Thursday, April 17, 2008

Bravo to Bill Henderson & Andy Morriss (as always)

For their op-ed in the National Law Journal (here) about other choices that students can make, in light of the rankings.

Wednesday, April 09, 2008

Are bankruptcy judges unconstitutional?

Another one of my colleagues here at UNLV, Tuan Samahon, has made some interesting arguments that they are--see here. (If you're getting the impression that there's cool work being done here at UNLV, you're right!)

A new take on article selection for law reviews

One of my colleagues at UNLV, Rachel Anderson, has posted an intriguing article on SSRN about market failure in the selection of articles for law reviews. See here for the draft.

Monday, April 07, 2008

Mobblog on legal education over at Madisonian.net

Thanks to Mike Madison & Deven Desai, there's a fun mobblog going on at Madisonian.net: see here for Erwin Chemerinsky's first post, here for Mike Madison's first post, here for Deven Desai's first post, and here for my first post. Enjoy!

Wondering about the fate of the billable hour?

I'm going to be at DePaul's one-day conference on Lawyers, Law Firms, and the Legal Profession: An Ethical View of the Business of Law (click here for more information). This year's conference, part of the Commercial Law League of America's Spring Meeting in Chicago (here) seems particularly timely, and the speakers are going to be quite good. More than a few of my colleagues from the American Bankruptcy Institute (here) are going to speak at the DePaul conference. After that one-day event, I'm hightailing it over to the University of Illinois for the University of Illinois & ABI's co-sponsored Interdisciplinary Academic Symposium on Debt (here). May is going to be a very, very interesting month....

You've gotta love this--the perfect decanal letter(s) responding to USNWR rankings

Thanks to the WSJ.com Law Blog, you can now read University of Tennessee law prof Gregory Stein's parodies of decanal letters responding to increases and decreases in the USNWR rankings (here). Bravo!

Saturday, April 05, 2008

A must-read blog post by Jeff Lipshaw

If you ever wonder what lawyers and other service providers in the corporate world are thinking when they give grey-area advice that might precipitate a corporate scandal, then you'll want to read Jeff Lipshaw's post, Realism and Idealism in Business Ethics:  A Post-Bear Reflection, on Daniel Solove's Concurring Opinions blog (see here).  Jeff was in the "real world" before he entered academia, and his perspective on what good boards should want is invaluable.  Bravo, Jeff!

Yet more suggestions about the rankings

See Daniel Solove's very sensible observations (here).  

Tuesday, April 01, 2008

More suggestions about changing the rankings

See Brian Leiter's open letter to Bob Morse of USNWR (here). Although I don't agree with all of Brian's suggestions, I certainly commend his efforts to suggest ways of reducing schools' abilities to game the rankings with easily manipulable or fraudulent data. As I suggest in an earlier post (here), let's continue brainstorming ways to make these rankings more useful as a consumer tool. They're not going to go away, and they're not going to stop being ordinal in nature (my biggest objection to them); but at least we can suggest ways to make them less bad. Shout-outs to Anonymous (but any of you could take credit for the comment, as it's anonymous) and to Ann Bartow for their comments on my earlier post.