Fractal Exams

[Yes, it's the time of year when our readers are going to be bombarded with a stream of grading-related posts. Expect more in the next few days.]

Wikipedia defines a fractal as:

A fractal is generally "a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole,"[1] a property called self-similarity. The term was coined by Benoît Mandelbrot in 1975 and was derived from the Latin fractus meaning "broken" or "fractured." A mathematical fractal is based on an equation that undergoes iteration, a form of feedback based on recursion.

It strikes me that most exams look like fractals. If you grade any unit of any exam, the impression you get (translated into a grade) will be fairly representative of any other part, and of course the whole. Obviously, as the sample size gets tiny, correlation to the final grade will decrease. But let's say you could grade a randomly selected 30% of a given exam. Wouldn't that be a very fair proxy for the rest (fair defined: a correlation of .8 or higher)? Newcomers to faculties often hear this described as the first-paragraph heuristic: you can get a robust sense of an exam's final grade just by reading one paragraph. Tempting.

Has anyone has done any empirical work on this, either using their own students' exams or a freestanding dataset?

(Image Source: Flames on a Mandelbrot set, Wikicommons)

Posted by hoffman at 06:58 PM | Comments (15) | TrackBack

Tenure!

I'm happy to report that my colleagues at Temple, having ignored my many faults, voted for my tenure this afternoon. (Along with Don Harris, Craig Green, and Duncan Hollis.) My tenure report, ironically, even quoted from this post of mine about measuring blogging. Anyway, though a university vote is pending, it was a nice day.

I wanted to take a moment and thank my anonymous outside reviewers. I obviously don't know who you are, though at least one of you apparently mentioned reading the blog, so I hope you see this post. I'm really grateful for your spending time on an activity that is a great example of the failure of wealth-maximizing, self-interested, accounts of human behavior.

I'm now off to teach a last class, and celebrate, probably in that order.

Posted by hoffman at 06:06 PM | Comments (21) | TrackBack

Oft-Overlooked Legal Writing Genres III

After considering statutory poetry, the law review cover letter, and the nastygram, consider two more muted, oft-overlooked genres of academic legal writing:

Course Descriptions. Earlier this semester I was discussing the “standard form” for course descriptions. Part of this is clarity: how many hours is the class, what subjects does it cover, and what graduation or certificate requirements does it fulfill? The standard, I think, is to err on the side of “timeless” writing, since who-all knows when course catalogue descriptions will be revisited. Of course, the conflicting impulse here is to make the course description really “whiz bang,” especially if the course has been approved on a provisional basis and you really want to attract students. Not to mention that the space limitations and the need to be inclusive and representative of what you may do in the class (often before you've ever taught it) make this a difficult blurb to write.

The External Review Letter. I received over twenty of them related to the promotion to full professor (now, after the faculty vote, happily exhaling… :). Ostensibly, the goal of these letters is to evaluate the candidate’s work fairly and to comment on its contribution to the field, creativity, and analytical ability. Most letters begin with a summary of the article – what does it cover, what is the argument – set out the positives, add a few small “quibbles” here and there, and then return to the positives. At least, (luckily), that was my overall experience.
Of course, there is always that wild card that you hear about but hopefully do not have to experience personally, that is the reviewer who decides that the process is not really about the candidate, or even a negative yet constructive evaluation, but rather is to show that s/he is smarter than everyone (not just the tenure candidate, or the candidate’s committee) but, literally, everyone. In the world. (Our young, mmm-mmm, they are so tasty…).

Posted by Miriam_Cherry at 04:08 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Making Blogging Count

More good news on the blogging-while-untenured front: Wasserman joins Henderson as a newly tenured blogger who pitched blogging's value to his tenure committee. Howard comments:

It also seems to me that the level of needed explanatory detail will decrease as more and more bloggers gain tenure (say, within the next five-seven years) and blogging becomes a routine and understood part of our writing activities. In about 5-10 years, it should be enough to say "I blog at ______" in the "other scholarly activities" section of the tenure folder. The interesting question will be whether committee members begin reading some blog posts for evaluation--not in the same way or with the same interest as they review scholarship, but with an eye towards evaluating how good this person is at this particular, accepted scholarly activity.

Yeah, I wonder about that too. The problem is volume & heterogeneity. As I wrote to my tenure committee, in "the last three years, I've written 550 blog posts, with an average length of 400 words. This works out to 220,000 blogged words, or 1,400 a week. Assuming that the average law review article runs for 25,000 words, I have written the equivalent of about nine additional law review articles in blog posts."

But of course some of those blog posts were substantive, and others weren't. I'm not sure how a committee could possibly be expected to read anything other than a self-selected sample of such posts (which I provided). But self-selected samples are unrepresentative. Committees, unless very pro-active, won't see that post you regretted writing as soon as you hit publish, the uncharitable comments, the flashes of foolishness. That is, there's a risk (from the administration's perspective) in counting blogging for the purposes of tenure: it's a ratchet that only goes one way. Since tenure in law school is already significantly cheaper to get than in the undergraduate departments, it seems sort of like piling on.

You might retort that this ratchet is a subsidy for an exciting new medium. The argument would go that blogging provides schools an opportunity to cheaply distinguish themselves from the pack -- a point highlighted by the relative lack of bloggers from top ten law schools. Clearly, blogging (as a market) desperately would like such a subsidy. As I've written many times now, I think that academic blogging, in its present form, has peaked. As Nick Denton recently pointed out, the "world does not need more blogs . . .there is approximately one reader for every blog out there." If schools don't subsidize blogging, moreover, the market won't either: advertising revenue for online media activities is likely to plummet in the next 12 months.

But I think that this kind of subsidy argument is misplaced, at least without a smart way to think about the value that professors' blogging has for schools and their students. What we ought to do (as a bunch of bloggers) is spend some time talking about how to evaluate faculty blogging, instead of merely celebrating it. Outside review letters that focus on blogging would be a place to start. Other ideas?

Posted by hoffman at 06:55 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

"The market and the internet don't care if you make money."

Via Andrew Sullivan I came across this really angry comment about the future of book publishing. In it, Seth Godin (Tribes) argues that the book industry needs to adapt - quickly - from being a bunch of people who print and sell books to a group of "marketers and agents and managers and developers of content". Sounds like a cinch. I wonder why newspapers haven't thought of that.

Godin continues that maybe publishers should consider selling books for a dollar, because the audience will purchase them at that price, and let authors make money from "bespoke work and appearances and interactions". (That means, I think, personalized books written on demand for particular groups. I imagine Godin has read The Diamond Age more the once. If you haven't, you should, even though it retails at $10.20 new.)

I don't know enough about the economics of the book industry, and I'm trying to learn more. But I wanted to focus for a moment on Godin's argument (noted in the title to this post) that content providers shouldn't feel entitled to monetizing their talent, simply because they are creating a product that people want. Very true. That said, it is also worth pointing out that entrepreneurs probably won't create until they see a path to making a living from their work. The Grateful Dead model - appearances & interactions - appears to me to be an audacious hope, not a business model. Or to put it another way, if I were a budding author reading Godin's interview, I would put down my pen and go to law school. At least we've got a Guild to protect us from the forces of modernization.

(Image Source: Ezra Cornell's Book, Wikicommons)

Posted by hoffman at 08:00 PM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

Paging the Bogeyman

It’s Halloween, and I wanted to write a related post to celebrate the day. I thought about resuscitating the “sale of a haunted house case,” Stambovsky v. Ackely, 572 N.Y.S.2d 672 (NY App. Div. 1991), fast becoming a casebook darling among property and contracts professors (great post on it here). Maybe some gruesome details from a crim law or torts case? But then I realized I needed a *really* scary topic. And, no, not the credit crunch, frightening as that may be.
As far as scary, I started thinking about my favorite Halloween movie, The Nightmare Before Christmas. So, how about… the Bogeyman? Now, I previously wrote a post, asking about the “elephant” lurking in your law school. By “elephant,” I meant a problem that is immense and yet “so common that no one talks about or discusses it.”
The Bogeyman, on the other hand, is different than the lumbering elephant. The Bogeyman is a symbol or a rhetorical strategy that is an exaggeration of a perceived threat or possible risk, usually raised in response to proposed change. For an example, take curriculum reform. If change is proposed, one rhetorical strategy to scotch it is to exaggerate the threat of a potential drop in the bar passage rate. Sometimes the Bogeyman quietly hides in corners, dormant, seemingly disappeared. Other times he jumps out, becoming more vocal, rattling his chains to great effect.
I wonder if some of this propensity to be-risk averse is part of profession – as lawyers we perhaps overcompensate for certain types of risk. Despite all the talk this election cycle about how much we either love “change” or “mavericks,” (depending on your ideological views), it’s safe to say that many (most?) law schools are, as institutions, fairly conservative (as far as changing things, anyway).
So perhaps change and an exaggerated tendency to be risk averse is in itself the Bogeyman. Its enemy? Logic. Empiricism. Bogeymen, I think, hate statistics, because it is in their nature to be irrational and play upon one’s fears.
What/Who is the Bogeyman in your law school? (or Bogeyperson, more politically correct).

Posted by Miriam_Cherry at 02:14 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Why Become A Lawyer?

Back in August I was asked to give an opening address to Seton Hall Law School's Class of 2011. The talk is given by a faculty member each year, reflecting on what it means to become a lawyer. I thought that in these dark times a little inspiration might be in order. So I'm posting it below.

The Aristocracy of Fairness: Law as the Necessary Science
August 21, 2008

I’m here to welcome you to a great law school. I’m also here to reflect on a few larger themes about what it means to be a lawyer.

This talk is usually titled “On Becoming a Lawyer,” and to me there are two key parts to that: inspiration and perspiration. You’re going to be making a huge investment of time and effort in becoming an attorney over the next three years. Why do it? That answer has to include some kind of inspiration—some reason law is a vocation for you, and not just another career. I’ll give you one abstract answer and several concrete ones. Let’s start with the concrete.

Just about every day this summer there has been a front page headline about lawlessness. Think about the housing and banking crisis. Earlier this decade, we were told that the normal regulations governing banks and mortgages weren’t needed anymore. “Innovators in the financial system” could “self-regulate,” we were told—they needed freedom from attorneys and their nitpicking rules. And they got it, leading to the worst foreclosure crisis since the Great Depression.

Another case of “self-regulation” run amok is food, drug, and product safety. Don’t worry, we were told, the market will punish any bad actors here. The head of the Consumer Product Safety Commission recently told Congress—“don’t give us any more funds or attorneys—businesses can assure safety on their own.” Well, somehow I think the 3000 people who annually lose fingers and thumbs to unsafe table saws—and the 60,000 injured annually--probably disagree with her on that one.

And who can keep track of all the scares we’ve been through the past few months—fake heparin in hospitals, dangerous toys menacing children, salmonella everywhere. It would be a full time job for even the most conscientious consumer to keep track of all the failures of what I like to call the “deregulatory delusion.”

Now what do all these things have in common? They all stem from a mindset that in the 21st century we are “beyond” law, that markets operating on their own can take care of everything. We are where we are today—a weakened, debtor nation, with a declining currency and ever more insecure citizenry—because in many areas we have stopped enforcing the structure of laws designed to make our lives fairer.

But as Franklin Roosevelt once said back in times that eerily parallel our own, “It is not in despair that I paint you [this] picture. I paint it in hope—because the Nation, seeing and understanding the injustice of it, proposes to paint it out.” And to extend that metaphor a bit, I hope to see many of you in this class lawyer it out. My inspiration as an attorney—and I hope yours too—is to maintain and restore the structure of fairness and opportunity that only law can make possible.

You’ll find many examples among your professors here. Linda Fisher and Baher Azmy have worked tirelessly in our clinics to bring some justice to people snared in the subprime mess. Our health law group tries to answer some of the toughest questions in law—its members have worked at the highest levels of state and international bodies to help rationalize a byzantine system. Professors Godsil and Maldonado have combined scholarship and advocacy for the disadvantaged in brilliant ways. And if you want to be sure people are treated fairly in the world of work, our employment law group is nationally recognized for doing just that. If you care about fairness, this is the place for you.

Please note well that I am not trying to tell anyone what clients you should or shouldn’t have. You may well feel that there are government agencies out there which are suffocating businesses. Helping those businesses negotiate the complex of legislative rules and interpretive rules and manuals and guidance letters---that whole iceberg of regulation that your average viewer of Boston Legal never gets a peek at—is often as worthy a task as conducting the investigations those laws authorize.

Of course, this dual nature of law—the two sides there are to every serious legal dispute—may make that advice seem relativistic. And as Socrates has said, the best physician is often the best poisoner. Nevertheless, if we do our jobs well here, you will find that what unites the two lawyers in any dispute is far deeper than what divides them.

The profession of law commits us to the resolution of disputes according to a system of public values. We have lots of other ways of resolving disputes. There’s force—let the strongest win. There’s the market—which often boils down to letting the person with the most money win. And finally there’s law—a system of rules that encodes the values we share. Law is a tradition of settling disputes without resorting to force or bribery. It should surprise no one that a law school is part of the Catholic mission of our university because law is and only should be a moral system for distributing the benefits and burdens of our collective life.

Of course, writers going back to Alexis deTocqueville have realized that this kind of responsibility can lead lawyers to have an inflated sense of their own value. As he noted in Democracy in America,

Some of the tastes and the habits of the aristocracy may . . . be discovered in the character of lawyers. They participate in the same instinctive love of order and formalities; and they entertain the same repugnance to the actions of the multitude, and the same secret contempt of the government of the people.

To explain this idea of “an aristocracy of lawyers,” Tocqueville goes on to say:

The special information that lawyers derive from their studies ensures them a separate rank in society, and they constitute a sort of privileged body in the scale of intellect. This notion of their superiority perpetually recurs to them in the practice of their profession: they are the masters of a science which is necessary, but which is not very generally known. . . .

He then goes on to describe a number of the great strengths and weaknesses of lawyers. The whole passage is illuminating.

So what does Tocqueville’s idea of lawyers as an aristocracy, and law as a “necessary science,” mean for us? We live in a leveling age, where the press is eager to cut down to size anyone who gets “too big for their britches” We are relentlessly told to “suspect elites.” But often the people behind that mantra are pretty elite themselves. So maybe we should start suspecting the elites who tell us to suspect elites.

In other words, the proper response to this ersatz egalitarianism is not to pretend that anyone is just as good as anyone else at resolving disputes, or just throwing open all decisions to force and markets. Rather, we strive to make ours an “aristocracy of fairness.” We are to be the umpires arguing about (and ultimately judging) the commerce and criminality that, respectively, enrich and threaten our world.

The paradox here is that fair play and equal opportunity depend on forms of privilege for lawyers—unique abilities to make demands, file lawsuits, learn the true story behind PR men’s obfuscation. The paradox is only resolved to the extent that we use those powers for good.

The most exciting part of your time here will be learning about how you can use to law to solve problems. You can be the person who keeps predatory lenders or eminent domain abusers from tossing longtime homeowners out of the community they love. You can help cut through the patent thickets that are now delaying cures for deadly diseases. You can help assure that needy people get the drugs and medical devices they need—either directly advocating for them, or for the companies that depend on Medicare and Medicaid. You can get innocent men out of prison, or put predators away for decades.

At this point, any of these futures are open to you. So as you dive into the books this year, doing the grueling reading and writing law demands, remember your inspiration for getting into this field. Keep it as concrete as possible. The more you care about particular outcomes, particular people, particular communities—the more your career in law will mean to you. Find some problem you want to solve with law, and don’t let go of it. That’s what being part of an aristocracy of fairness is all about.

Posted by Frank_Pasquale at 02:01 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Professors showing their political stripes

This presidential election has had much discussion about the voting preferences of academics, particularly law professors--from the legal advisory teams (consisting of many law professors) that every major-party candidate established during the primaries to the joke (made in this forum) about "Law Professors for McCain" holding their meeting in a booth in a diner somewhere between Chicago and South Bend to news and academic studies about where law professors and law faculties donate money.

I want to ask a more pedestrian question that arose with some colleagues: How appropriate is it for professors to include political signs or messages around their offices, particularly in the doorway? Is it OK to have a candidate poster on your door or on the walls of your office? How about in the window facing out onto campus, visible to all who walk by? Is there something about that space that ought to be "welcoming" to students of all stripes and views, such that a prominent visual display of one's political and partisan views is inappropriate? Is the office different than a classroom, where (I am guessing) most would believe it is inappropriate to display political preferences in that way? Or is this all simply a "grow-up-and-deal-with-it" issue for the students, something they should become accustomed to as they enter the legal world?

Cross-posted at PrawfsBlawg

Posted by Howard_Wasserman at 02:35 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

Odd Places To Make Final Stands: Tales from Teaching Corps

Have you ever had the experience, when teaching, of finding yourself getting incredibly worked up about a point of procedure, technicality, or minutia, to the degree that for that moment that it seems like a subtle moment of principled revelation? That's where I was last night, talking about "enterprise liability" in Minno v. Pro-Fab, 2007 WL 42292625 (Ct. App. Oh. 2007). By the end of the discussion of whether it was appropriate to piece a corporate veil to find liability against a sister corporation, where the evidence of fraud was limited to failure to buy liability insurance (!), I felt like I was two seconds away from standing on a desk and shouting

"Hier stehe ich. Ich kann nicht anders. Gott helfe mir!"

I was only able to restrain myself by considering that, even as we were debating this nice issue, the likelihood that A.I.G. was going to go bankrupt probably had increased by 20 or 30%.

As I told the class, if I could only have talked in that moment to myself as a young boy, who wanted to be a fireman, I'd have trouble explaining how or why I'd decide to make my stand defending the rights of small corporations to their settled expectations against tort creditors. (If that was, indeed, the root of my objection to Minno. Maybe the case is just terribly written.) Teaching outside of the public law canon, I guess you find yourself finding unexpected, small, odd places in the law where bad doctrine seems to implicate really big issues.

Maybe others have had similar experiences. So tell me, where's the oddest, most-seemingly-obscure, place in the law that you've found yourself saying "The line must be drawn here! This far and no further! And I will make them pay for what they've done!" And did your students look at you as if you were a raving maniac too?

Posted by hoffman at 09:17 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Some Data on Legal Academics' Tenure and Promotion

Over at Opinio Juris, Duncan Hollis has an informative report up about the tenure and promotion practices of law schools, based on a survey of 41 schools he and I completed earlier this year. The difference between rank and tenure was something that didn't enter my mind when I was on the hiring market, but it probably should have. Here's a taste of Duncan's post, which should be read in full by both folks on the tenure track and aspiring profs alike:

Alternatively, if one thinks of this solely in terms of how long until a newbie professor can expect it will take before being considered for full professor, we found that of the 36 schools that gave us time-lines, 18 allow tenure and promotion to full professor one way or another in year 5 (American, ASU, Cincinnati, Cornell, George Mason, Georgetown, Illinois, Maryland, Miami, Missouri, Notre Dame, San Diego, Seton Hall, Texas, UC Hastings, UCLA, UVA, and Washington University). By year 6, it’s 26 out of the 36 schools (those listed above, plus Berkeley, BYU, Cardozo, Hofstra, Minnesota, Penn State, Pitt, and Wake Forest).

I strongly recommend that aspiring folks seek to bargain about rank, if it is a deal point subject to negotiation.

Posted by hoffman at 10:36 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Loan Repayment Plans for Judges?

One of the most welcome initiatives in U.S. law schools over the last decade or so has been the creation of LRAPs, or Loan Repayment Assistance Programs, which subsidize (by delaying or reducing payments on student loans) recent law school graduates who work in an approved list of jobs. Those jobs are generally referred to as "public interest employment" and are, therefore, rather low paying -- especially by comparison to the positions in large law firms that so many law students seek. Many students who take the higher paying jobs will tell you that they feel boxed in, forced to take higher-paying jobs simply to pay off their student loans, even thought they'd really rather work in the public interest. Law schools responded with LRAP programs. Makes sense.

Given that LRAPs cost the law schools money, the difficulty lies in deciding who is most deserving of the limited dollars available for these subsidies. Beyond the obvious starting point of limiting the pool of potential recipients to those who accept lower-paying jobs, however, some difficult questions arise.

For example, at the University of Michigan Law School, which was in the process of significantly expanding its LRAP program when I was a J.D. student there from 1999-2002, I was told that judicial clerkships were not on the list of approved LRAP positions. The theory, as I understood it, was that even though federal judicial clerks were then being paid annual salaries of about $45,000 (about one-third of the starting salaries at big law firms at the time), and even though clerk's duties clearly served the public interest, clerking was most often a stepping stone to jobs that paid very well. As a matter of allocating scarce dollars, it made sense to exclude clerks in favor of, say, advocates for tenants' rights in blighted neighborhoods (or community organizers?).

I recently had a discussion with a colleague about an aspect of LRAP programs about which I had not previously been aware. For at least some LRAP programs, being a prosecutor is on the list of approved LRAP jobs, so long as the salary is below a certain level. When I expressed surprise that prosecutors would be eligible for loan subsidies, my colleague pointed out that it would be political suicide for law schools to subsidize law graduates who work as low-paid assistant public defenders but not those who work as low-paid assistant district attorneys. As a matter of public relations, this would obviously be easy to spin as "friendly to criminals." I can only imagine the storm of protest and demagoguery that would follow. Still, there seemed to be an important difference between the two positions, even when the salaries are similarly low.

For me, it is significant that district attorneys' offices are a well established stepping stone to later career success in politics and private practice, whereas attorneys who provide legal services for the poor more often sacrifice long-term career advancement even as they sacrifice short-term financial security. Obviously, not every assistant DA becomes Lieutenant Governor, nor is every assistant PD stuck earning $30,000 per year forever; but the career paths that lead out of the two offices are generally quite different. Public relations concerns aside, it seemed odd that prosecutors would be eligible for these limited funds. (Clearly, the more money that is available within any LRAP program, the easier it is to avoid difficult tradeoffs. In the extreme, we could make law school free for everyone. I haven't heard any plans to move in that direction recently, though.)

Pursuing this line of reasoning further, I began to wonder whether LRAP money should be available for judges. Clearly, federal judges would be ineligible for assistance simply on income-cutoff grounds, since all federal judges earn well over $100,000 per year. We often hear arguments about whether even those salaries are too low, but I cannot imagine anyone suggesting that a federal judge should be eligible for an LRAP program. Some state judges, however, are paid quite poorly, reportedly as low as $40,000 per year in New York State and lower still elsewhere. Should they be eligible?

Certainly, any person who is earning a low salary would welcome loan repayment assistance. That, however, is true of judicial clerks, who are excluded from coverage. Judges have opportunities to leave the bench at any time to move into some seriously high-paying jobs. Perhaps the difference is that we want judicial clerks to move on, whereas we are worried about judges hitting the trail too soon. There is thus at least one good policy reason to think that subsidizing judges is better than subsidizing judges' clerks.

Of course, it is also possible that we should not be excluding judicial clerks from the pool, either. Just as a thought experiment, I encourage readers to consider the following hypothetical. You are running an LRAP program's selection committee. You have four applicants, each of whom will earn the same (low) salary, is the same age (let's say 28 years old), and is in every other way similarly situated. They are about to accept the following positions:

(A) Judicial clerk,
(B) Public defender,
(C) District attorney,
(D) State judge.

Do you give all of the money to one recipient (which one?) or split it among two or more (which ones? evenly?)? Why? Show your work.

Posted by Neil_Buchanan at 01:55 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Former W&M Law Dean Becomes President of College

For those interested, Taylor Reveley, former Dean of William & Mary Law School, has been appointed permanent president of The College of William & Mary. Some of you may recall that Taylor was made interim president of the College after the train wreck that was once-and-present-law-professor-turned-university-president Gene Nichols's firing/resignation last spring. The official statement by the Board of Visitors follows the jump:

September 5, 2008

The Board of Visitors today concluded a special session to determine the leadership direction for the College. After careful consideration and with the benefit of input from the faculty, students, staff and alumni, the Board decided to eliminate Taylor Reveley's interim designation and formally appoint him the 27th President of William and Mary for a term of 3 years.

This is a change in direction, but one we have concluded is in the very best interest of the College. Taylor has exceeded every expectation and has worked with vigor uncharacteristic of a mere caretaker. He has tackled enormous challenges, and while he did not seek the job permanently this time, he nonetheless earned the right to lead us and we are grateful he has accepted our invitation. Choosing a president without a national search is unusual and not done lightly, but the circumstances in this case are unique. For one, Taylor was fully vetted in the national search held just a few years ago and was a finalist for the office. Second, rarely does the Board or the College community have the benefit of working with someone for over half a year in the position before making a decision on his appointment. Finally, our community is still healing from the events of last spring and the critical challenges presently facing the college need immediate attention, strongly suggesting a search would not be a constructive or productive endeavor -- a view we found was widely held.

The College has been fortunate to have a strong leader in place during this very difficult transition period. Taylor stepped into a complicated situation and handled it with grace. With his deep knowledge of and experience with the community, he tirelessly reached out to faculty, students, staff, alumni, public officials, and major donors to assure them that he would advance the important priorities of the school. And, in a very short period, he has indeed advanced those priorities.

Taylor zeroed in immediately on the need to restructure our financial model, given the unreliability of state funds. He navigated the College through substantial budget cuts, making difficult decisions but keeping our priorities at the forefront.

Taylor stepped into the admissions process mid-stream when some parents, on the cusp of helping their children make final decisions, were concerned about sending their child to a school without a sitting president. His assurances about the direction of the school helped William and Mary attract a very strong and diverse incoming class of students.

In addition to handling pressing needs, Taylor has also begun laying a direction for the future. He has initiated a long overdue strategic planning process. He has also redirected development efforts toward improving annual giving, so that the College can meet its operating needs, and initiated the work necessary for a future campaign to strengthen the endowment. He is working on plans for upgrading communication to and relationships with the campus and alumni, realizing that they are critical to our future. All of these actions are essential to setting the vision and direction of the College.

Taylor has exhibited such extraordinary skill, warmth and commitment that we are confident this is the best path for W&M right now. We have pressing challenges that need immediate attention. Major additional state cuts are imminent, re-structuring will need to be re-negotiated with Richmond, and we must complete a strategic plan. With his leadership, we will aggressively tackle these challenges, build on the traditions of the school, and look forward with confidence to the future.

We wish to thank the numerous faculty, students, staff, administrators and alumni who we consulted over the past several weeks. Their input and support for President Reveley was heartening and indispensible.

Posted by oman at 01:25 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Advice to First Years: Pick it Out of the Hat

Everyone is giving advice to first-year students these days. Good stuff! I was asked to contribute some thoughts to the first-year class during their orientation, speaking for Temple's faculty. My (short) speech, enhanced with some inspirational hyperlinks, follows.

* * *

I'm honored to have the opportunity to address you on behalf of the law school's faculty. As you might imagine, because this is an important day, the invitation came accompanied with certain stage directions.

I was told, above all, to be brief, to try to be funny, and to express the faculty's sense of its relationship to you.

This stage direction was necessary in part because law professors are so unused to giving lectures, or inspiring anyone with gentle humor.

Rather, our normal approach, when faced (as I am now) with a roomful of students, is to pick some likely candidate – usually someone who is looking down – and ask them what we're supposed to be learning.

If that poor student doesn't know the answer, I usually call on someone else, on the theory that the best way to learn judgment is to watch error. This of course is the vaunted Socratic method. I'll confess: from my side of the room, it's terribly fun.

I was pretty tempted to use that approach today, calling on one of you, hoping that you would be brief, funny, and wise. But this seemed cruel, and would unnecessarily put my tenure at risk. So I turned, as I often do, to one of our great works of literature for inspiration.

I assume that many of you have read the Harry Potter series … For those that haven't, imagine that at the beginning of the school year at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, a small, shabby, sentient hat sorts students into various dorms which will be their homes at school. As the hat explains, Gryffindors are brave; Hufflepuffs are just; Ravenclaws are smart; and Slytherins are cunning. The way it works is that you put the Hat on your head and it tells you what's in your heart.

It struck me that it might be very, very cool if I had a magical hat, which could right now sort you into the lawyers you will be. Now our lawyer sorting device might not be a wizard's hat, but instead, a small, dented, formal bowler, kind of like this one. [At this point, I brandished a bowler, sort of like the ones in the picture to the right.]

How would our law school sorting hat divide you? Coming from the perspective of someone who teaches the best-ever-subject, contracts, you'd first have the calm & wise Ravenclaws who draft complicated transactional contracts; next the brave Gryffindors who do public interest community service; the just Hufflepuffs, working in the government; and finally the crafty, Slytherian-like, advocates who try cases.

Because it's only a small, dented, hat, these choices are too limited. After all, your opportunities leaving this law school are many, among them: drafters and courtroom stars; counselors to businesses, and businesspeople yourselves; sports agents, judges, politicians, advocates, and better-informed citizens. But even so, if we had a working Law School Sorting Hat, you wouldn't have to agonize over these choices. You'd just put this on. [Waving the bowler in their direction]

While you might welcome this development, I am not sure I would. Why not? Well, as it turns out, the most exciting part of being a member of the law faculty is the opportunity to work with you in figuring out what kind of professional you want to be. Unlike college, we fully expect that each of you will leave Temple with the tools at hand to make a significant, immediate, impact upon the world. Most of us take great satisfaction in your success, and will do anything we can to help you for the next three years in making it possible. We expect our interactions with you over the years to be a very slow, less magical, mechanism for sorting. Getting it done today would leave us without the best parts of our jobs.

As the sorting hat explains in a later book, division and specialization has its down side, and I (like the hat) feel it necessary to warn you. While from the faculty's perspective, sorting is guidance, both rewarding and fun, from your perspective the sorting we do may sometimes feel quite different.

If you aren't careful, and don't hold onto the ambitions and dreams you have today, you may be tempted to believe that the sorting we do here is comes only to this: A, B, C, D, and, sometimes, F. It's quite easy to fall into that trap – to conflate doing well on tests with worth, and to believe that your success for the rest of your career will be predicted by your first-year grades.

Now, you can't avoid sorting by grade, but you must refuse to let yourself be defined by your exams, even and especially if you do well. Your faculty won't do so, because it knows that some of our most successful graduates – however defined, but including money, power, influence, fame, and happiness – haven't been the ones who earned all Owls. Law is a profession where being the kind of person who tests well certainly helps. But caring more about your job than the next lawyer is the way to achieve long-term success.

So here's my advice to you. Your faculty wants to be part of the first kind of sorting – wants to mentor you and waits eagerly for the day when you become colleagues at the Bar instead of students at the door. Your faculty hates the second kind of sorting – grading – recognizing it as the mind-numbing, confidence eroding, and inexact curse that it is. For our sakes, and for yours, I therefore urge you to spend time in our offices talking not just about grades and exams but also about how to find satisfying careers.

Thanks for lending me your time today: I wish you the best of luck.

Posted by hoffman at 01:21 PM | Comments (12) | TrackBack

Advice for First Year Law Students: Practice Writing!

Over at PrawfsBlawg, Paul Horowitz offers sage advice to first year law students. For all incoming 1Ls, I recommend that you read Paul's post.

I have one piece of advice to add -- practice writing as much as you can. This advice is best heeded long before you go to law school. Take writing classes in college. Or take a non-fiction writing class outside of college. I believe that there are plenty of courses offered. Or, if you can't take a course, get books about how to improve your writing. And practice writing on your own. Basically, write, write, write!

Writing is one of the most crucial skills in law school, and it is the one that I find many students could greatly improve. Your law school writing course is designed to teach you how to do legal writing. It is not a general writing course. Many of the problems I see on exams and in student papers stem from general writing issues -- inability to write clearly, poor organization, badly articulated concepts, and so on. You can never get enough training in writing. So work on improving this skill, and you'll likely improve your success in law school.

If you have difficulty in your first year of law school, I recommend taking a writing course over the winter break or over the summer break. Take a course where somebody works with you on basic composition skills. You can never get enough practice.

Posted by Daniel Solove at 11:50 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

AALS Rejects Boycott, Sort Of.

Responding to the LWI's boycott call, the AALS responds:

The AALS 2009 Annual Meeting will take place January 6-10, 2009, in San Diego, California. Several years ago the Association booked rooms at the San Diego Marriott and the Manchester Grand Hyatt. In the last few weeks there have been suggestions that the Association should boycott the Hyatt because its owner has contributed money to a ballot initiative designed to overturn the California Supreme Court's May decision in favor of same-sex marriage. In addressing this issue, the Executive Committee has sought to ensure that the Annual Meeting serves the needs of all participants to the maximum extent possible given our contractual obligations to the hotels.

Our contracts with the hotels provide that each hotel reserve a block of guest rooms, and leave to the AALS the choice of where to locate the AALS Registration, Exhibit Hall, Section Programs, Presidential Programs, and House of Representatives meetings. We will honor our contracts with both hotels, and we have exercised our option to hold all AALS events at the Marriott to ensure the maximum participation by our members.

Law schools and other organizations hosting meetings and receptions will be contacted soon by an AALS meetings manager regarding the location of their events. Faculty and staff at law schools will soon receive housing information and you will be able to choose your individual hotel room on a first-come, first-served basis in accordance with the usual housing procedures.

Translation: we agree with you that merely contributing to the SSM amendment is beyond the pale, but we (sadly) can't breach our contracts.

Posted by hoffman at 02:41 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

More on the AALS Boycott

I was thinking more overnight about the absurd proposed AALS boycott being pushed by the Legal Writing Institute. The LWI, like the AALS, is a large organization of law professors, with "over 2,100 members." Like the AALS, the LWI is governed by academics, in the case of the LWI, a Board of Directors. It struck me that these Board members, who apparently support the organization's proposal to boycott a meeting because the owner of the hotel hosting it donates to a cause they dislike, might be living in glass houses. The Board is huge, so here's just a select list...

Linda Berger, Board Member, teaches at Mercer's Walter F. George School of Law. Walter F. George? Yes, that guy.

Robin Boyle, Board Member, teaches at St. John's University, which is a Catholic University. Hey, don't the Catholic Bishops of NY have a position on same-sex marriage?

Anne Enquist, Board Member, teaches at Seattle. A jesuit university. Yes, those jesuits.

Michael Higdon, Board Member, teaches at the William Boyd School of Law (UNLV). Boyd, a gaming executive, supports republicans. Scary.

Ruth Robbins, President of the Board, teaches at Rutgers-Camden. I'm sure at least one of these people hates puppies.

Terry Seligman, Board Member, teaches at the Earle Mack School of Law (a.k.a., the provisionally-accredited Drexel Law School). Earle Mack is another huge republican donor.

How will these Board members remedy their institutions' reliance on conservative cash? I suggest a self-boycott.

Posted by hoffman at 09:05 AM | Comments (15) | TrackBack

Capture and the Proposed AALS Boycott

Paul Caron has a good roundup about the call by an organization of legal writing professors to boycott this year's AALS meeting. The spectacle is depressing, and is an example of how the AALS becomes distracted by ideology instead of, say, tending to the business of improving law school education. As Leiter put it, four years back:

Complaints about the AALS are legion among law professors: the organization's relentless political correctness (without regard to the diversity of views among its members), its inability to stage real scholarly conferences, and its intrusive, and again largely politically motivated (when not cartel-motivated!), regulation of law schools. On one important issue where the AALS might have made a difference--namely, the growing influence of the U.S. News law school rankings--the organization's response was to put its head in the sand and tell prospective students, incredibly, that they shouldn't look at law school rankings.

There's probably a useful agency-cost & legal regulation story to be told here about how nonprofits get captured by a small set of their constituents. For what it's worth, the boycott seems like a bad idea, for the reasons advanced in this post and thread.

Posted by hoffman at 05:37 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

When To Turn Down a Tenured Law Professorship Job Offer

There's a very interesting NY Times article about Barack Obama's time teaching law at University of Chicago Law School. From the article:

Soon after [losing in the primary for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives], the faculty saw an opening and made him its best offer yet: Tenure upon hiring. A handsome salary, more than the $60,000 he was making in the State Senate or the $60,000 he earned teaching part time. A job for Michelle Obama directing the legal clinic.

Your political career is dead, Daniel Fischel, then the dean, said he told Mr. Obama, gently. Mr. Obama turned the offer down. Two years later, he decided to run for the Senate. He canceled his course load and has not taught since.

Another interesting fact:

Mr. Obama arrived at the law school in 1991 thanks to Michael W. McConnell, a conservative scholar who is now a federal appellate judge. As president of The Harvard Law Review, Mr. Obama had impressed Mr. McConnell with editing suggestions on an article; on little more than that, the law school gave him a fellowship, which amounted to an office and a computer, which he used to write his memoir, “Dreams From My Father.”

The article also has posted some of Obama's class materials.

Posted by Daniel Solove at 10:25 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Shirking v. Intentional Bad Conduct: MoneyLaw and Tenure, Take Two

Dean Jim Chen, over at MoneyLaw's hall of doom headquarter's, has responded to my post about tenure and Pat Burrell. (So has Michael Heise, at ELS). Jim gently critiques me for offering an overly simplistic view of MoneyLaw's posture toward tenure. As he points out, tenure is "academia's third rail," and he's no fool: [o]ne's ability to accomplish things and to effect genuine change is inversely related to the extent to which one speaks one's mind." I take it that his message to me is: be mindful . . . young padawan. Thanks!*

Jim (unlike his commentators and some of ours) doesn't quibble with the finding that tenure doesn't itself reduce scholarly output. That was the relatively minor point I was making – tenure doesn't cause shirking & negligence. Jim's response is, essentially, well, ok, but it does "eliminate[e] meaningful sanctions against odiously selfish, institutionally destructive faculty members." It also, by insulating faculty members from market pressures, makes us bad at helping our graduates to understand the actual practice of law.

Although I'd like to disagree, just to provoke a good exchange, I can't. Jim hits the nail right on the head: tenure's most pernicious consequence is that it permits some faculty to be reckless or intentionally terrible. Now, tenure doesn't cause these bad eggs (or "rodents" as Jim calls them). It just makes it hard to get rid of them, making evident the need to do a better job in hiring and screening candidates. As a commentator at MoneyLaw notes, it's "hard to appreciate how horrible these are or how widespread the phenomenon is." My guess: 10-30% of many faculties would be fired, de-equitized, or otherwise let go if employed as lawyers. Of that 10-30%, some smaller percentage are "odiously selfish" or "institutionally destructive." I've heard that new Deans are told that if you can count on one hand the number of faculty members who are truly problems, you are lucky. That sounds about right.

Whether that percentage would be smaller given market pressures is the open question. And we have no way of really knowing. If tenure disappeared by fiat, certainly some folks would be let go, and some would turn the corner from recklessness to mere negligent performance. But I still think that the improvement in overall output over the academy as a whole would be trivial.

Jeff H., in his comment to my post, pointed to a study he did of tenure and law faculty productivity. He found a statistically significant negative relationship between tenure and pages of scholarly work produced (R2=.25). This is an interesting preliminary result, but I have some doubts that it would hold if Jeff repeated it while controlling for professors' age. Also, the relevant measure isn't pages produced but impact, which should be relatively easy to measure using newly developed scales. The theory here is that long-term employment contracts do not reduce output where monitoring is easy (i.e., performance is widely measurable). Since scholarship falls in this category, I'd hypothesize that tenure doesn't much affect its production. Since teaching is rarely publicly measured, I guess my prior would be that tenure does, in fact, have a relationship with bad teaching. (This is a good argument for putting teaching evaluations online and sharing them with the public.) But overall, the factor with the strongest influence on output should be age. This relationship isn't necessarily linear – you'd expect a strong correlation between reduced writing and having young children at home, a rally as the kids age, followed by a decline again later in life. (Interestingly, this effect sounds something like explanations offered by some folks when discussing gender and blogging).

That doesn't mean, as Solove pointed out in a comment to my post, that we wouldn't expect the rare outlier: someone who really produced pre-tenure and who didn't write much after tenure. Such outliers exist. But I bet that if you looked closely at the pre-tenure record of the "dead wood" professors you know, you'd see all the tell-tale signs. Past performance predicts, after all.

As I hoped I've made clear, I'm not defending tenure against all comers, just against the idea that it has measurable effects on productivity of the tenured. I suppose I should weigh the benefits of tenure (purportedly, better and bolder scholarship) against its costs (to those already discussed add increasing the cost of education, and decreasing innovation in the way it is produced). At this point, I think most folks who have thought about the problem sort of wave their hands skeptically at the benefits and then throw the issue to the comment thread. Which is precisely what I'm going to do.

(Photo credit: MSNBC, via this blog).

*Fair enough. I should disclose too. I'm up for tenure this fall. Since I see tenure as a straightforward tradeoff against the money I could be making as a lawyer, I certainly want it!

Posted by hoffman at 05:30 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

Law Professor Duties

How do law professors spend their time? Duties are traditionally divided into categories of teaching, scholarship and service (consulting is outside the traditional division). How investment is allocated among the three varies.

It could be difficult to generate reliable information about varying allocation by individuals, but it may be possible to identify implicit allocations across schools. The American Bar Association reports annual teaching loads of all ABA approved law schools. A table (after the jump) reports for the most recent academic year available to me (2004-05). The average that year for all law schools with FTEs between 700 and 1000 is 10.2 credit hours.

Inferences about institutional allocation can be made from the data, at least for conventional classrooms teachers (i.e., other than clinical and legal writing teachers or teachers of low enrollment courses). Suppose, for example, that the average teaching load at a school is 12 credit hours per year. That averages 6 per semester. Credit hours per semester are the number of classroom hours. Each credit hour translates into some multiple of that in aggregate work time (class itself plus preparation and reflection, student meetings, exam preparation and grading, recommendation letters and so on). Experience suggests it is not unreasonable to suppose that is 5 hours, optimally.

For faculty bearing an average teaching burden of 12 credit hours, this essentially means 30 hours per week allocated to teaching-related activities. Setting aside service obligations—and assuming for simplicity a 40-hour work week—that leaves some 10 hours per week for scholarly research and writing (although serious scholars obviously work far more than 40 hours per week). So the implicit resource allocation is 3/4 to teaching and 1/4 to writing (plus service).

Compare that with a faculty bearing an average teaching load of 8 credits. That essentially means 20 hours per week allocated to teaching, enabling at least an equal amount for writing. So the implicit resource allocation is 1/2 to teaching and 1/2 to writing (plus service).

Do many surprises appear in the following illustrations of average annual teaching loads? Perhaps a few. But an admittedly casual skimming of the list suggests a non-trivial positive correlation between scholarly productivity and reasonable teaching burdens.

USC ................. 6.7
Northwestern...... 6.8
Stanford............ 6.9
Berkeley............ 7.2
Ohio State ......... 7.3
Virginia..............7.4
GW...................7.4
NYU..................7.6
UCLA.................7.8
San Diego............7.8
Minnesota...........7.9
Penn.................7.9
Vanderbilt..........7.9
Yale..................8.0
Cornell...............8.0
Harvard..............8.1
Chicago............. 8.3
Wm. & Mary.........8.5
Duke................. 8.7
Case ................ 8.8
Fordham............ 8.9
Wash. U.............8.9
Notre Dame.........9.0
Cardozo.............9.1
Georgetown........9.6
Wake............... 9.7
Suffolk.............10.1

AVERAGE......... 10.2

Connecticut......10.3
Tennessee........10.4
St. John’s.........10.6
BU..................10.9
Washburn........11.1
New England.....11.2
BC.................11.2
St. Thomas........11.3
Quinnipiac........11.3
Catholic...........11.4
SMU...............11.4
Vermont..........11.4
Kentucky.........11.5
Maryland.........11.7
N. Illinois........12.0
Nebraska.........12.2
Louisville.........12.4
N. Kentucky......12.5
John Marshall....12.8
Akron............12.8
Kansas...........12.9
Florida State.....13.0
Gonzaga..........13.1
Mercer...........13.3
Northeastern....13.5
Baltimore........15.2

Within an institution, an important factor not revealed by average annual institutional teaching allocations concerns contact hours. This is the product of credits and student enrollment. It is a useful proxy for individual teaching burden (again, for conventional classroom teachers).

While imperfect, contact hour data can be an important aid in thinking about both equities and inefficiencies in the operation of a school. The data can help Deans evaluate how fairly teaching duties are distributed. Fairness can be assessed according to the distribution, say by quartiles. Surprises may appear and adjustments warranted. It may not be uncommon, for example, for a school to have 1/4 of its faculty members bearing, respectively, 100, 250, 500 and 700 contact hours.

It is rare but also possible to have even more acute tails, especially at large schools for teachers of high-enrollment courses. For some such teachers, annual contact hours can exceed 1200. That makes it more difficult for them to discharge their other duties in scholarship and service.

Posted by Lawrence_Cunningham at 08:52 AM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

Northwestern's Third Year

As reported at Above the Law and TaxProf, Northwestern has announced a program that allows its students to complete their legal degrees in two years instead of the usual three. Upon inspection, the two-year program is less revolutionary than it initially sounds. As described by Inside Higher Ed, the two-year program is an accelerated version of the usual fare, with students taking the same courses and credit hours as those in the three-year program.

The two-year option may have stolen the headlines, but what Northwestern announced about its third year is at least as interesting. Northwestern will allow students to spend a semester in full-time experiential programs, such as legal clinics and law firm apprenticeships. The move comes on the heels of the Carnegie Report, which urged law schools to incorporate a practical skills component wherever possible and to think creatively about the third year. Last March Washington and Lee responded by making all third-year courses experiential. While Northwestern has not gone this far, its experiential semester is likely to make its competitors follow suit. (Fear not, aspiring professors. Northwestern will have “research opportunities” available for you.)

P.S. The talk of practical skills reminded me of “reading the law,” or becoming a lawyer through apprenticeship, without ever going to law school. I had thought that reading the law was only of historical interest. But a little surfing revealed what many readers probably already know: four states still allow people to become lawyers after extended apprenticeships (provided they pass the bar exam). You can get the overview here.

Posted by Sarah_Waldeck at 10:00 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Class Action Challenging Wisconsin’s Diploma Privilege

As every law school graduate from UW-Madison or Marquette knows, Wisconsin is the last state in the nation to still extend a diploma privilege. Simply put, if students at these schools take certain courses and attain a particular minimum grade in those courses, they can be admitted to practice law in Wisconsin without taking a bar exam.

The Associated Press is reporting that a federal judge in the Western District of Wisconsin has certified a class action challenging the diploma privilege. Anyone who applies to the Wisconsin bar within 30 days of graduating from law school can join the suit, which alleges that the diploma privilege is unconstitutional because it discriminates against out-of-state graduates.

I haven’t thought much about the constitutionality of the diploma privilege, but I have pondered the wisdom of Wisconsin’s policy. As a Madison grad, the issue for me has always been whether it is too easy to gain automatic admission; in other words, should the required minimum grades be higher than they are? I perceive bar exams as performing an important, albeit imperfect (and perhaps too lenient), screening function. Put succinctly, if a graduate can’t pass the bar in the maximum number of times that they are allowed to take it, the public would be better served by having that graduate in a different profession. But I don’t have any empirical data about whether the Wisconsin diploma privilege provides the same sort of screening as a bar exam. (For example, how many graduates in other jurisdictions never pass that jurisdiction’s exam? How many graduates of Madison and Marquette do not qualify for automatic admission?) I do, however, think that a student’s performance in a semester-long class is a more accurate measure of whether she is qualified to be a lawyer, provided that Wisconsin’s bar is set high enough. (Bad pun absolutely intended.)

I’d be interested in relevant data, if anyone knows it. And I’m sure those who are currently sitting in a bar review course have their own opinions about Wisconsin’s system.

Posted by Sarah_Waldeck at 02:10 PM | Comments (18) | TrackBack

Public Interest Auction Donations -- Suggestions Wanted

I just returned from a visit to St. Paul, where we stayed with long-time friends Bill McGeveran and his family. Bill and I got talking about how he and several other law profs at the U of Minnesota will be taking a bunch of soon-to-be 3Ls to a karaoke bar as part of a donation to the annual public interest auction. Presumably, this was an exceptionally attractive purchase for the law students – what funnier than seeing your usually serious and straight-faced law prof singing to Paula Abdul or Amy Winehouse? Bill tells me it went for a large sum of money, commensurate with the ridicule he and his colleagues will suffer after the night is over. It got me thinking about all the very creative ways professors can contribute to the public interest auction. I have a colleague whose annual softball game (students v. her family of five), which is followed by a lobster bake, goes for a hefty price at the auction. I have also heard that John Sexton, when he was dean at NYU, sold a “pie-in-the-face-of-the-dean” item. At the end of the auction, Dean Sexton would graciously stand still while the winner of that item covered him in the pie-of-choice. I can only imagine what that went for. I have only offered (with colleagues) a night out shooting pool. This seems embarrassingly staid compared to the above options. What high-priced sought-after professor donations have you heard about?

Posted by Jessica_Silbey at 01:42 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

Total Law Professor JD Applicant Statistics: 1997-2007

I've been posting data about law professor applicants (see here and here), and I thought I'd share some more data that I have that AALS provided me with. Here is data about the schools with the most applicants from 1997-2007. During 1997-2007, there were 8675 applicants with JDs from US law schools. This is not the total number of applicants, as the statistic does not include applicants without JDs and from foreign law schools. The average number of applicants with JDs from US law schools from 1997-2007 is 789 per year.

The table below has more information.

LAW SCHOOL	TOTAL JD APPLICANTS 1997-2007	AVERAGE JD APPLICANTS PER YEAR	% OF TOTAL JD APPLICANTS FROM US LAW SCHOOLS
Harvard	675	61	8%
Yale	435	40	5%
Georgetown	376	34	4%
Columbia	307	28	4%
Michigan	271	25	3%
NYU	262	24	3%
Virginia	253	23	3%
Berkeley	228	21<