My recent post, “Law school faculty monetary contributions to political candidates, 2017 to early 2023,” has garnered a lot of attention and feedback, and I’m grateful for people’s interest in it! Some recurring questions came up. First, what does this say about the percentage of politically-engaged faculty (an important question raised by Professor Milan Markovic and others)? I tracked around 3300 faculty. That could double-count some faculty who moved around, so it could be smaller. And some could self-identify as a “law professor” but not teach at the law school (e.g., a business law profes ..read more

The ABA has released its new batch of data on bar passage. The data includes the first-time passage data for the Class of 2023 and the “ultimate” passage data for the Class of 2021. As I noted earlier, USNWR has increased the weight on bar passage as a metric (18% of the methodology is for first-time passage, 7% for ultimate), and it is one of the biggest metrics. It is also one of the most volatile metrics. To offer a snapshot of what the data means, I looked at both the first-time and ultimate passage data. I compared schools’ performance against their Class of 2022 and 2020 metrics. I weigh ..read more

This is a high level overview of the decision in Trump v. Anderson, written in a format as I’ve been presenting in various ways over the last few days. Disclosure: I did file an amicus brief in support of neither party in this case, and in the court below. On March 4, 2024, the Supreme Court decided Trump v. Anderson. It issued a per curiam opinion reversing the Colorado Supreme Court and effectively permitting Donald Trump’s name to appear on the Republican primary ballot. Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment provides: No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector o ..read more

Last year’s dramatic overhaul of the USNWR law school rankings saw the potential for increased volatility in the new metrics. But not much at the top, and much more beneath. And USNWR can only use publicly-available data. I worked on creating an alternative set of metrics to try to stress test the rankings and see what might change. I reduced the 10-month employment score from 33% to 30%, and I subdivided that further in 20% for last year’s graduating class and 10% for the year before, a two-year weighted average. I reduced the bar passage stats a bit. I added a couple of other statistics at a ..read more

Last year, I highlighted the fact that law schools have wide variance in how they handle academic dismissals of first-year law students and how they handle reducing or eliminating scholarships. Both categories, I argued, are negatives for law schools and the kind of information that USNWR could (and perhaps should) incorporate into its rankings. I offered a few ways of comparing schools to one another. Here’s a visualization of the percentage of first-year law students who were academically dismissed in 2023. These percentages are slightly different than the opaque percentages that are reporte ..read more

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The American Bar Association created an Experiential Credits Working Group out of the Standards Committee suggesting three potential proposals—increasing the number of “experiential credits” in legal education from 6 to 9 or 15. There are some major, and difficult, questions to address. A decade ago, the ABA added a requirement that all law schools would be required to include six “experiential” units to their curriculum as a condition for JD graduation. This would expand, perhaps significantly, that requirement. From the beginning of the new proposal, let me open with this: We have assumed t ..read more

After I project next year’s USNWR law school rankings, as I did last May and again here in December, there’s always a lot of chatter about the changes, about schools moving up and down. But the more notable thing is why the schools have changed spots, and there’s not a lot of explanation built into a single ranking metric. And some schools attract more attention than others. I would say I’ve received a decent number of questions about NYU (projected to be around 11) and Cornell (projected to be around 18) than most other schools, as both are significantly lower than their typical ranking. Why ..read more

Last May, I projected USNWR law school rankings based on the publicly-available employment and bar passage data. New ABA data fills out most of the rest of the rankings data. I thought I’d update and see what changed. In short, not much. It’s not surprising, as I mentioned in May that this data is not only weighted less in the rankings but less subject to change. Most of the movement essentially occurred from changes in rounding errors that pushed schools up or down a tied spot. Some ABA has data, which I tried to fix as best I can. I also have to approximate certain measures (e.g., which GRE ..read more

The 2023 law school enrollment figures have been released. They show the a drop in JD enrollment and a drop in non-JD enrollment. About 16% of law school enrollees are not enrolled in a JD program. For nine of the last 10 years, 1L JD enrollment has been between 37,000 and 38,500, remarkable consistency. In 2021, it hit a recent high of 42,718, but it trended down last year, and again this year, down to 37,886 the lowest since 2017’s 37,398. Total JD enrollment sits at 116,851, well off the peak of 2010-2011 with 147,525. Non-JD enrollment has been more fickle in recent years. It ballooned t ..read more