TaxProf Blog

Brooklyn Law School to Permit Dismissal of Tenured Faculty for Lack of Collegiality or Poor Student Evaluations

Brian Leiter (Chicago) reports that Brooklyn Law School's Board of Trustees has adopted rules permitting the termination of tenured faculty for "adequate cause," defined to include "demonstrated incompetence" -- "including but not limited to, multiple unsatisfactory performance reviews or complaints from supervisors; multiple complaints from students or multiple unsatisfactory student evaluations; sub-standard academic performance; lack of collegiality.” Brian notes:

"[T]hese standards are very alarming, and suggest the dangers associated with post-tenure review.  The inclusion of "lack of collegiality" in the definition of "adequate cause" is unbelievable. ... But at least as alarming is the fact that the definition equates "demonstrated incompetence" not with a peer review finding of pedagogical and scholarly incompetence, but with wholly unreliable and disreputable criteria like students evaluations, complaints from supervisors (which just smuggles "lack of collegiality" in the back door), and so on."

NY Court Dismisses Placement Data Fraud Lawsuit Against Brooklyn Law School

New York Supreme Court Justice David Schmidt on Monday dismissed a placement data fraud lawsuit against Brooklyn Law School by five of its alumni. Bevelacqua v. Brooklyn Law School, No. 500175/2012 (Apr. 22, 2013). New York courts previously have dismissed similar lawsuits against Albany Law School and New York Law School.

• Stephen F. Diamond (Santa Clara), Another Courtroom Defeat for Law School “Transparency” Crowd
• Thomson Reuters News & Insight, Brooklyn Law Grads Can't Sue Over Misleading Job Data: Judge
• Wall Street Journal, Judge Tosses Lawsuit Against Brooklyn Law School

ATL's 2013 Law Revue Video Contest

Above the Law has announced the six finalists in its 2013 Law Revue Video Contest.  My two favorites are:

UCLA:  Don't Call on Me:

 

West Virginia:  Law School (Parody of Maroon 5's Payphone):

My Sequester Proposal

Air Force One and all government planes used for travel by Cabinet secretaries, other executive branch officials, and members of Congress and their staffs, must endure the same delays and cancellations as that suffered by the average traveler the prior day.

Jimmy McMillan: Law School Dean or Mayor of New York?

Following up on my prior post on The Law School Crisis: What Would Jimmy McMillan Do?, 31 Pepperdine Law 14 (Fall 2012):

Several years ago, I co-wrote an article on applying the principles from Michael Lewis’s Moneyball book to legal education (What Law Schools Can Learn from Billy Beane and the Oakland Athletics (82 Texas L. Rev. 1483 (2004)). The article asked what Billy Beane would do as the dean of a law school to capitalize on the inefficiencies in legal education. 

Perhaps a better model for the crisis facing legal education today is Jimmy McMillan, who ran for New York Governor in 2010 with the slogan “the rent is too damn high.” Law school tuition is simply too damn high. Administrators and faculty need to ruthlessly examine law school budgets and cut areas that are not essential to the school’s mission. Law school is twice as expensive as it was twenty years ago (in inflation-adjusted dollars), yet no one would argue that legal education is twice as good today.

Jimmy McMillan is now running for Mayor of New York City:

(Hat Tip: Joshua Blank.)

ABA Task Force Struggles to Make Legal Education Less Costly

Chronicle of Higher Education:  Accountability and Flexibility Are Said to Be Keys to the Crisis in Legal Education:

Finding solutions to the problems plaguing legal education will require holding law schools accountable while giving them the flexibility to craft strategies to educate lawyers who can find jobs, pay off their debts, and serve the millions of people who can't afford legal services.

That's the closest to a consensus that the ABA's legal-education task force seemed to reach during a morning-long discussion that was broadcast online on Wednesday.

The panel kicked off a daylong conference at Indiana University's Robert H. McKinney School of Law. The proceedings will be posted on the task force's Web site.

Jay Conison, dean of the Charlotte School of Law, moderated the morning's discussion, citing the "tremendous challenges and anxieties" facing legal education.

Among other ideas that have been floated as ways to make legal education less costly and services more affordable, experts have proposed:

• Shortening law school from three years to two.
• Allowing law schools to rely more on distance education.
• Testing students on a series of competencies as they progress through law school and allowing those who reach a certain level to work as legal technicians.

The panel hopes to have a draft report ready by August or September to submit for approval by the ABA's governing body by November.

National Law Journal:  ABA Panel Struggles for Answers on Law School Reform:

It turns out that if you ask 30 different law professors, practitioners, judges and bar association leaders how to fix legal education, you'll get about 30 different answers.

The lack of consensus about what ails law schools and how to fix them was on display Wednesday during a daylong conference hosted by the ABA's Task Force on the Future of Education.

Participants in the forum struggled for agreement about what is driving the rising costs of legal education—or about how schools and regulators should respond to declining job prospects for new lawyers and flagging interest in law degrees.

"What the task force is doing is very difficult politically. It's very difficult conceptually. And its very difficult pragmatically," said Valparaiso University School of Law dean Jay Conison, the task force's reporter. ...

The task force hopes to release preliminary recommendations during the late summer or early fall, with a final report to follow in mid-November, said former Indiana Supreme Court Chief Justice Randall Shepard, its chairman. Members already have heard from several hundred people in public hearings and through written comments, he said. ...

The wide-ranging discussion,held at the Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law in Indianapolis, veered from whether to use the ABA's law school accreditation standards to force change, to whether a law degree is even necessary for many of the emerging jobs in the legal industry.

The attendees also appeared to struggle with whether the task force's mission lies with the needs of law schools, the larger profession or the broader society. When asked specifically what should be done, the responses fell across the board.

Some said law schools should be required to spell out the core competencies that students should develop at set points during their legal educations; others, that tuition reduction was the first priority. Several attendees endorsed higher teaching loads. No single idea dominated.

The ABA's accreditation standards were a major focus. However, no consensus emerged about whether to relax the standards in order to give law schools more room to experiment with curricula, or to tighten them to force specific changes. ...

At several points throughout the day, panelists and task force members discussed the idea of a tiered system of legal education that students could exit at different levels depending on their career aspirations.

School's Out for Summer!

I taught my last classes of the academic year today -- thanks to my students in Federal Income Tax and Federal Estate & Gift Tax for a wonderful semester, and for coming to our home for dinner the past two nights!

Well we got no choice
All the girls and boys
Makin' all that noise
'Cause they found new toys
Well we can't salute ya
Can't find a flag
If that don't suit ya
That's a drag

School's out for summer
School's out forever
School's been blown to pieces

No more pencils
No more books
No more teacher's dirty looks

Well we got no class
And we got no principles (principals)
We ain't got no innocence
We can't even think of a word that rhymes

School's out for summer
School's out forever
My school's been blown to pieces

No more pencils
No more books
No more teacher's dirty looks

Out for summer
Out 'til fall
We might not come back at all

School's out forever
School's out for summer
School's out with fever
School's out completely

Paul Caron Leaves Cincinnati for Pepperdine

After 23 years at the University of Cincinnati College of Law and the past four Spring semesters at Pepperdine University School of Law, I have accepted an offer to join Pepperdine's tenured faculty beginning in the Fall 2013 semester.

My wife and I loved our time in Cincinnati, as we launched our careers, raised our children, and found our faith there. We will be forever grateful that the University of Cincinnati College of Law and the United States District Court for the Southern District of Ohio took a chance on us 23 years ago.

I am honored to join the line of lateral faculty that Pepperdine has hired in recent years, including Doug Kmiec (Dean, Catholic), Ed Larson (Georgia), Grant Nelson (UCLA), Bob Pushaw (Missouri), and Tom Stipanowich (Kentucky). Indeed, Brian Leiter (Chicago) recently noted Pepperdine's "steep upward trajectory of both lateral and junior hiring over the last decade," which is reflected in Pepperdine's dramatic rise in the U.S. News rankings, caused in large part by the third-largest increase in academic reputation among 172 law schools over the past 16 years (A Longitudinal Analysis of the U.S. News Law School Academic Reputation Scores between 1998 and 2013, 40 Fla. St. L. Rev. ___ (2013)).  

Although it is a Christian university, Pepperdine welcomes faculty of all faiths. Pepperdine's other lateral tenured hire this year is Ahmed Taha (Wake Forest), who will be the law school's first Muslim professor.

Amy Monahan Wins ALI Young Scholar's Medal

The American Law Institute has awarded Young Scholar's Medals to Adam J. Levitin (Georgetown) and Tax Prof Amy B. Monahan (Minnesota):

"These two scholars are true standouts, and the work they are doing is already changing the conversation in high-level policy debates," said the chair of the Young Scholars Medal Selection Committee, Justice Goodwin Liu of the California Supreme Court.  ... "Professor Monahan's work on public pension reform and employee benefits has contributed significantly to some of the most important debates now playing out at the local, state, and federal levels." ...

Professor Monahan's scholarship centers on the intersection of health care reform and public sector pensions. Her teaching and research focuses primarily on the topics of taxation and employee benefits. She has written 17 articles or book chapters since the beginning of her law teaching career. Professor Monahan holds a J.D. from Duke University School of Law and a B.A. in international studies from Johns Hopkins University.

"Amy has rapidly established herself as one of the country's top scholars in health policy and employee benefits law," said David Wippman, the dean of the University of Minnesota Law School. "She's also a terrific teacher and colleague and richly deserves the Young Scholars Medal."

2013 Undergraduate Business School (and Accounting) Rankings

Bloomberg Businessweek: Best Undergraduate Business Schools 2013:

To identify the top undergraduate business programs among .. 124 programs, Bloomberg Businessweek uses a methodology that has not changed very much from our first ranking in 2006. It includes nine measures of student satisfaction, post-graduation outcomes, and academic quality (methodology here). Here are the Top 10:

1. Notre Dame
2. Virginia
3. Cornell
4. Washington (St. Louis)
5. Pennsylvania
6. Boston College
7. Emory
8. Michigan
9. Texas
10. North Carolina

Bloomberg Businessweek:  The Best Undergraduate B-Schools for Accounting:

Today we look at accounting, the area of focus for nearly a quarter of all undergraduate business students. The ranking is based on student responses to the question asking them to rank their program’s accounting offerings. Points are awarded for each response—one point for an “A” grade through five points for a grade of “F”—and averaged for each school. The ranking is based on the average; schools with the lowest average are ranked the highest. If a student did not have exposure to the area in question, they could answer NA, and their response was not included. The average accounting score for all 124 undergraduate business schools in the ranking was 1.37. At the top of the list is BYU, with a score of 1.067. 

1. BYU
2. Notre Dame
3. UC-Berkeley
4. Cornell
5. Illinois
6. Tulsa
7. Richmond
8. SMU
9. Wake Forest
10. Tulane

SSRN Tax Professor Download Rankings

SSRN has updated its monthly rankings of 750 American and international law school faculties and 3,000 law professors by (among other things) the number of paper downloads from the SSRN database.  Here is the new list (through April 1, 2013) of the Top 25 Tax Professors in two of the SSRN categories: all-time downloads and recent downloads (within the past 12 months):

 

		All-Time Downloads		Recent Downloads
1	Reuven Avi-Yonah (Mich.)	30,694	Reuven Avi-Yonah (Mich.)	6688
2	Paul Caron (Cincinnati)	22,583	Adam Chodorow (Ariz. St.)	4620
3	Louis Kaplow (Harvard)	20,476	Richard Kaplan (Illinois)	4368
4	Vic Fleischer (Colorado)	17,992	Paul Caron (Cincinnati)	3627
5	James Hines (Michigan)	17,646	Gregg Polsky (N. Carolina)	3030
6	Ted Seto (Loyola-L.A.)	17,063	Katie Pratt (Loyola-L.A.)	2895
7	D. Dharmapala (Illinois)	16,890	Ed Kleinbard (USC)	2874
8	Richard Kaplan (Illinois)	16,438	Jen Kowal (Loyola-L.A.)	2494
9	Dennis Ventry (UC-Davis)	14,410	Carter Bishop (Suffolk)	2442
10	Carter Bishop (Suffolk)	13,188	Bridget Crawford (Pace)	2431
11	Katie Pratt (Loyola-L.A.)	13,183	Ted Seto (Loyola-L.A.)	2314
12	David Walker (Boston U.)	12,779	David Gamage (UCBerkeley)	2268
13	David Weisbach (Chicago)	12,747	Erik Jensen (Case Western)	2254
14	Chris Sanchirico (Penn)	12,633	D. Dharmapala (Illinois)	2114
15	Francine Lipman (UNLV)	12,151	Brad Borden (Brooklyn)	2109
16	Herwig Schlunck (Vand.)	11,927	Louis Kaplow (Harvard)	2044
17	Jen Kowal (Loyola-L.A.)	11,803	Jim Hines (Michigan)	1988
18	Brad Borden (Brooklyn)	11,488	Wendy Gerzog (Baltimore)	1807
19	Bridget Crawford (Pace)	11,400	Dan Shaviro (NYU)	1737
20	Robert Sitkoff (Harvard)	11,281	David Weisbach (Chicago)	1562
21	Ed McCaffery (USC)	10,935	John Miller (Idaho)	1541
22	Wendy Gerzog (Baltimore)	10,642	Calvin Johnson (Texas)	1519
23	Dan Shaviro (NYU)	10,327	Vic Fleischer (Colorado)	1465
24	Steve Bank (UCLA)	9929	Allison Christians (McGill)	1423
25	Ed Kleinbard (USC)	9855	Joshua Blank (NYUl)	1406

Note that this ranking includes full-time tax professors with at least one tax paper on SSRN, and all papers (including non-tax papers) by these tax professors are included in the SSRN data.

The other SSRN ranking categories are: 

• All-Time Papers
• New Papers
• All-Time Downloads Per Paper
• New Downloads Per Paper

These rankings, of course, are imperfect measures of faculty scholarly performance -- as are the existing ranking methodologies of reputation surveys, productivity counts, and citation counts. Our modest claim in our article, Ranking Law Schools: Using SSRN to Measure Scholarly Performance, 81 Ind. L.J. 83 (2006) (Symposium on The Next Generation of Law School Rankings), is that the SSRN data can play a role in faculty rankings along with these other measures.  Bill Henderson (Indiana) thinks we are too modest, and that SSRN may provide a better measure of faculty performance than these other methodologies.

For my other articles on what SSRN downloads can tell us about the current state and future of legal scholarship, and about the relationship between scholarship and blogging, see:

• The Long Tail of Legal Scholarship, 116 Yale L.J. Pocket Part 38 (2006)
• Are Scholars Better Bloggers? -- Bloggership: How Blogs are Transforming Legal Scholarship, 84 Wash. U. L. Rev. 1025 (2006)

For Ted Seto's faculty-wide (and metropolitan area-wide) analysis of these SSRN tax rankings, see:

• The Top 25 Tax Faculties
• The Top 15 Graduate Tax Faculties
• The Top 10 Tax Faculty Metro Areas

Rapoport Reviews Tamanaha's Failing Law Schools

Nancy Rapoport (Interim Dean, UNLV), Book Review, 47 Law & Social Rev. 479 (2013) (reviewing Brian Tamanaha (Washington U.), Failing Law Schools (University of Chicago Press, 2012)):

This extremely short book review discusses why Tamanaha's book is a must-read for anyone in the legal education business, even if we don't always agree with what he's saying.

Other reviews of Failing Law Schools:

• Jennifer Bard (Texas Tech)
• Ray Campbell (Peking University School of Transnational Law)
• Jim Chen (Former Dean, Louisville)
• Chronicle of Higher Education
• Ronald Den Otter (California Polytechnic State)
• Stephen Diamond (Santa Clara)
• Stanley Fish (Florida International)
• Scott Greenfield (here and here)
• Bill Henderson (Indiana)
• Paul Horwitz (Alabama)
• Deborah Jones Merritt (Ohio State)
• Orin Kerr (George Washington)
• Brian Leiter (Chicago)
• Andy Morriss (Alabama)
• National Law Journal
• Philip Schrag (Georgetown)
• Robert Steinbuch (Arkansas-Little Rock)
• Washington Post

SoCal Tax Prof Dinner

My wife and I hosted Southern California Tax Profs and guests for a wonderful dinner last night, filled with great food, drink, and conversation.

Chapman Michael Lang Loyola-L.A. Ellen Aprill Katie Pratt Ted Seto

Northwestern Philip Postlewaite Pepperdine Paul Caron Bob Popovich

San Diego Jordan Barry Bert Lazerow Dick Pugh

Thomas Jefferson Richard Winchester USC Ed Kleinbard

• 2012 SoCal Tax Prof Dinner
• 2011 SoCal Tax Prof Dinner

TaxProf Blog Weekend Roundup

Saturday:

• Kleinbard:  Three Ways to Relieve Our Tax Hangovers
• From South Bend to Southern California: The World's Biggest Law Firm CEO's Journey for Sun (and Beer)
• Talking Taxes With California Beach Goers
• Online Advertising and Source-Based Taxation

Sunday:

• Martinez:  Structural Impediments to Tax Reform
• House Questions IRS Decision to Send Employees to Union Conference in Vegas in Wake of Furloughs
• Top 5 Tax Paper Downloads
• Rethinking § 104(a)(2)

From South Bend to Southern California: The World's Biggest Law Firm CEO's Journey for Sun (and Beer)

San Diego Union-Tribune, Man at the Top of World's Largest Law Firm Still Stays Grounded:

J. Terence O’Malley is the type of lawyer you’d want defending you before the Internal Revenue Service, or, shudder, arguing your side in a divorce. But that’s not what he does. He’s the boss of 4,400 lawyers, enough to invade a small country. Worldwide, his firm specializes in serving international commerce. Litigation is a bread-and-butter specialty, which means they’ll see you in court. Litigators are the Jesuits of the law, terrier-like defenders of the faith.

O’Malley is global co-CEO of DLA Piper, which occupies four floors in the Wells Fargo building in downtown San Diego, plus offices in La Jolla and the Golden Triangle. ... San Diego is just one branch of the firm, although a main one. DLA Piper has offices in 33 countries. ...

“At Notre Dame, I kept track on the wall by my bunk of the consecutive days I had gone without seeing the sun. I got to 30 and said, ‘That’s enough.’ I sat on the floor of my dorm room and planned the rest of my life. I figured out that San Diego had the lowest mean temperature variation and was one of the fastest-growing cities. And you could go to Mexico in 10 minutes and drink beer. It sounded like a pretty good deal, so I decided I would end up in San Diego.” ...

He talks about the intense, unending pressures on lawyers in today’s climate, where you cannot hide from cellphones and emails, even on vacation or weekends. But he also says the rewards for those hired by top firms, and those who lead those firms, are eye-blinkingly bountiful. A new graduate would start at approximately $150,000 and a senior partner of a 100-lawyer firm would earn about $500,000. “That income reflects the willingness of clients to hire you to do very complex tasks. I tell young lawyers this is a very hard job. Seven days a week, you are on call.”

• ABA Journal, Are You Living and Working in Your Dream City? If Not, Where Do You Want to Land?
• ABA Journal, Why DLA Piper’s Co-CEO Ended Up in San Diego (Hint: It’s a Numbers Thing)

Deborah Jones Merritt: How Much Must Law Grads Earn to Pay Their Student Loans? $236,850.

Deborah Jones Merritt (Ohio State), Unconscionable Debt:

A single, unmarried student attended a flagship public law school with the median scholarship offered by that school. ... Over his three years of law school, he borrowed $123,865. ... [A]t least a third of current 3Ls at public schools have borrowed $120,000 or more to finance law school. The average amount borrowed by private school graduates, of course, is already over $124,000. ...

What does it mean to borrow $123,865 to finance law school? ... [I]f you attempt to repay this loan on the standard ten-year plan, you will owe $1,579 per month. And here’s the kicker: The government program counsels that, using guidelines published by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, this student should find a job with a minimum gross income of $236,850 to support those loan repayments! Even the students who obtain those BigLaw jobs won’t gross that amount. ...

How can we possibly maintain access to the legal profession at these prices? How can we provide justice for clients? How can we in good faith enroll students in programs that will leave them financially strapped for years -- or dependent upon taxpayer goodwill for reduced payment programs? How can we, as scholars who value public policy, impose those costs on the public?

We can’t. There are four steps that we, as law schools, should pursue aggressively to address this unconscionable situation: (1) Dramatically lower tuition, whatever that takes. (2) Restructure law school so that students can work close to full-time while completing their studies; there’s no other way to cover post-college living expenses for adults who choose not to live with their parents (or don’t have that option). (3) Publicize very clearly how much graduates will earn from average jobs after making average loan payments. (4) Lobby Congress to guarantee reduced payment plans like IBR and PAYE for loans that have already been disbursed, but to repeal those programs for professional students going forward. Those programs were never designed for professional students, and they are coninuing to inflate the cost of professional education. As a policy matter, the money would be better spent on almost any other line in the federal budget.

The median starting salary for law grads is $60,000 (20-year salary data here).

Tushnet: Reflections on the Federalist Society, Pepperdine, and 'Conservative' Law Schools

Following up on Tuesday's post, Chronicle of Higher Education, How Conservatives Captured the Law, and in particular this statement:

Academics associated with the Federalist Society have educated a new generation of conservative law students, played a role in the rise of openly conservative law schools like Pepperdine's and George Mason's, and succeeded in gaining respect and traction for conservative legal ideas.

Mark Tushnet (Harvard), Reflections (I) on the Federalist Society Conference on Intellectual Diversity (Balkinization):

The idea is that institutions offer bundles of attributes to consumers (applicants), and each consumer chooses the bundle that, from her point of view, maximizes the achievement of her preferences as she understands them at the moment of choice. I used Pepperdine as my primary example, because it’s a school with a strong public law faculty that leans more conservative than other institutions (but I could have offered others – San Diego and St. Thomas in St. Paul, for example). So, consider a conservative student applying to Harvard and Pepperdine. If she gets in to Harvard, she’s certainly going to get into Pepperdine, and the LSAT and GPA numbers suggest pretty strongly that she’ll do better at Pepperdine than at Harvard. So, her choice is between (a) a liberal-leaning school where she’ll probably do all right but might not be at the top of the class, and the job opportunities associated with having a Harvard degree and (b) a conservative-ish law school where she’ll probably do quite well, with the job opportunities available to a student at the top of Pepperdine’s class.

For more, see:

• Robert L. Jones (Northern Illinois), A Longitudinal Analysis of the U.S. News Law School Academic Reputation Scores between 1998 and 2013, 40 Fla. St. L. Rev. ___ (2013): 

The article concludes with an identification of those law schools whose academic reputation scores have improved or declined the most during the fifteen year period, along with a brief discussion of some potential causes for those changes.

... Undoubtedly there are a number of other ways in which a school’s administration can, at least under certain circumstances, significantly influence their school’s academic reputation scores. It is quite possible, for example, that Pepperdine’s substantial gains over the period (a rise of .4) could in some ways be related to the notoriety of their dean (Ken Starr). Chart Q plots Pepperdine’s academic reputation scores with the timing of Starr’s arrival and departure at the school.

• William Henderson (Indiana), How to Increase Your Law School's Academic Reputation (The Legal Whiteboard):

I identified three research-oriented law schools where, compared to the rest of the legal academy, conservatives have fared well during faculty hiring: George Mason, San Diego, and Pepperdine. Why these three? (If there are other law schools that have tried to build a strong conservative faculty brand, they have escaped my attention.)

1. George Mason's Law & Economics emphasis.
2. San Diego Law is a conservative Catholic law school that hosts The Right Coast blog.
3. Pepperdine Law is a Christian-centered law school that hired Kenneth Starr to serve as dean as dean after he rapped up this tenure as Independent Counsel of the Clinton Whitewater investigation.

As show in the scatterplot above, all three law schools have fared very well in Academic Reputation:  GMU (#76 to #51, +25), San Diego (#69 to #51, +18), and Pepperdine (#107 to #65, +42). 

But wait, fellow academics vote in the USN Academic Reputation survey, and supposedly we are an overwhelmingly liberal.  So why did these three conservative school fare so well?  This could be combination of three factors:

• Discounts on productive scholars. ...
  
• USN "echo chamber" effect. ...
• USN Voters. ...

If moving on USN Academic Reputation is really important to a faculty, the lesson here is, "make a hard, high-profile right turn, and wait a decade."  That said, there are probably not enough spoils to go around for more than a handful of conservative law schools to use this strategy.

• Mark Tushnet, Reflections (II) on the Federalist Society Conference on Intellectual Diversity (Balkinization)

Update:

Richard Garnett (Notre Dame), Intellectual Diversity and Institutional Pluralism (PrawfsBlawg):

[T]hinking about the fact that the "conservative" schools Mark identified are all schools with a religious character or affiliation -- I think we need to be careful about equating a school's distinctive religious character with a "conservative" ideological character.  A Catholic law school, for example, might have more than the typical number of students and faculty who support closer regulation of abortion, but that same school might also have more than the typical number of students and faculty who are skeptical of certain forms of libertarianism or who support an arguably inefficiently (by some measures) generous level of social-welfare programming.

Mark Tushnet (Harvard), Comment (PrawfsBlawg):

On Rick's last point, I think I wrote that the three faculties had strong conservative public law faculties, not that the schools "were" in some general sense conservative, although maybe at some point I did use the summary label. In my remarks at the Federalist Society conference I mentioned the possible "social justice" orientation of some Catholic institutions. (Also, it's not really a quibble to point out that Pepperdine isn't a Catholic institution!) I may be posting some additional thoughts on across-institution diversity over the next few days.

NY Times: Obama's Budget Would Eliminate Taxes on Forgiven Student Debt

New York Times:  Budget Would Eliminate Taxes on Forgiven Student Debt:

President Obama’s proposed budget for the 2014 fiscal year would prevent the taxation of student debt that is forgiven under federal income-based repayment plans, according to the Institute for College Access and Success. ...

Last year, Ron Lieber wrote a Your Money column about the "tax time bomb" that could face some student loan borrowers who have their federal student loans forgiven under government repayment plans aimed at helping those struggling with high education debt.

Catholic University Imposes 20% Budget Cut Due to Declining Law School Enrollment

The Tower:  Law School Enrollment Dropoff Causes Departmental Budget Cuts:

Catholic University will cut operational expenditures by 20% under a proposal by the Provost, a move that is the result of a decline in revenue from law school enrollment.

Earlier this year, the Provost asked deans from the University to trim down their operational expenditures for the next fiscal year by 20%.  This decision has come following a decline in revenue from decreasing law school enrollment – a challenge that is being experienced by universities nationwide.

Lawyers, Guns & Money: Catholic University of America to Slash Overall Budget by 20%; Plunging Law Schools Apps to Blame:

The law school accounts for about 10% of the university’s overall enrollment, so the mind reels at the extent to which the rest of the university has been depending for its solvency on encouraging the law school to produce massively indebted graduates who are unable to get any sort of legal job in what is at present the worst place in the country to try to get a job as a lawyer (Washington DC).

This naturally raises the question of how many other universities depend on their law school’s graduates to cross-subsidize the rest of the campus to a similar extent. A friend who is in a position to know tells me that quite a few law schools are now actually running operating deficits, although university budgets are so byzantine in regard to cross-subsidization via the charging of “indirect expenses” and the like that it’s often very difficult to untangle the actual financial situation. We law faculty are of course encouraged by our administrative overlords not to worry our pretty little heads about these matters, not that most of us require much encouragement of that sort anyway.

Another friend makes a prediction:

My suspicion is that law schools will close when they appear to need long term subsidization. ... [W]hen you read most schools tenure guidelines as an implied contract, it starts to jump out that cost cutting would be extraordinarily hard in any department – with seniority rules, the need to show financial crisis etc. The easy out is actually to “pull the plug” on the whole department. That is why I think a few colleges could quite abruptly make the decision to simply close the law school.

I do find amusing the idea that some professors have that everyone will take a nice round 10% pay cut. You never can really sell an across the board pay cut – someone always has alimony, kids in school, impecunious parents, a big mortgage, and if it is hell to make it stick. Look how fast law firms push out partners having a bad year… The idea that senior faculty will take one for the team, or junior faculty, many of whom have big student loans – is not that realistic. The problem is that it does not look very easy to layoff tenured faculty and oddly, tenure seems to be one of the few areas in US law where the idea of constructive dismissal may actually apply (I did some research a while back.)

My own sense of the situation, which I have expressed before, is that when the first reputable college jumps and announces that its law school is closing there will be a rising wave of followers. The interesting question is how far are some schools from that point – if enrollment is way down in August/September it could start sooner than many people think.

I note your comment about lack of transparency. The late Dick Gordon told me, when he was Dean of Georgetown, that he took the decision to move to Capitol Hill so that he could segregate the finances better – that the murkiness was in overhead allocation for shared facilities – registration fees, campus upkeep, heating plant, you name it. Some departments pay essentially nothing for their use of campus facilities and office space, lecture halls, gyms, registration services, while law schools often pay inflated charges, and the law school Deans don’t necessarily know how inflated.

Chronicle: How Conservatives Captured the Law

Chronicle of Higher Education, How Conservatives Captured the Law:

The history of the Federalist Society is a story of how disaffection, bold ideas, commitment to principle, and enlightened institution-building have created a significant conservative shift in the legal, policy, and political landscape of America over the past 30 years. The society reports that more than 45,000 lawyers and law students are involved in its various activities, with approximately 13,000 dues-paying members. With a national budget of about $10-million, in 2010 its 75 lawyer chapters sponsored nearly 300 events for more than 25,000 lawyers, and the society sponsored 1,145 events at law schools for more than 70,000 students, professors, and others. Through conferences, debates, publications, litigation, education, and by holding key positions in government and the judiciary, the society has changed law and policy in areas like property rights, access to courts, affirmative action, privacy rights including abortion and same-sex marriage, and the influence of international law on the domestic legal system.

The Federalist Society's membership includes many brilliant and sincere theorists who raise important and interesting issues. On the other hand, the society's critics say, its overall impact is reactionary. By glorifying private property, demonizing government intervention (particularly at the federal level), insisting that originalism is the only legitimate method of constitutional interpretation, embracing American exceptionalism as a reason to remain apart from global governance, and pushing related policies, these critics say, the society advocates a form of social Darwinism that has been discredited by mainstream American legal thought since the 1930s.

Membership includes economic conservatives, social conservatives, Christian conservatives, and libertarians, many of whom disagree with one another on significant issues, but who cooperate in advancing a broad conservative agenda. They generally support individual rights and a free market, and prefer states' rights to action by the federal government.

Members have held senior policy making positions in the Reagan, George H.W., and George W. Bush administrations; have a commanding presence on the federal bench; and, as private lawyers, advocates in public-interest law firms, and government lawyers, challenge laws that are anathema to their worldview. The dockets of the federal and state courts (including the Supreme Court) are brimming with test cases brought or defended by Federalist Society members to challenge government regulation of the economy; roll back affirmative action; invalidate laws providing access to the courts by aggrieved workers, consumers, and environmentalists; expand state support for religious institutions and programs; oppose marriage equality; increase statutory impediments to women's ability to obtain an abortion; and otherwise advance conservative ideas.

Academics associated with the Federalist Society have educated a new generation of conservative law students, played a role in the rise of openly conservative law schools like Pepperdine's and George Mason's, and succeeded in gaining respect and traction for conservative legal ideas. Those stem in large part from an originalist interpretation of the Constitution, exemplified by the jurisprudence of Justice Scalia. That view posits that to interpret the Constitution, one must search for the original meaning of its provisions. The argument is that the original meaning of words may be objectively determined by recourse to historical sources that reveal how the words were used at the time, and that the original meaning is the only legitimate method of interpreting the document. ...

Four Supreme Court Justices—Antonin, Clarence Thomas, John Roberts Jr., and Samuel Alito—are current or former members of the Federalist Society. Every single federal judge appointed by President George H.W. Bush or President George W. Bush was either a member or approved by members of the society, as were many of the judges appointed by President Reagan. ...

Empirical studies by law professors and political scientists have demonstrated a high correlation between the politics of federal judges and the outcome in cases in their courts. Federalist society members themselves have long believed that the easiest way to change the law is to change the judges. Working together with other conservatives, they have done just that, moving the federal judiciary significantly to the right over the past 30 years. And as they predicted, the law has followed.

Houston Prof Charged With Making Terrorist Threat for Saying There Will Be Blood If He Is Denied Tenure

Inside Higher Ed:  Prof Charged With Threat Over His Tenure Case:

Authorities have charged Lei Wu, an assistant professor of software engineering at the University of Houston - Clear Lake, with making a "terroristic threat" based on statements he made to a colleague, The Houston Chronicle reported. Wu allegedly told a faculty colleague -- who recorded the conversation -- that there will "be blood" if he is not awarded tenure.

In response to an e-mail from Inside Higher Ed asking about the charges, Wu said: "Truth will come out soon. By then you will see. Justice will prevail."

• ABC News
• Chronicle of Higher Education
• Houston Chronicle

Brown: A Reboot for Legal Education

National Law Journal op-ed:  A Reboot for Legal Education, by Dorothy A. Brown (Emory):

The question that needs to be asked is: What makes for successful lawyers in the 21st century and how would a new rankings system reward law schools that did the job well? Although U.S. News does not seem to care, lawyers, law schools and consumers should. The current market for lawyers rewards value added. Given this, law schools must develop leaders who are problem solvers and collaborative workers — leaders who have the integrity to say no when no one in the room wants to hear it. If a rankings system could take that into account, society as a whole would be better off.

To be sure, there are qualitative differences among law schools, and rankings can help point out both strengths and weaknesses. And perhaps a flawed system is better than no system. Yet despite the whining and handwringing from law deans and faculty members each year, they have not come up with a good alternative.

We are facing some of the most intractable problems of recent history. A ranking system that rewarded those law schools that instilled integrity, developed leaders, and graduated problem solvers would be good for the country. We must find a better test to teach to.

S&P Downgrades Albany Law School's Bonds

Albany Times-Union:  Standard & Poor's Downgrades Albany Law School:

Albany Law School's ... enrollment has dropped 14 percent in just two years. The school now enrolls 617 students, down from 720 in the 2010-2011 academic year. That loss has caught the attention of the Standard & Poor's bond rating agency, which downgraded the school's outlook from positive to stable. Standard & Poor's said the situation at Albany Law reflected a national trend of law schools losing students and tuition income.

Weakening demand for Albany Law has decreased net tuition revenue and put significant pressure on the school's operating performance, the report found.

The report suggested that Albany Law is more vulnerable to the national trend of enrollment decline because it is not connected to a larger university. Law schools that are part of a larger university or university system were better able to absorb losses of the last few years. Schools tied to a university also can better attract students amid the shrinking market in the future because they are more able to offer bigger financial aid packages.

Law school enrollment and applications are expected to drop for several more years, so the trend at Albany Law probably not at the bottom yet, the report found.

Matt Leichter, Albany Law School’s Bond Rating Downgraded:

Nine-Year Anniversary of TaxProf Blog

Today marks the nine-year anniversary of TaxProf Blog (and the eighteen-year anniversary of the TaxProf Email Discussion Group). I hope the blog has at least partially succeeded in its mission (announced in my very first post) to provide both (1) permanent resources & links, and (2) daily news & information, of interest to law school tax professors and students; tax lawyers in private practice, government, nonprofits, for-profit corporations, and think tanks; accountants; and others in the tax community. Here are some numbers:

• Page Views:  23,200,000
• Visitors:  17,485,000
• Comments:  35,500
• Posts: 25,200

TaxProf Blog Weekend Roundup

Saturday:

• Raj Chetty Named Best American Economist Under 40
• NY Times Debate:  Offshore Tax Havens -- Global Tax Dodge or Economic Boon?
• 16th Annual Critical Tax Theory Conference Concludes Today at UC-Hastings
• More on the Obama and Biden Tax Returns

Sunday:

• Horwitz:  What Ails the Law Schools?
• Top 5 Tax Paper Downloads
• Public Opinions on Taxes:  1937 to Today
• Vance:  Why Your Tax Return Isn't Safe

Newton: Systemic Reforms in Legal Education and Licensure

Brent E. Newton (Adjunct Professor, Georgetown; Deputy Staff Director, U.S. Sentencing Commission), The Ninety-Five Theses: Systemic Reforms in the American System of Legal Education and Licensure, 64 S.C. L. Rev. 55 (2012):

Knowledgeable and respected authorities inside and outside the legal academy are correctly describing the American system of legal education as being in a state of “crisis” and in need of dramatic reforms. Yet most members of the legal academy refuse to accept that major structural reforms are necessary. Despite the academy’s intransigence, I feel compelled to nail my 95 theses to the academy’s door in the hope of hastening, however slightly, its glacial movement towards meaningful reform. The theses comprise six major themes, the first five concerning the legal academy and the sixth concerning the legal profession itself: (1) defects in the law school admissions process; (2) structural problems resulting from the excessive number of law schools, the ABA accreditation process, the current manner of law school faculty governance, and the current system of ranking law schools; (3) defects in law schools’ curricula, pedagogical methods, and assessments of students; (4) deficiencies in the professoriate at law schools; (5) problems related to legal scholarship and law reviews; and (6) flaws in the bar exam and licensure process and also in the process of graduates’ transition from law school to the job market. Most of the problems are interrelated and result in a negative synergy that increasingly threatens the health of the legal profession. As a result, the only way to effect meaningful change likely to persist is to implement systemic reform – root to branch.

Every major decision made by a law school should reflect a genuine fiduciary commitment to their students – with the ultimate goal of producing graduates who will be competent, ethical entry-level attorneys, that is, graduates who are “practice ready.” They should hire faculty members; design curricula and pedagogies; and admit and assess students with the primary goal of producing attorneys who can hit the ground running upon graduation. Law professors should make legal scholarship secondary to their teaching duties, and their scholarship should be relevant to the bench, bar, and legal policy-makers. Law schools also need to charge a fair amount of tuition in view of the quality of the legal education that they provide to students and expect students to carry reasonable amount of debt in relation to their job prospects. Finally, state licensing authorities should require law school graduates to demonstrate the broad range of competencies needed to be an effective entry-level practitioner before licenses are issued.

With these aspirations for the legal academy and legal profession in mind, I contend that that many structural changes in the current system of legal education are necessary – beginning with the manner that schools admit law students, continuing with the manner they teach and assess them during law school, and concluding with the manner in which law school graduates are admitted to the bar. Some proposed reforms look to effective practices in American medical schools and business schools as models. For most of the reforms to occur, law schools must engage in paradigm shifts in several areas in addition to modernizing their curricula and pedagogies – they must alter the composition of their faculties, their approach to legal scholarship, and their relationship with members of the bench and bar. The ABA’s Section on Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar must pave the way in order for these structural changes to occur. In particular, the ABA standards governing law school accreditation must be amended substantially – with respect to faculty composition, faculty governance, faculty duties concerning scholarship, and law school curricular requirements. Without such changes, no meaningful systemic reform will ever occur, and the many problems that currently plague legal education will continue. The ball is in the ABA’s court but, ultimately, law schools must effect change themselves (with or without the ABA’s help, to the degree that they are able) – for the good of law students, the legal profession, and the public. We can, and should, turn the current crisis in legal education into an opportunity for meaningful change.

Deans' Leadership in Legal Education Symposium

The University of Toledo Law Review has published the twelfth annual issue in its wonderful Deans' Leadership in Legal Education Series. Each issue contains essays written by Deans of various law schools on a wide array of legal education topics. The current issue contains seven essays written by these deans:

• Linda L. Ammons (Widener), Seasons & Sea Changes: Weathering the Storm, An Encouraging Tale, 44 U. Tol. L. Rev. 299 (2013)
• Annette E. Clark (St. Louis), Postscript to a Deanship, 44 U. Tol. L. Rev. 303 (2013)
• Phyllis L. Crocker (Cleveland State), The Paradox of Being an Interim Dean: The Permanent Nature of a Transitory Position, 44 U. Tol. L. Rev. 319 (2013)
• R. Lawrence Dessem (Missouri-Columbia), Stepping Aside as Dean, 44 U. Tol. L. Rev. 327 (2013)
• I. Richard Gershon (Mississippi), In Ten Years, All New Law Schools!, 44 U. Tol. L. Rev. 335 (2013)
• Robert H. Jerry, II (Florida), Leadership And Followership, 44 U. Tol. L. Rev. 345 (2013)
• Susan Poser (Nebraska), Inside the Star Chamber: A Dean’s Reflections on Central Administration, 44 U. Tol. L. Rev. 355 (2013)
• Emily A. Spieler (Northeastern), The Paradox of Access to Civil Justice: The “Glut” of New Lawyers and the Persistence of Unmet Need, 44 U. Tol. L. Rev. 365 (2013)

For those who followed the fiasco at St. Louis University School of Law, Annette Clark's piece on her one year as dean is riveting. For prior TaxProf Blog coverage, see:

• St. Louis Law School Dean Resigns Abruptly, Blasts University Administration (Aug. 8, 2012)
• St. Louis President Says He Was Going to Fire Dean, Names PI Lawyer Interim Dean (Aug. 9, 2012)
• More on the St. Louis Fiasco (Aug. 10, 2012)
• St. Louis Prof Addresses Turmoil at Her Law School (Aug. 12, 2012)
• More on the St. Louis Fiasco (Aug. 14, 2012)
• Brian Tamanaha's Revenge (Aug. 20, 2012)
• Brian Tamanaha's Revenge: 'Guilty as Charged' (Aug. 20, 2012)
• Proposed Post-Tenure Review Policy Adds to Turmoil at St. Louis (Aug. 30, 2012)
• St. Louis Abandons Post-Tenure Review Proposal (Sept. 19, 2012)
• More Trouble at St. Louis (Nov. 1, 2012)
• St. Louis Denouement (Mar. 5, 2013)

(Hat Tip: Al Brophy.)

2013 Tannenwald Tax Writing Competition

For students who wrote tax seminar papers this semester:  the Theodore Tannenwald, Jr. Foundation for Excellence in Tax Scholarship and American College of Tax Counsel are sponsoring the 2013 Tannenwald Tax Writing Competition:

Named for the late Tax Court Judge Theodore Tannenwald, Jr., and designed to perpetuate his dedication to legal scholarship of the highest quality, the Tannenwald Writing Competition is open to all full- or part-time law school students, undergraduate or graduate. Papers on any federal or state tax-related topic may be submitted in accordance with the Competition Rules.

Prizes:

• 1st Place:  $5,000, free trip to the 2014 ABA Tax Section Mid-Year Meeting and publication in the Florida Tax Review
• 2nd Place:  $2,500
• 3rd Place:  $1,500

Deadline:  July 1, 2013. Mail papers to: Tannenwald Foundation, Ste. 200, 1275 Pennsylvania Ave., N.W., Washington, D.C. 20004, Attn: Melnie Moore.

For more information, contact Nancy Abramowitz.

For a list of participating law schools, see here. For a list of winners from prior years, and their tax faculty sponsors, see here.

Death of Joe Feller

Joseph M. Feller, a 59-year old environmental law professor at Arizona State, was killed when he was struck by a car when jogging on Monday. From Arizona State Dean Douglas Sylvester:

Joe cared deeply about the environment and about environmental justice, and during his 25-plus years at ASU, he trained a generation of environmental lawyers in Arizona. He taught water law and natural resources law, and often led teams of students onto public lands and waterways across Northern Arizona, adding meaning to what they’d learned in the classroom.

Joe had a dazzling resume, having earned an undergraduate degree in physics and a law degree, magna cum laude, from Harvard, where he was editor of the Harvard Law Review. He also had a Ph.D. in physics from the University of California, Berkeley. But Joe’s warm personality and easy manner outshone his academic pedigree. ...

Services are pending. Please check back for more information.

Larry Solum has more here. (Hat Tip: Shelley Saxer.)

NY Times: How the Location of Colleges Hurts the Economy

New York Times:  How the Location of Colleges Hurts the Economy, by David Leonhardt:

Some of the nation’s most important companies did not exist a generation ago, and many of the most important – Amazon.com, Google, Apple, Costco, Home Depot, Microsoft, FedEx – did not exist 50 years ago. The federal government has also been transformed over the last century, with the creation of Social Security, Medicare, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the modern Federal Reserve and dozens of other agencies and programs.

The roster of major American universities, on the other hand, is largely unchanged. ... One problem that stems from the relatively unchanged nature of higher education is its geography. The country looks very different from the way it did 100 years ago, but the distribution of our leading universities still has 19th-century echoes.

 

The country’s most selective 236 colleges – colleges that tend to have more resources and much higher graduation rates than others – are especially concentrated in New England and, to a lesser extent, the mid-Atlantic. The Midwest, Southeast and California have fewer such colleges than the Northeast, but still noticeably more than Florida and Texas. The Mountain West has just a handful. ...

This pattern has real consequences for teenagers. All else equal, students who live near a college are more likely to attend college, research by David Card of the University of California, Berkeley, has found. And students who live near a selective college are more likely to attend a selective college.

Because students who attend a selective college are more likely to graduate than similar students who attend a community college or nonselective four-year college, the geographic dispersion of colleges creates winners and losers. Students who live near selective colleges benefit -- and those who do not pay a price.

The economy also pays a price, because so many talented teenagers, many of them in smaller metropolitan areas in the Sun Belt and Mountain West, fall far short of their potential.

The Top 25 law schools are located in 17 states:

• California (4)
• New York (3)
• District of Columbia, Illinois, Indiana (2)
• Alabama, Connecticut, Georgia, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia (1)

The Top 52 law schools are located in 27 states:

• California (6)
• New York, Virginia (4)
• Illinois, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Texas (3)
• Arizona, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Utah (2)
• Alabama, Colorado, Connecticut, Iowa, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee. Washington, Wisconsin (1)

Foundation Press Publishes Criminal Law Stories (35th Book in the Law Stories Series)

Foundation Press has published Criminal Law Stories (2013), by Donna K. Coker (Miami) & Robert Weisberg (Stanford):

This collection of case stories illustrates the balance, continuity, and evolution in substantive criminal law doctrine in light of the social and political contexts in which those doctrines are perennially tested. These stories focus on the pre-litigation behavior of defendants, raising important moral and cultural questions about human nature and human society and how social norms get translated into workable legal doctrines. They survey the typical variety of doctrines addressed in a standard criminal law course, elucidating the classic themes of common law jurisprudence.

Other titles in the Law Stories Series (for which I serve as Series Editor) are:

• Administrative Law Stories (2006), edited by Peter L. Strauss (Columbia)
• Antitrust Stories (2007), edited by Eleanor M. Fox (NYU) & Daniel A. Crane (Cardozo)
• Bankruptcy Law Stories (2007), edited by Robert Rasmussen (Dean, USC)
• Business Tax Stories (2005), edited by Steven A. Bank (UCLA) & Kirk J. Stark (UCLA) 
• Civil Procedure Stories (2d ed. 2008), edited by Kevin M. Clermont (Cornell)
• Civil Rights Stories (2008), edited by Myriam Gilles (Cardozo) & Risa Goluboff (Virginia)
• Constitutional Law Stories (2d ed. 2009), edited by Michael C. Dorf (Cornell)
• Contracts Stories (2006), edited by Douglas G. Baird (Chicago)
• Corporate Law Stories (2009), edited by J. Mark Ramseyer (Harvard)
• Criminal Procedure Stories (2006), edited by Carol S. Steiker (Harvard)
• Death Penalty Stories (2009), edited by John H. Blum (Cornell) & Jordan M. Steiker (Texas)
• Education Law Stories (2008), edited by Michael A. Olivas (Houston) & Ronna Greff Schneider (Cincinnati)
• Employment Discrimination Stories (2006), edited by Joel William Friedman (Tulane)
• Employment Law Stories (2007), edited by Samuel Estreicher (NYU) & Gillian Lester (UC-Berkeley)
• Environmental Law Stories (2005), edited by Richard J. Lazarus (Harvard) & Oliver A. Houck (Tulane)
• Evidence Stories (2006), edited by Richard O. Lempert (Michigan)
• Family Law Stories (2008), edited by Carol Sanger (Columbia)
• Federal Courts Stories (2010), edited by Vicki C. Jackson (Georgetown) & Judith Resnik (Yale)
• First Amendment Stories (2011), edited by Richard W Garnett (Notre Dame) & Andrew Koppelman (Northwestern)
• Human Rights Advocacy Stories (2008), edited by Deena R. Hurwitz (Virginia) & Margaret L. Satterthwaite (NYU), with Doug Ford (Virginia)
• Immigration Stories (2005), edited by David A. Martin (Virginia) & Peter H. Schuck (Yale)
• Indian Law Stories (2011), edited by Carole E. Goldberg (UCLA), Kevin K. Washburn (Dean, New Mexico) & Philip P. Frickey (UC-Berkeley)
• Intellectual Property Stories (2005), edited by Jane C. Ginsburg (Columbia) & Rochelle Cooper Dreyfuss (NYU)
• International Law Stories (2007), edited by John Noyes (California Western), Mark Janis (Connecticut) & Laura Dickinson (Connecticut)
• Labor Law Stories (2005), edited by Laura J. Cooper (Minnesota) & Catherine L. Fisk (Duke)
• Legal Ethics Stories (2005), edited by Deborah L. Rhode (Stanford) & David Luban (Georgetown)
• Presidential Power Stories (2008), edited by Christopher H. Schroeder (Duke) & Curtis A. Bradley (Duke)
• Property Stories (2d ed. 2009), edited by Gerald Korngold (New York Law School) & Andrew P. Morriss (Alabama)
• Race Law Stories (2008), edited by by Rachel F. Moran (Dean, UCLA) & Devon Carbado (UCLA)
• Statutory Interpretation Stories (2011), edited by William N. Eskridge, Jr. (Yale), Philip P. Frickey (UC-Berkeley) & Elizabeth Garrett (USC)
• Tax Stories (2d ed. 2009), edited by Paul L. Caron (Cincinnati & Pepperdine)
• Torts Stories (2003), edited by Robert L. Rabin (Stanford) & Stephen D. Sugarman (UC-Berkeley)
• Trial Stories (2008), edited by Michael E. Tigar (American) & Angela J. Davis (American)
• Women and the Law Stories (2011), edited by Elizabeth M. Schneider (Brooklyn) & Stephanie M. Wildman (Santa Clara)

Is Georgetown's Desire to Hire the 'Pick of the Litter' of Faculty Proof of Discrimination Against Older Applicants?

Following up on my prior posts (links below): Blog of the Legal Times, Georgetown Law Argues for Dismissal of Age Discrimination Lawsuit:

A Washington federal judge heard arguments Monday on whether the use of words such as "young" or "pick of the litter" in discussing law professor applicants was evidence of discrimination against older applicants in Georgetown University Law Center's hiring process.

Former North Dakota Attorney General Nicholas Spaeth sued Georgetown and five other schools after he failed to get an interview through the AALS faculty recruitment conference in 2010.

Georgetown moved for summary judgment, arguing that they had non-discriminatory reasons for rejecting Spaeth, in particular his lack of expressed interest in legal scholarship. U.S. District Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle heard arguments yesterday afternoon.

In briefs, Spaeth's lawyers pointed to an internal university memorandum discussing the need to hire "promising young scholars" and praising the "young cohorts" at peer institutions as an example of bias against older candidates. Hogan Lovells civil litigation partner William Nussbaum, lead counsel for Georgetown, argued today that the word "young" was used as a synonym for "new" and wasn't proof that Georgetown was against hiring older candidates.

Nussbaum added that Spaeth's lawyers engaged in "linguistics acrobats" to show that other phrases they identified in evidence related to the school's hiring process were proof of discrimination in favor of younger candidates, from "pick of the litter" to "enthusiastic."

Lynn Bernabei of Washington's Bernabei & Wachtel, a lead attorney for Spaeth, countered that the language was a clear indication of "structural discrimination" at Georgetown. She said that even absent statements that referred specifically to Spaeth, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and U.S. Supreme Court had held that evidence of a discriminatory atmosphere was relevant. ...

Sapeth's lawsuits against five other law schools were transferred to their home state jurisdictions, at which point Spaeth withdrew most of his claims. Besides the Georgetown case, Spaeth is still pursuing similar claims against the University of Missouri School of Law in a Missouri state court.

Prior TaxProf Blog posts:

• Former AG Sues Michigan State, Files EEOC Complaints Against 100 Law Schools, for Age Discrimination in Hiring (July 20, 2011)
• At Law Schools, Age Bias Co-exists with Outdated Practices (Aug. 29, 2011)
• Former AG Sues Five Additional Law Schools for Age Discrimination in Faculty Hiring (Nov. 27, 2011)
• Iowa Prevails in First of Three Faculty Hiring Discrimination Lawsuits (Feb. 28, 2012)
• Georgetown Refused to Hire 62-Year Faculty Candidate Due to Lack of Scholarship, Unwillingness to Teach Tax (Feb 2, 2013)

ACTEC Sponsors 2013 Law Student Writing Competition

The Legal Education Committee of the American College of Trust and Estate Counsel (ACTEC) is sponsoring the 2013 Law Student Writing Competition:

Purpose:  Consistent with ACTEC’s purposes, the American College of Trust and Estate Counsel Mary Moers Wenig Student Writing Competition was created to encourage and reward scholarly works in the area of trusts and estates. ACTEC’s purposes are to maintain an association of lawyers, international in scope, skilled and experienced in the preparation of wills and trusts; estate planning; probate procedure and administration of trusts and estates of decedents, minors and incompetents; to improve and reform probate, trust and tax laws, procedures, and professional responsibility, to bring together qualified lawyers whose character and ability will contribute to the achievement of the purposes of the College; and to cooperate with bar associations and other organizations with similar purposes.

Eligibility:  This competition is open to any law student in good standing (full-time or part-time) who is currently enrolled as a J.D. or LL.M. candidate in an ABA-accredited law school within the United States or its possessions.

Subjects: The paper must relate to the area of trusts and estates, broadly defined to include:

• Business Planning
• Charitable Planning
• Elder Law
• Employee Benefits
• Fiduciary Administration
• Fiduciary Income Taxation
• Fiduciary Litigation
• Estate Planning and Drafting
• Professional Responsibility
• Substantive Laws for the Gratuitous Transmission of Property
• Wealth Transfer Taxation (Estate, Gift and GST Tax)

Prizes:

• 1st Prize: $5,000 and publication in the ACTEC Journal
• 2d Prize:  $3,000 and online publication on ACTEC’s website
• 3d Prize:  $1,000 and online publication on ACTEC’s website

Deadline:  June 14, 2013

For more information:

• Prior Winners
• Official Rules
• Entry Form (Single Author)
• Entry Form (Joint Submission)

NLJ: Which Law Schools Are Tops for Jobs?

National Law Journal:  Which Law Schools Are Tops for Jobs?:

During the past two years, the ABA has significantly increased the amount and detail of information it requires law schools to report about job placement. It also has worked to get the information to the public much faster — the better to guide law school applicants. The organization breaks down the types of jobs graduates have landed and whether they are full-time, long-term or short-term positions, and identifies the three states where graduates of each law school were most likely to find work. The key takeaway is that the job market for new lawyers improved not much at all in 2012.

Read This If You Want a Legal Job
George Washington sent nearly 23% its class of 2012 into jobs paid for by the school itself. Rutgers–Camden sent the largest percentage of its class to state court clerkships. Those are among the thousands of nuggets of information contained in a data trove released recently by the ABA.

Where the Jobs Are
These 20 law schools placed the highest percentage of their 2012 graduates in full-time, long-term jobs that require bar passage.

Large-Firm Jobs
Want to work in Big Law? These law schools sent the highest percentages of their class of 2012 into permanent, full-time jobs at law firms of 100 or more lawyers.

Unemployed
These law schools had the highest percentage of their class of 2012 who were seeking jobs but had not secured any employment nine months after graduation.

Falling short of the Dream
Unemployment figures alone don’t offer a complete picture of law grads struggling the most on the job market because they exclude graduates in temporary or part-time work, or graduates in nonprofessional jobs.

School-Funded Jobs
These law schools had the highest percentage of 2012 graduates in jobs that were financed by the school itself.

Government and Public Interest
These law schools sent the highest percentage of their class of 2012 into either government jobs, such as prosecutors, or public interest jobs, such as public defenders or nonprofit attorneys.

Federal Clerkships
These schools sent the largest percentage of their class of 2012 into clerkships with federal judges.

State Clerkships
These schools sent the largest percentage of their class of 2012 into clerkships with state judges.

Women at Harvard Law School: Shatter the Ceiling and Canaries in the Coal Mine

Harvard Women's Law Association, Shatter the Ceiling Short Film and Solidarity Letter [video]

Harvard Law Record op-ed:  Do You Accept the Status Quo? It’s About Time to Shatter the Ceiling, by Lena Silver:

The Shatter the Ceiling coalition is an initiative calling attention to systemic gender disparities at Harvard Law School.

Shatter the Ceiling started with a rumor: “Did you hear that not one woman got Magna Cum Laude last year?” my friend asked me over winter break. With a few minutes of research, this rumor proved untrue, but its origin was easily explainable. In 2011, approximately 30 percent of magna cum laude recipients were women. In 2012, the number remained unchanged.

A little more research led me to Adam Neufeld’s 2004 Study, “Study on Women’s Experiences at Harvard Law School,” on the HLS website. Adam Neufeld had access to 1L grades, other statistics and freedom to observe classrooms. He found male students were 50 percent more likely than women to speak voluntarily at least once in class; 40 percent of men ranked themselves in the top quintile in quantitative skills versus 11 percent of women, and; from 1999-2003, 14.4 percent of men were awarded magna cum laude versus 8.4 percent of women. ...

We have uncovered more statistics that highlight the gender disparities across the board at HLS. Women comprise(d)

• 9 out of 44 of this year’s incoming Harvard Law Review members (which has prompted a change in HLR application policies);
• 29 percent of the Supreme Court clerkships from Harvard alum over the past six years;
• 18 out of 60 of the magna cum laude honors recipients in 2012;
• 7 out of 24 semi-rounds finalist in Ames 2013, and;
• 18 women out of 92 current professors and assistant professors.

We feel these interrelated disparities in achievement reflect a patent injustice, as well as signal that the educational environment and system at HLS negatively affects the quality of life and education for all members of the law school community, especially minority groups. We cannot forget the historical dimension at issue -- HLS excluded women until 1953, and women did not attend in significant numbers until the 1990s. The doors have opened, but we still have a long way to go to achieve parity.

For an alternative perspective, see Wall Street Journal:  The Crimson Canaries: Does the Socratic Method Keep Women Down?, by James Taranto:

So I think what I would say to you is probably captured by the miners' canary metaphor--that the women in law school are the canary in the coal mines. So they're more vulnerable when the atmosphere in the coal mines gets toxic. The canary, because of its different respiratory system, is more likely to start gasping for air, and that's a sign that the atmosphere is toxic not just for the canary but for the miners as well. So it's a signal to evacuate. -- Lani Guinier

The video's subject is "systemic gender disparities," which in ordinary English means that female Harvard Law students perform poorly by comparison with their male counterparts. ... According to U.S. News & World Report, the student body at Harvard Law is 47.2% female. So there's no disputing that these numbers, possibly excepting the proportion of cum laude grads, are skewed. Why? The WLA's hypothesis is discrimination against women. Our hypothesis is discrimination in favor of women. We suspect that in an effort to maintain a near-even sex ratio, Harvard Law holds female applicants to lower standards than male ones.

That would be analogous to the experience with racial preferences. Racial and ethnic minority students who are admitted for "diversity" value despite lower scores and grades tend to struggle in school and be likelier to drop out.

There's a problem with that analogy. Racial disparities in academic performance are observed in a wide variety of educational settings. Harvard Law's sex disparity, by contrast, is unusual. Indeed, today in most educational settings it is female students who outperform male ones, as Laura Rosenbury, a Harvard grad who is now Sullivan & Cromwell Visiting Professor of Law, says in the video:

I've been teaching at Washington University in St. Louis, and we don't have this problem. In fact, women outperform their male colleagues, both in terms of grades and in terms of law-review competition. And so what makes Harvard different?

Here is a possible answer: What makes Harvard different is its status as one of the most elite of the elite institutions of legal education. Among 194 accredited law schools, U.S. News ranks it second only to Yale.

The LSAT ... is a test of abstract reasoning skills, essentially an IQ test. "Most psychometricians conclude that men and women have the same mean IQ," as Charles Murray noted in a 2005 Commentary article. But "men consistently exhibit higher variance ... meaning that there are proportionally more men than women at both ends of the bell curve."

The right end of the bell curve represents a small portion of the population, but one that is enormously important in a culture and economy that increasingly value cognitive ability. The higher male variance means that the subpopulation of extremely intelligent outliers includes substantially more men than women. If admissions were purely meritocratic, the most elite schools would be the ones with the highest sex ratios. But the law school at Washington University, which U.S. News ranks only No. 19, has a higher ratio than Harvard's: 57% male to 43% female.

Of course, we could be wrong, to paraphrase one thinker. We haven't proved our hypothesis, merely set it forth and made an argument for why it is plausible. ...

In its way, this video is an excellent advertisement for Harvard Law School. If you were on trial for your life, you'd want a lawyer who'd gone through such rigorous training. You'd want a Harvard man.

Or a Harvard woman. With the video, the WLA does a grave injustice to those female Harvard Law students who are up to the challenge, who are able to compete with the fellows, who do make law review or graduate magna cum laude on the merits.

Not all women at Harvard Law are canaries. The Socratic method doesn't seem to have kept Elena Kagan down.

Update:  Ann Althouse (Wisconsin), A Hostile Environment Toward Women at Harvard Law School?

My Promise to My Dying Husband

My Promise to My Dying Husband:

Ryan Scott Prudhomme, I promise to you that I will cherish your memory as long as I live. Your character, your integrity, your heart for the Lord, and your unshakable faith in Him are all reasons that I, along with many others, will continue to regard you as a most extraordinary person. I admire you more than you could imagine.

Ryan, I promise to you that your son will know you as he grows. Any creative way that I can devise to ensure that he grows up feeling close to you—I plan to do it. Any person that can tell him about your jokes, your idiosyncrasies, your personality traits—I will ensure those people have an avenue to tell your son about his beloved daddy. Regardless of whether you get to parent him for two or twenty or seventy years, I pledge to you my commitment to raise him to know his dad.

I promise to you I will not despair, I will not be broken, and I will somehow, someday, some way again feel joy and peace. During the last two years, I know your first thoughts are usually of me—not of yourself—and you have been far more worried about me and Colton. Your love for me has never been more evident and has helped gird me through some very difficult times. I could never have done this without your faithful prayer and your encouragement, but I’m entering into a new phase where I won’t have the luxury of your nearness. Despite that, I know deep down that I am a person that can shoulder anything, as long as the Lord stands behind me. And He will. I will, with His grace, stand tall and will endure whatever tomorrow brings. Don't you worry. 

(Hat Tip: Derek Muller.)

TaxProf Blog Weekend Roundup

Saturday:

• WSJ:  More Than 50% of Law Graduates Aren’t Making a Living
• Obama Won't Take Charitable Deduction for Contribution of $20,000 of His Salary to Feds
• Obama Budget to Limit IRAs to $3 Million
• Dartmouth Grad:  Find a Man Today, Graduate Tomorrow

Sunday:

• Posner:  The Real Problem With Law Schools (They Train Too Many Lawyers)
• Top 5 Tax Paper Downloads
• The Guardian:  Law Students Face Uncertain Future With Jobs Scarce and Debt High
• 12th Annual Conducting Empirical Legal Scholarship Workshop

Posner: The Real Problem With Law Schools (They Train Too Many Lawyers)

Slate:  The Real Problem With Law Schools: They Train Too Many Lawyers, by Eric Posner (Chicago):

A crisis is looming in legal education. Last month, a notable group of legal educators who call themselves the Coalition of Concerned Colleagues released a letter declaring that law schools have spewed forth more graduates than the legal market can absorb, resulting in rising unemployment among young lawyers, who cannot pay off colossal student loans. As the New York Times recently reported, applications are plummeting, and a movement is on to reduce law school educations from three to two years—advocated in the New York Times by law professor Samuel Estreicher and law dean Daniel Rodriguez. The CCC letter similarly argues that legal education should be less expensive and less uniform, which sounds fine in the abstract. But in the details, the proposed fixes will make the crisis worse than ever.

The figures are grim, and the human cost is real. Ninety-two percent of 2007 law school graduates found jobs after graduation, with 77 percent employed in a position requiring them to pass the bar. For the class of 2011 (the latest class for which there are data), the employment figure is 86 percent—with only 65 percent employed in a position that required bar passage. Preliminary employment figures for the class of 2012 are even worse. The median starting salary has declined from $72,000 in 2009 to $60,000 in 2012. A while back, the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated that 218,800 new legal jobs would be created between 2010 and 2020. As law professor Paul Campos points out, because law schools graduate more than 40,000 students per year, those jobs should be snapped up by 2015—leaving only normal attrition and retirement spots left for the classes of 2016 to 2020. Meanwhile, tuition has increased dramatically over the last several decades. Students who graduate from law school today with $100,000 or more in debt will default on their loans if they cannot get high-paying work in the law.

The crisis could have been predicted. Demand for legal services boomed in the 1990s and 2000s. College graduates, drawn by skyrocketing pay and subsidized by government-guaranteed loans, flocked to law school in ever greater numbers. Law schools, rational market actors that they are, hiked tuition. The higher prices people were willing to pay for legal education encouraged universities to enlarge classes and open additional law schools. Not surprisingly, supply overtook demand. The mismatch is now exacerbated by the development of technological substitutes for some legal work, including online services that enable people to fill out legal forms, and a weak economy. ...

The “crisis,” then, is just part of the normal cycle of the economy—familiar to anyone who has held a job as construction worker, software engineer, salesman, or journalist. And the market is reacting in a predictable way. Fewer people are applying to law schools; class sizes are shrinking; some law schools may shut down. The excess supply of lawyers will reduce the price of legal services—a boon for everyone outside the legal sector—and so some lawyers will leave the profession for early retirement or more lucrative pursuits. (We seem to have forgotten the usual complaint about lawyers that they charge too much, not too little.) Demand and supply will eventually equilibrate, and the legal services market will look something like it did 10 or 15 years ago.

None of the proposals for reform advocated by CCC make sense in light of the group’s diagnosis of the problems lawyers face. ...

[Y]ou can’t blame government subsidies for the plight of young lawyers. Government guarantees lower the cost for lawyers to obtain training. If the subsidies create a larger supply of lawyers, it should also create a greater demand for their services, by reducing the costs that they pass on to clients. Depriving students of government-guaranteed loans is hardly a solution to the problem that legal education is too expensive. ...

The only realistic way to help lawyers today is to increase the demand for legal services—somehow convincing governments, for example, to pay for adequate representation of indigent defendants—but in the long term, greater demand will create the expectation of yet more job growth, and that could lead to another bust. The critics seem to think the legal profession can escape the logic of the market. It can’t.

Matt Leichter, "The Real Problem With Law Schools” Real Problem Is Poor Research, Flawed Reasoning:

Posner believes that the group of law school professors from mostly prestigious universities who sent a letter to the ABA calling themselves the “Coalition of Concerned Colleagues” “will make the crisis worse than ever.”

If you think that handing vouchers to everyone 18 years and up to attend law school at full cost to the government plus living expenses would be the only way things could get worse than ever (if people still even bother to apply at that), you obviously don’t know economics. ... The worst thing anyone can say about the “Coalition of Concerned Colleagues’” letter to the ABA is that it was too cautious re. the Direct Loan Program, which isn’t even worth a comment on a scamblog. Rather, Posner’s argumentum ad econ one-o-oneum is the only kind of logic we really need to escape from.

The Guardian: Law Students Face Uncertain Future With Jobs Scarce and Debt High

The Guardian:  Law Students Face Uncertain Future With Jobs Scarce and Debt High:

The law profession is facing a crisis, and a juris doctor is no longer a generalist's degree; it's not all courtrooms and arguing any more. Computers can do much of the same work as a law clerk, and schools are having to adjust. ...

There is less focus on how the change in the legal profession will affect students. Law schools are adapting, but graduates don't have it so easy. Many feel locked into legal careers because of the crushing debt they have accumulated; fewer people are running to law school hoping it will save them from the economy. Applications to law school have dropped by 20% compared with those posted by this time in 2012, according to a March report from the Law School Admissions Council. ...

Permanent jobs with high-paying salaries are a thing of the past for many graduates, and a handful of attorneys are suing against what they feel were misleading job success rates posted by their law schools. The Los Angeles Times reported Monday that 18 law schools around the country are being sued by graduates who claim they choose their schools because of high graduate placement, a figure commonly used to rank the quality of the school. At least five of those lawsuits were filed in California. ...

Massive debt and fewer prospects mean the era of law degrees as a route into the job market could be coming to an end. Law schools are meeting lower demand for graduates with generalist degrees by shifting law school curriculums into more specialized areas. "Private sector demand for smart but financially illiterate law graduates with a general professional degree and no particular industry expertise is, to say the least, dwindling," Victor Fleischer wrote in the New York Times last October.

But it's too little too late for some.

"I never really thought about whether I would actually like being a lawyer, which seems absurd to me now," Manhattan-based lawyer Emily, 28, told the Guardian, "but is extremely common among young people applying to law school." Emily's debt after graduating with a degree from Fordham Law is $139,000 – average Fordham debt: $134,319 – and though her salary of $170,000 at a Manhattan law firm is enough to pay off the bill in 10 years, she's locked into a career she doesn't enjoy at least until then. Her loan payment: $1,700 per month. "I haven't enjoyed my career so far, and I honestly don't think I will," Emily said. "I am tied to working at a big law firm if I want any chance at repaying my loans in a reasonable time and it is not a good job. And I'm one of the lucky ones because I'm employed!" ...

As thousands of students apply for law school this spring – less than before, but still thousands – they're inevitably asking themselves: is the debt worth it?

(Hat Tip: David Finkel.)

12th Annual Conducting Empirical Legal Scholarship Workshop

The 12th Annual Conducting Empirical Legal Scholarship Workshop will take place at the USC Gould School of Law on May 22 - 24, 2013:

The workshop is for law school faculty, political science faculty, and graduate students interested in learning about empirical research and how to evaluate empirical work. Leading empirical scholars Lee Epstein and Andrew Martin will teach the workshop, which provides the formal training necessary to design, conduct, and assess empirical studies, and to use statistical software (Stata) to analyze and manage data. Participants need no background or knowledge of statistics to enroll in the workshop.

For more information or to register, see here.

WSJ: More Than 50% of Law Graduates Aren’t Making a Living

Wall Street Journal:  More than 50% of Graduates Aren’t Making a Living -- Study:

More than 50% of law school graduates from the 2011 class aren’t earning enough to buy a house, according to a new study [Jerry Organ (St. Thomas), Reflections on the Decreasing Affordability of Legal Education, 41 Wash. U. J.L. & Pol'y ___ (2013)]. ...

Mr. Organ took a formula for measuring a law school graduate’s economic viability developed by University of Louisville Law Professor Jim Chen [A Degree of Practical Wisdom: The Ratio of Educational Debt to Income as a Basic Measurement of Law School Graduates’ Economic Viability, 38 Wm. Mitchell L. Rev. 1185 (2012)] and applied it to employment outcome data published on a per school basis by the ABA for the class of 2011.

Graduates need to be earning an annual income that’s at least two times their annual tuition — or an income that’s at least two-thirds of their law school debt — to reach “marginal financial viability,” according to the formula. Those below the threshold can’t afford to buy a $100,000 house and struggle to retire their debt. ...

He concludes:  Across all law schools and after accounting for scholarships in the manner described above, the estimated percentage of graduates from the Class of 2011 who have marginal financial viability increased from roughly 33% to roughly 46.5%, while the estimated percentage of such graduates who have less than marginal financial viability declined from roughly 67% to roughly 53.5%.

Those facing the bleakest prospects are graduates with lower LSAT scores and grade point averages who are more likely to pay full tutition, and those who went to school in places where legal education is more expensive, like California, Illinois, Massachusetts, and New York.

“Law schools are going to find themselves with fewer students to fill their seats unless costs come down or the job market improves significantly,” Mr. Organ told Law Blog by email.

See also Above the Law, If You Want to Own a Home, Don’t Borrow Money to Go to Law School

From Jim's article:

To offer good financial viability, defined as a ratio of education debt to annual income no greater than 0.5, post-law school salary must exceed annual tuition by a factor of 6 to 1. Adequate financial viability is realized when annual salary matches or exceeds three years of law school tuition. A marginal, arguably minimally acceptable level of financial viability requires a salary that is equal to two years’ tuition. The following table compares some tuition benchmarks with the salary needed to ensure the good, adequate, and marginal levels of financial viability identified in this article:

Dartmouth Grad: Find a Man Today, Graduate Tomorrow

Followiing up on Tuesday's post, Advice for the Women of Princeton: Wall Street Journal op-ed:  Find a Man Today, Graduate Tomorrow, by Emily Esfahani Smith:

In 2008, when I was a college junior, I went home to New Jersey one weekend to visit my family—and almost immediately regretted it. My mother seemed more interested in my romantic life than my academic life: "Have you found a boyfriend yet?"

I rolled my eyes and said no. With a healthy dose of young-adult arrogance, I explained that I was too busy studying, working on the college review, and helping out at my sorority. No time for men. My mother nodded, acknowledging that there was a lot going on.

Then she said calmly but forcefully: "You're in college. You're at Dartmouth. There will never be a better time to meet someone. I'm sure there are many interesting boys around. If you don't find one before you graduate, you might not find one at all—so start looking."

Fast forward to today. A woman named Susan Patton is being pilloried online and elsewhere for giving young women the same advice that my mother gave to me. Late last week, she wrote a letter to the Daily Princetonian newspaper advising the school's female students: "You will never again have this concentration of men who are worthy of you. . . . Find a husband on campus before you graduate."

Feminist attacks on Ms. Patton began immediately—the paper's website was swamped with complaints, the Twitter crowd was livid, and writers lit into her at Slate, New York magazine and beyond. ...

[M]y mother's advice five years ago stopped me in my tracks. If she, a strong, career-oriented feminist—who, with my dad, sacrificed a great deal for me to go to college—was telling me to pay more attention to my romantic life, then what did she know that I didn't?

A lot. She knew what few, if any, feminists would tell young women today: There is far more to happiness than career success. ... In a boardroom somewhere, Sheryl "Lean In" Sandberg's heart is sinking.

Career success and relationships are both undoubtedly important to women's happiness, but many young and ambitious women value their personal lives more than their career aspirations. And that feeling intensifies over time.

In a 2009 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, David Lubinski and his team at Vanderbilt found that in a sample of academically gifted young adults, women became less career-oriented than men over time. As they approached middle age, women also placed more value than men on spending time with family, community and friends. These differences became more pronounced with parenthood.

My mother's advice—Susan Patton's advice—may not be right for every woman, but it was right for me. In the fall of my senior year, I started dating a brilliant man and we're still together. If I were unattached today, I'm not sure what I would do. The post-college dating scene can be rough: Getting to know someone often means shouting across a noisy bar or scrolling through Internet dating profiles. Finding a partner in college is easier.

Mom was right.

Anderson: State Bar Exam Difficulty Rankings

My Pepperdine colleague Rob Anderson blogs The Most Difficult Bar Exams:

Law students and lawyers evaluate the relative difficulty of bar exams all the time. The most intuitive measure involves simply comparing bar passage rates among the states. That gives some indication of the bar exam's difficulty, but of course the composition of bar takers may vary significantly across states, making such a comparison potentially misleading.

To develop a slightly more accurate assessment of relative bar difficulty, I ran a regression of the bar passage rate for each ABA-accredited school for 2010 and 2011 on the school's median undergraduate GPA and LSAT, with an indicator variable for each state, weighted by the number of takers at each school. I collected this information from the LSAC Official Guide to ABA-Approved Law Schools (Alaska, Delaware, and the DC bars were omitted because of too few observations).

The table below sets out the resulting ranking of state bar exams in order from most difficult to least difficult. For each state, the weighted average LSAT score and the calculated (in the data) and overall (reported by the state) bar passage rates for 2010-2011 is set forth, along with the "bonus percent" relative to the California bar. The "bonus percent" is, roughly speaking, the percentage point bonus for a school's bar passage rate relative to the California bar (with predictors held at their averages).

Here are the 10 most difficult state bars under Rob's analysis:

	State Bar Examination	Bonus Percent	Calculated Average LSAT	Calculated Passage Rate	Overall Passage Rate
1	California	0.00	160.92	75.69	72.22
2	Arkansas	1.43	155.21	72.75	73.35
3	Washington	3.29	158.45	76.52	72.82
4	Louisiana	3.78	154.86	73.09	70.00
5	Nevada	4.72	158.41	77.85	72.86
6	Virginia	5.10	163.10	83.43	77.61
7	Oregon	5.19	159.21	78.67	76.04
8	West Virginia	6.47	153.43	76.78	78.80
9	Vermont	7.87	155.04	77.78	81.18
10	Maryland	7.99	160.40	82.82	79.08

• Above the Law, Which State Has the Most Difficult Bar Exam?

The Death and Resurrection of Sitemeter

Sitemeter, the ubiquitous traffic tracking service used by many blogs (including TaxProf Blog and the Law Professor Blogs Network), went down yesterday.  Disenchanted Tech and Frog Blog reported yesterday that Sitemeter may have neglected to reregister the sitemeter.com domain:

Normally when domains expire they go into a holding pattern for a while before they’re finally released and available to be registered again however it looks like someone swooped in and snapped it up straight away. This could get messy.

Disenchanted Tech reports today that Sitemeter.com Is Back (Nearly):

As of this morning, sitemeter’s whois information is back to what it should be. So it looks like they were lucky and got their domain name back quickly.

Pepperdine Symposium: The New Normal in College Sports

The Pepperdine Law Review is live webcasting its Sports Law Symposium at 8:30 a.m. to 5:15 p.m. PST (11:30 a.m. to 8:15 p.m. EST),  The New Normal in College Sports: Realigned and Reckoning (schedule here). Among the speakers are:

• Ken Starr (President, Baylor University; Former Dean, Pepperdine)
• Deanell Tacha (Dean, Pepperdine)
• Babette Boliek (Professor, Pepperdine)
• Andrew Brandt (ESPN NFL Business Analyst and Professor, Villanova (Moorad Center for Sports Law))
• Roger Cossack (ESPN Legal Analyst and Professor, Pepperdine)
• Mark Fainaru-Wada (ESPN Investigative Reporter)
• Gabe Feldman (Professor, Tulane (Tulane Sports Law Program))
• Daniel Lazaroff (Professor, Loyola-L.A. (Loyola Sports Law Institute))
• Michael McCann (Legal Analyst, Sports Illustrated and Professor, New Hampshire (Sports and Entertainment Law Institute))
• Matthew Mitten (Professor, Marquette (National Sports Law Institute))
• Jeff Moorad (Founder, Moorad Sports Management)
• Rodney Smith (Professor, Thomas Jefferson (Center for Sports Law and Policy))
• Jeffrey Standen (Associate Dean, Willamette)
• Katherine Sulentic (Assistant Director of Enforcement, NCAA)
• Maureen Weston (Professor, Pepperdine)

Arizona Cuts Law School Tuition by 11%

National Law Journal:  Arizona Cuts Law School Tuition, Marking a First, by Karen Sloan:

Is the era of law school tuition decreases upon us?

The Arizona Board of Regents on Thursday unanimously approved an 11% tuition cut for in-state residents at the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law and an 8% reduction for nonresidents.

The move would appear to be the first significant law school tuition reduction since nationwide application totals began to decline in 2011. It offers evidence that the list prices for a law school education, which have far outpaced inflation for more than a decade, are beginning to reflect supply and demand. ...

The decrease is intended in part to make the school more appealing and accessible, said interim law dean Marc Miller. Applications are down by about 10% compared to one year ago, although the law school intends to accept applications past the formal February 15 deadline. Nationwide, the number of law school applicants is down by about 17%, according to the Law School Admission Council.

Annual tuition for Arizona residents will be $24,381, a cut of about $3,000 per year. Non-resident tuition will be $38,841, about $3,500 less per year. ...

The law school plans to make up for the lost revenue by expanding existing master of laws and doctor of juridical science programs and introducing a new LL.M. for non-lawyers. It also plans to reduce its pool of scholarship money.

The university regents voted to maintain existing tuition rates at Arizona State University Sandra Day O'Connor College of the Law at $26,267 for resident students and $40,815 for nonresidents.

Arizona's tuition decrease doesn't go far enough, said Brian Tamanaha, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis School of Law and the author of Failing Law Schools.
"Although I applaud it, this strikes me as mostly symbolic," he said. "Their tuition is too high for the types of jobs available in Arizona, so an 11% reduction is not enough. Tuition must go below $20,000 for to better align cost and economic return for the majority of students." ... Tamanaha was unsure whether the lower tuition would make the school more competitive with in-state rival ASU but was skeptical that other law schools would voluntarily follow Arizona's lead. He thought tuition declines of 25% or more would be needed to fill the seats as some law schools....

[A]dministrators plan to market their lower rates to potential students, particularly in California, where resident tuition at public law schools is equal or higher to Arizona's nonresident tuition.

• ABA Journal, Attention Law School Shoppers: It’s Now Cheaper to Get a JD from the University of Arizona
• Arizona Daily Star, University of Arizona Law School Cutting Tuition as Enrollment Drops
• Comedians at Law, Law School Tuition Going Down
• Greedy Associates, Univ. of AZ Lowers Law School Tuition; Market Correction?
• Matt Leichter, More on the (In)elasticity of Demand for Law School: Tuition Cuts Edition
• Wall Street Journal, University of Arizona Fires First Salvo in Law School Tuition War

LexisNexis Publishes Estate and Gift Taxation

On behalf of LexisNexis and the Graduate Tax Series Board of Editors (Ellen Aprill (Loyola-L.A.), Joshua Blank (NYU), Michael Friel (Florida), Philip Postlewaite (Northwestern), and Scott Schumaker (U. Washington)) I am delighted to announce the publication of Estate and Gift Taxation (2d ed. 2013), by Robert Danforth (Washington & Lee) & Brant Hellwig (Washington & Lee).

The Graduate Tax Series is the first and only series of course materials designed for use in tax LL.M. programs. Like all books in the Series, Estate and Gift Taxation was designed from the ground-up with the needs of graduate tax faculty and students in mind:

• More focus on Internal Revenue Code and regulations, less on case law
• Analysis of complex, practice-oriented problems of increasing sophistication
• Teacher’s manual with solutions to problems and other guidance
• On-line access to the comprehensive and current Code and regulations, designed to complement the book

This new edition of Estate and Gift Taxation transitions from the temporary estate and gift tax regime that prevailed for the last decade by incorporating the provisions of the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012 that places the federal wealth transfer tax regime on a permanent footing. In addition to noting these fundamental legislative changes, the book devotes additional coverage to a number of recent estate and gift taxation hot topics, including:

• Defined value transfers and the increasing acceptance of this technique by courts;
• Portability of the unified credit from a predeceasing spouse to a surviving spouse;
• Availability of the gift tax annual exclusion for transfers of restricted beneficial interests in closely held entities; and
• Recent cases examining challenges to the use of family limited partnerships as estate planning vehicles.

Like the first edition of Estate and Gift Taxation published in 2011, the second edition consists of discrete chapters addressing the estate and gift tax regime in a context specific manner (i.e., jointly held property; life insurance; powers of appointment; retained-interest transfers, etc.). Each chapter contains a narrative explanation of the material, with important cases typically summarized rather than reproduced in full. Each chapter closes with a problem set requiring students to apply the relevant doctrine in the context of realistic hypothetical examples. A common technique in the problems is to present students sample trust language and then to ask students to identify tax pitfalls and to suggest drafting solutions around them. The authors provide their suggested answers to the problems in the comprehensive Teacher's Manual for the second edition, which also will be available in July.

Ten other books in the Graduate Tax Series also are available for adoption:

• Civil Tax Procedure (2d ed. 2008) & 2011 Supp.), by David Richardson (Florida), Jerome Borison (Denver) & Steve Johnson (Florida State)
• Corporate Taxation (2012), by Charlotte Crane (Northwestern) & Linda Beale (Wayne State)
• Employee Benefits Law: Qualification Rules and ERISA Requirements (2d ed. 2012), by Kathryn Kennedy (John Marshall) & Paul Shultz (Former Director, IRS Employee Plans Rulings & Agreement)
• Federal Tax Accounting (2d ed. 2011), by Michael Lang (Chapman), Elliott Manning (Miami) & Mona Hymel (Arizona)
• Federal Taxation of Property Transactions (2012), by Elliott Manning (Miami) & David Cameron (Northwestern)
• Partnership Taxation (3d ed. 2012), by Richard Lipton (Baker & McKenzie, Chicago), Paul Carman (Chapman & Cutler, Chicago), Charles Fassler (Greenebaum, Doll & McDonald, Louisville) & Walter Schwidetzky (Baltimore)
• Regulation of Tax Practice (2010), by Linda Galler (Hofstra) & Michael Lang (Chapman)
• Tax Crimes (2008), by Steve Johnson (Florida State), Scott Schumacher (Washington), Larry Campagna (Adjunct Professor, Houston) & John Townsend (Adjunct Professor, Houston)
• Taxation and Business Planning for Real Estate Transactions (2012), by Bradley Borden (Brooklyn)
• United States International Taxation (2d ed. 2011), by Allison Christians (Wisconsin), Samuel Donaldson (Washington) &  Philip Postlewaite (Northwestern)

Other information:

• For more details about the Graduate Tax Series, see here.
• Click on these links to purchase a copy of Civil Tax Procedure, Corporate Taxation, Employee Benefits Law, Estate and Gift Taxation, Federal Tax Accounting, Federal Taxation of Property Transactions, Partnership Taxation, Regulation of Tax Practice, Tax Crimes, Taxation and Business Planning for Real Estate Transactions, and United States International Taxation.  Faculty can request a complimentary review copy by emailing here (in the body of your email, note the title of the book you are requesting and your contact information).
• Email me if you would like more information about the Graduate Tax Series or if you would like to submit a book proposal.

Jones: The U.S. News Law School Academic Reputation Scores, 1998-2013

Robert L. Jones (Northern Illinois) agreed to discuss his forthcoming article, A Longitudinal Analysis of the U.S. News Law School Academic Reputation Scores between 1998 and 2013, 40 Fla. St. L. Rev. ___ (2013):

Longitudinal Analysis summarizes the results of an empirical study of the U.S. News academic reputation scores (“peer assessment scores”) for the 172 law schools that received scores for each year between 1998 and 2013. The year 1998 was chosen as the start of the study because U.S. News adopted its current 1-5 scale for the scores in that year. All of the scores are catalogued in the appendices that appear at the end of the article.

When I began the study, I expected to find that the academic reputation scores had not moved appreciably over the last sixteen years. For the most part, the data confirmed this hypothesis. The average standard deviation for the 172 schools in the data set was only .074. The average range of movement for the schools was .248. On average, in other words, the law schools moved less than .3 (both up and down) for the entire sixteen year period. Approximately half of the law schools finished the sixteen year period with scores that were within .1 of the scores they originally possessed in 1998. The chart below helps to illustrate the stability of the scores.

In several important respects, however, the results of the study were quite surprising. While the overall lack of volatility for the scores was anticipated, the direction of the aggregate movement for the scores was not expected. Large amounts of resources have been expended over the last sixteen years in efforts to improve the scores. The academic enterprise itself, furthermore, would seem stronger today at law schools than it was two decades ago. Many faculties have grown in size as new academics with strong qualifications have been hired. Schools have devoted additional resources to facilitating scholarship and the exchange of ideas between individuals and institutions. Blogs such as these, and the SSRN network they often reference, are important examples of the ways in which scholarship is more widely distributed and discussed today than when the period began.

It was quite surprising, therefore, to discover that the majority of law schools had finished the sixteen year period with lower academic reputation scores. One hundred and eight law schools, 63% of the data set, finished 2013 with scores that were lower than the ones they possessed in 1998. Only thirty-three law schools (19% of the data set) were able to finish the period with higher academic reputation scores.  Only eighteen of these law schools, furthermore, managed to improve their scores by more than .1. A mere eight schools (a little less than 5%) succeeded in improving their scores by .3 or more. In contrast, seventy law schools saw their scores decline by .2 or more during the period. Twenty-seven law schools finished the period with academic reputation scores that were down by .3 or more. The chart below summarizes these results in a pie chart.

The data revealed, furthermore, that the downward trend in academic reputation scores has accelerated in recent years.  The year 2013 represented the largest annual decline to the academic reputation scores during the sixteen year period.  Ninety law schools in the data set (52%) suffered declines to their academic reputation scores in the results released a few weeks ago. In contrast, only ten law schools (6% of the data set) managed to improve their scores this year. The timeline below charts the aggregate movement for the academic reputation scores during the studied period. Among other things, the timeline demonstrates that the years between 2010 and 2013 constituted the worst three year period during the study.

Interestingly, the declines in academic reputation scores were in stark contrast to the substantial improvements that law schools enjoyed with respect to the reputation scores they received from lawyers and judges. The study revealed that 142 of the 172 law schools in the data set (83%) finished the period with higher lawyer/judge reputation scores. The improvements to these scores, furthermore, were often substantial. Eighty-three law schools (48% of data set) were able to improve their lawyer/judge reputation scores by .3 or more during the period. Only thirteen law schools (8%), furthermore, suffered declines to their lawyer/judge reputation scores during the period. In contrast, one hundred and eight law schools suffered declines to their academic reputation scores. Overall, the average change for the 172 law schools in the data set with respect to their lawyer/judge reputation scores was a gain of .256 for the period. The average change for these same law schools with respect to the academic reputation scores was a decline of .88. The following two charts demonstrate the disparity between the two types of reputation scores.

The improvements to the lawyer/judge reputation scores would seem consistent with the recent advances in legal academia and the large expenditures that have been devoted to improving reputation scores. Why, then, have the academic reputation scores declined so significantly over the last sixteen years? This author contends in the article that the declines reflect the influence of the U.S. News rankings themselves. The U.S. News rankings now exert an inordinate degree of influence in the world of legal education. The academics who fill out the surveys each year undoubtedly understand that their schools cannot improve in the rankings without a corresponding decline by their competitors. The zero sum nature of the rankings, therefore, provides academics with a powerful incentive to employ increasingly stringent standards in their evaluations of competing institutions. This is not to say that anyone has voted disingenuously in the rankings. It seems apparent, however, that the rankings themselves are exerting a significant influence on the way the academic reputation scores are now formulated.

The influence of strategic considerations on the voting process for the academic reputation scores constitutes a significant methodological problem for the rankings because such influences are fundamentally inapposite to the function of the scores as measures of performance. In fact, the data suggests that these influences have disproportionately impacted those schools that were perceived as the greatest obstacles to the advancement of the other schools. In the chart below, the 172 law schools in the data set were grouped according to the strength of their academic reputation scores at the beginning of the period. The chart demonstrates that there was an inverse correlation during the period between the strength of a law school’s academic reputation score at the start of the period and the ability of that school to maintain its academic reputation score during the course of the period. Law schools that began the period with the highest academic reputation scores suffered the worst declines as a group whereas the law schools that began the period with the lowest academic reputation scores enjoyed the most success as a group.

 

In light of these findings, the article calls into question whether the academic reputation scores are a valid basis for constructing a ranking methodology. At the very least, the article contends, the U.S. News methodology should be improved to address the distortions that have been introduced by these strategic considerations. To that end, the article proposes that academics should not be allowed to rank their own schools, that the highest and lowest scores received for each school should be excluded from the tabulations, that law school deans should not be included in the voting process, and that the voting process itself should be converted to an on-line system which includes information about each school in the survey. Note that two of these improvements have already been proposed by other scholars (Leiter and Seto) but the need for such changes is more pressing now that the data has revealed the extent to which strategic considerations appear to be affecting the voting process.

The reality is that most law schools will continue to devote significant resources to improving their academic reputation scores as long as the scores occupy a central place in the U.S. News ranking methodology. The study identifies, therefore, those law schools that have improved and declined the most during the course of the period and includes a brief analysis of some of the factors that likely contributed to the movements of the scores for these schools. Among other things, the data suggests that a number of the schools were subject to the “echo effect,” a phenomenon whereby a law school’s overall U.S. News rank tends to influence that school’s academic reputation score.

I hope the article proves useful for those who share an interest in improving legal education and the rankings process that impacts it now in so many ways.

Video: Pepperdine/Tax Analysts Symposium, Tax Advice for the Second Obama Administration

The Pepperdine IT folks have divided the full 8-hour video of our January 18, 2013 symposium on Tax Advice for the Second Obama Administration into separate files on iTunes and YouTube.

Introduction and Welcome (iTunes; YouTube)

• Deanell Tacha (Dean, Pepperdine)
• Chris Bergin (President, Tax Analysts)

Keynote Address:  Michael Graetz (Columbia), Tax Advice for the Second Obama Administration, 138 Tax Notes 631 (Feb. 4, 2013) (iTunes; YouTube)

Occupy the Tax Code:  The Buffett Rule, the 1%, and the Fairness/Growth Divide (iTunes; YouTube)

Moderator:      David Brunori (Tax Analysts)

Papers:           Dorothy Brown (Emory), The 535 Report: A Pathway to Fundamental Tax Reform
                         Francine Lipman (UNLV), Access to Tax InJustice
                         Kirk Stark (UCLA) (with Eric Zolt (UCLA)), Tax Reform and the American Middle Class

Commentary:  Bruce Bartlett (New York Times), David Miller (Cadwalader, New York)

Estate and Gift Tax (iTunes; YouTube)

Moderator:      Paul Caron (Cincinnati/Pepperdine)

Papers:           Ed McCaffery (USC), Distracted from Distraction by Distraction: Reimagining Estate Tax Reform
                         Grayson McCouch (San Diego), Who Killed the Rule Against Perpetuities?
                         Jim Repetti (BC) (with Paul Caron), Occupy the Tax Code: Using the Estate Tax to Reduce Inequality and Spur Economic Growth

Commentary:  Joe Thorndike (Tax Analysts)

Luncheon Address:   David Cay Johnston (author/journalist) (iTunes; YouTube)

Business/International Tax #1 (iTunes; YouTube)

Moderator:     Tom Bost (Pepperdine)

Papers:          Steve Bank (UCLA), The Globalization of Corporate Tax Reform
                         Karen Burke (San Diego), Passthrough Entities: The Missing Link in Business Tax Reform
                         Martin Sullivan (Tax Analysts)

Commentary:  Michael Schler (Cravath, New York)

Business/International Tax #2 (iTunes; YouTube)

Moderator:     Khrista McCarden (Pepperdine)

Papers:          Reuven Avi-Yonah (Michigan), Corporate and International Tax Reform: Proposals for the Second Obama Administration
                        Allison Christians (McGill), Putting the Reign Back in Sovereign: Advice for the Second Obama Administration
                        Susan Morse (UC-Hastings), The Transfer Pricing Regs Need a Good Edit

Commentary:  Robert Goulder (Tax Analysts)

Closing Remarks:  What Have We Learned Today?:   David Cay Johnston (author/journalist) (iTunes; YouTube)

Business Week: The Case Against Law School

Business Week:  The Case Against Law School, by Paul M. Barrett:

The legal education industry has hit a wall. The U.S. has an oversupply of attorneys. Law schools keep pumping out more. Graduates have huge debts and sparse job prospects.

“Law schools need to take immediate action to confront today’s crisis,” Paul Caron, a thoughtful and prolific professor at the University of Cincinnati, recently explained [The Law School Crisis: What Would Jimmy McMillan Do?]:

“The current model—convincing 45,000 people each year to assume six-figure debt loads to chase 20,000 legal jobs (most of which do not pay enough to service the debt)—is simply unsustainable. Market and political forces are gathering steam.”

Caron, who specializes in tax law and knows his figures, suggests that the legal professoriate look to Jimmy McMillan for guidance. When he ran for governor of New York in 2010, the eccentric McMillan drove around my Brooklyn neighborhood in a car with a loudspeaker on its roof, shouting his memorable campaign slogan: “The rent is TOO damn high.”

At more than $50,000 a year, “law school tuition is simply too damn high,” Caron argues. “Administrators and faculty need to ruthlessly examine law school budgets and cut areas that are not essential to the school’s mission. Law school is twice as expensive as it was 20 years ago [in inflation-adjusted dollars], yet no one would argue that legal education is twice as good today.”