Via Tim Armstrong at Info/Law, I learned today that the Harvard Law School faculty voted to create an online open access repository of their scholarship.
To me, the vastly more interesting and provocative part of Tim’s post is a news item that I missed 10 days ago:  Berkman Center Executive Director John Palfrey will become the new […]

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Perhaps appropriately on the last day of this fascinating stream of mobbloging, I thought I would try and offer a partial defense of the-way-things-are-right now on the law review front:

Don’t romanticize the alternative: When one begins to publish in the peer-reviewed world, the whole romantic notion of blind review becomes somewhat tainted — in all […]

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Thanks to Deven all of us are thinking this week about an issue that we should indeed always be reflecting upon: realities and ideals of law schools. A law school is a multitude of things and has different meanings and consequences for different people. Law schools are workplaces, learning centers, research institutes, communities, and sometimes […]

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I’ve had the experience of serving on four different law school faculties, although my experience at Nebraska and Houston was skewed a bit, because being the dean of a school is quite different from being a typical faculty member.  People treat you differently when you’re the dean, and you’re privy both to more information (from […]

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Erwin Chemerinsky and Mike Madison have already gotten the ball rolling with two very thoughtful posts (here and here, respectively).  I want to add my own two cents by questioning the assumption that every law school should change in the same way.  Part of the problem with the condition of law schools today is the […]

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Thanks to Michael and Devan and the rest of the crew here for inviting me to join the conversation on “What kind of institution do we want a law school to be?”
The institution I’d like is, well, perhaps pretty close to the ones we already have–something like a mini university, or maybe it’s better analogized […]

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Susan Crawford has posted a helpful summary of a panel at last weekend’s American Association of Law Schools (AALS) Annual Meeting on “Implementing Scholarship.” Deborah Rhode (Stanford) and Harold Hongju Koh (Dean at Yale) both responded to a NYT column last Spring by Adam Liptak.  Liptak’s column reiterated the proposition that there is a problematic disconnect between […]

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Like several other folks who blog, I went up to Yale’s Reputation Economies conference last weekend. Plenty of others have offered thoughts about the conference (including Frank here). Eric Goldman has his own thoughts and a good list of links to other blogs and Rebecca Tushnet very helpfully posted panel-by-panel summaries.
It was an […]

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Orin Kerr blogged yesterday about a new Visiting Assistant Professor program in the works at Harvard Law School and attracted a pretty predictable chorus of critics (of Harvard, not Orin).  The post is hard on the heels of this post by Rick Swedloff at Concurring Opinions about law teaching fellowships, and Paul Caron’s roundup of […]

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Over at Concurring Opinions, Dan Solove has a thoughtful reaction to recent blogospheric angst over Brian Leiter’s citation impact studies of law faculty.  Let me explain.  No, there is too much.  Let me sum up. 
As faculty, we hate the rankings, and we’re utterly absorbed by them. 
Why?  This portion of Dan’s post caught my eye:
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Paul Caron at TaxProf is running a series of unsolicited “best big ideas” for incoming UC Irvine Dean Erwin Chemerinsky.  Here’s my contribution, posted yesterday:
The quality of the new lawyers who graduate from law schools depends heavily on the quality of the students that law schools enroll. So, for my single best idea, I would […]

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In the September 24 issue of Sports Illustrated, Peter King writes that Eric Mangini broke “a long-held code that NFL coaches live by: Don’t go against the family.”  According to King, there are three parts to the code:  1)  “don’t mess with a former colleague’s players,” 2) “don’t mess with a former colleague’s coaches,” and […]

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Together with the librarians at the University of Washington School of Law, faculty and librarians at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law today formally launched the Legal Scholarship Blog, at http://legalscholarshipblog.com/
The blog describes its mission this way:  The Legal Scholarship Blog
features law-related Call for Papers, Conferences, and Workshops as well as general legal scholarship resources. […]

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Summer is over already?  Wait, there’s that other thing.  Oh well.
To celebrate and commiserate, here’s a link to a series of posts that I wrote a couple of years ago for students coming to law school for the first time.  This link will carry through ten posts in all:  Welcome to Law School.
I followed that […]

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Today’s Boston Globe featured a story about a no confidence vote by the U. Massachusetts faculty against the U. Mass. President and Board of Trustees. The story mentions strong statements by faculty members to the President, who attended the meeting.
This story reminds me of the value of tenure, an institution under criticism within the […]

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Check out James Grimmelmann’s initial guestpost at Prawfsblawg, reflecting on law practice and legal theory and their analogues in computer science. 
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Release of this year’s U.S. News & World Report ranking of law schools is only days away, and I’ve been thinking about this recent paper on the growth in the number of “Research Dean” positions at American law schools over the last decade. The authors hypothesize that the increase in the number of appointments […]

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My Pitt Law friend and colleague Elena Baylis is a member of a group of women who specialize in international and comparative law and who have launched IntLawGrrls, “voices on international law, policy, practice.”  The blog is at http://intlawgrrls.blogspot.com/
From yesterday’s post:
With great pride and joy we announce the birth, on this 3d day of the 3d […]

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Dan Solove’s Concurring Opinions post on grading law school exams, wise though it appears to be, suffers from a 21st century flaw:  It subscribes to a belief in the wisdom of the one.  Have law faculty learned nothing from The Wisdom of Crowds?  The Wealth of Networks?  The Peer to Patent Project?
Law professors should load their […]

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Some time ago, Michael Froomkin posted a baseline list of technology tools for law teachers and scholars.  My recollection is of the post is that these were what every law professor ought to have at hand (and implicitly, ought to know something about).  (Sorry, Michael, if I’m mis-remembering.)
This summary of a recent law-teaching-tech program at […]

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