Author Archive | Andrew Morriss

It has been enlightening in many ways to spend time here. Thanks to Eugene for the invitation and to all for the useful comments and the many emails off-line. The new semester starts next week and it’s time for me to get to work. I’ve also begun a new blog with Tom Bogart (York College), […]

A paper I coauthored with the Mercatus Center’s Susan Dudley on the history of the regulation of silica dust and the problems regulators face in defining exactly what it is they are regulating is available on SSRN. Silica is a big component in cat litter (hence the header) and some feared that the hazards of […]

I thought that the most interesting theory proposed in response to my question about the rationale for state ownership of law schools was that it minimized transactions costs to bundle the set of goods produced by law schools rather than buying them ala carte. (There was also an interesting “promote local legal culture” theory proposed, […]

Paul Caron has an interesting post on a poll he did of incoming U. Cincinnati students using the eInstruction handhelds. Paul is a consistently interesting scholar and innovative teacher. (And, in the link to my guest-blogging, organized the rankings conference that produced the paper that got me here. So, not too far off topic.)

Commentators on my last post on state support for law schools offered some additional rationales I didn’t include: 1) Having attorneys familiar with local law. 2) Contributing to a viable state legal culture. 3) Cronyism, patronage and institutionalized graft. 4) the library, at least, is a public resource. 5) providing a middle class subsidy. 6) […]

A comment on one of my earlier posts raised the question of what business state law schools have in attempting to increase rankings. This raises a couple of interesting questions, about which I wrote an op-ed several years ago: 1) Why should states have law schools at all? If there is a desire for more […]

Rankings systems like U.S. News‘ require lots of data to make them work. This is problematic with things like the reputation survey because the survey is likely generating mostly silly numbers. But there is some hope that a new source of data is going to be available via SSRN. At the rankings conference last spring, […]

I hope Eugene will forgive me one post that strays a bit from the topic of rankings. I’ve just posted a paper on SSRN that discusses the structure of legal education in the context of an argument about the constitutionality of the Solomon Amendment. Even if you don’t agree with me about the main point, […]

Bill and I conclude our paper on rankings with four recommendations – 3 for law schools and 1 for U.S. News. Here they are, with some additional commentary from me (which Bill may not necessarily endorse): 1) Non-elite schools should emphasize scholarships over scholarship. A law degree is an extraordinarily expensive investment (tuition, living expenses, […]

Our last important result concerned the reputation variables – one for academic reputation based on surveys of law faculty and one for lawyer/judge reputation based on a survey of lawyers and judges. U.S. News doesn’t include much detail about the surveys (things like response rates would be nice), but I’ve filled out the academic one […]

The importance law schools have placed on U.S. News rankings mean that schools are engaging in some gaming behavior. Indeed, law schools are – more or less – in the position of taxpayers figuring out how to manipulate the tax code to minimize their taxes. There is a fair amount of play in a number […]

One of the most striking results we found was that schools in strong legal job markets did better in terms than schools in weak legal job markets in raising their median LSAT scores. We used Am Law 200 firm growth (number of lawyers) as our measure of the legal job market because (1) we had […]

The idea of more rankings touched off a lot of comments to my last post, so I’d like to push the point a bit further before moving on to additional findings from the paper. (Everyone can read – and download – the whole paper here, and help Bill and me crack the top 10 downloaded […]

Brian Leiter posts a lengthy and informative email from Paul McKaskle, former dean of the University of San Francisco (mentioned in a comment to my earlier post, but I wanted to highlight it for those who don’t read all the comments). Dean McKaskle makes some interesting points about rankings in general and suggests a two […]

We found that within each segment of the market (i.e. the top quartile and everyone else), the schools that started out ahead in the 1992 U.S. News ranking (the first year the magazine published rankings) did better in terms of change in median LSAT. The data bears this out. Variable 1992 U.S. News Rank Mean […]