Beginning in the late 1980s, when I was in practice, I and other lawyers participated in incubating the market for financial derivatives and securitization transactions. In the beginning, these deals were nowhere near as exciting as the same period’s newly-exciting mergers and acquisitions and finance practices. We would prepare one-off interest rate swap form contracts on a small scale. We would package credit card accounts receivable into pools for sale [...]]]> Causes of the worldwide credit crisis include, perhaps dominantly, the proliferation of innovative financial contracts, purportedly devices that would reduce financial risk but that instead backfired to concentrate and intensify it on a galactic scale. What role did corporate law culture play in this part of the cause? Was it too exciting? Should it be duller?

Beginning in the late 1980s, when I was in practice, I and other lawyers participated in incubating the market for financial derivatives and securitization transactions. In the beginning, these deals were nowhere near as exciting as the same period’s newly-exciting mergers and acquisitions and finance practices. We would prepare one-off interest rate swap form contracts on a small scale. We would package credit card accounts receivable into pools for sale to investors. But this practice area became increasingly exciting through the 1990s and 2000s as derivatives and securitization deals proliferated and came to form whole departments in law firms, rivaling mergers and acquisitions groups in glamour and revenue.

In the early 1990s, when I entered corporate law teaching, there was much exciting academic work being done, the culmination of what Yale corporate law scholar Roberta Romano heralded as a “revolution” in corporate law scholarship which, in the 1960s and 1970s, at least, had been dull. In that earlier period, the focus, in practice and the academy, was merely on positive, doctrinal law, mostly statutes, and on the old-fashioned duties managers owed to shareholders, often meaning practicing lawyers telling creative clients “no” when innovative ideas would violate longstanding duties.

Beginning in the 1980s, the focus in both turned to innovative deals, especially highly-leveraged hostile takeovers and what courts should do about them. Scholarship studied market behavior, looking empirically at deal effects on stock prices, how quickly and accurately information was absorbed into stock prices, how to measure investment risk and value. Important strands of this scholarship, and resulting law, urged facilitating these debt-financed deals.

In practice and scholarship, intensifying through the 1980s and into the 1990s, transactional and financial innovation was the rage. Corporate lawyers turned innovative, cutting edge, exciting, doing deals, developing new contractual devices for financial products—including those I worked on. Corporate law scholars took up finance theory with alacrity, doing exciting research showing how this innovation worked, with many producers and devotees of this work arguing how law should give it maximal space to flourish (though there were dissenters from this dominant view, including me).

As recently as 2005, Professor Romano, a leading scholar in this dominant style, urged doing more of it, more innovative financial engineering in practice and more finance oriented and exciting research in the academy. Professor Romano urged law schools to develop programs in law and finance to assist promoting this excitement, in practice and research, reporting how her school created a degree program in law and finance to seal the exciting links between law and finance and between cutting-edge law practice and legal scholarship.

Earlier this year, on a corporate law panel at the annual meeting of the Association of American Law Schools, though, Professor Romano said the program had attracted little interest among students. As Matt Bodie reports, panel discussion included talk of how the exciting finance models had failed and yet how problematic it is to design corporate law absent reliable empirical information. Professor Bodie wisely wondered whether these facts and lamentations spelled the end of the “revolution” in corporate law—a “post-post-revolution” period.

That makes me wonder, is it an inherent virtue for corporate law practice and scholarship to be exciting, or is being dull okay? Would the world be better off if more participants in corporate life were as dull as corporate lawyers used to be? Is it okay to tell clients “no, you can’t do that,” or, as I recall one stodgy old Cravath lawyer tell a client back in the late 1980s, “you can do that, but be prepared to go to jail”?

It was striking that all but one of the respondents said that their law school did not expect women to wait until tenure to have [...]]]> A couple of weeks ago, I invited readers to participate in a survey on maternity leave policies at various law schools.  This effort was aimed at provoking open dialogue on the topic rather than providing a scientifically defensible sample or survey of law school practices (a worthy endeavor but not one that this mommyprof can fit into her schedule!).  I received 22 responses to the survey, which could include some overlap from the same law school, so the results are not even close to representative of the 193 ABA-accredited law schools in the U.S.  Nonetheless, I think the findings are interesting.

It was striking that all but one of the respondents said that their law school did not expect women to wait until tenure to have children.  The other respondent was not sure how her school would view pre-tenure childbearing, but worried that a leave might attract stigma from male colleagues.  On the brighter side, one commenter noted that at her school, all of the junior women in relationships had children before tenure in recent years.  While I know from conversations with friends at other law schools that this norm is not universal, it’s nice to see that it may be more widespread than I had expected.

Responses about law school policies on paid maternity leave were much more varied, ranging from sick time only with an expectation that the mother will take the rest of the semester unpaid to a semester paid leave (or light load for a year).  In between were a school that offers six weeks paid leave, others that offer 2-4 months of paid leave, and one that offers a semester leave at half pay.  It was encouraging to see that at least two thirds of the respondents’ schools offer a semester paid leave but troubling to see the cases in which women are forced to choose between their paycheck and a reasonable amount of time at home with their newborn.

So where do these anecdotes lead us?  As mentioned above, it would be a most worthwhile endeavor to survey paid maternity leave practices at all ABA-accredited schools.  Short of that, it may be helpful to open up conversations with peers at other schools to compare practices, and particularly for women on the job market who intend to have children to think about negotiating maternity leave as part of their compensation package.  At the very least, this important issue should be on the radar screen of mommyprofs, deans, and others who seek to recruit and retain a gender-diverse faculty.

I started teaching civil procedure during my time at Brooklyn Law School where civil procedure was a two semester five credit course. When I got to Loyola, civ pro was a two semester six credit course. Two years ago we moved to a one semester four credit course as part [...]]]> I read with great interest Jon Siegel’s recent post on curricular reform and the thirty or so comments it generated. I don’t really disagree with his main point that law school is mostly about “acquiring the ability to acquire skills and knowledge.” But at the same time, I don’t spend that much time on personal jurisdiction and Erie in my civil procedure class and wanted to use this post to explain why.

I started teaching civil procedure during my time at Brooklyn Law School where civil procedure was a two semester five credit course. When I got to Loyola, civ pro was a two semester six credit course. Two years ago we moved to a one semester four credit course as part of a general reform of the first year curriculum. So I have now taught the course in just about every possible permutation.

I currently spend the first 2/3 of the course on the litigation process and about the remaining 1/3 on personal jurisdiction and Erie. I am probably in the minority on this and it’s hard to find a casebook that is set up the way I prefer.

I do it this way because of my belief that only a detailed study of the litigation process reflected in the FRCP can convey a deep understanding of the American civil justice system and its strengths and weaknesses. For better or worse, we have a system that (until very recently) has deemphasized pleadings and uses discovery to lay the groundwork for settlement or summary judgment for those cases that make it into the system and is increasing reliant on ADR for those cases that don’t. Of late, the Supreme Court has seemingly raised the bar on pleadings in Twombley and Iqbal and reinvigorated motions to dismiss as a more meaningful part of the litigation process. One cannot understand what we do, how we do it, why the rest of the world thinks we are crazy, what is changing, and what needs to be changed without a large amount of class time, which of necessity limits the amount of time devoted to personal jurisdiction and Erie.

All this is driven by my view of in most litigation the law is easy, but the facts are hard. Discovery is where the facts come in. If you don’t understand how parties marshal, present, and protect facts from their files, from the real world, and from the other side through discovery then the students leave civ pro (and possibly law school) without any real clue how our civil justice system works.

I view this as an exercise in at least mid-level theory, rather than specifically teaching litigation skills. The only drafting I have my students do is an affidavit where the “in state” students draft an affidavit as the domicile of the “out of state” students. I don’t have or assign mock case files or share complaints, pleadings, motions, deposition transcripts, discovery requests, responses, etc., except when they happen to appear in the book I use (at the moment the Yeazell casebook). However I do recommend Joseph Glannon’s fine book if the students want to see examples of those sort of documents.

If Loyola ever goes back to a two semester format I will increase my coverage of personal jurisdiction and Erie. I certainly see the value in watching a line of cases unfold over time and training students in the close reading of cases from day one. But this is probably the one skill that is well covered in the first year curriculum.

I have several reasons for starting with the litigation process and making it the focus. First, I think it’s just cruel to make a 1L read Pennoyer v. Neff in their first week of law school. Second, if the Supreme Court can’t figure out anything but platitudes and results in the personal jurisdiction field, why should I expect any more from my students? Third, jurisdiction to do what to whom? Starting with the litigation process at least gives the students the chance to understand how a case unfolds before they have to tackle the more abstract questions about what court it is supposed to take place in and why. Fourth, there are plenty of opportunities to pursue personal jurisdiction, subject matter jurisdiction, and Erie in Federal Courts and other litigation courses, including one I teach.

Finally, maybe I am fooling myself, but I also think that I am giving my students a leg up in their other classes. Every case in every course (other than criminal law) is a civil procedure case that just happens to be about a particular area of the law like torts or contracts. If the students can better understand the litigation process early and deeply, I think they will be better equipped for the rest of their first year experience.

But hey, I am a reasonable kind of guy and realize that law professors approach their courses with all kinds of different objectives. Any well thought out plan probably provides the students with a worth while experience. I am sure most would also agree that emphasizing one aspect of the course because its more fun or interesting or easier for the professor probably isn’t the way to go.

By way of conclusion, let me throw out the following challenge. I am happy (or at least willing) to switch approaches, if at least one of the other professors out there reading this is. Next fall I will teach the course 60/40 personal jurisdiction, subject matter jurisdiction, and Erie if you do the reverse. Then we can meet in the following January in cyberland on Concurring Opinions or elsewhere to compare experiences.

I think it is an error to imagine that the law school class time devoted to a particular subject needs to be proportional to the time students will spend on that subject in actual practice.  Law school is partly about acquiring particular skills and knowledge, but also, and probably more, about acuqiring the ability to [...]]]> Professors on the Civil Procedure professor listserv are debating the recurring question of why we devote so much energy to topics that come up only rarely in practice, particularly personal jurisdiction and Erie.  Some are suggesting that the civil procedure curriculum should be much more practice oriented, which would mean spending a lot less time on these subjects and more time on what most lawyers actually do in practice, particularly discovery.

I think it is an error to imagine that the law school class time devoted to a particular subject needs to be proportional to the time students will spend on that subject in actual practice.  Law school is partly about acquiring particular skills and knowledge, but also, and probably more, about acuqiring the ability to acquire skills and knowledge.  We will never teach the students all they will need to know as they practice law, but we can teach them how to learn what they need to know.

The amount of time devoted to personal jurisdiction and Erie in many Civ Pro classes makes little sense in terms of the practical importance of those topics in typical litigation.  But personal jurisdiction provides a lovely illustration of the process of legal change over time that students can appreciate as the law they learn changes over the course of their careers, and Erie provides an illustration about how imoprtant theoretical issues relating to federalism impact practical doctrines.  The students need to know how to appreciate the ways in which legal change interacts with social change and the ways in which theory impacts doctrine just as much as they need to learn what Rule 26 says about discovery and disclosure.

If people don’t like something, the solution is often as simple as a name change.  Consider fish.  Some of the most popular fish today are renamed versions of less desirable fish.  Orange Roughy used to be called slimehead.  Chilean sea bass used to be called toothfish.  Monkfish used to be goosefish. The result of these name changes has been a dramatic increase in popularity, so much so that many renamed fish are now overfished and endangered.

The renaming trend is now spreading to academic courses. From the Boston Globe:

Boston College German studies professor Michael Resler went searching for a way to boost flagging interest in his “German Literature of the High Middle Ages’’ class a few years ago, and settled on the [...]]]>

Chilean sea bass

If people don’t like something, the solution is often as simple as a name change.  Consider fish.  Some of the most popular fish today are renamed versions of less desirable fish.  Orange Roughy used to be called slimehead.  Chilean sea bass used to be called toothfish.  Monkfish used to be goosefish. The result of these name changes has been a dramatic increase in popularity, so much so that many renamed fish are now overfished and endangered.

The renaming trend is now spreading to academic courses. From the Boston Globe:

Boston College German studies professor Michael Resler went searching for a way to boost flagging interest in his “German Literature of the High Middle Ages’’ class a few years ago, and settled on the idea of simply giving the course a sexier name. The resulting “Knights, Castles, and Dragons’’ nearly tripled enrollment.

Resler then replaced his class on “The Songs of Walter von der Vogelweide,’’ a great German lyric poet, with “Passion, Politics, and Poetry in the Middle Ages.’’ Again, enrollment swelled.

“I suppose the moral of the story is that we live in an age where everything has to be marketed in order to find a willing audience,’’ Resler mused.

Maybe it’s time to rename law school classes:

Torts –> Crashes and Accidents

Criminal Law –> Murder Most Foul and Other Dastardly Crimes

Trusts & Estates –> Dead Hands: Power After Death

Corporate Law –> Gold and Parachutes

Property –> The Story of a Whale and a Fox

Hat tip: Inside Higher Ed

I’ve got to say, I find the prospect of a fall with no duties other than those I set for myself more than a little terrifying. Putting aside the absence [...]]]> This semester, I get to take my first sabbatical. As Larry observed, law firm sabbaticals are a thing of the past, and so lawyers might see this opportunity as yet more evidence that academics are insulated, head-in-the-clouds, wastrels. Perhaps, though it might help to see the sabbatical, like tenure, as simply a form of alternative compensation for professors, rather than a serious spur to productivity. And, like tenure, the sabbatical is a relic: while many years ago, a regular sabbatical policy was commonplace, now it’s my sense that it’s somewhat more rare.

I’ve got to say, I find the prospect of a fall with no duties other than those I set for myself more than a little terrifying. Putting aside the absence of structure, and colleagues to talk to, there’s the problem of figuring out which kinds of projects are the right size. If I pick something too big, I’m not going to finish (and thus feel pretty bad about having nothing to show for the immense privilege that the Law School and its stakeholders have extended me). If I pick something too small, well, you get the idea. So I’m looking for the sabbatical goldilocks. As I’ve learned, painfully, promising goldilocks projects in the empirical world are often (forgive me) wolves in sheep’s clothing. You start collecting data, and before you know it it’s two years later and you realize you never fully specified your research question. Yikes!

Some folks use their sabbaticals to do something entirely different, e.g., hiking the Appalachian trail (no, seriously); writing fiction; constructing toasters from scratch. I fear I’m more conformist than that. Apart from some personal business, I’ll probably be spending the fall writing more articles, coding more data, thinking about how to be a better corporations teacher, and blogging a little bit more often than I did over the summer.

I do have two larger intellectual projects that I’m going go try to fold in. The first is to read (again) the works of the Situationalist project. I’ve read several of the project’s papers – in one case, multiple times – but I still don’t think I really understand many of the claims, and, more importantly, the project’s motivation. Since there are tons of brilliant folks affiliated with the group, this obviously is a situation that I’ve got to remedy.  Second, I want to read at least a large sample of the articles that Herb Kritzer identifies here as fruits of pre-1940 empirical legal studies work. One of the few abiding disadvantages to not having a PhD is is a missing sense of the intellectual history of your field. That problem is particularly acute in ELS, where (to read the dates on citations in most recent papers) nothing useful was written before 1995.

I suppose that’s it. I’m not training to climb Everest. I’m not going to reorient my scholarly path. I’m not taking on a court case (though the amici in Jones appear to be having tons of fun). I can’t imagine that I’ll pick up a new hobby. Nevertheless, I’m pretty sure I’ll be spending more hours working than I do when I’ve got classes to teach!

In the Spring of 2010, Peter Huang and I will be co-teaching a colloquium on Law and Human Behavior for the second time.  The course invites outside speakers to present their work to an audience consisting of upper-year law students.  (Faculty are invited to attend as well.)  Students are graded on response papers that they write about the presenters’ works.  We hope they get good value from this kind of course, primarily: repeated writing opportunities with lots of feedback; exposure to a wide variety of current scholarship; and learning from the presentation styles of different speakers.  Teachers get return too –though the constant grading load makes the course at least as much [...]]]>

The Religious Colloquium of Marburg Bears Almost No Relation to Academic Colloquia Today

In the Spring of 2010, Peter Huang and I will be co-teaching a colloquium on Law and Human Behavior for the second time.  The course invites outside speakers to present their work to an audience consisting of upper-year law students.  (Faculty are invited to attend as well.)  Students are graded on response papers that they write about the presenters’ works.  We hope they get good value from this kind of course, primarily: repeated writing opportunities with lots of feedback; exposure to a wide variety of current scholarship; and learning from the presentation styles of different speakers.  Teachers get return too –though the constant grading load makes the course at least as much work as an ordinary seminar, and probably more.

As Peter and I begin to think about the Spring’s colloquium, I wonder whether any of you have experiences with this kind of course, and if so, how you answered the following questions:

(1)  Do you have “off-weeks” where you introduce the readings to come, or do you schedule a speaker every week? The last time we taught the course, we had four weeks without speakers which we used to preview the coming papers.  I’m not convinced these were particularly useful.

(2)  Do you require the students to write a response to every speaker? The last time we taught the course, students wrote responses for around three-fourths of the speakers.  An advantage to this approach is that it allows the students to pass if they really feel out of their element on a particularly paper.

(3)  Do you require (or strongly) suggest prerequisites for the course? We haven’t done so, though it became clear in the course that students with undergraduate backgrounds in statistics, economics and psychology were getting more out of the presentations.  This is obviously more of a problem in law-and courses than in, say, a colloquium course on constitutional theory.

(4)  Do students hand in their responses before, or after, the speaker’s presentation? Our approach was before, but students reported they would have preferred after.

(5)  Do you give all of the student responses to the speaker, or do you screen?  Our approach was inclusive, though this probably was a mistake.

(6) How did you deal with grading?  One issue here is that mastery grading (of the kind that is appealing in a writing course) means that you ought to start grading very “low” to give yourself room to increase grades over time. Another is that you have to be careful not to overly reward students who (as described above) have a substantive leg up because of their college majors.  An added word of warning: it’s my experience that students are much more likely to dispute their grades (or at least argue about them) in a writing seminar than in a large exam course, although the overall mean in seminars is much, much higher.

The experimenters gave the same tests to another group of students, but first made those students do a task designed to make them think about morality and honesty. One group of students had to write out as many of the Ten Commandments as they could remember. Another group was asked them to simply sign the statement, “I understand that this study falls under [...]]]> I’ve recently been reading Dan Ariely’s book, Predictably Irrational. One fascinating chapter is about the psychology of dishonesty. The experimenters gave two versions of a test – one graded by proctors, the other entirely self-graded, with a small monetary reward (10 cents per correct answer). They found an incidence of cheating in the self-graded answers, no surprise there.

The experimenters gave the same tests to another group of students, but first made those students do a task designed to make them think about morality and honesty. One group of students had to write out as many of the Ten Commandments as they could remember. Another group was asked them to simply sign the statement, “I understand that this study falls under the MIT honor system.”

These moral reminders had the effect of eliminating all (!) of the statistically significant cheating — with either one of those moral reminders in place, the students in the self-graded group had results that were statistically indistinguishable from the proctor-graded group.

(Interestingly enough, changing test conditions to make easier to cheat without getting caught didn’t affect the numbers much — once students decided to cheat, they cheated at the same rate. The only factors that changed their results were impossibility (proctor-graded exams), and the moral reminder.)

Now, as a law professor, I hear occasional reports of ethical lapses in exam taking. I don’t know how widespread any particular problem is, but I’d like to discourage any cheating on my exams. Ariely’s research suggests that many people are fundamentally honest (more than expected), but also that people are more honest when they are given a gentle reminder about the importance of honesty.

And so I’m planning on giving my students a “nudge,” going forward. I’m going to require all students, before the exam begins, to sign a basic honor code statement — along the lines of “I agree to comply with all TJSL honor code requirements regarding student ethics and honesty.”

I don’t know that it will have exactly the same effect as in the MIT experiments. Ariely’s experiments involved relatively trivial sums of money; it may be harder to deter dishonesty where the much more significant reward of law school grades is at stake. But I don’t think that a nudge like this will hurt — and I’m guessing that it will probably deter at least some potential bad behavior.

Have others of our readers tried something of this sort? To what extent has (or hasn’t) it worked for you?

A draft paper by Raymond Fisman (Columbia Business),  Shachar Kariv (Berkeley Economics) and Daniel Markovits (Yale Law) has gotten surprisingly little attention given its potentially radical implications.  Maybe it’s the title: Exposure to Ideology and Distributional Preferences. I would have gone with something different.  Perhaps “Law and Economics Eats Law Students’ Hearts.”

The authors looked at first-year students at Yale Law School taking contracts and torts.  They labeled the students’ professors by their purported tendency to emphasize economic and “humanist” rhetoric in class.*  They then used the natural experiment of law school sorting to determine the effect that exposure to economic ideology had on law students’ distributional preferences in the dictator game. That is, did students taught by economically-minded [...]]]>

Richard Posner. Founder. Latter-Day Apostate?

A draft paper by Raymond Fisman (Columbia Business),  Shachar Kariv (Berkeley Economics) and Daniel Markovits (Yale Law) has gotten surprisingly little attention given its potentially radical implications.  Maybe it’s the title: Exposure to Ideology and Distributional Preferences. I would have gone with something different.  Perhaps “Law and Economics Eats Law Students’ Hearts.”

The authors looked at first-year students at Yale Law School taking contracts and torts.  They labeled the students’ professors by their purported tendency to emphasize economic and “humanist” rhetoric in class.*  They then used the natural experiment of law school sorting to determine the effect that exposure to economic ideology had on law students’ distributional preferences in the dictator game. That is, did students taught by economically-minded professors behave differently than those taught by professors disposed toward humanism or critical-legal studies?

The bottom line: students taught by economically-minded professors were both more selfish and more likely to see fairness as a form of kaldor-hicks efficiency.  By contrast, students taught by humanists were more generous and also  likely to see fairness as a matter of equity.

These are important results for those interested in legal education.

• First, and most obviously, it suggests that our preferences for altruism and the content of fairness are highly manipulable — one semester of teaching by a professor – at Yale, no less – can affect them.  I admit to being a bit surprised by the size of the effect, given the mixed results from earlier work on the relationship between economics and altruism.  It’s also surprising that Yalies are so impressionable!  I wonder whether the effect persists past a semester, and whether better coding of actual classroom discussion would have changed the results.
• Second, it suggests yet more reasons for researchers to think hard about the effect that law school teaching has on the content of legal doctrine.  As I’ve argued, it’s quite likely that some law school professors who never published a lick have had more effect on substantive legal doctrine than those who’ve written reams, simply by influencing how their students (who went on to be lawyers and judges) thought about the content of rules and the byways of arguments.  We should do more work like this!
• Third, and most personally, this makes me nervous.  I’m a highly socratic teacher who places lots (and lots) of emphasis in the first-year on efficiency-arguments and on the need to look beyond questions about distributional equality in the present case.  I thought that by doing so I was helping students to think critically about the dynamic nature of contract law – the relationship between contract rules and market price; the usefulness of an intelligent system of defaults; the importance of getting beyond gut intuitions.  But maybe I’m also indoctrinating the students to grab more of the pie for themselves.  Nuts.

*The method they used to code economic preferences was, to be frank, a little mystifying.  They gave points for PhD’s in economics, but had to make exceptions for Alan Schwartz, PhDless but L&E to the bone, Guido, for obvious reasons, and both Robert Gordon and Carol Rose, who are similarly off-set.  Why not simply ask the professors themselves how much they emphasized economic rhetoric in class?  Or the students?

I’ve talked to a lot of folks at a lot of schools with different philosophies on law school centers.  Even folks within the same school often have widely divergent views about what law school centers can and should be doing for the overall law school enterprise.  And of course, it must be acknolwedged that centers can serve a variety of different functions within a law school – and different individual centers can have different individual roles.

So my question is whether there is any way to get to the heart [...]]]> So here’s a question for people thinking about the nature of law schools and the nature of scholarship (and with thanks to Mike Madison for picking up on my invitation to blog more about his research deanship).

I’ve talked to a lot of folks at a lot of schools with different philosophies on law school centers.  Even folks within the same school often have widely divergent views about what law school centers can and should be doing for the overall law school enterprise.  And of course, it must be acknolwedged that centers can serve a variety of different functions within a law school – and different individual centers can have different individual roles.

So my question is whether there is any way to get to the heart of the center question.  Are there one or more key ideals that all centers in law schools should be able to live up to, or to contribute to the school?  And, if so, is it something other than:  “It’s a marketing device to attract faculty/students.”  (Not that there’s anything wrong with that – I’m asking the question out of legitimate interest.)

We’ve been talking about this recently at my school and the question is of particular interest here because we have a number of different centers that were set up under vastly different conditions for vastly different purposes.  Some are research focused and obtain grant funding.  At least one has a private endowment.  Some take advantage of collections of faculty who specialize in particular subject areas.  Presumably none of them are cost-neutral for the school, although none of them drain big bucks out of the budget either.

There are always political questions within faculty about centers and the role of faculty who happen to operate as center directors (I plead guilty to the charge of being a center director).  “Why does s/he get [a lighter teaching load/a director's stipend/a dedicated administrative support person/_______]?”  Pick one or fill in the blank.

But politics aside, what do centers ideally contribute/potentially detract from a school?

Some possibilities…

- increased research synergies?

- impact on student admissions (ie strong students in specialist areas who might not be attracted to a particular school otherwise)?

- impact on faculty recruitment (but this could be positive or negative as it may attract faculty who write and teach in the area(s) of the center(s), but dissuade those who can’t see that they would fit in to a center; also hiring decisions internally could be impacted by a perceived need to “staff the centers”)

- impact on law school identity (again, pros and cons to this one – do you want to be known as a specialist school or a generalist school, and why)?

- ability for a school to attain a high ranking in a U.S. news specialty even if the school overall isn’t particularly highly ranked?

- focus for pulling together research grant or other funding (either by themselves or in concert with other institutions or other departments of the university)

- can be instrumental in pulling together specialty curriculums (again, this can be done without centers and this may add or detract from a school depending on its overall philosophy of the curriculum)

Anything else?  Are centers good or bad overall or is it institution-specific?  Are they mainly for marketing purposes or do the roots run deeper?

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