Bravo to the Green Bag!

Thanks to Inside Higher Education, Brian Leiter, my dad, and the Green Bag itself, there's a new ranking system in town: Green Bag's Deadwood Report system.

Different from HBO's 2004 Deadwood TV series, Green Bag "will [focus] on the most dully objective of measures: whether the work is being done – whether each law school faculty member is teaching courses, publishing scholarly works, and performing pro bono service."

Here's how it will work, according to the Green Bag itself:

Step 1: We will download a law school’s web pages containing (a) its list of “faculty”; (b) its current and recent course schedules and catalogs; and (c) its individual faculty profile pages containing vitas or lists of publications.

Step 2: We will compile our data. We are interested in providing information about the current state of a school’s faculty, so our focus will be on recent scholarship and recent teaching (and, in due course, recent service). A school whose faculty is heavy with people who used to be active might do well in a citation or reputation study, but it will do poorly in the Deadwood Report. After all, should today’s students be enrolling in schools where the faculty used to be engaged, or in schools where the faculty is engaged now?

Step 3: We will analyze. We are still working on the finer points of our sorting and weighing of various kinds of teaching and scholarship, but we are committed to a few basic ideas, including the following: First, we are interested in well-rounded, active faculty members, and so we will give more weight to the moderately active teacher-writer than to the hyper-writer who neglects teaching or the hyper-teacher who neglects writing. A specialist in neglecting both won’t be worth much. Second, we are interested in well-rounded, active faculties, and so we will seek to avoid perpetuating illusions of faculty strength that can result when one or two or a few members of a faculty publish and teach a great deal, while the rest do relatively little or nothing. Third, we are interested in honest, useful self-promotion by law schools, and so we will go out of our way to reward accuracy and penalize its absence.

Step 4: We will send each school’s dean our school-specific preliminary results, and invite him or her to send us a reasonably quick response identifying any inaccuracies in our work or on the school’s website.

Step 5: We will correct our errors. Then we will re-visit each law school’s website and incorporate any corrections we find there.

Step 6: We will publish our results.

Step 7: We will do it all over again for the next school year.

(Footnote omitted.) I've posted some thoughts about the ramifications about this new rankings system over at MoneyLaw (here).

More on Judge Sneed's passing....

Over at one of my favorite blogs, TaxProf Blog (here).

Why the anonymous posts?

I've been wondering why people post comments to blogs on an anonymous basis. Are they afraid of being harassed? Are they shy? Are they uncomfortable putting their names on their opinions?

So far, I've allowed anonymous posting, but most of what I've seen is just nasty stuff, which leads to my conclusion that only cowards post anonymously. If there's another reason for anonymous posting, especially on blogs like mine, please tell me what those reasons might be.

Judge Joseph T. Sneed III

Judge Joseph T. Sneed III died last week. I had the pleasure of clerking for him during the 1985-86 term, and here are just some of my recollections:

• Roughly the first week of the clerkship, he asked me to be the clerk who would drive him around Pasadena when he was sitting in Southern California. I greeted him with pink mirrored sunglasses and drove like a bat out of hell. He always got our co-clerk Bob to drive him places after that.
• He had seminars with his clerks almost every week, where we'd bring in slip opinions and dissect them with him. Once a law professor, always a law professor.
• Even though he was a Nixon appointee and I was much more liberal than he, he always impressed me as being very willing to do whatever the law actually mandated (more so than some of the more liberal judges on the court, who were known for bending the law to suit their own purposes). In that sense, I always thought of him as a true conservative.
• Judge Sneed's wife, Madelon, was a delight--a painter of some skill, she managed to make their home's dining room follow the shading of the San Francisco sun (what there was of it) with the colors that she used to decorate it.
• We did a workload study during my clerkship year to figure out where the logjams were. They most certainly weren't in his chambers. He was an efficient writer and a tireless worker. He also didn't take most federal holidays off, so we didn't, either.
• David Goodwin, another former Sneed clerk, and I had the pleasure of taking Judge Sneed's oral history for the Ninth Circuit's Historical Society. It's fair to say that Judge Sneed was Zelig-like in the ways in which he was at the center of some big issues in the 60s and 70s.
• I'm still close friends with one of the Judge's secretaries--one of the luckiest things to come out of the clerkship has been getting to know Carol Brown. I've also managed to stay in touch, intermittently, with two of his externs.
• He only spoke rarely about his daughter Carly. And she never answered my letters later on, when I was dean, asking her whether she'd speak at the law school. I would have liked to have met her, though.
• One of my theories about judges is that they are among the most silent of movers. Judge Sneed could move through the chambers almost as quietly as a sniper, which made for some fun with one of our co-clerks, who got a bit twitchy.

Judge Sneed contributed a great deal to legal education and to the law generally. I'll miss him.

I did it--I switched to a MacBook Pro!

Having gotten a full refund from Dell (thank you, Michael McKinney), I have switched laptop formats from Dell to a MacBook Pro, although I still have a Dell desktop.  Even though having an Apple computer is a tad like being a left-hander in a right-handed world, I love it:  I love the design, I love the sharpness of the screen, I love the fact that I've had it for two months and have not managed to break it.  So, bravo, Apple--thank you for making a good product that's fun to learn how to use!

And, Dad, you were right:  it is a spectacularly well-designed machine!

Death of the billable hour, part n+1

In this morning's NYT, Lisa Belkin's article, Who's Cuddly Now? Law Firms, caught my eye. As I've predicted (see here for an example), law firms are starting to move away from billable hours to more client-friendly, lawyer-friendly forms of fees. She points out that clients "reacting to spiraling legal costs, have begun insisting on flat-fee deals." She also notes that the newest generation of lawyers wants a more balanced life.

This is, to quote every parody of Martha Stewart ever done, a Good Thing: billable hours tempt fraudulent behavior (a one-minute phone call as a 15-minute increment of a fee?), punish the efficient lawyer, and grind inexorably on the quality of life of lawyers who do want to take time to do their jobs well. With alternative methods of billing, big-firm lawyers can concentrate on the professional side of their lives, in much the same way that their smaller-firm and contingency fee colleagues have been doing for decades.

By the way, thanks to Gil Grantmore for fixing the formatting of this post.

Bye, bye, lessons that we can learn from Enron

What with the Stoneridge case and the denial of certiorari in the Enron shareholder lawsuit, it's pretty clear that Enron--along with any lesson that we hoped to draw from it--is drawing to a sad, useless close. The more things change, etc., etc. See, e.g., here for comments about the Enron appeal.

It's all about the incentives....

Jared Sandberg's WSJ column today, Why Learn and Grow on the Job? It's Easier to Feign Infallibility, reminds me how important the right incentives are in business. Bad behavior unpunished is no different, really, from bad behavior rewarded. Enron wasn't that long ago, you know, and with the ink from the USSC's Stoneridge decision still wet, we're going to see continued bad behavior. We need to develop incentives that work, if we want to stop trying to learn the same lessons over and over again.

(And yes, I read the NYT, too....)

For all of my friends who know my political leanings, guess what? John Yoo is right about the lawsuit against him.

See his op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, here. For those of you who don't subscribe to the WSJ, here's an excerpt:

In a case about warrantless national security wiretaps ordered by Nixon's attorney general, John Mitchell, the court declared that executive branch officials should benefit from qualified immunity. Officials cannot be sued personally unless they had intentionally violated someone's clearly established constitutional rights.

Legal Ethics Nightmare Comes True--Sort Of

I'm assuming that other folks saw this article in the Saturday New York Times: Lawyer Reveals Secret, Toppling Death Sentence. It's about a lawyer who knew about alleged prosecutorial misconduct but kept it confidential until he was advised that he could speak up about it at last.

Adam Liptak's lead sentence of the article matches everyone's classic ethics hypo about confidentiality:

For 10 years, Leslie P. Smith, a Virginia lawyer, reluctantly kept a secret because the authorities on legal ethics told him he had no choice, even though his information could save the life of a man on death row, one whose case had led to a landmark Supreme Court decision.

The headline meme....

Jim Chen has tagged me, over at Jurisdynamics, to do my own version of the following four headlines:

Headline I most fear seeing in 2008:  2008 Exactly the Same as 2007; No Changes Predicted for 2009, Either

Headline I most want to see in 2008: Public Realizes Education Can Be Useful; Funding Increases

Headline I most expect to see in 2008:  Corporations Decide Pillaging Can Be Expensed; Congress Agrees

Headline I least expect to see in 2008:  Congress Swears Off Legislating Before Investigating Root Causes of Corporate Scandals

Now I tag Jack Ayer and John Steinberg.  Have fun!

Nice one, Cameron!

For those of you who missed Cameron Stracher's op-ed on the rankings, see here. For those of you who don't subscribe to the WSJ, here's an excerpt:

Of course there are other things that matter to law-school graduates -- like getting a job. Although the U.S. News rankings purport to measure a school's success at placing its graduates into gainful employment, the rankings do not distinguish between success at placing students at high-paying corporate law jobs versus low-paying paralegal-type jobs. Nor do they distinguish between jobs that graduates want and the jobs that graduates get. Students who assume that going to a more highly ranked school is more likely to get them a good job are essentially being misled by lazy reporting.

The U.S. News rankings are also heavily weighted toward reputation, which would seem to have some real world significance. But again, "reputation" is misleading, and often irrelevant. Beyond the top 20 or so law schools, law firms care less about the ranking of a school when making hiring decision and more about the ranking of the students at the schools.

Put a different way, there are really two kinds of law schools: those at which students decide where they want to interview, and those where firms decide. The large majority of law schools belong to the latter group. Hiring partners admit that they use GPA or other bright-line criteria (like law review membership) to interview at Tier 2, 3, and 4 schools, while taking resumes from nearly everyone at Tier 1 schools.

In short: The difference between the 55th-ranked law school and the 105th law school is of little significance in determining which students are more likely to get a good job. At both schools, unless a student is in the top 15% or 20% of his class, he has little chance of getting a high-paying job directly upon graduation. Students might be better served by going to a lower-ranked law school and doing better, rather than going to middling law school and not doing as well.

Students and parents are led astray by U.S. News because in putting a simple number on something that is incredibly complex, they are missing the nuances that are likely to be more important. But schools themselves -- high schools and law schools -- are partly to blame, because they resist fully disclosing important information.

Just as law schools would better serve their constituencies by releasing accurate information about numbers that matter -- bar results, jobs, and average salaries -- high schools should make more of an effort to fully disclose test scores, college admissions, class sizes and other important data. More information may put some schools under a harsh light. But it will help students and parents decide whether those high taxes and tuition rates are worth it. The alternative is letting U.S. News decide for us.

A couple of op-eds that resonated....

As we start out in 2008 (and here's wishing everyone a good 2008), I wanted to note a couple of op-eds that resonated with me:  one from the New York Times on December 26, suggesting that creative mortgages aren't such a bad idea, as long as those lenders who are offering them can explain them clearly to the borrowers (Michael S. Barr, Sendhil Mullainathan, and Eldar Shafir, A One-Size-Fits-All Solution, here), and one from the Wall Street Journal on December 28, pointing out that adding new laws to deal with the subprime crisis won't be nearly as useful as will figuring out why humans do some of the dumb, self-destructive things that we do (Neil Weinberg, Subprime Conduct, here).

Thanks for the plug, Paul!

A hat tip to Paul Caron for mentioning this book on MoneyLaw and TaxProf Blog: Law School Leadership Strategies: Top Deans on Benchmarking Success, Incorporating Feedback from Faculty and Students, and Building the Endowment. Thanks, Paul!

Ann Bartow: tag, you're it!

Jim Chen, the stalwart dean of the U of Louisville School of Law, has started a bad movie meme over at Jurisdynamics, and he's tagged me first.

Nice try, Jim, nominating Caligula. I think, however, we can reach lower: I nominate a bad movie from an actress whose work I normally like. I loved Melanie Griffith in Working Girl, but something went woefully wrong in A Stranger Among Us.

In this movie, Ms. Griffith plays a detective who has to go undercover in a Hasidic community. I don't know why the mix went wrong: the director's great (Sidney Lumet); the writer's great (Robert J. Avrech); the cast is great. But the movie's glimpse into life inside and outside the Hasidic cluster just fell flat, and Ms. Griffith's delivery of a line something like "stop, or I'll shoot" in her soft voice just didn't work for me. I was originally considering nominating Sheena, which was a very, very, VERY bad movie, although the flamingo-wrangler did a good job.

The difference, though, is that Sheena must have known it was going to be bad from the get-go. My guess is that people hoped for more from A Stranger Among Us.

Ann Bartow, of the wonderful blog Feminist Law Profs: I'd love to hear from you next. Tag, you're it!

A nice way to put things in perspective this week.

Hat tip to our friend Scott Unger for sending it along--thanks, Scott!

Latest lawyer joke--except that it's not one.

In yesterday's Wall Street Journal: "Except in One Career, Our Brains Seem Built for Optimism."

The only career where optimism wasn't, well, optimal? Law.

Anthony Ciolli gets dismissed from lawsuit

To see how disgusting some of the comments posted on AutoAdmit were, see here. The people who posted such things demonstrated their immaturity (at best) and their own venal natures (at worst). Nothing I've ever said condones the material that these people posted. I've been a victim of it, too (back when I was at the UH Law Center), albeit with less-nasty comments.

But Anthony Ciolli has been dismissed as a defendant in the case. For more info, click here.

Happy birthday, Marines!

I know some honorable people, although there are few enough truly honorable people that I can count the ones I know on two hands. But I know of one honorable group for sure:

Follow this link (here) for more. Happy birthday, Marines!

And now, for something completely different [in the law school publications wars]

I enjoyed Brian Leiter's comments about SUNY-Buffalo's latest publication (here). Having recycled my share of "law porn" this year, I'm actually looking forward to reading Buffalo's publication.

BTW, for those of you who said that I seemed a tad bitter about UH's 2004-2007 faculty publications PR piece, fair 'nuff. I am a tad bitter. The last few years at UH were brutal for me--so bad that it's taken me over a year to recover even this much from the experience. But I'll get over it. Life in Sin City is gooooooooood, and life at the Boyd School of Law is simply marvelous.