Law Commons^™

Reflections On Law Schools And The Idea Of The University, Thomas E. Baker

Faculty Publications

Thomas Baker is one of the founding faculty members of the Florida International University College of Law and this article is based on a speech delivered in October of 2002 during the university's Annual Faculty Convocation. It details the composition of both the entering classes and the law faculty and discusses the law school's mission to provide opportunities for minorities to attain representation in the legal profession that is proportionate to their representation in the population. It explores the role of law schools in higher education and notes the FIU College of Law's efforts to incorporate important developments in the …

Segmented Rankings For Segmented Markets, Rafael Gely

Faculty Publications

A joke frequently told by and about economists begins with a group of colleagues searching one night under a lamppost for a key in a gutter. A bystander asks the group where they have lost the key. The economists explain that although they had lost the key in a gutter some distance away, they were looking under the lamppost because the light was better there. The three articles in this panel remind me of this story, albeit in a non-conventional way. By exploring issues regarding the broader context in which rankings exist, the three articles encourage us to look not …

Generation X In Law School: How These Law Students Are Different From Those Who Teach Them, Joanne Ingham, Robin A. Boyle

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

Generation X is the group of approximately forty-five million people born between 1961 to 1981. They have been dubbed Generation X, or Gen Xers for short, because there seemed to be nothing dramatic about their experience—not the Vietnam War, not the Civil Rights movement, not the Second Wave of the Feminist Movement. They also have a reputation for disengagement. Gen Xers have been described as disrespectful and suspicious of authority. These stereotypes can negatively influence how law professors conduct their classes and treat their students in general.

This article presents the results of a multi-year study that examined the …

An Empirical Study Of Empirical Legal Scholarship: The Top Law Schools, Tracey E. George

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Empirical legal scholarship is arguably the most significant emerging intellectual movement. Empirical legal scholarship (ELS), as the term is generally used in law schools, refers to a specific type of empirical research: a model-based approach coupled with a quantitative method. This paper ranks law schools based on their place in the ELS movement and offers an essential ranking framework that can be adopted for other intellectual movements. A revised version of the paper was posted on October 11. The updated tables reflect additional data.

Dead Poets And Academic Progenitors: The Next Generation Of Law School Rankings With Paul Caron, Rafael Gely, Paul L. Caron

Faculty Publications

This Symposium is an outgrowth of our Moneyball article. With the approaching twentieth anniversary of the first U.S. News law school rankings, it is a particularly propitious time to take a fresh look, to hear new voices, and to reconsider issues surrounding law school rankings. Many of America's most thoughtful law professors (as well as academics in other disciplines) gathered on April 15, 2005 at the Indiana University School of Law--Bloomington to discuss “The Next Generation of Law School Rankings.” Many of the participants previously have written about law school rankings, but others have not--all are poets, and many have …