T-14, softs over numbers? Forum

[Veyron]

The USNWR rankings are not relevant to law teaching:

TLS: Should someone interested in academia even bother going to a school that is not a top 14 law school? Looking at your rankings would suggest that they should not.

Brian Leiter: Again, looking at the data I’ve collected, the first correct conclusion to draw is that “top 14” is not a relevant category. If you want to go into legal academia, you should go to Texas over Cornell, to take an obvious example. The law teaching market is, indeed, very pedigree-sensitive, but ‘top 14’ isn’t the relevant marker. The market is dominated by Yale (though faculty retention troubles at Yale may well change that over the next decade), and then Harvard, Chicago, and Stanford each have a big chunk of the market. After those four, Columbia, Michigan, and increasingly NYU are major players, also Berkeley. Virginia also does well. Then there’s another drop-off before you get to the Georgetown, Duke, Northwestern, Texas, Penn et al. cluster. I’d choose among these based on your interests, since finding faculty mentors, as noted, is really key to success on the academic job market. Texas and Penn, for example, have strong criminal law groups, and also a strong commitment to law & philosophy; Northwestern is an excellent place to be for someone with an empirical social science background interested in studying the legal system—so too Cornell. Finding a good intellectual match can also be relevant with respect to the top four schools for law teaching. All of them are quite strong in law & economics, but only Harvard and Stanford would make sense for a student interested in critical race theory, while only Yale and Chicago would really work for a student interested in law & philosophy. By the same token, a philosophy student thinking about law school and interested in teaching would be crazy not to consider NYU too, and a student interested in critical race theory or feminist jurisprudence ought to be thinking about UCLA. There are lots of specialty niches where particular schools excel.

http://www.top-law-schools.com/brian-le ... rview.html

No one takes this guy seriously. Also, unspeakable Texas trolling.

[Samara]

The USNWR rankings are not relevant to law teaching:

TLS: Should someone interested in academia even bother going to a school that is not a top 14 law school? Looking at your rankings would suggest that they should not.

Brian Leiter: Again, looking at the data I’ve collected, the first correct conclusion to draw is that “top 14” is not a relevant category. If you want to go into legal academia, you should go to Texas over Cornell, to take an obvious example. The law teaching market is, indeed, very pedigree-sensitive, but ‘top 14’ isn’t the relevant marker. The market is dominated by Yale (though faculty retention troubles at Yale may well change that over the next decade), and then Harvard, Chicago, and Stanford each have a big chunk of the market. After those four, Columbia, Michigan, and increasingly NYU are major players, also Berkeley. Virginia also does well. Then there’s another drop-off before you get to the Georgetown, Duke, Northwestern, Texas, Penn et al. cluster. I’d choose among these based on your interests, since finding faculty mentors, as noted, is really key to success on the academic job market. Texas and Penn, for example, have strong criminal law groups, and also a strong commitment to law & philosophy; Northwestern is an excellent place to be for someone with an empirical social science background interested in studying the legal system—so too Cornell. Finding a good intellectual match can also be relevant with respect to the top four schools for law teaching. All of them are quite strong in law & economics, but only Harvard and Stanford would make sense for a student interested in critical race theory, while only Yale and Chicago would really work for a student interested in law & philosophy. By the same token, a philosophy student thinking about law school and interested in teaching would be crazy not to consider NYU too, and a student interested in critical race theory or feminist jurisprudence ought to be thinking about UCLA. There are lots of specialty niches where particular schools excel.

http://www.top-law-schools.com/brian-le ... rview.html

I love that he says using "T14" is irrelevant, then proceeds to rank schools exactly in accordance with T14 rankings.

[kwais]

The USNWR rankings are not relevant to law teaching:

TLS: Should someone interested in academia even bother going to a school that is not a top 14 law school? Looking at your rankings would suggest that they should not.

Brian Leiter: Again, looking at the data I’ve collected, the first correct conclusion to draw is that “top 14” is not a relevant category. If you want to go into legal academia, you should go to Texas over Cornell, to take an obvious example. The law teaching market is, indeed, very pedigree-sensitive, but ‘top 14’ isn’t the relevant marker. The market is dominated by Yale (though faculty retention troubles at Yale may well change that over the next decade), and then Harvard, Chicago, and Stanford each have a big chunk of the market. After those four, Columbia, Michigan, and increasingly NYU are major players, also Berkeley. Virginia also does well. Then there’s another drop-off before you get to the Georgetown, Duke, Northwestern, Texas, Penn et al. cluster. I’d choose among these based on your interests, since finding faculty mentors, as noted, is really key to success on the academic job market. Texas and Penn, for example, have strong criminal law groups, and also a strong commitment to law & philosophy; Northwestern is an excellent place to be for someone with an empirical social science background interested in studying the legal system—so too Cornell. Finding a good intellectual match can also be relevant with respect to the top four schools for law teaching. All of them are quite strong in law & economics, but only Harvard and Stanford would make sense for a student interested in critical race theory, while only Yale and Chicago would really work for a student interested in law & philosophy. By the same token, a philosophy student thinking about law school and interested in teaching would be crazy not to consider NYU too, and a student interested in critical race theory or feminist jurisprudence ought to be thinking about UCLA. There are lots of specialty niches where particular schools excel.

http://www.top-law-schools.com/brian-le ... rview.html

I love that he says using "T14" is irrelevant, then proceeds to rank schools exactly in accordance with T14 rankings.

+1 incoherent

[TaipeiMort]

Well...I love teaching, and I'm good at it. Obviously, teaching law school would be very different than teaching high school English. (Understatement, sure.) But all career goals require a bit of imagination...

why do you want to teach law, in particular?

and it's a bit risky to go to law school if you ONLY want to be a law professor, tbh, because so few people get that position. would you be happy being a regular ol' lawyer if you can't get a law professor position?

I'm not going to argue this much today, but I have been in meetings where real data for LSAT distributions has been presented and this specific issue has been discussed. There are more men than women in the tails by a huge margin, which traces countless IQ studies which show that at the high-ends (140+ IQ), men tend to have a 8-1 incidence over women. The same is true at the lower end, where men have a similarly out-stupid women. The evolutionary bases for these numbers have also been outlined.

Because there are very few women at the tails, schools struggle to fill their classes with somewhat equal numbers of high LSAT takers. There has to be a very real couple point boost for women at the tails at some of the top schools, if in fact they bring in somewhat equal numbers of men and women, and maintain high LSAT medians.

This will not be true farther down the distribution, where there are a higher percentage of women slightly above the median LSAT.

[birdlaw117]

The USNWR rankings are not relevant to law teaching:

TLS: Should someone interested in academia even bother going to a school that is not a top 14 law school? Looking at your rankings would suggest that they should not.

Brian Leiter: Again, looking at the data I’ve collected, the first correct conclusion to draw is that “top 14” is not a relevant category. If you want to go into legal academia, you should go to Texas over Cornell, to take an obvious example. The law teaching market is, indeed, very pedigree-sensitive, but ‘top 14’ isn’t the relevant marker. The market is dominated by Yale (though faculty retention troubles at Yale may well change that over the next decade), and then Harvard, Chicago, and Stanford each have a big chunk of the market. After those four, Columbia, Michigan, and increasingly NYU are major players, also Berkeley. Virginia also does well. Then there’s another drop-off before you get to the Georgetown, Duke, Northwestern, Texas, Penn et al. cluster. I’d choose among these based on your interests, since finding faculty mentors, as noted, is really key to success on the academic job market. Texas and Penn, for example, have strong criminal law groups, and also a strong commitment to law & philosophy; Northwestern is an excellent place to be for someone with an empirical social science background interested in studying the legal system—so too Cornell. Finding a good intellectual match can also be relevant with respect to the top four schools for law teaching. All of them are quite strong in law & economics, but only Harvard and Stanford would make sense for a student interested in critical race theory, while only Yale and Chicago would really work for a student interested in law & philosophy. By the same token, a philosophy student thinking about law school and interested in teaching would be crazy not to consider NYU too, and a student interested in critical race theory or feminist jurisprudence ought to be thinking about UCLA. There are lots of specialty niches where particular schools excel.

http://www.top-law-schools.com/brian-le ... rview.html

I love that he says using "T14" is irrelevant, then proceeds to rank schools exactly in accordance with T14 rankings.

+1. I was going to post this same thing.

[Lady in Red]

Michigan accepted me with the 167/3.73.

[law2015]

Congrats, Michigan is a great school. Have you already made the decision to attend?

[Lady in Red]

Congrats, Michigan is a great school. Have you already made the decision to attend?

Yes! I can't wait!

[bmore]

Glad that you didn't listen to all the negativity. But didn't I read that you retested with a 180! Set your sights higher

[FloridaCoastalorbust]

Haters be hating on you. This link is useful.

http://leiterrankings.com/new/2011_LawTeachers.shtml

[Lady in Red]

Haters be hating on you. This link is useful.

http://leiterrankings.com/new/2011_LawTeachers.shtml

Great link! Thanks!

[Perdevise]

Edited b/c I didn't finish the thread. You could get CCN easily with these numbers, maybe H.