July 2008

I'm intrigued by Brian Leiter's rankings of law schools based on the success rates of its graduates in the 2006-2008 law school teaching market. If you don't want to read the rankings, here are some take-aways:

1. Yale was the most successful school (45% placement rate); Chicago was second (43%), followed by Stanford (41%), Harvard (37%), and UVa (35%).

2. Harvard and Yale accounted for 40% of all new faculty hires (90 out of 231).

3. Harvard had 126 grads in the market last year; Yale had 97. (The Yale number is astonishing, since they have a class about one third the size of Harvard's. By comparison, Chicago, which is the same size as Yale, had 28.)

4. DC schools apparently attract lots of people who want to teach, but few of them are successful. Three DC-area schools (Georgetown, American, and GW) had 125 grads in the market -- only 8 were placed, and all of them were from Georgetown. Georgetown alone had 80 grads in the market (placing 10%), while American placed 0 out of 27 and GW placed 0 out of 18.

5. Tulane is a real oddball in the top tier of placing schools -- its 20% placement rate outperformed Berkeley, Duke, Penn, and some other top schools.

I don't get books like this new one called Ahead of the Curve by recent HBS graduate Philip Delves Broughton. He was apparently shocked to discover that students there are competitive! And graded on a curve! They work hard/play hard! And head off to stressful, high-paying jobs! This guy was a journalist for ten years before going to business school. Why were these newsflashes to him?

The HBS culture is a strong one, and it's pretty transparent. It's not for everyone, and that's fine. Why go there if it's not your cup of tea? I'm thinking this was more a failure of due diligence on his part than it was a failing of HBS.

With Round 1 deadlines right around the corner, this book is a good reminder to think hard about what kind of environment you want. People are seduced by name brands all the time, and the biggest, baddest name brands do have much to offer. There's nothing wrong with being brand-conscious, because brands have value, and they matter in the real world. (I doubt the author is suffering because he now has an MBA from HBS.) Still, if you're going to be miserable there, as this person obviously was, question whether you should go at all, and at a mininum make sure that the benefits (which can be considerable) outweigh that particular cost to you. And don't go there and then complain that HBS is... HBS.

Justice Blackmun may be famous for having authored the majority opinion in Roe v. Wade, but he's also famous for the "sappy" 1972 baseball antitrust decision Flood v. Kuhn, which exempted baseball from antitrust laws just because baseball is, well, special:

[Flood v. Kuhn] begins with a hopelessly sentimental ode to baseball and a long list of best players who "sparked the diamond" through the national pastime's glorious history. It was so sappy that two justices in the majority refused to join that section of the decision.

How bad and sappy? The blurb above, from a Tony Mauro article about the decision in today's Legal Times, doesn't really capture the florid wretchedness of Blackmun's writing in this opinion, which deserves some kind of bad writing award (on top of legal reasoning so poor that it stands as an embarrassment to lawyers everywhere):

Then there are the many names, celebrated for one reason or another, that have sparked the diamond and its environs and that have provided tinder for recaptured thrills, for reminiscence and comparisons, and for conversation and anticipation in-season and off-season.... [See entire list of players below.*] And one recalls the appropriate reference to the "World Serious," attributed to Ring Lardner, Sr.; Ernest L. Thayer's "Casey at the Bat"; the ring of "Tinker to Evers to Chance"; and all the other happenings, habits, and superstitions about and around baseball that made it the "national pastime" or, depending upon the point of view, "the great American tragedy."

But I digress.

So along came a controversial and best-selling book by Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong called The Brethren (if you're applying to law school and haven't read it, you should, along with Jeffrey Toobin's forthcoming The Nine and Jan Crawford Greenburg's Supreme Conflict). The Brethren, which was overall very hostile to Blackmun, included a few sentences about the fact that Blackmun hadn't listed any black players in the first draft of his opinion and added them only at the behest of Thurgood Marshall. We were supposed to conclude that Blackmun was a bigot.

Turns out, "the story is false," according to Ross Davies in a recent interview with the Legal Times about an article he published in the current edition of the Journal of Supreme Court History entitled "A Tall Tale of The Brethren." (Ross is a professor at George Mason Law School, editor of the endlessly entertaining Green Bag, author of a new law school ranking called The Deadwood Report, and my former law review boss.) Ross's research shows that the infamous first draft omitting black players never existed.

Eagle-eyed readers of Ross's article might notice that this is not a battle of anonymous sources, as is so often the case, particularly with Woodward. The authors of The Brethren claimed to have relied on an actual draft of the purportedly all-white document, and they have yet to produce it. (See in particular pages 11-12 and 20-23 in Ross's article.)

What else can we take away from the Flood decision? As Brad Snyder, lawyer and author of a book about Curt Flood, explains in the Legal Times interview: "Even the best judges turn into pennant-waving schoolboys when they decide cases about sports."

 

* Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Tris Speaker, Walter Johnson, Henry Chadwick, Eddie Collins, Lou Gehrig, Grover Cleveland Alexander, Rogers Hornsby, Harry Hooper, Goose Goslin, Jackie Robinson, Honus Wagner, Joe McCarthy, John McGraw, Deacon Phillippe, Rube Marquard, Christy Mathewson, Tommy Leach, Big Ed Delahanty, Davy Jones, Germany Schaefer, King Kelly, Big Dan Brouthers, Wahoo Sam Crawford, Wee Willie Keeler, Big Ed Walsh, Jimmy Austin, Fred Snodgrass, Satchel Paige, Hugh Jennings, Fred Merkle, Iron Man McGinnity, Three-Finger Brown, Harry and Stan Coveleski, Connie Mack, Al Bridwell, Red Ruffing, Amos Rusie, Cy Young, Smokey Joe Wood, Chief Meyers, Chief Bender, Bill Klem, Hans Lobert, Johnny Evers, Joe Tinker, Roy Campanela, Miller Huggins, Rube Bressler, Dazzy Vance, Edd Roush, Bill Wambsganess, Clark Griffith, Branch Rickey, Frank Chance, Cap Anson, Nap Lajoie, Sad Sam Jones, Bob O'Farrell, Lefty O'Doul, Bobby Veach, Willie Kamm, Heinie Groh, Lloyd and Paul Waner, Stuffy McInnis, Charles Comiske, Roger Bresnahan, Bill Dickey, Zack Wheat, George Sisler, Charlie Gehringer, Eppa Rixey, Harry Heilmann, Fred Clarke, Dizzy Dean, Hank Greenberg, Pie Traynor, Rube Waddell, Bill Terry, Carl Hubbell, Old Hoss Radbourne, Moe Berg, Rabbit Maranville, Jimmie Foxx, Lefty Grove.

For an unrelated discussion of Blackmun's list of players by law professor/baseball fan/former Hall of Fame scholar-in-residence, see this 2006 article by Roger Ian Abrams.

Good friend Chioma Isiadinso, formerly on the admissions board at Harvard Business School and founder of her own MBA admissions consulting firm Expartus, just came out with her first book: The Best Business Schools' Admissions Secrets. Find Chioma at one of her speaking events here.

One of the hardest things to sort out in law school is whether to choose a litigation or transactional career. Law school training (at least the required part) is notoriously biased in favor of litigation, so the burden is on law students to figure out whether they want to default into a litigation career or seek out training for a transactional practice.

Prof. Jeff Lipshaw has some great postings on how to go about deciding whether transactional law is a good fit. Check them out here and here.

By the way, you are forgiven if you are a law student and don't even know what a transactional practice is. (And when transactional work is slow at law firms, as is the case on a fairly cyclical basis, even first-year lawyers walk the halls asking themselves, "What's a 'deal' anyway?") Prof. Kenneth Klee has written a great paper on transactional law, and you can also check out Columbia Law School's transactional program (arguably the best around) to get a sense of what's involved.

Note, too, that transactional work can get very specialized. For example, my old law firm (Irell & Manella) has sub-groups focusing on art transactions, intellectual property transactions, and IPOs and private placements (among others).

Edited to add: Prof. Lipshaw kindly sent this follow-up to his original posting, with an emphasis on in-house counsel positions. I have a posting on in-house roles here as well.