The Volokh Conspiracy - An Exciting Hiring Season at George Mason Law School:

We've hired eight candidates this year--two laterals and six entry-levels, with one more offer still outstanding. Meanwhile, no one is leaving, so this is a net gain of at last eight new faculty members on a faculty of about thirty.

Some of the highlights:

We only extended eight offers to yield our six entry-level acceptances, an impressive, and unprecedented for us, "yield". (Okay, one of our hires wasn't otherwise on the market, but that's still five out of seven.)

Several of our new professors turned down offers from "higher-ranked" (according to U.S. News) law schools, and others canceled pending job talks at such schools in favor of accepting our offer. We've lost faculty to some of these schools in the past, which makes our success this year especially sweet.

We were able to fill some longstanding curricular needs. Jay Verrett, for example, will help cover our business law courses, and Helen Alvare, a lateral from Catholic, will teach family law.

Four of our new faculty members work in the area of intellectual property. George Mason has long had an excellent IP program, staffed primarily by an amazing group of part-time and adjunct faculty, but we've struggled to develop a core group of full-time IP faculty. (Most recently, President Bush appointed my former colleague Kimberly Moore to the Federal Circuit.) Suddenly, next year we are going to have what has to be the most talented and interesting group of young IP scholars in the country. Joining our current faculty members with an interest in IP, Bruce Kobayashi and Samson Vermont, will be Laura Bradford (currently a visiting assistant professor at GMU), T.J. Chiang, Adam Mossoff (a lateral from Michigan state), and Chris Newman, formerly of Irell and currently a research fellow at UCLA.

Our seventh and eighth hires are Jonathan Mitchell, currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago, and Harvard Climenko Fellow David Schleicher, both extremely impressive individuals.

Admittedly, as chair of the appointments committee this year I'm biased, but I think that our junior faculty, which also includes co-blogger Ilya, Sam, Neomi Rao, Joshua Wright, Nathan Sale, and Allison Hayward, now compares favorably with any junior faculty in the country.

UPDATE: More good George Mason news: Our alum (and my former student) Jon Klick, formerly of Florida State, has accepted an offer from the University of Pennsylvania Law School.

	[David Bernstein, March 31, 2008 at 10:16am] Trackbacks An Exciting Hiring Season at George Mason Law School: We've hired eight candidates this year--two laterals and six entry-levels, with one more offer still outstanding. Meanwhile, no one is leaving, so this is a net gain of at last eight new faculty members on a faculty of about thirty. Some of the highlights: We only extended eight offers to yield our six entry-level acceptances, an impressive, and unprecedented for us, "yield". (Okay, one of our hires wasn't otherwise on the market, but that's still five out of seven.) Several of our new professors turned down offers from "higher-ranked" (according to U.S. News) law schools, and others canceled pending job talks at such schools in favor of accepting our offer. We've lost faculty to some of these schools in the past, which makes our success this year especially sweet. We were able to fill some longstanding curricular needs. Jay Verrett, for example, will help cover our business law courses, and Helen Alvare, a lateral from Catholic, will teach family law. Four of our new faculty members work in the area of intellectual property. George Mason has long had an excellent IP program, staffed primarily by an amazing group of part-time and adjunct faculty, but we've struggled to develop a core group of full-time IP faculty. (Most recently, President Bush appointed my former colleague Kimberly Moore to the Federal Circuit.) Suddenly, next year we are going to have what has to be the most talented and interesting group of young IP scholars in the country. Joining our current faculty members with an interest in IP, Bruce Kobayashi and Samson Vermont, will be Laura Bradford (currently a visiting assistant professor at GMU), T.J. Chiang, Adam Mossoff (a lateral from Michigan state), and Chris Newman, formerly of Irell and currently a research fellow at UCLA. Our seventh and eighth hires are Jonathan Mitchell, currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago, and Harvard Climenko Fellow David Schleicher, both extremely impressive individuals. Admittedly, as chair of the appointments committee this year I'm biased, but I think that our junior faculty, which also includes co-blogger Ilya, Sam, Neomi Rao, Joshua Wright, Nathan Sale, and Allison Hayward, now compares favorably with any junior faculty in the country. UPDATE: More good George Mason news: Our alum (and my former student) Jon Klick, formerly of Florida State, has accepted an offer from the University of Pennsylvania Law School.