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The Relationship Between Theory and Practice

Library

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 […]

On the New York Times and Legal Education

Legal Education

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 […]

Robert Morse’s Response on the US News Law School Rankings

US News Rankings Law Schools

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 […]

How to Fill Out the US News Law School Rankings Form

US News Rankings Law Schools

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 […]

10 Tips for Law Students Who Want to Pursue Careers in Legal Academia

Law School Tips

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 […]

Teaching Edited vs. Unedited Judicial Opinions

Judicial Opinions

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 […]

The Official Leaked US News Law School Rankings, Plus Ranking Secrets Revealed!

US News

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 […]

More Reflections on Legal Education

Book

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. […]