International JD Students
A recent news story notes that 17% of Harvard’s first-year law students are international students. This statistic intrigued me. International students have long been a staple of LLM programs, but how...
View ArticleDoes Feedback Improve Performance?
My colleague Ruth Colker gives her 1L students the opportunity to obtain mid-semester feedback on their written work. In her Constitutional Law course, currently taught during the spring semester of...
View ArticleJobs and Salaries for New Lawyers
What does the job market look like for new lawyers? The ABA will soon release statistics about the Class of 2016, and NALP will add additional information by the end of the summer. But the Bureau of...
View ArticleOur Broken Bar Exam
The bar exam is broken: it tests too much and too little. On the one hand, the exam forces applicants to memorize hundreds of black-letter rules that they will never use in practice. On the other hand,...
View ArticleClinics and Costs
Bob Kuehn has written an incisive article about the relationship between law school tuition and clinical education. Contrary to many educators’ assumptions, Bob finds that there is no statistically...
View Article2016 Employment Outcomes
The ABA has posted its report on employment outcomes for the Class of 2016, along with two school-by-school spreadsheets. One of the spreadsheets tracks law school funded jobs that require bar passage;...
View ArticleWhat Do Students Do in Clinics?
Douglas Kahn has posted an article criticizing the “proliferation of clinical and other experiential courses” in legal education. These courses, he argues, reduce the number of “doctrinal” courses that...
View ArticleReflections of a Bar Exam Skeptic
Robert Anderson has posted a thoughtful comment on the bar exam in which he dubs me a “bar exam skeptic.” I accept the label with pride: I have been deeply skeptical of the bar exam for years. I first...
View ArticleTrends in Law Firm Staffing
Altman Weil has released its annual report on “Law Firms in Transition.” The report, based on a survey of managing partners of law firms with at least 50 lawyers, documents continued change in the way...
View ArticleMore on the Bar Exam: Correlation and Competence
Derek Muller has identified an intriguing study of alternative ways to assess bar applicants. In 1980, the California bar examiners worked with a research team to explore the desirability of testing a...
View ArticleBar Exam Scores and Lawyer Discipline
Robert Anderson and Derek Muller have posted a provocative paper, The High Cost of Lowering the Bar, in which they argue that “bar exam score is significantly related to likelihood of State Bar...
View ArticleProvisional Accreditation for UNT-Dallas
The Council of the ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar has granted provisional accreditation to the University of North Texas at Dallas College of Law. As I wrote last fall, this...
View ArticleLaw Schools Should Set Reasonable List Prices That Reflect Earnings Available...
The following was part of a series published by the National Law Journal called Law Schools Are Losing Smart Applicants. How Do They Lure Them Back?” The NLJ asked 11 people from inside and outside the...
View ArticleCouncil, Please Shape Up
The Council of the ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar has weathered significant criticism over the last few years. Some of that criticism has been well founded; other attacks have...
View ArticleCivil War Generals
George Henry Thomas went to work as a law clerk in nineteenth century Virginia. Fortunately for the United States, he found that the work “lacked excitement” and he enrolled in the United States...
View ArticleLawyering Jobs
I’ve written before about the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Employment Projections program. Every other year, the statisticians associated with that program count the number of existing “lawyer” jobs as...
View ArticleNew Year’s Resolutions for Law School Professors
Keep your brain healthy by trying new types of mental exercise. Commit to learning at least one of these cognitive skills during the new year: fact gathering, client counseling, interviewing, or...
View ArticleNew AALS Section: Empirical Study of Legal Education & the Legal Profession
If you’re at the AALS meeting, don’t miss the inaugural session of the new Section on Empirical Study of Legal Education & the Legal Profession. Spearheaded by Judith Wegner, this Section welcomes...
View ArticleThe Second Class Among Us
Bob Kuehn has posted a sobering analysis of the status and salaries of clinical, externship, and legal writing faculty. It should be no surprise that most of these professors lack tenure–and that they...
View ArticleThe Market for Legal Writing and Clinical Professors
Why do professors who teach legal writing and clinics earn significantly less than professors who teach other courses? Why are the writing and clinical professors less likely to hold tenure-track...
View Article