Excess of Democracy

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

SITE DISCLOSURES Total operating cost: $192 Total content acquisition costs: $0 Total site visits: 81,587 (+38% over 2022) Total unique visitors: 81,357 (+57% over 2022) Total pageviews:...

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

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 up...

https://excessofdemocracy.com/blog/2023/12/updating-and-projecting-the-2024-2025-usnwr-law-school-rankings-to-be-released-march-2024-or-so

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 progr...

https://excessofdemocracy.com/blog/2023/12/law-school-1l-jd-hits-six-year-low-non-jd-enrollment-trends-down

After the USNWR law school rankings shakeup earlier this year, I pointed out that spending money on law professors would have less influence than in years past. So, where might there be incentiv...

https://excessofdemocracy.com/blog/2023/12/perhaps-the-most-valuable-legal-education-job-in-the-new-usnwr-rankings-landscape-career-development

Golden Gate has announced a closure plan for its law school program. Karen Sloan at Reuters highlights some of the trends of recent closures, a trickle we’ve seen over the years . Golden Gate ...

https://excessofdemocracy.com/blog/2023/12/california-has-lost-4-aba-accredited-law-schools-in-the-last-decade

The ABA disclosures reveal trends over time. And they reveal that law schools have shed about 7% of their full time faculty in the last 5 years, from 2017 to 2022—around 700 people (from 10,02...

https://excessofdemocracy.com/blog/2023/11/law-schools-have-shed-7-of-their-full-time-faculty-in-the-last-five-years

In 1998, a technical study from the Law School Admission Council looked at each of the three components of the LSAT—the analytical reasoning (sometimes called “logic games”), logical reaso...

https://excessofdemocracy.com/blog/2023/10/the-deprecation-of-the-lsat-appears-to-continue-as-lsac-drops-the-analytical-reasoning-section

I’ve long noted that USNWR’s decision to use the medians for admissions distorts how law schools behave . Law schools pursue medians at the expense of higher-caliber students who may fall jus...

https://excessofdemocracy.com/blog/2023/10/which-law-schools-are-most-aggressively-pursuing-admissions-ugpa-and-lsat-medians

USNWR has many rankings apart from its graduate school (and specifically law school) rankings, of course. (One of my favorites is its ranking of diets .) Its collegiate rankings have been around ...

https://excessofdemocracy.com/blog/2023/9/usnwr-incorporates-faculty-citations-graduate-salary-debt-data-into-its-college-metrics-will-law-schools-be-next

Earlier, I blogged about how USNWR should considering incorporating academic attrition into its methodology. Another publicly-available piece of data that would redound to the benefit of student...

https://excessofdemocracy.com/blog/2023/8/usnwr-should-considering-incorporating-conditional-scholarship-statistics-into-its-new-methodology