Z-Scores in Model of 2011 USN&WR Law School Rankings

As I have for each of the past several years, I this year again built a model of the most recent U.S. News and World Report ("USN&WR") law school rankings. This year's model matched the publishing rankings very nicely; comparing the model's scores with the published ones generated an r-squared of .997 (where 1 would indicate perfect correspondence). At the request of my readers, I here offer the weighted z-scores of the top-tier schools from last spring's (the "2011") USN&WR law school rankings:



Why do my fellow rankings geeks care about z-scores? In brief, these z-scores measure how well each school performed relative to its peers, thereby establishing its rank. (See here for a fuller explanation.) Because USN&WR uses z-scores to rank law schools, so too must any model of its rankings.

I weighted these z-scores simply by multiplying the z-score for each school, in each category of data, by the percentage that that category influences a school's overall score in USN&WR's rankings. That method of presenting z-scores has the virtue of highlighting which scores matter the most. You will thus generally find the largest weighted z-scores in the upper, left-hand corner of the chart, for instance, where lie both the most important categories of data and the law schools that scored the highest the rankings.

Consider, for instance, the weighted z-scores of .68 enjoyed by both Yale and Harvard under the "PeerRep" category. Numbers that large (comparatively speaking) overwhelm the effect of other measures of those schools' performances—the schools' BarRep scores, at .39 each, come in a distant second—and have twice the impact of the peer reputation scores of schools ranked as close as 20th from the top.

Using weighted z-scores also has the virtue of showing how very little influence many of the things that USN&WR measures have on its rankings. The weighted z-scores for Bar pass rates among top-tier schools, for instance, vary between only .07 and -.02.. Bar pass rates, however important to students, evidently do not matter much in USN&WR rankings.

Why did it take me so long to finish this year's model? In large part, you can blame my prepping two new classes (Property and a Law & Economics seminar) and serving on Chapman's Dean Search Committee (an effort that should soon conclude with our announcment of a fantastic new leader for our law school). Notably, though, some of the delay stems from how the ABA manages its statistical take-offs. The ABA recently abandoned its former practice of routinely sending electronic copies of its statistical take-offs at the request of any subscribing school. Allegedly, some Deans had complained that to make the data available electronically would make modeling the USN&WR rankings too easy. Nice try, Deans! Also, the ABA this year neglected to send several subscribing schools, including my own, even hardcopies of the statistical takeoffs. We got a prompt response from the ABA when we finally figured out that we we were not to blame for the missing take-offs, but the mix up still impeded my efforts. Again, though, geekery finally prevailed.

Interested in prior years' z-scores? Here are the ones from the 2010 rankings, the 2008 rankings, the 2007 rankings, the 2006 rankings, and the 2005 rankings.

[Crossposted at Agoraphilia, MoneyLaw.]

Can Empiricism Go to Law School?

Most readers know the cautionary "Be careful what you wish for . . . ." There is a comparable concern for those doing empirical research -- you may not find what you are looking for. By "what you are looking for" I do no mean that you will find no answer but that you may not confirm what you hoped to confirm. For example, you might believe that positive student evaluations are correlated with actual learning and find that they are not. Or, that the amount of discipline meted out to high school students is unrelated to the number of white high school administrators.

If you are a true scholar/empiricist you may shrug and then report your findings. A cultural clash occurs, howevever, when empiricism meets legal scholarship. Most legal "scholarship" as I have written before, is not scholarship at all. It is, instead,"service" to one particular end or another with that end usually ultimately being tied to a political goal. Thus, as they were trained to do in law school, legal scholars start with a "client" ( a political inclination) and set out to muster whatever they can to show that their client is "true."

So what happens when an empiricist comes along. The answer is, it depends. Let's take two empiricists both of whom have done a pretty shotty job. The have interpreted data to mean certain things when they have no way of knowing and they do not acknowledge the problems. They take a small sample, they make no effort to verify whether a survey they use actually measures what they purport that it measures. So, two empiricists, equally sloppy.

What it depends on is not the care that went into the study but what the study discovered. Let's say the first study shows a high correlation between the amount of punishment meted out to high school minoriities and whether the principal is white. The other study shows that there is no correlation between punishment and race. Given the policital state legal education today, the first study will be deemed "interesting," and "persuavise." People are likely to ignore any methodological problems or explain why they are not the author's fault. Chances are the second study will get exactly the opposite treatment. It will be viewed as "sloppy." "poorly conceived" and amateurish. There may be whispers about racism because the author allowed the result to become public. If it is a job talk, scholar one has a job scholar; two is, as they say on Project Runway, "out."

Maybe you think this is not so bad. At least one of the sloppy scholars did not get away with it. The problem is this, you could change the hypothetical so that the second scholar had done a spendid, air tight, objective, totally verifiable, triple-checked study and come out with the same results. In the eyes of most law professors there would still be problems. For some reason, the study cannot be right because . . . . well ultimately because it did not produce the right outcome. Consequently the careful, honest and skilled researcher is also "out."

What does this mean for empirical research and law schools. The first reaction has been to resist empirical research in part, I think, for two reasons: law professors are threatened by what they do not know and law professors were concerned about what the numbers would show. Now, I think the future is "brighter." Well maybe not brighter but different. Law professors are likely to embrace empirical efforts as long as the results are the "right" ones and some empirical work will be valued.

So You Want to Go to Law School: The Series

So You Want to Go to Law School, a viral video classic on the foibles of legal education and its relationship vel non to the practice of law, has become a full-blown series. David W. Kazzie, the author of the original video, will trace the adventures of Carrie-Ann Fox, an idealistic would-be lawyer, as she makes her way through law school. The first post-pilot installment introduces Will Graham, battle-hardened 2L, as Carrie-Ann's new friend with a sense of humor and shockingly deep insights into Lost and Grey's Anatomy:

Three Kinds of Diversity

Diversity comes in many flavors. I here compare three types—diversity of skin color and sex, cultural diversity, and ideological diversity—and offer some observations about the distinctive costs and benefits of each. I conclude that, holding all else equal, a group of people having diverse colors and sexes will enjoy modest institutional gains at low cost, while a group touting ideological diversity runs the risk of high transaction costs but wins a shot at great intellectual gains. Groups with high cultural diversity fall in between those two extremes.

Diversity of skin color and sex appears on the face of a group, thus offering ready proof that its selection, such as through hiring and promotion, was not tainted with invidious discrimination. Holding all else equal—assuming, specifically, that the racially and sexually diverse group does not possess above-average cultural and ideological diversity—the costs of intra-group transactions remain low. Thus, for instance, might a facially diverse group of culturally and ideologically similar people get along very smoothly. Think, here, of an elite law school where every professor has absorbed Ivy League norms and all lean moderately left. They might bicker, of course; law professors specialize in that. But such a culturally and ideologically uniform group is not likely to host nasty public fights about ballot initiatives or the like.

Are there downsides to pursuing diversity of skin color and sex in hiring and promotion? Not if you can find enough well-qualified candidates, and not if you avoid discriminating against candidates for blameless having an uninteresting color or sex. Happily, it is not too hard to satisfy both conditions, these days.

Cultural diversity proves harder to document, and runs some risk of increasing intra-group transaction costs. Someone brought up solely within the confines of respectable East Coast institutions will have to work a bit to understand a peer raised Mormon, in Utah's backcountry. So, too, might differences of sexual orientation (which like cultural differences generally do not appear on a person's face) sometimes lead to innocent misunderstandings. Holding equal for other sorts of diversity, however, cultural differences offer many charms and few serious costs. Most of us, and especially those of us in academia, enjoy meeting friendly people with exotic backgrounds. When we share ideologies, moreover, meeting fellow travelers who differ from us suggests that our most heartfelt values transcend race, sex, and culture—a comforting, if somewhat smug, idea.

Ideological diversity, standing alone, proves at least as hard to document as cultural diversity—it does not appear on a person's face nor even, typically, in a person's dress or hairstyle—and much more likely to raise intra-group transaction costs. Religious differences prove largely intractable, though in polite society we tend to keep them private. Political differences, at least in American institutions, threaten to burst out into loud and public disagreements, however. Such frank exchanges can help each side to hone its arguments, of course, and thus offers the prospect of considerable gains both to the disputants and the group that harbors them both. But if local norms do not temper the tone and proper boundaries of ideological debate, transactions costs can easily soar, making it hard for a group to manage even run-of-the-mill functions efficiently.

In sum: diversity of skin color and sex offers few costs and modest benefits; cultural diversity creates slightly higher transaction costs but compensates with intriguing charms; and ideological diversity presents a high risk/high return strategy for institutions devoted to generating new and useful ideas.

[Crossposted at Agoraphilia, and MoneyLaw.]

Outsourcing Legal Education?

The other day a pile of new course proposals by adjunct and non tenure track employees was delivered to the members of the curriculum committee. It made me wonder: How much of our curriculum is taught by people who did not go through a search process, have no role in faculty governance, or were not hired to be teachers. The number was high and growing. I doubt that makes us different from any other law school.

The one thing that all of these teachers have in common is that they are less expensive to use than tenure track professors. Also, I think it is generally true that they regard being able to say they are "professors" is a big deal to them.

I am not saying this is exploitation since these folks have choices but there a few things that seem amiss. (I do think the adjunct route is better for schools in highly populated areas were the choices are better, being able to say you are a "professor" is less important and the main qualification is not knowing someone on the faculty. )

First, what kind of rational hiring process spends tens of thousands of dollars in search expenses for professors on the one hand and conducts no search for those who will teach even more. I am not saying one is better but it's not a case in which the mix makes everything better.

Second, if the idea of a search is to ensure diversity and fair opportunities, why, if you take one position that involves teaching 3 courses and divide it in thirds, does the need for or desirability for a search disappear?

Third, part time teachers are cheap and seem desperate for the opportunity. Many have no say in governance and little contact with the school other than fitting in after work. Does this mean that power gravitates to the administration. More importantly, is that really a bad thing?

Distance learning, on line courses and degrees, externships, and part time teachers all involve outsourcing of a sort. The problem (or rather, the explanation) is not that it is driven by money grubbing management that hopes to make shareholders happy by cost cutting. In this case of outsourcing, no one gets richer.

I am not sure where this goes or even if I think it is wrong. I do not like it but that is a different matter. Most of this is cross-posted on classbias.

Encouragement For The Less Than Highly Motivated

I'm not as big a fan as Jim of animations, but feel that it's time that some concern be shown for those who might struggle to stare down the cynics.

Remember, not everybody raises their hand in class.

So you want to go to law school?

So you want to go to law school? Watch:



Congratulations to Wahoo Corner, the apparent origin of a video that is sure to become a viral classic for prelaw advisors, law students, lawyers, and even full-time legal academics. Hat tip to Donald Anton, Eric Fink, and Shubha Ghosh via Facebook.

Where Partners Come From: Finding the Brass Ring

The ABA has become increasingly interested in outcome measures. US News uses relative bar pass rates and questionable at-grad and 9-month employment rates. Bill Henderson has looked at per capita NLJ first-year-associate hiring rates.

This post reports preliminary results of a study examining what many law students view as the ultimate outcome measure: partnership in a big firm. Specifically, it attempts to gauge how successful graduates of each US law school have been at obtaining big-firm partnership status over the past 25 years. The study is limited to current partners (October 2010) in US offices of the NLJ 250.

My research assistants have almost completed the task of collecting the relevant information for all 250 firms from Martindale-Hubbell on-line. I have personally quality-checked the spreadsheets for the five largest law firms in the United States, which collectively employ 13,942 US lawyers – 11% of all US lawyers employed by the NLJ 250. This post reports the results for those five firms. The five firms studied (with their two largest US offices, measured by number of partners) are:

Baker & McKenzie (Chicago, New York)
DLA Piper (Chicago, New York)
Jones Day (New York, Washington)
White & Case (New York, Washington)
Skadden Arps (New York, Washington)

Here follow the complete results, by rank and number of partners in those five firms nation-wide who obtained their JD degree within the past 25 years (I apologize for the awkward formatting):

1 Harvard 69
2 Georgetown 61
3 NYU 55
4 Columbia 52
5 Michigan 47
6 Northwestern 44
7 Chicago 42
8 Virginia 41
9 Texas 35
10 Fordham 34
11 UC Berkeley 29
12 UC Hastings 27
13 Duke 25
13 Ohio State 25
13 Pennsylvania 25
16 Notre Dame 23
17 Cornell 21
18 Boston U 20
18 George Wash 20
20 UCLA 19
21 Maryland 18
22 San Diego 16
23 American 15
23 Loyola Chicago 15
23 Loyola LA 15
23 Yale 15
27 Case Western 14
27 SMU 14
27 Stanford 14
30 St. John's 13
31 Chicago-Kent 11
31 San Francisco 11
31 Tulane 11
34 Emory 10
34 Houston 10
34 Illinois 10
34 USC 10
38 Boston College 9
38 Brooklyn 9
38 Georgia 9
38 Minnesota 9
38 Pittsburgh 9
38 Wisconsin 9
44 Cardozo 8
44 Cleveland State 8
44 DePaul 8
44 Indiana 8
44 Miami 8
44 Vanderbilt 8
44 Washington U 8
44 William & Mary 8
52 Catholic 7
52 John Marshall 7
54 UC Davis 6
55 Baylor 5
55 Duquesne 5
55 Pepperdine 5
55 Rutgers 5
59 Albany 4
59 George Mason 4
59 Hofstra 4
59 McGeorge 4
59 New York LS 4
59 SUNY Buffalo 4
59 Syracuse 4
59 Temple 4
59 Texas Tech 4
59 Tulsa 4
59 Washington 4
59 Washington & Lee 4
71 Akron 3
71 Baltimore 3
71 Brigham Young 3
71 Cal. Western 3
71 Drake 3
71 Florida 3
71 Franklin Pierce 3
71 Golden Gate 3
71 Mercer 3
71 Northeastern 3
71 Oregon 3
71 Santa Clara 3
71 South Texas 3
71 Villanova 3
71 Widener 3
86 Alabama 2
86 Arizona 2
86 Capital 2
86 Cincinnati 2
86 Colorado 2
86 Connecticut 2
86 Creighton 2
86 Dayton 2
86 Florida State 2
86 Iowa 2
86 Kansas 2
86 Louisville 2
86 Marquette 2
86 North Carolina 2
86 Ohio Northern 2
86 Pace 2
86 Seton Hall 2
86 Southwestern 2
86 Toledo 2
86 Washburn 2
86 Wayne State 2
107 Arizona State 1
107 Arkansas 1
107 Campbell 1
107 Denver 1
107 Detroit-Mercy 1
107 Howard 1
107 Louisiana State 1
107 Memphis 1
107 Missouri 1
107 New England 1
107 Oklahoma 1
107 Oklahoma City 1
107 Penn State 1
107 Southern Ill. 1
107 St. Louis 1
107 St. Thomas 1
107 Stetson 1
107 Suffolk 1
107 Tennessee 1
107 Thomas M. Cooley 1
107 Valparaiso 1
107 Vermont 1
107 Wake Forest 1
107 Western NE 1
107 Western State 1

Focusing on the top 50 law schools (by top-5-firm partners), 21 law schools outperform their 2010 US News ranking by 10 or more (e.g., San Francisco is ranked 67 places higher on this scale than in the 2010 US News rankings):

San Francisco 67
Loyola Chicago 64
St. John's 57
Loyola Los Angeles 48
Chicago-Kent 46
DePaul 43
San Diego 39
Pittsburgh 33
Case Western 28
UC Hastings 27
Miami 27
Houston 25
Brooklyn 23
Ohio State 22
Maryland 22
American 22
SMU 22
Fordham 20
Tulane 14
Georgetown 12
George Washington 10

Note: Cleveland State is ranked 44th on this measure, although third tier in US News, and therefore clearly belongs on the list of overperforming schools. Indiana is not evaluated for under- or overperformance, because Indiana graduates do not typically list the campus, and the two campuses are ranked differently by US News.

Further work

My next step is going to be to extend the analysis to the full NLJ 250. The fact that the five firms analyzed employ 11% of all lawyers employed nationwide by the NLJ 250 suggests that the results reported here are likely to be somewhat representative, but this needs to be confirmed. In particular, I expect that Harvard is a more likely recruiting target for firms further down the NLJ 250 list than its competitors. (In Los Angeles, for example, Harvard graduates are heavily represented among big-firm partners; Chicago graduates are not.)

I have also collected city-by-city data. Again, I expect it will show that few schools are actually national law schools – in the sense of producing significant numbers of big-firm partners in multiple cities. Here again, I expect Harvard to perform well.

Finally, I intend to compare the percentage that each school's graduates comprise of all entry-level hires with the percentage that that school's graduates comprise of the NLJ 250 partner population. In effect, I intend to compute a success/washout ratio for each school. My intuition is that firms hire very heavily at some schools because of the schools' prestige, notwithstanding the fact that few graduates of those schools ultimately become partners, and that the converse is true as well. This information may be useful to both students and hiring partners.

Point Counter-Point

Since I received this in my email I suppose most other law professors did as well. It's about scholarly impact. I think an excellent and thoughtful reponse is this by Brian Tamanaha. Brian pretty much covers all the bases as far as the problems of counting as a way to assess scholarship.

More on UF Rent Boy Kerfluffle

Over yonder.

Tenure, Academic Freedom, Broadcasting, and Bill Inserts

You do not hear much about academic freedom from law professors because they rarely say anything controversial that anyone hears about. In fact, wouldn't it be far more interesting if someone were listening to us? It may seem odd that there is so little controversy given the iron clad protection we have. The reasons for the quiet, I think, can be traced to the fact that straying ideologically or culturally from the mainstream (of law professors that is) means you may be labeled "difficult" or "uncollegial" and these are career killers as much a being labeled a racist, whether true or not.

In fact, what an upside down situation it is. The biggest threats to academic freedom are clearly the professors themselves. Many scrutinize candidates for hiring and tenure to make sure they will "play ball" and I do not mean Moneyball. They want to make sure you are "tolerant" but what they mean is will you tolerate their intolerance.

What also concerns me is that, in state schools at least, faculty use taxpayer money to promote their only political agendas. Pleeeze do not tell me it's a matter of academic freedom. Academic freedom is what economists call a free good -- my speaking out hardly interferes with anyone else's. On the other hand, resources are limited and promoting one view with University resources means, by definition, that the resources are not available for something else.

Given the political inclinations of the vast majority of law faculty it reminds me of issues about equal time that arose in the context of telecommunications and then later in the context of inserts in utility bills. (The terms Red Lion, Consolidated Edison (or was it Central Hudson) and Pacific Gas and Electric come to mind but I am too busy now pushing my own agenda to look it up.) The idea in these instances was that speakers had special access due to a government granted privilege.

Of course, those wanting parity in those cases eventually lost to the incumbents. Nevertheless, law professors at state law schools are like a combination of broadcast licensees and public utilities. They are permitted to promote their personal views using the money of others. When that happens shouldn't the institution be required to subsidize as well those who dissent? Don't you just have a hunch that those with the political philosophy that led them to press for equal access or time in those other contexts would not hear of such a thing when it comes to their own special status?

Shameless self-promotion.

See here.

Elite Relief

If there is way to open doors for elites while closing them to others, law schools will find a way. And in the process they make some really questionable decisions from a economic perspective.

Take a recent policy adopted by UF. We now have a program of hiring people with "outstanding academic credentials" and with little or no scholarly record or teaching experience." (Yes it sounds like every other entry level hire.) They then work here with a reduced teaching load and summer grants for 1-4 semesters and, after our careful mentoring, go out to be recruited by other schools.

I'll give you one guess as to what outstanding academic credentials means to people who do law school hiring. It means people who have records like their own -- expensive and elite schools. (We stick closely to the Justice Scalia rule that silk purses are more readily made from elite grads than from your crummy old top of the class at say Wisconsin or Florida.) In this case, the candidates for relief are ones who had every conceivable advantage already and did not get a tenure track position by going through the meat market process. So what this appears to be is a relief program for elites who otherwise could not find a job.

I cannot comment on the relative productivity of our most recent hires who came from elite schools and seem to be doing well because we have no one here hired in the last six years, at least as I recall, who did not go the elite route and fit the profile even if it meant dipping pretty low in the class. As a general matter, however, at least, there is no correlation between elite credentials of any kind and productivity. In fact, it the may be inversely related.

So now we are taking it on ourselves to train elites who did not quite make the grade in the meat market. And then, after the investment is made and they are "all prettied up" out they out for someone else to hire. In other words we recoup none of the investment.

Wouldn't it make more sense to see if we can prepare potential law professors who did not have every opportunity to make the grade and fell short. Say someone ranked high from a decent state law school. Our "good deeds," as usual, extend only to those who look and think like us, no matter how conventional that may be.

I've been told we are doing this as part of a moral obligation to avoid free riding on other law schools. In the scheme of moral obligations that is an odd one. We are a State institution and have a duty to our stakeholders. Subsidizing the already privileged would not be ranked high, if ranked at all, among our moral obligations. Perhaps if we hired our own graduates it would make more sense but, although we pay others to hire them, we are apparently above that.

Maybe we plan to pay the relief candidates a significantly lower wage and this is a move to lower our teaching costs. In this way they "repay" us for our investment. This would not change any of the above but it would shift the silliness balance a bit to the other side. This, however was not part of the pitch.

Cross posted at classbias

New school

The double entendre is very much intended, because the New School's new president is anything but old school.

The New York Times article announcing the appointment of Northwestern Law School dean David Van Zandt as president of the New School offers this delicious observation from soon-to-be President Van Zandt:

People want to know what the facts are, and through a lot of discussion, people can understand why change may be good. . . . [A]cademics tend to be the most liberal politically and the most conservative when it comes to changing their own organization.

Congratulations, and good luck.

The Soccer Plan for Law Professors

The best soccer book I have read is Joe McGinniss' The Miracle of Castel di Sangro. Tim Parks' A Season with Verona is also good as is Hornsby's Fever Pitch. As soccer fans know, in the leagues within countries there are multiple levels. When a team finishes low in their level they are "relegated" to a lower level and teams who did well at the lower level are raised to play in a higher level. This all depends on rankings (Fellow readers of Castel di Sangro will have an appreciation of some unsavory aspects of this.)

Law schools do not have head to head, score keeping competition so there is no way to actually relegate a top 20 law school to the next 20 in the rankings if it is at the bottom of the 20. In way, USN&WR does some of this - a school can fall into a lower tier as mine did a couple of years ago and then fight its way back. But relying on USN&WR as a guide for this is a bit like asking Chauncy the Gardener to take care of a nuclear reactor.

But suppose there were some why of ranking faculty productivity alone -- pages published, teaching evaluation by those 5 year out of law school. You can see where I am going. Most law professors are tenured but does this rule out relegation, at least in this imaginary world. They get hired largely on the bases of credentials and tenured unless they monumentally screw up. So there really is nothing to do with the ones who are disappointing, except send them down a notch. The problem is that is hard to determine what it means to be relegated to a lesser school when lesser is not defined. On way around this is to relegate to a school where the productivity per faculty member is less than that at the underachiever's school. You could get promoted to you old school or higher by then outperforming the people at the new school.

I know there are many problems here. But you cannot get rid of tenured people and most law school deans do not have the money or courage to administer financial punishment. Surely there are antitrust issues but are they really as bad as the ones the NCAA has overcome by its lame "amateurism" rationale?

Best of all, in a Darwinian sense, schools can get rid of their mistake and professors will end up with their true Peers. Some will be relegated to Community Colleges, High school and out of the profession completely.

Ok, I guess I am kidding but not 100%.

Public Law School Faculty Salaries

See here for a list of law faculty salaries at Arizona State, Florida, George Mason, Illinois, Michigan, Missouri (Columbia), North Carolina, Ohio State, Rutgers (Camden & Newark), SUNY (Buffalo), Texas, UC-Berkeley, UC-Davis, UC-Irvine, UCLA, Virginia, William & Mary, and Wisconsin.

Making the Grades

The New York Times reports that at least ten law schools have raised their grade curves in the last two years. The new rationale for this timeworn response is that students need a competitive edge in a tight job market and higher gpa, however contrived, is just the thing. Ironically, by outing the culprit law schools, the New York Times has probably reversed any advantage their students might have reaped from the sudden lift in gpas.

The premise that a law school can give its graduates the edge in the job market simply by raising their gpas across the board is offensive. Rank in class and rank of law school provide much more useful comparative data than gpa, so the premise that higher gpas, all other things equal, will translate into more job opportunities is dubious. Even assuming that raising the grade curve for all students yields a benefit among a segment of the market (gpa fetishists), the benefit to students at a particular school is at best a wash. Students with otherwise lackluster gpas benefit at the expense of the top of the class who find it increasingly difficult and pointless to distinguish themselves from their peers. If everybody is special as a matter of law school policy, why bother with the time consuming ritual of studying?

Raising the grade curve may make a law faculty feel compassionate in the short run. But all it really accomplishes is to make the faculty less relevant to the market as an evaluator of relative quality. Expert faculty differentiation among students (via competitively awarded grades) is a huge part of what makes a JD valuable. If the market doesn’t perceive any meaningful differentiation among students on the basis of the grades we assign, we’ll be out of business in the blink of an eye. At the very least, we won’t be worth our current salaries.

Two things remain true regardless of the winds of grade inflation. I’d hire someone with a C+ in Corporate Tax over another with an A in (fluff of your choice) any day of the week. And, all students want A’s until the day everybody gets them.

Do Law Schools Golf?

I used to ask my students whether they would be golfers or football players when they graduated. The distinction I was trying to make was between golf, a sport in which players observe the rules and actually report themselves with they violate them, and football, where there are also rules but the idea is to bend them and disregard them and hope not to be caught. So, a lineman holds a charging defensive end and it's a great play as long as he is not caught. In golf it is a matter of observing social norms or even principle. In football it is strictly a cost benefit analysis.

When I ask whether law schools golf I mean both the faculty and the institutions as a whole. For the institutions the best example to which these standards could be applied is the information that forms the basis of the USN&WR rankings. I'd say that the schools fit the football player model — it is not cheating unless you are caught.

How about faculties? The example here might be teaching evaluations and I'd say it is mixed. To be a golfer means to do what is best for the students to prepare them for practicing law. Sometimes that clashes with high teaching evaluations. For example, you may be a stickler for attendance, preparation and being on time because you believe those practices are consistent with professionalism in practice. On the other hand, you may not stress those things because you may then be regarded as being disrespectful and if your dean is big on student evaluations and keeping the students happy it's not a good thing for you. I will forgo the list of ways teachers can game the student evaluations. If enough people game them they become irrelevant. My own view is that even when not gamed only the very low ones or the very high ones signal that something is amiss in the classroom. Yes, I did say even very high ones are suspect — even on the rare occasions I get them.

So if law school administrations are operating by football player rules and a significant number of law professors are doing the same, what does that suggest about the example set for students. Should we expect them to do what we say or to do as we do?

I actually do not know but I hope it is not the latter. Maybe their parents have taught them golfing rules. On the other hand, many years ago a friend whose daughter filled the newspaper racks around campus told me that the only machine where there were consistent more papers taken than money left was the Law School. That is football player behavior and not a good sign.

Collateral Damage

Law schools have now engaged in the USN&WR battle for several years and the collateral damages is mounting. I used to rail against my law school's participation in the war but now wish the Dean would go nuclear, whatever that means.

Most of the collateral damage is known to most of us. The biggest is huge publicity machines that turn out glossy magazine as schools fight for something comparable to economic rents. As best I can tell the biggest beneficiaries of these efforts are administrations who then can keep alums off their backs and keep their jobs. Faculties win too thought. Happier alums make for more contributions. I think we would all be astounded to compare most law school's publicity budgets of 1980 with what they are in 2010.

Other collateral damage is the hiring of one's own graduates in order to inflate the employment figures. Why is this collateral damage? Mainly it is a charitable contribution or welfare payment to already well-heeled people.

And then there is the endless fiddling with classes. The standard is to reduce the size of the entering class and admit more transfer students. Or report students as part time.

My reason for this post, since we have hashed this out before, is the impact of the new emphasis on GPA's and LSAT scores. I used to have the view that a state school should provide some opportunity for students who did not have the highest GPAs and LSAT scores. In favoring that view I did not think about the older applicants. What happens to a person who graduated with a 3.3 twenty years ago or more before grade inflation or who has an under 160 LSAT score but had not taken a standardized test for 25 years? The GPA/LSAT obsession pretty much closes them out even thought a 3.3 might be a 3.8 today. That person also offers age diversity to a school that generally admits 22-25 year olds who are wet behind their ears and have no idea what they want to do in life.

Shameless self-promotion, part n.

See here.  Our book came out in print today.

U.S. News: Less Transparency = More Fairness

Robert Morse today announced that, in response to evidence that law schools had been gaming its rankings, U.S. News would change the way it estimates the "Employment at 9 Months" measure for schools that decline to report that figure. Paul Caron offers some background here. Said Morse: "U.S. News is planning to significantly change its estimate for the at-graduation rate employment for nonresponding schools in order to create an incentive for more law schools to report their actual at-graduation employment rate data. This new estimating procedure will not be released publicly before we publish the rankings."

I understand that U.S. News generated the formula it formerly used to estimate the Emp9 figure for non-reporting schools by running a regression comparing the Emp0 and Emp9 data from reporting schools. It used to puzzle me that U.S. News did not evidently re-run the regression each year, but rather stuck with the original estimate. In retrospect, though, I see that sticking to the same formula might have partially helped U.S. News offset the gaming it so dislikes. After all, as more and more schools with low numbers refused to report Emp9 data, opting to rely instead on the publicized formula, the correlation between Emp0 and Emp9 scores would change so as to favor non-reporting schools. Better to stick with the old formula, dated though it might be, than to increase the incentive to opt out of reporting.

U.S. News thus avoided a vicious cycle, but only at the cost of signaling to schools exactly when hiding Emp9 data would help their rankings. Will its new reticence work? Schools can now only guess at how U.S. News will turn Emp0 numbers into Emp9 estimates, and will rightly worry that they might misjudge the new cutoff. Even if big-E ethics does not counsel reporting Emp9 numbers, therefore, small-c conservatism will. Granted, a school might reason, "U.S. News will still try to find a reasonably accurate way to turn Emp0 data into Emp9 estimates, and it has always helped us to not report in the past, so it remains a gamble worth taking." But such schools should also rightly worry that U.S. News might throw a punitive little kick into its new formula, to encourage schools to worry more about accuracy than about rankings.

[Crossposted at Agoraphilia and MoneyLaw.]

Over 100 Law School Commencement Speakers

Here.

Did 16 Law Schools Commit Rankings Malpractice?

Here.

U.S. News Law School Rankings: Judicial Clerkships

Here.

The Hand Rule

Judge Learned Hand famously opined that if the burdens of preventing an accident outweigh its cost multiplied by its probability, it does not constitute carelessness to avoid those burdens. Doesn't that little gem make you want to break out in song? I've got just the thing: The Hand Rule, a little ditty I recently composed and played for some students at Chapman Law School.

Though I've yet to record The Hand Rule, I can offer you a .pdf of the lyrics and chords as well as a PowerPoint, complete with pictures of Learned Hand, to accompany the performance (both uncopyrighted). Here's a sample of a verse and the refrain:

In the case of Carrol Towing Co., Learned Hand set forth to show
The meaning of "reasonability."

Defendant failed to leave in charge, a man to watch its unmoored barge.
And plaintiff's cargo met calamity.

"Negligence!" plaintiff complained and on appeal, Judge Hand explained,
The proper scope of liability.

Learned, learned, Learned. Learned in the law was he.
Learned Judge Hand, Learned, he judged so learnedly!
So learn what the Hand Rule teaches: "There's no liability,
If the burden of the cost exceeds the loss times the probability."

Silly? Yes, but it gets students to pay attention and remember what they learn. So goes the modus operandi of the Law and Fun school.

[Crossposted at Agoraphilia and MoneyLaw.]

2011 U.S News Peer Reputation Rankings & Overall Rankings

Full list here.

Chapman Dean Search--No Kidding!

We here in the sober and serious groves of academe have no time for foolishness, April 1st or not. So while you may think I jest in claiming that some very lucky person will soon get to become the new Dean of Chapman University School of Law, I assure you that I jest not. This good news comes straight from Chapman's Dean Search Committee (on which I happen to serve).

Please consider this call for applications yourself, or share it with someone else you think might be ready a life in paradise, helping our law school speed toward its bright future.

____________________________________________________________

CHAPMAN UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF LAW

DEAN

http://www.chapman.edu/law

March 24, 2010

The Chapman University School of Law invites applications and nominations for the position of Dean of the School of Law.

ABOUT THE SCHOOL OF LAW:

The Chapman University School of Law opened in 1995 and is located in the Historic Old Towne district in Orange, California. The School of Law is housed in Donald P. Kennedy Hall, a state-of-the-art facility completed in 1999. Chapman is fully accredited by the American Bar Association (ABA) and a member of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS).

The School of Law stands at an exciting and pivotal moment in its history. It already enjoys excellent students, accomplished faculty and outstanding facilities. The School of Law now seeks a dynamic intellectual leader to build on Chapman’s many successes and expand and improve its national reputation. The Chapman University School of Law seeks a Dean who will embrace and match our ambition to be recognized as one of the top 50 U.S. law schools.


EXCELLENT STUDENTS:

In 2009, the School of Law enrolled 547 J.D. and 76 LL.M. students. The median LSAT was 158 and the median G.P.A. was 3.43. According to the most current ABA data, this ranks Chapman #87 in median LSAT and #79 in median G.P.A. among ABA approved law schools.

Chapman students are increasingly successful on the California Bar Exam. Chapman’s first time takers passed at a rate of 81% on the July 2009 exam, earning a pass rate ranked 9th out of the 20 California ABA approved law schools (ahead of Pepperdine and the University of San Diego). Chapman’s bar passage rate on the July California Bar Exam has increased year-over-year for each of the past five years: 59% in 2005; 63% in 2006; 72% in 2007; 77% in 2008; and 81% in 2009.


Chapman’s students are extraordinarily happy with their law school experience. In the results of the Princeton Review’s annual survey of law students reported in the “Best Law Schools,” Chapman consistently ranks among the top ten law schools in the nation:

• Best Classroom Experience—#2 in 2010; #3 in 2009; and #7 in 2008.
• Best Quality of Life—#3 in 2010; #3 in 2009; and #1 in 2008.
• Best Professors—#7 in 2010; #7 in 2009; and #5 in 2008.
• Most Diverse Faculty—#9 in 2009.

Chapman’s admissions program is highly competitive. Applications for the Law School have increased 7% and 19% in the past two years and Chapman has admitted only 26% (2008) and 31% (2009) of its applicants.


CHAPMAN’S OUTSTANDING FACULTY:

The full-time faculty has grown in size to 48 full-time faculty members in 2009-2010. The expansion of faculty has included high impact lateral appointments and top caliber entry-level, visiting and program faculty members. The student/faculty ratio has fallen during this period to 8.9, one of the five lowest in the nation.

Also during this time, the Law School reformed its Legal Research and Writing Program from an adjunct model to full-time instructors with long-term renewable contracts, and greatly expanded its academic programs, including new certificate, LL.M., joint degree, summer abroad, and clinical programs.

Many of Chapman’s law faculty hold advanced degrees, including Ph.D.s from Oxford, Arizona, Virginia, Harvard, Minnesota and Claremont, LL.M.s or other advanced legal degrees from Yale, NYU, Pace, Michigan, Chapman and the University of Stockholm and Masters Degrees in diverse subjects such as Business Administration, Social Work, Philosophy, Economics, International Service, Latin American Studies and Political Science. The faculty also includes a Nobel Laureate and five former U.S. Supreme Court clerks who clerked for six different Supreme Court Justices.

Chapman professors excel as legal scholars, real world advocates, and passionate educators, representing a wide range of specialty areas and ideological views. The full-time faculty includes numerous chairpersons and committee members for important ABA and AALS committees, three members of the American Law Institute (one elected, one life and one ex-officio), a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, a Fellow of the American College of Tax Counsel, a member of the Advisory Board to Lexis/Nexus Publishing, a member of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, a member of the Federal Reserve Board’s Consumer Advisory Council, several former partners in National Law Journal “Top 250” law firms, and the former President and COO of Village Roadshow Pictures.

Chapman’s law faculty includes numerous nationally-recognized book and casebook authors. The faculty is actively engaged in producing top scholarship. Faculty productivity has ranked in the top 50 U.S. law schools for the last four years. Chapman currently ranks #45 in “Total New Downloads” and #37 in “Total # of Downloads (all time)” on the Social Science Research Network among U.S. law schools.

The School of Law is home to the Center for Global Trade & Development, the Center for Lawyering & Trial Advocacy and the Center for Land Resources. Chapman offers its law students the opportunity to complete emphasis programs in Entertainment Law, Advocacy and Dispute Resolution, Environmental, Land Use & Real Estate (ENLURE), International Law and Tax Law. A joint JD/MBA is offered in conjunction with Chapman's acclaimed George L. Argyros School of Business and Economics, and a new JD/MFA in Film & Television Producing provides additional opportunities for hands-on learning in conjunction with Chapman's Dodge College of Film and Media Arts.

Although the school is relatively new, its programs have thrived. Chapman’s tax law program recently debuted in the 2010 U.S. News & World Report Law School Tax Law Specialty Rankings as a Top 25 tax law program. Chapman entered the rankings at number 17.

Chapman’s faculty also oversee a wide array of clinical opportunities, including the following: the Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence; the Alona Cortese Elder Law Clinic; the Ninth Circuit Appellate Clinic; the Family Violence Clinic; the Tax Law Clinic; the Entertainment Contracts Law Clinic; the Appellate Tax Advocacy Clinic; and the AMVETS Legal Clinic.


ABOUT THE LOCATION:

Orange County offers one of the best places to live in the United States. It is the country’s fifth largest county with more than 3 million people residing in many richly diverse ethnic, social, intellectual and environmental communities in 800 square miles. It boasts a diverse economy—so large that, if it were a nation, it would rate as the 32nd largest GNP internationally. And the weather is great, with an average of 258 days of mostly sun and average lows in January of 45 degrees.
Orange County includes numerous major attractions, including Disneyland, Knott’s Berry Farm, Angel Stadium (home of the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim), the Honda Center (home of the Anaheim Ducks), and the Orange County Performing Arts Center, as well as some of the most beautiful beaches in the country. Short drives lead to the beauty and recreational opportunities of the Pacific Ocean, the San Bernardino and San Gabriel Mountains, low and high deserts, Los Angeles, San Diego and several major and international airports.


JOB DESCRIPTION:

The success of the Law School is integral to the success of Chapman University. Chapman University encompasses seven schools and colleges: Wilkinson College of Humanities and Social Sciences, George L. Argyros School of Business and Economics, Lawrence and Kristina Dodge College of Film and Media Arts, Schmid College of Science, College of Performing Arts, School of Law and College of Educational Studies. Named to the list of top universities in the nation by U.S. News & World Report and the Princeton Review, Chapman University enrolls more than 6,000 undergraduate, graduate and law students.
The Dean reports to the Chancellor of the University and serves as a key member of the Deans’ Council. The Dean provides leadership in all aspects of operation and evolution of the Law School. This includes academic affairs; administration and planning; student recruitment, enrollment management and financial aid; financial management and institutional advancement. The Dean is charged with increasing the quality and quantity of the academic, certificate and clinical programs and, enhancing the visibility of the Law School so that its reputation reflects the strong objective measures of quality already achieved. In addition, working closely with the Chancellor and the President, the Dean will be responsible for fund-raising and strengthening the link between scholarship and classroom excellence.


JOB QUALIFICATIONS:

Strong candidates will be superior managers and leaders who can develop and implement a clear vision for the school; who are able to develop a strong sense of community; who are respected by the faculty, trustees, alumni, and in the legal education community as a whole; who are effective fundraisers; who are strongly committed to diversity among faculty, students, and staff; who are able to foster scholarly productivity and teaching excellence; excellent communicators; and who are highly effective at attracting, retaining, and developing faculty, students, and staff.


APPLICATION PROCEDURE:

Chapman University is an Equal Opportunity Employer, committed to providing career opportunities to all people, without regard to race, color, religion, gender, age, national origin, sexual orientation, disability, or veteran status. The Dean Search Committee welcomes application and nominations of women and minorities.

The ten-member Dean Search Committee is chaired by Dr. Menas Kafatos, Vice Chancellor for Special Projects, and Dean, Schmid College of Science. The Committee invites applications, nominations and inquiries immediately. The Committee will conduct the search with confidentiality of all candidate information. References will not be contacted and candidacies will not be made public without the prior knowledge and approval of the candidate. The review of applications and nominations will continue until the position is filled.

All nominations and applications should be sent via email to:

Chapman School of Law Dean Search Committee
Dr. Menas Kafatos, Chair of the Search Committee
c/o Ms. Erika Curiel, Office of the Chancellor
Memorial Hall
One University Drive
Orange, California 92866

Email: curiel@chapman.edu

Phone: 714-997-6736

____________________________________________________________

Size doesn't matter. Really.

Once again it's tournament time. The NCAA men's basketball tournament always seems to bring MoneyLaw themes to the fore. This year is no exception.

Consider this statistical study (.pdf download) by Scout.com of the factors that let talented players elude the major college teams of the six power conferences and slip down, so to speak, to the midmajors:

Perhaps the most telling analysis in the study comes from how to judge a player’s frame. Midmajor big men are often viewed a tick off by powerhouse programs. Be it too short, too skinny or too weak, there is always something holding them back. Guards may be too short or slow. Forwards may not have the proper size to be considered a power forward or the proper skills to be considered a small forward. . . .

[The study concludes] that midmajor programs should evaluate physical attributes differently.

“It seems that, for guards, size in both directions isn’t correlated with success. . . . For forwards, rather than needing both height and bulk, one or the other is enough if the other skills are there.”

Different sport, same result. The mismeasure of athletes — and presumably of students, lawyers, and professors as well — is a long-running theme in MoneyLaw. Some of the funniest passages in Michael Lewis's Moneyball (2004) involve the laughably misguided reliance of baseball scouts on their visual evaluation of prospects' physiques:

Whatever happened when an older man who failed to become a big league star looks at at a younger man with a view to imagining whether he might become a big league star, Billy [Beane] wanted nothing more to do with it. He'd been on the receiving end of the dreams of older men and he knew what they were worth. Over and over the old scouts will say, "The guy has a great body," or, "This guy may have the best body in the draft." And every time they do, Billy will say, "We're not selling jeans here," and deposit yet another highly touted player, beloved by the scouts, onto his shit list. [Id. at 31.]

Or even more crudely:

[Quoting Paul DePodesta:] "You know what gets me excited about a guy? I get excited about a guy when he has something about him that causes everyone else to overlook him and I know that it is something that just doesn't matter." When Brant Colamarino removes his shirt for the first time in an A's minor league locker room he inspires his coaches to inform Billy that "Colarmarino has titties." Colamarino ... does not look the way a young baseball player is meant to look. Titties are one of those things that just don't matter in a ballplayer. Billy's only question for the coaches was whether a male brassiere should be called a "manzier" or a "bro." [Id. at 116-17.]

Just Go to This Cite

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLC7Q3DTzi4

Well orchestrated

From a former student's touching tribute to her violin teacher:

Mr. K. pushed us harder than our parents, harder than our other teachers, and through sheer force of will made us better than we had any right to be. He scared the daylight out of us.

I doubt any of us realized how much we loved him for it.

Power and Entitlement

Nearly 5 years ago I wrote an article, "Law Faculty Ethics: Shirking, Capture and “The Matrix,”" 82 DETROIT MERCY LAW REVIEW 397 (2005), in which I identified the many ways I felt law professors were shirkers. I analogized it to regulatory capture in the sense that faculty who were supposed to govern law schools for the benefit of shareholders -- students, taxpayers, donors -- actually governed to benefit themselves. The range of questionable activities ran from teaching specialized low enrollment courses because the topic was of interest to the teacher (but not to very many students) to foreign boondoggles, pushing ideology in the classroom, and hiring and tenure decisions based on social and political considerations rather than the merits of the candidates. Over on Classbias, where I do most of my complaining about law professor behavior, I attribute much of this to a sense of entitlement.

I realize that many disagree but if you think I am a little bit right, a recent article in the Economist (January 23, 2010) is quite interesting. Psychologists were able to induce in subjects a sense of power or powerlessness. They then asked questions about the rightness or morality of various corrupt acts. Consistently the subjects with power viewed the same sleazy acts as less immoral when they did them than when those with less power did them. In short, power does corrupt.

The kicker in this was a further step. The experiments were repeated by adding the factor of a sense of entitlement. That is, some people were led to believe they deserved their positions of power while others were led to believe the opposite. Here, as you might expect, those with a sense of entitlement were more likely to abuse their power and not understand why there was a problem. After all, they are special.

This may help explain some faculty behavior. After all, law faculties are largely populated by children of privilege. (I wonder what the record is for the most expensive education. I think we have it.) Many times their sense of entitlement is over the top. They deserve, therefore, to teach what they want to teach at the time they want to teach it, they deserve that new furniture or to vote yes on tenure for a pal because they have been told, since birth, that they are special. Some have a virtually infinite capacity to explain why they are deserving and why they are on the moral high road whether or not they are. I am convinced that the most dangerous ones are those who have no sense at all of how their power and sense of entitlement affect their behavior. I'd say in hiring, a law school would do well to hire those without a sense of entitlement although I am not sure how one tests that other than taking a closer look at the socioeconomic background.

Having said all this, it is clear that it does not quite all fit together so simply. Looking at my own faculty which is as heavily populated by children of privilege as any other, I am not sure the corruption level is all that high. In fact "corruption" is not really on point. Self referential decision making and obliviousness to the welfare of the stakeholders is more accurate. It appears mainly in hiring or tenure decisions when people allow social and political factors to influence their votes or even the veracity of their reports on a candidate's reviews. I am not an administrator so I have no way of knowing how demanding people are with respect to exactly the right schedule or for extra travel money or research support. Maybe the most "corrupt" thing going on is looking the other way when someone else is engaged in an activity that cannot be linked to the welfare of the stakeholders. I attribute this to indifference and log rolling but it is shirking nonetheless.

More importantly, not all those with an elite education seem to feel entitled. Far from it. Plus, some of those who do not have an elite education seem to feel an extreme sense of entitlement. Maybe all that can be said is those with the elite educations are more likely to have a sense of entitlement and more likely to justify their anti stakeholder activities than those without the same background.

I'd still like to avoid hiring the privileged for reasons of diversity and because there is no known correlation between how highly ranked a school is and how productive its graduates will be as law professors. But when it comes to the corrupting potential of a sense of entitlement, it would nice to assess it directly by administering to each candidate an "entitlement test."

My Favorite Motions

Faculty meetings may have their charms, but efficiency does not rank among them. Many a time I have looked around a room full of my colleagues, long minutes into a winding discussion of what was supposed to take only a few moments to resolve, considered the full agenda still stretching before us, and bemoaned the deadweight social costs of law school governance. Allow me, then, to share a couple of partial cures—one an old favorite and the other a new find—from Robert's Rules of Order.

I've long been a fan of "calling the question," as we casually style the motion at my school. Full-on Robert's geeks know it as the "Previous Question" motion. Call it what you like, you have to love its effect: It takes precedence over every debatable question and, if the motion carries, forces a vote on the issue under debate.

Suppose, for instance, that a handful of faculty members have been arguing back and forth about some relatively inconsequential motion for 20 minutes or so, as everyone else's attention wanders and more important business goes untended. You get the Chair to recognize you and simply say, "I move to call the question." Once the motion carries—and often with sighs of relief—you and your colleagues can vote on the trifling motion and move on to other topics. (Section 20 of the Rules offers caveats and details, but most law school faculties seem to manage, surprisingly enough, with less than the full panoply of formalities.) Try calling a question the next time a faculty meeting starts spinning its wheels. You—and most your colleagues—will enjoy the ride.

Calling the question does not cure all the inefficiencies that afflict faculty meetings, however. Because we law profs so love to hear ourselves speak, for instance, we sometimes run on (and on and on) a bit. Polite coughs, finger drumming, and the like usually suffices to keep our monopolizing tendencies in control, happily. In fact, it was only very recently that I found myself wondering what a fellow could do when those informal measures failed. Here, too, Robert's Rules offers a remedy: a Question of Order pertaining to decorum.

Roberts Rule's provides, in § 34, that "no member shall speak more than twice to the same question . . . nor longer than ten minutes at one time, without leave of the assembly, and the question upon granting the leave shall be decided by a two-thirds vote [§ 39] without debate." Upon encountering an infraction of that rule, you have the right to interrupt the speaker. As section 14 says, one who so objects "shall rise from his seat, and say, 'Mr. Chairman, I rise to a point of order.'" The Chair must then decide the issue immediately, without debate. If the Chair finds the challenged speaker out of order, and if anyone objects to the speaker continuing, he or she must cede the floor unless the assembly votes to grant leave.

That sounds like strong medicine, granted, and would doubtless ruffle some feathers. But faculty meetings pose a classic tragedy of the commons, one where just a few overly-talkative people risk consuming far more than their fair share of everyone else's time and attention. Raising a Question of Order can help you save you—and thus your school—from the perils of a grossly inefficient faculty meeting.

[Crossposted at Agoraphilia, MoneyLaw.]