Faculty Awareness Bulletin

Northwestern will be the first top ranked law school to offer both 2 and 3 year programs.  See what Northwestern Law School and a number of news outlets have to say about it here.  Also, read this Wall Street Journal blog entry  & Brian Leiter’s blog entry.

Topics: Legal Education

The Law School Admission Council Research Grant Program funds empirical research on legal training and legal practice. Topics include the study of precursors to legal training (including demographic variables), all varieties of legal training itself, and the work that lawyers, judges, law teachers, and other legal professionals do after they complete their training.  Although the program welcomes research on a variety of topics, three requests for proposals have been issued in the following areas:

* Research on Pipeline Issues and Access to Law Schools for Minority Populations
* Research on Access to Law School for Students With Disabilities
* Research on Law School Academic Assistance Programs

There are two reviewing cycles each year, with deadlines of Sept. 1 and Feb. 1.  For more details, go here & here.

Topics: Legal Education

The University of Washington School of Law is hosting a small conference, from September 5-7, 2008 entitled, Legal Education at the Crossroads — Ideas to Accomplishments: Sharing New Ideas for an Integrated Curriculum.  The conference is intended to respond to suggestions from a Carnegie Foundation report, Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law.  The deadline for submitting proposals is May 15, 2008.  For more details, go here.

Topics: Legal Education

Dean Saul Levmore of the University of Chicago Law School has blocked student “access to the Internet in classrooms last month to help them concentrate on course instruction.” Apparently, Dean Levmore has received “inquiries from about 10 other law schools interested in possibly following suit on the move.”  For more details, go here & here.

Topics: Legal Education

Washington & Lee University School of Law plans to reinvent its third year curriculum by making it a year of “professional development through simulated and actual practice experiences”.  For more details, go here.

Topics: Legal Education

The Green Bag will launch a new ranking this spring called the Deadwood Report.  This annual report will assess “whether faculty members do the work that the law schools say they do.”  The editors explained that law schools “generally hold themselves out as institutions led by faculties whose members are committed to teaching, scholarship, and service….The Deadwood Report will simply test the accuracy of that picture.”    For many more details, including methodology and reaction from law school officials, read this article from Inside Higher Education & this SSRN article.

Topics: Law School Rankings; Legal Education

According to a recent ABA Journal article, “nationwide enrollment of African-American and Mexican-American students in U.S. law schools is down significantly since 1992 and could drop further.”  The article cites statistics gathered by folks at Columbia Law School and the Society of American Law Teachers.   According to Vernellia Randall, a professor at the University of Dayton School of Law in Ohio,  “it’s going to get a whole lot worse before it gets better.”  Randall has put together a report entitled America’s Whitest Law Schools. 

Topics: Legal Education

Take a look at this interesting article that was written by J. Robert Brown at The University of Denver Sturm College of Law: Of Empires, Independents, and Captives: Law Blogging, Law Scholarship, and Law School Rankings.

Abstract: Law faculty blogs have been around for much of the new millennium. This article examines these blogs, including their role in the legal scholarship continuum and their growing influence of legal community. The paper begins with an evolutionary study, noting that law blogging originally began in a state of nature, with few rules governing frequency or content of posts. Increased competition and the emergence of Empire and Captive law blogs, however, has resulted in a growing sense of order on the legal blogosphere. Perhaps as a result, the influence of law blogs has increased. The paper relies on a list of approximately 130 law faculty blogs and studies the frequency of law review and case citations. The numbers have been undergoing significant growth. The growth is particularly noteworthy given the difficulty in searching for material posted on the Internet.

Topics: Law School Rankings; Legal Education

Andrea A. Curcio, Gregory Todd Jones, Tanya M. Washington, Law School and Bar Examination Performance: Developing an Empirical Model to Test Whether Required Writing Exercises or Other Changes in Large-Section Law Class Teaching Methodologies Result in Improved Exam Performance, 57 J. Legal Educ. 195 (2007)

Topics: Legal Education

Take a look National Jurist’s recently released list of average starting salaries for law school graduates.  To view the list, go here.

Topics: Legal Education