Excess of Democracy

I recently pulled data from Professor Brian Leiter ’s extraordinarily helpful list of law school hires. I looked at the last six years, 2019-2024, to see if there were any interesting trends. H...

https://excessofdemocracy.com/blog/2024/10/recent-trends-in-law-school-lateral-hiring-2019-2024

Following up on a post I wrote in 2020 , there’s been some discussion that the 2024 presidential election could be thrown to the House of Representatives. But how does this work? And how like...

https://excessofdemocracy.com/blog/2024/9/four-unlikely-ways-the-2024-presidential-election-ends-up-in-the-house-of-representatives

The Multistate Bar Exam scores for July 2024 have been released , and they show promising signs. The mean scaled score is a 141.8, the highest since 2013’s 144.3 (before the grim numbers that s...

https://excessofdemocracy.com/blog/2024/8/multistate-bar-exam-scores-for-july-2024-rebound-to-highest-level-since-2013

A generation ago, a typical federal judicial clerkship experience looked like this: A student would graduate from law school around May and begin a one-year (or sometimes two-year) clerkship in...

https://excessofdemocracy.com/blog/2024/7/law-students-you-can-and-maybe-increasingly-should-say-no-to-some-judicial-clerkships

The third in an occasional series I call “dire predictions.” March 2012 was a turning point for law schools. 14 law schools were facing consumer protection class actions on allegations that...

https://excessofdemocracy.com/blog/2024/6/how-did-more-than-30-law-schools-survive-class-actions-concerning-allegations-of-misrepresentations-in-employment-statistics6

Fifty-eight percent of the new USNWR law school rankings turn on three highly-volatile categories: employment 10 months after graduation, first-time bar passage, and ultimate bar passage. USNWR h...

https://excessofdemocracy.com/blog/2024/5/projecting-the-2025-2026-usnwr-law-school-rankings-to-be-released-march-2025-or-so

Back in 2018, the National Association for Law Placement loosened some of its calendar and deadlines for on-campus recruiting for law schools and law students. The concern was largely antitrust,...

https://excessofdemocracy.com/blog/2024/5/will-an-earlier-big-law-firm-recruiting-calendar-change-the-market-for-prospective-law-school-transfer-students

CNBC reports the new student loan interest rate figures, and they are pretty dire for higher education in general and law schools in particular: > For graduate students, loans will proba...

https://excessofdemocracy.com/blog/2024/5/one-point-increase-in-student-loan-rates-could-cost-new-law-school-graduates-tens-of-thousands-of-dollars-in-added-debt

Back in 2016, I noted how a lot of law school-funded positions “dried up ” once USNWR stopped giving those jobs “full weight” in its law school rankings. Yes, correlation does not equal c...

https://excessofdemocracy.com/blog/2024/5/which-law-schools-saw-the-biggest-changes-in-employment-placement-after-usnwr-gave-full-weight-to-new-categories-of-jobs

That is literally the same headline I had for the class of 2022 , but it’s another year of incremental improvement. Outcomes improved incrementally once again. Below are figures for the ABA-dis...

https://excessofdemocracy.com/blog/2024/4/overall-legal-employment-for-the-class-of-2023-improves-slightly-with-large-law-firm-and-public-interest-placement-growing

Hours after the release of last year’s dramatic change to the USNWR methodology, I noted the dramatic increase in “compression and volatility” in the coming rankings . USNWR changed a cou...

https://excessofdemocracy.com/blog/the-2024-2025-usnwr-law-school-rankings-methodology-tweaks-may-help-entrench-elite-schools-but-elite-schools-see-reputation-decline-among-lawyers-and-judges

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 inter...

https://excessofdemocracy.com/blog/2024/3/what-percentage-of-law-school-faculty-have-recently-contributed-to-political-candidates

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 not...

https://excessofdemocracy.com/blog/2024/3/analysis-of-first-time-bar-passage-data-for-class-of-2023-and-ultimate-bar-passage-data-for-class-of-2021

I’ve done some work looking at law firms and where political contributions from each went among the largest law firms. I thought I’d try my hand at gathering some comparable data among law p...

https://excessofdemocracy.com/blog/2024/3/law-school-faculty-monetary-contributions-to-political-candidates-2017-to-early-2023

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...

https://excessofdemocracy.com/blog/2024/3/supreme-court-analysis-trump-v-anderson

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...

https://excessofdemocracy.com/blog/2024/2/theres-not-much-to-change-with-the-usnwr-rankings-to-disrupt-the-status-quo

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 ....

https://excessofdemocracy.com/blog/2024/1/law-school-academic-dismissal-and-conditional-scholarship-eliminations-2023

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https://excessofdemocracy.com/blog/2023/12/annual-statement-2023

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�...

https://excessofdemocracy.com/blog/2023/12/hard-questions-about-experiential-learning-and-legal-education

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...

https://excessofdemocracy.com/blog/2023/12/nyu-cornell-and-the-new-usnwr-law-school-rankings-landscape