Law School

Is the Law Professor Gravy Train Over?

Posted on January 20, 2009
New York Times (Jan. 18, 2009): The Last Professor, by Stanley Fish:I have argued that higher education, properly understood, is distinguished by the absence of a direct and designed relationship between its activities and measurable effects in the world...

U.S. News on Track for April Release of New Law School Rankings

Posted on January 17, 2009
Robert Morse, Director of Data Research at U.S. News & World Report, announced on his blog yesterday that the U.S. News law school rankings are on track for the annual April publication:The law school statistical and peer assessment data collection is now complete...

There are no neutrals there

Posted on December 20, 2008
div style="background:#334422; color:#dddd99; padding:16px"div align="center"Natalie Merchant, a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3z2f63Njto" target=_blank style="font-style:italic; color:#eeeeaa"Which Side Are You On?/a, emon/em a href="http://www...

There are no neutrals there

Posted on December 20, 2008
Natalie Merchant, Which Side Are You On?, on The House Carpenter's Daughter (2003):They say in Harlan CountyThere are no neutrals there.You'll either be a union manOr a thug for J.H. Blair.Which side are you on, boys, which side are you on?A line of miners with troops leading them, a photo from the Harlan County Mine Strike Photographic Collection...

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The wonders of a pitiful, dreadful life

Posted on December 19, 2008
a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/19/movies/19wond.html" target=_blankimg src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/12/19/arts/19wonderful.xlarge1x.jpg" style="display:block; margin: 0px auto 0px; text-align:center; width:479px" alt="It's a Wonderful Life" title="It's a Wonderful Life"/abr /Almost precisely a year to the day after the publication of a href="http://www...

The wonders of a pitiful, dreadful life

Posted on December 19, 2008
Almost precisely a year to the day after the publication of Other People's Children and Marie Reilly's meditations on the Bailey Building & Loan Association comes Wendell Jamieson's fantastically insightful reexamination of It's a Wonderful Life:?It?s a Wonderful Life? is anything but a cheery holiday tale...

Orchestrating the university: Leon Botstein strikes the right note

Posted on December 15, 2008
Yes, times are tough in the American academy. But before panicking, let alone doing anything as drastic (and foolish) as freezing all hiring till further notice or raising tuition beyond levels that are already skyrocketing out of many families' reach, let us consider the wisdom of Leon Botstein, president of Bard College and director of the American Symphony Orchestra...

Curtains on cowboy philanthropy: a cruel lesson from the Madoff scandal

Posted on December 15, 2008
From Margaret Soltan's excellent coverage of the Bernard Madoff scandal comes this tip regarding the impact of Madoff's $50 billion scam on Jewish philanthropy around the world.According to Jonathan Sarna of Brandeis University, an expert on Jewish history, Madoff's swindle represents "an unprecedented loss to the 'Jewish economy' — the networks of Jewish institutions, donors and charities that include universities, schools, hospitals and community centers...

Today Is Final Day to Comment on ABA's Proposal to Eliminate Student-Faculty Ratio Data

Posted on December 15, 2008
Today is the final day to submit comments to the Council of the ABA Section of Legal Education & Admission to the Bar on the proposal of the Standards Review Committee to eliminate computation of the student-faculty ratio in connection with the accreditation of law schools (Standard 104 and Interpretations 402-1 and 402-2)...

When the lights dim and the crowd fades

Posted on December 13, 2008
Portraits of shameScandal scored a trifecta this week, as heavyweights from the worlds of politics, business, and law were accused of fraud. Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich has been arrested for offering to sell Barack Obama's open Senate seat to the highest bidder...

Looking for Help on SSRN

Posted on December 10, 2008
I do not want to jump to conclusions and may be the last to know so I'd like to understand the SSRN business plan. I have in the past expressed my suspicions about what numbers of downloads mean and why there appears to be a top ten list for virtually everything...

Beyond IRAC: Law Exam Taking Tips

Posted on December 07, 2008
Visit my official grading procrastination site over at Legal Profession Blog for a few choice but undoubtedly useless words to students on taking exams.

Hot Topics Panel: The Financial Crisis

Posted on December 06, 2008
The Financial Crisis: Hot Topics Panel, AALS Annual MeetingFriday, January 9, 8:30-10:15 am.A discussion of the causes, short-term solutions, and longer-term implications of the current financial crisis.Moderator: Theodore P. Seto (Loyola Law School ? LA)Speaker 1: Lauren E...

Mad Dogs and terrific trios

Posted on December 05, 2008
Any careful reader knows that the Atlanta Braves are the official Major League Baseball team of MoneyLaw. Just look at the banner atop this blog.It's worth a MoneyLaw post, then, to note the impending retirement of Greg Maddux. Some of the key numbers: A lifetime 355-227 record...

College football deserves the BCS

Posted on December 04, 2008
On good days I wouldn't wish the BCS on Division I-A college football. No serious fan prefers that lousy, irrational system over a real playoff. But December 3, 2008, was not a good day in college football.Auburn fires a good coach in Tommy Tuberville, while Notre Dame clings to Charlie Weis, who is quite possibly the worst football coach in the universe...

Viscous and vacuous

Posted on November 28, 2008
This post serves notice to once, current, and future educational administrators: If you write fatuous prose from your perch, critics such as the Scathing Online Schoolmarm (Margaret Soltan of University Diaries) and the Gopher Gadfly (Bill Gleason of The Periodic Table) will expose the flaws in your reasoning and your rhetoric, in your sense and your syntax, for the world to enjoy...

Real genius

Posted on November 23, 2008
Once again Jeff Harrison has lamented, in ways I appreciate, that the legal academy seems to hire a significant number of professors who are neither intellectually interesting enough (as a static matter) nor intellectually curious enough (as a dynamic matter) to make better teachers and smarter colleagues of themselves...

Searching for Outliers

Posted on November 22, 2008
I'd like to say there is a debate about the fascination law school hiring committees have with candidates with elite credentials. I am not sure it is a debate, however, if no one is listening to one side of the argument. If it is a debate, it is one that I and the six or seven people who agree with me (and I do not mean at my school but in the world) always lose...

Beetles, Frogs, and Lawyers

Posted on November 20, 2008
I think and write a lot about models and their limits, and what is "Moneyball" or "Moneylaw" if not a model?That's my lame connection to a piece I have just posted on SSRN, Beetles, Frogs, and Lawyers:  The Scientific Demarcation Problem in the Gilson Theory of Value Creation...

Mythical law school rankings

Posted on November 20, 2008
Pallas Athena and the PigskinAs the college football season winds down, it bears remembering that the NCAA recognizes no official champion for the Football Bowl Subdivision (which real fans will forever call Division I-A). Even if this season's BCS National Championship Game manages somehow to reprise the 2006 Cotton Bowl with a rematch of Alabama versus Texas Tech (this time with zero rather than two losses apiece), major college football will stage a mythical national championship:A mythical national championship ...

Harvard Law's second United States President

Posted on November 16, 2008
On a tip from a blog post written by my history-loving colleague, Kurt X. Metzmeier, and featured in the University of Louisville's law faculty blog, I looked it up:Yes, Barack Obama will be the second United States President with a law degree from Harvard...

An elegant bibliographical solution

Posted on November 15, 2008
The chambers of a nautilus are arranged according to an approximate logarithmic spiral that can be calculated in polar coordinates according to this simple formula:r = aebθwhere r represents the radial coordinate, θ represents the angular coordinate, e is the base of natural logarithms, and a and b are constants that (1) are arbitrary in modeling and (2) are empirically determined in real-world applications of logarithmic spirals...

Yes to SSRN

Posted on November 14, 2008
I've shared my views on what SSRN downloads mean but the story is not all negative. This occurred to me (probably later than to most) when a friend noted that some schools in sending out their reports of faculty scholarship include only SSRN cites. He thinks the objective is to drive up downloads or possibly to make it more convenient for attorneys to access the articles...

The Ex-Donald Bren School of Law

Posted on November 13, 2008
The U.C. Irvine School of Law recently announced that it will not carry the name, "Bren," contrary to an earlier agreement honoring a $20 million gift by philanthropist Donald Bren, chairman of the Irvine Company. Why the change of plans? According to an Irvine Company spokesman, "part of the reason to drop the name was to avoid confusion with other schools that are named after Bren on the campus of UC Irvine" (emphasis added)...

Are We Done Yet?

Posted on November 07, 2008
I worry that the posts to Moneylaw seem to have fallen off (in quantity, not quality). I really enjoyed reading the views of the original core of writers. So, what's up?But, by asking "are we done yet" I am not referring to Moneylaw and other blogs remaining from the "blog boom...

The powerlessness of faculty politics

Posted on November 04, 2008
On Election Day 2008, MoneyLaw takes a quick look at faculty politics. By "faculty politics," if only for this day, I mean the electoral preferences of college professors.Do professors' political proclivities influence their students' views? According to April Kelly-Woessner and Matthew Woessner, authors of Investigating the Impact of Politics in the Classroom: Considering Whether Students Recognize and React to Faculty Politics, the answer appears to be "no...

False Applause

Posted on November 02, 2008
This poem by Donald Burness from his collection, Brutal Like All Olympics Are, makes my cynicism about legal academics look positively Pollyannaish.MY ENEMIES gnathonic toads infesting fleasthis is the tribe of my enemiesjoyless drones self-righteous fraudsthey honor each other with false applausejealous knaves consumed by hateever eager to extirpatedull lifeless they cannot soaron winds of dancing metaphorswhat a paltry pathetic thingto honor Mediocrity as your kingand when the king lets out a fartthey love the smell with all their heartI wish them scrofulous days aheadand may they rightly be rememberedas zeros when they're deadThe brush is a bit broad even for me but the phrases "false applause," strikes a chord...

Underdogs and wonderdogs

Posted on November 01, 2008
Underdogs and WonderdogsFew days in this year's college football season will be more decisive than November 1. And the two games that dominate today's agenda — #8 Georgia against #5 Florida and #6 Texas Tech against #1 Texas — offer in tandem a glimpse at managerial traits that matter, in higher education as in football...

Up in smoke

Posted on October 31, 2008
In pursuit of a simpler life, a Harvard Law graduate burns his diploma:Hat tip: The ABA Journal Weekly and Legal Blog Watch.

Distributive Justice in Law Schools

Posted on October 30, 2008
Sometimes I feel like it's Bill Henderson's world, and I'm just living in it and trying to help connect the dots. So when John McCain talks about "spreading the wealth," I start thinking about distributive justice, specifically who gets what in the law schools that employ some of us, collect tuition from others, and ask still others for money every once in a while...

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