Posts about Legal Academia by Professor Daniel J. Solove for his blog at TeachPrivacy, a privacy awareness and security training company.
The longstanding attacks on legal scholarship all seem to assume a particular relationship between theory and practice, one that I believe is flawed. Recently, I responded to one such critique. There are others, with Justice Roberts and many other judges and practitioners claiming that legal scholarship isn’t worth their attention and isn’t useful to the […]
Much has already been written about David Segal’s article in the N.Y. Times, What They Don’t Teach Law Students: Lawyering. I join the strong critiques of this piece in condemning it as a lousy piece of journalism — more of a one-sided hack job, riddled with errors. It belongs on the op-ed page of a […]
Over at WSJ Blog, Ashby Jones contacted Robert Morse to get his reaction to my post about how raters should fill out the US News law school rankings forms: We caught up with Bob Morse, the director of data services for U.S. News, who said in his estimation, the 1-5 options generally speaking matched up […]
Every year, US News compiles its law school rankings by relying heavily on reputation ratings by law professors (mainly deans and associate deans) and practitioners and judges. They are asked to assign a score (from 1 to 5) for the roughly 200 law schools on the form. A 5 is the highest score and a […]
I recently posted data about law professor hiring statistics per institution where teaching applicants earned their JD. Some students from schools that did not have high success percentages have expressed despair that their chances are low because of the school they graduated (or will be graduating) from. My intent in collecting and analyzing this data […]
Over at the Volokh Conspiracy, David Post and Orin Kerr are debating Post’s experiment of having students read unedited judicial opinions in his classes. Kerr writes that the skill of locating the relevant material in a case is a skill that is learned through all types of reading. Post counters that “a critical part of […]
As usual, a ton of blogospheric attention has been devoted to the US News law school rankings. Over at PrawfsBlawg, Geoffrey Rapp has found a way to get the numerical rankings of law schools in the Third and Fourth Tiers. At TaxProf, Paul Caron ranks the law schools by reputation score. At Brian Leiter’s Law […]
A new article in the ABA Journal profiles Bob Morse, the US News & World Report “rankings czar.” I recently corresponded with Bob when he wrote to me about my parody of the rankings. He took my humor in good spirit. According to the ABA Journal article:
I’ve got the scoop of the year! An anonymous source from US News & World Report leaked this memo to me. It is a memo written by the magazine’s “law school ranking executive” describing how the magazine arrived at this year’s official rankings. See below for a sneak peak at this year’s rankings as well […]
Brian Tamanaha has just posted another interesting post in the discussion about legal education. He writes: Most law schools now follow the elite model, striving to hire faculty and produce scholarship like research universities, when it might better serve the interests of many non-elite law schools and their students to concentrate on training good lawyers. […]