Louisville 73, Murray State 10

A nice night at Papa John's Cardinal Stadium in Louisville, Kentucky:



Video and game report courtesy of ESPN.com.

And speaking of empirical data...

By now, almost everyone in legal academia has become aware of the United States Civil Rights Commission's call for law schools to report data on the success (or failure) of students of color at their schools and on the bar exam. (As usual, Paul Caron was one of the first to the scene.) Coupled with the Commission's urging that the ABA drop its accreditation requirement that a law school develop a plan to achieve diversity, the Commission's 220 page report seems like a very thinly veiled attack on affirmative action in law schools.

We may have very different views about the role of affirmative action in higher education. Personally, I am in favor it. However, given this blog's emphasis on making decisions based on empirical, verifiable, testable information, it's hard to reject out of hand the Commission's call for law schools to disclose information about the performance of ALL students (including students of color) that they have admitted. Of course there is the possibility that such information will be used (or misused) by those who want to dismantle affirmative action. But if affirmative action is worth defending, it should be worth defending on the facts and not just in principle.

The dissent of the Commission's two Democratic members certainly permits an inference that the Commission was more interested in reaching a particular result than in finding out the truth about the impact of affirmative action. (I couldn't find a direct link, but here's an excerpt: "No attempt was made by the Commission to assess the consensus positions of the scientific or legal community on these issues. No independent research was done by the Commission on these issues, nor did they perform a comprehensive review of others' research.") Defenders of affirmative action should not follow the Commission's lead. We shouldn't presume that we know what effect affirmative action has on the career chances of those we admit and educate in our schools. We may not like the heavy-handed way the Commission went about calling for this information to be disseminated, but nor should we fear providing our consumers with more information about exactly what it is we are doing.

More on Numbers

In recent posts, Sam and Jim raise the issue of the important of empirical evidence as the basis for all sorts of decisions law schools, law students and law professors make. The unwillingness to think in terms of actual data seems pervasive and I can think of specific examples where use of empirical studies would be useful. My impression it is that is rarely used in at least 4 instances:

1. Bar passage: Many schools, but not all, are concerned with bar passage rates but I wonder how many have undertaken a study to see if bar passage is related to LSAT, entering GPA, first year GPA, bar courses taken, pass/fail courses taken, transfer/non transfer status and a host of other variables with an eye to diagnosis? I know there are data like this around but how many schools have actually analyzed there own graduates to see where there might be improvement.

2. Teaching evaluations: I recently participated in University grievance process in which part of the reason for a tenure denial was poor student evaluations. I wonder if any law school has made an effort to determine whether their students’ evaluations of professors are correlated with teaching effectiveness?

3. Hiring: This is the time of year when the top schools go after the graduates at the top of the class at elite schools. Mid level schools go after people at the bottom of the top third of the same schools and largely ignore the top ranked graduates of non elite schools. (or so it seem so me.) I am not sure I have seen any empirical evidence that shows that the second tier students from elite schools out perform the top tier from non elite schools. In fact, I have seen none that shows that even the top students from elite schools out perform top students from non elite schools. Instead of attempting to discover who the best teachers and scholars will be, the practice of self-referential hiring persists.

4. Scholarship. The dearth of empirical scholarship is well known but that does not seem to stop anyone. One case that comes to mind in the current attack on “predatory” lending. I am not a fan of advantage takers and would probably be on this bandwagon myself. But then I ran across a discussion of a study of by Dean Karlan and Jonathan Zinman – reported in the August 4th 2007 issue of The Economist. The gist is that so-called victims of this type of lending are better off than they would have been had their loans been denied. If one assumes that those who borrow from predatory lenders do so because it is the only alternative, then the empirical evidence suggests we may be too quick to be paternalistic in this area. I choose only this one because I had just read the Economist article but my hunch is that it is representative of a great deal of legal “scholarship.”

Introducing the Docket Passer

The Cardinal Eye

Dispatches from the University of Louisville and its law school

An occasional MoneyLaw series

Download the August 29, 2007, edition of The Docket Passer . Or simply mash the "play" button above.

Click here for 2006 Cardinals football highlights.

Welcome to another season of University of Louisville football. I'm not just the dean of the law school here at the UofL; I'm also one of the Cardinals' most enthusiastic fans. I hope to bring you this webcast throughout the season. I call it "The Docket Passer." I'll offer some observations about football, our Cardinals, and my school, Louisville Law.

The Cardinals are coming off a phenomenal 2006 campaign. We're the defending champions of the Big East Conference, and we vanquished Wake Forest in the 2007 FedEx Orange Bowl. Starting quarterback Brian Brohm is a Heisman trophy contender. Under the leadership of our new head coach, Steve Kragthorpe, the Cardinals have a single goal in sight: to top the fantastic year we had in 2006 and to bring the national college football championship home to Louisville.

So let's talk a little about John Heisman. His is a name that we hope will soon be linked forever with that of Brian Brohm. Whether we work in athletics or elsewhere at the University of Louisville, we have a great deal to learn from John Heisman the innovator.

John Heisman, the namesake of college football's highest award for individual achievement, excelled in multiple sports. His love of basketball and baseball would have put him right at home here at the University of Louisville. And though he is best known as a coach and an innovator, he was a star player in his own right.

What is less known about John Heisman (except among legal writers quick to point out this connection) is what he studied. John Heisman went to law school. He received his LL.B. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1892. Like Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Heisman was a polymathic genius who happened to study law. Like Scott Boras, Heisman bypassed the legal profession in favor of a daring career in sports.

So what exactly did Heisman do in football? A profile in the New York Times summarized his accomplishments:

Aside from leading the fight for the legalization of the pass in the early 1900s, Heisman pushed to divide the game into quarters and created the center snap. The ball had previously been rolled on the ground. Heisman introduced the ''hike'' vocal signal and the first audible at the line. He invented the hidden ball trick and what would now be called the fumblerooski. Because he wanted fans to understand play-calling, he made it easier for them to follow the downs and yardage needed by erecting something else new at games: a scoreboard.

Among those innovations, of course, Heisman's signature contribution to the sport was the forward pass. As Wiley Lee Umphlett documented at great length in Creating the Big Game: John W. Heisman and the Invention of American Football (1992), the forward pass probably saved the sport from extinction. From 1904 to 1905, according to the Times, "44 players [were] reported killed in football games, with hundreds sustaining serious injuries." Heisman advocated the forward pass as a way of "scatter[ing] the mob."

The forward pass utterly revolutionized football. The threat of a quick-strike, "vertical" game -- one in which a thrown football could move a team the length of the field if the quarterback hits an eligible receiver in stride -- neutralizes defenses based on size and brute strength. You can't stack eight men in the box when the offense forces you to respect the pass. The forward pass guarantees that fast, thin players can compete on roughly equal footing with strong, heavy players. The threat of the forward pass animates deceptive plays such as the draw and the play-action pass. Those plays, after all, are mirror images of each other: the draw is a run that looks like a pass, and play-action lets the quarterback pass after tricking the defense into stuffing the run.

Everything since Heisman, truth be told, has been a variation on the theme of integrating the forward pass into a sport that would otherwise be a stop-and-go version of rugby. Offensive strategies such as the spread offense, the option offense, and the West Coast offense represent different strategic ways of exploiting a team's strengths and an opponent's weaknesses vis-à-vis the forward pass. The no-huddle offense and the audible are tactical innovations that enable a team to respond to highly variable conditions during the game.

So what does all this have to do with legal education and, in particular, innovation in legal education? These points come immediately to mind:

• There are significant differences between structural, strategic, and tactical innovations. The forward pass is foundational and structural; its emergence changes the sport. The choice between offensive game plans -- say, an option offense versus the Fun 'n' Gun -- enables a coach to plan at a highly abstract, strategic level. Innovative formations, individual plays, and the shrewd use of audibles all belong to the tactical level of the game.


• No single set of strategies and tactics works for every game, let alone every play. Defenses can be just as innovative as offenses. It similarly behooves a law school to retain its options across a wide range of pedagogical and scholarly tools. Clinical education? Intense skills training? Empirical research? Externships? Joint degree opportunities? International programs? Sure. All of that and more should be found in every law school's operational arsenal.


• Both football and legal education are profoundly conservative. With very few exceptions, football coaches continue to treat the forward pass as a deviant play, as though John Heisman had not existed. Similarly, the Langdellian model of legal education continues to hold sway, despite a grumbling, grudging consensus that the case-based, Socratic classroom falls far short of providing contemporary law students with comprehensive training.

Here at Louisville Law, we are striving to innovate. Just as John Heisman saved football by developing the forward pass, we work every day to train future lawyers, entrepreneurs, and leaders. It is no longer enough to teach our students to "think like lawyers." We have to teach them to act and to do like lawyers. The many walks of life that call our graduates demand no less. And we will deliver. Because what we do at Louisville Law is simple: We transform people for good.

A few final points bear notice. John Heisman never confined himself to one thing. He coached other sports, loved opera, and wrote prolifically. And most of all, Heisman understood that football was a team sport. He opposed an award honoring the most talented collegiate player, and only by his death did his name come to be associated with a trophy honoring individual excellence. Law schools and legal education at large should be so fortunate to have the foresight, the daring, and the basic decency of John Heisman.

Super-Crunching

Apropos of Sam Kamin's post on Ian Ayres's new book, here is the video in question:

For my part, I am happy to embrace the notion of empirically, statistically, quantitatively informed management. As I said but a few days ago on this forum:

The world is filled with problems that can be expressed in numbers. If the law harbors any hope of solving them, it cannot afford to discard so basic a tool as mathematics. As undergraduates approach the LSAT, as 1Ls matriculate, as professors end their collective estivation, I offer this wish for the coming academic year. Would it be that our profession no longer confessed -- no longer cherished -- its rampant innumeracy. Would it be that the law, reunited with the tools of quantitative analysis and reinvigorated with an appreciation of mathematical beauty, might cease to be the mathematical waste land of the social sciences.

Crunching the Numbers

Over at Balkinization, Ian Ayres has posted about his new book, Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-By-Numbers Is the New Way to Think Smart. (You've got to like any book that was named by a randomized experiment. I'm definitely going that way for my next article.) If you follow the link to the YouTube interview with Ayres, you'll see that the book is about how statistical analysis is (or should be) replacing intuition as a means of corporate decision-making.

I thought MoneyLaw readers would be particularly interested in this development and in this book. What role do statistics play in decision-making at your law school? Are your colleagues (or other relevant decision-makers) receptive to empirical studies that don't comport with their intuitions?

More on this to come.

The harmonious university

The Cardinal Eye

Dispatches from the University of Louisville and its law school

An occasional MoneyLaw series

Having shared official prose that I have written as the dean at Louisville Law, I figured I might as well make it a regular habit. MoneyLaw will host items I write in my official capacity as dean, as well as occasional pieces that draw upon my experiences at the University of Louisville. After all, if MoneyLaw's readership can put up with posts such as Comfortably Metrotextual, Crossing the River, and Common Wealth, in some cases weeks after these items' initial publication in our local bar association's monthly newspaper, then surely it will tolerate posts written specifically for an online audience.

It is a true joy to work at a law school that is backed by an entire university community. This claim embraces the entirety of the university experience, and not simply the fragments that are most readily imagined as partners for interdisciplinary work affecting law. Certain things -- athletics, performing arts, campus life -- enhance professional education in ways that law professors too often tend to forget.

Tonight's case in point: I just returned from the University of Louisville School of Music's fifteenth annual faculty gala, which coincides with the school's 75th anniversary. Our music faculty staged a spectacular concert. They covered an immense range of musical instruments and idioms. I left full of Cardinal pride, thoroughly pleased that the talented members of the School of Music let me share their campus.

The MoneyLaw point is simple: Why would any division of a university, especially one whose "product" is as esoteric as that of a law school, ever dream of isolating itself from its fellow colleges and departments? The School of Music, Cardinal Athletics, and the UofL's Department of Theatre Arts all do something that law schools rarely if ever do: They perform. Their work touches the broader public, in some cases so deeply that artistic and athletic performances are what members of our Commonwealth understand to be the University of Louisville.

To be sure, our university does many, many things, and I will be the first to emphasize the vital importance of activities not seen by the public at large. Much of the teaching, research, and service that we do takes place in quiet settings. Many of the books and articles produced by our professors are directed at specialized audiences. There does come a time, however, when the academy must make its case directly to the public. Law school outreach takes many forms: conferences, moot courts, public service by students. Don't overlook the law library. The imperative to connect with the public drives what I consider Louisville Law's most important innovation in a generation, and perhaps even deeper in its history: the opening of the University of Louisville Law Clinic.

Finally, this much bears remembering. Rarely if ever can a single department or college approach the accomplishments of an entire university. Superlative performances -- in the arts, in athletics, and in every academic endeavor -- lift all of us. The School of Music's triumph this evening casts a warm glow over the law school and every other corner here at the University of Louisville. Quite simply, and quite humbly, the Cardinal Nation thanks you.

---

Postscript: So that MoneyLaw's readers might have a taste of the concert I enjoyed, I have coded a musical selection drawn from the University of Louisville School of Music's storehouse of recordings. I hope you enjoy trumpeter Michael Tunnell of the Louisville Brass as much as I enjoyed Professor Tunnell and his colleagues at our faculty gala.

Michael Tunnell plays  Gloria 'N Cielo. More recordings are available from Professor Tunnell's archive and the University of Louisville School of Music.

Marginal MoneyLaw: What law schools can learn from bad baseball teams

Marginal MoneyLaw

What law schools can learn from bad baseball teams

A MoneyLaw series

Jeff Harrison's most recent post, Law schools and competitive markets, hints that law schools differ in their ability to compete, particularly during times of financial hardship. Jeff also suggests that the extent to which a law school is being operated for its shareholders -- and the magnitude of the success attained in that enterprise -- can be measured. These observations form the basis for a meaningful exercise in MoneyLaw.

As writers in this forum so often do, I turn to baseball. The late Doug Pappas developed a brilliant metric for assessing the efficiency of Major League baseball teams. As Doug explained in 2004:

The easiest way to measure front office efficiency is simply to divide a club's payroll by its wins to come up with "dollars per win." However, neither side of this equation reflects reality. The worst team a club can field won't go 0-162, and despite some owners' best efforts, it's impossible to spend $0 on a major league roster. It's then necessary to look at marginal wins and marginal payroll.

The Marginal Payroll/Marginal Wins (MP/MW) system evaluates the efficiency of a club's front office by comparing its payroll and record to the performance it could expect to attain by fielding a roster of replacement-level players, all of whom are paid the major league minimum salary. The formula is:

(club payroll - (28 x major league minimum) / ((winning percentage - .300) x 162)

The left side of this formula assumes that a replacement-level club would play .300 ball. That translates to 48.6 wins in a 162-game season, which before the 2003 Tigers was worse than any actual major league club since the institution of the amateur draft. [Editors' note: The 2003 Tigers went 43-119, good for a .265 record.] The previous low was the 52-110 (.321) record of the NL's two 1969 expansion clubs, the Expos and Padres, who began play with no minor league system, no way to sign free agents, and no players any other NL club really wanted to keep. After subtracting the replacement-level .300 winning percentage from the club's actual winning percentage, the resulting number is multiplied by 162 to calculate the number of marginal wins over a full 162-game season. This adjusts the formula for strike-shortened seasons and clubs which fail to make up a postponed game or two.

All that it takes to translate Doug Pappas's marginal payroll/marginal wins formula for use in legal education is to develop analogous metrics for payroll and wins.

The next two posts in this series will undertake these tasks. First, I will ask what it would cost to run the most threadbare law school that would manage to secure and retain ABA accreditation. That figure would represent legal education's equivalent of the Major Leagues' minimum payroll.

I will then tackle the more difficult task of defining "wins" in legal education. No matter how many law professors imagine themselves as the primary stakeholders in the existing university rankings game, students and their eventual employers are the true primary consumers of academic rankings. Since any effort to define academic "wins" is tantamount to proposing a different set of rankings, for purposes of this exercise, we might as well have the rankings we want. I propose student metrics mark the threshold of ABA accreditation: true employment rates (preferably at graduation), bar passage rates, and the like. A school performing at that level, and no better, would be legal education's equivalent of the 1969 Expos, the 1969 Padres, or the 2003 Tigers.


Establishing those two baselines will enable us to gauge individual law schools' performance by some sort of marginal budget/marginal performance metric. How much does each school spend, relative to the absolute minimum needed to secure ABA accreditation, to move its outcomes by some measurable margin beyond that threshold?

Ours, after all, is an unfair academic game. Some schools are simply richer than others. It is equally true that some schools make more of their wealth, however limited or extensive it might be, than comparably situated counterparts. In legal education as in baseball, wins count. In a world of scarcity, though, how a school attains those wins, and how much it spends getting there, are pivotal questions.

Law Schools and Competitive Markets

I think there is an analogy here but, if not, the message and the question for moneylaw advocates is the same. One of the issues that came up in airline and trucking deregulation was whether competition would lead to lower safety. The idea was that lower prices would mean cost cutting. The neoclassical economist's answer was to discount this by noting that the profit motive -- in the interest of shareholders -- would have already led to cutting costs as much as possible.

Now switch to law schools or any school in the middle of a budget crunch. The argument similar to the less airline safety argument is that the budget crunch will affect the quality of the law school. Less revenue means lower "safety." This, however, requires one to assume that before the crunch spending would have been cut to the lowest possible level consistent with the interests of shareholders.

I do not know the outcome as an empirical matter when it comes to transportation deregulation but everyone who is at a school that is going, has or will go through a budget crunch has a chance to test the theory about whether the school was operated in the interest of shareholders before the cuts. Let's say the snacks in the lounge are less lavish, the travel budgets a bit smaller, there are fewer "free lunches," not as many luncheon speakers, a couple of unfilled faculty positions and that faculty are asked to teach a few more students or a few more hours, and so on. Are shareholders worse off? Maybe there are some connections between luxuries for the faculty and the welfare to stakeholders but a budget crunch can also reveal how tenuous that connection may be and how cavalier schools can be when spending the money of others.

So, the moneylaw question is how much the operation of a public law school can, as far as cost cutting, resemble a firm in a competitive industry?

Let us now praise Alex Johnson

Now that Brian Leiter has publicized the University of Virginia's press release on Alex Johnson's return to Charlottesville, I thought I would say a few words about my former boss.

No person in legal academia has taught me more, or been more generous with his time and political capital, than Alex Johnson. He earned -- and deserved -- the fierce loyalty of his lieutenants. The name of this forum, MoneyLaw, owes its origins to long discussions we had about the careful stewardship and effective deployment of our law school's resources. Our shared passion for legal education, baseball, and the University of Minnesota defined the four years I was privileged to serve on a law faculty led by Alex Johnson.

Alex served all too briefly as dean at Minnesota. During those hundred fortnights in which he presided, however, Minnesota accomplished extraordinary things. As detailed in Virginia's press release, Alex "recruited and hired 19 faculty members to 'reinvigorate the faculty and the enterprise.'"

Even more remarkably, Alex posted this phenomenal record during a period of brutal budget cuts. The University of Minnesota slashed the law school budget on his arrival. The University and the state continued slashing, each year Alex served as dean. Alex responded by "revamp[ing] the alumni relations office" and "ramp[ing] up on our annual giving campaign." The bottom line? "We were actually able to not only cover the shortfalls, we were able to increase the budget and hire all those faculty members."

What once was allegory must now be stated explicitly:

There was a . . . dean . . . whose effective tenure was devoted to making the school's stakeholders brave and dignified and good . . . . When he left the people burst into tears in the halls and their minds wailed, "What can we do now? How can we go on without him?"

And if your literary taste runs far afield from John Steinbeck, then I'll offer another allegorical source of inspiration:

And Moses went up from the plains of Moab unto the mountain of Nebo, to the top of Pisgah, that is over against Jericho: and the Lord showed him all the land of Gil'e-ad, unto Dan, and all Naph'tali, and the land of E'phra-im, and Manas'seh, and all the land of Judah, unto the utmost sea, and the south, and the plain of the valley of Jericho, the city of palm trees, unto Zo'ar.

סלה -- Selah, y'all.

Academic Employment of Law School Graduates

In February, 2007, law schools recorded what sort of work their alums had found nine months after graduation. In the fall of 2007, law schools reported that data to the American Bar Association. Which law schools do you think reported the highest percentages of employed grads working in academia? Not Yale. Not Chicago. Not any of the law schools you would probably expect. The ABA data [Excel format] tells this story:



What explains these results? First off, note that "academic employment" does not here equate to teaching the law. It refers simply to working at an educational institution. Second, note that it does not equate to full-time work. Working part-time as a professor's research assistant or even as an envelope-stuffer in a law school's development office would thus qualify as "academic employment." Third, note that a school's Emp9 score counts for 14% of its score for purposes of U.S. News & World Report's law school rankings.

Together, those observations suggest a possible cause of the relatively high "academic employment" figures reported above: law schools hiring their own grads. I concede that other explanations might apply too, though. Perhaps the ABA data contains errors, for instance, or perhaps a great many graduates from, say, McGeorge got fed up with the law and became elementary school teachers. I also concede that I can imagine very good arguments for why law schools should hire their own grads for part-time work. It probably beats out-and-out unemployment.

Still, though, we might well wonder if those same graduates were sorely disappointed when they failed to find the sort of full-time legal work that they had expected to get after three years of law school. And we might well wonder how much the somewhat misleading Emp9 figures used in USN&WR's law school rankings contributed to that unpleasant surprise. Why doesn't USN&WR instead measure full-time employment for which a J.D. is required or preferred? The National Association of Legal Professionals' form [PDF], which defines the categories of employment data collected by both the ABA and USN&WR, already asks schools for that data (see question II.A.) It remains only for USN&WR to abandon the present Emp9 measure, which has proven alarmingly fallible, for something more likely to tell would-be law students what they really want to know.

[Crossposted to Agoraphilia.]

Earlier posts about Emp9 measure:

• Change to U.S. News Law School Rankings Methodology
  
• How U.S. News Calculates "Employment at 9 Months"
  
• The How, Who, and Why of Strategic Emp9 Reporting
  
• USN&WR to Change Employment Measure
  
• ABA v. USN&WR on "Employment at 9 Months" Data
  
• The Ethics of Strategic Emp9 Reporting
  
• 2008 USN&WR Law School Rankings Under New Emp9 Formula
  
• The Emp9 Puzzle: Answers and Questions
  
• Rankings Hack Hot Potato
  
• Hacking the New "Employment at Nine Months" Formula
  

How To Write and Avoid Not-Writing

It came from the comments over at my blog:

"Dude" asks:

Honestly, if you're a domestic LLM, chances are good you're mostly there to write - not to take more exam courses. Talking about how to do that (independant study options, thesis rules) would probably be extremely helpful.

I agree with you, Dude. Apart from the special topic LL.Ms (e.g. NYU's in tax, international law), academic-track LL.M programs vary widely in structure and rigorousness. I would say that Harvard is probably the most structured (all LL.Ms are required to write a thesis, and the S.J.D. program is relatively structured) while others, like Georgetown's, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Boalt Hall's are the least structured, allowing you to design your own course list and concentrate on independent writing. Most domestic LL.Ms will probably be either "research-track" or "thesis-track." And these are almost entirely unstructured programs, because the point is to not get a concentration in some subject--the point is to write.

The thing to do is actually write and avoid not-writing. While these programs are unstructured, they do have requirements and certain parameters. Most writing-track programs require academic aspirant LL.Ms to take a certain number of course units. They are about half the units required for general or special-topic LL.Ms, but they are still courses that will take time away from writing your monograph. So what to take for those courses?

Again, it probably depends on the structuredness of your program. At most schools there are no special courses just for academic-track LL.Ms and S.J.Ds. You will be choosing from the standard 2L/3L fare--and at this point, after your three-year J.D., what's there left to take? Whatever serves the monograph. At this point, you'll have most of the foundational courses taken cared of (this is why they're foundational). If you haven't taken Statutory Interpretation yet, I guess this that the do-over 4L year is as good as any to remedy that. And I'm not entirely opposed to exam courses--if they're useful for your monograph, then there's no reason not to take them. And the quick Vulcan-death-grip blow of the final frees you up for spending your writing energy on your monograph.

The thing to do is to make sure your courses serve your monograph. Depending on the program, there's lots of ways of going about this. Most schools will assign you/let you pick a faculty advisor to supervise your written work if they require a thesis/monograph. Depending on how much feedback you need/want, this can be a very interactive or completely detached relationship. Choose your advisor carefully, and don't be afraid to change advisors (but try not to change half-way--try to pick wisely and quickly in the first three weeks of school). But that faculty advisor will be the one supervising your independent study units (for which you will receive a grade upon completion of the monograph, most likely, so you'll get an "In-Progress" one semester and a final retroactive grade at the very end). Because your monograph is already graded, and you are already taking independent study units, your course units have to be efficient uses of your time.

Again, if you need some background knowledge, take those courses. For instance, since I never took it before and because I'm doing a project on the FMLA, I'm taking Employee Benefits this semester. But in general, my approach is to take courses that serve the monograph as much as possible. Depending on your school, you may be able to take courses from other departments. I'm taking a Research Methods Design course from a graduate department, and that will be useful for helping me design my management questionnaires and will give me feedback in the early stages my dissertation project design. I also plan on taking Organizations and Institutions from another department here on campus. I also take seminar courses from the law school that either 1) become a chapter of my monograph or 2) work as an independent paper in my field that I can publish while I'm working on the Big Project Monograph.

I don't mind spending 5-6 months writing a smaller article on a very particular topic in my field as I'm working on my 200 page monograph. Because I'm spending the first year of the S.J.D. doing field work, collecting data, and analyzing the data, I want to write as much as possible and workshop those articles on the conference circuit. Carefully chosen seminar topics/papers are ideal for this. Ever had a professor tell you that if you cleaned up a paper you could publish it? Well, at this stage, you definitely should. I would caution you to stick to your intended hedgehog specialization field though, so that when you do go on the market you have 2-3 articles (in addition to your dissertation) that look like a good package displaying your particular toolkit. As of now, I'm interdisciplinary but getting more focused: sociological perspectives on employment discrimination law.

I would write as much as possible, but by that I mean spend the bulk of your time writing 1-2 good articles. Try to get your coursework and writing projects to overlap and dovetail as much as possible. Make sure the things you write are good and publishable--so don't sweat it taking so many paper requirements that you end up writing 4 things badly. If you talk to the professor, most seminars will let you write research proposals in lieu of an independent paper. That's what I did last spring for one course--I wrote my dissertation proposal as I was finishing my independent study thesis, and with my third being an exam course, I got everything done. And now I have a dissertation proposal ready to go for this Fall (which I have spent the past week cleaning up for my new faculty advisor and other members of my dissertation committee, which is why I've been such a bad guest-blogger).

Try to write and avoid not-writing---so just keep writing. Of course it sucks. It always sucks. But you might be able to clean it up in the end. You might toss a lot, but at least some of what you write will be publishable. So just keep writing. If you're going to go on the market after the LL.M/VAP/Fellowship, you'd better write something publishable. If you're already on the market, then you probably have a few things under your belt. But if you are intending to go on the market very soon, you'd better be shopping your articles and getting a lot of eyes on those drafts. If you only have one year to do all of this, make it a productive year. I hate to say this, but don't sweat it trying to get too much balance. You'll fail at both--your productivity will suffer and your fun will not be all that fun if you feel guilt over not-working and are trying to cram fun into your busy schedule. Maybe you'll come back to this city as a tourist one day, but for now, work hard and play later.

I have more time to stretch now with three years to file my dissertation, but I'm still spending a fair amount of time reading and typing. As my advisor said, I have to hit the ground running with the amount of field work and data analysis I have to do--not to mention waiting for IRB approval. So the work started last year, and it's already raging right now. I know I've campaigned for balance before--but that doesn't mean I am slacking off of work or thinking of these years as party years.

"Balance" means that I am adding exercise to my regimen, but I definitely have a regimen. I get to do things that serve my mental, physical, and emotional health, but I don't get to slack off or over-commit myself to things that are inefficient uses of time. You're not a J.D. anymore. Don't join a law journal or law school organization. Don't decide that your do-over LL.M or S.J.D. years are the time to learn everything you didn't in law school. Write the monograph. And then spend whatever free time you have on things that make you happy so that you can have the energy to write when you plunk yourself down for a 8-10 hour day (and yes, you should create such a work/writing schedule on the weekdays even if you have class), as if you had a "real job").

In my personal quest for balance, I'm just trying to travel less (there was a time when I traveled almost every month for work or personal reasons), which means I get to spend weekends catching up on sleep, work, and the people in my life. Balance doesn't mean hitting the bars or being a tourist every weekend or going to every party--it means spending time more productively and healthily. I am making sure I get sleep. I get to cook, run, and have a hobby (choose your own adventure). I see a movie every couple of weeks or so, and try to find something to do one day (or both) a weekend that makes me happy and diverted. When I have such off-time, I spend it with loved ones, and that's the best balance to me. The rest of the time, yeah, I'm working. It's easy to forget this when you go back to the "student" life. Don't go to the bars every night with those crazy J.D.s! Set that alarm! You're not in college (or law school proper) anymore.

It's easy to forget your purpose as a domestic LL.M surrounded by J.D.s who are just barely out of college. Worse yet, you're surrounded by international LL.Ms who are here to get their American credential (sometimes on their firm's dime, their parents' dime, or a Fulbright dime) and lots of touring and partying before they go back to a salary bonus. You are not one of them. You are here to work. You are not 22 years old anymore (thank goodness). It sucks to be you.

But it will be awesome to be you in a few years (or so I hope), when you (and I) get that tenure track job--the best job in the world! Teaching a great subject to a new generation of law students.

Just make sure you write and avoid not-writing. It's easier said than done.

The mathematics of TrueColor (and what it has to do with legal education)

Editor's note: This post is adapted from its original version in Jurisdynamics. Its publication in that forum predated the creation of MoneyLaw, which is arguably a better forum for expressing ideas regarding legal education. In any event, we stand again at the beginning of a school year, the most appropriate time for the sentiment articulated here.

August is the cruelest month, bringing students back to the law schools, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull thoughts with fall pain.

This I remember, and this I love. Imparting visual power to an entire blog network has rekindled an old passion of mine: mathematics in motion. The mathematics of TrueColor arose in connection with website maintenance. And now footfalls echo in my memory down a passage I did not take, towards the door I now will open into the rose-garden.

I needed to redo the background in a .jpg file. "What color?" asked Microsoft Paint. "Ochre," I replied. But the oracle of Redmond understood me not. She demanded values in red, green, blue.

In despair, I asked Dr. Peter Jones, purveyor of the Web's easiest color calculator. "DDDD99," I muttered. "221 221 153," he replied.

And thus the hex was broken.

The six-digit codes designating TrueColor values represent the culmination of longstanding efforts to master the fascinating mathematics of color perception by humans in order to direct color production by machines. The graphic at the top of this post depicts the first step. The CIE (Commission International d'Éclairage) mapped human color perception onto the two-dimensional chart depicted here. Using the CIE chart, as French as the metric system but as intuitive as fathoms and furlongs, proved as easy as charting great circle routes on a flat map.

The CIE color chart gave way to the more geometrically satisfying HSV system for expressing color as a function of hue, saturation, and value. The HSV model resembles a cone, and slicing it generates conic sections that express some portion of the universe of visible color in a useful way. The whole enterprise is vaguely reminiscent of navigating according to spherical coordinates.

So much for modeling how the human eye perceives color. How can a machine produce the 10 million different colors that the sharpest human eye can see? Coding the visible spectrum as different portions of red, green, and blue -- with each constituent color assigned eight bits of information -- yields 256 x 256 x 256 colors, or 16,777,216 in all.

The unwieldy decimal number 16,777,216 is more elegantly described as 2²⁴, or, if you insist, a binary septillion. The exponent, 24, reveals an important truth: 24 bits suffice for the expression of TrueColor. More powerful 32-bit and 48-bit systems enable transparency and sophisticated overlays that are less prone to rounding errors that would otherwise accumulate with each iteration of image filtering.

The familiar RGB (red green blue) color scheme, traceable to the awful days of the four-bit, 16-color palette of IBM's color graphics adapter, is even more helpfully expressed in hexadecimal format. Since 16 x 16 equals 256, base 16 mathematics allow us to express any value from 0 to 255 with exactly two digits. Digits 1 and 2 represent red, digits 3 and 4 represent green, and digits 5 and 6 represent blue. DDDD99 -- quite a bit of red and green, with considerably less blue -- produces MoneyLaw's background color, casually described as "ochre."

Very well then. What does all this have to do with legal education?

Long ago I ran out of digits to tally the number of legally trained professionals who have confessed bewilderment at the idea that law might -- and indeed should -- be quantified to the very limits of the power of numbers to describe the world and to prescribe how best to fix its flaws. Law school, so these individuals confessed, was the refuge from numbers, equations, graphs. Check your probability distributions at the door. We went to the law school because we bombed the GMAT, much less the MCAT.

Ah, but there lies the rose-garden. The world is filled with problems that can be expressed in numbers. If the law harbors any hope of solving them, it cannot afford to discard so basic a tool as mathematics. As undergraduates approach the LSAT, as 1Ls matriculate, as professors end their collective estivation, I offer this wish for the coming academic year. Would it be that our profession no longer confessed -- no longer cherished -- its rampant innumeracy. Would it be that the law, reunited with the tools of quantitative analysis and reinvigorated with an appreciation of mathematical beauty, might cease to be the mathematical waste land of the social sciences.

Hacking the New "Employment at Nine Months" Formula

The people have spoken—or, rather, 30 readers have voted. I earlier polled you for advice about what to do with a rankings hack I've thought up. Specifically, I have in mind a way for law schools to game the new "employment at 9 months" formula that U.S. News & World Report will start using in next year's law school rankings. "What should I do with the new Emp9 hack?" I asked. Most of you replied, "Tell everybody, to level the playing field." (And nobody ponied up the money to make, "Don't be a chump! Sell it to the highest bidder," an attractive option.) I'm happy to oblige.

In brief, some law schools might improve their Emp9 scores next year by remaining willfully ignorant of whether alums likely to be studying full time for the Bar nine months after graduation have found paying work. That strategy would allow a school to classify those graduates as "Employment Status Unknown." Why do that? Because USN&WR counts each such grad as 25% employed.

Consider an example. If we take the average of all law schools covered by the most recent ABA-LSAC Official Guide [Excel format] we get these numbers:

• # of Graduates: 222
  
• Employment Status Known: 214
  
• Employment Status Unknown: 8
  
• Employed: 194
  
• Pursuing Grad Degree: 5
  
• Unemployed, Not Seeking Employment: 5
  
• Unemployed, Studying Full-Time for Bar: 5

(Because of rounding effects, the numbers don't quite add up).

Plug those numbers into the old Emp9 formula, and you get:

[194 + (8*.25) + 5] / (222 – 5) = 92.6%.

If our hypothetical average school were willing to play the classification game I described earlier (classifying graduates studying full-time for the Bar as "Unemployed, Not Seeking Employment,") its Emp9 calculation would run thusly:

[194 + (8*.25) + 5] / (222 – 5 - 5) = 94.8%.

The new Emp9 formula, because its denominator does not subtract out grads "Unemployed, Not Seeking Employment," will no longer respond to that classification trick. Under the new formula, our hypothetical school's Emp9 score will suffer accordingly:

[194 + (8*.25) + 5] / 222 = 90.5%.

A law school could still game even that new and improved Emp9 formula, however. How? By classifying as "Employment Status Unknown" grads who would otherwise qualify as "Unemployed, Studying Full-Time for the Bar." Such grads would then count as 25% employed in the Emp9 formula. Consider the result for our hypothetical law school:

[194 + ([8 + 5] *.25) + 5] / 222 = 91.1%.

That's not a huge effect, granted, but a law school with the right numbers could gain a lot of grounds from the hack. Suppose that 10 of our hypothetical law school's grads had failed the Bar the first time around, for instance. It might then trick the Emp9 formula into spitting out "92.2%."

How could a law school implement the hack? An outright lie would suffice, of course. Importantly, however, law school administrators need not resort to anything so crude as that. They might instead remain deliberately ignorant of whether alums who failed the summer Bar exam had found work nine months after graduation. That strategy would, however, put at risk the opportunity to claim as "Employed" grads who'd found jobs that don't require Bar membership. An especially daring and clever administrator might thus devise mechanisms to carefully control how much she learns about graduates who failed the summer Bar exam, keeping close tabs on those who find work while ignoring those who don't. Suffice it to say that a subtle mind could find that "Unknown" includes many shades.

For all I know, experienced law school administrators might regard these observations as old hat. Judging from the ABA data, however, I don't think that many schools have exploited the hack I've described. (For evidence of that, I calculated for each school the ratio, "number of first-time takers to fail the summer Bar exam/number of alums with 'Employment Status Unknown' nine months after graduation." The median ratio for all schools was 17%; the average 32%. Only 11 schools had ratios above 100%, 17 above 75%, and 28 above 50%.) Until now, after all, schools eager to pump up their Emp9 numbers have typically found other strategies more fruitful. It will prove interesting to review the ABA data next year, to see if this new rankings hack attracts new rankings hackers.

[Crossposted to Agoraphilia.]

Earlier posts about Emp9 measure:

• Change to U.S. News Law School Rankings Methodology
  
• How U.S. News Calculates "Employment at 9 Months"
  
• The How, Who, and Why of Strategic Emp9 Reporting
  
• USN&WR to Change Employment Measure
  
• ABA v. USN&WR on "Employment at 9 Months" Data
  
• The Ethics of Strategic Emp9 Reporting
  
• 2008 USN&WR Law School Rankings Under New Emp9 Formula
  
• The Emp9 Puzzle: Answers and Questions
  
• Rankings Hack Hot Potato
  

Is the Tail Wagging the Dog Always Bad? Or The Rub

Taking the USN&WR rankings seriously is a little like thinking fans vote for the best players when determining the baseball and basketball All Star teams. The connection between the voting and the actual merits is far from clear. Still law schools behave like teams that just want players in the All Star game even if it means finishing well down in the division.

Are there times, though, when the ranking quest and the quality may come together. One possible example is the effort to inflate entering student LSATs. The gaming has been well documented – part time students, decreased first year acceptances in favor of transfer students, summer admissions. Hide your lower LSATs and ratchet yourself up a slot or two.

Lets take the transfer student example. It is at least possible that a school that lops off all students below a certain LSAT and then admits transfer students may increase the quality of its student body and increase it’s bar passage rate. Its important to be careful to cut the right students and not to lower transfer student admission standards but some empirical evidence suggests that this is a place where gaming the system may produce desired results.

There are at least three areas of controversy:

1. Whether the student body is better is a wholly subjective matter. Yes, bar passage rate may go up, but it has been suggested to me and I have no way to confirm it, that diversity may decline. If so, this may be the rub when it comes to all out efforts to make the All Star game.

2. Did any school making the switch from entering students to transfers actually study the numbers first to see the likely impact on bar passage? If not, these dogs are totally at the mercy of the USN&WR tail.

3. What should law schools be doing – especially state law schools? Is it only to admit students who are predicted to do well on the bar exam or is it to give even high risk students a chance?

Mehr Musik!

Okay, so Goethe might not have said "Mehr Licht!" on his deathbed. (Alles wird auf dieser deutschsprechenden Webseite für die Neugierigen erklärt.) But on all the days between birth and death, "Mehr Musik!" is the worthier sentiment. If you're ever forced to choose between sight and hearing, do the smart thing: Donate your corneas, and keep your eardrums intact. As it happens, I'm in the mood for a concert.

I'm also making up for lost time. Paul Horwitz posted an item on the Dixie Chicks, and it took me six months to notice. Ye gods.

Paul ultimately pans the Chicks' most recent album, Taking the Long Way. "The righteousness and angry defiance," he concludes, "wear thin pretty quickly over the course of the album."

Although I do like Taking the Long Way, I sympathize with Paul. What Faulkner said of literature applies with equal force to music: The "problems of the human heart in conflict with itself . . . alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat."

In other words, dump the politics and write or sing about human passions. "Ich bin lieber Dichter als Richter" summarizes, again in German, the wisdom I've derived from intensely hating the Mets. Not that I am any closer to being a poet than a judge, but the message is clear. Laws die; Lieder, never.

This is admittedly a huge windup for what is ultimately a very simple blog post. Sometimes you gotta dance, and sometimes you just want to listen to music that speaks to you. For me, right now, I could use some vintage Dixie Chicks. Herewith two videos sandwiched around a sound clip from the Chicks' breakthrough album, Wide Open Spaces:

1. There's Your Trouble:




2. Am I the Only One (Who's Ever Felt This Way?):



The Dixie Chicks cover Maria McKee's "Am I the Only One (Who's Ever Felt This Way)?" (.mp3 file available via Chicks Rock! Chicks Rule!)


3. Wide Open Spaces:

Rankings Hack Hot Potato

In next year's law school rankings, U.S. News & World Report will introduce a new formula for calculating the "Employment at Nine Months" measure. The new formula will improve on the old one by foreclosing recourse to a particular classification scheme that evidently boosted some schools' rankings. After some reflection, however, I think I've figured out a way that schools might hack even the new and improved Emp9 formula.

I doubt that most of us would want to see law schools exploit the trick I have in mind. Even though it would probably not warp the USN&WR rankings quite so much as the tricks played on the old Emp9 formula did, it would hardly make the rankings more accurate. I'm a bit unsure how to best avoid that result, however. Please allow me, then, to poll you for advice about how much I should disclose about how to hack the new Emp9 formula.

What should I do with the new Emp9 hack?
	Tell everybody, to level the playing field.
	Tell me, alone. I'll keep it secret and will use it only for good!
	Don't be a chump! Sell it to the highest bidder.
	Shush! You've said too much, already.
Free polls from Pollhost.com

[Crossposted to Agoraphilia.]

Earlier posts about Emp9 measure:

• Change to U.S. News Law School Rankings Methodology
  
• How U.S. News Calculates "Employment at 9 Months"
  
• The How, Who, and Why of Strategic Emp9 Reporting
  
• USN&WR to Change Employment Measure
  
• ABA v. USN&WR on "Employment at 9 Months" Data
  
• The Ethics of Strategic Emp9 Reporting
  
• 2008 USN&WR Law School Rankings Under New Emp9 Formula
  
• The Emp9 Puzzle: Answers and Questions

Common wealth

Adapted from the August 2007 issue of "Louisville Bar Briefs," the monthly newspaper of the Louisville Bar Association.

Why do most students attend law school?

We know the standard answers. Most of us have written them.

To advance justice. To serve the underprivileged. To right wrongs and ensure peace.

Most students, however, are motivated -- at least partially and often substantially -- by something else. They attend law school in order to make more money.

There is nothing wrong with that.

Indeed, I'll go further. Louisville Law depends on its ability to enrich its students in consciously material ways, and on its students' willingness to convert their training into earnings.

The simple economic ambition of our students advances the mission of our Law School in three important ways. First, law schools enhance productivity in all walks of life, including but not limited to dispute resolution through law. Second, the task of enhancing the economic power of our graduates and our community lies at the very core of the University of Louisville's mission as a premier metropolitan research university. Finally, the success of individual graduates enables the Law School to right wrongs, to ensure peace, to serve the underprivileged, and to advance justice -- in the very ways that a market-based economy cannot accomplish on its own.


Our alumnae and alumni typically command higher salaries after graduation. Their enhanced earning power reflects the value that the Law School adds to their professional portfolios. Sophisticated legal knowledge, even if not translated directly into the practice of law, opens doors throughout the world of business. From financial services to logistics, manufacturing, and high tech, every productive endeavor demands organizational acumen. That is the very domain in which law school graduates excel.

Norman Rockwell, Rosie the Riveter (1943)

Economic advancement through education holds a powerful allure for the traditional constituencies of the University of Louisville. Our Law School specializes in students who have little if any prior exposure to the legal profession. We are a school of first generations and second chances. Higher education paves numerous paths to a better, more prosperous life, particularly in a Commonwealth that remains among the most poorly educated states in the union.

Relative to their counterparts at so-called "elite" universities, many students at the University of Louisville come from a more modest economic background. Louisville Law best serves these students by acknowledging their natural economic ambition and by providing the tools -- classroom instruction, practice-based learning opportunities, academic counseling and career services -- that will put the most lucrative post-graduation opportunities squarely within their reach.

The University of Louisville is one of the true bargains in American legal education. Comparable education experiences can be had elsewhere, but often at several multiples of Louisville's tuition. Some out-of-state students can affirmatively save money by matriculating here, rather than attending a public law school in their home states. Lower tuition means lower debt. It means greater accessibility. It means greater diversity, by every conceivable measure, during law school. It means a wider range of professional choices -- including public sector and public service jobs -- after graduation.

Gina Sawin, Giving and Receiving (Terns) (n.d.)

Scholarships, loan forgiveness, and generous public support are all essential elements of higher education in the United States. No other system in the world approaches the success of American universities. But that success, to say nothing of the public-serving goals that universities rightly pursue alongside their often understated mission of enhancing their graduates' earning power, depends on the value that students gain by virtue of attending school.

In due course, universities finance their most ambitious projects through contributions from their most financially successful graduates. Precisely because we serve a public mission and realize relatively little revenue from tuition, our Law School depends on graduates whose success is exceeded solely by their generosity. They do well so that we might do good.

This column therefore serves as an open letter to our graduates, especially those who find themselves in a position to help others in the legal profession who have voluntarily forgone private-sector earnings in order to serve the underprivileged and the public at large. Four lines, cascading downward from four syllables to one, say it all:

1. Make more money.
2. Send us some.
3. Here's why.
4. Thanks.

Summertime (And The Livin' Ain't Easy)

Summertime doesn't mean that the livin' is easy.

For some it may be though. I will tell you that right now, while you profs are scrambling to edit course readers and get syllabi out and are deluging your administrative assistants with photocopy requests, your students are trying to cram in as much fun as possible before the term starts. The 1Ls are of course freaked out, and are overwhelmed with welcome week activities. They are overcome with eagerness and vague trepidation over this new adventure. They will buy every book that they're advised to, including "Plain English For Lawyers" and every, and I mean every, hornbook in the bookstore. Right now, they are in their new apartments and looking over their two-feet stack of books and rigid course schedules and wondering what the hell they got themselves into. Only two months ago, they were English literature majors. Life was good. Reading was fun.

Right now, the incoming 1Ls sit in apartments furnished by Ikea and the kitchen-in-a-box from Target, awkwardly chatting with new roomates found via Craigslist or the law school list-serv, wondering at what have they done and are they really expected to learn the Rule Against Perpetuities?

Right now, the 2Ls and 3Ls are in Vegas or Hawaii.

But eventually all the 1Ls, 2Ls and 3Ls will meet up this weekend to cram in some fun in the city, at the beach, and most definitely in the bars. One (not really last, given the drinking culture and Bar Review) hurrah, and will try to cram in the first reading sometime on Sunday night, when they are bleary eyed and already exhausted from the pre-school fun. Good morning to you, Professor.

Because I am straddling the line between student and academic, this has been a mixed summer for me. I spent a week at Con Law Camp--a conference that required considerable preparation, all on the heels of finishing my master's thesis and moving into a new house. I had out of town guests every other week. I visited my family for a week and a half this summer as well, greeting a new nephew. Between settling into a new house, catching up on the much-neglected personal life, and working every spare moment on editing old articles--this summer has flown by!

If you're used to an academic calendar, it's the summer that's the season of change. It's the most dynamic. Every year the stores herald January 1st as the pivotal date of change. That's when the new calendars come out, and the new date books are available. Well, not if you buy the 18 month academic calendars that I do. When I think of "next year" I think "next Fall term." This is a sign that you've been going to school for too long, and that you're a born-and-bred academic. Summer is always a transition time for me--one academic year has ended, and in two and a half months another will will begin. I imagine, for the 1Ls, this season marks an even greater transition. For many of them, it marks their new status as graduate students. They have chosen a profession, and they are committing to careers. Even if many go to law school because they don't know what else to do (avoiding real life, as it were), this is probably the first really grown up thing that they're doing. No more dorms, no more parental safety nets, no more lax professors and fudging their way through. Welcome to the Bell curve of life and law school. And they will find all this change occurs within one change of seasons, from the summer of youth to the fall of young adulthood.

Summer's date hath all too short a lease--just two months ago, I finished my thesis and graduated with an LL.M. Yesterday I had my first meeting with my new dissertation advisor (which accounts for my not blogging over the weekend). It was a good and productive meeting. She likes my proposal, and has given me advice regarding courses, project design, and has given me a deadline of the end of September for a draft of my questionnaire and human subjects IRB proposal. By the end of the term, I should have a bibliography (and a chunk of it read) for my literature review. The plan is to hit the ground running by next summer so that I can really go out and do the field work and data collection. You see what I mean by summer being a season of change? I'm really happy with all this change though. I'm really excited about my project, and I really like my advisor.

This summer, I finished one program and began another. I changed houses and neighborhoods (trading up). I got a new advisor. Lots of good change. It's a good feeling. It's an exhausting feeling too. I don't know how you professors do it all during the summer--research, write, go to conferences, catch up on life. And I don't know how you deal with so many successive years of change, with the great turnover of students. There is a new class for you all to teach and mentor, and there will be new adventures in academia for all come Monday.

There are those that accuse academics of static indolence and laziness--armchair academics, are we not? I don't know about that. I think academics are pretty good at handling the sea changes of life and helping students manage such big transitions--we do it every year, after all.

Teacher's Experience, Test Scores, and Quality of Undergraduate Education, Not Credentials, Drive Student Achievement

Interesting paper on NBER: Charles T. Clotfelter, Helen F. Ladd & Jacob L. Vigdor (all of Duke University, Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy), How and Why do Teacher Credentials Matter for Student Achievement?. Here is the abstract:

Education researchers and policy makers agree that teachers differ in terms of quality and that quality matters for student achievement. Despite prodigious amounts of research, however, debate still persists about the causal relationship between specific teacher credentials and student achievement. In this paper, we use a rich administrative data set from North Carolina to explore a range of questions related to the relationship between teacher characteristics and credentials on the one hand and student achievement on the other. Though the basic questions underlying this research are not new -- and, indeed, have been explored in many papers over the years within the rubric of the "education production function" -- the availability of data on all teachers and students in North Carolina over a ten-year period allows us to explore them in more detail and with far more confidence than has been possible in previous studies. We conclude that a teacher's experience, test scores and regular licensure all have positive effects on student achievement, with larger effects for math than for reading. Taken together the various teacher credentials exhibit quite large effects on math achievement, whether compared to the effects of changes in class size or to the socio-economics characteristics of students, as measured, for example, by the education level of their parents.

(Hat Tip: Wall Street Journal.)

An un-Conventional defense of the conventional constitutional law course

A comment on my constitutional law post, Chen contra Paulsen, takes issue with my conclusion that constitutional law courses should stick with the traditional doctrinal sequence over Mike Paulsen's "modest proposal" to convert constitutional law into a "Great Cases/Great Books" course:

[Graduates of nonelite law schools] are . . . important cultural cogs in making the Constitution a living institution. Con law classic does a poor job of teaching students the role that the Constitution plays in political life.

No, with all due respect, the fault does not lie in the course. It lies in the impoverished imagination and perverse priorities of some (though not all) teachers of constitutional law.

The traditional constitutional law sequence, especially if the instructor finds time to include a smattering of first amendment controversies, is rich with opportunities to "teach[] students the role that the Constitution plays in political life." A popular supplement, Constitutional Law Stories, makes life easy: the story-behind-the-story for some leading cases is available off the shelf. (Disclosure: I contributed a chapter to that volume.) If you have trouble turning the story of Roscoe Filburn's wheat harvest into a political epic, it's not because the case is dull.

Or perhaps you believe, not merely defensibly but quite correctly, that there are key episodes in constitutional history that never quite made it to the courts. Fair enough. Teach them. The cases give you all the leverage you need. Want to talk about slavery, nullification, and secession? They're all wrapped up in the Missouri Compromise, which unraveled in a rather notorious case styled Scott v. Sandford. The ultimate fate of the Second Bank of the United States? Easy discussion after McCulloch v. Maryland. The amendment process? Just ask what business the Court had deciding Craig v. Boren as it did while the Equal Rights Amendment hung in the balance. Political questions? Presidential elections? So the Supreme Court went, in a matter of speaking, to the Tilden-Hayes election. In our time, Bush v. Gore came to the Court.

A shocking number of constitutional law teachers, including widely published constitutional scholars, disdain the traditional sequence because they have neither patience for nor mastery of the case law. Ahem. That's what lawyers do. Okay, lawyers do other things. But those who routinely put their Supreme Court bar admissions to work (as opposed to treating them as office decorations) assuredly know their cases. At least after a little work, so do business lawyers looking for a way to navigate around an anti-corporate farming statute, partisan manipulation of public contracting, or suspiciously protectionist mineral severance taxes. The lawyers who do their jobs well are the ones who get to attend the cocktail parties where the most influential political punditry takes place.

Here's my challenge to the legal profession's tenured class: If you find Supreme Court cases intellectually "uninteresting" or otherwise inadequate to the task of training future lawyers how to think critically about the American political system, find another course to teach. There is no shortage of law professors who would deliver exciting, enduring content that will shape future lawyers even as it trains them. Your associate dean would appreciate some effort on your part to couple your advanced constitutional law seminar with a higher-enrollment course, but a discussion of decent attitudes about course assignments is fodder for future MoneyLaw posts.

Finally, I can't help but think that there is a subtle but not altogether benign political motivation that inspires some members of the academy to trash the conventional constitutional law sequence in favor of a "Great Books" approach to teaching this subject. Rarely if ever have I met an advocate of a "Great Books" constitutional law course who thinks that the world has improved since 1787. Woe be unto those of us who draw inspiration from two other founding periods: Reconstruction and the New Deal. And this is to say nothing of those who fundamentally reject the Framers' expectations as a primary (let alone exclusive) source of constitutional wisdom. "They are dead," after all, "and we are not." For many Americans whose roots in this country reach no deeper than the last twelve decades' waves of immigration, nostalgia for the 18th century Constitution represents nothing more than an appeal to an ancient country that knew neither equality before the law nor citizenship by choice.

The United States of 1787, I am proud to say, is one I do not recognize as my own. And the story of today's Constitution, interpreted by judges, politicians, and citizens and sketched both within and beyond United States Reports, is well worth teaching.