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.]

Moneyball, Volleyball, and Faculty Productivity

Here.

"Exploding Offers"

Complaints about offers with deadlines perceived as short often ignore the realities facing non-top-tier schools and candidates.

Early in the hiring season, top-tier candidates begin getting offers from mid- to upper-level schools. Often, such schools have a ranked list of candidates to whom their deans are authorized to make offers. If a school's faculty has authorized the dean to make offers to, say, eight candidates to fill two slots, two offers will generally go out -- three if the dean has some financial flexibility and could live with the unexpected good luck of three acceptances.

Those slots are then out of play for the rest of the candidate field until the initial offerees make up their minds. The other six candidates the faculty has approved must sit around wondering what will happen next and when. They may face pressures from other schools lower on their preference list. They may need to begin planning to move their families. Too bad. They must wait until the initial offerees run the clock out -- as often happens.

Much of the commentary I've read about deadlines focuses on the needs of initial offerees -- typically the most highly credentialed candidates. But such candidates constitute only a small part of the entry-level pool.

Two practices create the problem to which expiring offers are a solution.

First, highly credentialed candidates commonly stockpile offers. Second, top law schools often expect candidates to wait around until mid- to late spring. Both practices inconvenience everyone else. The rest of us need the stockpiled slots released as quickly as possible so everyone else can get on with the process of finding an academic home. Short deadlines unclog the system.

Focusing solely on the "evil" of short deadlines assumes that stockpiling by highly credentialed candidates and mid- to late spring offers from top schools are themselves unproblematic. Even the language commonly used is loaded. Calling offers with short deadlines "exploding offers" is a lot like calling the estate tax the "death tax" -- it presupposes a particular normative outcome.

The simplest solution is already within candidates' control. Candidates who are concerned about short deadlines should ask about the offer policies of the back-up schools at which they are interviewing. They shouldn't interview at back-up schools to whose policies they object, take up offer slots that other candidates really want, and then complain about the deadlines. If enough top-tier candidates were to use as back-ups only schools willing to leave offers open for extended periods, such schools would presumably get more and better candidates. Schools that wanted to finish their entry-level hiring expeditiously wouldn't find their offer slots clogged by candidates who don't really want to teach there anyhow. Ultimately, the complaint about short deadlines is an assertion that all schools should be willing to serve as back-ups -- a premise with which one can reasonably disagree.

I agree that hardball tactics for the purpose of putting a candidate in an awkward position are reprehensible and counterproductive. But the issue of hardball tactics is analytically distinct from that of offer deadlines. The fact that some deans misuse offer deadlines does not mean that such deadlines -- even if short -- are themselves illegitimate. The contrary is in fact true: deadlines make the system work.

Hey Harvard

I read that Harvard has abandoned its program that waived tuition in the third year for students committing to five years of public interest work.

I appears that economic hardship required the change but the Harvard President is also quoted as saying they did not know how easy it would be to get Harvard students to go into public interest work.

On the other hand the Harvard Crimson reports:

"This year, 58 third-year students signed up for the initiative, which has a budget of $3 million per year for a five-year period ending in 2012, . . . About 50 to 60 students entered public service after graduation in previous years before the start of the tuition waiver."

If I am reading the numbers correctly it was a program that had little or no impact on the number Harvard grads opting for public interest work. So, what amounted to a $40,000 payment or an $8,000 a year bump to the public service salary appears to have been unpersuasive. Even by putting a $40,000 thumb on the scale, Harvard evidently could not compete with the big firms and the starting salaries for its grads.

I have and idea for every school that receives applications for qualified candidates in excess the spots available and wants students to "explore" (in the words of Harvard's President) the possibility of public interest work. But be careful what you wish for and do this only if you are serious. Don't reduce tuition. In fact, you might raise it for those with well-heeled moms and dads and even for those so desperate to go to to your school that for them no debt is too great. Just make 5 years of public interest work a condition of admission.

Big Law in Los Angeles

Top 20 Suppliers of Partners to the
Ten Largest Law Firms in Los Angeles
Over the Most Recent 25 and 10 Year Periods


                 Most Recent 25 Years  Most Recent 10 Years
    
Loyola-L.A.                51                                      9
UCLA                           51                                      7
Harvard                      48                                      8
USC                             38                                      6
Boalt                            31                                      5
Southwestern            26                                      6
Stanford                      19                                      1
Hastings                     18                                      2
Columbia                    16                                     1
Georgetown               15                                     1
NYU                              15                                    3
Yale                              12                                     1
Chicago                       10                                     1
San Diego                  10                                     1
BU                                   8                                     0
Pepperdine                  8                                     0
Santa Clara                  8                                     0
Boston College           7                                     2
Michigan                       7                                      0
Virginia                          7                                     1


Methodology

Number of partners in the 10 largest law firms in Los Angeles (Los Angeles County
offices only) admitted to the bar in 1984 or thereafter or 1999 or thereafter,
respectively. Year of admission to the bar is used as a proxy for year of
graduation. 10 largest law firms ranked by number of attorneys in L.A. County
offices per 2009 Los Angeles Business Journal Book of Lists. Search performed in
Martindale Hubbell on-line 11/27-30/2009. [I apologize for the ragged appearance
of the table. Tables are very difficult to create on this platform.]
 

Paging Billy Beane: Scholarly Productivity Lowers Reputation But Raises Salary

Details here.