Discourse.net

US News and the Costs of Ethical Behavior

Our US News score is lousy. The methodology is very bad — and any large private school without a very big endowment is going to suffer under it — but even so I think fails to reflect some of our real strengths when I look at who is doing relatively well out of the system.

Brian Leiter says, and who am I to gainsay him?, that many, many schools “massage” the data they report to US News,

Schools hire unemployed graduates as research assistants, hand out fee waivers to hopeless applicants to improve their acceptance rates, inflate their expenditures data through creative accounting or simply fabrication, cut their first-year enrollment (to boost their medians) while increasing the number of transfers (to make up the lost revenue), and so on. Because more than half the total score in U.S. News depends on manipulable data, schools intent on securing the public relations benefits of a higher rank simply “cook the books” or manipulate the numbers to secure a more favorable U.S. News outcome.

I’m 99.9% sure that this law school does exactly none of those things. I think our administration is honestly reporting its stats — honest to a fault, some might say.

Indeed, I know of a case where we have a person (not the Librarian) who doesn’t have tenure, who has a joint faculty and library job, carries two titles, but has been spending increasing amounts of his/her time teaching students, coaching moot court teams, doing all the things great faculty members do. Why not count this person towards our faculty for student/faculty ratio purposes, I asked? Wouldn’t be right given how the rules treat library staff, came back the answer.

There are two related issues here: The first is to what extent one can ethically lawyer the numbers to one’s advantage. Not being involved in those decisions, I have no idea where the line is, nor what the tradeoffs are on pushing it. There’s no question some schools went a lot too far, and paid for it in embarrassment when they got caught.

The second issue is what, if Leiter’s claim is correct, it means for law schools that don’t engage in any of the shenanigans he describes. On the one hand, I’m quite proud to be able to say that we are not cheating. On the other hand there’s always Leo Durocher’s warning to contend with, that “Nice guys finish last.”

I Should Jesticulate More

MoneyLaw: Teaching Evaluations Again

Nonverbal behaviors appear to matter much more than anything else in student ratings. Enthusiastic gestures and vocal tones can mask gobbledygook, smiles count more than sample exam questions, and impressions formed in thirty seconds accurately foretell end-of-semester evaluations. The strong connection between mere nonverbal behaviors and student evaluations creates a very narrow definition of good teaching.

…

…show a few seconds of a teacher on tape with the sound off. A group of students is then asked to evaluate the teacher on a number of measures. These evaluations — again based on sound off seconds — turn out to be remarkable close to the evaluations the same teachers receive at the end of a semester from their regular classes. In short, looks, movement, expressions, etc, may trump everything else.

(quoting from Bias, The Brain, and Student Evaluations of Teaching, 82 St. John’s L. Rev. 235 (2008))

If Only

(via la Bartow at Feminist Law Professors)

Why A Practitioner Dean Sounds Like A Better Idea Than It Usually Is

The Miami Daily Business Review ran an article yesterday about our Dean search, but it’s behind their paywall so I can’t link to it. Despite a couple obvious inaccuracies — as far as the faculty knows, for example, it’s not clear if we know yet who all the candidates will be — it’s a pretty balanced look at what’s going on, at least as far as I can tell.

But some alumni say the school’s next dean should have strong ties to South Florida’s legal community to support fundraising and create job opportunities for the school’s graduates. Departing Florida Supreme Court Justice Raoul G. Cantero III and Miami lawyer Brian Spector were named as possibilities.

“People like Raoul Cantero or Brian Spector are probably the types of leaders that law schools need for the future,” said Miami forensic accountant and lawyer Lewis Freeman, an alumnus and booster of UM and its law school. It’s “going outside the box of academia for people with real world experience.”

I think it’s understandable that smart people who live at some remove from the institution would feel this way. But I also think that as regards our short-term future they are — sorry to be so blunt — dead wrong.

A local lawyer is not going to have much of an edge in getting our students local jobs (and a former judge even less so). On the other hand, it’s possible that right local lawyer might be an excellent fund raiser, maybe even better than the right academic (although in all honesty, I’m not actually sure that is true). Fund raising is undoubtedly a major part of a Dean’s job. But at this time in our history, what we need as much as money is an administrator who knows law schools, understands how to run a construction project, and whom we don’t have to train. Law schools are different from firms (and courts) culturally, politically, and administratively. Let’s take each in turn.

The cultural problem is the easiest to overcome. There are practitioners and judges who get the academic mission, and who appreciate the central importance of scholarship in a law school. I certainly know some. So while this is a most critical of these three areas, it’s also the one where the supply of qualified practitioner/judges is greatest. But because this is so important, it’s the area where a faculty will be most wary: it’s not enough for a candidate to talk the talk — they have to have done it. Any practitioner, and probably any judge, who hasn’t written at least a few law journal articles or a book is not going to be a serious candidate, especially in this law school where the self-image, at least, is one of scholarship as well as teaching and service.

Which brings me to the second issue: politics. I don’t mean left-right — although a far-right torture-loving Dean wouldn’t work here — but rather personal politics. A University isn’t like a law firm: most of the inmates have life tenure. You can’t vote them off the island, or even cut their partnership share in any substantial way. It’s the ultimate “herding cats” environment. People used to more hierarchical work environments, not to mention used to judicial independence, are with very very rare exceptions simply not prepared for what’s in store. There are almost no whips to crack, and even if you do it, it usually ends up rebounding. Yet you can’t go far without significant buy-in from the team.

Then there’s the administrative side. From what I can tell, a lot of being a good Dean is making sure that other people have the details covered. To do that, you have to know what they are. On-the-job training is possible, but the learning curve for a person new to law school administration, who hasn’t even had a ringside seat as a professor, is frighteningly steep. I’m fairly sure that right now — in a school with a US News deficit and some substantial construction projects likely in its near future — isn’t the best time to undertake that training project … if it can be avoided.

I do agree that practitioners have a lot to offer a law school as teachers and members of our community. I’ve consistently supported ideas such as “practitioner in residence” and the hiring of academically oriented practitioners for various types of faculty posts, including in one case full tenure, depending on their writing experience. But teaching what you know is very different from managing what you don’t know.

The key mistakes that the practitioners quoted by the DBR make is thinking that law schools are not part of the “real world” and that being in or even running a law firm gives you easily transferable management skills. Law schools today are in fact complex organizations with tight budgets, unusual rules, peculiar labor forces, diverse and active constituencies, extensive relations with the greater University, and complex goals. They are hard to administer — much harder, I’d think than a court (at the end of the day, there’s always a bailiff…), and very different from a law firm. There are very few non-lawyers who you should trust to argue a case for you without some specialized training first; similarly, there are very few non-academics you should trust to be a Dean of a law school without some acculturation and experience first. And all of them see law schools as very ‘real world’ indeed.

Ave Maria Updates

It seems that Ave Maria law school is having some money woes, so it won’t build a building it its company town, but will locate in Naples, at least for now. More at Law.com - Ave Maria to Relocate Law School Once Again and at Law Blog - WSJ.com : Ave Maria! Unable to Raise Cash, Law School Scraps New Building Plan.

Meanwhile, some kindly soul has posted the transcript of what must be one of the Truly Weird Depositions of All Time, the testimony of Ave Maria Board Chairman (and general supremo) Tom Monaghan in a lawsuit brought by three former Ave Maria professors. The professors allege that they were fired in retaliation for reporting illegal conduct by Monaghan, and for refusing to acquiesce to what they say were Monaghan’s attempts to make the Board move the school from Michigan to Florida — to property he himself owns.

Summaries of the key weirdnesses at Avewatch, Monaghan Deposition #1: “I don’t know” and Fumare, Observations on Monaghan Deposition #1.

Watch those blogs for sequels.

The End, The Beginning

I taught my last class of the semester this afternoon. For several of the students it was their last class of law school, and they were more than a bit giddy with relief — demob happy. But we had a good class anyway, or because of it.

The end today for graduating students is really just a beginning of something bigger and longer and likely more important, which is why we call that ceremony coming up “Commencement”. The end today for me is just a turning of a wheel: I expect to do it all again next year.

But for one of my colleagues today, it was the final turn of this particular wheel. After 56 years on our faculty, here since September, 1951, Minnette Massey taught her last class today. It is very hard for me to imagine our University of Miami School of Law without this indomitable, outspoken, adorable, sometimes irascible, deeply decent, icon and pioneer of the Florida bar—one of the first women to do innumerable things in the Florida legal world. Minnette was Acting Dean for three years in the ’60s; I have to suspect sexism kept her from ever being appointed as ‘Dean’. She was a mentor to two generations of state legal luminaries, and the go-to person for local federal judges who needed special masters in complex cases, particularly before they had Magistrate Judges to do some of those jobs. Among Minnette’s many achievements is decades of work to fully integrate the bar, not least by mentoring students and young professionals. She’s not young, but no one who knows her thinks she had to retire. Minnette made it clear, however, that she didn’t want to be one of those people who waited until she had to be forced out: her leave-taking, like so much else in her life, would be her own decision on her own time on her own rules.

Everyone has a Minnette story or three. Here’s one of my earliest: back when I was in my first year of law teaching, with a full three months under my belt, I attended the AALS winter conference for the first time. I was teaching Civ Pro I in those days, so of course I went the to the meeting of the Civil Procedure Section, which happened to be a joint section meeting with the Admiralty section that year — the big case was Carnival Cruise Line, which was about the enforcement of forum selection clauses on cruise tickets. On the way into the room, I bumped into Minnette. I had planned to lurk in the back. Minnette steered me to the front row, greeting everyone in the room on the way, which left us craning our necks up at a panel on a raised dias. The talk began. The admiralty speaker was, from a civil procedure standpoint, somewhat obvious. And he was not brief. I was thinking how much better off I would have been in the back, but here I was in the front, with a senior colleague I didn’t know very well, she had said hello to everyone, we were very visible, there was no escape, we’d just have to look interested. “ISN’T THIS BORING?” Minnette said to me in a stage whisper loud enough to be heard next door. (I later learned that was her regular voice.) I wanted to crawl under my seat. But no one else seemed to mind. I suspect that everyone in the room just knew she was being herself: you always know where you stand with Minnette — she doesn’t play games, and no, she won’t suffer fools in silence, but you cannot be around her long without seeing how much she cares about people and about justice. Minnette doesn’t brag (much), so it takes somewhat longer to learn just how much she has given to others and to our law school. I will miss Minnette enormously — unless we are lucky and she again blazes a new trail, this time in retirement, and makes Emeritus status something that involves greater involvement in the law school community than has commonly been the case in the past.

Several of us snuck in at the end of her class this afternoon to join the standing ovation in Room 109, and formed an impromptu receiving line in the aisle as she left the room. When she came to Charlton Copeland, currently our most junior faculty member, she said, “It’s up to you now.”

What Do 1L Attrition Statistics Actually Tell You?

TaxProf Blog points us to a genuinely interesting and — to me — new statistic about law schools, 1L Attrition.

Now I’m trying to figure out what it means. Some things are clear:

• A very low attrition rate is probably good — it means that students are happy, don’t drop out or transfer, and aren’t flunked out. You’re likely to be happy there. (Unclear, though, what it means about legal education if no one ever flunks out; no admissions process is that perfect. Except maybe Yale’s.) Unless of course it means everyone wants to transfer but no one will take them…

• A very high attrition rate is a red flag of a sort. Either students are dropping out in droves, flunking out en masse, or getting the heck out of Dodge. But for some students it may not be all bad: a high flunkout rate, for example, may mean the school takes chances on marginal students and then gives them an honest signal about their prospects after the first year, rather than stringing them along (and collecting tuition) for three years. It could be a brutal first year, but it might be worth finding out what the place is like if you survive boot camp.

• What about the middle? Here, I think the headline number is almost misleading. I’d want to know why students are leaving. There’s a big difference between a school in which people leave because they can’t stand it (drop outs); leave because they can’t hack it (flunk outs); and leave because they transfer to somewhere better (feeders). A number of schools with high US News scores massage their data by not accepting low-LSAT candidates as 1Ls. They make up for the small resulting first year class (and lost tuition) by using the ‘2L transfer strategy’ — accepting a large number of transfers in as 2Ls. This also helps their bar pass rate, since the transfers in are people with good grades, which makes them good risks for the bar (and unless those students are replaced by transfers in, it also likely depresses the bar pass rate for the sending school below what the class they admit would have achieved, further enhancing the competitive position of the accepting school). From the point of view of some motivated students, a school that sends many transfers may actually be better than one whose 1L products are seen as unattractive for some reason by the schools using the 2L transfer strategy. Thus a high transfer number may be a sign that students are fleeing — or it may be a sign that admission to the school plus good grades sends a signal that higher-ranked schools are happy to accept.

• If I were trying to make sense of this number, I’d not only want to know why people left (especially flunking vs. transfers), and where they left to, but also how many transfers IN the school had. Although there too, the number would need to be treated with care. A school that loses large numbers to transfers out and gains few is a place people want not to be (or a great feeder school). A place that is more or less in balance seems to make the transfers figure something of a non-issue. A place that is a huge net gainer is probably a place people want to be — but it’s also a place that likely is gaming its US News stats, which a student might think reflects poorly on its general ethical climate, or at least suggests the number has even less meaning than usual.

[Lest this seem defensive in any way, I should point out that U. Miami’s statistics here put it at #78 (higher is better) in a large pack of many law schools bunched together with trivial statistical differences between them.]

I Need a Research Assistant

RESEARCH ASSISTANT WANTED

To: All 1st & 2nd Year Students at the University of Miami

From: Michael Froomkin

I need a research assistant this summer. If things work out, we could continue the arrangement into next year. At minimum, I need someone who can write clearly, who is well-organized, and who is really good at finding things in libraries and on the Internet. If you happen to have some programming/HTML skills, that would be a big plus but it is not in any way a requirement.

Hours (and weeks) are flexible and negotiable in the range of 10-20 hours per week. It’s also possible that if you need more hours I might be able to put together a package with another faculty member who also seeks part-time assistance during the summer.

The pay is the university’s standard miserable hourly wage ($8/hr) for research assistants, but the work is sometimes interesting.

If interested, please e-mail a copy of your resume (c.v.), a short writing sample (non-legal is preferred), a transcript (need not be an official copy), and a note telling me how many hours you’d ideally like to work per week, and when you are free to start. Be sure to include your phone number and email address. Please put the words RESEARCH ASSISTANT (in all caps) in the subject line.

First year students are particularly encouraged to apply.

How Law Schools Compete for Entry-Level Faculty

Glenn Cohen lists 17 questions that prospective hires should ask a law school after they get the offer.

I think it’s a great list.

UM Law, incidentally, does very well (in some cases very very well) on all but #11 (we give “only” one semester of pre-tenure sabbatical) and the second part of #15: Unlike (I think) most universities, we don’t have reciprocal deals for tuition remission with other schools, or any tuition assistance plan.

And I have two children approaching college-age …

Law School Dreams

There’s an interesting conversation going on at Madisonian.net.

Strike that.

There’s usually an interesting conversation going on a Madisonian.net, but this week they’re having an especially promising ‘Moblog’ on legal education.

• cheer successes,
• be engaged,
• don’t let up after tenure,
• “addresses conflict head-on and not in a passive-aggressive (or aggressive) manner” — but also stomp on bullies [hmm, some tension there?],
• set high standards for students, provide them with support to enable them to meet those standards, and hold them to those standards,
• model professional behavior by your actions,
• value those who teach in the clinic and those who teach legal research and writing,
• have fun.

We do some of these things better than others. And I’d love it if we did each of these things better than we do now — and with a Dean search going on, we’re certainly entitled to dream. But what Rapoport doesn’t say enough about is how you do all those things at once. Yes “it takes hard work to create such a community and to keep it thriving. ” I get that. But are these things that require a Dean to push them? Or are they things that only work as organic change bubbling up from below? Or do both sets of stars have to be aligned?

More prosaically, as we interview Dean candidates in the next weeks, how on earth to detect which ones are likely to help foster these tendencies?

I'm Relevant This Week

I’m teaching issues relating to search engines this this week in Internet Law, and one of the issues I’m doing is the problem of search engine bias.

How nice of Wired.com to run an article showing just how relevant my class can be:

A U.S. government-funded medical information site that bills itself as the world’s largest database on reproductive health has quietly begun to block searches on the word “abortion,” concealing nearly 25,000 search results.

Called Popline, the search site is run by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Maryland. It’s funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, the federal office in charge of providing foreign aid, including health care funding, to developing nations.

Lots more where that came from….

Update: The Dean of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health weighs in — and says the right things.

The "Security Mindset" and "Thinking Like a Lawyer"

One of my favorite security gurus, Bruce Schneier, has an entertaining and yet infuriating article on The Security Mindset in which he tries to explain how security professionals think differently from other engineers.

SmartWater is a liquid with a unique identifier linked to a particular owner. “The idea is for me to paint this stuff on my valuables as proof of ownership,” I wrote when I first learned about the idea. “I think a better idea would be for me to paint it on your valuables, and then call the police.”

Really, we can’t help it.

This kind of thinking is not natural for most people. It’s not natural for engineers. Good engineering involves thinking about how things can be made to work.

It’s fun and you should read the whole thing.

But it’s also a bit frustrating — because Bruce restricts his discussion to how engineers think. To me, what he is describing is a big part of “thinking like a lawyer”. And when Bruce asks whether this sort of demented worldview, one in which you shake things to see how they break, can be taught, I think, “Hell, yes: I’ve been doing it for years.”

Most lawyers don’t have the math to be a cryptographer or the technical chops to do security analysis of a complex program. But good lawyers — whether transactional or litigation oriented — do have a “security mindset”: A big part of learning to ‘think like a lawyer’ is learning again and again how things broke. That equips you to try to build things that won’t break (or at least won’t break in old ways); it also trains you how to break them.

Leiter's Open Letter to Law Bloggers

Brian Leiter, An Open Letter to Other Law Bloggers Regarding the US News Rankings

When the new rankings come out in a couple of weeks, may I suggest that you not post the overall ranking. You all know the overall rank assigned to a school by U.S. News is meaningless, often perniciously so. It combines too many factors, in an inexplicable formula, and much of the underlying data isn’t reliable, and some of it e.g., expenditures on secretarial salaries and electriciy isn’t even relevant. You all know this. So don t report it. The fact that this garbage appears in a major news magazine doesn’t change the fact that it is garbage.

Instead, let me suggest that if you want to blog about the rankings when they come out, write about some of the underlying data that speaks for itself: the reputational scores, for example, or the bar passage rates, or the numerical credentials of the students. Those have limitations too—the median of 500 is not really comparable to the median of 200; the reputation scores are not based on presenting evaluators with any information about the schools being evaluated; and so on—but one can at least say clearly what the limitations are, and one is not hostage either to the dishonesty of the schools “reporting” the data or the sheer idiocy of the U.S. News ranking formula.

Indeed the USN rankings are the dumbest pseudo-stats imaginable. But people — especially prospective students — put enormous weight on them.

I Wonder if this Teaching Technique Would Work In Law School

Kai Chang writes about his favorite college professor, who was also a self-confessed liar. See Overcoming Bias: My Favorite Liar for the details.

It’s an interesting idea; I wonder if it would work in law school or if students would resent it. There’s also the risk that people would free ride and wait for the answer in the next class. I suppose, though, that one could give some class participation credit for being the first to ID the answer…

Another Reason Not to Teach Contracts

I didn’t enjoy Contracts very much as a law student — it all seemed utterly arbitrary, except for the parts that seemed random or cruel. So I’ve never much wanted to teach it.

But now, thanks to Ethan Leib’s post Chicken. Fowl, indeed. I have a whole new reason never to want to teach it.

The Microcosmographia Academica Is Online

Thanks to Paul Horowitz’s PrawfsBlawg: “O young academic politician, know thyself!”, I now have a link to an online copy of the Microcosmographia Academica.

I was introduced to this wonder by a young man in a hurry when I was student in Cambridge. He’s done very well for himself, I might add.

First published in 1908, one hundred years later the Microcosmographia Academica reamains one of the truest and saddest things ever written about academic politics.

Official UM Law Dean Search Page

There’s now an official UM School of Law Dean Search page. Complete with a Position Description.

Here are some of the things the Dean will do:

• Strengthen institutional excellence and selectivity
• Enhance the recognition of the school’s quality and strengths
• Attract and retain promising scholars of the first rank.
• Continue to build and develop areas of strength in teaching and scholarship
• Strengthen excellence in both scholarship and classroom teaching
• Creatively support, enhance and promote faculty productivity
• Focus on ways to enhance the student experience at the Law School
• Fundraise, with a particular focus on relieving the financial burden on students and enhancing scholarship, teaching, and innovative programs
• Work with faculty and University leadership to finalize and implement the Law School’s Strategic Plan
• Maintain the excellence of the academic program in conjunction with the faculty, and provide leadership on innovative curriculum development, academic standards and program initiatives
• Offer students the diversity and richness of a large law school while providing a flexible, student-centered education with a commitment to excellence
• Encourage and support faculty scholarship, teaching excellence, and service
• Cultivate collegial and constructive relations with and among faculty
• Enhance diversity of the faculty, staff and student ranks
• Ensure that library and information resources continue to support the academic program and faculty scholarship, and explore new avenues for the fruitful deployment of technology in law studies

And that’s not even the whole list.

And here are some additional “Desirable Characteristics”:

The Dean should be an accomplished scholar who is highly regarded by the legal academy. She or he should have enthusiasm for the Law School’s future and appreciation for its history; institutional and intellectual ambition, energy and judgment; leadership skills, including political sensitivity, an effective personal style, and the ability to foster collegiality and engagement.

The Dean helps set the overall tone for the school. The Dean will have:

• The ability to attract, retain and develop outstanding faculty, administrators and staff
• The ability to promote successful change in response to emerging challenges
• An appreciation for the assets of the Law School and the ability to build its future by their effective utilization
• The capacity to manage and develop a complex academic enterprise
• A global vision with the ability to be an advocate for continued growth and excellence in the academic program
• The ability to promote scholarly enthusiasm and productivity
• A commitment to a collegial model of governance and the ability to cultivate respect for and demands of faculty and staff roles
• The ability to nurture a strong sense of community among faculty, staff, students and alumni
• An appreciation for and commitment to encourage student service in the community and legal careers geared to public service
• A commitment to diversity that will reinforce the Law School’s historic position as a school of opportunity
• A commitment to fund-raising with the interpersonal and communication skills necessary to interact persuasively with the philanthropic community, to solicit and steward both governmental and private support from alumni, members of the Board of Trustees, friends, foundations, law firms and corporations
• Excellent communication skills
• A high level of energy which motivates others, inspires enthusiasm and reflects the forward momentum of the Law School

Walking on water is also optional.

UM Law Team Wins State Trial Competition

Each year, the Trial Lawyers Section of the Florida Bar sponsors the Chester Bedell Memorial Trial Competition. Each law school in the state is invited to send two teams. This year eight schools responded and sent sixteen teams.

The 2007-08 competition, a mock products liability case, was held on Wednesday and Thursday. On Thursday, yesterday, each team tried the case twice, representing the plaintiffs at one trial and the defendant at the other. For each trial, three trial lawyers served as jurors and a judge or another trial lawyer served as the presiding judge. The teams with 2-0 records and the highest scores advanced to the semifinals on Friday morning. (Miami’s other team ended day 1 with a 1-1 record, losing to one of the semifinalists.) The winners (Stetson and Miami) advanced to the finals on Thursday afternoon. The finals were tried before a panel of five lawyer-jurors and a circuit judge.

And the UM team won. Robert Palmer, chair of the Trial Lawyers Section announced the winning team. Frank Angones, President of the Florida Bar, presented the best advocate award to Jonathan Weiss, and the team trophy to Joycelyn S. Brown, Christopher M.
Lomax, and Jonathan R. Weiss. Sarah B. King was the witness.

Congrats to all, and to team coaches Terry Anderson and James Gailey.

First Day of Classes

Today is the first day of class for both my Internet Law class and my Jurisprudence class.

Today is also the day that my office desktop displayed a blue screen of death when I booted it up this morning.

And it’s the day that the nice people from IT carted it away….

Drumroll Please

Today I’ll turn in the grades for Administrative Law.

Dean Search

Our Dean search starts in earnest in January. Meanwhile, if you know (or are!) someone who’d be a great Dean for our law school, email me and I’ll forward the info to the committee (which, thank goodness, I’m not a part of!).

Irreverent, no doubt irrelevant, video.

He Did It

Before you complain about my final exam, read this: Rube Goldberg Indicted for Murder.

Reasons to Avoid Law School

Paul Gowder has written an essay on Why you shouldn’t go to law school.. There’s a lot of truth there, but it also leaves out a few crucial things.

The truest parts are surely these: a lot of legal jobs are no fun. Some of the most no-fun jobs pay very well, but many of the no-fun jobs don’t pay that well if you consider the need to repay law school (and perhaps also undergraduate) debt.

A law degree is absolutely not a guaranteed meal ticket. Nor is it a guarantee that you’ll be doing something interesting. For one thing, before you even get to the negatives that Gowder lists, there’s an even more basic issue that makes some people unhappy: you are a lawyer. Some people — notably a significant fraction of the people who drifted into law school straight from college because they couldn’t think of anything else to do — find that they don’t like being a lawyer. Gowder captures that problem. And it is a very real problem.

One thing he doesn’t capture is that there are also people who actually discover they love the law. It’s about important things. You get to solve people’s problems. Perhaps you get to solve puzzles, or you get to deal with people.

Gowder’s essay is aimed at all the people who are not landing at the elite of the profession. People who do really well get to choose some of the firms that are still run by nice people with decent values.

Gowder is writing to the rest of the world, and he paints a grim picture. What he says has a lot of truth (although I think he’s overly grim about what the experience of public interest law is like), but also dramatically incomplete.

The biggest thing Gowder’s essay leaves out is the attractions of government work. There are a lot of good government jobs at the local, state and national levels. The federal jobs even offer decent wages. The local jobs don’t always. But government jobs do offer some other important things: because the offices are chronically understaffed and under-resourced, young lawyers get responsibility early in their careers. These jobs often offer the satisfaction of using one’s talents for the public good.

Government work has many faces: prosecutors, public defenders [link added 1/17], agency lawyers, state AG’s offices, advisers to legislatures and to the executive. Lots of these are frustrating yet fulfilling places to work.

The prospects for lawyers are not as bright as they were in the Good Old Days (whenever those were). The profession is stratified, pay and job quality varies enormously, satisfaction levels are shrinking while (not coincidentally) hours (especially in the highly paid sectors of the private sector) are at unreasonably high levels. And the billing rates are climbing to levels that are sure to incite client revolts.

So there are indeed many reasons not to go to law school. You should only go if you know why you are doing it (although you should also expect that you are likely to change your mind about what kind of law you like best once you are exposed to new things), not because you can’t think of anything better to do. And I also suggest a couple of years working full time before law school — there’s nothing like seeing the working world from the inside to both make you a more disciplined student, and also to give you insight into many of the situations that give rise to the legal issues you will spend three years analyzing. (Second-best: graduate school in an affiliated discipline, as it gives a different and also valuable perspective.)

That said, I have to admit I enjoyed many aspects of the practice of law. At the end of the day I didn’t care deeply enough about which oil company got the money, but I cared about my clients (and they cared a lot which oil company got the money!), and I had pride in the quality of our work. Unlike Gowder’s dismal prediciton, I was never in a position where either I or anyone around me even contemplated anything unethical. I did have the advantage of parlaying elite credentials into working for a very good and very decent firm, but not all firm jobs (at least 15 years ago) amounted to complete corporate serfdom.

I enjoyed law school more, which is a large part of why I came back to it. There really is a distinct kind of rigor and reasoning style which characterizes the law. Law is how we decide (or, sometimes, should decide) important social issues. It is the means by which we implement the large majority of public policies. It matters. Unless you are caught up in the sort of associate treadmill that eats all your waking life, a law license is also a license to take part in a meaningful way in politics, law reform, legal aid, and many other things that can be very satifying even if your day job isn’t as exciting as it might be.

In Law School We Present Every Point of View

Law school dialectics:

We're Hiring!

Today is the start of the AALS meat meet market, the annual hiring conference for would-be law professors. My wife is the chair of our entry-level appointments committee, so she’s in DC along with the rest of our committee, while I’m minding the home front.

The law school has a lot of openings this year — six by some counts, although I’d guess that one or two of those jobs may be earmarked for lateral offers. But whatever the number, we’re hiring, and it’s a recession year. If this turns out to be anything like the year I was on the market, many state schools will find their budgets being cut between now and summer, and some of the jobs they thought they had may evaporate. There are some disadvantages to being in the private sector — high tuition burdening students with debt chief among them — but this may be one of the times when being private works to our advantage.

A few weeks ago I published an extended essay on this blog in which I tried to describe some of the salient features of life at UM from the point of view of entering faculty. I titled it “Ten Reasons Why You Should Teach Here — And Three Why You Shouldn’t”. In case anyone is reading this from the AALS, I repost a slightly amended version of the same essay below.

But before I do that, I can’t resist quoting from our student newspaper, the Res Ipsa Loquitur, which recently interviewed our most recent hire, Charlton Copeland, about his initial impressions of UM Law. This is part of what he said:

The faculty stood out for me a the AALS recruiting conference as one of the most intellectually engaged faculties with which I met over the weekend. They actually were interested in my writing projects, and gave me the sense that they took them and me seriously. My time with the committee ran out too quickly for me. My feeling of intellectual comfort with the faculty was only enhanced during my visit to the campus later in November, but that was augmented by my delight that this would be a group with which I’d be comfortable beyond simply discussing scholarly work. They were a bit quirky, and in a way about which I am excited. I am excited about the diversity of the city of Miami as well, and the opportunities that I think it will provide me to think about my areas of research in new ways — ranging from race and the the law (where the Law School has long been at the forefront in American legal education) to comparative separation of powers issues in Latin America.

And that maybe sums it up better than I can. It’s certainly shorter.

Ten Reasons Why You Should Teach Here — And Three Why You Shouldn’t

1. Faculty

The best reason to come to U.M. is the faculty. At its best (which is to say, “outside of faculty meetings”), this is a faculty that believes ideas are serious things, but also is willing to play with them. You will see this most vividly at faculty seminars, especially those with external speakers. The faculty reads the paper in advance of the talk. It thinks about it. We don’t let the presenter speak a long time — we want to have a discussion. There may be an element of performance in the questions and comments, but that usually just adds to the fun. Unlike some faculties I’ve heard about, we are not worshipers at the temple of sub-disciplinarity: faculty members feel comfortable commenting on papers far outside their own specialties, and they are usually right to do so as the distant perspective sometimes proves at least as valuable as the insider’s.

While faculty vary in the extent to which they will seek you out – some are shy; others are busy – they will almost all be happy to see you if you seek them out. Very few will treat you like a junior colleague; for most, you will be part of the family from the start. And it’s an interesting family, including some big names in international law, tax, law and society, law and identity, and several other subjects.

2. Institutional style & institutional support

UM wants productive faculty, and it believes in research. But it isn’t about telling you what to do. My own story may be instructive: I was hired thinking that I would be writing mostly about administrative and constitutional law. In fact, however, within a couple of years I had turned into an Internet lawyer, and was writing primarily about computers, networks and the law. At no time did anyone here ever suggest that this was a problem. What mattered to people was that I was publishing.

Another way in which UM may differ from some law schools is that our faculty is routinely interdisciplinary and international. Many publish in non-legal journals — a fact which does not necessarily help either our publication or citation counts since the legal tabulators tend to focus only on law journals. Although we recognize that there may be some reputational costs, we are not prepared to tell people where they should publish. We just want it to be good.

There is no international ghetto at UM (the same is true of tax, a traditional faculty strength). As a matter of unwritten policy, everyone is expected to teach a basic course outside their specialty; the result is both that we can have more internationalists (and tax scholars), and that there’s a much greater community of overlapping interests.

3. Library

The University of Miami enjoys a superb law library, the result of a decision more than two decades ago to make library acquisitions a financial priority. And if we don’t have it, the library will borrow it for you, no questions asked. (As one former librarian put it, “we aim to provide law-firm-quality service”. And in fact, it is almost as good as a top law firm, and the librarians are much nicer.)

The law library has extensive holdings in related disciplines, notably political science, and of course the university library is literally next door, and it also has ever-growing electronic access to journals — which can even be accessed from your home office. We have a particularly strong collection in Latin American and Caribbean law, but also strong holdings in European law. We are weak in India, China, and Russia, and no doubt several other countries with non-Romance alphabets, so if your research involves heavy use of materials from one of those countries, you should check to see if we have you covered. I also have a sense that our holdings for pre-1940 materials are not as strong generally as for things published in the last 70 years. But I am continually having pleasant surprises when I consult Baron, the online card catalog. They’ve done some impressive buying over the years — which is a good thing as the next major law library is a long way away.

4. Students

We have smart students with upwardly mobile ambitions. Some come from wealthy families, but for many a law degree will be the highest level of education ever achieved in their families — a matter of pride for an extended clan you may have the good fortune to meet at graduation. Despite the lures of nearby South Beach, UM students are by and large a studious lot: their awareness that few silver platters await at graduation usually translates into a commendable work ethic. At least until the end-of-term fog settles in, I find that my students have done the reading, and often have something to say about it. There is a little shyness — some students don’t want to ask questions for fear of looking silly; other students worry about being labeled a “gunner” — but ordinarily class discussion can be pretty lively. Although we have more men than women as students, it is often the case that the women lead the discussions and make the most substantive contributions. Classes tend to be fun (at least for the instructor). Visiting professors from other law schools consistently remark on the high quality of classroom performance here.

The UM student body has improved greatly in the past decade. Our best students would be at home in any law school. Our worst students would have been near the middle of the class 15 years ago. The only fly in the ointment is that despite their good college grades and creditable LSATs, a substantial fraction of the class comes to law school unable to write as well as they think or speak. Overcoming this obstacle remains one of our biggest challenges. That said, every year we have students who write publishable papers in classes and seminars. It’s been a particular pleasure to see those pieces go into print along side those of full-time academics.

Some of our students will go on to be national leaders; a much larger number will play key roles in the State of Florida, as judges, politicians, and leading members of the bar. Some people have described alumni reunions as state judges’ conventions, but this is slightly unfair. On the other hand, there’s no question that both Florida as a place, and UM graduates as important players in that place, have been at the center of major wrangles with national impact ranging from the 2000 election to the Terri Schiavo affair.

Aspiring faculty sometimes worry that they will not find good research assistants outside a top ten law school. It’s true that I don’t hear stories about students writing papers that professors then publish under their own name as I did when I was a law student at Yale. But if you are looking for a research assistant rather than a ghost writer then my experience suggests this is not a serious problem if you teach a first-year class. As a teacher in the larger first year classes you can identify the students who are good and who fit your style before they get too caught up in other things. Some of them will get on law review, and will be too busy to work for you; some of those that don’t will work downtown for higher pay than the law school can offer, but usually there’s someone you will be happy to have who will be happy to have the job in their second or third year. I can’t claim that every research assistant I’ve had has been stellar, but I can say that some of them were amazing — and that they are harder to find when I don’t teach first years.

5. Research support

Research support exists to make it easier for you to write. The most important part of UM’s research support is its excellent law library. But it doesn’t stop there: In addition to the collection itself, we have a staff of helpful law librarians who seem happiest when given difficult research requests. There’s a document delivery service which will get you any book or article you ask for and deliver it to your office within a day if it’s on campus or a few days if it must be sent from far away. (One down side: you can gain weight from the loss of movement caused by having everything come to you.)

At conferences I sometimes hear stories about places where senior colleagues try to tell tenure-track faculty what to write about (or, worse, forbid certain topics or styles). We don’t do that. If anything, we have erred in the other direction — tip-toeing around junior faculty sensibilities so much that we may have provided insufficient mentoring, In an effort to do better in that department, the faculty now enjoys the services of a “director of faculty development” — yours truly as of a few weeks ago — whose job will be to help colleagues (and especially pre-tenure colleagues) with their research and writing by identifying resources, serving as a sounding board, or just staying out of the way.

In addition, every faculty member has an office budget which allows you to hire a research assistant, books and supplies, and to travel to conferences. Each of these budgets is fairly generous, and the Associate Dean has discretionary funds to add to them up for good cause. In my experience, any cause I can bring myself to ask about has been treated as a good one.

6. The University

A generation ago it was “Suntan U”. Today, under the (very) energetic leadership of Donna Shalala and an impressive suite of Deans, the University of Miami is joining the ranks of the leading research universities in the USA. For openers, President Shalala raised $1 billion for the University. YES, $1 BILLION. Now that it’s in the bank, she’s warming up for a new round of fund-raising. The lion’s share of the first round went to the medical school, but the rumor is that the law school might be able to claim a bigger share of the next round.

More importantly, the past couple of decades have seen a transformation in the quality of both the students and the faculty in the arts and sciences. It’s become hard for students to get in; and departments such as History, Psychology, Business, and Sociology have attracted faculties that include a wealth of potential collaborators, adding to existing strengths in Medicine and Communications. Both the law school and the University encourage inter-disciplinary collaboration. The law school has begun to take advantage of these resources (I, for example, am working with a team on health privacy issues that includes participants from both the Business School and the Med School), but there’s much waiting for you that remains untapped.

7. Perks

The law school wants to support your research, and we try to put our money where our mouth is. Entry-level faculty can apply for a summer research grant before starting work in order to prepare their courses. We light-load you (usually only one course per semester) during your first year to give you time to find your feet. You’ll get a summer grant as of right every summer until tenure to encourage you to write — after that you’ll have to submit proposals and make good on them too. And you’re entitled to a semester’s leave before tenure, more or less in the term of your choice, in order to help you write.

The law school is located on a very beautiful campus in the center of suburban Coral Gables, itself a very pleasant city with excellent restaurants. Rumor has it that in the old days the university administration spent more on landscaping than books; whatever the truth, there’s no question that the campus is very nice to look at. It also sports a state-of-the-art gym that’s about three minutes walk from the law school around our picturesque lake (crocodile optional). The campus sports other useful amenities, including a faculty club, a food court, and an on-campus daycare.

8. Miami

Miami is a cosmopolitan city. Part of its identity is as the defacto capitol of Latin America; part is as an artistic and musical center; and then there’s the celebrity-and-tourist thing. It’s an attractive place for young and old, and — if you take care to live in the right school districts, or have kids who qualify for the right magnet schools, or are ok with private schools — a pretty easy place for the middle-aged pater and mater familias. Like many sunbelt cities, Miami is more sprawling mosaic than urban core and periphery. Both urban and suburban living are within easy reach of the campus. Our politics are fascinating and complex, with much political power held by first and second generation immigrants from Cuba, and to a lesser degree Haiti, and Central America. The region now enjoys a lively cultural life, with a rich music and dance scene and some creditable small theater companies. If you prefer nature to culture, there’s always the nearby Everglades as well as world-class coral reefs for diving just south of Miami.

If your work involves domestic issues, you will find them in Miami, which is the city of the future in ways both good and bad. Along with our glitz you will find us on the cutting edge of today’s and tomorrow’s political and social issues: immigration, environmental (think “Everglades restoration”), medical (think “retirees”), and all the social questions that big cities produce.

Housing costs tend to be high, but many other living costs are low and there is no state income tax. The University has, however, taken bold steps to address the housing issue by offering new hires a deal in which the university will subsidize part of your home purchase in exchange for a proportionate share in the equity when you sell, an offer that puts many nice homes within reach.

9. Weather

Miami’s weather is glorious for almost half the year; variable for another chunk, and miserable in the dog days of summer and early Fall. The good news is that much (but not all) of the miserable part comes when the law school is not in session, so you can escape if you choose. When the weather is nice, our central courtyard, the “bricks,” becomes the social center of the community, a place where students and faculty mingle between classes. Even office rats like me end up looking healthier than the wan, pale, parka-clad figures I see huddling on the Boston subway. For those with outdoor ambitions, you can live on Miami Beach, or just enjoy the sea view from a balcony in a tower apartment in downtown Brickel.

10. The revolution is coming

The next five years will see a radical transformation in the faculty, and perhaps the style, of University of Miami School of Law. We have at least six open jobs at present, with the likelihood of much more turnover as faculty retire (couples welcome!). The next three to five years’ appointments, including that of our next Dean, stand a good chance of determining the future course of the school for a generation to come.

At present we have only ten full-time faculty under 50, and only fourteen between 50 and 60; the remaining 17 are over sixty, including some very much over sixty. Our hiring is resolutely in compliance with the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (of our last six entry-level hires, two were very experienced lawyers well over 40), but given the overall composition of the entry-level market, it is likely that this age profile will change dramatically in the next few years.

What this means for our new hires is that they will find themselves at the heart of their new community — and have a chance to lead it — much earlier in their careers than they might otherwise. The coming turnover in the faculty, coupled with this year’s Dean search introduces an element of uncertainty about what we’ll be like in the future that may not be to everyone’s taste. Fortunately, the faculty is engaged in a strategic planning exercise this year which means that any new hires will be spared that chore at least. At present, the law school enjoys a nearly unique chance to reinvent itself, and people with ideas and energy should find all the breathing room and opportunity they want. I hope that people reading this will come join us in building something wonderful.

All that is very well, but honesty compels me to say that there are also some reasons why not everyone may be happy here. Indeed, there are three main reasons why you should not teach here:

1. Weather

If skiing is your passion, and neither waterskiing nor snorkeling are substitutes, then Miami may make you sad. It’s hot and very humid here from July until the heat breaks sometime in October or September. That means you can have up to three and half months when it’s not much fun to go outside. Plus, occasionally we get weather with a name. But we don’t get snowstorms, avalanches, wildfires, earthquakes, random tornadoes, floods, or mudslides. If you want immunity to natural disasters, move to Rhode Island.

2. Language

Many people in South Florida speak Spanish as their first (and often only) language. The campus is Anglo — although some of the bilingual staff and students will speak Spanish to each other — so this is not a work issue. But it is a life issue: you will hear lots of Spanish in the stores and on AM radio. If you are the sort of person who can’t cope with foreign languages around you, there’s a strong chance you will not be happy here. I don’t speak Spanish, and I only found it a noticeable handicap for my first few weeks here, when I would get lost driving around and stop at a store for directions, then wait impatiently while they went to find the English-speaker. It’s a non-issue today unless I happen to go bargain shopping for some exotic household good, and indeed contributes to Miami’s cosmopolitan vibe.

3. Geography

It’s flat here — no mountains (and houses have no basements). More seriously, it’s also far from many of the legal nerve centers. If you’re doing national work and you are having meetings related to it, odds are the meeting will neither be in Miami nor even within driving distance. That means air travel. And while we have great direct air connections to most of the world and the law school is generous with travel support, we do not have a working time machine. Given the post-9/11 security regime at airports, and the increasing vagaries of air travel generally, it is rarely possible to have a meeting in New York or Washington without spending the night out of town. That can mean having to reschedule a class (something we allow for good causes), which is a pain for you and even more of one for your students. It certainly means that doing national committee work is always a substantial time commitment. It is almost 500 miles to the state line, and then where are you? Somewhere between Tallahassee and Moultrie, Ga.

This year I am not on either our entry-level or lateral hiring committees. But if you find the positives outweigh the negatives and have an interest in coming here, I’d still be happy to try to answer any further questions you might have, either in comments to this entry or by private email.

A Finding With Many Implications

Is a photo worth a thousand votes?:

People asked to rate the competence of an individual based on a quick glance at a photo predicted the outcome of elections more than two-thirds of the time.

Nearly 300 students at Princeton University were asked to look at pairs of photographs for as little as one-tenth of a second and pick the individual they felt was more competent, psychologist Alexander Todorov reports in Tuesday’s issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The participants were shown photos of leading candidates for governor or senator in other parts of the country, but they were not told they were evaluating candidates. Those who recognized any of the photos were not counted.

When the elections took place two weeks later, the researchers found that the competency snap judgments predicted the winners in 72.4 percent of the senatorial races and 68.6 percent of the gubernatorial races.

It seems to me that this finding, if valid, has many implications.

• National political parties should focus group photos before deciding who to recruit or support in primaries
• I’ll bet it’s a very sexist test — this may explain part of how elections disadvantage female candidates.
• I wonder if this works for law schools? Would student satisfaction be higher when taught by professors whose looks signaled competence? Can we focus group potential hires via their photos? Can we do it without disadvantaging anyone who’s not a white male of a certain age?
• Might it be that dress sends signals of competence? If so, is it important to dress up (or down?) for the first day of class?
• “Lookist” takes on a new meaning
• Do I sense the makings of a new suspect class? Are people who don’t look competent to others a “discrete and insular minority”? Certainly their disability affect electability, thus undermining their political power, which is one of the tests….

And, how do I look?

Amnesty International Comes to UM Law

Good things sometimes come to my mailbox.

The University of Miami School of Law will host this year’s Southern Regional Conference of Amnesty International from October 19th through the 21st. Attendees will include delegates from eleven states, local activists, and the UM School of Law community.

The conference starts on October 19th at the Holiday Inn across from the University of Miami with workshops and a human rights tour of Miami. At 7:00 p.m. Haitian writer and poet Edwidge Dandicat will be the keynote speaker at the opening cultural event held at the Storer Auditorium (5250 University Drive Coral Gables, FL 33146).

Throughout the weekend Amnesty will hold 22 workshops on a variety of critical human rights issues and activism skills with renowned speakers. Four of the workshops will be in Spanish and English/Spanish interpretation will be provided during the opening and closing plenary.

UM faculty will be on a panel about Immigration and give a workshop in Spanish on the Death Penalty.

The Conference closes on Sunday, October 21st, with Bukeni Tete Waruzi - a former child soldier - speaking about his experience in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Should be a great event.

Best Headline of the Day

WSJ Law Blog, Law-School Dropout Wins Nobel Peace Prize.

I Knew That

Does Law School Curriculum Affect Bar Examination Passage? asks the question, and says the answer is “no”. That is certainly what our study here, several years ago, showed.

WSJ Story on Impoverished Law Graduates

The whole legal blog world is linking to the Wall St. Journal article Hard Case: Job Market Wanes for U.S. Lawyers and this WSJ blog discussion of it, WSJ.com : The Dark Side of the Legal Job Market, so why buck the trend.

For what little it’s worth, the anecdotal evidence I have from former students is that while things can be pretty rough, they’re not as bad as this article makes out unless you either did very poorly in law school, or (this is my interpretation) interview very badly.

There’s no question that a law degree from U.M., or indeed any but a tiny number of law schools, does not guarantee you a job, much less a very high-paid job: as I noted previously (Starting Salaries For Law Students are BiModal — If Not Bipolar), the evidence is that the legal market has become segmented into two parts, with the lower tier getting starting — starting — salaries in the $40-$55 thousand range. A good wage…but not so great if you are carrying a huge load of debt.

Some Thoughts on Law School Selection, With Particular Reference to Miami

A commentator in the “We’ll Try Harder” thread, in which I noted with some pleasure that a magazine says UM is great for Hispanic students, throws down the gauntlet,

What are the top 10 Best Law Schools for Jews, michael? Asians? Whites? Show this troll that the legal community really does care about segregating minorities into “incubators” where they can really flourish. Surely you have some thoughts on which Law schools are best for particular minorities…please share!

Well, since you asked.

I don’t think there’s a simple answer to the question of what law school is best for everyone (unless it’s “Yale”). Tastes and needs vary.

Urban/rural is a really important choice — where are you more comfortable? Do you need to be away from distractions?

Weather matters a lot to some people, especially those subject to Seasonal affective disorder. Geography also matters in the sense that all other things being equal, there’s multiple advantages to going to a law school near where you’d like to work. (Learn the local folkways, meet local employers in social and legal events, easy to get to interviews especially with smaller firms that may not have a travel budget.)

Big/small — you can get lost in a big place unless you are a self-starter while small schools tend to do a better job of hand-holding, but big schools usually have a larger faculty and thus a richer curriculum.

Some schools — fewer than you’d guess from their ads — have specializations that may matter to your JD education.

And for some people the makeup of the student body and/or the sensitivity of the law school and/or surrounding community may matter. In that sense, Miami really does have a serious and relatively rare feature that may matter enormously to some potential students: this is a city that speaks Spanish as much as English — and more than English in some neighborhoods. (The effect is much less pronounced on campus, as we’re fairly Anglo, but a lot of the staff and some of the students will speak Spanish to each other.) That may attract some people, and may put off others, but it is a real fact of life in this city. I would imagine that some bilingual students would find this very comfortable and even comforting; I would imagine that some Anglos unused to linguistic diversity might find it challenging. (Others, like me, find it charming and cosmopolitan.) But it is a real and relevant fact here and in that sense if no other makes this a welcoming place for Hispanic students. (There are, of course, other things too, such as our habit of teaching a few courses relating to civil law in Spanish, but that’s another story.)

As for Jews, I’m no authority on the subject, but I think there’s a spirit at Cardozo that you don’t find many places. When I went there for an interview I felt at home right away in a way that I rarely encounter. It wasn’t unique, but it was noticeable. I wasn’t able to accept their job offer for geographic reasons, but I really liked the place. And it is nice to have a school that recognizes Jewish holidays. (UM does a tolerable job of accommodation, but it’s not always built into the official calendar.) My kids’ resolutely secular private school closes for major Jewish holidays, just as it does for major Christian ones, and I appreciate that.

As for whites, I would say the best schools are the ones that are not too dominated by whites. It’s a diverse and complex world out there, boys and girls, and you better get used to it.

We'll Try Harder

1. New Mexico (27%; 22%)
2. Miami (12%; 8%)
3. Texas (17%; 4%)
4. USC (16%; 6%)
5. American (14%; 6%)
6. Florida State (8%; 7%)
7. Arizona State (15%; 7%)
8. Stanford (11%; 7%)
9. Arizona (12%; 8%)
10. Florida International (28%; 17%)
11. UCLA
12. BYU
13. George Washington
14. Florida
15. Illinois
16. Colorado
17. Connecticut
18. San Francisco
19. DePaul
20. Southwestern

via TaxProf Blog.

Ladies & Gentlemen - The Nation's First Radioactive Deanship

The rumors that have been flying around the internet all day appear to be true: Chemerinsky says UC Irvine rescinds offer to become law school dean. Why would a startup school treat a major Cosntitutional scholar like this? It seems that, notwithstanding his 20 year publication record, they discovered this week that he’s a — wait for it — liberal. Apparently a major donor freaked or something.

Not only is this sort of behavior unheard of, unprincipled, but it’s also very stupid. Who would take the job now, after this display of political interference and intolerance?

But meanwhile, hey Erwin, we need a Dean here next year!

Every Law School Needs One of These

Via Boing Boing comes news of a Voice-stress ice-cream dispenser that increases portions for the miserable:

Demitrios Kargotis unveiled his Mr Whippy machine at the Ars Technica festival in Linz. It’s a self-serve frozen custard machine that doles out portion sizes based on the amount of misery it detects in a voice-stress analysis. The sadder you are, the more ice-cream you get.

I think every law school should have one of these!

ABA Withdraws Proposed Bar Pass Standard

I was amazed to learn that the ABA apparently withdrew — or at least delayed — the controversial proposed bar pass standard, aka Interpretation 301-6, more than two weeks ago.

Here are some Comments sent to the ABA regarding Proposed Interpretation 301-6: (comments1); (comments2); (comments3); (comments4); and (comments5).

I’ve been unable to find an official notice of the withdrawal, but it’s reported in this Press Release from the National Lawyers Guild.

Previous posts:

• ABA Proposes Bar Pass Rate Standard
• More on Proposed ABA Standard on Bar Pass Rates
• Other Perspectives on the ABA’s Proposed Bar Pass Standard
• The ABA’s Proposed New Standard: Predicting Effects

Starting Salaries For Law Students are BiModal -- If Not Bipolar

Bill Henderson has a really interesting chart up at Empirical Legal Studies: Distribution of 2006 Starting Salaries: Best Graphic Chart of the Year which shows a very bimodal distribution of starting lawyer saleries. As he says,

The sample includes—in order of size—private practice (55.8%), business (14.2%), government (10.6%), judicial clerks (9.6%), public interest (5.4%), and other (2.8%). Half of the graduates make less than the $62,000 per year median—but remarkably, there is no clustering there. Over a quarter (27.5%) make between $40k-$55k per year, and another quarter (27.8%) have an annual salary of $100K plus.

If the chart were a flipbook of the last twenty years, the first mode would be relatively stationary, barely tracking inflation, while the second mode would be moving quickly to the right—i.e., the salary wars. In fact, because of the recent jump to $160K in the major markets, the second mode has already moved even more to the right.

Lots of other interesting comments there too.

Bad Times at Ave Maria

It’s time to check in on Ave Maria, the Catholic law school with plans to relocate to South-West Florida.

Things were already quite bad at Ave Maria — just how bad can be seen from this Feb. ‘07 resignation letter from Assoc. Prof. Kevin Lee (“In my estimation the Law School operates in a manner more in tune with Thomas Hobbes than Thomas Aquinas.”). [It’s an interesting letter on several levels, not least its assertion of a vision of Catholic legal scholarship as based “in true devotion to Mary.”]

But back to Ave Maria today. Set the scene with the Statement at Mirror of Justice (a blog which I really should read more often); then see the subtly-titled post Dean Runs Amok at AveWatch.org…or read the whole series of entries on that topic.

The full text of the letter sent by Dean Dobranski to the tenured Professor he is trying to fire would be appropriate if the Professor were a suspected ax murderer or rapist. The Dean has yet, as I understand it, to make the charges public (it’s not even clear if he’s informed the subject of them), but the real offense is thought to be that the Professor “was involved with the faculty’s complaint to the school’s accreditor, has filed a complaint with law enforcement against Dobranski, and recently called for a renewal of the faculty’s earlier ‘vote of no confidence’ in governance.”

Next, there’s the stiff, elegant, letter by Professor Emeritus Charles E. Rice, co-founder and former member of the Board of Governors, in which he urges the current Board of Governors of Ave Maria to fire the Dean, then resign en mass in order to save the school (and themselves).

Fumare, another blog that keeps an eye on doings at Ave Maria, reports that “Professors Lyons and Pucillo have cleaned out their offices and were evicted from the law school this past week.” Evicted? Cf. this Statement from Professors Lyons and Pucillo to AMSL Community.

There is no sign of any of this, however, at Incense, the relentlessly upbeat “independent weblog of alumni & supporters of the many good works of the Ave Maria Foundation, where we accentuate the positive about all things Catholic. Dominus vobiscum.”

Previous posts:

• There But for the Grace…
• Another Law School Moves Into the Neighborhood

Welcome Section "B"

I participated in the Law School’s orientation program today by moderating a discussion on the law relating to Guantanamo with the incoming students in section ‘B’. I don’t teach in the first year but the idea was that students having a teacher who won’t be grading them this year would make students more willing to talk.

It was a lively session. I see my role in these events primarily as devil’s advocate, so I tried not to telegraph my opinions. Indeed, after class one student told me he was sure I was a liberal, the other that he was sure I was a conservative. I told the class that if they wanted to know what I really think, they’d find it here. So, students wanting to know what I think about the issues will find a hint in my 124 postings on Guantanamo and in the 99 posts on Torture. Since the posts are in reverse chronological order, you should start at the bottom, where you’ll find Guantanamo: Our Collective Shame. Posted October 10, 2003 and still true.

Ten Reasons Why You Should Teach Here -- And Three Why You Shouldn't

Hiring season is approaching — indeed, today is the day that hiring committees get to see the first round of AALS faculty appointments register forms — and the law blogs are full of unusually good advice for lawyers wanting to enter the teaching profession. In recent years I’ve felt constrained about what I could say publicly about the hiring process because I was a part of a hiring committee. But this year, as far as hiring is concerned, I am just a regular faculty member, so I can speak more freely.

Rather than repeat the general advice you can find elsewhere, I thought I would instead say a few things about a subject I know particularly well: teaching here at the University of Miami School of Law. Although our overall US News rank is very middle-of-the-pack, due mainly to our large size, our faculty has a relatively high reputation rate both in US News and other comparable surveys. But none of these (flawed) indexes really reflect much about what a faculty member’s life is like, and thus they are even less useful to an aspiring faculty member than they are to would-be law students.

So, aspiring law professors and future colleagues, I’ve compiled ten reasons why you should teach here — and three why you shouldn’t.

1. Faculty

The best reason to come to U.M. is the faculty. At its best (which is to say, “outside of faculty meetings”), this is a faculty that believes ideas are serious things, but also is willing to play with them. You will see this most vividly at faculty seminars, especially those with external speakers. The faculty reads the paper in advance of the talk. It thinks about it. We don’t let the presenter speak a long time — we want to have a discussion. There may be an element of performance in the questions and comments, but that usually just adds to the fun. Unlike some faculties I’ve heard about, we are not worshipers at the temple of sub-disciplinarity: faculty members feel comfortable commenting on papers far outside their own specialities, and they are usually right to do so as the distant perspective sometimes proves at least as valuable as the insider’s.

While faculty vary in the extent to which they will seek you out – some are shy; others are busy – they will almost all be happy to see you if you seek them out. Very few will treat you like a junior colleague; for most, you will be part of the family from the start. And it’s an interesting family, including some big names in international law, tax, law and society, law and identity, and several other subjects.

2. Institutional style & institutional support

UM wants productive faculty, and it believes in research. But it isn’t about telling you what to do. My own story may be instructive: I was hired thinking that I would be writing mostly about administrative and constitutional law. In fact, however, within a couple of years I had turned into an Internet lawyer, and was writing primarily about computers, networks and the law. At no time did anyone here ever suggest that this was a problem. What mattered to people was that I was publishing.

Another way in which UM may differ from some law schools is that our faculty is routinely interdisciplinary and international. Many publish in non-legal journals — a fact which does not necessarily help either our publication or citation counts since the legal tabulators tend to focus only on law journals. Although we recognize that there may be some reputational costs, we are not prepared to tell people where they should publish. We just want it to be good.

There is no international ghetto at UM (the same is true of tax, a traditional faculty strength). As a matter of unwritten policy, everyone is expected to teach a basic course outside their specialty; the result is both that we can have more internationalists (and tax scholars), and that there’s a much greater community of overlapping interests.

3. Library

The University of Miami enjoys a superb law library, the result of a decision more than two decades ago to make library acquisitions a financial priority. And if we don’t have it, the library will borrow it for you, no questions asked. (As one former librarian put it, “we aim to provide law-firm-quality service”. And in fact, it is almost as good as a top law firm, and the librarians are much nicer.)

The law library has extensive holdings in related disciplines, notably political science, and of course the university library is literally next door, and it also has ever-growing electronic access to journals — which can even be accessed from your home office. We have a particularly strong collection in Latin American and Caribbean law, but also strong holdings in European law. We are weak in India, China, and Russia, and no doubt several other countries with non-Romance alphabets, so if your research involves heavy use of materials from one of those countries, you should check to see if we have you covered. I also have a sense that our holdings for pre-1940 materials are not as strong generally as for things published in the last 70 years. But I am continually having pleasant surprises when I consult Baron, the online card catalog. They’ve done some impressive buying over the years — which is a good thing as the next major law library is a long way away.

4. Students

We have smart students with upwardly mobile ambitions. Some come from wealthy families, but for many a law degree will be the highest level of education ever achieved in their families — a matter of pride for an extended clan you may have the good fortune to meet at graduation. Despite the lures of nearby South Beach, UM students are by and large a studious lot: their awareness that few silver platters await at graduation usually translates into a commendable work ethic. At least until the end-of-term fog settles in, I find that my students have done the reading, and often have something to say about it. There is a little shyness — some students don’t want to ask questions for fear of looking silly; other students worry about being labeled a “gunner” — but ordinarily class discussion can be pretty lively. Although we have more men than women as students, it is often the case that the women lead the discussions and make the most substantive contributions. Classes tend to be fun (at least for the instructor). Visiting professors from other law schools consistently remark on the high quality of classroom performance here.

The UM student body has improved greatly in the past decade. Our best students would be at home in any law school. Our worst students would have been near the middle of the class 15 years ago. The only fly in the ointment is that despite their good college grades and creditable LSATs, a substantial fraction of the class comes to law school unable to write as well as they think or speak. Overcoming this obstacle remains one of our biggest challenges. That said, every year we have students who write publishable papers in classes and seminars. It’s been a particular pleasure to see those pieces go into print along side those of full-time academics.

Some of our students will go on to be national leaders; a much larger number will play key roles in the State of Florida, as judges, politicians, and leading members of the bar. Some people have described alumni reunions as state judges’ conventions, but this is slightly unfair. On the other hand, there’s no question that both Florida as a place, and UM graduates as important players in that place, have been at the center of major wrangles with national impact ranging from the 2000 election to the Terri Schiavo affair.

Aspiring faculty sometimes worry that they will not find good research assistants outside a top ten law school. It’s true that I don’t hear stories about students writing papers that professors then publish under their own name as I did when I was a law student at Yale. But if you are looking for a research assistant rather than a ghost writer then my experience suggests this is not a serious problem if you teach a first-year class. As a teacher in the larger first year classes you can identify the students who are good and who fit your style before they get too caught up in other things. Some of them will get on law review, and will be too busy to work for you; some of those that don’t will work downtown for higher pay than the law school can offer, but usually there’s someone you will be happy to have who will be happy to have the job in their second or third year. I can’t claim that every research assistant I’ve had has been stellar, but I can say that some of them were amazing — and that they are harder to find when I don’t teach first years.

5. Research support

Research support exists to make it easier for you to write. The most important part of UM’s research support is its excellent law library. But it doesn’t stop there: In addition to the collection itself, we have a staff of helpful law librarians who seem happiest when given difficult research requests. There’s a document delivery service which will get you any book or article you ask for and deliver it to your office within a day if it’s on campus or a few days if it must be sent from far away. (One down side: you can gain weight from the loss of movement caused by having everything come to you.)

At conferences I sometimes hear stories about places where senior colleagues try to tell tenure-track faculty what to write about (or, worse, forbid certain topics or styles). We don’t do that. If anything, we have erred in the other direction — tip-toeing around junior faculty sensibilities so much that we may have provided insufficient mentoring, In an effort to do better in that department, the faculty now enjoys the services of a “director of faculty development” — yours truly as of a few weeks ago — whose job will be to help colleagues (and especially pre-tenure colleagues) with their research and writing by identifying resources, serving as a sounding board, or just staying out of the way.

In addition, every faculty member has an office budget which allows you to hire a research assistant, books and supplies, and to travel to conferences. Each of these budgets is fairly generous, and the Associate Dean has discretionary funds to add to them up for good cause. In my experience, any cause I can bring myself to ask about has been treated as a good one.

6. The University

A generation ago it was “Suntan U”. Today, under the (very) energetic leadership of Donna Shalala and an impressive suite of Deans, the University of Miami is joining the ranks of the leading research universities in the USA. For openers, President Shalala raised $1 billion for the University. YES, $1 BILLION. Now that it’s in the bank, she’s warming up for a new round of fund-raising. The lion’s share of the first round went to the medical school, but the rumor is that the law school might be able to claim a bigger share of the next round.

More importantly, the past couple of decades have seen a transformation in the quality of both the students and the faculty in the arts and sciences. It’s become hard for students to get in; and departments such as History, Psychology, Business, and Sociology have attracted faculties that include a wealth of potential collaborators, adding to existing strengths in Medicine and Communications. Both the law school and the University encourage inter-disciplinary collaboration. The law school has begun to take advantage of these resources (I, for example, am working with a team on health privacy issues that includes participants from both the Business School and the Med School), but there’s much waiting for you that remains untapped.

7. Perks

The law school wants to support your research, and we try to put our money where our mouth is. Entry-level faculty can apply for a summer research grant before starting work in order to prepare their courses. We light-load you (usually only one course per semester) during your first year to give you time to find your feet. You’ll get a summer grant as of right every summer until tenure to encourage you to write — after that you’ll have to submit proposals and make good on them too. And you’re entitled to a semester’s leave before tenure, more or less in the term of your choice, in order to help you write.

The law school is located on a very beautiful campus in the center of suburban Coral Gables, itself a very pleasant city with excellent restaurants. Rumor has it that in the old days the university administration spent more on landscaping than books; whatever the truth, there’s no question that the campus is very nice to look at. It also sports a state-of-the-art gym that’s about three minutes walk from the law school around our picturesque lake (crocodile optional). The campus sports other useful amenities, including a faculty club, a food court, and an on-campus daycare.

8. Miami

Miami is a cosmopolitan city. Part of its identity is as the defacto capitol of Latin America; part is as an artistic and musical center; and then there’s the celebrity-and-tourist thing. It’s an attractive place for young and old, and — if you take care to live in the right school districts, or have kids who qualify for the right magnet schools, or are ok with private schools — a pretty easy place for the middle-aged pater and mater familias. Like many sunbelt cities, Miami is more sprawling mosaic than urban core and periphery. Both urban and suburban living are within easy reach of the campus. Our politics are fascinating and complex, with much political power held by first and second generation immigrants from Cuba, and to a lesser degree Haiti, and Central America. The region now enjoys a lively cultural life, with a rich music and dance scene and some creditable small theater companies. If you prefer nature to culture, there’s always the nearby Everglades as well as world-class coral reefs for diving just south of Miami.

If your work involves domestic issues, you will find them in Miami, which is the city of the future in ways both good and bad. Along with our glitz you will find us on the cutting edge of today’s and tomorrow’s political and social issues: immigration, environmental (think “Everglades restoration”), medical (think “retirees”), and all the social questions that big cities produce.

Housing costs tend to be high, but many other living costs are low and there is no state income tax. The University has, however, taken bold steps to address the housing issue by offering new hires a deal in which the university will subsidize part of your home purchase in exchange for a proportionate share in the equity when you sell, an offer that puts many nice homes within reach.

9. Weather

Miami’s weather is glorious for almost half the year; variable for another chunk, and miserable in the dog days of summer and early Fall. The good news is that much (but not all) of the miserable part comes when the law school is not in session, so you can escape if you choose. When the weather is nice, our central courtyard, the “bricks,” becomes the social center of the community, a place where students and faculty mingle between classes. Even office rats like me end up looking healthier than the wan, pale, parka-clad figures I see huddling on the Boston subway. For those with outdoor ambitions, you can live on Miami Beach, or just enjoy the sea view from a balcony in a tower apartment in downtown Brickel.

10. The revolution is coming

The next five years will see a radical transformation in the faculty, and perhaps the style, of University of Miami School of Law. We have at least six open jobs at present, with the likelihood of much more turnover as faculty retire (couples welcome!). The next three to five years’ appointments, including that of our next Dean, stand a good chance of determining the future course of the school for a generation to come.

At present we have only ten full-time faculty under 50, and only fourteen between 50 and 60; the remaining 17 are over sixty, including some very much over sixty. Our hiring is resolutely in compliance with the age discrimination in employment act (of our last six entry-level hires, two were very experienced lawyers well over 40), but given the overall composition of the entry-level market, it is likely that this age profile will change dramatically in the next few years.

What this means for our new hires is that they will find themselves at the heart of their new community — and have a chance to lead it — much earlier in their careers than they might otherwise. The coming turnover in the faculty, coupled with this year’s Dean search introduces an element of uncertainty about what we’ll be like in the future that may not be to everyone’s taste. Fortunately, the faculty is engaged in a strategic planning exercise this year which means that any new hires will be spared that chore at least. At present, the law school enjoys a nearly unique chance to reinvent itself, and people with ideas and energy should find all the breathing room and opportunity they want. I hope that people reading this will come join us in building something wonderful.

All that is very well, but honesty compels me to say that there are also some reasons why not everyone may be happy here. Indeed, there are three main reasons why you should not teach here:

1. Weather

If skiing is your passion, and neither waterskiing nor snorkeling are substitutes, then Miami may make you sad. It’s hot and very humid here from July until the heat breaks sometime in October or September. That means you can have up to three and half months when it’s not much fun to go outside. Plus, occasionally we get weather with a name. But we don’t get snowstorms, avalanches, earthquakes, random tornadoes, floods, or mudslides. If you want immunity to natural disasters, move to Rhode Island.

2. Language

Many people in South Florida speak Spanish as their first (and often only) language. The campus is Anglo — although some of the bilingual staff and students will speak Spanish to each other — so this is not a work issue. But it is a life issue: you will hear lots of Spanish in the stores and on AM radio. If you are the sort of person who can’t cope with foreign languages around you, there’s a strong chance you will not be happy here. I don’t speak Spanish, and I only found it a noticeable handicap for my first few weeks here, when I would get lost driving around and stop at a store for directions, then wait impatiently while they went to find the English-speaker. It’s a non-issue today unless I happen to go bargain shopping for some exotic household good, and indeed contributes to Miami’s cosmopolitan vibe.

3. Geography

It’s flat here — no mountains (and houses have no basements). More seriously, it’s also far from many of the legal nerve centers. If you’re doing national work and you are having meetings related to it, odds are the meeting will neither be in Miami nor even within driving distance. That means air travel. And while we have great direct air connections to most of the world and the law school is generous with travel support, we do not have a working time machine. Given the post-9/11 security regime at airports, and the increasing vagaries of air travel generally, it is rarely possible to have a meeting in New York or Washington without spending the night out of town. That can mean having to reschedule a class (something we allow for good causes), which is a pain for you and even more of one for your students. It certainly means that doing national committee work is always a substantial time commitment. It is almost 500 miles to the state line, and then where are you? Somewhere between Tallahassee and Moultrie, Ga.

As I said at the outset of this essay, this year I am not on either our entry-level or lateral hiring committees. But if you find the positives outweigh the negatives and have an interest in coming here, I’d still be happy to try to answer any further questions you might have, either in comments to this entry or by private email.