"Put me in Coach!" -- Too Much Noise

When I was a young boy first playing sports I noticed other members of the team fell into two general categories. There were those who practiced hard and hoped their work ethic and skills would mean the coach would put them in the game. Except for cheering for the team, they stood fairly silently on the sideline when not playing. Then there were the “Put me in coach” kids. They constantly badgered the coach and many coaches relented, inserting them into the game ahead of the silent ones.

Now these position are taken up by law faculty and law schools. Now please, I am not writing here about someone writing an article and making sure colleagues know it is out or those who send reprints to people in the field.

When in comes to faculty I am thinking of the colleagues who:

1. Purchase 1000 extra reprints far more in the interest of getting attention that in communicating the substance of what he or she has written.

2. Insist that 10 pages of recorded extemporaneous comments are an article to be listed in the “decanal glossy.”

3. Inform the dean every time his or her name is in the newspaper for any reason. (At my school we had someone and may still have (I toss the these communications in the recycling container conveniently located next to the mailboxes.) someone who tallies our “hits.”

These must be the same people who were badgering the coach to “put me in.” All they really do is raise the noise level so it is harder for the coach to know who to “put in.” Luckily, although I have had my issues with most deans, I have yet to meet one who could not see through the fluff. Still, substituting self promotion for substance does not seem very MoneyLawish and there is way too much of it.

While Deans know not to pay much attention to “put me in faculty” they seemed to exhibit the same behavior – not in their personal interests but in what they perceive to be the interests of their schools: Thus we have:

1. The decanal glossy. Yes all those post cards, magazines, newsletters and so on that list the faculty achievements of the year. I really wonder how many of us, when seeing one of these on our mail boxes, eagerly read it, open it or page through. A dean’s report on what the faculty claims to have done in the past year, who the school’s visitors are, or the lectures given there is about as substantive as Cool Whip. That’s not what I am likely to consult if I want to know what is going on. And, judging by the contents of the mailbox recycling container, I am not alone.

2. Awards. They have become like standing ovations – so common that they mean little. Happily, I can report that my own law school, with the exception of one bizarre award that seems to be created by a crony for another crony, is pretty clean on this. I hear, however, of Law School awards for the best article, most significant contribution to the administration of justice, best teacher, most weight less (actually I made this one up and hope to win it someday but am waiting until we sell the name of our school again and become the Slim Fast College of Law) and so on. Everyone gets one every few years. I am not concerned about the awards per se but the feeling that many have come into existence so they can be added to resumes and reported to the press and not because of any underlying need to recognize excellence.

3. Centers, Programs, Institutes, Workshops, Foreign Programs, I have already expressed my opinion that many of these activities are for faculty and not for Law School shareholders. They also serve the “put me in” purpose. They are often created, but more frequently perpetuated, because it makes the School’s resume longer. This is despite the fact that a close look would reveal that nothing of consequence is happening. The poet James Buffet might say “we do it for the stories we could tell” but this is the dark side of that sentiment.

Here again, the “put me in mentality” means a great deal of noise (and the destruction of a few forests) not in the interest of being better but in just seeming to be that way.

(No music link but join me in humming Mathew Ryan’s “I Hear a Symphony”)

Law School Rankings, Faculty Scholarship, and Associate Deans for Faculty Research

Richard Buckingham, Diane D'Angelo & Susan Vaughn (all of Suffolk) have posted Law School Rankings, Faculty Scholarship, and Associate Deans for Faculty Research on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

The authors contend that a boom in law school rankings has encouraged many U.S. law schools to take new measures to encourage and publicize faculty scholarship. The establishment of associate deans for faculty research is one such measure. The authors conducted a study to determine the number of law schools that have these dean-level positions. They argue that many law schools have established these positions as part of their efforts to improve their standing in the increasingly important rankings.

The authors begin with a historical overview of the original law school model and discuss how that model evolved over time. They focus on how those changes led to a competitive law school market that helped lay the groundwork for U.S. News & World Report and other law school rankings. They then explore numerous alternative ranking methodologies and conclude with a study of ABA-accredited law schools that have appointed associate deans for faculty research.

Cross-posted on TaxProf Blog.

Shameless cross-posting about my latest Toledo Law Review piece

On my own blog, I've posted a link to my latest piece about shared governance. Other posts on my blog talking about shared governance are here.

Book Review - The Destruction of Young Lawyers

Several weeks ago, I posted some thoughts (not positive!) about The Destruction of Young Lawyers, by Douglas Litowitz, which had gotten some play on the blogs of several well-regarded professors, including Legal Ethics Forum, Leiter's Law School Reports and Balkinization. I have since written, and now posted on SSRN, a more fulsome review of the book, summarized by this abstract:

This is a review of The Destruction of Young Lawyers: Beyond One L by Douglas Litowitz (Akron: University of Akron Press, 2006).

While the book may be a credible (if tiresome) account of Mr. Litowitz's own unhappiness as a law student and large firm new associate, and evidence of the fact there are unhappy lawyers in the world, it overpromotes itself on two counts. Although it is written by a law professor and published by a university press, and makes broad and universal claims about evils in the legal profession, it is largely a slapdash pastiche of hyperbole and anecdote. Nor is it a balanced view of the profession. Rather, it is one man's attempt to transpose his own journey through hopelessness and despair into a universal truth under the patina of scholarship.

I am perhaps slightly less sanguine than others who post on this particular blog about whether truth necessarily emerges by way of the inductive process from data. Nevertheless I have a healthy respect for good data, and taking careful and thoughtful conclusions from it. What you cannot tell from the abstract is that the review juxtaposes good empirical work by Bill Henderson (Indiana-Bloomington, left) and David Zaring (Washington & Lee, above right), as well as an interesting piece by John Conley (North Carolina, below right) to which they cite briefly: "How Bad Is It Out There?: Teaching and Learning about the State of the Legal Profession in North
Carolina," 82 N.C. L. Rev. 1943 (2004).

My piece will appear in Hart Publishing's Legal Ethics, of which Brad Wendel (Cornell) is the book review editor.

UPDATE: One of the book's themes is how the unholy cabal of elite law schools and big law firms force law students to keep taking those $160,000 starting salaries to pay off the six-figure student debt. Somebody forgot to tell NYU. Today from Peter Lattman at the Wall Street Journal's Law Blog is a summary of Crain's New York's "The Business of Law Report" which includes:

A Q&A with Joshua Perry, a recent NYU Law grad who took a job as a
public defender in New Orleans. When asked about his law-school debt,
he explained that at $40,000 per year there’s no way to repay a
six-figure debt bill, but NYU has a generous loan repayment program. As
long as Perry stays in the public interest for five years, he says that
NYU picks up his loan debt and making his payments as long as his
salary stays below a certain cap.

(Cross-posted on Legal Profession Blog).

Understanding the US News Law School Rankings

I'm happy to be able to report that a complete draft of my article entitled "Understanding the US News Law School Rankings" has now been posted on SSRN. It can be found at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=937017

The new draft substantially substantially expands my discussion of the expenditure variables, adds discussion of the student/faculty ratio and library variables, and includes a new Part III "Managing Your School's Rankings" and new Part IV "Improving the U.S. News Ranking System."

Winthrop Jordan, RIP

Please pardon me one more intrusion on the moneylaw turf, to commemorate one of our country's greatest historians, Winthrop Jordan, who I have just learned died on Friday. My favorite book of his is White Over Black: American Attitudes Towards the Negro, 1550-1812. Much learning in there about the racial and legal origins of slavery. It is one of the finest works of history I have ever read.

He was educated at Harvard College (graduating with a social relations degree in the storied class of 1953) and then a Ph.D. in history from Brown University in 1960. He taught for a number of years at the University of California, Berkeley and then, like some other historians of the South with great affection for this region, he moved here--to Ole Miss in 1982. The Jackson Mississippi Clarion Ledger has more details.

Is Placement of Law Review Articles Overrated?

As we law professors obsess over the placement of our articles during the semi-annual law review shopping season, we perhaps should take heed of a new economics paper by Andrew J. Oswald (University of Warwick), An Examination of the Reliability of Prestigious Scholarly Journals: Evidence and Implications for Decision-Makers, 74 Economica 21 (2007). Here is the abstract:

Scientific-funding bodies are increasingly under pressure to use journal rankings to measure research quality. Hiring and promotion committees routinely hear an equivalent argument: ‘this is important work because it is to be published in prestigious journal X’. But how persuasive is such an argument? This paper examines data on citations to articles published 25 years ago. It finds that it is better to write the best article published in an issue of a medium quality journal such as the OBES than all four of the worst four articles published in an issue of an elite journal like the AER. Decision-makers need to understand this.

From the Introduction:

The paper collects data on the accumulated lifetime citations to papers published 25 years ago. It uses these to construct a simple test. The data come from issues of six economics journals of varying levels of reputation. These data show the expected ranking. However, and more interestingly, they also reveal that the best article in an issue of a good to medium-quality journal routinely goes on to have much more citations impact than a "poor" article published in an issue of a more prestigious journal.

Cross-posted on TaxProf Blog.

Update: My colleague Michael Solimine pointed me to Ian Ayres & Frederick E. Vars, Determinations of Citations to Articles in Elite Law Reviews, 29 J. Legal Stud. 427 (2000), which analyzes the most, and least, cited articles in the Harvard Law Review and Yale Law Journal in 1980-95 and urges "extreme modesty" in citation analysis.

Brown University's Response to Its Slavery and Justice Committee

While Bill Henderson helps us refine and perhaps shift what we're talking about, here's another post about universities and money, though like my last post on the Elihu Yale portrait controversy, it's not about the typical topic for moneylaw.

The administration at Brown University has just released its response to the report last fall of its Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice. The administration's responses focus on education, which makes sense because that's the business that Brown's engaged in. Some of the recommendations are:

•To commission a revision of its official history “so that it presents a more complete picture of the origins of Brown.”

•Hold the relevant materials used to prepare the report in the university’s archives, make them available to scholars and exhibit them.

•Through existing departments, centers and institutes or through creation of a new academic entity, undertake a major research and teaching initiative on slavery and justice.

•Join with city and state officials in determining how the history and role of slavery in Providence, Rhode Island and at the university should be memorialized in the state, city and on College Hill.

•Raise a permanent $10-million endowment to establish the Fund for the Education of the Children of Providence, starting immediately.

•Provide free tuition to Brown to as many as 10 admitted graduate students per year. After completing a master’s degree in either teaching or urban education policy, they must agree to serve in Providence-area schools or surrounding area schools for at least three years.

Here's an extended treatment from the Providence Journal. I'm sticking by my prediction over at blackprof from last fall that other schools will follow Brown's lead.

MoneyLaw schools in a non-MoneyLaw world, part II

(Part I is here.) As long as employers stick to their tried-and-not-so-much-true methods of choosing employees, graduates of MoneyLaw schools will head into a world that values group membership over individual abilities--a very anti-MoneyLaw world. Here's why:

Grades aren't bad measures of ability, but they're certainly not perfect measures. For one thing, curved grades show comparative ability, not absolute ability. For another thing, to the extent that law professors aren't particularly well-trained at composing tests, law students always run the risk of being part of the garbage-in, garbage-out problem. Moreover, law school exams are often a learned skill, at least in the first year of law school. Students who "get" how to write exams have an enormous edge in the first semester, and their GPAs get a head start.

Grades aren't good measures of other skills that good lawyers must have, though: grades don't measure the ability to work in teams, emotional intelligence, public speaking ability, etc. In a way, many exams reward the ability to come up with every possible answer, even silly ones, as a way of demonstrating the student's capacity for wringing meaning from the hypothetical. Such exams don't reward those students who decide not to write about every possible answer--in other words, those exams don't reward the students who use common sense to restrict their answer to the most important possibilities. (That's one reason that I prefer to limit the space for answers--it forces students to focus on the most important answers, not every possible answer.)

Think about how students get selected for summer associate slots at many big law firms. Their 20-minute, on-campus screening interview is determined by their law school GPA. If they get call-backs, they go for a full-day interview, broken into 20-30 minute, one-on-one in-office meetings with partners and associates, and a lunch. Unless the in-office interviewers are particularly skilled, those 20- or 30-minutes sessions are a rehash of the student's resume, coupled with routine questions ("Why are you interested in our firm?") and routine answers ("Because your firm is the leader in [insert language from firm's website]") that reveal nothing about whether there's a match between the student's abilities and interests and the firm's needs.

The advantage of these types of interviews? Relatively little lawyer-time. But the cost? HUGE. By not taking the time, at the front end, to look beyond (1) the rank of the school (group membership), (2) grades (and if grades are curved, then there's a group membership complication in the grades as well), and (3) whether the student can walk and talk, the firm is buying itself some serious associate attrition as soon as the associates are mobile (coincidentally, associates are mobile around the time they first turn profitable--after the second or third year of practice).

What if law firms used a MoneyLaw approach and searched for indicia of those several skills that the most successful lawyers in the firm have? (Heck, I'd settle for an analysis of the law school GPA of those associates who stayed and made partner....) Here are some possibilities:

1. Participation in clinical programs. (Reducing the effect of overall GPA on the decision to interview a student.)
2. Participation in moot court, mock trial, or writing competitions. (Ditto.)
3. Answering hypotheticals during the interview. (Focusing on individual skills, not group membership.)
4. Getting an assignment during the interview and then returning it within a short timeframe. (Ditto.)
5. Being willing to dip twice as low into a school's cutoff GPA to see if there's any significant difference in the quality of candidates.

Until law firms change the way that they hire, MoneyLaw schools--which would be lovely places to work--won't provide their graduates with one of the crucial benefits of a legal education: the ability to find satisfying work in the law.

OK, Bill and Al: I still don't have a MoneyLaw theory, per se, but maybe I'm on my way....

MoneyLaw schools in a non-MoneyLaw world, part I

I'm very glad that Bill Henderson has gotten us talking about a cohesive MoneyLaw theory (here), and I'm equally glad that Al Brophy has weighed in with reminders of the various empirical analyses of student "numbers" and bar pass rates. Bill and Al (as well as Paul Caron, Rafael Gely, among others) have been doing a superb job of studying all of the issues surrounding the rankings. Of course, the rankings, well, rankle us over at MoneyLaw.

And it is time for a MoneyLaw theory of what makes a great law school, as Bill reminds us in his post (and Jeff Harrison reminds us here). Using that tentative list of possible factors is a good start to flesh out a theory.

The factors again, from both Bill's post and Jeff's post:

• Bar passage (LSSSE adds a whole new layer of variables), including factors that reduce or eliminate any minority passage gap
• Employment at graduation / Employed at 9 months (regressions published here)
• Credentials of incoming students (regressions published here)
• Annual giving (rate, average amount)
• Career satisfaction of graduates
• Satisfaction of major employers of graduates
• Faculty participation in law reform / participation in successful law reform
• Pro bono commitment of graduates

I can't quibble with bar passage, employment rates (at least those that are honestly derived), satisfaction of employers (presumably with the quality of the work--and perhaps the character--of the graduates), and some measure of faculty effectiveness in scholarship (not sure I like the "law reform" angle, but I get the concept of this factor).

The other factors are more troubling for me. Credentials of incoming students tell us about the applicant pool and the selection of incoming students, but they don't tell us much about the school's quality. Instead, the credentials tell us about the (forgive me, students, for this one) raw materials going into the school. Annual giving can be measured in dollars (Jeff's "rich get richer" point) or percentages of alumni giving (but the latter misses giving by non-alumni, and for new-ish schools like UNLV's law school, that problem misses literally millions of dollars that Dick Morgan has raised). Pro bono commitment of graduates is a lofty goal, and it might tell us something about the culture of the school, but it might also be a factor that depends on other aspects of the graduates' lives (time, ability, desire) that law school might not affect.

As we look at these proposed factors, though, we face a larger problem: that we're not living in a MoneyLaw world. Let's take placement at graduation. Even before the rankings, employers looked more deeply into the class at the top schools than they did at less highly regarded schools, on the theory that the graduates at the top schools were smarter. GPAs have ordered employer interest in graduates at all schools (e.g., cutoffs for interviews) on the theory that graduates with the highest grades were smarter. This way of choosing whom to hire doesn't value MoneyLaw ideas at all.

I've spoken to various groups about the disconnect between grades and skills (and between grades and social / emotional intelligence). No matter what I say, most employers are afraid to test their own theories of what makes a good associate, or a good partner. And yet, as they lose associates over time, they realize that they may not be finding the best "fit" for their particular work environment. More about this in part II.

The Best Law School

In the immediately preceding, post Al Brophy draws our attention to an issue Bill Henderson rightfully directs at MoneyLaw contributors and others: how does one measure MoneyLaw success. Bill lists a number of possibilities ranging from bar results to the satisfaction of graduates. I have reproduced the list here but you should read his post for the other thoughtful comments it contains.

1.Bar passage (LSSSE adds a whole new layer of variables), including factors that reduce or eliminate any minority passage gap
2. Employment at graduation / Employed at 9 months (regressions published here)
3. Credentials of incoming students (regressions published here)
4. Annual giving (rate, average amount)
5. Career satisfaction of graduates
6. Satisfaction of major employers of graduates
7. Faculty participation in law reform / participation in successful law reform
8. Pro bono commitment of graduates

To me, Bill's list is somewhat weighted in the direction of the "rich get richer." Since there is no World Series to name a winner, we are all fishing around a bit for a measure of success but I worry about middle of the road state law schools with average LSATs of 162 or so, dedicated faculty, modest giving rates, and which struggle to place their students. Are they irrelevant? Here is why they are not.

1. When it comes to state law schools, one has to think in terms of the return to public investment. Items 7 and 8 pick up some of this and it is not clear how to measure it. Still, unless state law schools operate as perverse delivery systems for welfare payments to the middle class students and faculty, somewhere in the equation should be a consideration of how the graduates and faculty pay back those who pay the bills. Placement rates and starting salaries do not capture this factor.

2. A MoneyLaw school is an efficiency school -- getting the most out of what it has. Thus, factors like expenditure per student and credentials of entering students must be compared with what is ultimately produced. A small budget school with students who are unable to get into elite schools and which has a modest placement rate may be out-performing schools others regard as "top" schools. Unlike item 1, this one could be put to an empirical test.

As I have noted earlier, the search for a meaningful test of what a MoneyLaw school does probably has little to do with focusing on output measures alone. This strikes me as revising the USN&WR methodology. Instead it is best assessed by observing what takes place on a day to day basis.

The best law school may be one somewhere in the South, the Midwest or an urban area, spending modest amounts per student; and where faculty simply work hard, help each other, gossip little, and for whom national recognition is a secondary consideration.

(No music link but join me in humming The Band's "The Weight")

Bill Henderson on MoneyLaw

Readers of MoneyLaw will want to read our friend Bill Henderson's thoughts over at elsblog about what we ought to be talking about here. Much to think about. And close followers of this blog may recall Bill's exchange last fall with Jim Chen. Bill had one of my favorite lines in recent memory: "It is rare that a junior scholar has the opportunity to utter these words to a scholar of Jim Chen's stature, but here it goes: Jim, you need a theory."

Bill and I have talked about one related issue, linearity and the correlation between student quality and bar pass rates (and my response here). Last fall Paul Horwitz also spoke about some MoneyLaw issues.

Political Science rankings

First of all, I would like to thank Dean Chen for his invitation to guest blog at MoneyLaw. I will be writing about rankings and hiring in political science. I have been collecting data on assistant professors in political science for two years now (here's my website), a somewhat related discipline to law. I will remain anonymous, so I apologize for the lack of a more thorough personal introduction.

This first post will be a very descriptive account of rankings in the discipline. After all, the purpose of Moneyball is to rise in the rankings, so it's good to know what kind of rankings are out there. The future posts will be about my own work, as well as on Moneyball hiring strategies in political science more generally. Even though there are considerable differences between legal and political science academia, I hope that some ideas are at least somewhat illuminating.

There are two main types of rankings in political science (as, I assume, in other disciplines) – “reputational” and “objective.” I cannot describe the rankings in much detail, but I have provided links to papers/websites where possible (some of the sources require a subscription, I am sorry about that).

Reputational rankings

Probably the most famous ranking is the one compiled by the National Research Council (1995). It surveyed 208 political scientists who were asked to rate the “scholarly quality of program faculty.” The top 5 was Harvard, UC Berkeley, Yale, Michigan and Stanford. U.S. News also ranks graduate departments in political science, based on surveys sent to department heads and directors of graduate programs who are asked to rate departments on their academic quality (top 4, ranked in 2005, are Harvard, Stanford, Michigan, and Princeton; UC Berkeley, and Yale are tied for 5th). One noteworthy ranking (technically, only "rating") that also, in the end, relies on reputation, is the British Research Assessment Exercise. It’s noteworthy because of the impact of the ranking – much of the research money in the UK is distributed based on that particular ranking. By the way, both NRC and RAE are just in the process of compiling a new round of rankings – NRC will publish its data by the end of 2007.

Publication and citation based rankings

NRC did and does collect data on publications and citations, but there are various problems with the data (e.g., no weighing for publication quality whatsoever; and quite obvious errors were noted in citation counts). Not surprisingly, right after the 1995 NRC reputational rankings came out, there were a couple of rankings published that analyzed “objective” and “better” data. Miller, Tien & Peebler (1996) looked at publications in the top political science journal: The American Political Science Review, from the time period of 1954-94, and constructed various tables with rankings (they also took into account citations to authors who had published in the APSR). For example, most publications in the top journal were from faculty at Stanford, followed by Michigan, Harvard, Michigan State, Ohio State and Rochester. Ballard & Mitchell (1998) looked at publication records in nine leading journals (whether a journal was “leading” was determined by a survey conducted earlier). After controlling for faculty size, their top 5 includes California Institute of Technology, SUNY Stony Brook, Rochester, Iowa, and Houston. Among the most recent rankings is the Hix global ranking (working paper and data on his website) of political science departments, based on number of publications in a selection of political science journals, the impact factor of the journals where articles are published, and faculty size. Columbia, Harvard, Stanford, Ohio State and European University Institute come ahead. Masuoka and Grofman (forthcoming) look at which departments have the most highly-cited faculty. They construct various tables; for example, “citations per capita” top 5 is Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Michigan, and Cornell. Another very recent "objective" ranking is compiled by Academic Analytics (see an article about it). This ranking is based on the number of book and journal publications, faculty size, citations, grants and awards. The top 5 are Washington University (St. Louis), Harvard, Yale, SUNY Stony Brook, and Illinois.

Alumni-based rankings

There are a couple of rankings based on the work of the alumni of a program. McCormick & Rice (1982; 2001) looked at whose graduates publish in five “leading journals” (a journal was leading if it was published by the national or one of the regional political science associations). Michigan, UC Berkeley, Chicago, Rochester and Indiana are the top 5. In a later study, Rice, McCormick & Bergmann (2002) looked at whose graduates publish books that had been reviewed at the flagship journal APSR. Harvard, UC Berkeley, Yale, Chicago and Princeton top that list (when weighed by size of the graduating class, Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Case Western Reserve and UC Berkeley are at the top). Masuoka and Grofman look at which departments have produced the highest number of highly-cited faculty (determined by being in top 400 of all faculty). The top 5 are Harvard, Yale, UC Berkeley, Michigan, and Chicago. They also look at placement records (additional tables and figures) as such – the top 5 in 1991-2000 placements were Harvard, UC Berkeley, Michigan, Princeton, and Chicago.

Individual rankings

Finally, there are a couple of rankings of individual political scientists. Miller, Tien & Peebler (1996) looked at publications and citations in the APSR. The most recent ranking, Political Science 400, and based on a citation count, (full excel spreadsheet here) was just published by Masuoka, Grofman and Feld in the January 2007 issue of the journal PS: Political Science and Politics (most of the rankings and articles referenced above are from that journal). This is the first paper in a series of three (two papers are noted above); more information is available on Grofman's website.

Alma Mater, Mater Mea?

"Alma Mater" roughly translates as "fostering mother," or "nourishing mother. Does that make your academic alma mater your mother in any real sense?

Maybe during the college years, which I hear are quite formative--it's the first time away from one's parents home, and the college becomes for better or worse the surrogate parent--atending to your educational, dietary, medical, and personal development needs. Tons of student organizations devoted to every type of obsession and pathology. Dorm formals, or "dormals." Dining hall plans. Broomball (apparently...brooms, a ball, some sort of goal other than idiocy). Student health clinics that train students in safe sex and help them deal, hopefully privately, with the repercussions of unsafe sex. Ultimate frisbee tournaments, Scrabble hoe-downs, any number of ridiculously orchestrated non-academic social events. In graduate school, it offers the same functions, but by then you are supposed to be more autonomous. You are supposed to be able to eat without a dining plan, figure out how to make friends yourself (although those awful school-sponsored kegs in the courtyard...), and hopefully know how to take care of yourself by this age. So really, does graduate school perform any sort of maternal or paternal function?

I was a commuter to my nearby state college, so I never had that nurturing feeling from school--but I spent so much time there by virtue of my two majors in two different schools (and plus commuting is a pain more than twice a day), that I felt like I spent a significant amount of time there five days a week. I volunteered in many feminist organizations, and edited the feminist newspaper. I belonged to the honors programs in each of my schools. I felt very much a part of the school, despite having to leave it every evening and hardly being there any weekend. I felt that college contributed significantly to my development, both intellectual and personal. When I graduated, I donated a bit of money--not much, but not bad consdering my charity budget then was exactly $100 a year.

I lived very close to law school, and spent even more time there--and the three years I spent in law school, though they passed quickly, felt as laborious and intense as four years in college. I spent many a weekend at the law library. I attended far more school functions than I ever had in college--public lectures, talks, brown-bags, symposia, social events (except bar review)--and this even when I hated law school the first 1.5 years. I didn't even wait till I graduated to give money back. My school has public interest think tanks that I gladly to which I gladly contributed, as well as a public interest law fund (and charity event) that I donated to every year. In law school, I found causes as well as reasons to contribute. It wasn't my mother, but I still felt a sense of duty to aid it in some of its endeavors. I supported the endeavors, and so I supported my school. I may indeed carve out some of my slightly enlargened charity budget to donate to the school fund--not just special projects, now that I've graduated I see that the entire school is a project that may deserve my support if it can continue with its many particular endeavors.

It's no different now that I'm in a post-graduate program, except that it's only a one-year program. I hardly go to school, having only two classes. I don't get much out of my school as an institution other than an opportunity to write and work with faculty--and this is something one may in theory do by oneself if one can develop such relationships independently. My school helps me get in touch with faculty and fixes me up with a main advisor--but a lot of the leg work is my own. So it's not a sense of ingratitude, but rather institutionally-bred detachment that I am looking at my "Class of 2007" contribution form with some wariness. I would much rather contribute to the public interest law fund, or a public-interest think tank here. At least until I feel like I really am a part of the school. Maybe that moment will come with my SJD.

It is slowly awakening now that I've been better integrating myself into the law school as a whole, and not just my program. It sounds silly, but taking classes in a particular program concentration or making friends with the "American" law students goes a long way to making LLMs feel a part of the campus community. It's like that first surge of school spirit I had when I represented my school at a colloquium, or my first school football game. It's the undefinable moment when you feel like you are a part of a greater institution doing great things, and not just using the school as a go-between or writing-coach.

The point is, I'm not fully there yet, and I wonder if it's the problem with such short, independent academic programs--I no sooner adjusted to being here than I am leaving. I'm not really integrated to the rest of the school, and it takes a great deal of effort to carve out time to join and attend extracurricular activities. And all in one year. I can't imagine what it is like for the internationals, who will go back to their countries. Yet they invariably donate to the class fund here. I appreciate their fervor, even as I can't really understand it. Then I think what it must be like to be a freshman at 18 living away from home for the first time. Ah, so the school has become their mother. I am so comfortable here with friends outside of law school nearby and family not too far away, that I don't feel need or compulsion to attend every social event or rely on the school too much to fulfill my personal needs. Maybe the school is an alma mater to my classmates, who are so far away from their own mothers.

I'm visiting my law school alma mater this week, and I will let you know whether I feel a resurgent sense of nostalgia and largesse, and whether I miss the hallowed halls because once I belonged there.

A scientific explanation for email "nastygrams"

Today's New York Times posits a scientific explanation for the difference in behavior of those who are civil in face-to-face encounters but brutally venomous in email or instant messaging exchanges. In Flame First, Think Later, New Clues to E-Mail Misbehavior, Daniel Goleman (of Social Intelligence and Emotional Intelligence fame) explains that, in the absence of visual social cues, our brains no longer have that "uh-oh" control that keeps us from inadvertently offending the person with whom we're electronically communicating. As Goleman puts it:

The emerging field of social neuroscience, the study of what goes on in the brains and bodies of two interacting people, offers clues into the neural mechanics behind flaming.

This work points to a design flaw inherent in the interface between the brain’s social circuitry and the online world. In face-to-face interaction, the brain reads a continual cascade of emotional signs and social cues, instantaneously using them to guide our next move so that the encounter goes well. Much of this social guidance occurs in circuitry centered on the orbitofrontal cortex, a center for empathy. This cortex uses that social scan to help make sure that what we do next will keep the interaction on track.

That lack of an immediate visual reaction to an email could explain innocent miscues, such as typing "I resent that email" and then wondering why the other party is upset, when all you meant was that you re-sent the email. It could also explain why people use smiley faces, the word "grin" in brackets, and other ways of showing that the writer does not intend to offend.

What of those nastygram senders, though, who do want to offend? Unlike Oscar Wilde's famous statement that "[a] gentleman is one who never hurts anyone's feelings unintentionally," these nastygrammers aren't necessarily gentlepersons. Instead, they seem to want to stir up discontent in a public forum. I don't want nastygrammers to use the social neuroscience excuse ("the lack of visual cues made me do it"), so how does a community otherwise prevail on a nastygrammer to cease and desist? Ignoring the emails might work, or it might escalate the nastygrams in the hope of getting some reaction. Any suggestions?

Elihu Yale Portrait Controversy

This post is about money and universities, though not the typical focus of money-law. I hope to be back soon to writing about rankings of law journals and the role of race of the study body in US News rankings.

Yale has recently decided that it will take down a picture of Elihu Yale, the university's namesake, which depicts a young enslaved male (who is wearing a metal collar) waiting on him. I had never heard of the picture before the story broke. Yet, now that I see it, I think it's an important depiction of the connections between that great university and the institution of slavery. I've posted the picture, from the Hartford Courant website at right. Here's the Courant's article on the controversy.

The article reports that the painting hung in a room where the trustees met, though the room apparently was not generally open to the public. It is going to replace the offending portrait with another one, which does not have a slave in it.

Yale has other portraits of its benefactor, with less historical baggage. A painting of roughly the same size - of Yale standing alone by a table, a seascape behind him - will soon be dusted off and pulled from a storeroom at the Yale University Art Gallery to replace the one up now.

The African slave trade was brought to America by European settlers, desperate for bodies to work the sugar and cotton plantations, to supply their trading empires with goods. In paintings of the time, images of blacks in metal collars, marking them as slaves, were not uncommon, said John Marciari, a curator of early European art at Yale.

"It's a simple but lamentable fact of history," he said.

I think it's important to talk about the past and so I am grateful for the discussion of the Yale portrait. But I also worry when I see an effort to erase history, which may be one effect of moving the portrait. Lots to talk about here, of course. (I wrote about some of these kinds of issues last fall over at blackprof, though those posts focused largely on Brown University's slavery and justice report and on what to make of connections to slavery now.) I hope in the not-too-distant future to complete a monograph on the connections between universities and proslavery thought, which I have tentatively titled University, Court, and Slave.

Thanks to Jim Campbell for alerting me to this story.

Ignorant Bliss in Hiring Legal Academics

Academics tend to favor the disclosure of all credible and interesting facts. Consider, for example, the post in which I recited figures, originally collected and published by the American Association of Law Schools (AALS), quantifying how various categories of candidates had done in landing legal academic jobs. Some readers evidently regretted that I had aired the data at all, apparently judging it as flawed beyond redemption and as dangerously likely to inflame animus against affirmative action. I found more convincing, however, arguments that the post should have analyzed the data and detailed its limitations. On that view, I erred by saying too little rather than too much.

Nonetheless, I am somewhat sympathetic to the notion that a little well-placed ignorance might improve the AALS's faculty recruitment services. As I mentioned in my prior post, the AALS collects information about candidates for legal academic jobs and uploads it into an electronic Faculty Appointment Registry (FAR). The form that the AALS gives to candidates invites them to classify themselves by sex and race. Employers can use a web-based interface to run a variety of searches on the FAR database. Notably, the AALS allows would-be employers to run searches for "female" or "minority" candidates. It does not, in contrast, allow a would-be employer to run a search for "male" or "non-minority" candidates. Why?

Having learned the hazards of skimping on caveats, let me emphasize that the curiously circumscribed search functions of the FAR database do not prove that the AALS encourages, or that any law school engages in, the preferential treatment of women or minority candidates. Perhaps the AALS selectively limits searches so as to protect it against baseless claims that it facilitates bias in favor of men or non-minority candidates, to the disfavor of women or minority ones. Or perhaps the AALS regards allocating scarce interview slots on the basis of race or sex as no more than affirmative action qua outreach. At this point, I honestly do not know.

Even if the AALS has selectively curtailed FAR database searches in order to facilitate the preferential treatment of women and minority candidates, moreover, it might not constitute a legal problem. I do not pretend to be an expert in employment or civil rights law and so cannot predict what a court would say about such a practice. With all those caveats granted, though, it surely does not strain credulity to imagine someone complaining that to choose interviewees on the basis of their sex or race fails to qualify as an equal opportunity, non-discriminatory hiring practice.

Perhaps, then, the AALS should consider some alternative ways of handling information about candidates in the FAR. It might, for instance, simply stop collecting data about the sex, race, or ethnicity of candidates for law teaching jobs. Or, perhaps better yet, it could collect that data but not allow schools to use it to run searches on the FAR database.

At the very least, AALS should consider making it easier for appointments committees using the FAR database to remain willfully blind to the sex, race, or ethnicity of candidates for law teaching jobs. That data now appears at the top of every FAR form. If you want to avoid learning it, you have to resort to strategically placing post-it notes on your computer screen. That hardly works perfectly, though. A better system would allow interviewers to automatically blank out information about the sex, minority status, and name of each candidate. Even if the AALS does not itself think that equal opportunity, non-discriminatory hiring practices demand such measures, it would be nice if it could accommodate interviewers who think otherwise.

[Crossposted to Agoraphilia.]

The Pluses and Pitfalls of Gossip

In the previous post, Jeff Harrison made several excellent points about the poisonous, pernicious nature of faculty gossip. It isn't a far stretch to imagine that idle chatter would undermine collegiality and proffesionalism among faculty colleagues. In theory, at work, one wishes to be evaluated by one's colleagues based on only the "pertinent" criteria of efficiency, productiveness, professionalism, etc. etc. Then again, I remember how much faculty friendship and collegiality is celebrated at every first year orientation--as if for some reason, it matters that the faculty are friends with each other, have dinner with each other and know the names of each others' kids. As if such friendship and cordiality will trickle down to the students, in this sing-song sunny law school environment where everyone is friends with each other and knowing a lot about each others' personal lives is a "good" thing.

I used to have idealistic notions of the academy, a perspective that is continually disabused the more time I spend in academia. I'd like to think that the gossipy nature of law school, which is very capable of existing in a graduate law program with mostly international students (gossip isn't culture-specific, it just means more languages with which to transmit the gossip) and is reflected by the experiences of my graduate student friends in other disciplines (English, Journalism, Sociology, MFAs, you name it)--well I'd like to think that it would stop once we got "real," "grown-up" jobs. Then I remember that we are adults, just not with the adult accessories (mortgage, Roth IRAs, kids), and if we act this way now, we will probably act this way a few years from now. Things apparently don't change once you get a job. I know this, because now some of my grad student friends are professors, and I now have law professor friends. The human inclination to idle gossip doesn't end just because you change hats. If anything, you start angling the hat to hear the gossip better.

On the one hand, some studies conducted by the University of Wisconsin and SUNY-Binghamton show that gossip can be good for the workplace. Check out this article from the NY Times, this audio clip from NPR, and this article from the Post-Gazette.

From the NY Times article:

People find it irresistible for good reason: Gossip not only helps clarify and enforce the rules that keep people working well together, studies suggest, but it circulates crucial information about the behavior of others that cannot be published in an office manual. As often as it sullies reputations, psychologists say, gossip offers a foothold for newcomers in a group and a safety net for group members who feel in danger of falling out.

"There has been a tendency to denigrate gossip as sloppy and unreliable" and unworthy of serious study, said David Sloan Wilson, a professor of biology and anthropology at the State University of New York at Binghamton and the author of "Darwin's Cathedral," a book on evolution and group behavior. "But gossip appears to be a very sophisticated, multifunctional interaction which is important in policing behaviors in a group and defining group membership."

When two or more people huddle to share inside information about another person who is absent, they are often spreading important news, and enacting a mutually protective ritual that may have evolved from early grooming behaviors, some biologists argue.

"We're told we're not supposed to gossip, that our reputation plummets, but in this context there may be an expectation that you should gossip: you're obligated to tell, like an informal version of the honor code at military academies," Dr. Wilson said.

Fair points. But that doesn't mean that the positive, social tie/social network building effects of gossip can't quickly degerate into pernicious social closure by those with axes to grind or just mean personalities. The thing with gossip in the workplace is that such idle chatter can lead to very real employment outcomes--the exclusion of certain people from career-enhancing informational networks, denial of valuable assignments and promotions, and disappointing the rightful expectation that those we work with will conduct themselves with professionalism. In theory, you'd expect to act with greater maturity than your students.

And however good gossip may be anthropologically and sociologically, it can be bad for one's reputation and weigh negatively in the assessment of one's character.

The folks at Crooked Timber posed a great question about whether evidence of a gossipy personal character may be used as a factor of consideration for graduate admissions, and the responses are well worth reading:

Graduate Admissions Committee for the department in question is deciding whom to admit. For said discipline, as for several others, there is a website on which potential students gossip share information about the departments to which they are applying, and many do so anonymously. One applicant to said department behaves on the website (under the supposed cloak of anonymity) like… well, very badly, saying malicious things about departments he has visited, raising doubts about whether he is honest and the kind of person it would be reasonable to want other students to deal with, and generally revealing himself to be utterly unpleasant.

Question: is it wrong for the GAC to take this information about the applicant into account when making a decision? Secondary question: does it make a difference to your answer that the department is in a private, not a public, university?

Please weigh in with your own responses over at Crooked Timber or here. Altogether very interesting questions posed by both Jeff and Harry: how do we stop gossip. and should we judge others by their human propensity to gossip?

(Picture: From Toothpaste For Dinner)

Stop Me Before I Slap Myself

In a recent post I suggested that the real quality of a law school is assessed by examining what goes on day to day. I listed a number of items and asked readers to rate their own law schools. The bad news is that my own School scored quite high (low is better). The surprising news to me, although I have heard all law schools are pretty much the same, was that we are not alone. There is one item that I should have included on my list of 10 questions and, if I had, I am sure that my School could have distinguished itself.

Gossip. All Schools have it and, let's face it, sometimes it is juicy and fun. Sometimes it is even true. A great deal of the time it is the work of bored and nasty people who want to be authorities on something -- anything.

At my School, just in the last few weeks, I have heard the following:

1. The Dean will tear up the ballots on a faculty candidate if the results are not to his liking. (Not much of a rumor because a good rumor needs to be plausible.)
2. Someone in the Administration is having an affair with a secretary. (Plausible but unconfirmed and a generic rumor.)
3. One faculty candidate was only invited to campus because the Committee mistakenly believed he was an African-American. (Plausible but uncomfirmed. This rumor was traced to the originator who conceded, "I might have said this" but it remained a rumor.)
4. A faculty member is teaching from bar review materials. (Plausible but not juicy.)
5. Professor A slapped Professor B.
6. Professor A did not slap professor B. (Stalemate rumors.)
7. Professor C is only teaching the course he is teaching to keep Professor D from teaching it.
8. Professor E voted for a candidate the Dean favored after being promised more money for a Center.

And there are the more general ones:

1. Professor F has an alcohol problem.
2. Professor G practices law most of the time.
3. Professor H is homophobic.
4. Professor J is racially insensitive.

5. Professor H eats way too much Italian food. (O.k., this is one I made up and spread around but it just did not seem to have legs.)

Different people are authorities on each of this. Ask them how the know and 99% of the time they heard it from somewhere else. Mostly, but not always, rumors seem to be about people who are threatening in one way or "outsiders." In fact, standing out in almost any way is a good way to be a rumor target. I once voted again a current facutly member for tenure and it seemed like I earned my own white-collar-personal-gossip stalker for years.

One thing gossip tells us is that people have time on their hands. The second is that at some point it begins to undermine the ability of a faculty to cooperate sufficiently to do what is best for stakeholders. Incorrect information becomes the basis for actions.

Gossip depends a great deal on the "knowing better, doing nothing" crowd. For example, at my school a faculty member publically stated a rumor as fact and the do nothing crowd let it pass without comment. (Not people to get in a foxhole with!)

How to control it? That's the hard part. It serves some kind of need. I once took it upon myself to trace a rumor to it orginator who did fess up but then yelled at me about something else and, I feel confident, immediately found sympathetic ears in order to hatch new rumors. Unilaterial action is not the answer. Like any addiction, group intervension might work.

So, how does a law school cure itself of its gossip addiction? Is there Law School rehab? Can you do it in a day?

A great debate at WSJ's Law Blog

Today, Peter Lattman posted The Law: A Profession, a Trade or Both?, which pulls together Cameron Stracher's Meet the Clients op-ed and Law Is Still a Profession, Not an 18th-Century "Trade," a letter to the editor by Tamar Frankel and Wendy Gordon. I'm delighted that these three professors are bringing this topic to the popular press, as we've kept the discussion inside the academy for far too long. (For today's shameless self-promotion, see Is "Thinking Like a Lawyer" Really What We Want to Teach?)

The whole issue of whether "thinking like a lawyer" is the right mantra links to the larger issue of what law schools are supposed to do generally. I hope you'll weigh in here at MoneyLaw.

Summer Grants

In a pervious post I noted a small empirical project I undertook suggesting that tenure and a decrease in scholarship were closely related. My impression then was that the relationship shown by the numbers way understated the decline in post tenure writing. I found massive amounts of post tenure recycling -- a series of articles that became a book, multiple editions of basically the same casebook, the ideas presented in earlier articles dressed up in new clothes, edited books of readings containing previously published works. I do not claim to be a non offender on any of these.

I am wondering how the plans different schools have for summer compensation play into this. We know this much. Law professors generally perfer not to teach in the summer and they also like to get paid. So one way to increase scholarship --- perhaps the only way to do it with post tenure people -- is to withhold summer reseach grants unless the professor can show that he or she actually produced something with past summer grants. I do not mean a 5 page transcription of a speech or something that was actually finished in May and sent out in September.

So, here is a short poll (two questions) on how your school operates.

Does your school use summer grants as a means of encouraging scholarship?
	Yes
	No
	Inconsistently
Free polls from Pollhost.com

If so, how?
	Grants only to those who used a previous grant to write or complete a substantial article or book.
	Grants to those who are generally productive even if their work cannot be linked to previous grants
	A general expectation that one should use a grant for research but no serious enforcement.
	Available only to those who have taught in the summer recently.
	Available to all who ask.
	Other-- Please answer as a comment
Free polls from Pollhost.com

Hop to the Co-Op

The good folks over at Concurring Opinions are running a fabulous series of posts about pedagogy and exam grading, and I've contributed probably way too much to the comments. And so should you--the discussion is lively and interesting.

Here is a list of the links and snippets from the posts:

Dave Hoffman on Exam Review Culture

The basic story would go like this. At some schools - including the one where I teach - there is a strong culture of encouraging students to come to professors' offices after receiving grades to review the exam and find ways to improve their performance. To my mind, this is a very good thing - not just for students, who can be taught to do better on an economically consequential activity - but for professors, who can figure out exactly how badly written exams confuse test-takers. Casual inquiry among conference participants suggests that a culture of encouraging colleagues to undertake individualized exam review is more common at schools outside of the traditional top tier. Why?

Dave Hoffman on Replicability, Exam Grading, and Fairness

This is an old debate, made more salient today by my recent experiences at the AELSC One the major messages of the ELS proponents was replicability: put your data online; record your methods (even your syntax); and make sure that further researchers can recreate your results. This raised for me the question of what is an empirical legal studies approach to grading?

Kaimi Wenger on Who Are We Teaching, Anyway?

In any class, there will be a range of student ability, and student ability will correspond broadly to ideal teaching method; this creates a tension. That is, there will be students who catch the material easily on the first reading, there will be students who need extended exercises and discussion to understand the material, and there will be students at various in-between points on the spectrum. Students of different aptitude will respond best to different types of teaching. In particular, struggling students are likely to benefit most from repetition and extended discussion of basic core concepts, while other students may become bored and tune out if the class is moving too slowly.

Paul Ohm on Exam Grading and the Standard Deviation

Imagine you give an exam with two questions, each supposedly worth 50% of the final grade. Imagine further you grade both questions and properly normalize the scores for each one to a 50 point scale. (I'm not so sure all professors normalize properly, but that's a different problem.)What do you do if the standard deviations in the two normalized grade populations vary widely?

In other words, imagine that question one elicits a long, flat curve: the lowest score is much lower than the highest score, and there is a lot of variation in the scores in between, while question two elicits a compact curve with a very high peak that drops off quickly in both directions.

Is it legitimate (fair, proper) simply to add the normalized scores for
questions one and two to derive the final score? Does this cause the first
question to exert an unfairly disproportionate effect on the final curve?

The reflections I contributed were based on my experiences as a teaching assistant at the college level; no doubt the pedagogical purposes and methods differ in the law school context. I also offered my perspective as a once-and-future law student, 4L, etc. But please do hop to the Co-Op and weigh in your own thoughts, whether you are law school graduates or law school professors.

Lincoln the Lawyer

I'm not a Lincoln scholar but I am from Illinois. So, for my first official post on MoneyLaw, I write to honor his remarkable life. He was a MoneyLaw president and a lawyer to boot.

Letter to John M. Brockman on September 25, 1860
J. M. Brockman, Esq.

Dear Sir: Yours of the 24th. asking "the best mode of obtaining a thorought knowledge of the law" is received. The mode is very simple, though laborious, and tedious. It is only to get the books, and read, and study them carefully. Begin with Blackstone's Commentaries, and after reading it carefully through, say twice, take up Chitty's Pleadings, Greenleaf's Evidence, & Story's Equity &c. in succession. Work, work, work, is the main thing.

Yours very truly

A. Lincoln

"Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it."

Lincoln's Cooper Institute Address, February 27, 1860.

Congratulations to Harvard and Drew Faust

I'm delighted to read in this morning's Washington Post that Drew Gilpin Faust will be the next president of Harvard. She's a terrifc scholar (obviously) and a wonderful person. Harvard is, indeed, fortunate to have her.

Plus, I'm always happy to see when good things happen to historians of the antebellum south! Alas, I fear, that is where the overlaps in our resumes diverge.

Among Faust's many books that I enjoy, my favorite is The Creation of Confederate Nationalism, though James Henry Hammond and the Old South: A Design for Mastery is a close second.

Her A Sacred Circle is a brilliant, brilliant work of intellectual history that has a special place in my heart. I've thought for a long time (like decades) that we need a study that uses the antebellum judges to test Faust's picture of the isolation of intellectuals in the old South. This isn't the place for extended treatment of this topic, but if one's interested in seeing how the effect of ideas about slavery, hierarchy, history, and morality, antebellum judicial opinions are excellent places to turn (as well as antebellum legislative debates). But judicial opinions are particularly good places because you can trace out how people who read widely put together these ideas, at least one step removed from politics in the legislature. I think those judges are able to illuminate a lot of the practical impact of ideas studied by scholars like Faust, Elizabeth Fox Genovese and Eugene Genovese, and Michael O'Brien.

AALS Policy on Researching the FAR Database

I recently related some figures, originally collected and published by the American Association of Law Schools (AALS), indicating that women and minorities do better on average than men and non-minorities at landing academic jobs through the AALS's Faculty Recruitment services. Some commentators explained that result by supposing that women and minority job candidates might on average tout better credentials than their counterparts. I promised to look into the matter. The AALS has asked me to refrain from conducting the necessary research, however. Allow me to explain.

The AALS collects various types of information about all candidates seeking law teaching jobs through its recruitment services. It then makes that data available in an online searchable database—the Faculty Appointments Register (FAR)—to law school deans and the members of law school appointments committees. I am one of the latter. I thus thought that I might run some searches on the FAR database to figure out whether candidates' credentials correlate with their sex or minority status.

Specifically, I proposed to run searches on the FAR database allowing me to fill the 24 spaces in a table four columns wide by six rows tall. The column headings would refer to types of candidates, and would comprise these categories: Female; Minority; Female Minority; and All. The row headings would refer to candidates' searchable professional attributes, and would comprise these categories: Clerkship, Major Published Writing; Law School Teaching; Top 10% of Class; JD from Top 17 "Feeder" School (as defined by Brian Leiter's research); and All (a category referring to candidates with all of the aforementioned attributes).

Knowing the critical bent of my readers, I anticipated a number of questions. Why those credentials? (Because they seem like fairly widely recognized ones and because the FAR database's interface allows searches for them.) Why not run searches for male or non-minority candidates? (Because the FAR database does not allow searches of that sort; it allows searches only for female, minority, female minority, or all candidates.) Why think that running such a search on the extant pool of candidates would teach us anything about the make-up of past candidate pools? (Because it seems reasonable to assume that the present pool does not radically differ from prior ones and, at any rate, we might at least get data allowing us to eventually learn something about the role that sex, race, and academic credentials played in the present pool's search for law teaching jobs.) Subsequent events have rendered those questions moot, however.

Recognizing that the AALS offers the FAR database for recruitment purposes, I thought that I ought to seek its permission. I dutifully contacted the AALS and explained my research proposal. After several polite email exchanges, I found the AALS unwilling to approve of my plans. Why? For pretty good reasons, I must admit.

It seems that a similar request earlier this year led the AALS to realize that it had never actually won the consent of past candidates to do the sort of statistical research that it has long done on the FAR database. The AALS now apparently plans to ask for such consent in the future, thus clearing the way for it and at least some third parties to conduct statistical research that does not risk violating candidates' confidentiality. It remains for the AALS Executive Committee to decide, however, about the propriety of allowing third parties such as myself to conduct research on the contents of FAR databases from this and prior years' hiring seasons.

Conceivably, given that candidates to-date have not been notified about the possibility of such research, the Executive Committee might decide to withdraw even the research that the AALS has conducted and published. Or it might simply deny all third parties access to the data. Given that the AALS has the stated goal of "the improvement of the legal profession through legal education," however, I think it more likely that the Executive Committee will open the FAR database to certain types of statistical research—namely, research that stands to both preserve candidates' privacy and reveal how legal academia works.

[Crossposted to Agoraphilia.]

The Law School-Big Law Complex?

The always-interesting Carolyn Elefant over at MyShingle.com has a take on the revamped curriculum at University of Detroit Mercy Law School. It ties into the recent flurry around associate alienation in the big law firm world, provoked by the multiple posts from David Luban, and commented on by others, including Jeff Harrison just below and me. Carolyn's reaction brings to mind John Steele's observation over at Legal Ethics Forum about the pyramid structure of law schools feeding into the pyramid structure of the law industry. John notes "if we're talking about fundamental structural change in the legal profession we have to discuss the school-firm complex."

Carolyn has a link and reaction to a National Law Journal article on the new third-year curriculum at UDM in which all students will be required to practice what appears to be "big firm" law, in a program designed in conjunction with lawyers from firms like Baker & McKenzie and Skadden. (Disclosure: I know Craig Roeder from Baker & McKenzie, who is mentioned in the article, and the former chairman of Dykema Gossett in Detroit, Lloyd Semple (left), who is the distinguished visiting professor running the program, is my former partner.) The gist is the question why a school like UDM, which is unlikely to place more than a small minority of students in big law firms, is making a "big law" program its capstone experience.

I don't know enough to make a judgment. It's entirely possible that it's the big firms that have the time and resources to devote to UDM, and the skills being taught are universal. And you certainly have to give a nod to UDM for its willingness to break out of the mold. And Lloyd, who is a big guy with a Chris Berman like booming voice, will certainly do a good job of playing senior partner. Indeed, when I started at Dykema in 1979, he was the partner in charge of the associates, and he scared the crap out of me.

But check out Carolyn's post and the interesting comments.

Compression

Reading the posts about Marxism in law firms (ya gotta be kidding) and thinking about the salaries of professors led me to wonder about the MoneyLaw position on salary compression. I have not paid attention to other salaries at my school but I understand that here and elsewhere it is necessary to raise starting salaries and that we match offers incumbents may get from other schools. In a sense these salaries are market determined. Everyone else crawls upward, salary-wise, meaning that, apart from some high salary people, the range from top to bottom is quite small. I do not think it is common in law schools but friends in our economics department tell me that it is not uncommon for new hires to pass incumbents over there.

I am torn on this for the following reasons:

1. I think the vast majority of senior level law professors could not find jobs and salaries to match the ones they now hold if they resigned today and circulated resumes. Younger and less experienced professors could be hired to do almost the same thing at lower salaries. Why should stakeholders pay more than the least possible? Under this theory the seniors do not resign all at the same time.

On the other hand,

1. Something seems amiss about a salary scheme that encourages people to constantly be trolling around for a better offer in order to leverage their salaries up at their own schools. From a more economic perspective, schools require professors to absorb a search cost in order to qualify for salary increases. More importantly, it seems both unfair and to encourage disloyalty or at least a lack of personal interest in the long term development of the home school.

2. The people most likely to get the offer that permits leveraging are of the Making Nice, Knowing Better, Doing Nothing variety. Not exactly a great way to encourage faculty activism.

3. If one believes in a life-cycle wage theory senior level law professors are not overpaid but are drawing what is owed them.

So, Jim and others, what is the MoneyLaw position on salary compression?

(Sorry, No music link but I am humming Richard Thompson's 1952 Vincent Black Lightning.)

Law Schools, Corporate Law Firms, and Marxist Economics

There is an interesting chain of posts out there on the relationship between corporate law firms, their economics, and law school curricula, starting with a perceptive take on some data from Brian Tamanaha, then to a Marxist spin by David Luban, and my ensuing rant over at Legal Profession Blog. I do think the original post by Brian Tamanaha has a very serious point about "non-elite" law schools and their offerings, even if my sympathy for the union of highly-paid associates is not apparent in the reaction to the Marxist spin. Plus, in the spirit of Jim Chen's posts, I have a musical link over there.

Being In Sync, Syncretism, and Syncronicity, or is There Such a Thing as "The Law"?

From the Oxford English Dictionary:

synchronous (inflected and abbreviated as: in sync):

1. a. Existing or happening at the same time; coincident in time; belonging to the same period, or occurring at the same moment, of time; contemporary; simultaneous. Const. with. b. transf. Relating to or treating of different events or things belonging to the same time or period; involving or indicating contemporaneous or simultaneous occurrence.

syncretism:

1. Attempted union or reconciliation of diverse or opposite tenets or practices, esp. in philosophy or religion;

synchronicity:

The name given by the Swiss psychologist, C. G. Jung (1875-1961), to the phenomenon of events which coincide in time and appear meaningfully related but have no discoverable causal connection.

Before going to law school, I didn't realize how splintered the study of law can be. When you are a liberal arts major in college and do not have lawyers in the family or as acquaintences, you kind of just think that you'll go to law school, you'll study the law, and be a lawyer. The definite and indefinite articles are important, reifying very abstract things. What kind of law will you study? What kind of lawyer will you be? You realize that these are questions you should have asked before going to law school.

I knew, as an avid fan of criminal procedure shows, that there was criminal law. I knew that in the criminal justice system, "the" people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups: the police who investigate the crime and the district attorneys who prosecute the offenders, and that these are their stories. I knew that.

But I honestly didn't know how I would be learning seemingly discrete topics of law taught in separate classes: civil procedure law, tort law (I didn't even know what tort law was before law school!), contracts, constitutional law, constitutional law (which you know, I thought was everything but apparently not), property law, and of course, criminal law. And then in the second uear, there were ever more different topics of law and permutations of those different topics to choose from: intellectual property law, tax law, land use law, environmental law, civil rights law, employment law, etc. etc.

But oddly, it wasn't until my third year of law that I realized, "Hey wait!" All these various topics and subtopics are not so different, they are all a part of the great corpus of "the law"--that there are tort, contract, criminal, procedural, constitutional, property issues in almost every legal case and certainly in every legal course. Okay, this may be a no brainer to you all. But when you think of how the law can be taught as a series of discrete topics, not until you take a holistic course like "Remedies" does it all really start to come together. And once I took Remedies, I began to think of the law holistically and syncretically. Employment Discrimination Law is one such great end-tying course, as it definitely integrates procedural, constitutional, tort, and contract law and remedies (to learn about laches in two courses was a revelation).

Which brings me to the above definitions: Do you, dear law professor people, try to teach your courses in a holistic manner? Do you try to impress upon the minds of your young, confused, "I went to law school because I rocked the LSAT and it seemed like a good idea at the time" students that "The Law" (unlike either political party) is a "big tent" and each seemingly discrete topic is inextricably related to any other? If you don't, it would be a good thing to impress upon students right away, the first year, that first course. I considered myself a "social justice" law student as a J.D., and didn't take nearly enough corporate law or tax courses thinking that they were irrelevant to my intellectual project and thus useless or "boring." And you know, now that I read articles on how the tax laws or bankruptcy codes have disparate impacts on minorities, I think "damn I should have taken those courses." No student should limit him or herself as being one "type" of law student or lawyer. We wil concentrate eventually, but while we are learning it would do us good to expose ourselves to many topics of law and think of legal education as an integrated enterprise. To go for breadth in addition to depth. To learn the law in all of its many forms and see how they are all related and inevitably become a part of the same corpus.

I wonder if professors limit their course's reach out of a fear that it'll be information overload for the students, or too complicated to understand. But for myself, I loved realizing that I shouldn't think of torts having this remedy or contracts having that remedy or employment discrimination as entirely separate from either, but that they're all different versions of the same legal problems. It somehow felt good to know that my education wasn't piecemeal, and that there was something greater, something bigger than me or any class that I was learning.

As an LLM, I'm only taking two courses in addition to The Thesis, and they are seemingly unrelated. Statutory Interpretation, taught by Avuncular Sweater Vest Prof, and Sociology of Law, taught by I'm A Sociologist Not a Lawyer Prof. And in each class I'm studying Title VII of the 1964 act. In each class, I'm examining the history and development of the EEOC as a regulatory body and how broader statutory interpretation increased the reach and enforcement powers of the EEOC. At first this appeared an almost random coincidence, a Jungian moment of synchronicity, until I remembered that I'm not just studying legislation or sociology--I am studying The Law, not just "A" type of law, (see how definite articles matter), and so it is natural that the two courses should overlap. It's not even syncretism, since these aren't truly different areas of the law--they're just different approaches to the same topic, a statutory construction approach or a sociological approach, which is still different from the employment discrimination approach. But I'm still studying the same thing--just from different angles. Everything is synchronous, or "in sync."

But when they overlap, what a thrill, to have my knowledge reinforced, to feel a part of something bigger. to realize that I'm a lawyer and a law student (again), but I'm always studying something that I can call "The Law."