Archive for the ‘Law School’ Category
The Blackstone & Burke Center for Law & Liberty
In higher education, History, Humanities, Jurisprudence, Law, Law School, Legal Education & Pedagogy on January 29, 2020 at 6:45 am
Prospective Law Students Should Consider These Questions
In Law, Law School, Legal Education & Pedagogy, Teaching on June 5, 2019 at 6:45 am
An earlier version of this post appeared here at Faulkner University’s blog.
When you’re visiting law schools, remember to ask questions about the faculty and class size. Law school is more than just classrooms and libraries: It’s your home for three years, and you’ll be connected to your law school throughout your professional life.
To make sure you’re choosing the institution that’s right for you, be sure to ask these less common but crucial questions during your visit.
Does the law school offer scholarships after the first year?
Most law schools consider all new students for merit-based scholarships based on their LSAT scores, undergraduate GPAs, and other criteria such as demonstrated leadership and service. During your visit to a law school, admissions professionals will probably tell you about their merit-based scholarships and the amount you might expect to receive as an incoming student. But in most cases, those awards are guaranteed only for the first year of law school—so it’s important to ask whether similar scholarships are also available for the second and third year. At Faulkner Law, for instance, we review each student’s record at the end of the academic year to determine scholarship eligibility for the following year.
How does the law school help students secure internships or employment?
Getting into law school is an important achievement, but most people expect it to be just one more step on the path to securing the job they want. Having a J.D. after your name, however, doesn’t automatically open doors to employment; most law students secure internships while in school and rely on their law school’s career services to help them network and find employment.
At Faulkner Law, we place more than 200 students in internships every year. Our post-graduate employment rate is close to 90 percent and trending upward, and our employment rate for JD-required positions is 70 percent.
What’s it like to live here?
Most law students hope to enjoy cultural attractions, a vibrant restaurant scene, and a safe and friendly environment outside of school. Find out about the culture and community near the law school you’re considering. Consider what forms of entertainment will be available to you during the next three years when you’re not attending class or studying.
At Faulkner Law, we want our students to succeed, not just professionally but also personally and spiritually. The River Region is vibrant, and the revitalized downtown in Montgomery features several restaurants, minor-league baseball, parks, concerts, museums, historic landmarks, and tourist attractions. Many students relocate here to attend law school and then choose to make Montgomery their permanent home.
What is the law school’s vision for the future?
Law school is a choice for life, not just for three years. Faulkner Law equips students to become competent, reliable attorneys with a passion for learning and service. Our graduates dedicate their careers to solving problems, representing clients with vigor and diligence, improving lives and institutions, and cultivating an ethic of candor, civility, integrity, and professionalism.
Interview with the James G. Martin Center regarding English Departments, Higher Education, Marxism, and Legal Education
In Arts & Letters, Economics, higher education, History, Humane Economy, Humanities, Law, Law School, Legal Education & Pedagogy, liberal arts, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Pedagogy, Philosophy, Scholarship, Western Philosophy on March 13, 2019 at 6:45 am
Focus on Reining in the American Bar Association
In Academia, higher education, Law, Law School, Legal Education & Pedagogy, Politics, university on December 3, 2018 at 9:25 am
This post originally appeared here at the blog of the National Association of Scholars.
What the 2018 Election Means for Higher Education
When the 116th Congress is seated in January, political control will be divided, with Democrats holding a majority in the House and Republicans in the Senate. What does this mean for higher education? We asked a few NAS members to weigh in.
What does the 2018 election portend for higher education? The question might be reframed this way: having lost their majority in the House of Representatives, what can Republican lawmakers expect to accomplish in the field of higher education between 2018 and 2020? The answer, in short, is “not much.” So long, for now, to the PROSPER Act and the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act. Perhaps with some experience in Congress, however, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will learn what makes up our three branches of government—a minor gain for education in this country, but a gain nonetheless.
One promising development involves the Department of Education’s proposed Title IX guidelines that would amend rules regarding sexual-assault adjudications on college campuses to restore certain due-process rights of the accused. These guidelines have now entered a 60-day period of public comment; if they are adopted, they will go into effect in 2020.
Will Betsy DeVos remain the Secretary of the Department of Education through 2020? Given the number of dismissals and resignations among President Donald Trump’s political appointees, the question is worth asking. And if DeVos is out, who is in? President Trump reportedly offered the job to Jerry Falwell Jr., the president of Liberty University, before approaching DeVos. Larry Arnn, the president of Hillsdale College, was allegedly in the running as well. But would leaders of this stature and reputation give up the success they enjoy at their present institutions to take a position they might hold for no more than a year? Not likely.
If I had one suggestion for the Department of Education going forward, it would be to strip the American Bar Association of its accreditation authority over law schools, leaving state supreme courts and state bar associations to determine whether graduates of any given law school may sit for the bar examination in their state. This move would require pressure from law schools, state legislators, and state supreme courts. It could unite conservatives and progressives in common cause. As I have stated elsewhere, “In this period of political rancor, reining in the ABA should appeal to both the Left and the Right, the former on grounds of racial diversity and fundamental fairness and the latter on grounds of decentralization and economic freedom.” There’s much more to say about this issue (see, e.g., here). My hope is that it becomes part of the national conversation.
Carnegie Classifications—What’s All the Fuss?
In Academia, America, Humanities, Law, Law School, Legal Education & Pedagogy, liberal arts, Pedagogy, Scholarship on June 27, 2018 at 6:45 am
This article originally appeared here at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.
Dartmouth falls out of an exclusive group,” declared a 2016 headlinein The Washington Post just days after the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education released its 2015 classifications that moved Dartmouth College from the R-1 (that is, Research 1) to the R-2 (Research 2) category. “A Key Survey Indicates that Dartmouth May Be Losing Its Elite Status,” reads another headline.
A school like Dartmouth hardly risks dropping out of “the elite,” but why would anyone say that?
Dartmouth’s response to the perceived downgrade was muted. “We don’t know what new algorithm they are using to classify institutions,” wrote Diana Lawrence, a university spokeswoman, “so we can’t replicate the data.” Lowered morale since the 2015 classification allegedly has resulted in the closing of Dartmouth’s Gender Research Institute.
Indiana University, which now runs the Carnegie Classifications, recently began reclassifying schools every three rather than every five years. The next round will appear later this year. University leaders have been silent about this development, but according to Doug Lederman, “the foundation’s sorting…sends some institutions into fits of anger or excitement over perceived insult or approval for how they are classified compared to their peers.”
As anxious university administrators await this release, it is worth asking what these classifications mean and why is the R-1 designation so coveted?
Carnegie classifies institutions by type: doctoral universities, master’s colleges and universities, baccalaureate colleges, baccalaureate/associate colleges, associate’s colleges, special focus institutions, and tribal colleges. The research designations everyone talks about (R-1, R-2, R-3) apply only to universities classified as doctoral universities. R-1 indicates “highest research activity,” R-2 “higher research activity,” and R-3 “moderate research activity.”
To be classified as a doctoral university, an institution must award at least 20 research-based doctoral degrees per year. Professional doctorates like a law degree do not count. Among the schools that meet this classification, research productivity is measured by two indices: the number of research doctorates awarded plus research staff, and the amount of research expenditures, scaled to the number of faculty.
Carnegie measures research and development expenditures in science and engineering (S&E), humanities, social science, STEM, business, education, public policy, and social work. These classifications are categorical rather than ordinal: they fit universities within certain descriptive categories but not in order of best to worst. The point of the classifications is not to grade but to group universities according to their program offerings and research expenditures.
Thus, administrators should not treat moves from R-1 to R-2 as demotions or devaluations. After all, quality of education and quality of research cannot be reduced to raw figures by totaling the number of faculty, the number of doctoral programs offered and doctoral degrees awarded, and the amount of money invested in research. These figures account principally for funding and size, not the amount of published material (in peer-reviewed journals or otherwise) and certainly not the excellence of scholarly research. Nor do they account for teacher quality or educational outcomes for students.
Nevertheless, schools moving from R-2 to R-1 celebrated the 2015 Carnegie classifications in press releases. For example, “It is no secret that Ole Miss is one of the top research schools in the south,” read a statement by the University of Mississippi, “but being recognized on a prestigious national level is a true achievement.”
Given the focus of the Carnegie classifications, one wonders why they command such attention. Could not universities game the system, so to speak, by hiring more faculty, throwing money at programs, and graduating more doctoral students in certain disciplines? The answer, of course, is yes—but that does not diminish the standing the Carnegie classifications enjoy.
The reason they are valued is because the Department of Education and U.S. News and World Report, among others, rely on them. (U.S. News explains its methodological reliance on the Carnegie Classifications here). Indirectly, then, the Carnegie classifications are used for rankings and grant eligibility.
Rather than coming up with its own categories, U.S. News relies on Carnegie classifications for its list of national universities, national liberal arts colleges, or regional universities. If, say, Furman University wanted to be ranked alongside Princeton, Harvard, Yale, and MIT, it must increase the number of research doctoral-degree programs it offers to account for Carnegie’s metrics.
The Problem with the Carnegie Classifications
The main problem with the Carnegie classifications is that they create the incentive for educational malinvestment on a grand scale. When a university’s administration seeks to move from R-3 to R-2 or R-2 to R-1, they churn out more doctorates and hire more faculty than the market demands.
That is most notable in the humanities. The number of humanities doctorates awarded has reached record highs while the job market for humanities professors has shrunk. Young people pursuing these doctorates often assume substantial debt only to find themselves with no university employment after graduation. Carnegie in effect rewards universities for conferring an excessive number of research doctorates, thereby contributing to the systemic problem of graduate-student debt and the dearth in faculty hiring, and possibly to the diminishing quality of humanities research.
The Carnegie classifications also fail to account for the quality of scholarly research, or for true faculty productivity. They measure aggregate numbers of people and investment but not the number of peer-reviewed papers published by members of a department or the value or effectiveness of those papers.
Therefore, the Carnegie classifications should really be considered funding categorizations, not research categorizations. Yet too many people treat them as indicators of the productivity of a university faculty or the worth and excellence of research content.
The Carnegie classifications are not per se bad or unhelpful. It is just that they are being misinterpreted and misused to the economic detriment of higher education writ large. Donors, administrators, journalists, university rankers and evaluators, and other stakeholders at universities should monitor the Carnegie classifications and use them as needed to shape the goals and identities of institutions. But these classifications should no longer be considered proxies for the measure of research quality.
Moreover, Carnegie should drop the phrases “highest research activity,” “higher research activity,” and “moderate research activity” that accompany the R-1, R-2, and R-3 label because they are misleading: the Carnegie rankings do not measure research activity but research expenditure. It could be that a university spends money on research without actually yielding research. That would be a poor investment that Carnegie seems, strangely, to value or reward.
The Role of Law Schools in the Classifications
My fellow law-school administrators can do little if anything to help their home institutions that are ranked as doctoral universities move from R-2 to R-1 or R-3 to R-2. (I work at Thomas Goode Jones School of Law, whose home institution, Faulkner University, is classified as a master’s college or university according to Carnegie.) J.D. degrees are not research degrees, although a few law schools (Yale or Berkeley among them) offer Ph.Ds in law, which do contribute to the sum of research degrees offered. No matter how productive a law faculty is, its research output will not affect the home institution’s Carnegie classification.
By and large, deans at law schools have not spent much time thinking about the Carnegie classifications. The future, however, may present different challenges and opportunities for law-school deans. “[W]e are planning a change that will reshape membership of the Doctoral Universities and Master’s Colleges and Universities categories,” Carnegie states on its website. “We are doing so to accommodate Doctor’s degree—professional practice within our methodology. These degrees . . . have previously not been considered as part of the Basic Classification Methodology.”
Therefore, by adopting Ph.D. or J.S.D. and S.J.D. programs (which are research-based and require dissertations for completion), law schools can nudge their universities in the direction of a higher Carnegie research classification. That might seem an attractive inducement, but one that would be economically unsound for most schools. Law deans should resist going the way of the humanities.
Qualifications of Judges and Law Professors: A Telling Mismatch
In Academia, Law, Law School, Pedagogy, Scholarship, Teaching on June 6, 2018 at 6:45 am
This piece originally appeared here in the Library of Law & Liberty.
Late last year, President Donald Trump took heat for nominating allegedly unqualified lawyers to the federal bench. As of February 16, 2018, a majority, substantial majority, or minority of the American Bar Association’s Standing Committee on the Judiciary has rated several of his judicial nominees “not qualified.” These evaluations purportedly assess professional competence, integrity, and judicial temperament, but have been accused, rightly, of improper politicization.
Would that an impartial and non-political set of ratings could be applied to aspiring law professors. Because of their lack of practical experience, academic training, and teaching record, entry-level faculty hires at many American law schools tend to be, as a class, unqualified to teach. They have not gained on-the-ground, learned-by-doing knowledge of legal practices and processes, yet in their new roles they will be expected to serve as gatekeepers into the profession, a profession that many of them have only barely participated in.
These days extensive practice experience is a disadvantage, not an asset, for the prospective law professor. It signals to faculty hiring committees a late interest in teaching and research, and a turn to academic work because of a disenchantment with the everyday work of lawyers. Faculty are sensibly turned off by candidates who believe, or seem to believe, that life in the academy is free from stress and responsibility.
No one wants a colleague who views the professoriate as a breezy backup plan, or whose only animating desire is to trade in a life of hourly billables for the supposed tranquility of the Ivory Tower. Hating law-firm culture is not a good reason, by itself, to seek a job in a law school. The last thing law professors need to impart to young students facing a competitive job market is deep cynicism about the practice of law. These legitimate concerns, however, should not preclude faculty from admitting into their ranks those who are best able to familiarize students with the practice of law.
The conventional path to law teaching runs something like this: attend a prestigious law school (ideally, one ranked in the top 15 by the U.S. News and World Report), obtain a federal clerkship (one with the U.S. Supreme Court, if possible), and then apply for open faculty positions, either directly through a law school or through the recruiting conference of the American Association of Law Schools (aka “the meat market”). The chances of securing tenure-track positions diminish measurably the longer one waits to enter the meat market.
No step along this path to becoming a law professor involves teaching. The longer you go down the path, the more practical skills you acquire, but the less desirable you become as a candidate for teaching.
A law degree is not a reliable proxy for the suitable or successful characteristics of a good teacher. A federal clerkship does not necessarily cultivate the traits necessary to excel in classroom instruction. So why does the system disincentivize not only the acquisition of practical skills, which most students are hoping to learn, but also teaching skills, which law professors are expected to have?
One reason is that there’s little agreement about what makes a good law professor.
How do you even quantify the effectiveness of law professors? Vocational outcomes and earning differentials among graduates say more about a law school, in particular its career services office and market reputation, than they do about the aptitude of individual faculty members. Bar-passage rates correlate with admissions standards and selectivity and reflect, perhaps, the overall educational experience of the graduates.
But there’s no measurable connection between those figures and the instruction methods of individual professors. Student evaluations suffer from drawbacks and deficiencies in law schools (such as biases, unreliability, grade inflation to win popularity, etc.) just as they do elsewhere in universities.
Without pedagogical consensus (i.e., without widely agreed-upon teaching philosophies, practices, or methods) within the legal academy or established standards for law-teaching achievement, hiring committees in law schools look simply to narrative, subjective data (e.g., the prestige of a candidate’s alma mater and recent employer, the candidate’s fit with subject-matter needs, etc.) that do not demonstrate a commitment to teaching or an ability to teach. The assumption behind these hiring decisions is, I think, twofold: that individuals who have earned prestigious credentials can translate their accomplishments to the classroom and that the Socratic Method allows them to disguise their “greenness” by deflecting difficult questions back on students.
Most Ph.D. programs in humanities disciplines involve some degree of classroom training and pedagogical coursework. Law school, by contrast, does not equip students with teaching or introduce them to pedagogical schools and approaches. Teaching expectations for law professors remain ill-defined and unpublicized, in part because they vary from school to school. With rare exceptions, aspiring law professors possess no pedagogical preparedness when they begin teaching.
Law schools should not continue hiring faculty with little to no practical experience, little to no record of scholarship, and little to no teaching experience. The ideal faculty candidate should have a substantial record of success in at least one of those three areas. The fact that a candidate graduated from Harvard Law and clerked a year or two for a federal appellate court may suggest the promise of future scholarship, but it doesn’t demonstrate proven merit as a scholar or teacher. Nor is that clerkship alone sufficient to familiarize a lawyer with the ins and outs of legal practice.
An emphasis on the readiness and qualifications of judges should be matched with tangible benchmarks in law-faculty hiring. Analogizing the qualifications of law professors and judges is reasonable, even if their jobs differ: both have attained high offices that superintend the profession, both are involved in the administration of the legal system, both should understand the nexus between theory and practice, both should possess exemplary character and enjoy good standing in the community, both should model the conduct and professionalism expected of all lawyers, and both should be researchers and writers with deep knowledge about the history of the law.
Redirecting ire and scrutiny away from judicial nominees and toward law-school faculties may not fully resolve ambiguities about the proper, requisite experience for judges. But it may lead to a rethinking of the minimal qualifications of law faculty, raising questions about whether the standards governing judicial nominees should extend to the legal academy, which trains future judges.
The growing chasm between law professors and the practicing bench and bar is not a novel subject. Media restlessness about President Trump’s judicial nominees, however, provides a clarifying context for reconsidering the optimal qualifications of law professors. The ABA’s evaluations of judicial nominees may be flawed and nefariously politicized, but at least they value practical experience in a way that hiring committees in law schools by and large have not.
If a prospective law professor lacks extensive practical experience, he or she must have an extensive record of scholarship or teaching. We should expect as much from our law schools as we do from our federal judiciary.
Want to Go From R-2 to R-1? Don’t Look to Law Schools to Help
In Academia, Law School, Legal Education & Pedagogy on March 28, 2018 at 6:45 am
Say you’re an administrator at a university classified as a “doctoral university” by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions on Higher Education. You’re currently ranked in the R-2 category, meaning your school has a higher degree of research activity, but not enough to get you into that coveted R-1 spot for highest research activity. Your president and board of trustees have pushed you and other administrators to elevate your school’s ranking to R-1. What should you do? How can you accomplish a jump in rankings?
Here are four steps to get you started. However, there is one thing, historically, you should not do to move from R-2 to R-1: rely on your law school for a boost.
Professional degrees like a law degree (J.D.) do not count toward a school’s total number of research doctorates awarded according to the metrics used by Carnegie to classify universities. Law schools, at least in theory, teach legal doctrines and equip students with the professional skills necessary to practice law (whether law schools have succeeded in this mission is another matter). Yet law schools by and large do not train students to become scholars or to conduct scholarly research—hence the Carnegie “post-baccalaureate” designation.
Carnegie (which is now run out of Indiana University, not the Carnegie Foundation) treats law degrees as post-baccalaureate credentials, or professional-practice doctorates, but not as research degrees. For this reason, among others, Carnegie generally does not measure research and development expenditures in law schools. The fields Carnegie considers for these benchmarks are science and engineering (S&E), humanities, social science, STEM, business, education, public policy, and social work.
Universities report to the federal government the classification of their degrees (e.g., research or professional) by academic program. Data for this reporting are publicly available through the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS). Law schools like the one at Berkeley, which offers a Ph.D. in jurisprudence and social policy, report degree credentials besides just the professional-practice doctorate (J.D.). The most recent available data come from the 2015-16 academic year, when Berkeley reported 332 professional-practice law degrees and 13 research-scholarship degrees. Thus, the law school at Berkeley probably contributed to that school’s R-1 status as a doctoral university with highest research activity.
University investment in law schools that do not offer research Ph.Ds. (or their equivalent, such as an S.J.D. or J.S.D.) is a reallocation of resources away from programs and departments that could help your school move from R-2 to R-1.
Before year’s end, Carnegie will have updated its classifications. The last time it updated its classifications was 2015. Carnegie has begun updating its classifications on a 5-year cycle rather than a 3-year cycle to, in its words, “better reflect the rapidly changing higher education landscape.”
The latest updates will change not only rankings but also how J.D.s are assessed. Law degrees “have previously not been considered as part of the Basic Classification methodology,” Carnegie states. But the revised methodology allegedly will account for law degrees in new ways. “We will soon release a proposal for this change and solicit feedback regarding our plans from the higher education community,” Carnegie submits.
The Carnegie rankings remain a point of pride and competition between universities. They are high priorities for university presidents and administrators because the United States Department of Education relies on them, they contribute to a university’s prestige, and they can affect a university’s eligibility for grant money.
Depending on the methodological revisions Carnegie adopts for its classifications, having a productive law school might, in the future, push a university from R-2 to R-1. Funding law faculty research potentially could yield significant returns in terms of Carnegie rankings—but probably not in 2018.
Much remains unknown about the future of the Carnegie rankings. It’s unlikely the J.D. will be reclassified as a research doctorate any time soon, if ever. And it’s thus unlikely research and development expenditures on law schools will help universities looking to move from R-2 to R-1. (To be classified as an R-1 doctoral university with highest research activity, your university must offer 20 research-based or scholarship-based degrees.)
In short, you should tell your university president and board of trustees to hold off on investing additional, substantial sums in law schools—at least for the purposes of moving from R-2 to R-1. It’s better to wait and see how the Carnegie changes play out and then to respond accordingly. Fortunately, the wait won’t be long. We’ll know more in the coming months.
The Literary Lawyer: A Forum for the Legal and Literary Communities 