Law School Blog

• "John C. Jeffries, Jr. is one of the few people to have had the privilege of being a student, faculty member, and dean at the University of Virginia School of Law."
  "Jeffries Reflects on Years of Service as Dean" -- Virginia Law Weekly


• "Ave Maria School of Law, apparently unable to sell naming rights to its planned new building in Ave Maria, Fla., will instead move to an older building in nearby Naples."
  "Ave Maria to Relocate Law School Once Again" -- Law.com


• "Ray Nimmer was named dean of the University of Houston Law Center by the university's provost Wednesday."
  "Acting UH law school dean Nimmer gets the job" -- Houston Chronicle


• "It may be getting harder than it used to be to find a lawyer at Yale Law School."
  "Law school aims to forge links to other disciplines" -- Yale Daily News


• "St. John Fisher College is moving forward with its plan to build a new law school."
  "Fisher law school plans moving forward" -- Rochester Homepage

That's it for this week -- light law school news cycle, apparently!

First, Michael Klarman -- "a plum catch" by Boston.com's assessment from UVA. Then the slightly more famous Cass Sunstein from Chicago. Then, Harvard raided competitor Yale's pantry, and came away with Anne Alstott.

Harvard Dean Elena Kagan touted the new hires in press releases, which the student newspaper just couldn't let slide. Proving its sense of humor, it let loose with satire:

In an Onion-esque news story titled "Dean Kagan Hires Every Law Professor in the County," the paper noted that "the new additions will cause the law school's faculty payroll to balloon from $30 million to $9 billion," but that Kagan was unconcerned. "This university has upwards of 40 billion kazillion dollars," the satire read. "Also, we'll just hit up some alumni." Harvard Law School spokesman Mike Armini was happy to play along, jesting that Harvard's hiring binge had just begun. "Why stop there?" he quipped. "Law is increasingly connected to so many other fields, so we'll be raiding the business and medical schools next."

Send your press releases or emails about professors on the move to About Law School at lawschool dot guide at about dot com! (You know what to do.)

This is a very inspirational story, from SignOnSanDiego.com, about Jose Orozco, a high school dropout who a few short years ago was on the verge of being drafted into one of his neighborhood gangs. Now, Orozco is in his second year of law school at California Western School of Law in San Diego and is planning a career as an employment lawyer.

Law school, I think, is too often seen as a cure-all for the disenchanted who don't know what they want to be when they grow up. But this story demonstrates pretty nicely how the noble calling of law can serve as a saving grace for those who are truly motivated.

One of the more interesting debates in recent memory must be the new "trend" (I use the word loosely) towards disabling internet access within the school's classrooms. See, for example, this article regarding University of Chicago law school dean Saul Levmore's email to students announcing the decision.

I can see both sides of this issue. I can't imagine all those students clicking away at Solitaire or shoe-shopping sites would be welcome by the professor trying to engage the students in the Socratic method. On the other hand, I personally have gotten a lot of benefit in CLEs (the closest thing practicing lawyers have to a law school class, I guess) from being able to access the full text of cases being discussed by the presenter, or looking at the full text of a statute under discussion. The bar against web-surfing would prevent that, of course. (Although when I was in law school -- and I'm definitely dating myself now! -- there was no wireless access to the Internet. We had dial-up only. And we were happy! OK, no, we really weren't.)

What do you think? Is this in fact a trend? Has your law school instituted an internet ban in class? Good thing or bad?

My home state, North Carolina, gets a little play on our Law School Profiles page this week!

The Tar Heel state boasts several fine law schools, all of which will eventually be profiled here (as well as all accredited U.S. schools), but this week's turns belong to the University of North Carolina School of Law and Duke Law.

You can see the profile for UNC here, and the profile for Duke here.

The ABA-LSAC Official Guide to ABA-Approved Law Schools 2009, edited by Wendy Margolis et al., is available for pre-order at Amazon.com. The price is $24.00.

It's a very useful resource for those contemplating law school. Amazon is also offering a 5% discount for those who pre-order, apparently.

Michael Seringhaus, a 1L at Yale Law School (currently #1 on the U.S. News & World Report law school rankings), wrote an articulate editorial for the Hartford Courant about the reaction of law school deans to the rankings' release.

Dean Carolyn Jones of the University of Iowa College of Law responded to that school's slight slide (from 24 to 27) by admitting that "hundreds of hours of sophisticated thought by alumni, faculty and staff" have gone into "studying the U.S. News rankings" — an initiative "informally dubbed the Apollo Project." As a law student, I find it worrisome that a respected dean can issue a letter whose sole purpose is to minimize the importance of the U.S. News rankings, then turn around and obsess over those very rankings.

(To clarify, Dean Jones was not alleged to have written a specific letter; I think Seringhaus is referring to the 2006 joint letter from law school administrators across the country.)

Of course, some of the comments have pointed out the irony (to be kind) in a Yale law student writing an editorial that's critical of rankings. But to be fair, I don't see Mr. Seringhaus's editorial as critical of rankings per se. Rather, he seems to be calling out the deans who appear to be acting in direct contradiction to the joint letter which attempted to downplay the importance of the rankings, in their quick-draw response to last week's release of the rankings. Elsewhere in the editorial, the author cites a few examples -- deans emailing students with pledges to find out why the school slipped, and to make up the lost ground at the earliest possible convenience.

So which is it, law school deans: are the rankings important? Or are they meaningless? The comments are divided, but I propose that the rankings are, as I've stated elsewhere, only one factor to consider in making a good decision about which school to attend.

It's that time of year again: the U.S. News & World Report law school rankings have rolled off the presses. Interestingly, the rankings were leaked prior to their Friday street date.

I'm working on an analysis, of course, and hope to have that up next week. In the meantime, I can share the online rankings with you. No real surprises in the top five -- Yale is number one, Harvard number two. To see the full report, you'll have to pay a premium: $14.95 for online access, $9.95 for print, and $19.95 for both.

My alma mater, University of South Carolina School of Law, is hanging on to a Tier One slot. However, I made absolutely no inquiry into rankings when I picked my school, relying instead on my own criteria. If I had it to do all over again, I probably would also consider rankings, but certainly not as a determinative factor.

Update: The blogosphere is abuzz with talk about the rankings, but I found a post from Gordon Smith at TheConglomerate.org particularly interesting.