The Faculty Lounge

Before the JD: New AALS Study on Why Students Do or Don't Choose Law

The AALS has just released a study of 22,000 undergraduates and 2800 1L's in its effort to better understand what leads people to choose (or not choose) to pursue a JD.   Karen Sloan at the National Law Journal reports on the study.  Here is some of the juicy stuff:

Half of the undergraduates considering law school have at least one parent with an advanced degree, despite the fact that only 12 percent of people between 45 and 65 nationwide have such a degree. Put another way, applicants from economically privileged backgrounds comprise a disproportionate of the law school applicant pool.

Undergraduates who are interested in an advanced degree report seeing more information on campus about master’s degree, Ph.D.s and Masters in Business degree than about law school, and say their college professors talked about those programs more than a J.D.

The overall cost of a law degree and poor work-life balance were the reasons cited most often by undergraduates for potentially not going to law school, and the three-year length of J.D. programs was another common deterrent.

Location was the most important criterion for choosing a school, according to the first-year students. But the other criteria shifted according to Law School Admission Test scores. Those with scores of 165 or higher were more concerned with the status and prestige of campuses, while respondents with lower scores weight bar pass rates and overall costs more heavily.

Law school comes on the radar of many students quite early. More than half of law students begin thinking about law school before they get to college, and a third consider it even before high school.

Hiring Announcement: St Thomas University School of Law

ST. THOMAS UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF LAW seeks to fill entry-level tenure-track or, lateral tenure-track,-position(s) beginning in Fall 2019 in the areas of: Contracts, Business Associations, Tax Law, Criminal Law & Procedure, Evidence, Health Law, Tax Clinic, Academic Support and Bar Prep. Other doctrinal areas may be considered depending on the institutional needs. All applicants must have a strong academic record and be committed to outstanding teaching, scholarship and service. Prior teaching experience preferred.

St. Thomas University School of Law trains lawyers capable of applying legal principles to address and solve problems in an increasingly complex and changing society. The rigorous academic program of the Law School emphasizes lifelong learning and scholarship in a personalized, caring environment under Catholic auspices with a diverse student body and faculty. To this end, the Law School remains committed in teaching, scholarship, and service, to fostering a public order of human dignity, to training lawyers sensitive to the needs of the region’s underrepresented communities, and to expanding access to professional opportunities which includes active partnerships with business, government and the South Florida community.

St. Thomas encourages applications from all candidates, including women and minorities, who will contribute to our stimulating and diverse cultural and intellectual environment.
The Faculty Recruitment Committee will review applications on a rolling basis, and anticipate attending the AALS Faculty Recruitment Conference in October 2018. Applicants should send a cover letter indicating teaching and scholarly interests, a curriculum vitae to Professor Mark Wolff, Chair Faculty Recruitment Committee at St. Thomas University School of Law, 16401 NW 37th Avenue, Miami Gardens, FL 33054 or email mwolff@stu.edu.

AALS CFP: New Voices in Legislation

This just in:

The AALS Section on Legislation & Law of the Political Process is pleased to announce that it will host a “New Voices in Legislation” program during the 2019 AALS Annual Meeting in New Orleans, LA. This works-in-progress program will bring together junior and senior scholars in the field of legislation for the purpose of providing the junior scholars with feedback and guidance on their draft articles. Scholars whose papers are selected will present their work in small panel sessions. A senior scholar will moderate each panel and lead discussion about the draft article.

Eligibility: The New Voices Program will be open to full-time faculty members from AALS member schools who are untenured or have been tenured for two years or less. All scholars, whether or not presenting a paper or moderating a discussion, are welcome to attend the program and participate in discussions.

Submission Requirements: Submissions should be drafts of articles relating to legislation and the law of the political process, including articles related to legislative structure, the legislative process, the budget process, statutory interpretation, and deliberation. Submissions should be near completion and should not exceed 30,000 words, including footnotes. The purpose of the program is to provide junior scholars with feedback that can be incorporated into their works-in-progress; as a result, articles are ineligible for the program if they are expected to be in print at the time of the program in January 2019. However, articles that already have been submitted to journals for publication, and accepted for publication, are not ineligible for this reason.

Submission Process: To be considered for participation in the program, please email a copy of the paper and abstract to Anthony O’Rourke, aorourke@buffalo.edu, by Sunday, October 1, 2018. Selected participants will be notified in early November 2018. Final drafts of those who are selected must be submitted by December 15, 2018.

Senior Scholars: If you are interested is serving as a commentator for one of the junior papers, please contact Anthony O’Rourke, aorourke@buffalo.edu.

Call for Papers—Judicial Diversity in Transnational Courts — AALS 2019 New Orleans

 The AALS Sections on European and African Law invites submissions of paper proposals for the upcoming panel, “Judicial Diversity in Transnational Courts,” which will take place at the 2019 AALS Annual Meeting (New Orleans, January 2-6 2019). Submissions from junior scholars are encouraged. Confirmed speakers include Laurence Burgorgue-Larsen, Professor at the Sorbonne Law School at the University Paris I; Josephine Jarpa Dawuni, Assistant Professor of Political Science, Howard University; Sally J. Kenney, Newcomb College Endowed Chair Professor, Tulane University; and Iyiola Solanke, Professor of Law, Leeds University, UK. The proceeds of the panel will be published as a special issue of the Connecticut Journal of International Law.

Program Summary: Why do so few women and people of color serve on transnational courts and tribunals? Given the paucity of seats available to each nation on the international bench, it should be easy for states to nominate, vote, or appoint them in greater numbers. Yet, despite a series of initiatives to increase gender parity, women, particularly women of color, continue to be conspicuously underrepresented on these courts. Why does it matter? There is now an extensive body of scholarship discussing the reasons why domestic judiciaries might strive for more diversity, including increased legitimacy, dispelling stereotypes, higher quality decision-making and outcomes, and internal institutional change. Are there additional, specific benefits to greater judicial diversity to be expected at the transnational level? Convening leading scholars in the fields of equality law and transnational courts, this panel will address these questions with a special focus on European and African regional courts. 

Submission guidelines:

• To be considered, submit a title and abstract (300 words maximum) to Mathilde Cohen (mathilde.cohen@uconn.edu) and Fernanda Nicola (fnicola@american.edu) by August 15, 2018.
• Paper drafts will be due on December 15, 2018 to be circulated among panel participants. Final papers will be due on March 1 and should be between 7,000 and 8,500 words.

AALS CFP: Corruption and Legitimation

This just in:

The Anthropology & Law and Law & Social Science Sections invite paper proposals for a joint panel on “Corruption and Legitimation,” to be held at the 2019 meeting of the American Association of Law Schools (New Orleans, January 2-6, 2019). How does government corruption work and what effects does it have? Equally importantly, what constitutes corruption in any given society, and how do we recognize corruption’s inverse, legitimation? The panel seeks to address these questions from a range of methodological and disciplinary perspectives.

We welcome proposals for papers that discuss, among other topics, local perceptions of government action; the conditions for its validity in particular places; debates in legal, scholarly, or popular work about what constitutes corruption; as well as research analyzing recognized corruption and its effects. We hope this panel will lead to a stimulating discussion about both the corruption in government and the malleability of the very concept of corruption.

Confirmed speakers include:

Mary Fan, University of Washington
Eugene Mazo, University of Baltimore
Christopher Robertson, University of Arizona
Mary Szto, Valparaiso University 

We will select the remaining panelists through this call for papers.

Please send an abstract (around 500 words) outlining the paper that you’d like to present by May 1, 2018, to Anya Bernstein (anyabern@buffalo.edu) and David Kwok (dkwok@uh.edu).

 

The Role of Evidence in Social Science

There is no law school in the U.S. (nor, I would venture, in the U.K.) where the curriculum fails to address the importance of social science to law practice. Regrettably, social scientists do not always understand that the lessons can also run in the other direction, especially when it comes to the marshaling of facts. This became apparent to me when I read a review of my recent book, Interrogating Ethnography, on the British website Social Science Space.  The reviewer, a consulting sociologist named Robert Dingwall, panned the book, which of course happens to every author.  But he also missed the entire point of the subtitle – Why Evidence Matters – which I fear may tell us something more troubling about the practice of sociology.

Dingwall, who is co-editor of the SAGE Handbook of Research Management, is highly skeptical of documentary fact-checking, which he considers a “second-best method.” Yes, documentation has its limitations. But so do human informants, witnesses, and interview subjects, whose statements, as lawyers well know, are predictably affected by poor memory, self-interest, skewed perspective, implicit biases, the desire to please, and sometimes outright prejudice or deception. Dingwall may believe that ethnographers can effectively weed through all that, but the best of them – for example, Matthew Desmond, Mary Pattillo, Terry Williams, Kathryn Edin, and, again, Mitchell Duneier – realize that documentary fact-checking is an essential tool for social scientists.  Interrogating Ethnography therefore illustrated various means of fact-checking ethnographies, with results that ranged from disproof to solid verification.

This brings us to the heart of Dingwall’s review, which is his defense of Alice Goffman’s On the Run. I had no plans to revisit these issues – having already said my piece – but Dingwall’s argument presents a good opportunity to elucidate the role of factual accuracy in social science.

AALS CFP: Structural Facilitation Of Property Markets

This just in:  

The Section on Property Law is pleased to announce a Call for Papers from which at least
one presenter will be selected as a panelist for the Section’s program to be held during the AALS
2018 Annual Meeting in San Diego on Thursday, January 4, 2018 from 10:30 a.m. to 12:15 p.m.

Topic Description:

A variety of legal doctrines, systems, and institutions have emerged
over time to facilitate the effective operation of markets in property by adding
value to property assets, adding certainty to and streamlining the process of
property transactions, adding accessibility to property, or otherwise proving
greater security for property rights. At other times, informal norms may
emerge to accomplish similar aims.

These structural facilitators are, indeed, sometimes features of the
property system itself (component parts of its governance) and at other times
operate outside but ancillary to the system. Some of these arise spontaneously
by market demands while other elements of the property law infrastructure
may or may not be possible only by means of government intervention in the
markets.

Some facilitators are deliberately designed to benefit the property
system, while others simply have that effect. Some are arguably designed to
enlarge “freedom” while others could be described as restricting “freedom” in
order to save it, i.e. intentionally placing limits on autonomy to enhance the
value of the property rights that remain.

Examples of such facilitators that may be discussed by the panelists
include: information systems like recording regimes or registries; traceability
mechanisms like blockchain technology; content limits like the numerus
clausus principle; fairness, equality, and anti-discrimination principles geared
toward enlarging property ownership markets; prohibitions on certain
restraints on alienation; or at other time restraints on alienation like with
fraudulent conveyancing doctrines. Land use and public law systems
themselves create a legal infrastructure designed to facilitate property
ownership or to manage property conflicts. Other examples of facilitating
industries or polices could include: big data; financial markets; banks and real
estate financing; brokers; title and other insurance; and tax preferences,
among others.

AALS CFP: Legal Implications of Social and Political Activism in Sports

This just in:

AALS Section on Law and Sports Co-sponsored by the AALS Section on Contracts

When QB Colin Kaepernick kneeled during the national anthem at NFL games during the 2016 football season, he quickly became a symbol of a renewed era of athlete activism, triggering collegiate and professional athlete activists across the country to join demonstrations and sparking national conversations about racism and police brutality. But athlete activism is much broader, extending to philanthropic work such as NFL wide receiver Brandon Marshall’s efforts to spread mental health awareness and Lebron James’ funding of college scholarships for inner-city youth. Professional athletes’ willingness to take public stands on political and social issues is reflected and reinforced by sports entities’ social responsibility initiatives. For example, the NCAA relocated men’s basketball championship games out of North Carolina in response to a state law that curbed anti-discrimination protections for transgender people. Most sports leagues and governing bodies regularly participate in socially responsible causes.

In short, the sports industry has adapted the tenets of corporate social responsibility to fit its uniquely visible profile and serve its communities. Consequently, a constant stream of information can be found in news reports that showcase league, team and player efforts to make sports healthier and safer at all levels, improve literacy, create and fill jobs, address gender and racial inequalities, fight disease and poverty, prevent substantive abuse, address domestic violence, and clean up the environment. However, in staking out positions on political, social, and health questions, sports industry participants face legal ramifications and risk.

This program examines both public and private law issues that arise whenever individuals and organizations among the complex network of relationships that define the sports industry try to make socially responsible choices or engage in social or political activism. For example, public expression from professional athletes may be circumscribed by their collective bargaining agreements and league/team personal conduct codes. Morality clauses in endorsement contracts may be triggered by an athlete’s statements or actions. The ability of leagues to implement their social responsibility programs is heavily affected by the buy-in of their constituent teams. Athletes and other sports entities may require reverse morality clauses to ensure their rights to disassociate from corporate relationships when company conduct leads to public opprobrium. First Amendment considerations must be reconciled with contractual obligations.

The program will include a speaker selected from this Call for Papers. The selected author will participate in the Section’s annual program on Thursday, January 4, 2017 from 10:30 a.m.-12:15 p.m. in San Diego, California. Only full-time faculty from AALS member institutions are eligible to submit papers. Authors must rely on their own institutions for funding to attend the conference.

The Journal of Legal Aspects of Sports will consider proposals submitted in response to this Call for Papers for inclusion in a Special Issue on Athlete Activism and Sports Industry Social Responsibility scheduled for publication in August 2018 and guest edited by Professors Arthur Miller (NYU Law) and Jodi Balsam (Brooklyn Law).

The deadline to submit a draft paper or abstract is Monday, August 21, 2017. Please e-mail your submission to Professor Ettie Ward, Chair of the Section on Law and Sports, at warde@stjohns.edu. Members of the Section’s Executive Committee will review submissions and communicate decisions by late September 2017.

Charlottesville, the Jim Crow South, and the Nazis

Brent Staples op-ed that links the Jim Crow South to the Nazis from last May is making the rounds again today, for obvious reasons.  One of the things Staples does is mention Jim Whitman's important new book, Hitler's American Model.  I posted a little bit about this last June, which I want to repost now:

James Whitman's fabulous new book Hitler's American Model explores the Nazis' use of American precedents on race laws.  There's a lot to say about it; I'd like to focus here on the fact that Whitman's book is much, much more about how Nazis thought about the US than about what the law in the US was, or whether there was some causation or "transplantation" from the southern US states to the Nazis.  The Nazis were plenty capable of coming up with vicious race laws all by themselves -- but this is largely the story of how Nazi lawyers interpreted and spoke about the US' history of conquering Native Americans and then segregating African Americans.  (There was, of course, criticism by the Nazis of the breakdown of the strict line separating the races in the US.)  If this had been written in the 1950s, at the height of the myth and symbol school of American studies, it would have been called something like "The image of southern US law in the Nazi legal mind."  Let me say to legal historians, you really need  to read this book, soon.  As I told a colleague this afternoon, this is the best book I've read in legal history in years, in large part I think because it seems so fresh.  I've read books that are deeper but none in recent years that seem so original and iconoclastic.

I've been obsessed with the Nazis of late (probably like a lot of readers).  Though I guess my interest in this goes back to the day as as a graduate student when I watched a bunch of Nazi era films at the Harvard film archives.  How, I continue to wonder, did the person who wrote and starred in Das Blaue Licht become a leading filmmaker for the Nazis?  I mean, my god, isn't that all about unjust persecution?  Did Leni Riefenstahl ever consider in her later years what her younger self (who wrote about the persecution of the witch) would have thought of the Nazis?  Maybe not.  I guess that's how self-delusion  works.

To return to my story, Whitman talks about a lot of things that are of interest to American legal historians, especially how the Nazis had a form of legal realism.  This will cause me to rewrite at least somewhat my essay on Karl Llewellyn's lost work against lynching.  But one of the more astonishing insights of many in Whitman's book is that Heinrich Krieger, who published a major study of the American race laws in 1936 also published an article, on Native Americans in the George Washington University Law Review in 1935.  Holy cow.  (And here I am thinking that the defense of the Confederacy and the constitutional vision of the pre-Civil War south in the Yale Law Journal in 1921 was bad).  To be fair, Krieger's article is really about how the Constitution does not quite cover the category of dependent citizenship that had been assigned to Native Americans.  If you didn't know Krieger was a Nazi lawyer, you wouldn't get that sense from this article, with maybe a few asides (such as a remark about the degeneration of Native Americans at 284).  Though there are some other places where he seems to doubt the wisdom of recognizing that Native Americans have the same rights as other citizens. (at 307-08.)  (And if you're interested in reading Krieger's book I've scanned it in here.)

I'm going to spend some time thinking all of this through, though I'm really slow at reading German these days, so this is going to be a long-term project for me.  What interests me most about this book is the legal theory and how American law looks through the eyes of the Nazis.  And how the Nazi perspective aligns -- or not -- with how we now think about the US' long history with race.  One comment stuck with me from Whitman -- that the Nazis complained that the Americans tried to hide some of their grosser race laws.

The image is of the Lee Statue in Charlottesville.

AALS CFP: Legal Competency at the Crossroads: Mental Disability & Family Law

This just in:

Co-Sponsored by the AALS Sections on Disability Law, Family and Juvenile Law, and Law, Medicine, and Health Care

Legal competency, the law’s recognition of an individual’s personhood and agency, represents a conceptual cornerstone for law and mental disability scholars. The success of the disability rights movements in fostering greater public support for economic and social rights for people with mental disabilities has generated, at least rhetorically, broader support for the law’s recognition of the decisional capacity of people with mental disabilities in these areas. The scope of scholarly inquiry has expanded in recent years from curbing state encroachment in private decision-making to crafting positive theories of rights for people with mental disabilities in sexuality, reproduction, marriage, and parenting.

This panel seeks to bring together legal scholars across several fields to explore emerging theory and doctrine in family law for people with mental disabilities. With its emphasis on intersectionality and cross-pollination, panelists will discuss such issues as assisted reproductive technology, parental termination, and sexual access. An explicit goal of this panel is to develop a research agenda for this emerging interdisciplinary area of legal scholarship. The Family Court Review, an interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed journal, has agreed to publish the program proceedings. For more information on publication guidelines and recent issues, see http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/%28ISSN%291744-1617;jsessionid=0F04F41C5579A8C616CC83AA114B131F.d03t04.

We encourage academics at all levels and from a broad range of backgrounds including but not limited to law and mental disability, disability rights, health law, and particularly family law to submit proposals for consideration. Please e-mail your abstract to Jasmine E. Harris at jeharris@ucdavis.edu by Wednesday, August 23rd.

AALS CFP: Keeping Up With The Changing Face Of The American Family

This just in:

Keeping Up with the Changing Face of the American Family

The AALS Sections on Family and Juvenile Law, Children and the Law, and Aging and the Law are pleased to announce a call for papers from which two to four presenters will be selected for the section’s program at the AALS 2018 Annual Meeting in San Diego, California. We will have a joint, half-day program with two consecutive panels. The date and time of the joint program is Friday, January 5, 2018 from 9 am - 12 noon. The two panels will be divided based on general topics, such as caregiving, family formation and regulation, family dissolution, or structural legal policy impacting children, parents, the elderly or families as a whole.

Here is an overview of the panel subject matter:

The composition and structure of the American family has changed significantly in the last 65 years. From the decline of marriage and fertility to the increase in blended families, interracial relationships, and single parenthood, the face of the family is visibly different. The legalization of same sex marriage, the rise in the number of working women and fathers who share in household and childcare responsibilities, and the growing number of aging family members who need daily care has also impacted how families function. In some ways federal and state family laws precipitated these changes and opened the door for the new trends, but in other ways the law has been mired down in tradition, making it more difficult for the modern family to operate. This panel explores the ways in which family law and other related laws lie behind the curve in areas such as reproduction, custody, companionship, and caretaking. Panelists will also examine the various consequences of this gap between law and the realities of families today, as well as consider ideas and current efforts being made to close the divide.

We ask that submissions fall generally or specifically under the above topics. The papers will be published in a 2018 symposium volume of Family Law Quarterly, the scholarly journal of the American Bar Association Section on Family Law. If you are interested in submitting your paper for consideration, please send it to jdweaver@smu.edu by August 21, 2017. Please use “AALS Call for Papers Submission” as the subject line of your email. We are particularly interested in submissions from junior faculty. Papers should be no longer than 11,000 words and no more than 100 footnotes. Papers that have been accepted for publication are not eligible for consideration because panelists will be publishing their papers in the Family Law Quarterly.

A committee appointed by the section chairs will review the submitted papers and notify the authors of the selected papers by September 25, 2017. All panelists, including the panelists selected from this call for papers, are responsible for paying their own annual meeting registration fee and travel expenses. If you have any questions about the call for papers or the Family Law Quarterly symposium, please contact Jessica Weaver.

AALS CFP: Professional Responsibility 2018 Works In Progress

This just in:

AALS Section on Professional Responsibility Call for Papers – 2018 AALS Annual Meeting  

The AALS Section on Professional Responsibility invites papers for its program “Professional Responsibility 2018 Works in Progress Workshop” at the AALS Annual Meeting in San Diego. Two papers will be selected from those submitted.  

WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION:  

This workshop will be an opportunity to test ideas, work out issues in drafts and interrogate a paper prior to submission. It will pair each work in progress scholar with a more senior scholar in the field who will lead a discussion of the piece and provide feedback. Successful papers should engage with scholarly literature and make a meaningful original contribution to the field or professional responsibility or legal ethics.  

ELIGIBILITY:  

Full-time faculty members of AALS member law schools are eligible to submit papers. Preference will be given to junior scholars focusing their work in the area of professional responsibility and legal ethics. Pursuant to AALS rules, faculty at fee-paid law schools, foreign faculty, adjunct and visiting faculty (without a full-time position at an AALS member law school), graduate students, fellows, and non-law school faculty are not eligible to submit. Please note that all faculty members presenting at the program are responsible for paying their own annual meeting registration fee and travel expenses.  

PAPER SUBMISSION PROCEDURE:  

Two papers will be selected by the Section’s Executive Committee for presentation at the AALS annual meeting.  

There is no formal requirement as to the form or length of proposals. However, the presenter is expected to have a draft for commentators one month prior to the beginning of the AALS conference.  

The paper MUST be a work in progress and cannot be published at the time of presentation. It may, however have been accepted for publication and be forthcoming.  

DEADLINE:  

Please email submissions to Ben Edwards, Associate Professor, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, William S. Boyd School of Law, at ben.edwards.unlv@gmail.com on or before September 30, 2017. The title of the email submission should read: “Submission – 2018 AALS Section on Professional Responsibility.” 

 

AALS CFP: New Voices In Legislation

This just in:

AALS Call for Papers: “New Voices in Legislation”

AALS 2018 Annual Meeting

The AALS Section on Legislation & Law of the Political Process is pleased to announce that it will host a “New Voices in Legislation” program during the 2018 AALS Annual Meeting in San Diego, CA. This works-in-progress program will bring together junior and senior scholars in the field of legislation for the purpose of providing the junior scholars with feedback and guidance on their draft articles. Scholars whose papers are selected will present their work in small panel sessions. A senior scholar will moderate each panel and lead discussion about the draft article.

Eligibility: The New Voices Program will be open to full-time faculty members from AALS member schools who are untenured or have been tenured for two years or less. All scholars, whether or not presenting a paper or moderating a discussion, are welcome to attend the program and participate in discussions.

Submission Requirements: Submissions should be drafts of articles relating to legislation and the law of the political process, including articles related to legislative structure, the legislative process, the budget process, statutory interpretation, and deliberation. Submissions should be near completion and should not exceed 30,000 words, including footnotes. The purpose of the program is to provide junior scholars with feedback that can be incorporated into their works-in-progress; as a result, articles are ineligible for the program if they are expected to be in print at the time of the program in January 2018. However, articles that already have been submitted to journals for publication, and accepted for publication, are not ineligible for this reason.

Submission Process: To be considered for participation in the program, please email a copy of the paper and abstract to Evan Zoldan, evan.zoldan@utoledo.edu by Sunday, October 1, 2017. Selected participants will be notified in early November 2017. Final drafts of those who are selected must be submitted by December 15, 2017.

Senior Scholars: If you are interested is serving as a commentator for one of the junior papers, please contact Evan Zoldan, evan.zoldan@utoledo.edu.

CFP: AALS Section on Law & Religion Award for Excellence in Scholarship

The AALS Section on Law & Religion is once again soliciting papers for consideration for its annual Award for Excellence in Scholarship, to be given at the AALS Annual Meeting next January. All fellows at AALS Member Schools, as well as faculty members with ten years or less experience as faculty members, are eligible. The award is given annually to a paper either published or to be published by July 15 of this year, that has made an outstanding scholarly contribution to the field of law and religion.

Any faculty member at an AALS member school can nominate up to one paper for the award. Nominations should be sent directly to Professor Haider Ala Hamoudi (hamoudi@pitt.edu) as Chair of the Prize Committee. Nominations must be received by August 15.

Haider Ala Hamoudi, Chair, Prize Committee
Professor Of Law
Associate Dean For Academic Affairs
University Of Pittsburgh School Of Law
(412) 624-1055
Hamoudi@Pitt.Edu

Robin Fretwell Wilson, Chair, Law & Religion Section
Roger and Stephany Joslin Professor of Law
University of Illinois College of Law
504 East Pennsylvania Avenue
Champaign, Illinois 61820
217.244.1227 (office)
wils@illinois.edu

International students in US law schools: AALS discussions and the need for information

Thank you, Dan!

At the AALS annual meeting last week, the topic of international students in US law schools was the focus of a number of sessions.  These included a discussion about (i) fostering inclusion of international students enrolled in post-JD programs as well as encouraging their interaction with JD students, (ii) the ABA Section of Legal Education’s approach to gathering information and acquiescing in post-JD and non-JD programs that include international students and (iii) how law schools help international students in non-JD programs prepare for a US bar exam.  The number of sessions that included some discussion of international students’ experiences in US law schools, coupled with the variety of participants in these sessions, is some evidence of the importance of this population to US law schools. 

At the same time, many who work with the international student population remain frustrated with the absence of basic information about this group and their experiences in US law schools.  For example, there is no public source of information reporting the number of international students in US law schools outside of those enrolled in a JD program, much less on the home countries of such students (law schools report the number of non-resident alien JD students in their Standard 509 reports).  Demographic information about international applicants to post- and non-JD programs (including number of applicants, home country, age, gender etc) is not available, nor do law schools report on their funding of international students in these degree programs.   My work on the careers of international LLMs remains the only empirical research on career trajectories and the ways in which international students experienced the value of a US LLM.  

The AALS sessions did not solve this dearth of information, and comments by Bill Adams of the Section of Legal Education indicated that the Section is reluctant to add disclosure obligations relating to information that is not directly necessary for regulatory purposes.  And information about applicants, law school experiences, funding and careers is not required for the Section to determine its position on acquiescence, which is the standard for non- and post-JD programs.  But perhaps there is another reason for law schools to cooperate on disclosing this sort of information, related to what Theresa Kaiser-Jarvis of the University of Michigan describes as a business reason: to help US law schools make informed decisions in structuring the operating programs for international students, and to contribute to knowledge about the value of US legal education for these students. 

My next post will take up the issue of the value of US legal education for international students.

The Law School Industry: Dean, Associate/Assistant Dean Positions 2015-2016

The data included in the excel spread sheet and attached brief pdf summary (downloaded attachement is provided via link on tab 'files') provides information from the 2015-2016 academic year on the composition of dean positions in the US Law School industry.

The appointments are organized alphabetically by state, and within each state, by school, with a list of the Head Dean and any Assistant and Associate Deans. In addition, profile links, email addresses and background degree information is provided. Certain information is color-coded to help identify specific factors (e.g., female deans, post-graduate degrees). We specifically focused on questions of gender, pedigree and level of degrees in relation to state geographies, and we have included some overview of our findings below.

There are, of course, a substantial number of additional factors that could be incorporated into the study, and might influence how the data is interpreted: e.g., questions of age, disability, race, sexual orientation, socio-economic conditions, and so forth. The data was compiled from the 2015-2016 academic year, so there may be some more recent updates that are not incorporated into this study. We apologize for any errors, hope the document is of interest, and grateful for any corrections.

 

 

AALS CFP: China In Africa: Legal, Political And Development Issues In The Africa-China Relationship

This just in:

The AALS Africa Section, in cooperation with our co-sponsor the AALS East Asia Law & Society Section, is pleased to announce the following call for papers for our 2017 Annual Meeting program:

China in Africa: Legal, Political and Development Issues in the Africa-China Relationship

Over the last 15 years, the Africa-China relationship has expanded dramatically driven by exponential growth in trade and economic investments that have resulted in increasing social, political and legal interactions between Africa and Asia. The rapid expansion and intensification of this relationship raises a complex set of inter-related issues that unfold in a context shaped by the persistent influence of the colonial legacy in Africa, which has contributed to persistent poverty and instability in a number of African countries. We are seeking papers that address all legal, political and development aspects of the Africa-China relationship. Papers may focus on a single African state or regional and international dimensions of the relationship.

We anticipate choosing at least one paper for presentation at the session from this Call for Papers. The subject is deliberately broad, and we welcome papers that address any aspect of the topic that has a legal connection.

Manuscripts or proposals should be comprehensive enough to allow the selection committee to meaningfully evaluate the aims and likely content of the final papers. Papers that have been published, or will have been published by the time of the Annual Meeting, are not eligible.

AALS CFP: Animals As Living Accomodations

The AALS Sections on Animal Law, Disability Law and Law and Mental Disability have issued a call for papers for their 2016 panel, Animals as Living Accomodations.   

This panel will explore the use of animals as living accommodations for individuals with disabilities. The panel will be interdisciplinary, likely spanning topics in animal, disability, health, business, criminal and education law and policy. Possible topics include but are not limited to: business obligations to accommodate service and emotional support animals; species restrictions in service animals; animals as accommodations in schools; emotional support animals in civil and criminal proceedings, housing, and air travel; the use of animals to treat mental distress; and service animal training and placement. Interested speakers should submit an abstract of up to 300 words electronically by August 31, 2016 to: Ani B. Satz, Chair, AALS Section on Animal Law, asatz@emory.edu. Selected speakers will have the option of publishing original papers in a dedicated symposium in the Animal Law Review.

AALS CFP: New Voices In Legislation

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The AALS Section on Legislation and Law of the Political Process is pleased to announce that it will host a "New Voices in Legislation" program during the 2017 AALS Annual Meeting in San Francisco, CA. This works-in-progress program will bring together junior and senior scholars in the field of legislation for the purpose of providing the junior scholars with feedback and guidance on their draft articles. Scholars whose papers are selected will present their work in small panel sessions. A senior scholar will moderate each panel and lead discussion about the draft article.

Eligibility: The New Voices Program will be open to full-time faculty members from AALS member schools who are untenured or have been tenured for two years or less. All scholars, whether or not presenting a paper or moderating a discussion, arewelcome to attend the program and participate in discussions.
Submission Requirements: Submissions should be drafts of articles relating to legislation and the law of the political process, including articles related to legislative structure, the legislative process, statutory interpretation, and deliberation. Submissions should be near completion and should not exceed 30,000 words, including footnotes. The purpose of the program is to provide junior scholars with feedback that can be incorporated into their works-in-progress; as a result, articles are ineligible for the program if they are expected to be in print at the time of the program in January 2017. However, articles that already have been submitted to law reviews for publication, and accepted for publication, are not ineligible for this reason.

Submission Process: To be considered for participation in the program, please email a copy of the paper and abstract to Evan Zoldan, evan.zoldan@utoledo.edu by Friday, October 7, 2016. Selected participants will be notified in early November 2016. Final drafts of those who are selected must be submitted by December 15, 2016.

Senior Scholars: If you are interested is serving as a commentator for one of the junior papers, please contact Evan Zoldan, evan.zoldan@utoledo.edu.

 

AALS CFP: Responding To Fisher v. Texas

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The AALS Employment Discrimination Section is pleased to announce a Call for Papers for the section’s program, which will take place Thursday, January 5th from 1:30 pm to 3:15 pm, at the 2017 Annual Meeting in San Francisco. This year’s program is titled, Responding to Fisher v. Texas. This program will reassess, in the wake of Fisher v. University of Texas (to be decided in Summer of 2016), whether and/or how employers can be attentive to race in hiring and promotion. The answers to these questions are important since very large numbers of employers engage in diversity programs that might or might not be characterized as affirmative action, but are certainly not blind to race. Moreover, Fisher may tell us something about the Court’s view of the relationship, if any, between diversity and merit. This panel will react to Fisher and consider the potential implications of the Court’s affirmative action jurisprudence for the world of employment.

We are seeking one or two additional speakers who will present on a relevant topic, and we particularly encourage new voices to submit a paper abstract. To be considered as an additional speaker, please submit an abstract of no more than 400 words and a resume to Section Chair, Professor Brad Areheart, at brad.areheart@tennessee.edu by August 31, 2016. Additional speaker(s) will be selected by members of the Executive Committee of the Section and will be notified by September 15, 2016.

Please note that the selected author(s) will be responsible for paying his/her registration fee as well as hotel and travel expenses. Any inquiries about this Call for Papers should be submitted by email to Professor Areheart.