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Rankings: A Dramatization of the Incentives Created by Ranking Law Schools

Jeff Sovern, St. John’s University School of Law professor and author of the Consumer Law & Policy Blog, has taken advantage of an unusual format to comment on the current law school ranking system.

Sovern this week has published Rankings: A Dramatization of the Incentives Created by Ranking Law Schools. He uses the format of a play to more vividly express “how the incentives created by a ranking system could affect law schools and their administrators, faculty, and students”:

Sellers in a competitive market shift resources from attributes buyers don’t care about to attributes buyers do care about. In markets in which buyers rely on imperfect signals for quality, sellers move resources away from improving the quality of their product to enhancing the illusion of quality. For example, before freshness dating, when consumers tested the freshness of bread by squeezing it, bakers reportedly added chemicals to bread to preserve its softness longer, thereby creating the illusion of freshness. Similarly, law school rankings encourage schools to shift resources away from improving the quality of the education they provide in favor of investing in improving their standings in the rankings.

As patrons of the legal arts, the very many editors of BoleyBlogs! enjoyed and informally acted out the play in our blogger cubicles. Entertaining even without the proper stage equipment and lighting, the script is likewise a good read for those not relating to the master thespian within. All you need is an interest in the unfortunate results of the current law school ranking system.

Source: Legal Blog Watch

Big-Firm Associates: Why They Go and How to Keep Them

All the indicators are up for associates at the largest law firms – salaries, bonuses, recruiting classes, internships – yet one critical indicator is down. Big-firm associates are leaving in droves after three to four years, most often at the associate’s choice. Why is this happening and how to keep them are the questions raised in this Corporate Counsel article, Big-Firm Associates: Why They Go and How to Keep Them.

Building on After the JD: First Results of a National Study of Legal Careers (pdf), by American Bar Foundation and Harvard Law School’s Program on the Legal Profession, the authors address,

Why associates are leaving:

[W]e believe that for a significant number, their first professional experience after at least seven years of higher education is too unprofessional and demoralizing. That disappointment is a major reason for leaving their firm.

. . .

Big-firm associates, then, may be a lost generation: a cohort of junior lawyers whose initial professional experience is extremely unsatisfying, who are turned off by the traditional rite of passage in a large firm, and who are not developing as legal professionals in the broadest sense of that phrase.

And what needs to be done:

In the end, the answer is coherent, systematic, up-front law firm investment in young lawyer development programs within the firm, not fancier recruiting restaurants, to develop skilled, energized lawyers who can, and will, provide longer-term value to the firm — and to the profession.

Be sure to read the article for all of the details, arguments and full conclusions drawn by the authors.

Source: Law Librarian Blog

Law Prof Blog Rankings

Jack Bog’s Blog, the work of Lewis & Clark Law School’s own Professor Jack Bogdanski, turns up twice on the latest list of most popular law professor blogs.

Bogdanski’s Jack Bog’s Blog is the 7th most trafficked law prof blog based on page views, also ranking 12th based on number of visitors — somehow sneaking past this, well, more stoically popular BoleyBlogs.

Source: Law Librarian Blog

This week marks the release of a substantial amount of federal case law on the web, for free, for the first time. Public.Resource.Org and Creative Commons have jointly made available at http://bulk.resource.org/courts.gov/ all U.S. Supreme Court decisions and all U.S. Courts of Appeals decisions from 1950 on – the equivalent of 1,858 volumes of case law in book form.

The goal is the “creation of an unencumbered repository of federal case law,” all part of an effort to create a distributed, sustainable, unencumbered system for accessing the law. Thus, federal case law is being released with the Creative Commons CC0 (CCZero) label, “indicating that the contents are Works of the United States Government and are thus free of copyright or other restrictions for their dissemination and reuse.”

Though Public.Resource.Org just released the first iteration of the raw data, others have already begun to make the case law available in full-fledged search tools. AltLaw, the wonderful effort of Columbia and University of Colorado Law Schools to bring federal case law to the people, has now incorporated the Courts of Appeals cases from 1950 into their system. Now all U.S. Supreme Court Cases (from the beginning) and Courts of Appeals (from 1950) decisions may be searched using their effective, quick and Google-like search system.

Also, Elmer Masters of CALI has grabbed the data and created an awfully good looking Find a Case! alpha front-end for a version to use with CALI’s eLangdell open course materials project. In part, CALI will use the data as a source for legal faculty to link to cases in online course materials, textbooks, collaborative research, open publishing, etc.

The raw data comes from the Fastcase legal research system, purchased with the help of foundations and individuals (including David Boies and John Gilmore), and via donations from William S. Hein & Co. (think HeinOnline) and Justia.

Read a fine overview of the issues and people involved, including the use of cases scanned straight from West Reporters, at Free Online Access to U.S. Court Decisions by Douglas S. Malan, The Connecticut Law Tribune (Feb. 19, 2008).

The School Law Blog

The very many editors of this very blog have a bit of an interest in school law issues. Which explains this use of the power of editorial choice to highlight just one of the many new legal blogs still regularly appearing online: The School Law Blog

Published by Education Week, The School Law Blog is the work of longtime school law beat reporter and now Managing Editor Mark Walsh. His plan:

To be newsy, with lots of links to court decisions on matters of interest to educators, policymakers, lawyers who handle education cases, and parents. When appropriate, I’ll also try to offer analysis and insight.

A journalist visiting a few years back from The Times Educational Supplement, a British newspaper that is somewhat akin to Education Week, asked me why we had a school law beat. He was surprised when I told him that lawyers and judges can play such a significant role in the operation of U.S. public schools, and that the Supreme Court is often at the center of some of the most contentious education issues. For better or worse, that is how it is in this country.

Topics to be covered include Diversity, Curriculum & Learning, No Child Left Behind, Testing & Accountability, Leadership & Management, Law & Courts, Special Education, Technology, Safety & Health, Charters & Choice, Finance, Colleges & Careers, Research and Teachers.

Source: How Appealing

The Faculty Lounge

Fighting a bit of a recent trend of burned-out bloggers, Dan Filler of the College of Law at Drexel University along with five other faculty from across the nation (including Willamette Law’s Laura Appleman) have begun a new venture in legal blogging, The Faculty Lounge.

Noting the forlorn current state of most law school faculty lounges – “often empty or barely populated, as we all fall prey to the incessant demands and overload of modern life,” this faculty lounge is “online, 24-7, easily accessible, open to anyone who wants to talk ideas or ponder questions large and small.”

The vision:

We imagined a blog that shamelessly embraced both high theory and pop culture. A blog that accepted the all-too-true reality that everyone is too damn busy to read anything that isn’t engaging. A blog with multiple voices, some newer and some older.

It seemed to me that we wanted to recreate the experience of a faculty lounge. Where sometimes people are talking about a great new paper on SSRN, other times they’re lamenting the loss of a wonderful colleague to a competitor school, and once in a while they’re just amused by a funny bumper sticker they saw on the way to work. Where the senior colleague adds non-dairy creamer to his java while his youthful colleague steeps her organic hemp tea. And where you never know where the conversations will go next.

Plus it has a solid blogroll (’reading room’) of the best of the legal blogosphere. All in all, The Faculty Lounge should be well worth a regular visit.

Source: Concurring Opinions