The Faculty Lounge

South Dakota Law Review Symposium Call for Papers

USD Law Review will be hosting a Symposium on Cybersecurity and Agricultural Law this coming Spring. Abstracts are due 8/23/22. More info. here: Download South Dakota Law Review - CFP 2022

American Journal of Legal History

I am pleased to announce that Stefan Vogenauer of the Max Planck Institute and I are starting co-editing the American Journal of Legal History.  Roman Hoyos of Southwestern Law is book reviews editor.  Recently Oxford University Press acquired the journal from Temple Law School, which has published it since it was started in the late 1950s.  Harwell Wells of Temple Law is the current editor-in-chief. This morning's announcement of the transition is here.

I'm very much looking forward to this.  Now is an exciting time for legal history.  There are lots of people working in the field; it's deeply embedded in law schools, and has increasing attention in history departments.  Having AJLH alongside the Law and History Review, publishing timely and important work, will help the field, I hope and expect.  And I want to add that I learned a lot from editing book reviews under two fabulous editors at the Law and History Review -- Chris Tomlins and David Tanenhaus -- and more recently from observing  Elizabeth Dale as she has edited Law and History Review.  I aspire to bring Chris', David's, and Elizabeth's outstanding judgment, vision, and work ethic to AJLH.

Our new website is up now, as is our portal for manuscript submissions.

On a personal note, this is  meaningful because the AJLH published one of my first articles -- a quantitative study of litigation in a county in Pennsylvania (now Delaware) in the late seventeenth century. (That was back in the days when I did more counting than I do now!)  And, on a somewhat less happy note, they also were the first journal to reject an article submission by me -- a paper on the legal theory surrounding the suppression of abolitionist literature in the 1830s. There were a couple of really good pieces published shortly afterwards, which made my work, if not completely redundant, at least not all that important.

Update: Over at legal history blog, Dan Ernst talks some about the history of both AJLH and the American Society for Legal History -- and talks about the growth of legal history as a field from the 1950s when they were both founded.  Dan also talks about the legal history community.  Working with scholars, as authors and referees, is one of the things I'm most looking forward to.

AALS Indian Nations & Indigenous Peoples Section Call for Papers

The Indian Nations and Indigenous Peoples Section of the American Association of Law Schools (AALS) invites paper proposals on the following topic. How do Indian Tribes, First Nations, and other Indigenous Peoples regulate same-sex marriage, same-sex relationships, and adoption and foster parenting by same-sex couples and LGBT individuals? What role does evidence of Tribal culture and tradition, if any, play in these decisions? Additionally, what are the processes by which Tribes change their laws with respect to same-sex relationships? More broadly, we are interested in the ways in which Tribes, First Nations and other Indigenous Peoples regulate sexuality and family structure.

Please send proposals of 500 to 1000 words summarizing a paper or work-in-progress you would present on an AALS panel on these issues. The selected panelists will be invited to present their work in a joint program of the Indian Nations and Indigenous Peoples and the Law and Anthropology Section, which will be co-sponsored by the Family Law Section. The Program will be held at the AALS Annual Meeting, January 6-10, 2016. Selected papers will be published in the William Mitchell Law Review. Please submit your proposal on or before September 1, 2015 to Michalyn Steele, Chair-Elect, at [email protected]. Questions can also be directed to Ann Tweedy, Chair, at [email protected].

Ranking Law Schools with LSAT, Employment, and Citations

I have a new paper on ranking law schools with LSAT scores, employment outcomes, and law review citations.  This builds on the paper that I workshopped here at the faculty lounge last summer and that appears in the Indiana Law Journal.  I've made some changes to methodology in light of those comments and also updated the data.

The new paper is "Ranking Law Schools, 2015: Student Aptitude, Employment Outcomes, and Law Review Citations." Here is the abstract:

This essay builds on a paper released last year that ranked law schools on three variables: the median LSAT of entering students of the most recent class, the most recently available employment outcome for each school’s graduates, and citations to each school’s main law reviews over the past eight years. This paper updates that study with LSAT median data for the class entering in fall 2014, employment data for the class graduating in 2014 nine months after graduation, and the most recent law review citation data for 2007 through 2014. It studies 195 ABA approved law schools.

In addition to using more recent data, this study changes the method of combining those data. Where the last paper used simple ranks for each variable and averaged them, this study has a more granular approach to the data. It converts each school’s median LSAT score and the percentage of students employed in full-time, permanent, JD-required jobs nine months after graduation (excluding school-funded positions and solo practitioners) to standard scores. In addition, given the dramatic differences in number of law review citations among schools, it employs a common log transformation of law review citations and then converts the transformed scores to standard scores. The paper combines the first two scores to provide a two-variable ranking, and then combines all three variables to provide a three-variable ranking. The paper reports average scores for the three-variable ranking, thus permitting examination of how close schools are to each other. It also ranks the 195 ABA-approved law schools in the United States (excluding the three schools in Puerto Rico) that U.S. News included in its rankings released in March 2015. And it compares the new, two- and three- variable rankings to the U.S. News provided ranks in March 2015. It identifies the schools that improve and decline the most with the new rankings.

Akron Law Review Fast Track Summer Submissions

From the editors of the Akron Law Review...

Akron Law Review Summer Submission

And Fast-Track Review

 The Akron Law Review is excited to announce that it is implementing a Summer Submission Program.  The Editorial Board of the Akron Law Review will review articles submitted during the months of June, July, and August.  We welcome articles from legal scholars and practitioners writing on all areas of law. We also encourage submissions in the areas of Taxation and Intellectual Property, as two of our issues next year will be dedicated to these topics.

Through the Summer Submission Program, the Akron Law Review offers traditional and a “fast-track” review.  Traditional review is standard review during the summer months.  Authors choosing fast-track review agree to accept an offer for publication.  In return, the Akron Law Review will guarantee that within two weeks of your submission, members of our staff will review your article and promptly respond with an acceptance or rejection.

If you are interested in submitting an article for our Summer Submission Program, you may do so through Expresso or by email to [email protected].  Please note whether you are choosing traditional or fast-track review. 

Please contact Akron Law Review’s Editor-in-Chief, Daniel Glass, with any questions or concerns.  He can be reached by email at [email protected] or by telephone at 330-819-2865.  

 

A Bisexual Plaintiff’s Employment Discrimination Victory in Flood v. Bank of America

In a little noticed decision issued a couple of months ago, the First Circuit reinstated a bisexual plaintiff’s employment discrimination claims under the Maine Human Rights Act, reversing the district court’s dismissal on summary judgment.  The decision is remarkable because, as I and Dr. Karen Yescavage discuss in our recent law review article, despite the fact that bisexuals experience significant levels of discrimination, they rarely sue.  Even more concerning is the fact that, when they do sue, they almost never succeed.  Indeed, the only employment discrimination case Dr. Yescavage and I found in which a bisexual plaintiff had ultimately succeeded on the merits was decided by a British court.  To be sure, the First Circuit decision in Flood v. Bank of America Corp., 780 F.3d 1 (1st Cir. 2015), is not a final victory for Shelly Flood.  Instead, it only means that she may present her evidence to a jury, but, given the dearth of case law involving bisexual plaintiffs, it is highly significant.    

The evidence supporting Shelly Flood’s termination and harassment claims (both rooted in allegations of sexual orientation discrimination) appears fairly strong.  Ms. Flood presented evidence to the effect that one of her supervisors (who was also her assigned mentor) began to treat her drastically differently upon learning that Ms. Flood was having a romantic relationship with a woman and that this supervisor enlisted other bank administrators to engage in similar treatment.  The negative treatment Ms. Flood describes includes suddenly receiving poor performance evaluations, being subjected to retroactive changes in evaluations, and receiving “cold stares . . . and disparaging comments about [her] eating habits, dress, and hair style.”  780 F.3d at 13.  According to Ms. Flood, this negative treatment eventually reached such an egregious level that she could no longer bring herself to go into work. 

The First Circuit held that the district court had wrongly dismissed the discharge claim because it erroneously interpreted the claim as one of constructive discharge (rather than actual discharge) and that it had wrongly dismissed the harassment claim based on its mistaken conclusion that the harassment was not severe or pervasive.  In response to the Bank’s argument that Ms. Flood’s claim failed as a matter of law because she was “not exposed to explicitly homophobic statements or derogatory remarks,” the First Circuit noted that many employers now “know better than to spew explicitly . . . homophobic remarks . . .” and that “the absence of such blatant vitriol does not doom a claim of discrimination.”  Id. at 10-11.

All in all, the First Circuit’s analysis is well-reasoned and the result, especially with respect to the harassment claim, may seem unsurprising.  But, as a precedent for bisexual plaintiffs bringing sexual orientation employment discrimination claims under state laws (which tend to be similar in structure to federal law), this case is huge news.  To be sure, the case involved a fairly straightforward type of discrimination—homophobia.  As Dr. Yescavage and I discuss, bisexuals appear to be subject to two primary forms of discrimination:  homophobia and biphobia, the latter of which involves fear and discomfort specifically related to bisexuality.  Biphobia may be particularly hard for courts to understand, as the limited case law suggests.  See, e.g., Apilado v. North Am. Gay Ameteur Athletic Alliance, 2011 WL 5563206, at *1–3 (W.D. Wash. Nov. 10, 2011).  However, the significance of Flood should not be underestimated.  For now, it stands as the strongest precedent available for bisexual victims of employment discrimination in the United States.

Penn State Law Review Announces Spring Exclusive Submission Process

This just in:

The Penn State Law Review is conducting an exclusive spring-cycle article review. Any article submitted to this exclusive review between now and April 19th will be evaluated by April 27th. If you have submitted an article to the Penn State Law Review previously, you must resubmit your article for consideration in the exclusive article review.

By submitting your article, you agree to accept an offer for publication, should one be extended. Any articles accepted will be published in Volume 120: Issue 1 or Issue 2 of this review—both of which are slated for publication in summer of 2015.

If you have an article that you would like to submit, please e-mail an attached copy of the article, along with your cv and cover letter, to [email protected] . Please include “Exclusive Spring 2015 Article Review” in the subject line.

Associate Dean for Research & Scholarship Symposium Offers Perspectives on Engaged Scholarship and the Changing Definition of Scholarly Work

The Touro Law Review has published a symposium, “Perspectives from an Associate Dean: Scholarship and School Visibility,” coordinated by Associate Dean Fabio Arcila. A theme running through the five essays is not only the balancing of resources in legal education to continue to promote scholarship for a multitude of reasons, but the broadening of the definition of what constitutes appropriate and desirable scholarship, engaged scholarship with a purpose, and broadening the community of scholars as well as the audience to receive the work.  This broadening can enhance a school’s visibility and impact – and not simply inside the academy.

Arcila of Touro Law Center offers an introductory piece, The Future of Scholarship in Law Schools, beginning with a discussion of the scholarly obligation to engage in research and scholarship noting that despite the waves of anti-intellectualism, scholarship “…influences public and academic discourse, legislation, and judicial decisions, all of which guide our conduct.” He asserts that even with the increased emphasis on experiential legal education, scholarship deserves prominence not only because it is “central to the role of institutions of higher education as creators of knowledge and fonts of ideas about law’s role in society, government, and business,” but also because such efforts also help to inform our teaching role by deepening knowledge and thinking on the subject matters we teach.  He acknowledges the challenges of promoting and encouraging scholarship given the tendency to downsize or eliminate budgets to support this effort coupled with time demands on faculty members to focus on other competing priorities, and calls for finding new ways to support research at the same time as supporting pedagogical reforms. His ideas include a realignment of teaching schedules for productive scholars – not necessarily always less time in the classroom (although he asserts faculty less interested in scholarship may assume a heavier teaching and/or student load) but offering a more compact teaching schedule to accommodate blocks of time for research and writing; using titles as a form of recognition for prolific faculty; and encouraging alternate outlets for shorter pieces (e.g., blogs, commentaries and essays).

 A. Benjamin Spencer, the Earl K. Shaw Professor of Law at the University of Virginia School of Law, who served as Associate Dean for Research and Director of the Frances Lewis Law Center at Washington & Lee University School of Law, focuses his contribution, Supporting and Promoting Scholarly Life in Turbulent Times,noted that at Washington & Lee, an independent endowment was specifically created to fund scholarly life and his role included strategically investing those funds in faculty to promote scholarly pursuits.  The fact that such an endowment exists, he observes, is what has insulated scholarship support from the economic realities facing legal education.  Spencer describes other strategies he employed in his associate dean role such as the sponsoring of scholarship roundtables where books and other significant work were vetted by inviting thought leaders in the field to the school for a day to offer critiques in the development of the work; junior faculty exchanges and faculty workshops – both involving sharing faculty by sending junior faculty to other schools and inviting scholars from other schools to present at colloquia; “incubator lunches” where faculty can bounce off ideas at the early stage of development; and hosting symposia including participants from outside the school. Spencer concludes with describing ways in which he helped faculty to get their work published and then how he helped to promote the work for others to read. 

B. Jesse Hill, Laura B. Chisolm Research Scholar and Associate Dean for Faculty Development and Research at Case Western Reserve University School of Law contributed an essay entitled, The Associate Dean for Research in the Age of the Internet. Hill focuses on how the internet has created new opportunities for research but also outlets for scholarly work and vehicles to more easily share the scholarship produced, noting of course, that a law school’s visibility is tied to the visibility of its faculty. Her essay offers a number of ideas on how to use the internet to promote faculty research and scholarship.  For example, replacing the expensive glossy scholarship pieces received in the mail with electronic newsletters, such as Case Western’s Scholarly Impact. She offers important insights into the differences between Digital Commons and SSRN, two platforms most often used by law schools to make faculty scholarship more widely available due to the free nature of the search engines and the ability for many more people to discover the work. Although admittedly not a regular blogger herself, Hill acknowledges the intellectual exchanges that can be spurred by blogging, as well as the name recognition that can develop for bloggers. Hill concludes by reminding associate deans that they should lead by example and maintain their own scholarly profile (something I think all deans should do). 

The next piece in the symposium is from Christine N. Cimini, Associate Dean of Research and Faculty Development at Vermont Law School. She begins her piece, Scholarship with a Purpose: The View from a Mission-Driven School, by reflecting on how she got this decanal appointment given her fairly recent entry into the academy and her background as a clinical faculty member, however, this can offer refreshing perspectives (and as she later observes, “can bridge the divide between theory and real-world application.”).  Cimini ties her observations to the unique mission of Vermont Law School, opining that effective associate deans will tie their actions to the mission of their schools. She quotes the Vermont Law mission, “we are committed to developing a generation of leaders who use the power of the law to make a difference in our communities and the world because the status quo is no longer acceptable.” She describes the culture of faculty and students engaged in scholarly exchanges that advance the mission including through the auspices of centers and institutes at the school.  She describes how a faculty can connect scholarly exploration with real world impact offering a range of examples of how faculty prepare testimony for legislative hearings, write amicus briefs for significant court cases, publish op-ed pieces in major newspapers, are columnists, bloggers, and write, among other things, transition papers for high-level governmental offices – all important work and mostly left out in the tradition connotation of scholarship. Cimini correctly notes that traditional law review placements may not always reach the intended target audiences and that at times, industry, technical and profession journals prove much more valuable to getting out the message in a particular body of work. She also reminds us that student scholarship can be an important part of a school’s scholarly culture.  She concludes by stating emphatically, “Engaging in meaningful scholarship is critical because it makes us better teachers, better citizens in the world, supports our students and provides them role models on how to use the law to impact the world in positive ways.” 

The symposium concludes with an article, Encouraging Engaged Scholarship: Perspectives From an Associate Dean for Research, by Sonia K. Katyal, Associate Dean for Research and Joseph McLaughlin Professor of Law at Fordham Law School. It is a fitting end to the symposium as she recounts passages from a 1996 article by Robert A. Williams in the Michigan Law Review, Vampires Anonymous and Critical Race Praxis, making the point that publishing work, that should count as scholarship, in various formats and for a, reaches more people and different types of people with the writer’s messages.  Katyal uses this as a jumping off point to assert that, “one of the most glaring failures in legal academia today: our romance with ‘serious scholarship’ – the ‘top’ law reviews, the ‘top’ scholars in the field, the ‘top’ law schools – has obscured the potential breadth and value of legal scholarship, overshadowing the impact of what legal scholarship can become.”  She recounts how Williams described how he wrote in bar journals, newsletters, encyclopedia-type publications, casebooks, applied for grants and engaged in clinical projects, all of which would not have been considered serious scholarly pursuits by his colleagues, but Katyal notes that by following Williams’ example, we can vastly improve and extend the audience for legal scholarship. Katyal next explores opportunities and complex challenges for today’s associate deans (challenges identifies include social relationships on faculties, race, gender and class; as well as support for librarians, clinicians, students, clinicians and other categories deserving of greater support to encourage and build a broad scholarly community).  She writes that after her first year in the role of associate dean, she realized the importance of valuing the “broader constellation” of writings as legitimate scholarship – e.g., peer reviewed papers, work in clinical publications, books, reports, white papers, blogs and essays – all different from the “traditional” view of scholarship. In the next section, Katyal proceeds to discuss the important benefits of engaged scholarship. Turning to methods of scholarly engagement, she suggests “building a scholarly community by chipping away at the ivory tower,” by, among other things, actively bringing in parts of the law school community often left out. She offers practical ideas on how to do so, how to share substantive news of community scholarship, mentoring and distributive considerations in supporting research visibility. She concludes her article and the symposium with these words, “…the task of an Associate Dean for Research is to find methods to broaden the law school community, increase its visibility and vibrance, while maintaining a healthy commitment to innovation, inclusion, and self-critique.” 

Thank you Deans Arcila, Spencer, Hill, Cimini and Katyal for opening a new dialogue and saying what needs to be heard.

The Curious Case of Patent Jobs

An article in my SSRN feed caught my eye this week: Where Have All the Patent Lawyers Gone? Long Time Passing... by Kenneth L. Port, Lucas Hjelle, and Molly Rose Litman (William Mitchell; Schwegman, Lundberg and Woessner; William Mitchell student).

The paper makes a pretty bold assertion - that the number of new patent lawyers is going to drop by 50% in the next three years. This is not necessarily surprising - after all, new law student enrollments are dropping. But not by 50%. Further, their prediction is not just conjecture or fancy econometrics - they look at the number of LSAT takers qualified to take the patent bar, and find that only 600 in the whole country were so qualified this year. Given that about 80% of qualified law students actually enter the patent bar, the numbers are looking to be south of 500 in 2018. By comparison, the number hovered between 800 and 1200 between 2003 and 2014.  So that's that. Then why is this a curious case?

Law Review Quote Of The Day

"Death sentences are also seen as more final and irrevocable than other punishments."

Daniel Epps, The Consequences of Error in Criminal Justice, 128 Harv. L. Rev. 1065, 1084.  Maybe the author couldn't find a cite for a more definitive assertion.  (Not a critique of the author, but rather the traditional law review requirement that such a strong assertion would require a footnote.)

Should Your Law Review Article Have an Abstract and a Table of Contents?

Yes, say the authors of this article that surveys citation rates. 

The stronger impact on citation levels comes from having an abstract, but tables of contents also contribute, and the two together generate citation rates 70% higher than articles without either.

Their theory is that abstracts and tables of contents reduce cognitive burdens on other researchers, which makes sense.

They don't appear to correct for article length, which might also be part of it, as my unscientific guess would be that long, 'battleship' articles of the type that might merit citations seem more likely to get the abstract and table of contents treatment. I also wonder whether some law reviews that generate high levels of citations are more likely to suggest/require both.

Washington and Lee Law Review

From an email that I received earlier today:

The Washington and Lee Law Review is opening an exclusive review program for articles until November 24, 2014, at 7:00 PM EST.  The Law Review will extend offers for publication by December 8, 2014.  All authors who submit articles to this program agree to accept a publication offer, should one be extended.  For more information and submission instructions, visit this description.

Kentucky Law Journal

From an email message that I received earlier this afternoon:

The Kentucky Law Journal is opening an exclusive submission window for articles until November 14, 2014, at 5:00 PM EDT. All papers submitted during this window will be reviewed for publication in Volume 103, Issue 4, set for publication in Spring 2015. By submitting your article during this window, you agree to accept a publication offer, should one be extended. This window is available for articles on all topics, including articles previously submitted to the Kentucky Law Journal, though resubmission will be required. Submissions should be between 15,000 and 25,000 words with citations meeting the requirements of The Bluebook.

Submissions should be sent via email to [email protected]. Please include your article, a copy of your C.V. and a short abstract or cover letter.

Is there still a fall submission season for law reviews?

For the first time in years, actually probably ever, I had a bunch of pieces in circulation in the fall law review submission cycle.  I'm used to struggling to place my legal history.  I get legal history pieces often don't get citations, which some people care about. I'm skeptical of the focus on citations.  Still everyone has the right to think in utilitarian terms.  This also makes me long in some ways for the days when history mattered.  I suppose that's why we should be writing more about applied legal history and less on the jurisprudence of slavery or certainly popular constitutionalism in the dedication addresses of pre-Civil War cemeteries!  (Come the spring, though, I have a better title for the latter piece.  Thanks to my colleague Richard Myers it's going to be "The Road to the Gettysburg Address.")  Still, I ask, why did I have a problem placing ranking law schools with LSATs, Employment Outcome, and Law Review Citations?  I mean everyone seems to care about that.  (Gossip sells, doesn't it?  Or at least you can give it away for free).  Anyway, this leads to a question.

It seems like a lot of journals were announcing on bepress and scholarstica that they were already full for the year this summer and telling us to check back in the spring of 2015.  The few law review editors I've had a chance to speak with tell me that they had very few slots left by mid-August.  This causes me to wonder -- and I'm guessing other people have speculated on this, too -- whether we're essentially moving ot one submission window, in the spring?  I would think this would have a lot of negative consequences for people up for retention, promotion, and tenure, because I'm guessing that a lot of people are finishing their capstone piece in the summer and looking to place it in the fall.

Thoughts?

The image of a lottery ticket is from our friends at wikipedia.

Michigan Journal of Race and Law at 20

Next Friday, September 19, the Michigan Journal of Race and Law will host a symposium celebrating the journal's twenty years.  Cribbing from the announcement:

We will look back at the Journal and its leadership in the field. We will also launch the Journal’s next twenty years, highlighting new directions in scholarship at the intersection of race and law. Program participants include Michigan Law alums Todd Aagaard, ’97, Jasmine Abdel-Khalik, ’00, Jeannine Bell, ’99, Guy-Uriel Charles, ’96, Gabriel “Jack” Chin, ’88, Meera Deo, ’00, Matthew Fletcher, ’97, Luis Fuentes-Rower, ’97, Elizabeth Hinson, ’11, Emily Houh, ’96, Travis Richardson, ’96, Tom Romero II, ’04, Hardy Vieux, ’97, Adam Wolf, ’01, and keynote speaker Dr. Mary Frances Berry, ’70. 

Since its founding, the Journal has been a platform for the exploration of issues relating to race, law, and civil rights. It is recognized for publishing cutting edge scholarship that is innovative and probing, including critical race theory, law and economics, immigration, education, criminal justice, and beyond. The Journal takes pride in the many perspectives it embraces, publishing the views of scholars, students, practitioners, and social scientists. Today, the Journal is nationally recognized as a leading journal in the field of civil rights.

The schedule is as follows:

ABA's THE BUSINESS LAWYER

From an email message that I received in recent days:

The Editorial Board of The Business Lawyer is soliciting submission of articles and essays for Volume 70.  TBL is the flagship scholarly journal of the American Bar Association  Section of Business Law.  It reaches 40,000 readers on a quarterly basis.  Authors must submit exclusively to the journal and submissions are peer-reviewed.  We generally give authors a response in about two weeks.  TBL provides a good forum to reframe scholarly articles published elsewhere for an audience of judges and practitioners.  Past authors include Lucian Bebchuk, Barbara Black, Bernie Black, Starvros Gadinis, Joe Grundfest, Henry Hu, Roberta Karmel,  Jonathan Lipson, Vice Chancellor Leo Strine, Guhan Subramanian, and former Chief Justice of the Delaware Supreme Court Justice Norman Veasey.

Articles should be submitted to Diane Babal, Production Manager, at [email protected]. Questions about submissions can be addressed to Associate Editor-in-Chief, Professor Gregory Duhl, at [email protected].

More Rankings Based on LSAT, Employment, and Citations

A couple of weeks back I wrote about a brief study that ranks schools based on their rank on median LSAT score of the class entering in fall 2013, employment outcome for the class of 2013, and citations to their main law review.  I have now done two things with this paper -- first, expanded the analysis to all 194 law schools that U.S. News included in its March 2014 rankings (what it calls the 2015 law school rankings).  Previously I dealt only with the 147 schools that U.S. News provided ranks for; now I include the additional 47 that U.S. News called "unranked."  Second, in response to suggestions by readers, I have used two different measures of employment.  The initial study used the percentage of the class of 2013 employed nine months out at full-time, permanent JD required jobs and this study provides a ranking using that measure.  I now provide a separate table that uses a modified employment score (full-time, permanent JD required jobs minus school-funded positions and solo practitioners).  

The exclusion of school-funded and solo practitioners causes some schools to fall rather dramatically and a few schools rise a little.  One of the tables in the paper reports the schools that have the highest percentage of those positions (Emory tops the list at 21.9%; William and Mary is close behind at 20.7%; the University of Virginia is third at 15.9%).  The final table in the paper reports the schools' three variable rank using the "traditional" measure of employment and the three variable rank using the modified employment measure and the differences between those two ranks.

As before, there is a high correlation between the U.S. News' rank of the top 147 schools and the three variable rank presented here.  That in some ways validates U.S. News and maybe they validate the rankings here.  But importantly, there are significant differences between the U.S. News rank and those presented here, which suggests that prospective students should look very carefully at each school to see how it performs on factors that they care about.  Some schools' ranks in U.S. News seem to be supported by strong reputation scores that may or may not reflect current realities and some schools are performing significantly better (or in some cases worse) in areas like graduates' employment rates than their U.S. News ranks would suggest.

Anyway, the expanded version of the paper is now up on ssrn.  For those looking for the bottom line (i.e., faculty, administrators, students, prospective students, and alumni curious about how your school fares), tables 4 and 11 are the ones you'll want to turn to.  Table 4 provides the ranking of all 194 schools based on the rank of median LSAT for the class entering in fall 2013, percentage of the class of 2013 employed in full-time, permanent JD required jobs, and citations to the schools' main law review from 2006 to 2013.  Table 11 ranks all 194 schools based on rank on those 3 variables, but using the modified employment variable that excludes school-funded positions and solo practitioners.

Update: Lawschooli.com has some commentary on this.  Also, Laura Stantoski over at most strongly supported discusses the rankings methodology extensively.  Ms. Stantoski picked up the story from a post I had at law.com about the new rankings.

The Indiana Law Journal Supplement published the study in November 2015.  http://ilj.law.indiana.edu/?p=3711

Ranking Law Schools Based on LSAT, Employment Outcome, and Citations

Given all the talk about the U.S. News law school rankings I've been thinking for a while that I wanted to look at how a ranking of law schools based on a few of the factors that prospective students might care about (and that I certainly care about) would look.  I have put together a quick look at schools based on an average of ranks of the median LSAT score of students entering in fall 2013, the rank of schools based on the percentage of their 2013 graduates who had full-time, permanent JD-required jobs, and the rank of their main law review based on the number of citations it received from 2006 to 2012.  There's a lot one could argue about with regard to the selection (and weighting) of those three variables -- and if I do anything else with this paper I may very well refine the weight assigned to each variable (or even change the variables).  But I do think this is a nice start in the direction of ranking schools based on the factors that matter in quality of an institution. 

One of the things that I found of particular interest is how highly correlated a lot of the variables are.  For instance, correlations between each of the three variables and the overall U.S. News rank are also high, though the U.S. News rank and LSAT median rank are correlated most highly of the three (.93).  The correlation between U.S. News rank and full time, permanent JD required jobs rank is .76 and the correlation between U.S. News rank and law review citations rank is .87. 

Cribbing now from my abstract on ssrn:

This paper returns to the perennially favorite topic of ranking law schools.  Where U.S. News & World Report includes a wide variety of factors – some of which are criticized as irrelevant to what prospective students care about (or should care about) – this paper looks to three variables.  They are median LSAT score of entering students, which seeks to capture the quality of the student body; the percentage of the graduating students who are employed at 9 months following graduation at full-time, permanent JD required jobs; and the number of citations to each school’s main law review.  This paper rank orders each of those variables, averages those ranks to obtain a new ranking, and then compares those new rankings to the U.S. News & World Report rankings.

If you're interested in this, you can find the full paper here, along with tables that list the schools that are the biggest winners in this new ranking and those that decline the most.  Down the road I'd like to extend this ranking to all ABA-accredited law schools.  The image is a series of scatter plots of ranks on U.S. News, LSAT medians for students entering fall 2013, percentage of class employed at JD-required long-term, full time jobs,  and citations to law reviews, 2006-13.

Update: Over at taxprof Paul Caron has some discussion of this paper and there are a lot of comments on what should be counted in a ranking system.  One of the things that I hoped this initial post would do is help me refine the factors to use and I appreciate the comments there and here -- and I'm particularly interested in the range of responses to the use of citations to schools' law reviews.

Michael Smith is also talking about the new ranking method at his blog -- especially the virtue of avoiding the peer assessment scores.

Harvard Law Review Names A New EIC

Her name is Rachel Miller-Ziegler.  And she probably knows a hell of a lot more about Argon than you do.

Law Review Trivia

I've written about the importance of opening lines before.  Let me ask a trivia question related to the opening line of a law review article.  This one will probably be pretty easy.  Whose article began with this memorable line:

There are places in law through which a pair of mutually oblivious doctrines run in infinitely parallel contrariety, like a pair of poolhall scoring racks on one or the other of which, seemingly at random, cases get hung up.

The Troubled Peer Review System, the Open Access Wars, & the Blurry Line Between Human Subjects Research & Investigative Journalism

Legal academics who work across disciplines sometimes find themselves in the uncomfortable position of explaining to their stunned colleagues the process by which second- and third-year law students, armed with author c.v.s, decide what gets published and where.

Well, get ready to get your schadenfreude on. For the past 10 months, John Bohannon, a contributing correspondent for Science magazine, has been conducting a sting of (other) science journals and their peer review processes. Much like the famed Sokal hoax, Science submitted to 304 journals a bogus paper written by a fictitious researcher from a nonexistent institution. The paper described "the anticancer properties of a chemical that [the fictitious researcher] had extracted from a lichen," and according to Bohannon, "[a]ny reviewer with more than a high-school knowledge of chemistry and the ability to understand a basic data plot should have spotted the paper's short-comings immediately" and rejected it promptly. And yet, over half of the journals accepted the paper. Recall that the bogus paper purports to report on the discovery of the anticancer properties of lichen. Let the prospect of bogus cancer research published in peer reviewed medical journals sink in.