Monthly Archives: October 2009

Hard Times at Ave Maria Law (Updated)

AveWatch reports on Ave Maria Law's latest troubles as it settles into Naples, Florida: Declining LSATs.

This news comes on the heels of a very significant legal victory by former Ave Maria School of Law professor Stephen Safranek who accepted a settlement offer in his October 2007 wrongful termination suit against Ave Maria moneyman and controlling power Tom Monaghan, the Ave Maria Foundation, the Law School, and former AMSL Dean and President Bernard Dobranski — see Safranek Wins Settlement from Ave Maria and Monaghan for details.

Update: A reader points me to Ave Maria Law School Settles Into SW Florida which includes the school's own more cheerful account of its current class (2009, which would be the year after the last summarized in the article linked above):

“We had record applications and the credentials of our students have gone up at the same time that we increased class size,” Dean Milhizer said. “Average LSAT scores went up over the previous year. In terms of selectivity, we admitted less than half of the students who applied which is the first time we've ever been that selective.”

The LSAT scores and grade point averages of the incoming class “increased by significant numbers,” according the the law school's director of external affairs, John Knowles.

There are more than 200 new students at the school and the class also has its highest percentage of women to date, the dean said.

Missing from this account, however, is hard data on grades/scores. In due course they'll be reported the ABA, I suppose.

Posted in Law School | 1 Comment

UM Law May Have a New Building Much Sooner than You’d Think

Law School to Share New Building With Business School in Fall 2011 (from the Res Ipsa, our student newspaper).

The building is permitted (that's very significant in Coral Gables!) and the elegant outside is already designed. It's planned to be between the Lowe Art Gallery and the existing Business School — a nice part of campus. We'd get three floors built to our specifications, our own entrance, and some shared common space adding up to about 60% of the square footage of our current plant. And the best part is that all of this would be an add-on to our current building, solving our space crisis pending construction of our new hoped-for mega-building on the South-Eastern side of campus…a plan which still requires some substantial fund-raising.

The ink is not yet affixed to this deal, and devils can always lurk in the details, but at first glance this looks like a truly wonderful development for the University of Miami School of Law. And it explains where we'll find suitable office space to house all those new faculty members we plan to hire in the next few years.

My only worry is that this new building will reduce the space on campus for the annual Beaux Arts Festival of Art, as I think it will occupy part of that grassy expanse.

Posted in U.Miami | 3 Comments

Knowledge Ecology International

!='s KEI FOIAs USTR ACTA NDAs points us to a really great blog post by Jamie Love on what appears to be a really good blog called Knowledge Ecology International (“Attending and mending the knowledge ecosystem”).

Recommended for anyone interested in the intersection between intellectual property law and, well, freedom and development.

Posted in Law: IP | 1 Comment

The Search for the Senate Democrats’ Spine Continues

Daily Kos: Harry Reid abdicates his leadership role.

Seems the X-rays emerging from the Majority (q.v.) Leader's Office are not encouraging.

Posted in Health Care | 3 Comments

Books Snark

Snarky letter in today's NYTimes, Letter – How to Find a Book

To the Editor:

Re “A Library to Last Forever” (Op-Ed, Oct. 9):

Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google, writes, “Today, if you want to access a typical out-of-print book, you have only one choice — fly to one of a handful of leading libraries in the country and hope to find it in the stacks.”

Fly??? I’m pretty sure I can e-mail a reference librarian and ask her to check holdings before I do anything so drastic as fly. Hasn’t this guy ever heard of the Internet?

Lauren Baratz-Logsted
Danbury, Conn., Oct. 9, 2009

Not to mention this major civilization advance known as “inter-library loan” — a service provided not only by university libraries but even by better public libraries.

Posted in Internet | 6 Comments

A New Way to Think of Supreme Court Justices

john_marshall.jpg
In a faculty seminar earlier this week, a (female) colleague said, apropos Chief Justice Marshall, that he “is the only Supreme Court Justice I would have liked to date.”

This is, to me, a wholly new way to think of Supreme Court Justices.

Any other candidates?

Posted in Law: The Supremes | 1 Comment