Dean Martinez's 10-Page Letter To The Stanford Community About The Disruption Of Judge Duncan's Speech

Dean Jenny Martinez sent a 10-page letter to the Stanford community yesterday:

As my message to you last week indicated, I had hoped to wait until after final exams concluded at the end of this week to offer any further comments on the disruption of Judge Kyle Duncan’s speech at a student Federalist Society event on March 9, 2023, and the school’s response to that disruption. However, continuing outside attention to these events, as well as the volume of hateful and even threatening messages directed at members of our community, have led me to conclude that a more immediate statement is necessary.

As we consider the role of respectful treatment of members of our community, I want to be clear that the hate mail and appalling invective that have been directed at some of our students and law school administrators in the wake of March 9 are of great concern to me. All actionable threats that come to our attention will be investigated and addressed as the law permits.

In the message below, I respond below to many of the questions I continue to receive about why I apologized to Judge Duncan, why I stand by that apology, and why the protest violated the university’s policy on disruption. I articulate how I believe our commitment to diversity and inclusion means that we must protect the expression of all views. And, I outline some of the steps the school will be taking in the wake of this incident, including the adoption of clearer protocols for managing disruptions and educational programming on free speech and norms of the legal profession.

This message is unusually lengthy; because we are a law school and these issues are core to our educational mission, I explain some of my reasoning in quite a bit more detail than I would for a general audience. I also recognize that what I share below will not please everyone. While some of you may disagree with my views, I look forward to continuing the conversation about how we can create a learning environment that both respects freedom of speech and ensures that we support all of our diverse community members on their path to becoming lawyers.

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Law School Deans See Through The U.S. News Rankings Bluster

William M. Treanor (Dean, Georgetown), U.S. News and World Report Has a New, Aggressive Defense of Its Rankings. Law School Deans Like Me See It for What It Is.:

Since 1987, U.S. News & World Report has been ranking law schools. While the law school rankings have been criticized for decades, this year more than 40 law schools have announced they will not participate, and earlier this month, representatives of more than 100 law schools attended a conference to discuss a solution, hosted by Harvard and Yale law schools (the first schools to pull out), and featuring Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona.

In anticipation of the Harvard-Yale conference, U.S. News, which had been relatively quiet in the face of past criticism, responded ferociously, running a full-page ad in the Boston Globe and a Wall Street Journal op-ed defending the ranking system. In the op-ed, U.S. News’ executive chairman and CEO Eric J. Gertler suggested that law schools were withdrawing from U.S. News because, in anticipation of the Supreme Court’s possible invalidation of affirmative action in admissions, they want to be able to ignore grades and standardized test scores in admitting students, without suffering a drop in their U.S. News ranking.

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The Top 20 Law Schools Produce Fossil Fuel Lawyers 3X The Rate Of The Average Law School

Law Students For Climate Accountability, Fueling the Climate Crisis: Measuring T-20 participation in the Fossil Fuel Lawyer Pipeline:

On November 16, 2022, the Dean of Yale Law School Heather Gerken made a shocking announcement: Yale Law School would be leaving the US News & World Report law school rankings. Many law schools shared her frustrations with the rankings that Gerken called "profoundly flawed," and more than 40 law schools have followed Yale's decision to exit the rankings.

With the dominant framework for law school rankings in decline, the question arises of how we can better evaluate law schools. One important metric is the impact that graduates are having on the greatest justice issues the world faces, including, most significantly, the climate crisis.

On this metric, the law schools that have typically been ranked highest are not performing the best-in fact, they tend to perform the worst. We find that T-20 law schools-the top 20-ranked schools in the US News rankings ­have produced fossil fuel lawyers at over three times the rate of the average US law school. T-20 schools have produced nearly half of all US fossil fuel lawyers in our dataset.

Our findings emphasize that prestige in the legal field, including the view promoted by the US News rankings, is far too often accorded to actors advancing injustice. The same law schools that sit at the top of the US News rankings serve as linchpins in the production of lawyers who help climate polluters avoid accountability, write the contracts for climate-destroying fossil fuel projects, and lobby against environmental regulations.

In this respect, the current rethinking of the law school ranking system could provide an opening for law schools, as it may reduce pressures to promote careers at fossil fuel-friendly corporate law firms. We hope they will take it.

The climate crisis threatens-and has already begun-to produce immense harms, with its harshest impacts falling on the Global South and, within the US, BIPOC and low-income communities. Lawyers can play a vital role in addressing the climate crisis, but many use their legal skills to advance extraction of and dependency on the primary cause of the climate crisis: fossil fuels. As LSCA's annual Law Firm Climate Change Scorecard shows, elite law firms conduct far more work to exacerbate the climate crisis than to address it.

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'Academic Freedom Has To Protect The Amy Waxes So It Can Be There To Protect The Galileos'

Following up on last week's post, New York Times, UPenn Accuses A Law Professor Of Racist Statements. Should She Be Fired?:  Chicago Sun-Times Op-Ed:  When a Professor Makes Obnoxious Remarks on Race and Culture, Is It a Matter of Academic Freedom?, by Mona Charen:

University of Pennsylvania professor Amy Wax has no patience for victimhood complaints. Asked whether she considers mid-20th century British politician Enoch Powell (whose writing she assigned and who gained fame for his “rivers of blood” anti-immigration speech) was a racist, Wax was indignant.

“Can you define racism for me? Is so-and-so a racist? Where are we getting with that? Define racist. I have no idea what you mean. It is a bludgeon that is a promiscuous term. You define what a racist is, and I will spend two seconds addressing that question because it is sterile.”

And yet, Wax herself is competing for victim status by upping the ante on obnoxious public remarks and almost daring the law school at which she teaches to punish her. ...

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ChatGPT Thinks I Am Way More Interesting Than I Am

Write a bio of Pepperdine Caruso Law School Dean Paul Caron

Paul Caron is an American legal scholar and academic administrator who currently serves as the Dean of the Pepperdine Caruso School of Law. He was born in the United States and grew up in the Chicago area.

Caron graduated with honors from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he earned a Bachelor of Science in Accountancy. He then went on to earn a law degree from Yale Law School, where he was an editor of the Yale Law Journal.

After law school, Caron worked as an attorney in the tax department of the law firm Sullivan & Cromwell in New York City. He later joined the faculty of the University of Cincinnati College of Law, where he taught courses in tax law and served as the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs.

In 2003, Caron joined the faculty of the University of San Diego School of Law, where he held the rank of Professor of Law and served as the Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Development. During his time at USD, Caron became well-known for his scholarship in tax law and his popular TaxProf Blog, which he founded in 2004.

In 2017, Caron was appointed as the 7th Dean of the Pepperdine Caruso School of Law. In this role, he has overseen significant changes at the law school, including the construction of a new campus in downtown Los Angeles and the creation of new programs in areas such as dispute resolution and entertainment, media, and sports law.

Throughout his career, Caron has been a prolific scholar and writer, with more than 50 published articles and book chapters to his credit. He is widely regarded as one of the leading experts in the field of tax law, and has been frequently cited in the national media on issues related to tax policy and reform.

Caron has also been active in the legal community, serving on the board of directors of the American Tax Policy Institute and as a member of the executive committee of the Tax Section of the American Bar Association. He has received numerous awards and honors for his scholarship and teaching, including the University of Cincinnati College of Law's Goldman Prize for Excellence in Teaching and the American Bar Association's Section of Taxation Distinguished Service Award.

In addition to his academic and professional accomplishments, Caron is also an accomplished musician and photographer. He has released several albums of original music and his photographs have been featured in exhibitions and publications around the world.

Can you guess the number of factual errors?

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WSJ: The Unraveling Of The U.S. News Rankings

Wall Street Journal, The Unraveling of the U.S. News College Rankings:

Yale Law School Dean Heather Gerken floated the idea past a small circle of colleagues. She had a sleepless night and queasy morning. And then, on Nov. 16, she started the revolt.

“The U.S. News rankings are profoundly flawed,” Ms. Gerken said in a letter that day. And with that, Yale Law pulled out.

Within three months, more than 40 law schools—about 20% of the programs that U.S. News ranks—said they would also end their cooperation and no longer share data with the publication, including 12 of the top 14. A wave of medical schools, led by No. 1 Harvard Medical School, followed. At the undergraduate level, the Rhode Island School of Design (No. 3 among regional universities in the North) and Colorado College (No. 27 in the latest measure of national liberal-arts colleges) withdrew last month.

The rebellion, which has thrown into tumult the most famous source of college rankings for generations of would-be students, was decades in the making.

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How Law Schools With Bar Pass Issues Can Get Their Rates Above 75%

ABA Journal, How Can Law Schools With History of Bar Pass Issues Get Their Rates Above 75%?:

The University of Dayton School of Law has an accomplishment many see as important—both its two-year and first-time bar pass rates are now above 75%. The law school’s two-year pass rate fell below 75% once, for the class of 2018. This year, the two-year pass rate (based on the class of 2020) is 97.06%, and the first-time pass rate is 75.58%. ...

Of the 19 existing law schools that at some point since 2020 had two-year bar pass rates below 75%, Dayton is one of six that has not received public notice of noncompliance. A chart with the data can be seen below. ...

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2024 U.S. News Law School Rankings

U.S. News & World Report has announced that the new 2024 law school rankings will be publicly released on Tuesday, April 18 (law schools will receive an embargoed copy on Tuesday, April 11). Here is my coverage of the current 2023 law school rankings:

• Pepperdine’s Place In The 2023 U.S. News Law School Rankings (Mar. 29, 2022)
• Amanda Runyon (Pennsylvania), Leslie Street (William & Mary), & Amanda Watson (Houston), U.S. News Rankings Get it Right On Law Libraries (Mar. 31, 2022)
• 2023 U.S. News Tax Rankings (Mar. 30, 2022)
• 2023 U.S. News Business/Corporate Law Rankings (Mar. 31, 2022)
• 2023 U.S. News Clinical Training Rankings (Apr. 1, 2022)
• 2023 U.S. News Constitutional Law Rankings (Apr. 2, 2022)
• 2023 U.S. News Contracts/Commercial Law Rankings (Apr. 4, 2022)
• 2023 U.S. News Criminal Law Rankings (Apr. 5, 2022)
• 2023 U.S. News Dispute Resolution Rankings (Apr. 6, 2022)
• 2023 U.S. News Environmental Law Rankings (Apr. 7, 2022)
• 2023 U.S. News Health Care Law Rankings (Apr. 8, 2022)
• 2023 U.S. News Intellectual Property Law Rankings (Apr. 9, 2022)
• 2023 U.S. News International Law Rankings (Apr. 11, 2022)
• 2023 U.S. News Legal Writing Rankings (Apr. 12, 2021)
• 2023 U.S. News Trial Advocacy Rankings (Apr. 13, 2022)
• 2023 U.S. News Omnibus Specialty Rankings (Apr. 14, 2022)
• 2023 U.S. News Omnibus Specialty Rankings v. Overall Rankings (Apr. 15, 2022)

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When Old Habits Die Hard: A Comment On Sander And Steinbuch's 'Mismatch And Bar Passage'

Following up on Friday's post, Richard Sander (UCLA), Law-School “Mismatch” Is Worse Than We Thought:  Sherod Thaxton (UCLA), When Old Habits Die Hard: A Comment on Sander and Steinbuch's “Mismatch and Bar Passage”:

Mismatch theory—which posits that race-conscious admissions policies harm racial minorities by admitting students into challenging schools where they cannot succeed—has figured prominently in the debate over affirmative action during the last half century. The recent challenges to Harvard University’s and the University of North Carolina’s consideration of race as a factor in admissions decisions have argued, inter alia, that universities “can eliminate this harmful mismatch and allow students to excel at schools for which they are most prepared by eliminating the use of racial preferences.” The persistence of the idea of mismatch in both policy discussions and litigation is puzzling given that the empirical evidence in favor of mismatch is not only sparse, but has been deemed unreliable by the vast majority of analysts who have rigorously investigated the matter. In an effort to preserve the legal and political relevance of mismatch in light of these mounting critiques by many of the most prominent statisticians and social scientists in academia, proponents of mismatch posit that the limitations of available data hamper the precise measurement of key variables and that better data would reveal stronger support for mismatch.

Richard Sander and Robert Steinbuch’s “Mismatch and Bar Passage: A School-Specific Analysis” presents a statistical analysis of the “law school mismatch hypothesis” in an effort to explain racial differences in the likelihood of passing the bar examination on the first attempt.

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Mitchell Hamline Law School Dean To Step Down After Four Years To 'Focus On His Own Well-Being'

Twin Cities Pioneer Press, Dean of Mitchell Hamline Law School to Step Down in 2024:

The dean of the Mitchell Hamline School of Law plans to step down when his contract expires in June 2024.

Anthony Niedwiecki, who has helmed the St. Paul law school since July 2020, said in a note to alumni on Monday that his decision was driven by the need to focus on his own well-being.

“My husband Waymon and I took stock recently when we celebrated our 20th anniversary, looking at the health issues we’ve both had in recent years as well as our quality of life,” Niedwiecki wrote. “I realized I love serving as president and dean but feel like the all-consuming focus it demands is no longer what’s best for my family and me.”

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Legal Ed News Roundup

• ABA Journal, Data On About 6,500 Law Students Proves My Mismatch Theory, Shows Racial-Preference Harm, Law Prof Says
• ABA Journal, Latest Version of ChatGPT Aces Bar Exam with Score Nearing 90th Percentile
• ABA Journal, Law Prof Placed On Leave After He’s Charged With Assaulting Woman At New York Casino
• ABA Journal, Law School Gets Extension To Meet Standard 316; ABA Legal Ed Council Posts Additional Notice On Faculty Diversity
• ABA Journal, Stanford Apologizes After Conservative Federal Appeals Judge Is Heckled During Federalist Society Talk
• ABA Journal, Weekly Briefs: Protesters Target Law Dean; Florida’s Stop Woke Act Blocked At Universities
• Bloomberg Law, Innovative Law Schools Embrace Experiential Learning

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ABA Gives Golden Gate Law School 3-Year Extension To Meet 75% Bar Passage Accreditation Standard

Following up on my previous post, ABA Finds Golden Gate Law School Out Of Compliance With 75% Bar Passage Within Two Years Accreditation Standard:  ABA Journal, Law School Gets Extension to Meet Standard 316:

The Golden Gate University School of Law, which has not had a two-year bar pass rate at or above 75% since its class of 2017, has received a 3-year extension to come into compliance with Standard 316, which requires a bar passage rate of at least 75% within a two-year time period.

After its Class of 2017 achieved a 75% two-year bar pass rate, Golden State has fallen below 75% in each of the last three years:

• 2018:  57.50%
• 2019:  66.67%
• 2020:  62.71%

Five additional law schools fell short of the 75% accreditation threshold for the Class of 2020:

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Trial Of Charlie Adelson In Dan Markel's Murder To Begin On October 23

Following up on my previous post, Does Judge's Delay Of Charlie Adelson's Trial In Dan Markel Murder And Refusal To Unseal Katie Magbanua's Proffer Mean State May Be Closing In On Donna, Harvey & Wendi?:  Tallahassee Democrat, Trial Date Set for Charlie Adelson in Dan Markel Murder Case:

Jury selection and testimony is slated to begin in October in the trial of Charlie Adelson, who is accused of orchestrating the 2014 professional hit on Florida State law professor Dan Markel.

Circuit Judge Robert Wheeler, in a Wednesday order, set jury selection for Monday, Oct. 23, with testimony beginning on or before Monday, Oct. 30.

The court expects the trial to conclude by Thursday, Nov. 9, Wheeler said in his order.

Last month, Wheeler granted a request by Adelson’s defense attorneys for a continuance in the trial, which had been set for April 24. Daniel Rashbaum, a Miami attorney representing Adelson, said the defense was still going through hundreds of wiretaps and volumes of phone calls, emails, texts and other records.

• FSU Public Media, Charlie Adelson's Trial Over Dan Markel's Killing Will Now Start in October
• WTXL, New Start Date Set for Charlie Adelson Trial in Death of Dan Markel

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TaxProf Blog Weekend Roundup

Saturday:

• This Week's Ten Most Popular TaxProf Blog Posts
• More Commentary On The Disruption Of A Federal Judge's Speech At Stanford Law School (Part 2)
• ProPublica IRS Files: Wealthy Executives Make Millions Trading Competitors’ Stock With Remarkable Timing
• Big Law's Immigration Advocates

Sunday:

• NY Times Op-Ed: The Real Problem With the ‘He Gets Us’ Ads
• NY Times Op-Ed: Pope Francis’ Decade Of Division
• Brunson & Hackney: A More Capacious Concept Of Church
• The Top Five New Tax Papers

NY Times Op-Ed: The Real Problem With The ‘He Gets Us’ Ads

Following up on my previous posts:

• Washington Post, A $100 Million Campaign Aims To Fix Jesus’ Brand From Followers’ Damage (Nov. 13, 2022)
• John Inazu (Washington University), What The Left And The Right Get Wrong About The 'He Gets Us' Super Bowl Jesus Ads (Feb. 19, 2023)

New York Times Op-Ed:  by Tish Harrison Warren (Priest, Anglican Church; Author, Prayer in the Night: For Those Who Work or Watch or Weep (2021) (Christianity Today's 2022 Book of the Year)):

About a year ago, I noticed a “He Gets Us” ad on a billboard. I gathered that the “he” in “He Gets Us” referred to Jesus, but beyond that I didn’t pay it a lot of attention.

Since then, I’ve distantly followed the ad campaign, which features television commercials, online ads and billboards, and which Christianity Today described in 2022 as targeting “millennials and Gen Z with a carefully crafted, exhaustively researched, and market-tested message about Jesus Christ.” In the ads, Jesus is portrayed as an impoverished refugee, an immigrant and a radical revolutionary committed to justice and love.

“He Gets Us” commercials ran during the broadcasts of several high visibility events in the past several months: the N.C.A.A. basketball tournament, the Grammys and, of course, the Super Bowl. The Times described the campaign’s videos as connecting “Jesus to contemporary issues like immigration, artificial intelligence and activism.” Jason Vanderground, the president of Haven, the agency behind the ads, hopes that the campaign increases “the relevance of Jesus in American culture.” The billboards and commercials invite viewers to visit the “He Gets Us” website to learn more.

As a Christian and a pastor, I care deeply about religious discourse in America, but to be honest, it’s hard for me to care much about the “He Gets Us” ads, not primarily because of any problem I have with their content (though I may quibble here and there), but because, by their very nature as commercials and billboards, they tend toward the trivial.

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NY Times Op-Ed: Pope Francis’ Decade Of Division

New York Times Op-Ed:  Pope Francis’ Decade of Division, by Ross Douthat:

Lent is with us, and so is the 10th anniversary of Pope Francis’ ascent to the papal throne — an appropriate conjunction, since these are days of tribulation for his papacy.

There is the two-front war that Rome finds itself fighting on doctrine and liturgy, trying to squash the church’s Latin Mass traditionalists while more gently restraining the liberal German bishops from forcing a schism on Catholicism’s leftward flank.

And then there are the grim numbers for the Francis-era church, like the accelerating drop in the number of men studying for the priesthood worldwide, which peaked around the beginning of Francis’ pontificate and has been declining ever since. Or the unhappy financial picture, now bad enough that the Vatican is charging higher rents to cardinals to compensate for years of deficits.

In the secular press the narrative of Francis as a great reformer was established early on, and as contrary evidence has emerged, the response has often been a decorous silence. It’s been mostly left to his conservative critics to compile the lists of clerics accused of abuse who have been given favorable treatment by this pontiff; or to harp on the failures of financial reform and the absence of any obvious renewal in the pews; or to point out that a pontificate that once promised to make the church less self-referential, less inward-focused, has instead produced a decade of bitter internal arguments and widening theological divisions — while Catholicism’s official verbiage is received with conspicuous indifference by the wider world. ...

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This Week's Ten Most Popular TaxProf Blog Posts

Legal Education:

1. Inside Higher Ed, A Law School’s ‘Denaming’ Evokes Donor Family’s Ire
2. Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), Preview Of The 2024 U.S. News Law School Rankings: Employment
3. Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), Preview Of The 2024 U.S. News Law School Rankings: First-Time Bar Passage
4. Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), Preview Of The 2024 U.S. News Law School Rankings: Ultimate Bar Passage
5. Paul Caron (Dean Pepperdine), Preview Of The 2024 U.S. News Law School Rankings: Admissions
6. Bryce Clayton Newell (Oregon), 2022 Meta-Ranking Of Flagship U.S. Law Reviews
7. Council of the ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar, Notice of Finding of Significant Noncompliance With Standard 206, University of Oregon School of Law
8. Stanford President And Law Dean, Apology To Fifth Circuit Judge For Disruption Of His Speech
9. Richard Sander (UCLA), Law-School “Mismatch” Is Worse Than We Thought
10. Theodore Seto (Loyola-L.A.), First-Time Bar Pass Performance of California Law Schools, Controlling For 25th Percentile LSATs

Tax:

1. Bryan Camp (Texas Tech), Lesson From The Tax Court: The Inherent Unreliability Of Third-Party Reporting
2. U.S. Treasury Department, Greenbook On Tax Proposals In Biden's FY24 Budget
3. Bryan Camp (Texas Tech), Lesson From The Tax Court: The Unforeseen Circumstances Rule For §121 Home Sale Exclusions
4. Bloomberg, ChatGPT's Tax Advice Was Wrong 100% Of The Time
5. Cato Institute, The Federal Tax System Is Highly Progressive
6. James Alm (Tulane), Jay Soled (Rutgers) & Kathleen DeLaney Thomas (North Carolina), Multibillion-Dollar Tax Questions
7. ABA, The Tax Lawyer Publishes New Issue
8. Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), Tax Policy in the Biden Administration
9. SSRN, The Top Five New Tax Papers
10. Tracey Roberts (Cumberland), Review Of Taxing Luxury Emissions By Clint Wallace (South Carolina) & Shelley Welton (Penn)

Faith: 

1. Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), Religious Liberty Clinics At Notre Dame, Pepperdine, Texas, And Yale File Supreme Court Amicus Briefs: Post Office Must Accommodate Employee's Sabbath Observance

More Commentary On The Disruption Of A Federal Judge's Speech At Stanford Law School (Part 2)

Wall Street Journal Op-Ed:  My Struggle Session at Stanford Law School, by Stuart Kyle Duncan (U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit):

Stanford Law School’s website touts its “collegial culture” in which “collaboration and the open exchange of ideas are essential to life and learning.” Then there’s the culture I experienced when I visited Stanford last week. I had been invited by the student chapter of the Federalist Society to discuss the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, on which I’ve served since 2018. I’ve spoken at law schools across the country, and I was glad to accept this invitation. One of my first clerks graduated from Stanford. I have friends on the faculty. I gave a talk there a few years ago and found it a warm and engaging place, but not this time.

When I arrived, the walls were festooned with posters denouncing me for crimes against women, gays, blacks and “trans people.” Plastered everywhere were photos of the students who had invited me and fliers declaring “You should be ASHAMED,” with the last word in large red capital letters and a horror-movie font. This didn’t seem “collegial.” 

Walking to the building where I would deliver my talk, I could hear loud chanting a good 50 yards away, reminiscent of a tent revival in its intensity. Some 100 students were massed outside the classroom as I entered, faces painted every color of the rainbow, waving signs and banners, jeering and stamping and howling. As I entered the classroom, one protester screamed: “We hope your daughters get raped!” ...

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Big Law's Immigration Advocates

Jayanth K. Krishnan (Indiana; Google Scholar), Megan Riley (Indiana) & Vitor M. Dias (Butler), Big Law's Immigration Advocates, 2024 U. Ill. L. Rev. __ :

This study examines lawyers working in the federal appellate courts who represent immigrants seeking relief from deportation. By analyzing over 23,000 appellate cases during the Trump and Obama Administrations, the research here uncovers crucial findings. To begin, there was a statistically significant difference in the win rates of lawyers working pro bono and coming from the largest and most profitable, corporate “Big Law” firms compared to lawyers based in other, typically more specialized immigration practice settings. 

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Weekly Legal Education Roundup

• David Bernstein (George Mason), New Law School "Mismatch" Data from UCLA Lawprof Richard Sander
• Josh Blackman (South Texas), Is The DEI Juice Worth The Squeeze?
• Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), Preview Of The 2024 U.S. News Law School Rankings: Employment
• Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), Preview Of The 2024 U.S. News Law School Rankings: First-Time Bar Passage
• Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), Preview Of The 2024 U.S. News Law School Rankings: Ultimate Bar Passage
• Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), March Madness Law School Bracket: Duke, Northwestern, Texas, Virginia in Final Four
• Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), Religious Liberty Clinics At Notre Dame, Pepperdine, Texas, And Yale File Supreme Court Amicus Briefs: Post Office Must Accommodate Employee's Sabbath Observance
• Council of the ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar, Notice of Finding of Significant Noncompliance With Standard 206, University of Oregon School of Law

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Next Week’s Tax Workshops

Monday, March 20: David M. Schizer (Columbia) will present Red White and Blue – and also Green: How Energy Policy Can Protect Both National Security and the Environment as part of the San Diego Tax Law Speaker Series. 

Tuesday, March 21: Clinton G. Wallace (South Carolina; Google Scholar) will present Taxing Luxury Emissions (with Shelley Welton (Penn)) as part of the UC-San Francisco Law Tax Policy Colloquium. If you would like to attend, please contact Manoj Viswanathan. 

Tuesday, March 21: Phyllis Taite (Oklahoma City) will present Welfare v Wealthfare: The Illusion of Equity in Tax Policy as part of the Georgetown Tax Law and Public Finance Workshop. If you would like to attend, please contact Emily Satterthwaite and Dayanand Manoli.

Wednesday, March 22: Sarah B. Lawsky (Northwestern; Google Scholar) will present Coding the Code: Catala and Computationally Accessible Tax Law, 75 S.M.U. L. Rev. 535 (2022) as part of the Toronto James Hausman Tax Law and Policy Workshop Series. If you would like to attend, please contact Benjamin Alarie.

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GPT-4 Beats 90% Of Aspiring Lawyers On The Bar Exam

Daniel Martin Katz (Chicago Kent), Michael James Bommarito (Michigan State), Shang Gao (Casetext) & Pablo Arredondo (Casetext), GPT-4 Passes the Bar Exam:

In this paper, we experimentally evaluate the zero-shot performance of a preliminary version of GPT-4 against prior generations of GPT on the entire Uniform Bar Examination (UBE), including not only the multiple-choice Multistate Bar Examination (MBE), but also the open-ended Multistate Essay Exam (MEE) and Multistate Performance Test (MPT) components. On the MBE, GPT-4 significantly outperforms both human test-takers and prior models, demonstrating a 26% increase over ChatGPT and beating humans in five of seven subject areas. On the MEE and MPT, which have not previously been evaluated by scholars, GPT-4 scores an average of 4.2/6.0 as compared to much lower scores for ChatGPT. Graded across the UBE components, in the manner in which a human tast-taker would be, GPT-4 scores approximately 297 points, significantly in excess of the passing threshold for all UBE jurisdictions. These findings document not just the rapid and remarkable advance of large language model performance generally, but also the potential for such models to support the delivery of legal services in society.

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Sander: Law-School 'Mismatch' Is Worse Than We Thought

Richard Sander (UCLA), Law-School “Mismatch” Is Worse Than We Thought:

With the Supreme Court poised to rule on affirmative-action in admissions, the time to spread the word is now.

Eighteen years ago, I published an article in the Stanford Law Review which documented for the first time the enormous breadth and scale of race-based admissions preferences in law schools [A Systemic Analysis of Affirmative Action in American Law Schools, 57 Stan. L. Rev. 367 (2004)]. At most law schools, the undergraduate grades (UGPA) and median LSAT scores of enrolled Black students were two standard deviations below those of white students at the same school. Outside of a handful of “Historically Black” institutions (where racial preferences were minimal), Blacks in law school were not faring well. They were failing out of school at more than twice the white rate; half of those who did graduate had grades in the bottom 10th of their class; and Blacks were six times as likely as whites to take the bar exam multiple times but never pass. ...

Robert Steinbuch (a colleague at the University of Arkansas, Little Rock) and I eventually secured the public release of data from 12 cohorts of law students at four law schools, covering about 6,500 students in all. And after a multi-year review process, the Journal of Legal Education—the official organ of the Association of American Law Schools—has now agreed to publish the first set of our results in its next issue.

Our findings are even stronger than we expected. A student’s degree of mismatch in law school is by far the strongest predictor of whether he or she will pass a bar exam on a first attempt. ...

Most of our results are in regression analyses that can be hard for those without a technical background to interpret. But one of our tables, reproduced below, makes the basic pattern clear. It shows first-time bar-passage rates for several thousand law graduates, grouped by their LSAT score and whether they attended an elite, somewhat-elite, or non-elite law school. Unsurprisingly, students with high LSAT scores had high bar-passage rates at all schools and did particularly well at the elite school in question. But students at the elite school with LSAT scores 12 to 14 points below the median of their fellow students (i.e., LSAT scores of 150-152) had only a 22 percent first-time bar-passage rate, while students with the same LSAT score at the non-elite school in question had a 79 percent first-time bar-passage rate. In other words, lower mismatch translates into dramatically better performance.

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Preview Of The 2024 U.S. News Law School Rankings: Ultimate Bar Passage

Following up on my previous posts:

• Summary Of Changes To The Forthcoming U.S. News Law School Rankings
• Preview Of The 2024 U.S. News Law School Rankings: Admissions
• Preview Of The 2024 U.S. News Law School Rankings: Employment
• Preview Of The 2024 U.S. News Law School Rankings: First-Time Bar Passage

The current 2023 methodology year does not include 2018 ultimate 2-year bar passage results. On several occasions, U.S. News has said it would likely add ultimate 2-year bar passage data to its law school rankings, but has not said whether they will include 2019 ultimate 2-year bar passage results in the forthcoming spring 2023 rankings. 

Below are two 2019 ultimate 2-year bar passage rankings. The first is a simple ranking using the pass rate. The second uses Z-scores to better approximate the U.S. News methodology.

	Law School	Pass Rate	Pass Rate (Including Diploma Privilege)
1	Belmont	100.00%	100.00%
1	Marquette	100.00%	100.00%
3	UC-Berkeley	99.69%	99.69%
4	Duke	99.54%	99.54%
5	Chicago	99.49%	99.49%
6	George Mason	99.36%	99.36%
7	Virginia	99.30%	99.30%
8	Baylor	99.29%	99.29%
9	Harvard	99.29%	99.29%
10	Alabama	99.21%	99.21%
11	Yale	99.04%	99.04%
12	Stanford	98.88%	98.88%
13	Minnesota	98.69%	98.69%
13	Northwestern	98.69%	98.69%
15	Michigan	98.34%	98.34%
16	Campbell	98.13%	98.13%
17	NYU	98.11%	98.11%
18	UCLA	98.08%	98.09%
19	Liberty	98.04%	98.04%
20	Penn	97.97%	97.97%
21	Cornell	97.93%	97.93%
22	Ohio Northern	97.87%	97.87%
23	UC-Irvine	97.86%	97.86%
24	Georgia State	97.85%	97.85%
25	Florida	97.83%	97.83%
26	Boston Univ.	97.61%	97.61%
27	Notre Dame	97.37%	97.37%
28	Washington Univ.	97.30%	97.30%
29	Texas	97.29%	97.29%
30	Boston College	97.20%	97.20%
30	Washington & Lee	97.20%	97.20%
32	Florida Int'l	97.16%	97.16%
33	Oklahoma	97.09%	97.09%
34	Vanderbilt	97.06%	97.06%
35	Illinois	96.72%	96.72%
36	Fordham	96.71%	96.71%
37	Texas A&M	96.69%	96.69%
38	Georgia	96.67%	96.69%
39	Georgetown	96.43%	96.43%
40	New Mexico	96.30%	96.30%
41	Utah	96.20%	96.20%
42	Cardozo	96.04%	96.04%
43	Colorado	95.95%	96.05%
44	Florida State	95.88%	95.88%
45	William & Mary	95.81%	95.81%
46	Kansas	95.74%	95.74%
47	Montana	95.65%	95.65%
48	Samford	95.59%	95.59%
49	Columbia	95.58%	95.58%
50	George Washington	95.46%	95.46%

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More Commentary On The Disruption Of A Federal Judge's Speech At Stanford Law School (Part 1)

Update:  More Commentary On The Disruption Of A Federal Judge's Speech At Stanford Law School (Part 2)

National Review Op-Ed:  Stop the Chaos: Law Schools Need to Crack Down on Student Disrupters Now, by James C. Ho (U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit) & Elizabeth L. Branch (U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit):

Law schools like to say that they’re training the next generation of leaders. But too many institutions of legal education have become laboratories of divisiveness, not leadership. A series of recent videos from law schools, including Yale and Stanford, captures screaming students insulting and disrupting accomplished litigators, legal scholars, even federal judges. Evidence is rapidly accumulating that law schools across America are failing in their basic mission to teach students how to become good citizens — let alone good lawyers. ...

Administrators who promote intolerance don’t belong in legal education. And students who practice intolerance don’t belong in the legal profession.

Law schools know what their options are. They know they can suspend or expel students for engaging in disruptive tactics, or threaten to report negatively on a student’s character and fitness to state bar examiners. They know this because schools have done it.

And if schools are unwilling to impose consequences themselves, at a minimum they should identify the disrupters so that future employers know who they are hiring.

Schools issue grades and graduation honors to help employers separate wheat from chaff. Likewise, schools should inform employers if they’re injecting potentially disruptive forces into their organizations.

Otherwise, more and more employers may start to reach the same conclusion that we did last fall — that we have no choice but to stop hiring from these schools in the future. At the end of the day, that may be the only way to send a message that will resonate with law schools — judges and other employers imposing consequences on law schools who refuse to impose consequences on their own. No one is required to hire students who aren’t taught to live under the rule of law.

Washington Post Op-Ed:  Expensively Credentialed, Negligibly Educated Stanford Brats Threw a Tantrum, by George Will:

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NY Times: UPenn Accuses A Law Professor Of Racist Statements. Should She Be Fired?

New York Times, UPenn Accuses a Law Professor of Racist Statements. Should She Be Fired?:

Amy Wax and free speech groups say the university is trampling on her academic freedom. Students ask whether her speech deserves to be protected.

Amy Wax, a law professor, has said publicly that “on average, Blacks have lower cognitive ability than whites,” that the country is “better off with fewer Asians” as long as they tend to vote for Democrats, and that non-Western people feel a “tremendous amount of resentment and shame.”

At the University of Pennsylvania, where she has tenure, she invited a white nationalist to speak to her class. And a Black law student who had attended UPenn and Yale said that the professor told her she “had only become a double Ivy ‘because of affirmative action,’” according to the administration.

Professor Wax has denied saying anything belittling or racist to students, and her supporters see her as a truth teller about affirmative action, immigration and race. They agree with her argument that she is the target of censorship and “wokeism” because of her conservative views.

All of which poses a conundrum for the University of Pennsylvania: Should it fire Amy Wax?

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Preview Of The 2024 U.S. News Law School Rankings: First-Time Bar Passage

Following up on my previous posts:

• Summary Of Changes To The Forthcoming U.S. News Law School Rankings
• Preview Of The 2024 U.S. News Law School Rankings: Admissions
• Preview Of The 2024 U.S. News Law School Rankings: Employment

The current 2023 methodology for the 2020 calendar year is:

Bar passage rate (0.03, previously 0.0225): U.S. News revamped its treatment of bar passage rates to incorporate all graduates who took the bar for the first time. Computations were further modified to de-emphasize the impact of geography on law schools' relative performance.

Specifically, the bar passage rate indicator scored schools on their 2020 first-time test takers' weighted bar passage rates among all jurisdictions (states), then added or subtracted the percentage point difference between those rates and the weighted state average among ABA accredited schools' first-time test takers in the corresponding jurisdictions in 2020. This meant schools that performed best on this ranking factor graduated students whose bar passage rates were both higher than most schools overall, and higher compared with what was typical among graduates who took the bar in corresponding jurisdictions.

For example, if a law school graduated 100 students who first took the bar exam — and 88 took the Florida exam, 10 the Georgia exam and two the South Carolina exam — the school's weighted average rate would use pass rate results that were weighted 88% Florida, 10% Georgia and 2% South Carolina. This computation would then be compared with an index of these jurisdictions' average pass rates — also weighted 88-10-2. (For privacy, school profiles on usnews.com only display bar passage data for jurisdictions with at least 10 test-takers.) Both weighted averages included any graduates who passed the bar with diploma privilege. Diploma privilege is a method for J.D. graduates to be admitted to a state bar and allowed to practice law in that state without taking that state's actual bar examination. Diploma privilege is generally based on attending and graduating from a law school in that state with the diploma privilege.

In previous editions, U.S. News divided each school's first-time bar passage rate in its single jurisdiction with the most test-takers by the average for that lone jurisdiction. This approach effectively excluded many law schools' graduates who took the bar. Dividing by the state average also meant the location of a law school impacted its quotient as much as its graduates' bar passage rate itself. The new arithmetic accounts for average passage rates across all applicable jurisdictions as proxy for each exam's difficulty and reflects that passing the bar is a critical outcome measure in itself.

Below are two first time bar passage rankings. The first is a ranking by the school pass rate for the 2021 calendar year plus the total difference between the school pass rate and the average state pass rate as reported by the ABA. The second uses Z-scores to better approximate the U.S. News methodology.

	School	School Pass Rate	Average State Pass Rate	Total Difference	School Pass Rate Plus Total Difference	Pass Rate Including Diploma Privilege
1	UC-San Francisco*	81.72%	77.05%	81.72%	163.44%	81.72%
2	Missouri-Kansas City*	74.78%	81.76%	74.78%	149.56%	74.78%
3	Montana	100.00%	79.94%	20.06%	120.06%	80.60%
4	Harvard	99.44%	82.04%	17.40%	116.84%	99.44%
5	Chicago	97.75%	79.05%	18.70%	116.45%	90.99%
6	Yale	98.14%	80.69%	17.45%	115.59%	98.14%
7	Michigan	97.18%	79.79%	17.39%	114.57%	97.18%
8	Stanford	97.08%	79.73%	17.35%	114.43%	97.66%
9	Duke	97.21%	80.67%	16.54%	113.75%	97.21%
10	NYU	98.70%	84.24%	14.46%	113.16%	98.70%
11	Kansas	95.92%	78.83%	17.09%	113.01%	95.92%
12	USC	95.00%	77.59%	17.41%	112.41%	95.80%
13	Vanderbilt	95.15%	78.02%	17.13%	112.28%	95.15%
14	Minnesota	95.67%	79.40%	16.27%	111.94%	95.67%
15	UC-Berkeley	94.95%	78.14%	16.81%	111.76%	95.25%
16	Penn	96.46%	81.50%	14.96%	111.42%	96.46%
17	Texas	94.61%	77.95%	16.66%	111.27%	83.88%
18	Northwestern	95.05%	79.00%	16.05%	111.10%	95.05%
19	BYU	96.15%	82.50%	13.65%	109.80%	96.15%
20	Virginia	94.82%	79.90%	14.92%	109.74%	94.82%
21	Georgia	93.75%	77.79%	15.96%	109.71%	93.75%
22	UCLA	93.84%	78.01%	15.83%	109.67%	93.84%
23	William & Mary	93.82%	78.66%	15.16%	108.98%	93.82%
24	Columbia	96.52%	84.22%	12.30%	108.82%	96.52%
25	Texas A&M	92.98%	77.57%	15.41%	108.39%	92.98%
26	Ohio State	93.71%	79.18%	14.53%	108.24%	93.71%
27	Boston College	94.06%	80.65%	13.41%	107.47%	94.06%
28	Seton Hall	89.60%	71.89%	17.71%	107.31%	89.60%
29	Wake Forest*	94.27%	78.63%	12.64%	106.91%	94.27%
30	Boston Univ.	93.53%	80.29%	13.24%	106.77%	93.53%
31	George Washington	93.46%	80.50%	12.96%	106.42%	93.46%
32	Georgetown	93.23%	80.62%	12.61%	105.84%	93.23%
33	Notre Dame	91.67%	77.82%	13.85%	105.52%	91.67%
34	Oklahoma	91.72%	78.13%	13.59%	105.31%	91.72%
35	Belmont	88.54%	71.87%	16.67%	105.21%	88.54%
36	Tennessee	88.50%	72.57%	15.93%	104.43%	88.50%
37	Emory	91.79%	79.37%	12.42%	104.21%	92.16%
38	Washington Univ.	91.63%	79.26%	12.37%	104.00%	91.63%
39	Florida Int'l	86.72%	69.91%	16.81%	103.53%	86.71%
40	George Mason	90.62%	78.54%	12.08%	102.70%	90.63%
41	Wisconsin	90.00%	77.46%	12.54%	102.54%	99.61%
42	Univ. of Washington	92.21%	82.05%	10.16%	102.37%	90.97%
43	Fordham	93.74%	85.33%	8.41%	102.15%	93.73%
44	Penn State-Univ. Park	89.74%	77.68%	12.06%	101.80%	89.74%
45	Villanova	88.24%	74.74%	13.50%	101.74%	88.24%
46	Indiana (Maurer)	89.61%	77.73%	11.88%	101.49%	89.61%
47	Cornell	92.23%	83.03%	9.20%	101.43%	92.23%
48	Texas Tech	88.96%	77.39%	11.57%	100.53%	88.97%
49	Liberty	88.33%	76.60%	11.73%	100.06%	93.81%
50	UC-Irvine	88.72%	77.39%	11.33%	100.05%	88.73%

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Students Target Stanford Law School Dean In Revolt Over Her Apology To Federal Judge FedSoc Speaker

Update:  

• More Commentary On The Disruption Of A Federal Judge's Speech At Stanford Law School (Part 1) (Mar. 16, 2023)
• More Commentary On The Disruption Of A Federal Judge's Speech At Stanford Law School (Part 2) (Mar. 18, 2023)

Following up on Monday's post, Stanford President And Law Dean Apologize To Fifth Circuit Judge For Disruption Of His Speech:  Aaron Sibarium (Washington Free Beacon), Student Activists Target Stanford Law School Dean in Revolt Over Her Apology:

Hundreds of Stanford student activists on Monday lined the hallways to protest the law school’s dean, Jenny Martinez, for apologizing to Fifth Circuit appellate judge Kyle Duncan, whom the activists shouted down last week.

The embattled dean arrived to the classroom where she teaches constitutional law to find a whiteboard covered inch to inch in fliers attacking Duncan and defending those who disrupted him, according to photos of the room and multiple eyewitness accounts. The fliers parroted the argument, made by student activists, that the heckler’s veto is a form of free speech. ...

When Martinez’s class adjourned on Monday, the protesters, dressed in black and wearing face masks that read "counter-speech is free speech," stared silently at Martinez as she exited her first-year constitutional law class at 11:00 a.m., according to five students who witnessed the episode. The student protesters, who formed a human corridor from Martinez’s classroom to the building’s exit, comprised nearly a third of the law school, the students told the Washington Free Beacon. 

The majority of Martinez’s class—approximately 50 students out of the 60 enrolled—participated in the protest themselves, two students in the class said. The few who didn’t join the protesters received the same stare down as their professor as they hurried through the makeshift walk of shame. ...

This protest was even larger than the one that disrupted Duncan’s talk, and came on the heels of statements from at least three student groups rebuking Martinez’s apology. ... The groups argued that the students who disrupted Duncan, in violation of Stanford’s free speech policies, were merely exercising their own free speech rights. 

David Lat (Original Jurisdiction), 7 Updates On Judge Kyle Duncan And Stanford Law:

Here's a curated yet comprehensive collection of news updates, original documents, and online commentary.

• Daily Caller, Elite University Students Protest Dean For Apologizing To Heckled Conservative Judge
• Daily Signal, That Tantrum at Stanford Law School and What to Do About It

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March Madness Law School Bracket: Duke, Northwestern, Texas, Virginia in Final Four

Here is the March Madness Law School Bracket, with outcomes determined by the 2023 U.S. News Law School Rankings (using academic peer reputation as the tiebreaker). The Final Four are Virginia (8), Duke (11), Northwestern (13), and Texas (17), with Virginia beating Northwestern in the championship game.

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Preview Of The 2024 U.S. News Law School Rankings: Employment

Following up on my previous posts:

• Summary Of Changes To The Forthcoming U.S. News Law School Rankings
• Preview Of The 2024 U.S. News Law School Rankings: Admissions

The current 2023 methodology for the Class of 2020 is:

Employment rates for 2020 graduates 10 months after graduation (0.14) and at graduation (0.04): For both ranking factors, schools received maximum credit when their J.D. graduates — in alignment with ABA reporting rules — obtained long-term jobs that were full time, not funded by the law school, and where a J.D. degree was an advantage or bar passage was required. In contrast, jobs that were some combination of short term, part time, funded by the law school and/or did not require bar passage received less credit by varying amounts, determined by the combination. For a more detailed explanation, see Notes on Employment Rates, below [at the bottom of this post].

U.S. News has announced that it will not use employment rates at graduation in the forthcoming 2024 rankings for the Class of 2021 because that data is not collected by the ABA. U.S. News plans to give greater weight to student outcomes, so employment rates ten months after graduation presumably will be weighted more than 14%. 

Below are two previews of the 2024 employment rankings. As noted below, U.S. News does not reveal the weights it gives to the 45 different job types, employment statuses, and durations. The first is a simple ranking for the Class of 2021, showing both the former 2023 methodology (including full-time, long-term bar passage required or JD-advantaged jobs, but excluding school-funded jobs and pursuit of a graduate law degree) and the new 2024 methodology (including school-funded jobs and pursuit of a graduate law degree). The second uses Z-scores to better approximate the 2024 U.S. News methodology.

	2023 Methodology		2024 Methodology
School	BPR & JD Adv	Rank	BPR & JD Adv	Funded BPR & JD Adv	Graduate Studies	BPR & JD Adv, Funded, Graduate	Rank
Penn	93.0%	24	93.0%	5.8%	0.4%	99.2%	1
Duke	96.8%	2	96.8%	1.6%	0.8%	99.2%	2
Chicago	95.3%	7	95.3%	2.8%	0.9%	99.1%	3
NYU	93.3%	22	93.3%	4.5%	0.6%	98.5%	4
Wake Forest	96.5%	3	96.5%	0.0%	1.7%	98.3%	5
Northwestern	94.1%	15	94.1%	2.9%	0.7%	97.8%	6
Columbia	96.3%	4	96.3%	1.1%	0.2%	97.6%	7
Virginia	93.4%	21	93.4%	3.8%	0.3%	97.5%	8
UC-Berkeley	90.2%	40	90.2%	4.9%	2.1%	97.2%	9
Georgia	97.0%	1	97.0%	0.0%	0.0%	97.0%	10
USC	95.3%	6	95.3%	1.0%	0.5%	96.9%	11
Yale	79.8%	136	79.8%	13.8%	3.2%	96.8%	12
Texas A&M	94.7%	10	94.7%	0.0%	1.8%	96.4%	13
North Carolina	94.7%	9	94.7%	0.0%	1.4%	96.2%	14
Kansas	94.9%	8	94.9%	0.0%	1.0%	95.9%	15
Cornell	94.3%	14	94.3%	1.6%	0.0%	95.9%	16
Stanford	87.0%	76	87.0%	6.0%	2.7%	95.7%	17
UCLA	91.5%	31	91.5%	3.5%	0.6%	95.6%	18
Michigan	93.1%	23	93.1%	1.7%	0.8%	95.6%	19
SMU	92.7%	25	92.7%	0.0%	2.7%	95.5%	20
Texas Tech	95.4%	5	95.4%	0.0%	0.0%	95.4%	21
Florida	90.7%	35	90.7%	0.0%	4.5%	95.2%	22
Arizona State	94.6%	11	94.6%	0.0%	0.4%	95.0%	23
Ohio State	94.4%	13	94.4%	0.6%	0.0%	94.9%	24
Villanova	93.7%	18	93.7%	0.0%	1.1%	94.9%	25
Kentucky	94.0%	17	94.0%	0.0%	0.8%	94.7%	26
Washington Univ.	94.6%	12	94.6%	0.0%	0.0%	94.6%	27
Fordham	94.1%	16	94.1%	0.2%	0.2%	94.6%	28
Wayne State	93.7%	19	93.7%	0.0%	0.8%	94.4%	29
Utah	92.0%	28	92.0%	0.0%	2.3%	94.3%	30
Harvard	88.0%	64	88.0%	4.7%	1.5%	94.3%	31
Oklahoma	93.6%	20	93.6%	0.0%	0.6%	94.2%	32
Vanderbilt	92.7%	26	92.7%	1.0%	0.0%	93.8%	33
Stetson	89.7%	49	89.7%	0.0%	3.8%	93.5%	34
Illinois	90.2%	41	90.2%	0.8%	2.5%	93.4%	35
Minnesota	92.0%	29	92.0%	0.4%	0.9%	93.4%	36
BYU	85.7%	87	85.7%	5.7%	1.9%	93.3%	37
Washington & Lee	89.8%	46	89.8%	0.8%	2.5%	93.2%	38
Georgetown	89.7%	48	89.7%	3.0%	0.4%	93.2%	39
Texas	92.0%	30	92.0%	1.1%	0.0%	93.1%	40
Montana	90.1%	42	90.1%	0.0%	2.8%	93.0%	41
Missouri-Columbia	89.3%	53	89.3%	3.6%	0.0%	92.9%	42
Iowa	92.7%	27	92.7%	0.0%	0.0%	92.7%	43
George Mason	90.7%	36	90.7%	0.6%	1.2%	92.5%	44
Emory	88.9%	56	88.9%	0.4%	3.2%	92.5%	45
St. Thomas (MN)	88.0%	65	88.0%	4.2%	0.0%	92.3%	46
Florida State	87.6%	69	87.6%	0.9%	3.7%	92.2%	47
Boston College	90.8%	34	90.8%	1.3%	0.0%	92.1%	48
South Carolina	90.5%	38	90.5%	0.0%	1.5%	92.0%	49
Pepperdine	90.0%	43	90.0%	1.3%	0.7%	92.0%	50

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New Evidence On Racial Disparities In IRS Audit Selection Calls For Immediate Action

Kathleen Bryant (NYU Tax Law Center) & Chye-Ching Huang (NYU Tax Law Center), New Evidence on Racial Disparities in IRS Audit Selection Calls for Immediate Action:

A recent working paper has found that although the Internal Revenue Service (IRS)’s audit selection processes are ostensibly “race-blind,” Black tax filers are 2.9 to 4.7 times as likely to be audited by the IRS as non-Black tax filers. Our report summarizes the paper’s conclusions, explains what we do and do not know about the causes of these disparities, and outlines next steps for policymakers to address racial disparities in audit selection.

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NYU Law Students Demand Compensation For Work On Law Journals

Washington Square News, NYU Law Students Demand Compensation For Academic Journal Work:

Students at NYU’s School of Law are demanding compensation for their work on student-run journals — scholarly publications affiliated with the law school that focus on legal issues. The students created a petition with over 250 signatures in support of the cause, and eight on-campus publications signed a letter to law school administrators this past Monday.

In the letter, students asked that all contributors to the journals be able to choose whether to receive compensation in hourly wages or credit hours. Currently, only third-year students are eligible for compensation through credit hours, and no students receive hourly pay.

“We love our work, but prestige is not adequate compensation for the value we provide,” the letter reads. “Our journals have been cited in courts throughout the country, up to the Supreme Court. NYU reaps the benefits of robust journal publication in admissions and institutional prestige.”

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Legal Ed News Roundup

• ABA Journal, 15-Year-Old Who Got 174 On LSAT Looks Forward To Law School
• ABA Journal, ABA Partners With Law Schools To Advance New Approaches To Policing And Public Safety
• ABA Journal, Using Data, Law Prof Finds Many Disciplined Lawyers Represent Consumers—With No Oversight
• ABA Journal, Law Prof Isn’t Sure Whether Florida Blogger Bill Applies To Him, Says Second Bill Would Help Cop Defamation Suits
• David Bernstein (George Mason), "Antisemitic Invective" at the University of Michigan Law School
• The College Fix, Five Security Guards, Threats of Discipline Required to Protect Free Speech Talk by Ilya Shapiro at Denver Law School
• Daily Business Review, 'I Haven't Handed Out a Business Card in Years': Is it Time for Lawyers to Upgrade?
• Law360, Northwestern Law Prof. Rebuts Judge's Misconduct Report

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Stanford President And Law Dean Apologize To Fifth Circuit Judge For Disruption Of His Speech

Update:

• Students Target Stanford Law School Dean In Revolt Over Her Apology To Federal Judge FedSoc Speaker (Mar. 15, 2023)
• More Commentary On The Disruption Of A Federal Judge's Speech At Stanford Law School (Part 1) (Mar. 16, 2023)
• More Commentary On The Disruption Of A Federal Judge's Speech At Stanford Law School (Part 2) (Mar. 18, 2023)

Letter of Apology from Marc Tessier-Lavigne (President, Stanford) & Jenny Martinez (Dean, Stanford Law School) to Judge Kyle Duncan (U.S Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit) (Mar. 11, 2023)

• Josh Blackman (South Texas), Is The DEI Juice Worth The Squeeze?
• Rod Dreher, EXCLUSIVE: US Judge Kyle Duncan Interview
• Inside Higher Ed, Stanford Apologizes After Students Heckle Judge
• William Jacobson (Cornell), Stanford Law Students, With Support From Diversity Dean, Shout Down Visiting Appeals Court Judge Because He’s Conservative
• William Jacobson (Cornell), Stanford Law Student Shout-Down Reflects Normalization Of Intimidation Of Conservative Judges
• William Jacobson (Cornell), Firing Diversity Dean Over Judge Shout-Down May Help Stanford Law School Escape Consequences Of Its Toxic DEI Culture
• FIRE, Stanford Administrator Remarks at Event Featuring Fifth Circuit Judge Duncan
• David Lat (Original Jurisdiction), Yale Law Is No Longer #1—For Free-Speech Debacles
• Brian Leiter (Chicago), The Stanford Law Disaster Involving a FedSoc Event With Judge Duncan
• San Francisco Chronicle, Stanford Apologizes to Trump-Appointed Judge Shouted Down by Students at Event
• Aaron Sibarium (Washington Free Beacon), ‘Dogs—t’: Federal Judge Decries Disruption of His Remarks by Stanford Law Students and Calls for Termination of the Stanford Dean Who Joined the Mob
• Aaron Sibarium (Washington Free Beacon), Stanford Tells Federalist Society Students To ‘Reach Out’ To Diversity Dean Who Encouraged Disruption of Their Event – and To Shut Up on Twitter
• Stanford Daily, Law School Activists Protest Judge Kyle Duncan’s Visit to Campus
• Stanford Daily, President, Law School Dean Apologize to Judge Kyle Duncan For ‘Disruption’ to His Speech
• Stanford Review, Fire Tirien Steinbach
• Jonathan Turley (George Washington), “Is the Juice Worth the Squeeze?”: Stanford Dean Joins Mobs in Denouncing Federal Judge at Law School Event
• Jonathan Turley (George Washington), “No Squeeze” at Stanford: President and Law Dean Issue Apology that Omits One Critical Thing …
• Eugene Volokh (UCLA), Stanford President and Stanford Law School Dean Apologize to Judge Kyle Duncan
• Ed Whelan (National Review), Crybullies at Stanford Law School Threaten Free Speech:
• Ed Whelan (National Review), Stanford President and Law-School Dean Apologize to Judge Duncan

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Seto: 2022 First-Time Bar Pass Performance Of California Law Schools, Controlling For 25th Percentile LSATs

TaxProf Blog op-ed:  First-Time Bar Pass Performance of California Law Schools, Controlling For 25th Percentile LSATs, by Theodore Seto (Loyola-L.A.; Google Scholar):

In a recent TaxProf blog post, Paul Caron ranked all law schools by their 2022 first-time bar passage rates, based on ABA data. Based on that same 2022 data, I then explored the extent to which California law schools over- or under-performed in first-time bar passage after controlling for the median LSATs of their students. After posting my analysis, Paul asked me to replicate that analysis using law schools’ 25th percentile LSATs — in effect, to measure the extent to which California law schools add value to their students most at risk, the bottom quarter of their classes by LSAT.

Because U.S. News uses median LSATs in ranking law schools, schools have the flexibility to take other criteria into account in admitting the bottom half of their classes (by LSAT) without directly affecting their U.S. News ranking (e.g., admitting diverse or first-generation students). To the extent LSATs are predictive of bar passage, however, doing so may negatively affect bar passage rates. Schools can manage this problem in at least two ways: (1) by keeping their 25th percentile LSATs as high as possible, or (2) admitting lower-LSAT students (typically diverse or first-generation students) and devoting resources to maximizing the likelihood that they too will pass the bar. This follow-up analysis therefore looks at the extent to which California law schools are successful in preparing the bottom of their classes for the bar — that is, the value they add to their students most at risk.

Here are the relevant raw data from 2022. The first column is 25th percentile LSATs, the second is distance of the school’s bar passage rate above or below the state average. Schools are listed in the order of 25th percentile, high to low:

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TaxProf Blog Weekend Roundup

Saturday:

• This Week's Ten Most Popular TaxProf Blog Posts
• A Law School’s ‘Denaming’ Evokes Donor Family’s Ire
• Tax Sanctions And The Russia-Ukraine Conflict
• Harvard Law School Faculty: 'Why I Changed My Mind'

Sunday:

• Was The Sermon You Heard At Church Today Written By ChatGPT?
• Religious Liberty Clinics At Notre Dame, Pepperdine, Texas, And Yale File Supreme Court Amicus Briefs: Post Office Must Accommodate Employee's Sabbath Observance
• Pandora’s Box Of Religious Exemptions (Harvard Law Review)
• The Top Five New Tax Papers

Was The Sermon You Heard At Church Today Written By ChatGPT?

Axios, Religious Leaders Experiment With ChatGPT Sermons:

Religious leaders are dabbling in ChatGPT for sermon writing, and largely reaching the same conclusion: It's great for plucking Bible verses and concocting nice-sounding sentiments but lacks the human warmth that congregants crave. ...

• Early sermon-writing experiments have shown that ChatGPT can pull together cogent and relevant thoughts from religious texts and eminent theologians, plus turns-of-phrase that seem stirring and poignant.
• A consensus seems to be emerging that ChatGPT can alleviate some of the religious leaders' more routine or repetitive tasks — such as explaining particular holidays — while freeing them for more meaningful spiritual counseling.

What they're saying: "It's really impressive — it's kind of amazing," Ken Sundet Jones, a Lutheran pastor and theology professor in Des Moines who posed the Lazarus question, told Axios.

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Religious Liberty Clinics At Notre Dame, Pepperdine, Texas, And Yale File Supreme Court Amicus Briefs: Post Office Must Accommodate Employee's Sabbath Observance

Following up on my previous post, Two Perspectives On How Far Employers Must Go In Providing Religious Accommodations To Employees: four law school religious liberty clinics have filed amicus briefs arguing that the post office must accommodate an employee's observance of the Sabbath in Groff v. DeJoy, No. 21-1900:

• Notre Dame (representing eight religious liberty and employment law scholars (including Bob Cochran (Pepperdine) and Rick Garnett (Notre Dame))
• Pepperdine (representing the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America)
• Texas (representing religious liberty scholars Asma Uddin (Visiting Assistant Professor, Catholic) and Steven Collis (Director, Texas Law & Religion Clinic))
• Yale (representing the Seventh-day Adventist Church in Canada, Atlantic Conference of Seventh-Day Adventists, North Pacific Union Conference of Seventh-Day Adventists, and National Council of Young Israel)

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This Week's Ten Most Popular TaxProf Blog Posts

Legal Education:

1. Paul Caron (Dean Pepperdine), Preview Of The 2024 U.S. News Law School Rankings: Admissions
2. Bryce Clayton Newell (Oregon), 2022 Meta-Ranking Of Flagship U.S. Law Reviews
3. Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), Law School Rankings By Ultimate Bar Passage Rate (2020)
4. Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), Law School Rankings By 2022 First-Time Bar Passage Rate
5. ABA Journal, Three Years After $20 Million Naming Gift, University Of Kentucky Is Out Of Compliance With Accreditation Standard That Law Schools Have Sufficient Financial Resources
6. Theodore Seto (Loyola-L.A.), 2022 First-Time Bar Pass Performance Of California Law Schools, Controlling For Median LSATs
7. ABA Journal, ABA Finds Four Law Schools Back In Compliance With Accreditation Standards: Hofstra (Faculty Diversity), Ave Maria, UDC & Vermont (2-Year Bar Passage)
8. Derek Muller (Iowa), Boycotting Law Schools Are Still Admitting 'Splitters' To Maximize Their U.S. News Ranking
9. ABA Journal, ABA Finds Baylor Out Of Compliance With Law School Accreditation Standard On Adjunct Faculty Diversity
10. Florida Politics, Does Judge's Delay Of Charlie Adelson's Trial In Dan Markel Murder And Refusal To Unseal Katie Magbanua's Proffer Mean State May Be Closing In On Donna, Harvey & Wendi?

Tax:

1. Bloomberg, ChatGPT's Tax Advice Was Wrong 100% Of The Time
2. Bryan Camp (Texas Tech), Lesson From The Tax Court: Fill Out The Damn Form
3. Donald Tobin (Maryland), MTV The Challenge: Did Tori And Devin Just 'Win' A Huge Tax Problem?
4. Bryan Camp (Texas Tech), Lesson From The Tax Court: The Unforeseen Circumstances Rule For §121 Home Sale Exclusions
5. Daniel Shaviro (NYU), Would an Unapportioned U.S. Federal Wealth Tax Be Constitutional, and What Does That Mean?
6. Bryan Camp (Texas Tech), Lesson From The Tax Court: Distinguishing Property Settlement From (Indirect
7. Diane Kemker (DePaul & Southern), Do Black Taxpayers Matter? A Critical Tax Analysis of IRS Audit Practices
8. Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), Tax Policy in the Biden Administration
9. SSRN, The Top Five New Tax Papers
10. Young Ran (Christine) Kim (Cardozo), Review Of The Rise Of The Robotic Tax Analyst By Ben Alarie (Toronto)

Faith: 

1. Kevin Williamson (The Dispatch), Who Are These ‘Cultural Christians’|'Christian Atheists'?

A Law School’s ‘Denaming’ Evokes Donor Family’s Ire

Following up on my previous post, After Richmond Law School Removed Slave-Owner Benefactor From Its Name, Family Demands Return Of His Donations ($3.6 Billion With 132 Years Of Interest):  Inside Higher Ed, A Law School’s ‘Denaming’ Evokes Donor Family’s Ire:

When the University of Richmond’s Board of Trustees voted last fall to remove the name of alumnus and donor T. C. Williams from its law school, Williams’s descendants were irate. The board was following a new set of principles adopted earlier that year to ensure the namesakes of buildings, colleges and professorships lived up to the university’s values; the trustees decided that Williams, a wealthy tobacco farmer and slave owner, did not.

Richmond president Kevin Hallock broke the news to Robert Smith, Williams’s great-great-grandson and a graduate of the law school, over the phone. Smith responded with a letter denouncing the decision and accusing the university of hypocrisy and ingratitude.

“It is stunning to me that the University’s position is that there is just one acceptable monolithic narrative, and all those that don’t agree, even people born over 200 years ago, must be cancelled,” he wrote. “History and posterity will judge the University and the Board.” ...

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Harvard Law School Faculty: 'Why I Changed My Mind'

The Global Herald, HLS Beyond Presents: Why I Changed My Mind:

Back by popular demand, a second iteration of the faculty panel "Why I Changed My Mind" features three Harvard Law School faculty members’ stories of professional moments of reckoning when ideas they had previously thought settled in their worldview changed.

Featured Harvard Law School faculty:

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Weekly Legal Education Roundup

• ABA Journal, Does ChatGPT Produce Fishy Briefs?
• ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar Council Decision, Notice of Finding Significant Noncompliance With Standard 202 (University of Kentucky J. David Rosenberg College of Law) (Feb. 2023)
• Vikram David Amar (Dean, Illinois), Some Thoughts on the Recent Controversies Concerning Law (and Med) School Rankings: Part I in a Series
• Paul Caron (Dean, Pepperdine), ABA Finds 4 Law Schools Back In Compliance With Accreditation Standards: Hofstra (Faculty Diversity), Ave Maria, UDC & Vermont (2-Year Bar Passage)
• Chronicle of Higher Education, ChatGPT Is Everywhere
• Florida Politics, Trial Delayed; Proffer Stays Sealed: Paradoxical Evidence That Justice Is Afoot in Dan Markel Murder Case
• Robert R. Kuehn (Washington University) & David A. Santacroce (Michigan), An Empirical Analysis of Clinical Legal Education at Middle Age

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Next Week’s Tax Workshops

Wednesday, March 15: Michael Simkovic (USC; Google Scholar) will present Pigouvian Contracts (with Meirav Furth-Matzkin (UCLA)) as part of the Northwestern Advanced Topics in Taxation Colloquium. If you would like to attend, please contact Gregg Polsky.

Wednesday, March 15: Deanna Newton (Pepperdine) will present Closing the Opportunity Gap as part of the Toronto James Hausman Tax Law and Policy Workshop Series. If you would like to attend, please contact Benjamin Alarie. 

Thursday, March 16: Ariel Jurow Kleiman (Loyola-L.A.; Google Scholar) will present Subjective Costs of Tax Compliance (with Jonathan Choi (Minnesota; Google Scholar)) as part of the OMG Transatlantic Tax Talks. No registration is required for this event.

Thursday, March 16: Ruth Mason (Virginia; Google Scholar) will present Bounded Extraterritoriality (with Michael Knoll (Penn)) as part of the UCLA Colloquium on Tax Policy and Public Finance. If you would like to attend, please contact Kirk Stark and Jason Oh.

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More Commentary On The U.S. News Law School Rankings Op-Ed

Mike Spivey (Spivey Consulting), Some Commentary on the U.S. News Op-Ed:

U.S. News & World Report is not sitting idle while its rankings come under fire. The CEO published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal offering his views on the rankings boycott. ...

We have been paid money over the years to help law schools understand their U.S. News rankings. It's against our interests as a firm, from a revenue standpoint, for schools to boycott the rankings, and for applicants to stop paying attention to them. But we're telling you that is the best outcome for everyone.

U.S. News has no expertise in law or legal education. They have no expertise in education in general. Imagine if a bunch of lawyers got together and decided to rank the best immunology programs. That's the absurdity of what U.S. News does. At least when Above the Law publishes its rankings they come from actual lawyers and law school graduates.

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Tax Prof Presentations At Today's Poverty Law Conference

Tax Prof presentations at today's Poverty Law Conference at Berkeley (register here): 

David Gamage (Indiana-Maurer; Google Scholar), Taxpayer Mobility and the Goal of Inclusive Prosperity (with Erin Scharff (Arizona State) & Darien Shanske (UC-Davis; Google Scholar)):

Taxpayer mobility is often cited as a primary obstacle to progressive tax policies. However, this Article argues that mobility responses to taxation are often overemphasized. The empirical literature on taxpayer mobility sometimes characterizes responses as “large” merely because the responses are substantial enough to be measured with statistical significance. Yet, from a tax policy perspective, what should be considered “large” is partially a normative philosophical question. Applying a normative philosophical lens to the empirical literatures on taxpayer mobility, this Article concludes that there is no convincing evidence supporting the commonly held notion that taxpayer mobility should be considered a primary obstacle to enacting progressive tax policies—either for national-level governments or for subnational state and local governments. This does not imply that mobility responses are unimportant, however. This Article suggests policy responses to concerns related to taxpayer mobility for national governments and the international tax regime, for fiscal federalism and the interrelationship between national governments and subnational governments, and for subnational state and local governments acting on their own.

Francine J. Lipman (UNLV; Google Scholar), Not Taxing Puerto Rico? Whitewashing Impoverishment in United States v. Vaello-Madero:

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An Empirical Analysis Of Clinical Legal Education At Middle Age

Robert R. Kuehn (Washington University; Google Scholar) & David A. Santacroce (Michigan), An Empirical Analysis of Clinical Legal Education at Middle Age, 70 J. Legal Educ. __ (2023):

This article provides the first comprehensive empirical analysis of clinical legal education’s development and growth over the past fifty years. By analyzing dozens of surveys and reports on aspects of clinical legal education, including unique data developed by the authors, and comparing the results over time, this article presents a factual picture of clinical legal education’s progression from early adulthood to today’s middle age.

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3 Years After $20 Million Naming Gift, University Of Kentucky Is Out Of Compliance With Accreditation Standard That Law Schools Have Sufficient Financial Resources

ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar Council Decision, Notice of Finding Significant Noncompliance With Standard 202 (University of Kentucky J. David Rosenberg College of Law) (Feb. 2023):

At its February 16-17, 2023, meeting, the Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar of the American Bar Association (the “Council”) considered the status of the University of Kentucky J. David Rosenberg College of Law (the “Law School”) and concluded that the Law School is not in compliance with Standard 202(a).

Accreditation Standard 202 Resources For Program
(a) The current and anticipated financial resources available to the law school shall be sufficient for it to operate in compliance with the Standards and to carry out its program of legal education.

ABA Journal, Finance-Related Notice for Kentucky Law School Posted by ABA Legal Ed:

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Colleges (And Law Schools) Are Rushing To Respond To ChatGPT

Chronicle of Higher Education, ChatGPT Is Everywhere:

It’s hard to believe that ChatGPT appeared on the scene just three months ago, promising to transform how we write. The chatbot, easy to use and trained on vast amounts of digital text, is now pervasive. Higher education, rarely quick about anything, is still trying to comprehend the scope of its likely impact on teaching — and how it should respond.

ChatGPT, which can produce essays, poems, prompts, contracts, lecture notes, and computer code, among other things, has stunned people with its fluidity, although not always its accuracy or creativity. To do this work it runs on a “large language model,” a word predictor that has been trained on enormous amounts of data. Similar generative artificial-intelligence systems allow users to create music and make art.

Many academics see these tools as a danger to authentic learning, fearing that students will take shortcuts to avoid the difficulty of coming up with original ideas, organizing their thoughts, or demonstrating their knowledge. Ask ChatGPT to write a few paragraphs, for example, on how Jean Piaget’s theories on childhood development apply to our age of anxiety and it can do that.

Other professors are enthusiastic, or at least intrigued, by the possibility of incorporating generative AI into academic life. Those same tools can help students — and professors — brainstorm, kick-start an essay, explain a confusing idea, and smooth out awkward first drafts. Equally important, these faculty members argue, is their responsibility to prepare students for a world in which these technologies will be incorporated into everyday life, helping to produce everything from a professional email to a legal contract.

But skeptics and fans alike still have to wrestle with the same set of complicated questions. Should instructors be redesigning their assignments and tests to reduce the likelihood that students will present the work of AI as their own? What guidance should students receive about this technology, given that one professor might ban AI tools and another encourage their use? Do academic-integrity policies need to be rewritten? Is it OK to use AI detectors? Should new coursework on AI be added and, if so, what form should it take?

For many, this is a head-spinning moment.

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Does ChatGPT Produce Fishy Briefs?

ABA Journal, Does ChatGPT Produce Fishy Briefs?:

Lawyers are abuzz about the possible uses of ChatGPT. Could the artificial intelligence-powered chatbot write a persuasive legal brief worthy of judicial consideration? Given its limitations, we believe that’s unlikely. ChatGPT, a large language model developed by the San Francisco company OpenAI that launched in November, can draw only on sources available on the web; it cannot crawl appellate records or access subscription-based services such as Westlaw. Still, the ABA Journal decided to put the technology to the test just for kicks. ...

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ABA Finds 4 Law Schools Back In Compliance With Accreditation Standards: Hofstra (Faculty Diversity), Ave Maria, UDC & Vermont (2-Year Bar Passage)

In November, the ABA found Hofstra out of compliance with Accreditation Standard 206, which requires a faculty that is diverse with respect to gender, race, and ethnicity. From its 2021 509 report:

• 47 full-time faculty: 51.1% female, 10.6% people of color
• 81 non full-time faculty: 29.6% female, 8.6% people of color
• 128 total faculty: 37.5% female, 9.38% people of color

Last month, the ABA found Hofstra back in compliance. From its 2022 509 report:

• 50 full-time faculty: 54.0% female, 14.0% people of color
• 77 non full-time faculty: 35.1% female, 6.5% people of color
• 127 total faculty: 42.5% female, 9.45% people of color

In December, the ABA found three law schools out of out of compliance with Accreditation Standard 316, which requires a 75% two-year bar passage rate, for their Class of 2019:

• Ave Maria (67.2%)
• District of Columbia (67.2%)
• Vermont (67.5%)

Last month, the ABA found the three schools back in compliance with Standard 316 for their Class of 2020:

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