Archive | Academia

A surprisingly common path: It looks like you just need to make a pit stop as a law school Dean for a few years. (Hat Tip: Dan Filler)

We discussed the site The Legal Workshop when it opened in April 2009, and I thought folks might appreciate a reminder. The site features short summaries of new law review articles published in participating journals.

The faculty hiring season is well under way.  The first distribution of AALS FAR forms are out, appointments committees are dissecting reams of resumes and scheduling interviews, and pre-meat-market anxiety is building. Do faculty hiring committees focus on the “right stuff” in prospective faculty hires?  Georgetown adjunct (and Sentencing Commission deputy staff director) Brent Newton […]

Ben Kaplan, a legendary Harvard Law professor who also served as a Justice on the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, passed away a few days ago at the age of 99. Kaplan began teaching at Harvard in 1947, and as a state court judge he continued to write opinions for the Massachusetts Court of Appeals […]

If you’re just starting out as a law professor this fall, here’s my advice: 1) Prepare to spend much more time teaching than you expect. Teaching any class for the first time is intensely time consuming, especially when you have never taught before. Among new law teachers, it’s common to spend about 10-15 hours prepping […]

I just wanted to remind lawprof readers that several sections of the AALS have a Call for Papers out for its January 2011 Meeting in San Francisco. For example, my colleague Greg Maggs informs me that the Section on Commercial and Related Consumer Law has posted a call for papers on the federal Credit Card […]

NYU lawprof Rick Hills has posted a good critique of Brian Leiter’s (and others’) defenses for tenure (for which see here and here). For my own criticisms of tenure, see here, here, and here. Some of the exchange between Hills and Leiter has do with possible conflicts of interest in the debate. For example, Leiter […]

Professors often lament that today’s students do not work as hard or are not as well prepared as in the past.  Others claim the good old days really weren’t that good, that professors idealize the past have a distorted view of how much work the average student put in when we were in school.  Then again, […]

The NYT has an interesting article on the apparent increase in plagiarism by college students.  Why is this happening?  One explanation the story offers is that “many students simply do not grasp that using words they did not write is a serious misdeed.”  And this, in turn, is the fault of the Internet: It is […]

Larry Solum has a short introduction posted on SSRN entitled The New Realities of the Legal Academy, in which Larry argues that the entry-level hiring process for law professors has undergone a major transformation in the last few decades. It’s true that hiring standards have changed: More highly-credentialed candidates want to teach, and scholarly standards […]

In a recent post, Orin (relying on an argument by H. Lorne Carmichael) cites faculty self-selection as an argument for tenure: The basic idea is that tenure is a necessary evil because faculties vote on who to let join them: If professors know that their own jobs will be in jeopardy if they hire someone […]

The New York Times has a forum debating the institution of academic tenure. Economics blogger Megan McArdle recently criticized the institution in this blog post. One of the interesting aspects of the tenure system is that even many of its principal beneficiaries – tenured professors – agree that it is a severely flawed institution that […]