If you are interested in the topic of law professor lateraling, you've probably already seen Paul Secunda's series at Concurring Opinions. That series is worth checking out to see all of the comments. However, for your convenience, Paul has glued the series into a single PDF that includes some of the choicest comments in the footnotes. I believe that Paul's article is the most comprehensive discussion on the very mysterious topic of lateraling, so many thanks to Paul for trying to lift the veil. And congratulations to him on his successful move to a school dear to my heart!

Kirsten Wolf, a 32-year-old graduate of BU Law, is out to warn people about law school. At WSJ Law Blog, she complains:

Lots of people go to law school as a default. They don’t know what else to do, like I did. It seems like a good idea. People say a law degree will always be worth something even if you don't practice. But they don’t consider what that debt is going to look like after law school. It affects my life in every way. And the jobs that you think are going to be there won’t necessarily be there at all. Most people I know that are practicing attorneys don’t make the kind of money they think lawyers make. They’re making $40,000 a year, not $160,000. Plus, you’re going to be struggling to do something you might not even enjoy. A few people have a calling to be a lawyer, but most don’t.

Now that she works as a businesswoman in the publishing industry, when asked if she got any value from her JD, she says yes but "is that worth paying student loans until five years before my social security kicks in?"

In February 2006, I spoke about teaching contract drafting at a symposium at Brooklyn Law School. Nearly 2 years later, I have finally posted the associated essay, entitled "Integrating Contract Drafting Skills and Doctrine." It's brief (6 pages) and breezy, but I hope you find it useful if you teach contract drafting or are looking to incorporate more transactional material into your doctrinal courses. The abstract:

This Essay is based on my remarks at the "Teaching Writing and Teaching Doctrine: A Symbiotic Relationship?" conference at Brooklyn Law School, February 2006. The Essay discusses the benefits and challenges of integrating the teaching of contract drafting skills and doctrine. The Essay then discusses some ways I have accomplished this integration.

Represented by Morrison & Foerster, Toshiba won a commercial dispute with New England Technology. Per the contract, the judge awarded attorneys' fees to Toshiba. As usual, the court gave a 10 day period for Toshiba to file a motion detailing its exact fees. The fees were about $1M. The day the motion was due, a courier left Morrison & Foerster's Orange County office with the motion at 3:30 but hit some unexpectedly ugly OC traffic, causing the courier to arrive at 4:01--1 minute after the office closed. It turns out to be a very costly minute (even vastly exceeding the inflated per-hour fees charged by the big firms). The judge declared the motion too late and, as a result, has refused to award any attorneys' fees. Toshiba is SOL.

For an amusingly different view on late filings, see this classic memo.

On my exams, I tell students that I do not accept late finals--there is no grace period, not even one minute, in which case a late paper results in an F for the course. (I also tell them "NO EXCUSES" so that they don't waste their creativity trying to come up with a brilliant excuse I simply can't refuse). I don't normally like taking such a hard line, but situations like Toshiba's comfort me that there can be draconian consequences for lawyers who are late, and my rules are fair training for that. If you think getting an F in a course is bad, imagine how bummed MoFo feels about being out $1M (which, undoubtedly, they will bear instead of Toshiba).

UPDATE: Howard Bashman weighs in on the matter.

UPDATE 2: WSJ Law Blog has the order.

Back in April 2006, a first-rate group of law professor bloggers (and a few other bloggers) gathered for the Bloggership conference to discuss how blogs affected legal scholarship and our lives as law professors. My recap from the event. I thought the experience of meeting other bloggers face-to-face to discuss blog-related issues was so terrific that it inspired me to initiate a local variation, the Bay Area Blawger gatherings.

At the event, a number of the speakers discussed the disintermediation of law reviews by new electronic publishing tools such as SSRN, as well as the difficulty of dead trees publications to compete with the blogosphere's speed at disseminating commentary and digesting events. As if to reinforce the points, the Washington University Law Review has now published the collection of papers from the Bloggership conference, about a year-and-a-half after the event was held and the early drafts of the papers were published via SSRN. Paul Caron has helpfully posted a comprehensive index to the papers as published in the Washington University Law Review as well as links to a variety of other goodies related to the event. My paper on Co-Blogging, in its final published form, is here.

According to this Mercury News article, state Treasurer Lockyer is floating a discussion proposal of eliminating state funding for the UC system. I don't think anyone expects that to happen, but as the article points out (and as I previously blogged), state funding has dwindled to a trivial percentage of some "public" law schools. Once again, this reminds us that some stereotypes about "public" and "private" schools may be outdated.

Law students don't seem to appreciate how easy it is to win a legal writing competition. Write a good paper on an original topic, and you will stand out from the pack.

Instead, most students gang-tackle the exact same topics, which makes for dreary reading and reduces the odds of saying anything new. For example, I was recently asked to evaluate 5 papers for a copyright law writing competition. Two of the papers were on YouTube's legal liability. At minimum, I'm going to compare the two against each other, so one of the papers is guaranteed to be DOA. However, it's pretty hard to say something truly unique and insightful on the topic, so the papers get caught in a bit of a Scattergories problem. As a result, both papers knocked each other out.

Another paper was on Google Libraries. I only got one of those this year, but I've seen a dozen or more student papers on the topic in the past. Another Scattergories knock-out.

With respect to both of these "current-event" topics, student papers have an extremely difficult time adding anything new to the conversation. In fact, these three papers said nothing that had not already been thoroughly discussed months or even years ago in the blogosphere. As I've said before, with the advent of blogs, law review-style papers on current event topics no longer make sense (if they ever did). If you are a professor supervising student papers, I propose that you add the words "YouTube" and "Google Library" to the list of verboten student paper topics (already on the list: "Grokster" and "online music").

The fourth paper was a case note on a case interpreting the requirement of 17 USC 411(a) to register the plaintiff's copyrights before bringing suit. At least this is a different topic, so this paper could have had some legs. Unfortunately, there's a reason why no one writes on this topic--there's not much to say, especially in the context of a case note.

The final paper undertook a multi-country comparative analysis of an International copyright treaty in light of the First Amendment. I think it's hard to find original topics regarding International IP treaties, especially for students, so I don't know if this paper topic was really new. However, this paper simultaneously undertook three really hard tasks: (1) a constitutional analysis, (2) analysis of an International treaty, and (3) a multi-country comparative analysis. At most, I would counsel students to tackle only one hard task per paper. Doing three in a single paper is fatal for students.

In the end, I didn't recommend any of these papers for further consideration.

So students, if you're writing a paper that you want to shine in the writing competitions, spend some time researching and identifying a good topic--not a case note, not a current events topic, not a topic that's been overgrazed, and not a topic so challenging that you can't deliver. For more on topic selection, see here.

By Eric Goldman

The WSJ recently published a recap of some troubling trends in the legal/law school industries. Among its points:

* the legal industry is experiencing a growth slowdown, and many categories of lawyers are experiencing deflation in their inflation-adjusted wages
* law schools are proliferating, and the number of law school graduates is growing
* perhaps exacerbated by law school marketing efforts and skewed data collection/reporting, students may not be doing a good job fully contemplating how relatively few non-top tier graduates are getting the jobs paying the biggest bucks
* the cost of a legal education is going up, and students are graduating with bigger loans

These points are all well-known phenomena in the industry, but seeing them in a single article reinforces the significant and disturbing problems we face in legal academia. At best, there are plenty of warning signs that there is currently a supply/demand imbalance that could lead to a major market correction in the legal education industry. On the other hand, so long as students believe that law school is a lottery for a high paying job, students may be willing to continue entering the lottery even if the chance of winning is low.

On Monday, we held a panel discussion on campus entitled "Blogging, Scholarship and the Bench and Bar." Panelists included Paul Butler, Cindy Cohn, Judge Michael Hawkins, Larry Solum and myself, and the conversation was led by Nancy Rogers and Leigh Jones (a reporter at the National Law Journal). Larry Solum's brief recap. The conversation covered a number of topics, but the main threads were (1) how can blogs help lawyers and judges do their work?, and (2) how does blogging fit into the activities of law professors? We have posted the video online; see here (this video should be accessible for 30 days).

Before the event, I was given a few questions that I might be asked. The notes I prepared in anticipation of the panel:
_______

"How much time should a professor spend on blogging? When is it too much?"

• Assuming that a professor chooses to blog…
• Minimum amount of time: enough to ensure that the posts enhance the professor’s reputation.
- This means extra time to clean up first draft writing and, more importantly, doing verification/fact investigation to ensure accuracy
- For example, I don’t blog on a case/statute unless I’ve read the original source material. No way that I would rely on news reports or other bloggers’ characterizations
- Very uncool for bloggers to spread misinformation
- I also do a precedent check to ensure my comments are adding new incremental material rather than rehashing.
- So I rarely post in less than 1 hour; I have spent 10+ hours on some posts
• Maximum amount of time: such that blogging doesn’t interfere with professor’s other duties
- From my perspective, blogging doesn’t displace obligation to produce legal scholarship
- So if blogging is preventing me from contributing to scholarly discourse through more traditional format, then I’m spending too much time on it.
_______

"How can someone tell the difference between a good blog and a bad blog? How can the reader know if what's on a blog is accurate and truthful?"

• I try to avoid snap judgments about blogs I’m encountering for the first time
- I look at topical focus, length of time blogging, how regularly the blog is updated and if the posts look like they are adding new incremental material to the discussion.
- I also check external measures of popularity, like Technorati’s link count or Google PageRank
- When I find a topically relevant blog that looks like it has credibility and is being regularly maintained, I often add the blog to my RSS subscription list and “watch it” to see if I get new incremental and useful material from it. This also means that I regularly drop blogs from my RSS list.
• At the moment, I do not subscribe to any pseudonymous blogs.
- This is a matter of personal taste.
- For me, knowing the author’s identity is crucial to assessing the author’s credibility. I’ve also found that pseudonymous blogs tend to flame out quicker
- In many ways, my blog subscription list mirrors my social network—I tend to read blogs of people I’ve met offline and have developed trust in their expertise
_______

"What suggestions do you have regarding the format of law review articles that are drawn from your blogging experience?"

• Blogs offer quick publication, the ability to easily review cited sources, and often the ability of readers to interact with the author and other readers.
- Law reviews are already experimenting with similar offerings through online complements.
- However, law reviews are still trying to manage the community aspect. I’ve seen many journals with no comments; and others overrun by comment spammers and trolls—neither of which reflect well on the journal or make authors very happy
• The blogosphere’s quick publication cycles mean that new cases and statutes are digested very quickly.
- As a result, I think law reviews should categorically get out of the business of publishing case notes or recent updates unless they operate at blog speed.
- Otherwise, a law review has almost no chance of making any useful substantive contribution to the dialogue 12-18 months after a new case/statute when the blogs have already vetted the issue 12-18 hours after it occurred
• Law reviews also need to learn that publishing articles without additional marketing isn’t that useful for the journals or the authors.
- Therefore, each publication should be an event that sparks dialogue, which may require journals to more actively market new releases.
- Some journals have made limited progress on this front, but law reviews have a lot to learn from blogs about how to engage in bona fide conversations.
_______

"Law school gossip -- who has an offer from what law school, for example -- travels quickly on blogs. Has this been a positive or negative development on balance?"

• Blogs help form new communities that couldn’t exist in physical space
- For someone who doesn’t have physical access to information about law schools or law firms, blogs provide much needed access to very useful information
• However, “gossip blogs” can lead to unfortunate socialization
- Obsessing about every detail can lead to lots of efforts to improve relative positioning and make people feel like someone is always getting a better deal
- This can lead people to feel like they should be worrying about these details even if they otherwise wouldn’t care
- This is unfortunate, but it’s also the inevitable consequence of information democratization
• Blogs have also captured gossip that normally was ephemeral, but now this gossip is preserved forever and published to the world. Unfortunately, some of this gossip has had a greater detrimental effect than its off-line equivalent.
- Some of this gossip isn’t good, but it is inevitable, and I hope (over time) people will learn to better wield the power of publication
_______

I was also on deck to discuss gender disparities among bloggers--a topic I'm happy to defer to others. Cf. Dahlia Lithwick, who wrote that on the subject of the dearth of women opinion writers, men “are terrified to opine on the debate because the inquiry is so fraught with the possibility of career-terminating levels of politically correct blowback—à la Larry Summers—that they deem it better to hold their tongues and wait for the storm to pass.” In that vein, fortunately for me, this topic didn't arise in the panel discussion.

There is a lingering perception that public law schools are cheaper than private law schools. First, the accuracy of this perception is hard to measure because of the extensive price discounting (in the form of scholarships) used by private law schools (and some public law schools) to engage in price discrimination. Therefore, students generally can't infer very much on the published "sticker price" of a law school; the actual price can vary widely and can't be known until an individual student's financial aid package is prepared.

Second, I wonder if the era of "public" law schools is drawing to a close because many "public" law schools now derive trivial state support. This National Law Journal article gives an update on this development: University of Virginia Law School gets zero state support; University of Michigan and University of Minnesota get 3% of their budget from the state; and Illinois, Texas and William & Mary all derive 10% or less. Inevitably, this means the price discount for public law schools will narrow; and it challenges our notions about what makes a law school "public" in the first place.

Normatively, I don't think this development is inherently good or bad. Obviously, public law schools have played a key role in providing low cost access to a legal education, but diminishing state support doesn't automatically mean the end of that in an era of aggressive non-public price discounting. But the phasing out of state support should ultimately contribute to the decline of stereotypes of the benefits of public vs. private legal education. In the future, they will be indistinguishable.

A Wisconsin legislator who believes Wisconsin has too many lawyers is trying to eliminate the state subsidy to the University of Wisconsin Law School. The motion was added to the Assembly budget, but it's likely to get washed out in negotiations with the Senate or get vetoed by the governor. Interestingly, there isn't even agreement on the amount of the state subsidy. The legislator believes it's $7M/year; the dean says it's only $2M/year (or only 10% of the operating budget).

Judge Real approved the $49M settlement in the Bar/Bri antitrust litigation, but he rejected the incentive payments to the class representatives, instead telling the lawyers and the class representatives to work out the financial matters among themselves. So the settlement approval hardly ends the case; instead, it appears to commence a new round of fun.

The National Law Journal runs a glowing article on how law students have gotten jobs/offers from blogging. This is great to hear, and done properly a blog can turn a law student into a superstar while still in school. But as the article only hints at, blogs also have the potential to produce the directly opposite effect, as evidenced most recently by the AutoAdmit fiasco. I caution law students to consider both the upsides and downsides of blogging before entering the blogosphere.

This semester I gave a take-home exam. Students had ample time to think about the exam and consult any source they wanted, so almost everyone properly identified and applied the applicable legal standards. This compares favorably with tightly-timed in-class exams (especially closed book exams, though it occurs with open book exams too) where it’s relatively easy to downgrade poor performers who widely miss major concepts.

I often worried that such mistakes reflect exam anxiety or speededness, neither of which I want to test, instead of substantive difference in learning. As a result, like Dan Solove, I’m considering moving to take-home exams as a better assessment tool.

However, when most take-home exams competently cover most of the basic points, grading distinctions become more subtle. This year, I noticed that my grading followed a process not dissimilar to the board game Scattergories. If you’re not familiar with the game, players are given a limited time to write down all of the words that they can think of that meet specified parameters (such as “list fruits beginning with the letter ‘C’”). Players earn points only if they list words that aren’t on other players’ lists. For example, if two players out of 6 list “cantaloupe,” neither of them get a point, but if only one player out of the 6 lists cantaloupe, the player scores a point. Thus, a player’s strategy can be to defensively list easy-to-identify words (to block other players from earning points for those words) or offensively list esoteric examples that other players aren’t likely to come up with (which scores affirmative points).

Writing a take-home exam follows a similar strategy. When most students analyze an issue virtually identically, these analyses all knock each other out, and no one scores any differentiated points for their work. If I expected the analysis, an omission would have detrimentally affected the score, so for these points a student could either earn a zero or a -1. On the other hand, when a student makes a relatively unique and valid point, that student earns a +1.

This suggests a “Scattergories strategy” to achieve a top score on take-home exams: address all of the basic points competently so you don’t lose any points due to omissions, but spend some time coming up with some “unique”/differentiated analysis to score extra points. Note that this may be a different strategy than in-class exams, where the top scoring paper typically gets there simply through consistently correct analysis without obvious mistakes, compared to the other papers that have one or more major mistakes.

I've been doing more admissions work this year than I have in the past, and part of my sales pitch is to explain why students should look past the US News rankings. This WSJ article nails it:

Keyan Rahimi-Keshari last year chose to attend Vanderbilt University Law School in Nashville, Tenn., ranked 16th in U.S. News, over 36th-ranked California-Hastings in large part because of the rank differential. But he couldn't get a summer-job interview from any of the 40 firms he applied to in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he wants to work after graduation. The magazine's rankings, he has concluded, doesn't account for the fact that schools below the top 10 may not carry as much weight with employers outside their region. He's considering transferring to a California school.

Bill Henderson and Andrew Morriss wrote a terrific article for the American Lawyer blasting law schools for whining about US News rankings but failing to sponsor a useful alternative. They write:

It is not reasonable to blame U.S. News for law schools’ decisions to distort the numbers. In fact, U.S. News has modified its rankings over time to include more reliable data. Rather, law schools and the ABA have failed to adopt effective self-regulation.

If law schools are serious about diminishing the importance of the rankings, a simple solution is available: supplying more detailed information in a standard format that would allow students to make direct school-to-school comparisons.

The article also includes numerous examples of just how out-of-control the law school rankings game has gotten. Few of these anecdotes are new; but as strung together by Bill and Andrew, they are devastating.

Judge Real has rejected the proposed settlement in the Bar/Bri antitrust lawsuit. The soap opera continues!

National Law Journal: "More job hopping at schools." This year, there was a lot of faculty movement at highly ranked law schools--a circumstance this article attributes to (1) Harvard's decision to bring in new blood and reduce faculty-student ratios, and (2) Columbia's vow to increase its faculty 50% (over 3 years) to reduce faculty-student ratios. Collectively, these decisions led to a domino effect which is likely to percolate for several years as top-ranked schools raid lower-ranked schools and as professors play musical chairs among the top-ranked schools. Some implications:

* reduced faculty-student ratios are terrific for both students and faculty, but they don't come for free. At many schools, this necessarily means increased tuition for students. With tuition well over $35k/year at some schools, how high can tuition go?

* the article suggests that faculty decisions to move aren't always financially motivated, but at many schools, lateral movements by professors (or, at least the threat to do so) is a principal way for professors to reset their salaries to prevailing market standards. In turn, as law professor salaries escalate due to this market-resetting, students likely will pay the bills for this as well.

* as the article points out, some students are disappointed when they select a school to study with a particular professor who then moves on. Note to prospective law students: life is uncertain, so deciding between schools based on the identity of specific professors has an unmitigatable risk of disappointment.

Students regularly ask me to supervise a paper of theirs. This blog post discusses my suggestions and requirements if you want me to supervise your paper.

1) At your earliest convenience, read Prof. Eugene Volokh's book, Academic Legal Writing [an Amazon Affiliate link]. Copies are available in the library, the bookstore and online. This is a terrific book that (among other things) efficiently explains how to select a paper topic (and how NOT to do so). This book will save you a lot of time in the paper-writing process, so the earlier you read it, the better off you will be.

2) In my opinion, selecting a paper topic is the most critical stage in the paper-writing process. A paper with a poor topic still will be a poor paper, no matter how well-written or researched it is. In contrast, if the topic is stellar, a paper can be a star paper even if it is only competently executed. So there is little point in marrying a poor paper topic, as it will simply mean that you are investing a lot of hard work in a paper with little or no upside.

Unfortunately, it is hard to find a worthwhile paper topic. Then again, I may be more demanding about paper topics than other professors. I routinely reject paper topics that (a) are case notes, (b) are already well-covered by the existing literature (or are going to be imminently flooded by papers in queue), (c) relate to a current event (such as pending legislation or a current dust-up) that likely will be forgotten in 12-18 months or has a high risk of mooting by subsequent developments, or (d) seek to recap the existing state of the law rather than advancing the dialogue. There are no shortcuts to picking a good topic, so I expect that generally you will do a fair amount of upfront work evaluating potential topics (including doing careful precedent checks to assess the originality of your proposed topic), and it's probable that I will reject several of your topic proposals before we find a mutually acceptable topic.

3) After we agree upon a paper topic, I will ask you to provide me your preferred schedule of deliverables with your own self-selected deadlines. I am not good about proactively cracking the whip on you; instead, I prefer that you let me know how you like to work, and then I can enforce your self-selected deadlines if you prefer. However, if you are the kind of writer that needs a professor to constantly hound you on deadlines and deliverables, I may not be the best choice.

You can pick any delivery schedule you want, but if you delay your work until the end of the semester, you run a serious risk of having me raise major structural concerns about the paper with little time for corrective measures.

4) I think it's very hard (if not impossible) to write a publishable paper in a single semester from a "cold start." However, I will be happy to work with you even after the semester if you want to make your paper publishable or if you want to submit it to the writing competitions. On that front, you might educate yourself about possible writing competitions using my mom's book, How to Pay for Your Law Degree (copies are in the library).

We're trying something new this year at SCU by offering a new 1-unit course entitled "E-Discovery." See the press release. While I'm sure E-Discovery topics have been addressed in other law school courses, I believe this is one of the first courses that a law school has offered for academic credit that focuses solely on E-Discovery.

AP story on the rising number of law school applicants with deep scientific backgrounds. From my own personal observation this year being loosely involved with SCU's admissions process, I'm blown away by the technical backgrounds and expertise of our applicants. There are a lot of strong scientists who've decided to pursue law instead. As the article quotes Prof. Polk Wagner, "It almost scares me...Who's left in the lab?"

For a couple of years now, the search term "law professor salary" or "law professor salaries" consistently has been one of the top 10 search terms used to find my blogs. It seems to be a topic of significant interest! See my earlier post: What kind of pay can a law professor expect? (March 2005)

Fortunately, we have some new data to obsess over. SALT has published its 2006-07 survey of law professor salaries. This gives a rough sense of the going rates for various law professors, although I must confess that I don't find the numbers fully credible. For example, Gonzaga's listing appears to contain an obvious error when the assistant professor median is $119k but the full professor median is only $82k. I'm sure this is reversed. Also, less than half of the schools responded, giving us an incomplete view of the field. Finally, I'm sure that most of the schools' numbers don't include summer research stipends, administrative stipends, retirement plan contributions and other financial incentives offered to professors, so I'm guessing the dichotomy between schools is even greater than indicated. (Those additional compensation factors may be included in the ambiguous "fringe benefits" category--I wasn't sure what that column represented). Brian Leiter gives some good guidance for interpreting law professor salary data generally.

For some more reliable data, see Virgina's law professor salaries, the SFGate report on UC law professor salaries and Paul Caron's data comparing salaries at the UC schools and Virginia. As you can see, at the high end, some professors are making some eye-popping numbers.

In any case, taking the SALT data as given, note the big spread for assistant professors, ranging from a median of $70,000 at NC Central to a median of $143,000 at Michigan--a spread of more than 2X. The spread appears even larger at the full professor level. Ignoring the Gonzaga outlier, the median range is from $83,000 at DC Law School (a brutally low number) to $241,000 at Harvard--almost 3X!

The data also indicates the relatively slow progression of law professor salaries. At most schools, the full professor median is less than 50% more than assistant professor median, showing that salary increases are very low from year-to-year. (Harvard is one of the rare exceptions to this, where the ratio is about 2X). I've complained before that law professor salaries often grow at a rate lower than inflation, and I think this data provides some support for that. On the other hand, looking at my post from 2005, I see some positive growth in the numbers--at some schools in 2004, the median range for assistant professors used to dip below $60,000.

Finally, this data reinforces how to think about the financial implications of becoming a law professor. This is not a career path for those who want to get fabulously rich, and many of us make less than our students who take first year associate jobs at the big NY firms (now paying $160,000). However, most of us also make enough money to live a comfortable if conservative lifestyle. And we as law professors are generally better off than our academic peers.

HT: Andrew Perlman at Legal Ethics Forum

From InsideHigherEd: "This much is undisputed: One evening three years ago, a then-professor at the University of Iowa’s College of Law tampered with anonymous student evaluations that rate teaching effectiveness. Kenneth Kress admits to replacing three unfavorable student-completed questionnaires with his own versions and altering two others to improve his rating."

Marquette Law is back in the second tier of law school rankings after having dropped to the third tier last year. I'm shocked (massive sarcasm). See my prediction of this development from last April. Note my next prediction that Marquette will drop back into the 3rd tier in at least one of the next 5 rankings--that would be troubling except for my 3rd observation. So a reminder to prospective law students: it's stupid to rely on any single year's ranking in US News (and perhaps it's not smart to rely on them ever).

Judge Real preliminarily approved the settlement in the Bar/Bri antitrust case.

Cardozo Law School held an event entitled "Trends in Federal Judicial Citations and Law Review Articles" where 7 appellate judges and several law professors discussed the general decline in court citations to law review articles. The New York Lawyer writeup (free registration required). Some of the article rehashes some well-trodden ground, but a few interesting tidbits emerged. Most importantly--the judicial crowd has made it relatively clear that they aren't able to do much with policy-oriented law review articles, which makes sense, but legislators can act on our arguments.

So, as at least one judge points out, we as law review article authors should make our arguments to legislators. Of course, this requires more than mere publication; some evangelization would be required to affect legislators' thinking. I have been thinking a lot about how to do this effectively; perhaps some day we can organize an AALS panel on that topic.

UPDATE: This topic has sparked a lot of discussion. See:
* Adam Liptak NYT Article
* WSJ Law Blog recapping the discussion.
* Dan Solove: "the worthwhile articles are becoming needles in an ever-growing haystack"
* Orin Kerr: "my sense is that a lot of law review scholarship is not terribly serious about engaging with the law"
* Eugene Volokh: "we shouldn't, it seems to me, insist that all or even most legal scholarship be aimed at judges, or see certain genres' lack of desire to influence judges as a sign of those genres' inherent flaws"
* Mike Madison: we should write to plug into some community, even if it's beyond the legal community.

The Washington Post runs a story on one of the most vexing problems I face in my administrative capacity--how to communicate programmatic or administrative announcements to students. The article explains that proliferation of communication technologies has reduced the likelihood that any one method will reach students; plus, students routinely and deliberately ignore messages they receive via any of the official communication media (the article has quote after quote from students fessing up to this willful blindness). I can't count the number of times that I've spoken with a disappointed student saying "I had no idea" about some message that I had done my best to disseminate. It's very, very frustrating for everyone involved!

One particularly cumbersome solution is to blast students with the same message via multiple media, which only compounds the problem by increasing the data flow (and, perhaps more importantly, the irrelevancy of some of the data flow) to students, giving them even more incentive to check out. If anyone has figured out an effective method to reach students, I would LOVE to hear it!

A friend recently asked for gift suggestions to give to a new incoming law student. This request had a certain irony, as those who know me well know that I am completely gift-challenged (and doubly ironic, as another friend had asked me about gifts to give law professors). So, at the risk of further exposing my gift-incompetence to the world, here's the suggestions I made:

Books to help with the first year
* Eugene Volokh, Academic Legal Writing. I can't tell you how many 2Ls and 3Ls have told me that they wished they had read Volokh's book as a 1L. There are many other books in this genre, such as Fischl, Getting to Maybe.
* Bluebook. Every 1L is going to have to buy it, and worse yet, they will curse having had to spend money on something so worthless. So this is an ideal 1L gift--much needed, often used, and something better received than purchased.
* There are some packages of commercial outlines covering the full range of first year courses, like Gilbert Law Summaries: First Year Program. This would be a nice one-stop resource for students who are probably going to buy commercial outlines anyway. You could also buy individual commercial outlines, especially if you had a favorite.

Media depictions of the first year:
* Scott Turow, One-L. I won't say that this is the easiest book to read as a prospective law student, but it's a still-relevant preview of life as a 1L.
* DVD of Paper Chase or Legally Blonde. Neither of these are all that realistic, but they are still both fun.

Tools to help professional development:
* Student membership in the ABA or another geographically proximate or topically relevant bar association, such as the AIPLA for IP students. Getting your recipient involved in a bar association might be a great way to jumpstart his/her networking/job search/expertise development, so this is a gift that could, in theory, keep on giving.
* How to Pay for Your Law Degree, 2006-2008. Disclosure note: this is my mom's book. However, it's a great resource because it lists various scholarships and writing competitions for incoming and current law students. This might help your recipient get some extra dough for law school or gain extra recognition.
* Multi-color highlighter set. This is partially a joke--recall Dahlia Lithwick's meltdown over her choice of highlighter colors. But I think a lot of law students burn through a lot of highlighters in law school, so why not help them out a bit?

Fun stuff:
* Silly shirt from a Cafe Press shop
* Gift certificate(s) for stress reliever (massage, LaserTag, weekend getaway, etc.)

Let me know if you have any other ideas!

[note: some links go through Amazon Affiliates]

I've previously blogged on problems with student evaluations of teaching. First, I've expressed concern about the anonymous nature of the feedback, which means that the evaluators have reduced accountability for what they say. Second, there's evidence that superficial things like the professor's attractiveness affects the evaluations.

Deborah Merritt of Ohio State University College of Law provides much-needed structure to these critiques in her excellent article, Bias, the Brain, and Student Evaluations of Teaching, which reviews the extensive social science on teaching evaluations and how people judge other people to explain the significant deficiencies with the typical written evaluation of teaching. In a nutshell, she explains why written evaluations fail to accurately measure the quality of the professor's instruction, making them susceptible to bias and other unwanted forces. Her solution is to elicit student feedback in a guided discussion, a much more time-consuming method of collecting feedback but one that avoids the defects of the written evaluation.

The abstract:

Student evaluations of teaching are a common fixture at American law schools, but they harbor surprising biases. Extensive psychology research demonstrates that these assessments respond overwhelmingly to a professor's appearance and nonverbal behavior; ratings based on just thirty seconds of silent videotape correlate strongly with end-of-semester evaluations. The nonverbal behaviors that influence teaching evaluations are rooted in physiology, culture, and habit, allowing characteristics like race and gender to affect evaluations. The current process of gathering evaluations, moreover, allows social stereotypes to filter students' perceptions, increasing risks of bias. These distortions are inevitable products of the intuitive, “system one” cognitive processes that the present process taps. The cure for these biases requires schools to design new student evaluation systems, such as ones based on facilitated group discussion, that enable more reflective, deliberative judgments. This article draws upon research in cognitive decision making, both to present the compelling case for reforming the current system of evaluating classroom performance and to illuminate the cognitive processes that underlie many facets of the legal system.

Douglas Litowitz is issuing a second edition of the book The Destruction of Young Lawyers. I haven't read the book, but this interview with him lays out his basic thesis. He argues that 5 key attributes of the legal profession are contributing to widespread unhappiness among practicing lawyers:

* law school (among other critiques, "It is outrageously expensive, boring, and doesn’t teach concrete lawyering skills")
* the bar exam, "a totally pointless ritual of subjugation"
* "the big-firming of the profession," where (among other things) "equity partners are like a master-class while the young associates are like wage workers hired out by the partners"
* the billable hour method of charging
* new communication "technology which has transformed the practice of law into a 24-hour quickie-mart"

I'm not sure any of these critiques are new or even especially enlightening. However, who can resist such colorful rhetoric?

From Law.com: West and Kaplan are proposing to settling the antitrust lawsuit over Bar/Bri for a total of $49M, of which $37M would go to class members (the rest goes to attorneys), or about $125/class member. If class members really were overcharged $1,000 each, this is a pretty good deal for West and Kaplan!

UPDATE: It looks like at least one plaintiff isn't happy with this settlement. See the petition.

UPDATE 2: WSJ Law Blog weighs in. Read the comments.

UPDATE 3: The NYT weighs in.

NY Lawyer (free registration req'd) republishes an NLJ article about law professors establishing "of counsel" relationships with law firms, giving the examples of Laurence Tribe at Akin Gump and Kathleen Sullivan at Quinn Emanuel. According to a Quinn Emanuel partner, Kathleen's affiliation creates a "wow factor." He continues: "Honest to God, having Kathleen with you at a meeting is like walking in with Mick Jagger."

In October 2004, I gave a talk to Marquette first years about taking law school exams. I thought it would be useful to share my notes from that talk:

Preparing for the Exam

1. Learn how to take law school exams
2. Determine how the professor will evaluate the course
• open book v. closed book
• multiple choice v. checklist v. holistic
3. Do every sample exam you can
• If the professor doesn’t make sample exams available, ask for them!

Taking the Exam

4. Manage your time
• Allocate time in accordance with points
• Don’t freak out

[For essay exams]
5. Spend extra time issue-spotting
• Mix it up with the facts
6. Invest in organization
• Put your strongest arguments first
7. Answer all questions asked
• Don’t answer a question that wasn’t asked
• Don’t answer the question from the wrong perspective
8. If you are uncertain about the facts or the law, state your assumptions and discuss both ways
9. Don’t brain-dump
• Cutting and pasting costs the professor's confidence
• More words aren’t better; it’s about the right words
10. Be accurate with the law and the terms
11. If you’re handwriting, write legibly

After the Exam

12. Move on and don’t compare notes
13. After grading is completed, review every exam to learn what you did right and what you can improve
14. Recognize the poor correlation between grades and anything that matters

From AP: Allan Stewart, a 91 year old man, got a law degree in Australia. Talk about fulfilling a lifelong dream. Welcome to the profession!

In the ongoing lawsuit about Bar/Bri's alleged antitrust violations in the bar exam preparation market, Kaplan has lost its motion for summary judgment. My last entry about this case was about the Bar/Bri class action website.

From the Chronicle of Higher Education: Pick-A-Prof, one of the numerous websites providing student reviews of professors, publishes the grading histories/practices of professors for many of the 170 schools it covers. Obviously, many schools do not provide this data willingly, but Pick-A-Prof's believes such data is a public record, thus forcing some public institutions to fork it over. Sometimes, lawyers are needed as attitude-adjusters. See the story about its lawsuit against UC Davis, which just last month concluded favorably for Pick-A-Prof when UC Davis relented.

Should we simply put this in the "more-information-is-better" category? Unquestionably, this information is highly relevant and interesting to students picking among courses. Further, it's existed in some limited fashion forever--certain professors get a reputation for being easy or hard graders, and these impressionistic reputations will be replaced by hard data.

However, will students use past grading data wisely to improve their decision-making? There are plenty of reasons to believe they will not. Instead, there remains significant concern that students will flock to the easy-grading professors, regardless of pedagogical merit, while tougher professors either will have their enrollments suffer or, worse, will change/lighten up their grading standards as a marketing ploy to prop up course enrollments or to win popularity contests.

To be clear, I've routinely published my own grading data (for example, see the 11 years worth of exam writeups for my Cyberlaw course), so I'm not philosophically opposed to the public availability of this data. However, to the extent that democratized grading information contributes to students viewing a course simply as an economic transaction to acquire a grade, I think we all suffer.

How much do law professors hate the USNWR law school rankings? So much that at the big annual meeting for law professors, an entire day-long workshop has been organized on the "ratings game," including panels with descriptions like:

"In this session, speakers will confront the #@%$&**@ U. S. News and World Report rankings system"

and

"In this session, panelists will imagine creative alternative ways to assess law schools that may entail rating, not ranking, and ignore the U.S. News"

It takes a fair amount of antipathy to motivate spending a whole day to collectively figuring out how to moot the USNWR rankings! Unfortunately, I suspect this workshop won't succeed in doing so, although I do support the endeavor.

From the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Robert L. Schrag, a communications professor at North Carolina State University, recorded his classroom lectures and offered them for sale on a website for $2.50 each. There wasn't a great market for them (only 12 bought, with a total of $11 going to Schrag), but the practice nonetheless raised some difficult questions. NCSU, like many universities, allows its professors to retain their copyrights, so Schrag wasn't infringing on the University's copyright (however, a different result might obtain at other schools with different policies). Yet, the practice of a professor getting double-paid for classroom duty implicates some complex fairness norms, plus there is at least a hypothetical concern that some students might be willing to pay to bypass classroom attendance for the convenience of podcasted lectures.

After the communications dean indicated that she was bothered by the practice, Schrag stopped. However, surely we haven't heard the last of this practice--or of other ways that enterprising professors can generate alternative revenue streams.

UPDATE: I've learned that a site, TeachersPayTeachers.com, is trying to make a market for teachers to sell lesson plans to other teachers.

James B. Levy, As a Last Resort, Ask the Students: What They Say Makes Someone an Effective Law Teacher, 58 Me. L. Rev. 50 (2006):

"[T]he profile of the ideal law school professor from the students' perspective is someone who is an expert in her field, projects confidence about that expertise, respects students, cares that they learn, and has great enthusiasm for teaching. Somewhat surprisingly, characteristics that we usually presume to be very important to students, such as teacher's learning students' names, the ability to entertain students in class, or socializing with them outside of class, were not as important to students as we often believe."

But what about professor sexiness?

Wisconsin is the only state that still allows graduates of in-state law schools to become lawyers without taking a bar exam (called the diploma privilege). This creates some interesting dynamics--UW and Marquette graduates have some extra incentives to stay in WI because it means they can avoid a bar exam, and out-of-state graduates/lawyers have to jump through some extra hoops just to get to the same place as in-state graduates.

This dichotomy creates controversy constantly, but it may boll over as the new state bar president has targeted the diploma privilege as part of his agenda. You can see a video on this issue here, focusing on the sad story of Arnie Moncada (name corrected per comment below), who went to Thomas Cooley Law School in Michigan, failed the Wisconsin bar 4 times, and now can't be a lawyer in WI forever...while if he had just graduated from Marquette or UW, he'd be a lawyer now.

Personally, I always thought the diploma privilege did Marquette graduates a disservice--it encouraged students to focus on Wisconsin job opportunities in preference of other great options elsewhere. On the other hand, the diploma privilege helps UW and Marquette in the US News rankings every year (it's hard to beat 100% "passage").

(Thanks to Garet Galster for sending this link).

A website has been set up in the Rodriguez v. West case over BAR/BRI's alleged monopolization of the Bar exam test preparation market. Affected class members can opt out of the class by following the instructions on the website. A trial has been scheduled for September.

For more of my blog coverage on the Bar/Bri class action lawsuits, see here.

Jeremy Blachman a/k/a "the Anonymous Lawyer" has a funny bit on silly bar exam rules. Rules like: gum is OK, but only if unwrapped (presumably, people could write very small cheat sheets on the wrapper). Jeremy's conclusion::

A few final words: Don't wear a catheter. Unwrap your gum. Make sure you bring your swimming goggles. And you're all ready to pass the bar exam.

Read the whole thing to see why this advice, in a twisted way, actually makes sense. While you're at it, you can check out my tips for passing the California bar exam (a little dated, but still mostly accurate). For those of you studying for the exam, you're almost at the finish line. Good luck!

Rodriguez v. West Publishing Corp., No. 05 CV 3222 (C.D