Category Archives: Law School

Selected previous posts on grading:

• On Law School Exams, Open Book and Closed Book, December 09, 2004
• Grading, May 14, 2005
• My Grades Are In, January 20, 2006
• More On Law School Grading, January 31, 2006
• We Have Great Students, January 16, 2007

The Washington Post and Newsweek have a crude but interesting methodology that aims to capture whether high schools challenge their students.

The metric has a lot of limitations, but it also has its attractions. They start by excluding all magnet schools, more or less on the grounds that they'd win if they were included. They rank the remaining schools on how many advanced tests the students take:

We take the total number of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate or Cambridge tests given at a school in May, and divide by the number of seniors graduating in May or June. All public schools that Newsweek researchers Dan Brillman, Halley Bondy and Becca Kaufman found that achieved a ratio of at least 1.000, meaning they had as many tests in 2006 as they had graduates, are put on the list on the Newsweek website, and the 100 schools with the highest ratios are named in the magazine.

… I think 1.000 is a modest standard. A school can reach that level if only half of its students take one AP, IB or Cambridge test in their junior year and one in their senior year. But this year only about five percent of all U.S. public high schools managed to reach that standard ….

This is indeed a crude measure. It doesn't capture how good the teachers or the students are (the results of the tests don't enter into the calculation). There's no control for demographics of the school's catchment area, although it appears that the correlation isn't that good since rich schools sometimes reserve their APs for the 'best' students which keeps down the numbers.

And it's not exactly a measure of value-added either.

No, at best it measures what it says: whether or not the high schools are challenging their students by exposing them to advanced courses. That may be very basic, but it's still worth knowing.

How would we make a comparable metric for law schools?

In Law School Innovation: Should law schools be developing legal wikis? Doug Berman links to Robert Ambrogi's article Legal Wikis Are Bound to Wow You, and also says this:

I could readily imagine having a class project centered about building a wiki (my death penalty class blog this past semester has some wiki-like facets). I also would readily approve a student independent study project that was wiki-centric, and I certainly could see student organizations and law reviews working on wikis as an integral part of their activities.

That sounds like fun.

A a few hours ago I sent the following email to all the students who signed up for my Internet law class next fall:

Thank you for signing up for Internet Law in Fall '07. It's a great class and I'm looking forward to teaching it. Unfortunately, it seems I'm going to be teaching it next Spring, not next Fall.

I know that late schedule changes cause you significant inconvenience, so I wanted you to hear from me why this change is necessary before you got the official notice from the Registrar's Office, which should arrive in a day or two.

After the schedule was set, I was appointed to two administrative positions in the law school that will require intensive effort in the Fall: First I was appointed to the Strategic Planning Committee and this week I agreed to take over as Director of Faculty Development from Prof. Mary Coombs, who is resigning from that post.

Internet law is a demanding class to teach: I use my own materials, and I try to make them as up-to-date as possible in a very fast-changing area. It was clear that there was no way I could do the class in Fall and also do justice to both of these new responsibilities. In appointing me to the Faculty Development post, the Dean's office urged me to only teach one class in Fall — and that has to be Administrative Law, which we try to offer every semester.

This means you are getting the short end of the stick, and I apologize for that. The Dean's office and I have asked the Registrar to give you priority for Internet Law if you decide to take it in the Spring — and I hope to see you then. Meanwhile, if I can be of any help in suggesting alternate courses, please don't hesitate to email me with a list of courses you are considering.

And, if you have a particular interest in Internet law that won't wait, or if you are graduating in December, it might be possible to arrange an independent writing project for the Fall. To do that, however, you need to have a (fairly narrow) topic in mind. More information about how I supervise independent writing projects is here.

Again, I hope you will accept my apologies for this late change to the schedule.

An English prof blogs about an unreasonable student request in “Most outrageous note evar.”

While I agree that this student's request is totally unreasonable (barring a medical emergency), I think this blogger's reaction shows that English profs lead sheltered lives. Here in law school, where we train people to be advocates, many students come to think they have nothing to lose by making pushy requests, even ridiculous ones, and they do it quite often. Given how things work, they may be right — there's not much penalty for being turned down and, as fund-raisers say, “If you don't ask, you don't get.” Figuring out where the line is between zealous advocacy and Rule 11 (sanctions for frivolous or vexatious arguments) takes judgment, and it takes some people longer to acquire that than others.

One tries not to get inured, but I suppose it creeps up….

Previous related post: If You Don't Ask, You Don't Get. But Some Things You Shouldn't Ask.

Things sound really, really bad at neighbor-to-be Ave Maria Law School,

Crisis at Ave Maria Law: To summarize: last spring, a substantial majority of the faculty issued a vote of “no confidence” in Dean Bernard Dobranski. The response from the AMSL Board of Governors, led by Board Chairman and AMSL's largest funder, Thomas Monaghan, was a terse restatement of its support for the Dean. This rejection of open discussions, combined with retaliatory actions by the Dean, exclusion of the faculty from governance of the school, and serious violations of academic freedom were subjects of an investigation by an ABAfact-finder earlier this year. In the midst of this ABAprocess, the AMSL Board voted in effect to close AMSL and transfer its assets to a new law school to be located on the campus of Ave Maria University, in southwest Florida.

Disagreement over this proposed move is thus only one aspect of the difficulties at AMSL. Problems at AMSL go much deeper, and are much more structural. Since the vote of “no confidence” in Dean Dobranski in April 2006 over issues of faculty governance and academic freedom, he has used threats and retaliation to try to silence members of the faculty from voicing concerns about his leadership and that of Mr. Monaghan. A majority of the faculty whom the Dean believes to be disloyal to him have been punished financially and through manipulation of the promotion and tenure system. One tenured faculty member has been repeatedly threatened with termination based upon bizarre allegations. Junior faculty members have been threatened that their careers would be harmed if they associate with disfavored tenured faculty. We have also been informed that Dean Dobranski had instituted a system of monitoring our emails and computers, and student research assistants have been closely questioned about research projects of disfavored faculty members. All tenured faculty members have been removed from the Chairs of faculty committees, and such chairs are now in the control of the few faculty members whom the Dean believes to be loyal to him. Cumulatively, such intimidation and bullying has created an intolerable atmosphere of fear and contempt at our school.

And there's lots more where that came from.