David Yellen is the Dean of Loyola Chicago.

David Yellen is a member of the ABA's Task Force on the Future of Legal Education.

In an op-ed written for Above the Law, David Yellen said, "Law schools must fully comply with the ABA Standards and Rules of Procedure for Approval of Law Schools to receive or retain accreditation."

Law School Transparency conducted a survey of law school websites more than 4 months after the ABA revised Standard 509.

In a report covering the findings of its investigation, Law School Transparency said, "Of the 199 ABA-approved law schools, 78.4% (156/199) did not meet the expectations set forth by Standard 509."

Standard 509 is among the ABA Standards and Rules of Procedures for Approval of Law Schools.

In an op-ed written for Above the Law, David Yellen said, "Law schools must fully comply with the ABA Standards and Rules of Procedure for Approval of Law Schools to receive or retain accreditation."

David Yellen is a member of the ABA's Task Force on the Future of Legal Education.

David Yellen is the Dean of Loyola Chicago.

David Yellen says, "Law schools must fully comply with the ABA Standards and Rules of Procedure for Approval of Law Schools to receive or retain accreditation."

Law School Transparency says, "Of the 199 ABA-approved law schools, 78.4% (156/199) did not meet the expectations set forth by Standard 509."

David Yellen is the Dean of Loyola Chicago.

David Yellen is a member of the ABA's Task Force on the Future of Legal Education.

Frank Wu was recently deemed by his peers to be the most influential person in legal academia. Too bad when it comes to improving legal academia he's got his head up his ass. Here he is writing at the Huffington Post about the tension between transparency reform and cost reform:

Everyone wants us to be transparent, while lowering our costs. Those goals, as is true of many human desires we feel simultaneously, are not highly compatible. Like elegant product design, transparency turns out to be pricey. Specifically it requires that we build an apparatus to find the information, organize it, verify it, submit it, and then track the trends that are revealed.

The other day, I spent the lunch hour in our cafe to chat with students. A nice fellow, a first-year student, came by to meet me. The only subject he wished to bring up was ice cream. He wanted to know if the cafe could install a machine as he recalled from his undergraduate days elsewhere, so he could enjoy soft-serve ice cream.

As I explained to him, I have nothing against ice cream. If we can make a profit as the vendor, then we would be delighted to offer ice cream. But if we cannot do so, then our strategic plan does not call for ice cream.

First, your attitude of "we'll be transparent if it turns a profit" is ridiculous. Transparency is an ethical obligation (and increasingly a regulatory requirement), and deserves more than a simple cost/benefit analysis.

Second, your school already has a NALP report. It's in your possession right now. You can publish it on your website FOR FREE. YOU CAN PUBLISH YOUR NALP REPORT FOR FREE. YOU CAN PUBLISH YOUR NALP REPORT FOR FREE RIGHT THIS VERY FREAKING MINUTE YOU INSINCERE ASSHAT.

Now that we know Wu's head is so far up his ass that the lump in his throat is his nose, let's look at Wu's explanation for why law school is so damned expensive these days:

The greatest change has been the embrace of clinical legal education. By "greatest," I mean the most sizable and the most worthwhile. Similar to the model of clinical medical education, clinical legal education is the best means by which we prepare students for practice. It has been so successful we as a profession might well be on the cusp of requiring it for every graduate. No med student graduates without examining a few actual patients.

The expense of clinical legal education can be calculated in straightforward terms. A professor in a doctrinal class, such as the first-year required curriculum of civil procedure, criminal law, property, contracts, and torts, can lecture to a hundred students at once. That is not ideal, but it is not uncommon. A professor in a clinical class, supervising student attorneys who are representing real people in real cases, cannot train more than ten students at once. That's if she cares about her responsibilities both as a teacher and a lawyer.

It happens that the "podium" professor as they are called likely makes more money than her clinical counterpart, though not by much. Thus the difference is more than an order of magnitude. Once you count the overhead required for an actual legal office, the clinical course requires ten times as much money. There are new technological advances that will alleviate some of that.

Pause for a moment on this math. If we want clinical legal education, we will need to spend much more to provide it. As curmudgeons tell the young, this is called a choice.

If only law schools were actually making a choice. They're not. When law schools expand their course offerings, well, that's just it. They expand course offerings. They never engage in choice. They don't say "X course would be great, in fact, better than Y, which is virtually useless, so let's replace Y with X." No, they say "X would be great, let's add that, and replace $$ with $$$."

Yes, clinical education is expensive. A whole lot more expensive than externships, but let's put that issue off for another time. A class with 10 students is more expensive than a class with 100. No debate there. And reformers do often ask for more of those 10 person classes. So let's look at what other expensive seminar courses UC Hastings is offering:

Accountability in International Human Rights Law - It's often joked that the bulk of law students enroll hoping to practice international human rights law, but that this of course is a practice area which is virtually non-existent. Apparently Hastings didn't get the joke.

Asian Pacific Americans and the Law - Truth is America doesn't have a great track record with Asian immigrants, what with the railroads and internment camps and all that. But, these aren't really contemporary legal issues, and the class would be better placed in a history department. There are immigration issues for Asian Americans, but that topic isn't in the course description.

China and the International Legal Order - This is a class that discusses China's role in the UN, WTO, and how it views trade and sovereignty issues. Perfect for the exactly 0 students who go on to become ambassador to China. Useless for the rest.

Critical Race Theory - Almost every school offers some version of this. And they pay a very expensive law professor for it instead of a much cheaper French postmodern literary theorist, and if at any point you discuss Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, or Baudrillard, that's really who should be teaching this class because you're using "critical" to mean "obfuscated beyond comprehension" and "theory" to mean "fashionable nonsense."

Film and the Law - It's not a class on the publication of private facts in documentaries. It's exactly what you think it is.

Law of the Human Body - Whether we should be allowed to enter into a kidney exchange is a really interesting issue. You can cancel the class and buy everyone interested in it a copy of Leo Katz's Why the Law is So Perverse instead.

UC Hastings does offer a number of practice-oriented seminars and simulation courses. And that's great. But remember, the operative word here was choice. Hastings isn't making a choice, it's just piling on every class a professor has an interest in and passing the increased costs along to the students. And that's basically the attitude every other school takes. "Oh my gorsh! How can you say that a wills drafting seminar is more important than a legal issue that isn't handled in the courts but rather by top-level political officials who are more beholden to voters than legal principles? Better offer both!"

Learn to make the hard choices, Dean Wu. Take the soft-serve ice cream off your course catalog until you can afford it. And for the love of God, publish your damn NALP report or shut the hell up about how expensive it is to become transparent.

Just for good measure, we saved the most ridiculous Hastings class for last:

Research Seminar on Career of Roger Traynor - "The student work will contribute to a biography that Professor Hazard is exploring in cooperation with Michael Traynor, the Justice's son and himself a prominent lawyer, and with Professor Emeritus James McCall of Hastings." You get to pay for the privilege of helping your professor write a book that will carry his name, and not yours, and where he'll collect royalties, and not you. Not only is this worthless as a law school class, it is incredibly exploitative and if law schools had serious ethical guidelines the professor would be sacked, along with whoever approved this class.

Guess it takes the most influential person in legal academia to pull off a system where students pay to be research assistants.

Imagine University of Chicago philosophy professor of law and self-styled member of the American peerage Brian Leiter reposted on his blog his criticism of the US News and World Report Law School rankings, the most easily criticized ranking system our nation has had since the President and Vice President were elected separately, and that he got the criticism nearly entirely wrong. Imagine no more! Here comes the breakdown:

1.  Contrary to what one sometimes hears, it is clear to me, and I imagine any other informed observer of school evaluations, that the reputational surveys are the one component of the U.S. News ranking that actually keeps the results tethered to reality.  Unfortunately, as Professor Stake of Indiana has shown, the superficial survey method U.S. News employs is increasingly producing an echo chamber effect, with the reputation of a school essentially tracking the overall rankings from prior years by U.S. News.  In order to minimize that effect, I suggest you switch to an on-line survey system with academics (your response rate from academics is already quite high, and I imagine that for an on-line survey it will be even higher), in which evaluators are presented with concrete information about each school, rather than simply a school name:  e.g., a current faculty roster, numerical credentials of the student body, a list of distinguished alumni (let the school provide a list, limited to 50 names, say), and so on.   Ask academics to evaluate the scholarly and professional excellence of the school, not simply the "reputation" they associate with a name.

It's clear to anyone who actually talks to prospective students, the intended audience of the US News rankings, despite how much Leiter thinks they exist for his own personal glorification, that the survey of reputation among other law professors is the most absurd, least grounded in reality part of the whole ranking. (That is if you use a weighted measure. Spending per capita is more absurd, but only a small part of the ranking. Peer reputation is 25% of the whole damn thing.)

50 names of professors and distinguished alumni? Outside of a few super-elite schools that horde brand-name professors and produce Senators and Supreme Court Justices, the median number of names you'd (or a tenured professor) would recognize from the list is 0. And even if you do recognize someone's name, unless they're writing in the same field as you, you're going to have no idea what they've done with their career in the last 5 or 10 years. Arthur Miller at NYU, incredibly famous (not as famous as the other Arthur Miller, but still, famous among law profs) -- any idea what he's written lately? Probably not. NYU gets some reputation points for having him, despite the fact that he hasn't published a law review article since 2006, and only has 2 published in the last 15 years.

So on top of not having a clue what these people are even doing, when you do know what they're doing what they're doing is the wrong thing to evaluate them on because it's based on scholarship, and prospective students really don't care about that. They want professors who know how to teach, and it's highly unlikely that any professor filling out the USN survey has spent the 10,000 hours it would take to sample each of the 200 schools' 50 top professors.

2.  To the extent you continue to employ data self-reported by the schools, you really must undertake more aggressive audits of the data.  This year--to take the most notorious example that has already attracted widespread attention--the University of California at Berkeley claimed an astounding 99% of its students employed at graduation, a fact to which Professor Lindgren of Northwestern has already called attention.   In prior years, Berkeley has reported (going backwards by year) 97.2% employed at graduation, 74.4%, 89.8%, 88.7%, 96.8%,  and 93.2% .  Berkeley is a state school, subject to open record requirements.  Have you assigned a reporter for your magazine to investigate anomalous data reporting by schools?  The integrity of the enterprise surely demands an occasional follow-up investigation.

It did seem that Berkeley was fudging the numbers, and some sort of auditing it necessary to ensure the integrity of the data. Where Leiter goes off the rails is that when Law School Transparency filed a complaint with the ABA about a school publishing false employment data Leiter called the complaint "frivolous." And how did LST discover the fraud? They analyzed some publicly available data that contradicted Rutgers-Camden's marketing claims and then ...filed an open records request.

So why the change of heart about the importance of following up on employment claims? Two likely explanations.

First, professors love the rankings because it gives them a sense of pride. They need to protect the rankings to keep their egos puffed up. Employment stats that are presented to prospective graduates don't affect the rankings, and complaining about them hurts the profession as a whole. Can't have that.

Second, Leiter is allowed to criticize his peers. But middle-class members of the professions engaging in the same criticism? Insolence.

3.  Since what can only be facetiously called the "objective" data that schools self-report is the source of most of the egregious trickery and deceit that renders the results dubious, why not take steps to reduce your reliance on this data?  (That was a primary consideration in the Canadian law school rankings I designed for MacLean's.)  Eliminate expenditures altogether:  that alone would put a halt to the worst offenses.  What schools spend on utilities and secretaries and landscaping has nothing to do with anything.  Per capita expenditures systematically penalize larger schools for their economies of scale and reward inefficiency:  there is simply no denying this.  Even expenditures on faculty salaries is a very poor proxy for faculty quality, and would be, in any case, redundant upon well-done reputational surveys or citation studies, which would provide a direct measure.

The expenditure ranking is pretty ridiculous. What's stupid here is that Leiter doesn't know what the word "objective" means. Being fraudulent is not the same as not being objective. Also, there's not any evidence that schools mis-report their expenditures. Leiter could have filed an open records request to see what the actual numbers are, though he didn't. But, we've never heard of such a complaint. Instead, the complaint is that schools actually are spending more money to boost their rank. Students would love it if they just lied instead of increasing tuition.

And again, reputational surveys would not provide a direct measure of faculty quality. By definition a reputation is an indirect measure. And reputational surveys of faculty quality are, as previously said, not even really surveys of quality at all.

You should also eliminate the self-reported employment data, which is, as you well know, a work of fiction:  it bears some resemblance to reality, but it is mainly a work of the imagination.  Substitute data in the public domain, like the representation of school graduates as associates at leading law firms nationwide, or in federal clerkships.  Eliminating expenditures data, and substituting public data on employment success for self-reported employment statistics, would immediately increase the credibility of the results, and would get U.S. News out of the business of rewarding trickery and deceit.

The problems with the USN employment data isn't that it's a work of fiction, it's that it's a poorly crafted work of non-fiction. USN simply lumps all jobs together, part-time, short-term, non-professional. Doesn't matter, a job is a job. Using something like the LST Employment Score methodology would be a vast improvement, counting only full-time, long-term jobs requiring bar passage, and not counting solo practices. Are some schools lying on the data they send to the ABA? Maybe, and there should be audits, but narrowing what counts as a real job means you at least have to really commit fraud to game the system. Right now schools can just hire someone part-time for a couple weeks in February and count them the same as a BigLaw associate. No fiction, just a bad metric.

Leiter's alternative though is perhaps even worse than the current system. Only 45 schools send 10% or more of their class to firms with 101 or more attorneys (and that's a very liberal definition of BigLaw). Only 16 send 30% or more. 51 schools send 3% of more of their class to federal clerkships, and only 8 send 10% or more.

The BigLaw+Federal Clerkship number is important for figuring out how good a school is, but it's hardly the only important metric. It's basically only important for figuring out which of the elite schools is the most elite, which is of course the only thing that Leiter really cares about. But if you want to know whether to go to Alabama or Samford, the scores are 18.3% vs. 12.2%. They're just not the most relevant numbers for people working in Alabama, and the same is going to be true for most states that aren't dominated by a major legal market. If you compare Alabama and Samford's Employment Score, you get 71.3% vs. 59.5%, and the  Under-Employment Score comparison is 7.9% vs. 19.6%. Those are the numbers (along with salary data) that matter to people making that choice.

So there you have it. If you actually want to fix the US News rankings, you need to approach it with the eye of someone applying to law school. That generally means a focus on employment outcomes, and ditching the national scale because no one needs to know if how Arizona compares to Fordham. Or, you can take Leiter's approach, which is basically to make US News a more reliable gauge for professors to compare their relative prestige.

Over the weekend, Chicago Law professor Brian Leiter posted what we think can best be described as a rather mild piece of hate mail. First, a wee bit of back story. Paul Campos wrote on Inside the Law School Scam that the phrase "thinking like a lawyer" is pretty empty. Brian Leiter then wrote on his blog a short post titled "Paul Campos admits he doesn't "even [know] what it means" to think like a lawyer." Then the e-mail came:

You’re a “Law and ______” Professor, not a lawyer. How would you know how to ‘think like a lawyer’?

This is hardly a unique criticism of legal academics, and it's especially fair when it comes to Leiter. He does teach Evidence, but his area of scholarship is purely philosophy. Here's his list of book titles from his CV: Oxford Studies in the Philosophy of Law, The Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy, Nietzsche and Morality, The Future for Philosophy, Nietzsche, Objectivity in Law and Morals, Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality. Seven books, not to mention all of his book sections and journal articles. Leiter is quite prolific, which likely explains why he's a a professor at a top law school rather than making a third of the same amount teaching at the University of Chicago's philosophy department, since at the end of the day he's not a law professor. He's a philosophy professor who teaches Evidence on the side.

Here is Leiter's response to the e-mail:

Dear Mr. [-----],

Are you actually an attorney at the firm in question? If so, why do you not appear on the website? Do your supervisors know that you are using the firm’s e-mail to send impertinent and juvenile messages to other professionals?

“Thinking like a lawyer” refers to a style of reasoning and analysis that is exemplified in the law section of appellate briefs and in judicial opinions; I assume you must be familiar with both genres. It encompasses, for example, the use of analogical reasoning to distinguish precedents or propose extensions or developments of existing doctrine, but also involves techniques of statutory and constitutional construction, the use of arguments from authority, facility with the law/fact distinctions, and so on. Again, merely looking at the chapter headings of Schauer’s book Thinking Like a Lawyer would illuminate this apparently opaque topic for you. Alternatively, you might read Edward Levi’s classic book An Introduction to Legal Reasoning; Mr. Levi was the former Dean of my Law School, as well as former Attorney General of the United States.

Of course, there are more skills involved in being a lawyer than thinking like a lawyer. There is industry-specific knowledge, know-how with respect to how local courts or regulatory agencies approach statutory language, rhetorical talent, as well as a range of psychological and interpersonal skills that are important. For example, most good lawyers I know, among my family and friends, exhibit maturity and professional judgment, that would prevent them from sending insolent e-mails from their’s firm account to other professionals. I will be sure to send a copy of this entire correspondence to the name partners of your firm.

In other words, "I think you're wrong, and now I'm going to complain to your boss about you." Brave action, from someone with the bullet-proof protection of tenure. David Bernstein at Volokh Conspiracy picked up the story, criticizing Leiter for his lack of civility and basic human dignity. Here's the choicest bit from that response:

I have a challenge for Prof. Leiter.  Let’s take the adjectives with which he has described the correspondence that prompted this round: juvenile, impertinent, and insolent.  Let’s get a panel of three neutral arbitrators, perhaps chosen from ABA ethics committees.  And let’s take some of Leiter’s choicer blog posts, and let the arbitrators decide whether his posts meet the accepted definition of juvenile, impertinent, and insolent.  (We can start with the one quoted above, though that’s a relatively tame one by his standards).  And since he obviously thinks there should be professional consequences for juvenile, impertinent, and insolent writings, if the arbitrators agree that his posts meet the definition for which he chose to try to humiliate and punish his hapless correspondent, he’ll take unpaid leave from Chicago for a year.

Of course, Leiter will never take him up on it. Why submit to any sort of authority when tenure means never having to say you're sorry?

Just for fun, let's look at a few of the best comments from Volokh:

David Neiporent says, "[Leiter is a smart guy] About some things. That nobody cares about. But if he were a tenth as smart as he thought he was, he'd have won the Nobel Prize. That is, all the Nobel Prizes."

Lashon Foster says, "Leiter reminds me of the character Jacob Ben Israel from Glee, who runs the school newspaper. He is wildly annoying and no one likes him, but because he controls the flow of the high school gossip, everyone must pay attention to him. Leiter's entire reputation in legal academia, at least, seems to be based on running a TMZ-esque blog. Perhaps he is more substantive in the philosophy community."

More to the substance of Leiter's response, John G. says, "Leiter: "'Thinking like a lawyer' refers to a style of reasoning and analysis that is exemplified in the law section of appellate briefs and in judicial opinions"