The Faculty Lounge

Reported Salaries by Law School

The September 2011 issue of the National Jurist has an interesting article, Best Law Schools for Standard of Living (pp. 28-34). The deflation of New York City Big Law salaries after taxes and cost of living was impressive.  But what caught my eye was the variation in the median reported private salaries for the Class of 2010--from a low of $42,500 to a high of $160,000.

The chart below shows the distribution of law-school median salaries by $10,000 range, from the 40s to the 160s:

 

Law and Economics as a Pillar of Legal Education

I see that Paul Caron is blogging about  the new paper by Joni Hersch and W. Kip Viscusi (both of Vanderbilt Law School), entitled "Law and Economics as a Pillar of Legal Education," which is now up on ssrn.  Lots of good stuff to talk about in there.  For instance, about 32% of faculty at the top 13 schools have Ph.Ds.  I didn't realize that recent hiring has been so phd-centric at those schools.  Also, I was somewhat surprised by table 1 ("Educational Profiles of Faculty at the 26 Highest Ranked Law Schools").  Of the 1338 faculty at the top 26 schools, 65 have only a phd (and no law degree).

Here is the abstract:

This paper reports the distribution of doctoral degrees in economics and in other fields among faculty at the 26 highest ranked law schools. Almost one-third of professors at the top 13 law schools have a Ph.D. degree, with nine percent having a Ph.D. in economics. Law school rank is highly correlated with the share of faculty holding a Ph.D. in economics and is less correlated with the share of faculty with other doctoral degrees. Law and economics is a major area of legal scholarship based on citations in the law literature and other impact rankings. In recognition of the increased importance of law and economics in legal education, in 2006 Vanderbilt University established a joint J.D./Ph.D. program in law and economics. We provide information on the genesis and operation of the program.

It must be fall, if the next generation of rankings scholarship is going up on ssrn!

Senator Barbara Boxer Issues Press Release, Letter To ABA

And it's about law school transparency.  It's right on the merits.  Suffice to say, however, it would have been better if it hadn't quoted Bob Morse from US News kvetching about inaccurate reporting (does critiquing deceptive reporting really require a cite to US News?) and suggested that Morse's letter is one indicator that "independent oversight must surely be part of any reform proposal"?   

I've cut and pasted the email I just received after the jump.

Blogging On Law School Financial Aid & The New York Times

Lots of people have been reading and pondering yesterday's New York Times article, Law Students Lose the Grant Game as Schools Win.  (Listen to a podcast with article author David Segal here - go to 26:10 to cut straight to the discussion.)  I thought it might be useful to aggregate all the relevant blog posts.

Al Brophy had an early comment here.

Volokh features posts by Kenneth Anderson, Orin Kerr, and Eugene.  

Paul Caron has a post up (with extensive NYT excerpt) at TaxProf.

Law School Transparency proposes a new disclosure standard.

Mike Dorf talks about law schools and the antitrust exemption here.

Student comments on the piece are over at Nuts & Boalts.

Jerry Organ's paper The Impact of Scholarship Programs on the Culture of Law School is here.

Update:

The WSJ Blog weighs in here.

Jeff Lipshaw ponders the nature of full disclosure here.

Quick Takes on US News 2012 Law School Rankings

Continuing in the tradition of years past (going way back to 2007), I have prepared some quick takes on the most recent US News law school rankings.  This year I'm focusing on the correlations between a series of variables (peer assessment, lawyer/judge assessment, 75th and 25th percentile LSAT and GPA of entering class).  And because I'm struggling -- again -- with typepad over the format of the tables, here they are in pdf form.  Couple of quick observations here.  There is a very high (.96) correlation between peer assessment and lawyer/judge assessment for all 190 schools and also for the top 53 (the "top fifty" includes a three-way tie at fifty) (.95).  The correlation between peer and lawyer/judge assessment for the forty-five unranked schools (what is now called tier two) is substantially lower, though still high (.78).  I might hazard a guess here that tier two schools have stronger regional reputations among judges and lawyers than among academics.

I might add something else here, about the rankings phenomenon in general.  There seems to have been much less talk of rankings this year than I remember in past years; perhaps this just reflects the fact that I've been quite busy of late, so I haven't been reading the blogs (or talking to my colleagues for that matter).  But maybe something else is going on; "rankings" is a game we play when we're affluent.  We want to know how we rank in all sorts of things when things are going well.  However, when we're all concerned with getting jobs, or helping our students get jobs, or worried about how we're going to do more with less, the old talk of rankings just isn't so important.  If there's something positive about the new austerity, it may be that we're all returning to the basics of trying to provide a solid grounding for our students.  Let me hazard two other hypotheses that may account for some of the decline in "rankings talk."  First, the significant problems with employment numbers have caused a number of people to lose confidence in rankings.  In fact, as Brian Leiter has pointed out, there are all sorts of other problems with the manipulable data that go into the rankings.  Second -- and I think this is really subsidary to my previous hypotheses -- to the extent that academics study rankings (like the relationship between US News rankings and law review citations), perhaps we have fished out, at least for the time being, the rankings area.

Update as of March 21: Just to follow up on this post a little, here is another table, which breaks out the peer and lawyer/judge assessments by rank (all schoosl, top 53, and unranked). As in past years, the peer assessment scores are lower at each level than are the lawyer/judge scores. And as I hypothesized in the first paragraph, there is greater difference in the lawyer/judge scores among the unranked schools than in the top 53.

Bard on US News Rankings

Over at HealthLawProf Blog, Texas Tech law prof Jennifer Bard (pictured) has posted some thoughtful observations on the US News rankings, with emphasis on whether applicants / students are (or should be) using a law school's rank as a proxy for employability.  Here's the link.

2012 US News Law School Rankings Analysis Part I

Sure, it's only 2011, but the new 2012 U.S. News rankings are out.  The most surprising thing about this year's U.S. News law school rankings is that the magazine (if you can properly call it that) managed to embargo the list right up until its release on the web.  They did so by deferrring sale of the hard copy version of the rankings until April 5 - thus denying thieves, snoops and other crafty characters a chance to score a photocopy of the new rankings prior to the moment of formal release.  Unfortunately, while you can embargo the list, you can't silence the individual listees quite as well.  Thus, at 8:36 pm this evening, David Bernstein reported the true fact that Arkansas is ranked 84th by US News.

In these days leading up to publication, commentators have been chit chatting about a few issues.  First, there is the matter of how US News calculates a school's placement success.  There were hints that the rankings would reflect a new method more reliant on date of graduation employment numbers.  Not so much.  This year, as last year, 4% of a school's total points came from its at-graduation placement rate, while 14% were derived from its 9 month rate.  This year, however, US News is calculating these numbers a tad differently.  This from their new methodology memo:

Changes in US News Data

According to Bob Morse's blog (here), law schools can expect some changes to the data reported in connection with the US News annual rankings:

In an effort to make our law school employment data more reflective of the current state of legal employment, U.S. News has modified how we calculate the employment rates that are used in the new law school rankings. We will also be publishing more detailed law school employment data on our website as part of the new rankings. * * * 

At U.S. News, we work to make meaningful and fair comparisons, based on industry-accepted data. We provide a great deal of information to prospective students and serve an important function as an intermediary between them and schools such as yours. We have become popular because people value the information we provide, and many schools have benefitted from the exposure our coverage has given them.

To accomplish this, we rely on a certain amount of goodwill and ethical behavior from the various institutions that we survey, and our experience has been that the vast majority of them behave ethically. It is not our role to be setting industry standards nor enforcing them. However it is our responsibility to provide accurate information to our readers. To eliminate some of the gaming that seems to be taking place, we have changed the way we compute employment rates for the rankings due out March 15. In addition, we will also be publishing more career data than we have in the past in an effort to help students more completely understand the current state of legal employment. We think more still needs to be done.

The main responsibility to gather data and implement quality standards lies with the ABA, which also accredits law schools. For whatever reason, it appears that some schools do not treat the ABA reporting rules with the seriousness one would assume. We understand that the ABA is working toward the creation of tighter, more meaningful standards, which seem promising.

The statement that US News recognizes that the "main responsibility to gather data and implement quality standards lies with the ABA" reminds me that (unfortunately) US News -- not the ABA -- is the tail wagging the dog of much of what is going on in legal education.  

Most Productive Environmental Law Scholars 2005-2009 at "Top" Environmental Schools

Here's my list, in rank order, of professors with number of law review publications during the period 2005-2009  listed in parenthesis after school affiliation (US News ranked programs only).  Methodology explained below the fold.

1.  Dan Farber (Berkeley) (31)

2. John R. Nolon (Pace) (16)

     J.B. Ruhl (FSU) (16)

4.  Lisa Heinzerling (Georgetown) (14)

5. Hope Babcock (Georgetown) (13)

    Richard J. Lazarus (Georgetown) (13)

7. Robert L. Rabin (Stanford) (11)

      Jason Czarnezki (Vermont) (11) [ -- unintentionally omitted from first post.  BJC]

9. Robin Kundis Craig (FSU) (10)

     Jim Rossi (FSU) (10)       

11.  Holly Doremus (Berkeley) (9)

        Robert Howse (NYU) (9)

UNH Whips Franklin Pierce In Rankings Battle, Or The Power Of Brand

Gordon Smith has posted the final rankings of his crowdsourced survey about law schools.  Perhaps the single most important thing it teaches us is: brand matters.  We all believed this already.  But either accidentally or intentionally, Gordon tested this theory with his new rankings by including one law school under two names: Franklin Pierce and the University of New Hampshire.  The two schools partnered this year and as of this past fall, the Pierce name was replaced by UNH.  So which school does the crowd think superior?  No surprise, State U fared far better than Franklin Pierce.  UNH scored a 43; Pierce a 33.  UNH jumped 20 spots in the reputation rankings simply by changing its name.

Of course, there might be substantive reasons for this.  For example, perhaps the subjects understood that Pierce would be improving in the future due to support of a big university.  But more likely they responded to their overall impression of the University of New Hampshire brand.  If you think Pierce is pleased by this reputational lift, imagine the excitement among folks at Southern New England School of Law (aka UMass Law) as they imagine the incremental benefit of their merger!

Vote For The Best Law Schools And Law Reviews!

Gordon Smith, over at Conglomerate, is trying to get a crowdsourced ranking of both 185 law schools and a ton of law reviews.  Go to vote for law schools here and law reviews here.  It's an ambitious project: he'll need a ton of readers to invest some time into this project in order to get decent data.  Brian Leiter already generated a more modest ranking of only 55 schools using this same approach.

Gauging The Impact Of A Voluntary LSAT

The ABA is toying with the idea of eliminating the current accreditation standard mandating use of standardized tests at admission.  The National Law Journal has the skinny.  ABA accreditation standard 503 currently provides that:

A law school shall require each applicant for admission as a first year J.D. student to take a valid and reliable admission test to assist the school and the applicant in assessing the applicant’s capability of satisfactorily completing the school’s educational program.

Interpretation 503-1 elaborates:

A law school that uses an admission test other than the Law School Admission Test sponsored by the Law School Admission Council shall establish that such other test is a valid and reliable test to assist the school in assessing an applicant’s capability to satisfactorily complete the school’s educational program.

As a practical matter, almost every law school demands the LSAT (though a few will accept the GMAT under certain circumstances.)  What might it mean for the ABA to drop this requirement?

Commentators have varied views.  Brian Leiter argues that it would cause law schools to "focus more on the prior academic record of the applicant and other qualities that might be indicative of likely success."  But he adds that it might result in outsized reliance on nominal GPA - irrespective of the difficulty of the undergraduate program - simply because the US News will insist on some putatively objective metric.

Vivia Chen, over at The Careerist, argues:

My hunch is that the law schools that won't require LSATs will be either newly opened law schools looking for bodies or those rated at the bottom....I fear that schools that don't require the extra hurdle of the LSAT will attract even more applicants (probably some very weak ones, who shouldn't be in law school in the first place)--and that the cycle of bad schools and jobless graduates will escalate. My bet is that established law schools will continue to require LSATs. 

Brian implies that elmination of the rule might signal the demise of a required LSAT.  Chen (and David Yellen, Dean at Loyola Chicago) believe otherwise.  Indeed, in their view, the act of requiring the LSAT might function as signal of quality: the school would, in effect, show its bravado by exposing itself to quantitative comparison with peers.   

My own sense is that things could go a couple of different ways.  First, US News could create a ranking method that effectively forces law schools to accept the LSAT.  For example, if they were to continue heavy reliance on the LSAT, schools could be punished for deviating from the norm.  The ABA doesn't require schools to produce employed-at-graduation data, but US News relies on it nonetheless.  (Admittedly, because of their current method of gap-filling for schools that fail to provide this info, the US News methodology can have the effect of helping non-compliant schools.)

If US News stops relying on the data, schools might still rely on it as a signal of quality.  Under these circumstances, however, the GMAT - or perhaps even the GRE - might become widely accepted alternatives.  (On an unrelated note, shouldn't high school students seeking admission to an elite college take both the SAT and the ACT?  They're similar but by no means identical.  And I'll bet few students can assess, ex ante, where they'll perform best.  Similarly, if law schools accept multiple tests, the savvy applicant will take all of them - and forward only their best results.  This is currently impossible because LSAC tracks the testing experience of each applicant.)

Or perhaps, in some dream world, schools will no longer require these tests, gather a full portfolio of each applicant, conduct a searching analysis, and admit the best candidates overall.

No.  That won't happen. 

Of this I am confident:  as long as shoppers continue to purchase, and everyone in the law world continues to discuss, US News law school rankings, the magazine will continue to figure out a way to produce them.  At this point in history, it seems to be their biggest product.  You gonna ask Coke to stop making Coke?

U.S. News to Rank Third Tier Law Schools?

Apparently the U.S. News is considering numerically ranking third tier law schools.  Story here.

Data Reporting to US News

Robert Morse blogs on law school data reporting in today's post here.

Determining the Size of Top Environmental Faculties

 
Before I became an Associate Dean, I never contemplated that taking a faculty headcount could be complicated.  But I have become (too) familiar now with the ABA Annual Questionnaire on which a law school must report its “student/faculty ratio.”  On the faculty side, that requires a break-down into categories of (1) tenured and tenure-track folks, (2) clinicians and legal writing instructors not on the tenure track, (3) adjuncts, emeriti and non-tenure track administrators who teach, librarians who teach, and teachers from other parts of the university.  With that in mind, I should not have been surprised at the difficulties I encountered in determining the relative size of the “environmental faculty” at my school compared to environmental faculties at other schools with strong programs in this speciality. 

My goal was to benchmark the size of our faculty for informational purposes, as we were coming into a new faculty recruiting season.  My intended methodology was somewhat simple.   Get the list of the “Top Environmental Programs” from the latest US News rankings and count up the number of faculty members at each school who were listed in the 2009-2010 American Association of Law Schools Faculty Directory as teaching “Environmental Law” (I did this before the issuance of the most recent directory).  How naïve of me!

Using my own faculty as a test case, I quickly determined that the AALS Directory lists of “Environmental Law” teachers might be both over-inclusive and under-inclusive.  For example, two of my faculty colleagues were listed, even though they hadn’t taught environmental courses in over a decade.  Other key environmental faculty members weren’t listed at all.  (As to why that was the case, I know that depending on the school, responsibility for confirming listings in the AALS Directory usually is the responsibility of the Dean’s Office or individual faculty members.  You won't drag it out of me.)

My colleague Emily Gold Waldman and I then consulted the website of each school with a "Top Environmental Program" (in US News lingo).  In several cases, the school’s web-list of “Environmental Law” faculty members included adjuncts, “affiliated” faculty members who did not seem either to teach or write in the environmental law area, or program administrators who were not tenured or tenure-track faculty members.  What’s a data-head to do then? 

We decided to make a person-by-person determination about each individual listed either in the AALS Faculty Directory or on the school’s website as teaching "Environmental Law."  If the faculty member’s bio page revealed any information that would suggest that she or he teaches or writes in the area of “environmental law,” construed as broadly as possible, we counted them as "Environmental Law" faculty members.

Because Emily and I are  not environmental law folks ourselves, we then asked two colleagues with experience in environmental law to review and confirm my person-by-person classifications, refining the data as necessary.

Our preliminary counts are shown in the chart above.  The raw data -- with notations of any discretionary determinations -- are available here.  Comments, corrections and suggestions very welcome.

US News Law School Rankings History: 1997-2010

Just because I know people love to pore over this stuff, I've gone back through the US News law school rankings over the past decade and a half and put together a chart showing overall rankings for slots 18 through 50 in selected years.  Rankings races are clearly fun; it's a shame that they don't put a note on the listings stating "for entertainment purposes only." 

 

	1997 (’96 school data)	2001 (’99 school data)	2003 (’02 school data)	2007 (’05 school data)	2010 (’08 school data)
18	Texas	Vandy	Southern Cal	Southern Cal/Vandy tied at 17	Southern Cal
19	Illinois	Minnesota	Minnesota	GW	Wash U
20	Notre Dame	W & L	W & L (tied at 19)	Minnesota (tied at 19)	BU
21	W & L (tied at 20)	Iowa	Iowa	Wash U (tied at 19)	Emory (tied at 20)
22	BC	UNC	BC	BU	Minnesota (tied at 20)
23	Minnesota	BC	GW (tied at 22)	Iowa (tied at 22)	Indiana – Blm
24	GW	GW (tied at 23)	Notre Dame (tied at 22)	Notre Dame (tied at 22)	Illinois (tied at 23)
25	U Washington	Illinois (tied at 23)	Illinois	W & L (tied at 22)	Notre Dame (tied at 23)
26	Fordham	Emory	Wash U (tied at 25)	Emory	BC
27	Georgia	Notre Dame (tied at 26)	Emory	BC	Iowa (tied at 26)
28	Iowa	U Washington (tied at 26)	BU	Wm & Mary (tied for 27)	Wm & Mary
29	Emory	Wm & Mary	Wm & Mary (tied at 28)	Illinois (tied for 27)	GW (tied at 28)
30	Colorado	Georgia (tied at 29)	UNC (tied at 28)	UNC (tied for 27)	Fordham
31	BU	Wash U (tied at 29)	BYU	U Washington (tied for 27)	Alabama (tied at 30)
32	Connecticut	BYU	Fordham (tied at 31)	Fordham	UNC (tied at 30)
33	BYU	Fordham (tied at 32)	UC Davis (tied at 31)	Wisconsin (tied for 32)	U Washington (tied at 30)
34	UNC (tied at 33)	Hastings (tied at 32)	Georgia (tied at 31)	BYU	W & L (tied at 30)
35	Wake Forest	BU (tied at 32)	Wisconsin (tied at 31)	UC Davis (tied for 34)	UC Davis
36	Wm & Mary	Wisconsin	Hastings	Georgia (tied for 34)	Georgia (tied at 35)
37	Wash U	Indiana - Blm	Wake Forest (tied at 36)	George Mason	Wisconsin (tied at 35)
38	Wisconsin	Ohio State (tied at 37)	Indiana – Blm	Indiana – Blm (tied for 37)	Ohio St (tied at 35)
39	UC Davis	Arizona (tied at 37)	Ohio State (tied at 38)	Ohio State	Hastings
40	Arizona	Wake Forest (tied at 37)	George Mason	Wake Forest (tied for 39)	Wake Forest
41	Utah	UC Davis	Colorado (tied at 40)	Florida	BYU
42	Case Western	Connecticut (tied at 41)	Connecticut (tied at 40)	Maryland	George Mason (tied for 41)
43	Tennessee	Tulane	Utah (tied at 40)	American	Arizona
44	Indiana – Blm	Utah (tied at 43)	Arizona	SMU (tied at 43)	American (tied for 43)
45	Ohio St	Colorado	Tulane	Tulane (tied at 43)	Tulane (tied for 43)
46	Maryland	Alabama	Alabama (tied at 45)	Alabama (tied at 43)	Colorado (tied for 43)
47	Arizona St	Arizona St	Florida (tied at 45)	Arizona (tied at 43)	Utah (tied for 43)
48	Tulane	Tennessee (tied at 47)	Maryland (tied at 45)	Hastings (tied at 43)	Maryland (tied for 43)
49	New Mexico (tied at 48)	Baylor	U Washington (tied at 45)	Colorado (tied at 43)	SMU
50	Houston	Cincinnati (tied at 49)	SMU	Connecticut	Cardozo (tied for 49)

 

The Ultimate Law School Reputation Survey

Following on my recent Leiter post deconstructing US News law school reputation rankings, Brian has created a Condorcet survey seeking to determine what law professors value when assessing the quality of other law schools.  What matters to you when you contemplate law school reputation?  Take the survey here.

Leiter's Top 40 Poll, the Sisk Rankings, US News, and Law Review Citations

I know that Brian Leiter was just having some fun with his internet poll on the top 40 law schools, (with the final results -- what one  might call "the definitive ranking of the top 40 law schools, 2010 edition" here) but I figured that I'd compare the results of the Leiter poll with the Sisk data (and some other standbys -- the US News peer assessment and lawyer/judge scores and the Washington and Lee Law Library citations study, a/k/a the Doyle data).

So....

Variable1 Variable 2   r rho N

Leiter study Sisk study  .70 .77 40

Leiter study Peer 2011 -.96 -.97 39

Leiter study Law/J 2011 -.91 -.90 39

Leiter study Journ02-09 -.81 -.84 39

Sisk study Peer 2011 -.74 -.81 39

Sisk study Law/J 2011 -.66 -.75 39

Sisk study Journ02-09 -.68 -.75 39

Peer 2011 Law/J 2011 .96 .93 39

Peer 2011 Journ02-09 .85 .85 39

Law/J 2011 Journ02-09 .81 .84 39

r = Pearson correlation, rho = Spearman rank-order correlation

All correlations are significant (p < .0001).  N is 39 rather than 40 for most correlations because data for California-Irvine are available only for Leiter ranks and Sisk ranks.

A couple of things stand out here -- there's a high correlation between the Leiter ranks and the Sisk ranks (.7) -- but there's a really high correlation (.96) between the Leiter ranks and the US News peer assessment data.  The Leiter voters and the US News voters are coming to very similar conclusions....

Related posts on Sisk et al.'s study are here, here, here, and here (a fun post!)  More of my thoughts on the relationship between law review citations and law schools are here.

Scatterplot of Sisk/Leiter Scores and US News Peer Assessment

Following up on my scatterplots post yesterday, I thought that I'd post a larger (and easier to see) plot of the Sisk/Leiter weighted scores against the US News' peer assessment scores. And one with both the straight and the polynomial lines drawn on the plot.

You may want to click on the image at right to pull up a slightly larger version -- or here for a pdf, which is a little easier to see.  The red line illustrates the straight-line plot; the green line is a polynomial fit to the curved data.  One thing that I increasingly think about when I look at the data is how a small number of schools have really terrific performance.

Fun With Scatterplots: The Sisk/Leiter Scores and Law Review Citations....

Well, it's a Saturday morning and I've been spending a lot of time reading scholarship of AALS candidates -- always fun and exciting and inspiring ...  but also intense and exhausting.

Now it's time for a little fun.  How about a series of scatterplots that diagram the Sisk data and a bunch of other data that I've been dealing with!  You may recall that I posted a matrix correlating these data:  Sisk weighted score, US News peer assessment, US News lawyer/judge assessment, 25th percentile GPA,  GPA midpoint, 75th percentile GPA, 25th percentile LSAT, 50th percentile LSAT, 75th percentile LSAT, percent acceptance, and the school's bar pass percentage in the jurisdiction where the most students take the bar divided by the overall bar pass percentage in that jurisdiction. 

Below are a series of scatterplots that diagram those same factors.  Click on the image to bring up a more readable version.   (Here's a pdf version, too, which you may find easier to read.)

Focusing for a moment on the top row and the second column in from the  left (which plots the Sisk/Leiter weighted scores against US News Peer assessment scores), there is a curvilinear relationship.  The linear correlation is .80.  When a second-degree polynomial is fit to that data, the correlation rises to .91.  The square of those correlations indicates that the linear fit accounts for 65% of the common variance and the polynomial fit accounts for 84%.

The scatterplots suggest some of the other relationships are curvilinear as well.  And on that I hope to talk some more soon.