Ken White at Popehat reports on the bureaucratic blindness of officials at Modesto Junior College, where a student was told he needed to fill out a form in order to obtain permission to handout copies of the U.S. Constitution on campus in honor of Constitution Day, and that he could only hand out the materials […]
Archive | Academia
Coase and UVA
The Charlottesville Hook has an article suggesting Ronald Coase and James Buchanan were both pushed out of the University of Virginia due to ideological objections to their work. (HT: Michelle Meyer) If true, UVA got its just deserts, as both were awarded Nobel Prizes in Economics after their respective departures. More here.
SCIL Loses First Amendment Challenge to Bar Passage Disclosure Requirement
By Jonathan H. Adler on August 21, 2013 8:38 pm in Academia, Bar Exam, Freedom of Speech, Law Schools, Legal Profession
As I noted here, the Southern California Institute of Law sought to challenge a requirement that it disclose the bar passage rate of its graduates. The San Francisco Chronicle reports that the judge was not too impressed with this argument. SCIL’s attorney says the school may appeal. More from the WSJ Law Blog and ABA Journal.
The “New Normal” in the Legal Profession
By Jonathan H. Adler on August 18, 2013 12:11 pm in Academia, Law School Tuition and Loans, Law Schools, Legal Profession
UNC’s Bernard Burk has an interesting new paper on changes to the legal profession and legal job market, “What’s New About the New Normal: The Evolving Market for New Lawyers in the 21st Century.” Here’s the abstract: Everyone agrees that job prospects for many new law graduates have been poor for the last several years; […]
California Law School Claims First Amendment Right Not to Report Bar Passage Rates
By Jonathan H. Adler on August 17, 2013 2:29 pm in Academia, Bar Exam, Freedom of Speech, Law Schools, Legal Profession
The WSJ Law Blog reports that the Southern California Institute of Law claims that it cannot be required to disclose the bar passage rate of its graduates as a condition of accreditation. Such a requirement, SCIL claims, runs afoul of the First Amendment. Southern California Institute of Law is suing bar association officials for requiring […]
Benno Schmidt on Academic Freedom
Prompted by the outcry over criticism of pop-left historian Howard Zinn by then-governor Mitch Daniels, Benno Schmidt (the President of Yale University when I was an undergraduate), wrote a good op-ed on the issue of academic freedom. Here’s a taste: Academic freedom is faculty’s freedom to teach. But, more important, it is also students’ freedom […]
On the Value of a Law Degree
By Jonathan H. Adler on July 18, 2013 4:40 pm in Academia, Law School Tuition and Loans, Law Schools, Legal Profession
In the NYT‘s Dealbook column, Ohio State’s Steven Davidoff discusses a new study, “The Economic Value of a Law Degree,” by Michael Simkovic and Frank McIntyre. This study purports to show that a law degree remains a good investment for many people. Here is the study’s abstract: Legal academics and journalists have marshaled statistics purporting […]
Getting the Details of Online Courses Right Is Likely to Be More Difficult Than Anticipated
I’m afraid I’ve been absent from blogging for quite a while, but am eager to pick it up again on a more regular basis … and one reason I’ve been away from blogging is some work on online higher ed. There’s a lot of discussion about MOOCs – Massive Open Online Courses – and while […]
Joseph Massad Update
Long-time readers will recall the controversy over tenure for Columbia professor Joseph Massad. Massad’s defenders argued that his tenure was only in doubt because pro-Israel forces were out to get him due to his anti-Israel views. I wrote in response, after Massad received tenure It’s often alleged, as in the Finkelstein case at DePaul, that […]
Joel Alicea on Intellectual Diversity in the Legal Academy
Last month, I posted about a first-rate conference at Harvard Law School on the topic of intellectual diversity in the legal academy. Joel Alicea, the student who organized the conference, has a nice op-ed in the Washington Times on this topic today. Here is how it begins: “One cannot truly understand a legal argument on […]
My Review Fear Itself by Ira Katznelson
has been published at Reason.com. It’s not a favorable review–I argue that Katznelson grossly exaggerates the extent to which FDR was stymied from pursuing a progressive agenda by the power of southern Congressmen, and that he is unpersuasive in excusing some of Roosevelt’s worst policies on the grounds that the alternative was to put democracy […]
Congratulations to Jeffrey Rosen, New President and CEO of the National Constitution Center
My law school classmate and GW professor Jeff Rosen has been named the new president and CEO of the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. Jeff and I have sometimes sparred on this blog (no, Jeff, there is no still such thing as the “Constitution in Exile movement,”) but he’s a top notch and amazingly prolific […]
Eliminating the “C” in Law School Grading?
By Kenneth Anderson on May 12, 2013 2:28 pm in Academia, Law Schools, Legal Professor, Uncategorized
Via Paul Caron at TaxProfBlog and the Wall Street Journal Law Blog, a proposal by Joshua Silverstein, law professor at Little Rock-Arkansas William Bowen School of Law, to eliminate the “C” in law school grading. Here is the SSRN abstract for “A Case for Grade Inflation in Legal Education,” forthcoming in University of San Francisco […]
The Highest-Paid Government Employee in Your State is Probably a Football or Basketball Coach
At Deadspin, Reuben Fischer-Baum has an interesting piece cataloguing the highest-paid state employees in each of the fifty states. Forty of fifty are coaches, all but one of them in either football or basketball. As Fischer-Baum notes, this state of affairs is not quite as egregious as it may at first seem. Many of these […]
Diversity at Harvard Law School
The Harvard Crimson is currently running “a three-part series on gender disparity issues at [Harvard] Law School.” Part I reports that there are 17 tenured or tenure-track women out of 92 total on the Harvard Law School faculty. It goes on to report: Since she took the helm of the school four years ago, [Dean] […]