What's on your mind?

So far as I can recall, we've never had an open thread here -- so I figure it's well past time to ask you all who're blurking in the lounge: what's on your mind?

Comments

[msbilder]

Hi Al--is it possible to figure out how many places in the rankings an individual school might be able to move by hiring one or two of the folks with lots of citations? If one were playing "fantasy law school" who would one want on the faculty if the only measurement for a ranking was the Leiter/Sisk statistic?

[Alfred Brophy]

Yes--the fantasy law school game! Joseph Liu blogged about this a few years back: http://www.concurringopinions.com/archives/2005/11/fantasy_law_sch_1.html

Really interesting question. You could very easily figure out how much an individual would add to a law school's mean. Let me take UNC as an example. It had a mean of 132 (and a mean rank of 34). It looks like Sisk calculated that off of 36 tenured faculty. So I'm guessing those faculty had something like 4752 citations from January 2005 to January 2010. If UNC added another faculty member with 1000 citations over that period, the mean would have increased to 155, which would have put UNC near Florida State, whose mean rank is 19, I think.

Adding one more person wouldn't move the median much, and to know how much would require running a westlaw search on each of the 36 faculty Sisk included in the study.

1000 would be a *heck* of a lot of citations for one person over a five year period, of course. A heck of a lot. Here's a link to Brian Leiter's list of the most cited faculty in a number of areas, which shows that some -- not many, but some -- people do even better than 1000 citations in 5 years. The vast majority of even those on Leiter's highly cited list have only a fraction of 1000, however.
http://www.leiterrankings.com/new/2010_scholarlyimpact.shtml

Adding one person could make an important difference for many schools -- but that one person is mighty difficult to locate, I'd imagine.

[Jeff Yates]

Al,

Two quick things - neither is a major matter, but you asked what was on our minds, so ....

First, I am interested in readers' thoughts on class materials on the Patriot Act - specifically reasonably short articles, chapters, or other readigs on it that explain it well, are even-handed, and relatively recent (say, after 2006).

Second, I was sorry to see that the prawfs post on podium filler positions isn't getting more comments - what's up with that - c'mon, that would be interesting information folks :-)
http://prawfsblawg.blogs.com/prawfsblawg/2010/09/podium-filling-visitor-spots-for-2011.html

[Alfred Brophy]

Thanks, Jeff--I'm wondering if it's early yet for schools to be thinking about filling podium visits for next year? My sense -- though this may very well be wrong -- is that a lot of that gets done in the late fall and early spring?

[John Nelson]

Here's a question:

What value does, and should, area specific LLMs provide? A post over on the PropertyProf blog asks about the value of a Real Estate LLM. See ( http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/property/2010/09/property-llms.html ).

I'm on record on that site arguing that the practical purpose is better and more cost effectively solved through CLEs.

Which leads to another question: Do we lawyers (and you law professors) sometimes overlook the value of CLEs?

The CLEs I have attended so far run the gamut of worthless networking events to incredibly informative on discrete areas of the law, and some in-between. They remind me, in some ways, of elective courses in law school -- especially those taught by adjuncts. Some are fantastic, some are not -- but most, if you spend your own time at the least, can be informative.

That's what's on my mind. And money.