Western, Cincinnati, Cleveland-Marshall, Dayton, Ohio Northern, OSU-Moritz and Toledo. Competition is regional and national although some public law schools cannot afford to pay law faculty and law librarians salaries that are nationally competitive.

US News Rankings. Reputation rules the day. The quality of law faculties, student bodies and, as we law librarians like to think, law libraries matters. OK, two out of the three really matter; online access to information resources is becoming the great law library leveler for all but major research law libraries (read OSU in Ohio).

Of the nine Ohio law schools, only Case Western, Cincinnati and OSU are ranked in the US News Top 100. OSU is king of the Buckeye State hill. Case Western and Cincinnati have been competing for "second best" Ohio law school for years. Case Western's 10 place decline in 2009 (from 53 to 63) is more a quirk of the US News ranking system than a reflection of the school. US News doesn't use tie-breakers in its rankings which is based on an overall score. The problem, the lower a school's overall score, the more likely it will be tied with other schools. The difference in overall scores for 52nd place and 63 place is three points this year; three schools are tied in 52nd place, 4 in 55th, 4 in 59th and 3 in 63rd place.

Nothing has "happened" at Case Western to merit such a dramatic decline. Case Western and Cincinnati will continue to compete for second place honors for years to come. But watch out Case Western! If Cincinnati can overcome alumni alienation to fund the construction of a much needed new $100 million facility from its mainstream Republican base, the "buzz" will substantially increase Cincinnati's profile. Target date, 10 years from now.

Cincinnati's student quality scores give the school its competitive edge in the rankings game and that's because US News doesn't weigh student metrics by the size of entering classes. Cincinnati's entering class is 100 less students than either OSU or Case Western. Still Cincinnati, indeed all Ohio public law schools have been operating under financial duress for years. The former (Taft) state administration's reallocation of limited financial resources to elementary and secondary education has crippled state universities. Change is in the wind but kudos to all public law schools in Ohio for surviving. Cincinnati for example, suffered through something like 14 annual permanent and/or one-time budget cuts in the last 15 years.

Here's how Case Western, Cincinnati and OSU were ranked by US News from 2000 to 2009, overall and by reputation. For student quality, ranking is based on the average of the 75th and 25th percentile LSAT scores for entering classes. Alternative metrics are provided.

Color-coding. For all ranking tables, relative places are color-coded: maroon for first, teal for second and gray for third place.

Faculty Quality. Faculty quality assessment contributes 40 percent to the US News ranking. US News survey respondents are asked to rate law schools on a scale from "marginal" (1) to "outstanding" (5). For peer assessment, surveys are sent to aw school deans, deans of academic affairs, the chair of faculty appointments, and the most recently tenured faculty members. For bench and bar assessment, legal professionals, including the hiring partners of law firms, state attorneys general, and selected federal and state judges, are surveyed. See US News Law School Ranking Methodology for more.

For the below table, I added the two scores to produce annual overall law faculty reputation scores for 2000-2009. The scale would be from 2 ("marginal") to 10 for "outstanding." Immediately following are tables for peer, and bench and bar assessments. Since the the US News survey response rate by lawyers and judges is substantially lower than the peer response rate (e.g., 26% compared to 70% this year), I believe the peer scores are more significant.

There are substantially better metrics for law faculty quality. Brian Leiter (Texas) has been providing them for about ten years now at Brian Leiter's Law School Rankings [Links to Faculty Quality Studies]. OSU appears in some of his faculty quality ranking studies. Case Western or Cincinnati do not because they fall below Leiter's Top 30-40-50 cutoffs. The above information (plus whatever puffery law school PR machines churn out) is the best that's available.

Alternative Metrics. Some argue that schools with smaller law faculties are at a disadvantage in the faculty reputation game. See the quick facts displayed in the last table for faculty size. Perhaps you agree. Not me. Leiter adjusts for faculty size by using per capita metrics. More generally, some schools are stepping-stones used by some law profs to advance their academic careers after establishing their professional reputations "in the trenches." (More likely at Case Western and Cincinnati than OSU.) Others leave for better compensation. (More likely at Cincinnati than Case Western and OSU.)

Student Quality. For Case Western, Cincinnati and OSU, the below table provides historical student quality data as measured by the average of the 75th and 25th percentile LSAT scores for entering classes reported by US News. The metric is Leiter's. See Ranking of Top 40 Law Schools by Student (Numerical) Quality 2008 (April 6, 2008)("No feasible measure of student quality is particularly ideal, but LSAT scores are the best, crude proxy we have available.") In the event of ties, the school with the larger estimated entering class, if larger by 50 or more students, is ranked higher.

Alternative Metrics. Placement of law graduates in Supreme Court and appellate clerkships, and law teaching jobs is a good proxy for how strong the high end of a law school's class is. Leiter has been measuring this for years at Top Producers of New Law Teachers, 2003-2007 (Case Western, Cincinnati and OSU do not appear) and Supreme Court Clerkship Placement, 2000 Through 2007 Terms. (Only OSU listed).

Some Quick Stats. For context, the below table displays current data reported in the 2009 US News Law School Rankings for faculty and students at Case Western, Cincinnati and OSU. Law library data is also displayed because LLB is a blog by law librarians for law librarians.

Click on any of the tables for a larger display. Please report any data errors by commenting to this post.

Endnote. I think I've beaten the 2009 US News Law School Rankings to death. No more LLB posts by me, I promise (I think). Wait, what about ranking by NCAA conferences? (Have you noticed the declining fortunes of Big Ten schools in the rankings?) [JH]

Earlier LLB posts:

• Where Are the US News Top 30 Law Schools of 1996 Now?
• US News 2009 Law School Rankings Now Online
• US News Law School Rankings: Why March Madness Started Early This Year in the Legal Academy
• Law Schools Flipping Out Over Falling US News Rankings

Brian Leiter's 2008 Top 40 Law Schools by Student Quality Now Available

Brian Leiter (Texas) has published his Ranking of Top 40 Law Schools by Student (Numerical) Quality 2008 on Brian Leiter's Law School Rankings website. Noting that LSAT scores are "the best, crude proxy available for measuring student quality," he ranks the top 40 schools as measured by the average of the 75th and 25th percentile LSAT scores for the class that entered in fall 2007. Class size is the first tie breaker: the larger school with the same LSAT credentials was ranked higher. The second tie breaker is the average of the 75th and 25th percentile GPA scores.

Leiter's previous annual rankings of law schools by student quality can be accessed from this link. Note the change in method. How schools fare in placing their graduates in Supreme Court and appellate clerkships and law teaching jobs is also a good proxy for how strong the high end of the class is. See Leiter's Top Producers of New Law Teachers, 2003-2007 and Supreme Court Clerkship Placement, 2000 Through 2007 Terms. [JH]

US News Numerical Ranking for Tier 3 and Tier 4 Law Schools

Check out Geoffrey Rapp's post on PrawfsBlawg: US News Hacked?: Does the US News Web Site Display 3rd Tier & 4th Tier Law Schools Ranked in Order? [JH]

Solove on the Contradictory Goals of Law School Rankings

Check out Dan Solove's (George Washington) US News law school rankings commentary on Concurring Opinions. Here's a snip from his post, The Contradictory Goals of Law School Rankings:

If we step back from this year's frenzy, I believe that there's an important fact about law school rankings that accounts for much of the displeasure about them. Law school ranking systems have contradictory goals. Here's why. Law schools, like many institutions, are not incredibly dynamic and changing in the short term. They often change slowly, not dramatically. The result: We shouldn't see much movement year to year in the rankings. Most schools should stay about where they are. A few schools might move over time, but any one year's movement is not significant in the grand scheme of things. So to be accurate, rankings shouldn't change all that much.

But rankings systems have a contradictory goal: They need to reflect some kind of change, or else looking at the rankings each year would be like watching glaciers move. There must be some drama in the rankings year by year. We eagerly await our rankings each year, and we don't want rankings at five or ten year intervals. And we don't want stable rankings -- we want changes to cheer and kvetch about.

[JH]

Where Are the US News Top 30 Law Schools of 1996 Now?

If one is interested enough to get beyond the chatter about which law schools rose or fell a couple of places in the 2009 US News ranking, one might want to ask "where are the Top 10, or 20 (or even 30) law schools of 1996 now? Click on the image (left) to find out. You might note the position gains/losses for some Top 10 schools -- Penn, plus 4 from 11 to 7, Duke, minus 4 from 8 to 12, but the Top 10 list is relatively stable and that's hardly news.

The same can be said for law schools ranked 11-20 in 1996 with two notable exceptions, Iowa minus 8, from 19 to 27; and Illinois minus 7, from 20 to tied in 27th place with Iowa in 2009. Note also that Washington (St. Louis) advanced to 19th place in 2009 from 29th place in 1996.

Note well, the above-mentioned one-on-one 1996-2009 comparisons are probably misleading because US News changed its ranking method.

Historical Perspective. Any given year, law schools' US News fortunes rise and fall. Up 3 in US News one year, down 5 the next. The one-year comparison isn't very meaningful. It's just absurd fodder for University and law school PR machines. See Brian Leiter's (Texas) comments, Hall of Shame: Schools Publicizing Their Meaningless US News Ranking. 

Given that US News rankings will be used, I think prospective law students, aspiring law profs, and others should be asking, how long has a law school been in the Top 10 or 20 (or even 30)? Is the current rank a fluke? Has a school's ranking shown incremental increases or declines during the last 5 or 10 or more years?

To answer these questions, click on the below image. It is a table that displays every law school that made the US News Top 30 at least once from 1996 through 2009. These schools are listed by name by their 2009 rank. A line chart plotting ranking change by school would have been too busy so table cells are colorized according to the  following groupings: dark red for 1-10; teal for 11-20; blue-grey for 21-30; and medium gray for Below 30.

I think that by colorizing the table cells, one can visualize just how established the boundaries are for each tier. Despite US News ranking method changes only 39 schools have been ranked 30 or better during this 14-year period. It's a small group, smaller than I expected. Smaller still but not a surprise -- only 24 schools ranked in the Top 20 and 13 in the Top 10. Some sort of general US News "echo chamber" effect in play?" See Brian Leiter's posts on the echo chamber effect of US News peer review scores here and here.

Mindful of 1990s rank method changes, one can view the incremental changes in an individual law school's rank that led to the school breaking through the ceiling of a higher tier or falling through the floor into a lower tier. One can also easily spot unusual one-year declines that should be ignored. For example, how does a school like Texas go from 17-18th place for 1996-98, to 29th in 1999, then moves to 15th place in 2000 and for the next six years? The 1999 rank should be ignored. You'll see other instances where the rank reported for a law school in a particular year is too questionable to be taken seriously.

If you would like to re-sort the data by year or view a full screen display of the table, download the spreadsheet here: Download usranking19962009.xls. If you spot any errors, please file a comment for readers. I probably won't be making corrections because this is only a blog post.

Calls for US News law school ranking reform abound. See for instance, An Open Letter to Bob Morse of U.S. News by Brian Leiter, author of the leading source of alternative law school ranking information, Brian Leiter's Law School Rankings.

Endnote. Why not provide historical data for the Top 50 or Top 100 law schools? Because I subscribe to the notion that if a law school isn't listed in the US News Top 20 or its Fourth Tier, the ranking becomes increasingly more insignificant in the marketplace. "Top 20" and "Fourth Tier" mean something. Between the two lies the legal academy's middle ground, a large dot on the map that represents 69% of the ranked schools this year. [JH]

A Foolproof Guide for Aspiring Law Profs and Lateral Appointment Seekers

Joining the Workforce, Law School Style. The AALS Meat Market, the teleconference call, the airport interview, the day-long masquerade ball on site for applicants deemed worthy of consideration, these are the rituals of the legal academic hiring process that are truly mysterious to those wanting to become law profs (or academic law librarians) as well as those wanting to move onward and upward in the legal academy.

Getting a Foot in the Door. If you didn't graduate from a top feeder school, serve as a law clerk at the Supreme Court or one of the more "elite" federal Circuit Courts, work for a top-notch large law firm, Fortune 500 corporation or Federal agency in a "hot" practice area, aspiring law profs need to establish their street credentials. That means demonstrating that you can publish and teach, perhaps as an adjunct or fellow.  Dust off your law review notes and comments, briefs, conference presentations, etc. Knocking on the door of a local law school for an adjunct gig is easy enough but getting a teaching fellowship is a different matter. Paul Caron (Cincinnati) has compiled one of the best lists of teaching fellowship resources I've seen. Check out his post on TaxProf Blog.

Landing that First Professorship. David Cases' The Pedagogical Don Quixote de la Mississippi, 33 U. Mem. L. Rev. 529 (2003) [Westlaw] is a must-read. In it, Case tells the story of his trials and tribulations as a practitioner who breaks into the Ivory Tower after several attempts.

Once a member of the Club, getting lifetime employment isn't very hard. Gladly (or pretend to be happy to) teach 1L courses so senior members of the faculty. But don't insist on teaching Con Law. Every school has an over-abundance of aspiring constitution law scholars. Go for contracts, property, torts, and those pesky mind-numbing upper-class bar exam courses like the UCC. Avoid at all costs, the legal research and writing program because that's a dead-end.

Despite the wailing over how difficult it is to get published because of the power held by law review student editors (what about the faculty advisor's input?) over your career, getting two published articles listed on your CV is substantially easier to achieve than almost any other academic discipline. There are some 170 law review titles, most of them are desperately seeking content and, unlike other disciplines, published legal scholarship does not need to be peer-reviewed. Unless you are publishing in law and economics, scholarly legal works are rarely "dead wrong." It's a "soft" discipline that defies empirical certitude. Just be sure to Shepardize your cases.

Don't worry about your articles being cited by other law review articles or court opinions. The majority aren't. Thank God for the string citation or the vast majority would never be cited. How do you get cited? Draft a sentence or two in black letter law fashion. Remember what Second Circuit Judge Robert Sack said about citation practices,when cited, law review articles are used the same way drunks use lampposts - for support rather than illumination. See Adam Liptak, When Rendering Decisions, Judges Are Finding Law Reviews Irrelevant, New York Time, March 19, 2007, at A8

In four years or so, you will be tenured. Almost every law prof gets tenure; "it's a state law". Ultimately what matters in tenure decisions is personality, not results; your peers know all too well, that the job security tenure brings means that they are going to see you in the hallways for a very long time. Upon tenure, you can start behaving like an ass but hopefully you will not become infected with the megalomania that runs rampant in the legal academy.

It's hardly a difficult road to travel when compared to the typical 7-year long odyssey associates make in large law firms where objective measures like billable hours, bringing in new clients, and winning in the transactional or litigation arenas matter in partnership decisions. You won't be compensated as much as practitioners -- hell, some of your 3Ls who land a BigLaw gig will be paid more as first year associates than you make at their hooding. But you get your summers off, can make extra cash above your annual salary during the summers if you play your cards right, be in line for those much sought after annual sabbaticals, and, if the trend towards reducing teaching loads to free up time for "scholarship" continues at its current pace, you probably will be teaching no more than one course each semester long before your retirement date arrives.

Moving Onward and Upwards. Many law profs stay put after their initial appointment, some for personal reasons. Many strive to move onward and upward. More money, more opportunities to pursue their academic interests ... working with notable colleagues, students more interested in scholarship than just passing the bar and the stimulating environment therein certainly motivate many lateral moves. Depending on where you start, what you accomplish there, and the associations you make, moving up the ranks of law schools to a Top 10 or Top 20 school is no easy task.

Hiring prominent faculty members to increase a school's reputation for US News & World Report's annual law school rankings is the name of the game and it becomes ever more competitive the closer a school is the top 10th-percentile. The law professor lateral hiring market is a seller's labor market but navigating it is no easy task. Employment law prof and co-editor of Workplace Prof Blog, Paul Secunda (Mississippi, soon Marquette) offers advice on how to go about it in his very interesting Tales of a Law Professor Lateral Nothing (SSRN) article. A "nothing," I don't think so. See this post. In offering advice on the lateral hiring market, Secunda writes:

I feel as well suited as anyone to undertake this delicate task. I offer these humble observations as someone who has been on the lateral market for the last three years and who has been turned down by numerous schools (including two after fly-back interviews), turned down a lateral offer, and finally, accepted a lateral offer from Marquette University Law School this year.

It's the best article I could find. Although I am generally dismissive of SSRN download clicks as being a measure of anything, the relatively high ratio of abstract views to downloads for Secunda's article appears to indicate that a not insignificant number of law profs are interested in learning more about this "mysterious world."

On Being Foolproof. To parse Brian Hayes for the convenience of this post , "proof is foolproof, it seems, only in the absence of fools." Today is April Fool's Day, right? [JH]

Law Schools Flipping Out Over Falling US News Rankings

Above the Law is reporting excerpts and in some instances the full text of emails sent by law school deans to their students about their ranking decline in this year's US News Law School ranking. The schools? Iowa, Minnesota, North Carolina, Buffalo and one from Case-Western that is buried deep in the long list of comments. Dropping 3 spots, from 24 to 27, Iowa has scheduled nine discussion group meetings to give students some face time with their dean.

Hat tip to Adjunct Law Prof Blog. [JH]

US News 2009 Law School Rankings Now Online

Background Information by US News

How to Use the Rankings Wisely Methodology Used to Rank Law Schools Additional Information

The 2009 US News Law School Rankings is now online in a substantially redesigned web format. The rankings cover 195 law schools: Top 100 ranked (104 schools because of ties) with (a) 37 schools listed in Tier 3, (b) 43 in Tier 4 and (c) 11 unranked schools. To focus in on specific schools, check out the A-Z Directory of Law Schools.

Prospective Law School Students. If prospective law school students get past the overall numerical ranking they may find some helpful information in the "School Trends" series of articles. Brian Leiter's Law School Rankings, the leading source of alternative law school ranking information, provides substantially better (read empirical instead of hearsay) information than US News when it comes to law school reputations and the only reliable placement data.

Law School Trend Articles

• What are the priciest and cheapest private law schools? (Yale - BYU)
• What are the priciest and cheapest public law schools? (Michigan - North Carolina Central)
• Whose graduates have the most debt? The least? (Northwestern - Southern Univ. Baton Rouge)
• Which public schools award the most and the least financial aid? (Virginia - South Dakota)
• Which private schools award the most and the least financial aid?  (Loyola Marymount - Atlanta's John Marshall)

Two law school trend articles are only available on the fee-based "premium" online version. For the reasons noted below, neither are worth the money:

• What schools have the best first-time bar passage rate? Listed by state of jurisdiction, this information is readily available.
• Whose graduates are the most and least likely to land a job? Unreliable because law schools have been known to fudge this unaudited self-reported data.

A Class of 2010 Columbia Law School student has posted a video that prospective law school students may find interesting. See also her blog, Law School: USA. [JH]

Choosing a Law School: Money over Rankings

US News Law School Rankings: Why March Madness Started Early This Year in the Legal Academy

Corrections & Clarifications for the ABA Journal Article

When I worked for the Chicago Tribune, the paper published a follow-up "Corrections & Clarifications" column whenever the paper goofed in one of its articles. Here's a howler for the ABA Journal article. Noting that his TaxProf Blog "often becomes a forum for venting about law school rankings," the article reports that Cincinnati Law's Paul Caron "says his own university does not publicize its place in the U.S. News rankings or whether it rises or falls." Unless misquoted twice in the article, that simply isn't accurate, half true at best. I used to work with the University's PR machine which regularly publicized the College's ranking, annually that is until the College's academic peer assessment score took a hit a few years ago that drove the College's ranking into the embarrassing mid-50s range and eventually dragged the College's ranking down to the third best in Ohio. Rest assured that would change. Betting money is on the University's well-oiled PR machine; it probably would overheat if UC made it above 50 and reclaimed its "rightful place" as the second best law school in Ohio, after OSU of course. But not yet. If lawschooldiscussion.org has posted an authentic copy of the 2009 rankings, it looks like Cincinnati can reclaim its second place standing in Ohio but it hasn't broken through the Top 50 barrier (tied at 52, up from last year's 57). Why? The much-dreaded Reputation category. Weighted at an enormous 40 percent of a school’s total rating, the hearsay category is, as the ABA Journal article claims, "the one category that can make or break a law school’s ranking." In Cincinnati Law's case, it looks like the College has tied for second lowest academic peer score and tied for worst assessment score by members of the bench and bar among the top 55 law schools this year. When the College's hearsay rankings took its hit, the College's dean told me, half in jest I think, that the College doesn't talk about assessment scores. Unfortunately the College talks up the quality of Cincinnati Law students all too infrequently. Bottom line, the College's law students, measured by GPA and LSAT by US News, has kept it from plummeting further down the rankings these last several years. Rankings improvement is a University-wide objective at UC. Ranking performance is factored into the budgeting calculus every year. Unfortunately, I think this is a fairly common practice.

Two events have the legal academy buzzing before the release of the dreaded US News Law School Rankings on March 28th.

First, the ABA Journal article, The Rankings Czar: Law deans hate Bob Morse's rankings. He'd like their help to make them better is out. The article reiterates well-known complaints, law school reporting practices, and consequences of playing the cut-throat rankings game. It features, for example, interviews with Nancy Rapoport (UNLV) (read her "poster child" post) and Brian Leiter (Texas), author of Brian Leiter's Law School Rankings, the leading source of alternative law school ranking information.

Unfortunately the article failed to interview one law prof whose comprehensive critique of the US News ranking's methodology would have publicized his well-recieved research to the Journal's non-academic audience, namely, Ted Seto (Loyola Law School Los Angeles). See his Understanding the U.S. News Law School Rankings (SSRN). Check out Daniel J. Solove's (George Washington University Law School) Improving the US News Rankings: A Wish List (Concurring Opinions), one of many posts that have launched the earlier than usual March Madness buzz in the legal blogosphere.

Robert Morse is director of data research for U.S. News & World Report. He developed the methodologies and surveys for the magazine's America's Best Colleges and America's Best Graduate Schools annual rankings. Check out his blog, Morse Code: Inside the College Rankings. The folks at the ABA Journal email bombed law bloggers to call attention to the article and to announce that Morse will be taking questions from the public on ABAJournal.com on Friday, April 11, from 3 to 4 p.m. ET. Wow, one hour! Why wait; post comments on Morse's blog instead.

Second, lawschooldiscussion.org has posted what the site claims to be pages from an advance copy of USN&WR's 2009 Law School Rankings (pdf). Instead of listing the Top X schools, which will be blogged soon enough, I'll close with a cautionary note from Judge Posner's Law School Rankings (SSRN):

Ranking is a method of evaluation. It has the advantage of extreme simplicity and the disadvantage of revealing very little, because the ranking doesn’t disclose the distance between the ranks. In fact, rank ordering exaggerates quality differences because of its association with winning; normally what matters in a contest is who came in first, not how much better the winner was than the losers. Ranking is thus a low-cost, low-benefit method of evaluation—cheap, but crude.This makes it suitable primarily for unimportant decisions—decisions where the cost of a mistake is slight, so that there is little benefit to increasing the information content. [Emphasis added]

As previously mentioned at A Jury of One's Peers: Ranking Law School Reputations, the online edition of the 2009 US News Law School Rankings will be launched on March 28, 2008; pre-order it now for the rankings-obsessed. [JH]

Washington and Lee Reinvents 3L Curriculum

The third year at Washington & Lee will be all of professional development through simulated and actual practice experiences. "The demanding intellectual content of the third year will ... be presented in realistic settings that simulate actual client experiences, requiring students to exercise professional judgment, work in teams, solve problems, counsel clients, negotiate solutions, serve as advocates and counselors—the full complement of professional activity that engages practicing lawyers as they apply legal theory and legal doctrines to the real-world issues of serving clients ethically and honorably within the highest traditions of the profession. Practicum courses will span the array of traditional legal subject matter: antitrust, banking, corporate finance, securities law, tax, family law, environmental law, criminal law, employment law, intellectual property, estate planning, media law, civil rights and civil liberties practice—in short, anything and everything that might be offered in a traditional law school course." Details here and here.

Hat tip to Brian Leiter's Law School Reports. [JH]

A Jury of One's Peers: Ranking Law School Reputations

Brian Leiter has just published Top Producers of New Law Teachers, 2003-2007, a ranking of feeder schools for the legal academy, on Brian Leiter's Law School Rankings [his blog post].

I thought it might be interesting to create a table displaying data from Table II. Total Placement in Law Teaching, 2003-2007 of this study and Table III: Ranking of Law Faculties by Mean and Median Per Capita Citations of his Top 35 Law Faculties Based on Scholarly Impact, 2000-2007, alongside the Top 20 Law Schools from the dreaded 2008 USN&WR Law School Rankings (displaying overall and academic peer assessment scores). Here it is, click to enlarge the display:

No profound comments but a reminder ... the online edition of USN&WR's 2009 Law School Rankings will be launched on March 28, 2008; pre-order it now for the number-crunchers! [JH]

Another New Legal Education Reform Blog

Hosted by the Elon University Law School, the Center for Engaged Learning in the Law Blog "is intended to contribute to the discourse on teaching and learning in law, from the inspirational to the whimsical, to the mechanical. It includes the varying perspectives of teachers, administrators, learners and practicioners." See our earlier posts covering this growing body of resourses:

• On Reforming Legal Education: Cheatsheets, Required Readings, Etc.
• A Quick Look at Best Practices for Legal Education Blog
• Transforming Legal Education: Learning and Teaching the Law in the Early Twenty-First Century

[JH]

Fair Warning to Law Schools ... Deadwood Investigators Coming to Your Website

Many (most?) but not all law schools simply cannot stand to be what they are, namely run of the mill. Not as in diploma mill fashion, but just down right ordinary.  Enter the marketing component of law school publications, the law porn published in slick brochures, magazines, and now law school websites. You've seen the puffery which tries to entice unwitting prospective students to apply for admissions, alumni to write big checks without stipulations about how the funds will be used, and new profs to join the "best" under-appreciated law faculty in the country. As Ross Davies (George Mason) recently explained in an Inside Higher Ed interview, "All our faculty are the same: Each one is an active scholar, an active teacher, and committed to law in the service of the public. ... We have 180-190 institutions saying, We are bastions of teaching, scholarship and service."

Such puffery is double-edged. Someone with the time, energy, resources, and courage (yes, courage) to reality-check claims made by law schools about their faculty is needed to cut through these exaggerations; it's long overdue (and many largely silent law profs would agree, I think). Enter the Deadwood Report. Sponsored by Green Bag, it will test the accuracy of claims law schools make. [George Mason press release] The focus will be on the most objective of measures: "whether the work is being done – whether each law school faculty member is teaching courses, publishing scholarly works, and performing pro bono service."

Beginning this spring, George Mason law prof Ross Davies, editor-in-chief of Green Bag since 1997, and a team of research assistants will begin gathering information from law school websites for Green Bag's first substantial effort to help applicants make more informed decisions for admission to or employment by law schools. The first effort may not solve this problem but over time the Deadwood Report could contribute to reigning in law schools' more spacious claims.

Such an effort wouldn't been needed if law schools policed themselves or if the Association of American Law Schools and the American Bar Association held the legal academy accountable but these organizations "'appear to be committed to obfuscation'” and avoid qualitative assessment of law schools at all costs" according to Green Bag. Let the nightmare of reality checking begin; nightmare for the PR folks, law school administrators and law profs responsible for this widespread phenomena, that is.

Time to Edit Law School Websites. So law schools, keep your websites current, weed out the self-promotional language that is too laughable to be taken seriously by insiders, your fellow colleagues, because the Deadwood Report is coming. It's about time. I wonder how many members of the legal academy are contacting Davies right now to call attention to some nonsense published by their law schools on their websites. I certainly could come up with examples; bet you could too.

The sad truth is that all too often law students discover that what law school websites claim is substantially less than what law schools deliver. They simply do not believe the legal academy would stoop to marketing practices perfected to persuade consumers to buy one brand of canned soup over another. The tens of thousands of dollars spent by individual law schools to "brand" themselves and to create slick websites to market themselves is shameful. And the content, well finding accurate information in a forest of puffery is not always an easy task. One need only try to determine how frequently upper-level courses listed in a law school's online catalog of course descriptions are being offered to appreciate the problem; after that, try to figure out if a course is being taught by an expert in the field, dumped on an nontenured prof who has no interest in the subject matter, or assigned to a adjunct who is teaching non-practice related courses to fill in gaps in the knowledge base of the regular faculty.

Kudos to Davies for taking dead aim at this issue.

Read more about the Deadwood Report in Ross Davies' Green Bag editorial: Fair Warning to Law Schools ... and an Invitation to 1Ls, 2Ls & 3Ls (available on SSRN). Here's the abstract:

Aspiring law students and professors should have more and better information about the relative quality of law schools. Unfortunately, the people in the best positions to provide that information - the AALS and ABA - have powerful reasons to avoid doing so. The void has been filled in part by the U.S. News rankings. We could go on about their defects and limitations, but we have done that before. U.S. News could improve its product, but why bother? Doing more and better work would be costly, and in the absence of a genuine competitive threat there is no reason to make the investment. Enter the Deadwood Report, in which the Green Bag will provide rough and admittedly partial but transparent measures of law school faculty quality by measuring teaching, scholarship, and (eventually) service. Law schools generally hold themselves out as institutions led by faculties whose members are committed to working in all three areas. Why? Because - according to the law schools and many leaders of the profession - the best teachers tend to be active scholars, and the best scholars tend to be active teachers, and all the best lawyers of every stripe engage in service for the public good. Evidence of the law schools' commitment to this view is reflected in the practically universal requirement of high achievement in all three areas for tenure. And so we should be able to say with some confidence that a good law school will have a faculty consisting of hard-working teacher-scholar-humanitarians. The Deadwood Report will simply test the accuracy of that picture. Our focus will be on the most dully objective of measures: whether the work is being done - whether each law school faculty member is teaching courses, publishing scholarly works, and performing pro bono service.

[JH]

Big Drop in Minority Law Students, Columbia Site Says

From the ABA Journal:

"Nationwide enrollment of African-American and Mexican-American students in U.S. law schools is down significantly since 1992 and could drop further.

According to statistics reviewed by individuals at Columbia Law School and the Society of American Law Teachers and discussed on their website, law school enrollment by members of these racial minority groups has dropped by 8.6 percent over the past 15 years. And that has occurred despite a constant number of minority applications and an increasing number of law students overall during the same period, reports the Wall Street Journal Law Blog. It apparently got the scoop from an upcoming article in the National Law Journal.

The statistics, which were compiled by the nonprofit Law School Admission Council, show a disturbing trend away from making law school admissions process more inclusive of minority applicants, experts say.

And "it's going to get a whole lot worse before it gets better," predicts Vernellia Randall. A professor at the University of Dayton School of Law in Ohio, she has put together a report on "America's Whitest Law Schools."  [RJ]

Drexel Law Receives ABA Provisional Accreditation

As noted in the Drexel press release, it is no small accomplishment that the law school recieved provision accreditation less that 18 months after opening its doors to students:

To reach this milestone less than 18 months after welcoming our first law students to Drexel is remarkable, and a testament to the vision and commitment of our Board of Trustees and the hard work and passion of the faculty and staff of the College of Law and its founding dean, Roger Dennis. Drexel Law has gathered some of the most talented, innovative law faculty, practice professionals and students anywhere, and it shows in every initiative.

Certainly true with respect to the law library staff. In 2005, law school representatives were making some "wild and crazy" statements about the school's law library and the provision of information resources and services to students and faculty. See our posts here and here. Luckily reality set in. Drexel hired Chris Simoni and he, in turn, hired a well-qualified staff. Congratulations to Chris and his team on a job very well done. [JH]

Free Legal Classes at People's Law School Set Example for Law Schools, Law Libraries and Local Bar Associations to Follow

The University of Texas School of Law is hosting and co-sponsoring free legal classes at People’s Law School on Saturday, February 23, 2008. Participants can choose to attend up to three classes, each featuring one topic. The classes, taught by local attorney volunteers, last seventy-five minutes and include a question and answer session at the end. UT Law Library tours are included in the program

Read more about this interesting event. Other law schools and law school libraries can easily pattern similar programs after this one. If you know of some, please publish details as comments to this post. [JH]