The Faculty Lounge

Is The Moment Ripe? Notable Increase In Law School Applications

The newest LSAC volume summary is out and there is good news for those working in law school admissions offices: applications are up.  Of course, they're not actually up compared to last year.  Total numbers are still down, and dramatically.  But they're down by a lower margin that they were a few weeks ago.  Back on January 10, we reported that applicants were down 22.1% compared to last year.  Based on that number, LSAC was projecting something around 52,000 total applicants this year.  Four months later, and the news is a bit different.  Now, as of the May 17, 2013 report, the total number of applicants is down 13.4% and the projected total number of applicants is looking like it'll be around 58,700.  That's a big dip from the 68,000 last year...but a dip of 10,000 is signficantly different than a dip of 16,500.

I am certain that many deans and admssions directors are asking if we've hit a bottom.  I think it is far, far too early to tell.  But I also think that the intensity of negative coverage may be triggering a burst of applications among those who realize that there may never be a better year to apply to law school, from the point of view of maximizing the power of one's given LSAT score as well as minimizing actual tuition costs.

Because let's face it: people willing to attend law school in select cities (such as, for example, Philadelphia) can get quite a bargain.  A student with a 159 LSAT and decent grades can choose among multiple Philadelphia law schools and pay very, very low tuition.  Prefer to pay full freight?  Given that the top schools seem likely to maintain class size even in the face of an overall credential drop, a 168 LSAT is likely to take you a long way this year.

That doesn't mean law school is the right choice for any particular person.  But for people who want to become lawyers no matter what, the math right now is starting to look awfully appealing.  Or at least that's what the numbers suggest.

 

Richard Coulson (1942-2013)

I want to pass along the sad news that one of my mentors, Richard Coulson, passed away last week.  Richard, whose scholarship was centered around international law and legal history, was an emeritus faculty member at Oklahoma City University, where he had taught for decades.  Richard was a beloved figure among the students and faculty and taught me a great deal about law and teaching when I was on the OCU faculty in the 1990s.  

We also had a lot of fun together.  I remember in particular a trip we took back in 1996 to the American Society for Legal History, when it was meeting in Richmond.   We flew into the Baltimore airport (mostly we could get really cheap flights because of Southwest).  But we thought I'd make a virtue out of this, so we stopped in Fredericksburg and I think did a little driving around the Richmond battlefields.  Fun times for two people who were deeply interested in history and its relation to law and how history is presented to the public.

I have a lot more I want to say about Richard's role building the OCU law school and as an educator and colleague, but I wanted to pass this news along now.  And on a personal note, I know Richard was very, very proud of his son Doug's work on law, history, and rhetoric, which includes a terrific article in the Yale Journal of Law and Humanities in 2010, "Distorted Records in "Benito Cereno" and the Slave Rebellion Tradition."  Doug is starting this fall as an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon Univeristy, which I know Richard was delighted about.   Here is Richard's obituary from the Edmund Sun.

Biondi (Finally) Out As President of Saint Louis University

Saint Louis University President Rev. Lawrence Biondi announced, yesterday, that he will be retiring as President.  After all the tumult at SLU, plenty of law professors (among many others) are smiling.

Bloomberg Business Week Kicks NYU Law In The Shins

This week, Bloomberg Business Week published a graphic showing "underemployment range of the 20 cheapest vs. most expensive law schools."  Unfortunately, their editors didn't know the difference between NYU Law and New York Law.  Or maybe Mike Bloomberg just hates John Sexton.  

(Yes, it's been corrected online.  But for all the old-timers who read Business Week on paper - also known as  parents-of-propsectives - the correction is unlikely to get noticed.)

 

We Were Not Equals

You can prep a dean all you want for his deposition in a lawsuit regarding a faculty firing, but sometimes he'll still answer entirely candidly.  Background on the case is here.

[Update: Jeff Malkan clarifies that this was testimony before a court, not in a deposition.]

Buffalo Law Dean Makau Mutua  was asked by Jeffrey Malkan's attorney about events that occurred before Mutua was dean...

Dean: I wanted to educate myself more about the various staffing models of the programs and I asked Jeff [Malkan] to provide me with a summary of the various models used by various schools to staff their research and writing programs.

Attorney: And he complied with your request even though he technically wasn't bound to do that for you?  You were equals, right?

Dean: No.  We were not equals.

Attorney: You were not both --

Dean: We were not equals.  This is again, you are coming back to the same problem.  Jeff Malkan, you know, was a research and writing instructor.  I was a professor of law.

More text of the exchange is here.  

Yes, I understand precisely what the dean was saying about faculty status.  But I think plenty of tenured faculty would never imagine that they were anything other than equals of their contract faculty colleagues.  ABA standard 405(c) may (or may not) protect jobs, but it has nothing to say about  respect. 

Dean Search Announcement: Samford / Cumberland

Dan has previously mentioned that Samford / Cumberland will be looking for a new dean to succeed John Carroll, who is stepping down from the helm in 2014.  You can find details on the search at this link.

John F. Sutton, Jr.: 1918-2013

Longtime University of Texas law professor John F. Sutton, Jr. passed away at the age of 95 in recent days.  Sutton joined the UT law faculty in 1957, served as dean from 1979 to 1984, and retired about ten years ago.

Additional reading here (obituary), here (Austin American-Statesman), and here (ABA Journal).

The Broad Institutional Impact Of The Law School Crisis

Brian Leiter briefly noted this news story claiming that Catholic University is considering instituting a 20% university-wide cut in operational expenditures as a result of declining law school revenue.  It appears that this cut will not affect permanent faculty lines - but may impact things like adjunct faculty hiring.  This isn't an isolated situation, I suspect.  I have heard of at least one other school that cancelled a faculty hire in another department due to the law school situation.  And although nothing is public right now, we know that law schools themselves are starting to make some hard decisions.

Bill Henderson has previously said that he expects big layoffs at law schools this fall - presumably thinking that there will be a huge overall revenue shortfall, but that schools won't know, until opening day, just how bad their own situations look.  We will soon be able to test Bill's crystal ball.  But the Catholic University story should wake up a much wider swath of academics to the impact of the current law school crisis.  At universities highly dependent on law school revenue - apparently, Catholic U is among those schools - the crisis will eat directly into the budgets of other programs.  But where law schools are break-even propositions - the many law schools where overhead  covers just that - the reality that law schools actually need institutional subsidies (just like almost every other college in a larger school) may mean that the universities may more critically question the need for a law school...and may empower the university to impose its will and priorities on law schools that were previously very independent.

There are big implications to this crisis.  The simple (but serious) story is about cutbacks, layoffs and possibly closings.  The more complex story we may soon learn involves the question of whether, notwithstanding the ABA,  law schools that have claimed exceptional status within their institutions will become unexceptional colleges in the larger university constellation.  Special snowflakes no more, as it were.

Deanship Update: Campbell

Bankruptcy judge J. Rich Leonard has been named the new law dean at Campbell.  Judge Leonard completed his undergraduate work at the University of North Carolina, and he earned a law degree at Yale.  He has served on the bankruptcy court for the Eastern District of North Carolina since 1992.  Judge Leonard has been the editor in chief of the prestigious American Bankruptcy Law Journal since 2011.  And a few months ago he published a children's book entitled The House by the Creek, "a tale of the Revolutionary War set in NC, filled with bravery and surprises, and based on a family legend."

Click here for additional reading.

New Law School Rankings: Employment Data Cleaned Of School Funded Jobs

I've taken the same data that Gary Rosin used in this post (which ranked schools by percentage employed in full-time, long-term jobs requiring a JD) and cleaned the list...by excluding all such positions that were funded by the law school.  

One concern I have about Gary's list - similar to concerns about US News rankings - is that once you eliminate the top schools, an ordinal ranking suggests large distinctions between schools with small acutal differences.  Thus, the gap in Gary's list from the #1 school (Penn) to the #31 school (Georgia) is 25 percentage points; Penn placed 94.4% of its students and Georgia placed 69.4%.  But the gap between Georgia and the school 30 places down the list - #61 FIU (which placed 63.6 of its students) - was only 5.8 percentage points.  A law school candidate might be agnostic as between Georgia and FIU, based on placement, but not between Penn and Georgia.  

I am going to publish my list from number 1 to 197, but a savvy reader would be well advised to consider schools in clusters.  For example, this time using my list, schools 1 to 6 place over 85% of their grads in legit L/T, F/T JD required jobs.  Call that cluster 1.  Schools 7-19 place over 75%.  Schools 20-52 place over 65%.  Schools 53-98 place over 55%.  And so on.

Even this clustering obscures important facts for anyone comparing law schools, the primary one of which is this: outside of a few elite schools, most grads with jobs are working somewhere geographically close to their law school.  So a graduate of #34 Campbell University has a comparatively good shot at a job; it's probably going to be in North Carolina.  Ditto #28 South Texas College of Law.  And if your goal is Big Law, particularly in $160K-ville, you'd best take that #17 Northwestern offer (even if you did get into #16 LSU or #15 West Virginia.)  I do love Alabama - after all, it was my first academic home - but if I had an offer from #14 Yale and #13 Alabama...well, you know where this is going.

And a close reader might consider whether a particular school claims a very high number of graduates going into solo practice.  While solos are treated the same as associates at Wilmer Hale, for statitstical purpose, the average solo is probably going to earn less during her first few years than she would have made in a non-JD job.  You can go here and and sort through all sorts of these issues. 

Are there any notable distinctions between my list and Gary's?  That is, did some schools hire a big chunk of their grads in long-term, full-time JD required positions?  A few.  Virginia falls from #2 to #11  - or almost 15 percentage points.  A bunch of schools - Chicago, NYU, Columbia, and others - showed distinctly weaker placement numbers, though they remained quite strong, comparatively.  And then there was George Washington which fell from 14 to 76 or from 81% employed to 60.35%.  This is an admirable form of back-end financial aid for unemployed grads, and phenomenally expensive, but it does confound the rankings a bit.

My chart is after the jump.  If you want to compare Gary's ranking which includes law school funded jobs, it's here. 

Thomas Cooley Law And Western Michigan Consider Affiliation

The Western Michigan University Thomas Cooley School of Law?  Could happen, if the current proposal for a new formal alliance is approved.  They would remain separate institutions, formally, with separate governance structures.  I'm not sure how much this would be like the linkage between Detroit College of Law and Michigan State University, resulting in the current Michigan State College of Law.  The new school remains independent of MSU, notwithstanding its name.

For Cooley, this would be a major branding event - affiliating the school with a state university.  For Western State, the situation seems similar to the Southern New England School of Law - UMass Dartmouth merger.  Just as UMass Dartmouth was unlikely to get a law school without the merger, Western Michigan seems similarly unlikely to gain a law school without this proposal. 

Picture of the future? Western Michigan University Thomas Cooley School of Law, Tampa Campus .

New 2012 Law School Employment Statistics

Thanks to Gary Rosin for pointing out that the summary of the new ABA law school employment data release is here.  School by school statistics can be found, individually, here.

These are the overall numbers (click to enlarge):

 

Federal Court Permits Consumer Suit Against Widener Law

Senior Federal District Judge William Walls denied Widener Law's FRCP 12(b)(6) motion to dismiss in an action alleging that Widener University School of Law "posted to its website, and disseminated to third-party law school evaluators, misleading and incomplete graduate employment rates in violation of New Jersey and Delaware Consumer Fraud Acts".

The opinion is here.

This is an interesting decision in part because  it could have implications for the many other law schools that recruit in New Jersey.  (I leave it to the Civil Procedure buffs to opine about the extent to which New Jersey law could be used more broadly.)

For Widener  the stakes are indisputably high.  The plaintiffs seek $75 million in damages due to inflated tuition price - $225 million or more, total,  after treble damages.   Using back of the envelope math, it sounds like plaintiffs claim that Widener's method of reporting employment data resulted in annual tuition that was roughly$10K  too high.  

Many matters remain to shake out in this case, including class certification, a difficult case on the merits, and some challenging damages issues.  

But this decision appears somewhat more significant than the (thus far limited) coverage would suggest.  If nothing else, ongoing cases of this potential size could pose challenges for schools seeking to issue new bonds.  And you have to wonder about potential exposure for many other law schools under this reading of New Jersey law.

H/T ABA Journal

Uptick In Law School Applications

There's nothing in the new LSAC current volume summary to make law school admissions officers happy, but applications are now down by a lesser amount than they had been in prior weeks.  The current data shows total applicants down 17% and total applications down 20.9%.  At this point in time last year, 88% of the applicants had been counted.  Projecting current numbers to the end of this cycle, we might expect something like 56,000-plus total applicants this year.  That is up a few thousand from recent projections.

Prior posts on applications are here, here, here, here,  here, and here.

I will moderate comments and delete any comments about individuals.  

University of Texas Regents Order Investigation Into Flow Of Law Foundation Money

In a split 4 to 3 vote, the UT regents authorized an external review of the flow of fund-raised money through the University of Texas Law Foundation.  Board members were continuing to react to the revelation over a year ago that the Foundation provided forgivable loans to law faculty.  Opponents of the review argue that it is part of a broader effort to oust UT President, and former law dean, Bill Powers.

Hamilton Named Dean at UNLV

I'm delighted to report that my friend (and co-editor) Daniel W. Hamilton has just been named dean at UNLV's William S. Boyd School of Law.   Dan is currently associate dean for faculty development at the University of Illinois and he teaches and writes in the areas of property and legal history.   His work includes the wonderfully thoughtful and engaging book  The Limits of Sovereignty: Property Confiscation in the Union and the Confederacy During the Civil War, which was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2007.

Dan's appointment adds to the number of legal historians who are deans, including Dave Douglas at William and Mary, Greg Mark at DePaul, Robert Post at Yale, Bruce Smith at Illinois, Avi Soifer at Hawaii, Ray Solomon at Rutgers, and Bill Treanor at Georgetown.

Here is UNLV's press release.  Congratulations to Dan and UNLV!

Michael Schill A Finalist To Lead UW - Madison

Dean Michael Schill of the University of Chicago Law School has been named one of four finalists in the search for a new Chancellor of the University of Wisconsin - Madison.

Rutgers-Camden and Rutgers-Newark Law Schools To Merge

...at least if Rutgers President Robert Barchi has his way.  (Limited) details here.  The proposal will apparently call for the two schools to keep their existing campuses.  

Law school: Are the wrong people being discouraged?

Brian Leiter has this interesting bit about an apparent slight uptick in applications to law schoools. Applications to Law Schools.  A curious aspect appears to be that the group seeing the largest decline may well be those for whom law school would likely be a good (or at least better) risk.

Intrigue At George Washington Law

Today, the GW Hatchet - which has a banner boasting "An Independent Student Newspaper" - offers the first extensive account of the departure of GW Law Dean Paul Berman in an article titled Faculty Plotted to Oust Dean.   Can't vouch for the accuracy of it, but it's interesting reading.