Category Archives: Law School

There's an interesting conversation going on at Madisonian.net.

Strike that.

There's usually an interesting conversation going on a Madisonian.net, but this week they're having an especially promising 'Moblog' on legal education.

My biggest cheer so far goes to Nancy Rapoport's What kind of faculty would I want in the ideal law school? which I think hits a series of nails right on the head with this advice for what law faculties should do:

• cheer successes,
• be engaged,
• don't let up after tenure,
• “addresses conflict head-on and not in a passive-aggressive (or aggressive) manner” — but also stomp on bullies [hmm, some tension there?],
• set high standards for students, provide them with support to enable them to meet those standards, and hold them to those standards,
• model professional behavior by your actions,
• value those who teach in the clinic and those who teach legal research and writing,
• have fun.

We do some of these things better than others. And I'd love it if we did each of these things better than we do now — and with a Dean search going on, we're certainly entitled to dream. But what Rapoport doesn't say enough about is how you do all those things at once. Yes “it takes hard work to create such a community and to keep it thriving. ” I get that. But are these things that require a Dean to push them? Or are they things that only work as organic change bubbling up from below? Or do both sets of stars have to be aligned?

More prosaically, as we interview Dean candidates in the next weeks, how on earth to detect which ones are likely to help foster these tendencies?

I'm teaching issues relating to search engines this this week in Internet Law, and one of the issues I'm doing is the problem of search engine bias.

How nice of Wired.com to run an article showing just how relevant my class can be:

A U.S. government-funded medical information site that bills itself as the world's largest database on reproductive health has quietly begun to block searches on the word “abortion,” concealing nearly 25,000 search results.

Called Popline, the search site is run by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Maryland. It's funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, the federal office in charge of providing foreign aid, including health care funding, to developing nations.

Lots more where that came from….

Update: The Dean of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health weighs in — and says the right things.

Brian Leiter, An Open Letter to Other Law Bloggers Regarding the US News Rankings

When the new rankings come out in a couple of weeks, may I suggest that you not post the overall ranking. You all know the overall rank assigned to a school by U.S. News is meaningless, often perniciously so. It combines too many factors, in an inexplicable formula, and much of the underlying data isn't reliable, and some of it e.g., expenditures on secretarial salaries and electriciy isn't even relevant. You all know this. So don t report it. The fact that this garbage appears in a major news magazine doesn't change the fact that it is garbage.

Instead, let me suggest that if you want to blog about the rankings when they come out, write about some of the underlying data that speaks for itself: the reputational scores, for example, or the bar passage rates, or the numerical credentials of the students. Those have limitations too—the median of 500 is not really comparable to the median of 200; the reputation scores are not based on presenting evaluators with any information about the schools being evaluated; and so on—but one can at least say clearly what the limitations are, and one is not hostage either to the dishonesty of the schools “reporting” the data or the sheer idiocy of the U.S. News ranking formula.

Indeed the USN rankings are the dumbest pseudo-stats imaginable. But people — especially prospective students — put enormous weight on them.

Kai Chang writes about his favorite college professor, who was also a self-confessed liar. See Overcoming Bias: My Favorite Liar for the details.

It's an interesting idea; I wonder if it would work in law school or if students would resent it. There's also the risk that people would free ride and wait for the answer in the next class. I suppose, though, that one could give some class participation credit for being the first to ID the answer…

I didn't enjoy Contracts very much as a law student — it all seemed utterly arbitrary, except for the parts that seemed random or cruel. So I've never much wanted to teach it.

But now, thanks to Ethan Leib's post Chicken. Fowl, indeed. I have a whole new reason never to want to teach it.