The Leiter Reports: Editorials, News, Updates

April Fools Jokes on Law School Websites...

courtesy of a very funny law student. Even if you don't go to law school, you'll get a laugh.

More Thoughts on the US News Law School Rankings

Goodness, when the National Review smeared me, I got over 2600 hits that day, but all one has to do is make a few off-hand remarks about US News rankings, and I top 2700 for the first time. Imagine that? Now what if US News smeared me for my comments on their rankings? I'd probably top Instapundit.

For those interested, someone in cyberspace has scanned the new law school rankings here. I imagine the US News lawyers are in hot pursuit of this felon as we speak....

Various folks have been writing with comments. Jim Rossi (Florida State) correctly asks:

"What's going on with the swings in practitioner/judge reputation score? I think San Diego dropped .4. FSU dropped .2. These are significant changes. Did other schools drop or increase on this or the other reputation ranking as well? At a glance, this could be driving the realignment in the 50's and 60's. The degree of swing on this measure is inexplicable to me. Given all of the improvements on key objective variables we know about here at FSU - e.g., our 75th LSAT up two points, our S/F ratio down significantly -- these overall rankings seem very odd to us, as they must to San Diego. I don't see the same degree of relative improvement in many schools that jumped us (we were tied 64 last year) -- or San Diego (tied 59 last year) -- but I haven't yet reviewed all of the data. Perhaps, now that we rank 50-100, even more schools are strategically gaming the data they submit to U.S. News than before?"

I think there can be no doubt that the main consequence of extending the ordinal ranking to 100 was to increase the amount of strategic gaming. (The strategic gaming in the academic reputation surveys has reached fairly ridiculous levels--notice that Yale and Harvard can only manage a 4.8 in this category. Notice, too, the downward pressure on the scores: it used to be, e.g., that schools in the 10-15 range for academic reputation had scores of 4.2-4.3; now it's 4.1-4.2)

Now the practitioner reputation survey is highly volatile. Part of the explanation must be that the response rate is so low (36% this year, many years it is less than one-third). Since US News only surveys large offices (and thus the survey is skewed towards the Northeast corridor and California), and since most hiring partners will know nothing about most schools, the actual numbers voting on the less national schools has got to be extremely small. So all it takes, e.g., is for two hiring partners in San Diego to forget to fill out the forms and give USD the usual 4.0 they give to their favorite local school, and, boom, USD's practitioner reputation score drops dramatically.

"Impeach Bush, Impeach Cheney"

So says Berkeley economist Brad DeLong here, and with good reason: "Former White House terrorism chief Richard Clarke writes his book about Bush administration counterterrorism 'policy.' From all accounts, the national security side of the Bush administration is an even more disgraceful clown show than the domestic policy side as told by Paul O'Neill to Ron Suskind in The Price of Loyalty...."

The only thing more astonishing than the reinvention of Bush as a "war President" who has been "tough on terrorism" was the whipping of the country in to a war frenzy with Iraq in the fall of 2002 and spring of 2003. But the former is still astonishing enough, and suggestive of the "theater of the absurd" condition American is now in.

Who can forget that on the day of the 9/11 atrocities our alleged President was "on the run" (flying from air base to air base), and when he finally appeared on T.V., he came across as slightly pathetic, as though an immature, spoiled ne'er-do-well had been dropped down square in the middle of a grown-up problem that he knew was over his head. On a day of horror, it was utterly depressing to have to listen to this deeply unserious person, and realize that our fate was in his hands. (One of my very eminent colleagues, who shall remain nameless here, suggested at a public forum shortly thereafter that Bush should resign, since he was so obviously ill-equipped to deal with serious problems--this colleague, a staunch Democrat, preferred Cheney at the helm.)

Who can forget that on the day of the 9/11 atrocities, the public figure on whom the American public invested all its hopes was the Mayor of New York Rudy Giuliani, who appeared before the cameras--in the city under attack, no less--and spoke directly and maturely about what had happened. The Mayor of New York was, for that day, the leader of the nation.

U.S. News Law School Rankings Hijacked by Malicious Typesetter

Chicago is not 6th

Berkeley is not 13th

Illinois is not 27th

Wisconsin is not 31st

Tulane is not 56th

San Diego is not 67th

The list could go on.

Some malevolent typesetter must have fooled with the law school rankings at the last moment in order to make U.S. News look ridiculous. A major news magazine wouldn't publish disinformation like this.

For UT Law and Philosophy PhD Students...

...details of my fall seminar (cross-listed between Law and Philosophy) are finally available here. Let me know if you have questions.

Parfit Accepts Part-Time Post at Rutgers

Oxford's Derek Parfit, one of the world's leading moral philosophers, has accepted a part-time appointment at Rutgers University at New Brunswick. On each visit, he will be at Rutgers for 7 weeks, starting in fall 2005, continuing in spring 2007, and then every other year after that. The initial period of the commitment is for 8 years, during which time he will teach 5 graduate seminars. It is not yet clear whether this will impact Parfit's quarter-time arrangements with Harvard and NYU. This is the latest in a series of appointment Rutgers has made to strength its coverage in value theory; others include the full-time appointments of Larry Temkin from Rice and Jeff McMahan from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, as well as the part-time appointment of James Griffin, who is White's Professor of Moral Philosophy Emeritus from Oxford.

John Gardner in Austin...Light Posting the Next Few Days

John Gardner, the Professor of Jurisprudence at Oxford, is in Austin the next few days, which means there will be only light posting. Today, he'll be talking to my "Jurisprudence" class about his essay "Legal Positivism: 5 1/2 Myths"; tomorrow, he'll be presenting at the Constitutional and Legal Theory Colloqium his paper "Backwards and Forwards with Tort Law"; and Friday, he'll give the Leon Green '15 Lecture in Jurisprudence on "Some Types of Causal Relations."

I will, of course, try to steal a few minutes to post some comments on the obsession of the moment for aspiring law students, namely, the soon-to-be-released U.S. News rankings!

"Worse than Watergate"

So says John Dean regarding the Bush White House in his new book; as this LA Times article comments:

"Worse Than Watergate, the title of a new book by John Dean, Richard Nixon's White House counsel, is a depressingly accurate measure of the chicanery of the Bush/Cheney cabal. According to Dean, who began his political life at the age of 29 as the Republican counsel on the House Judiciary Committee before being recruited by Nixon, "This administration is truly scary and, given the times we live in, frighteningly dangerous." And when it comes to lies and cover-up, the Bush crowd makes the Nixon administration look like amateurs. As Dean writes, they 'have created the most secretive presidency of my lifetime … far worse than during Watergate.'"

UPDATE: And see this interview with Dean:

Question: At least until recently, the Bush administration has successfully used the public's fear of terrorism to advance its agenda. You go so far as to agree with Gen. Tommy Franks' dark prediction that another major terror attack on U.S. citizens will drive the country to suspend the Constitution. Why do you fear that?

Dean's Answer: As I state in the book, I agree for reasons that probably differ from those of Gen. Franks. The short summary of what is really a thread that runs through the book is that when you have a presidency that has no regard for human life, that develops and implements all (not just national security) policy in secrecy, and is driven by political motives and a radical philosophy, it is impossible not to conclude that they will overreact -- and at the expense of our constitutional safeguards. Bush and Cheney enjoy using power to make and wield swords, not ploughs. They prefer to rule by fear. We've had three years to take the measure of these men. I've done so and reported what I found in a book I never planned to write, but because others were not talking about these issues, I believed they needed to be placed on the table.

Bush and Cheney have exploited terrorism ever since 9/11. Now they are exploiting it to get reelected. Should there be an even more serious threat, they have found that when Americans are frightened they can be governed like sheep, which suits Bush and Cheney perfectly. Rather than taking the terror out of terrorism by educating and informing Americans, they have sought to make terrorism as frightening as possible -- using terrorism to launch a war of aggression that is breeding a new generation of terrorists and getting the Congress to pass the most repressive new laws imaginable and calling it an act of patriotism.

Ranking Insanity

If you want to see what happens to prospective law students when they think they've found the new U.S. News rankings, check this discussion site out. I think it's credible these are the real rankings, by the way, but that's not the point. What is scary is that, given the rather absurd ranking methodology--in which more than half the criteria are self-reported by the schools and unverifiable by US News; more than one-third of the criteria favor small schools over large ones; and less than half the criteria have anything to do with academics!--students actually seem to hang on changes in overall rank as though they mean anything! Wow!

UPDATE: A graduate of Pepperdine's law school writes with some fair points:

"In your post about the US News ranking insanity, you wrote that 'students actually seem to hang on changes in overall rank as though they mean anything!' I agree with you that the US News rankings are a fraud. I also agree with your conclusion, in that whether Harvard or Yale is ranked #1 means very little for those students.

"But, changes in overall rank are important for people like me who went to schools like Pepperdine. Unfortunately, many employers still weed out applicants by only granting interviews to those from 'top 20 law schools.' Granted, Pepperdine isn't near the top 20 (or 40, 60, and 80 for that matter), but getting out of the 'second 100' to the top 60 can only raise the reputation of Pepperdine among law firms, which leads to more interviews and more jobs.

"I've been hiding my bitterness pretty well so far, but I'm a 2003 graduate still looking for employment. Granted, I'm looking for work in a tough legal market, southern California, but I graduated cum laude, did Law Review, and externed for a 9th Circuit judge. Perhaps I'm mistaken, but I feel that if I made one change to my resume - switching Pepperdine with a school ranked around the top 60, say University of San Diego, or if that's too bold, Santa Clara - I might
actually get a job. Or just an interview. Or at least a goddamn rejection letter."

I would note that I think students overestimate how much effect US News has on law firms; law firms form their view of the merits of schools and their graduates based on long experience, typically, not fluctuations in rankings. Still, over time, it is a reasonable supposition that if a regional school were consistently ranked around 50 rather than around 100, that might begin to have some impact on decisions by recruiters.

By the way, if it turns out to be true that Berkeley is ranked 13th this year--behind, e.g., Duke and Northwestern--that would just prove that the US News rankings are untrustworthy, rather than showing anything pertinent about Boalt. But we'll see....

Philosopher Harold Noonan from Birmingham to Nottingham

Harold Noonan (metaphysics, philosophical logic, philosophy of mind and language), a longtime member of the faculty at the University of Birmingham, has accepted appointment as Professor at Nottingham starting this fall. Birmingham, sadly, has suffered a number of losses in recent years, including the untimely death of Gregory McCulloch, and the losses of Rob Hopkins (to Sheffield), Alex Miller (to a research post at Cardiff, then on to Macquarie), and Jose Zalabardo (to Univ Coll London).

Peacocke from NYU to Columbia

Christopher Peacocke (metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language and mind) at New York University has accepted an offer uptown, from Columbia University. That will certainly give a reputational boost to Columbia, though it is likely to be a wash for NYU given their other recent appointments (i.e., I would expect NYU, Princeton, and Rutgers to still remain at the top of next year's survey). But, with decision time at hand, I'll post a few thoughts on the "hierarchy," as it were, in a bit, in light of the various moves.

Upton Sinclair...

offers this memorable observation: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." (I came across this via Mickey Z, who was talking about Karl Kraus's favorite journalist-he-never-met.)

The Homosexual, Feminist, and Fundamentalist "Agendas" Exposed At Last!

Details here. (Thanks to Pharyngula for the pointer.)

A Good Resource on Bush Administration Distortions about Iraq

Mark Steen, a graduate student in philosophy at Syracuse University, has kindly written with the following:

"There is a searchable database at this government site of '237 specific misleading statements about the threat posed by Iraq made by President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary Rumsfeld, Secretary Powell and NSA Rice in 125 separate public appearances.'

"Perhaps more interesting is the pdf available at the page where Representative Henry Waxman analyses and categorizes the misleading statements."

Mr. Steen also kindly thanks me for "the refreshing acrimonious tone" of this blog, adding, "just hope it is never directed at me!"

Two Tax Profs to Florida

Paul McDaniel, currently at Boston College (and formerly at NYU), has accepted a Chair at the University of Florida Levin College of Law. In addition, Diane Ring, currently an assistant professor of law at Harvard, has accepted a tenured offer from Florida. This solidifies Florida's position as one of the top three graduate tax programs in the country, after NYU and Georgetown. (Some experts, my colleagues in the field tell me, would put Florida ahead of Georgetown.)

Philosopher Brewer from Oxford to Warwick

Bill Brewer (philosophy of mind and action, metaphysics, epistemology), currently at Oxford University, has accepted a professorial chair at the University of Warwick. That marks another loss for Oxford, as discussed earlier.

In Memoriam: Joel Feinberg

I have just received the following e-mail sent by Professor Chris Maloney, Head of Department at the University of Arizona:

"I regret to inform you that Regents Professor of Philosophy and Law (Emeritus) Joel Feinberg died today, March 29, in Tucson following a long illness.

"Professor Feinberg retired from the University of Arizona Philosophy Department in 1994 after 17 years on the faculty. Prior to his appointment at Arizona, Professor Feinberg taught at Brown University, Princeton University, UCLA and Rockefeller University. He held the B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. [Leiter addendum: he wrote his dissertation on the philosophy of Ralph Barton Perry under the supervision of Charles Stevenson!]

"Professor Feinberg was internationally distinguished for his research in moral, social and legal philosophy. His major four volume work, The Moral Limits of Criminal Law, was published between 1984 and 1988. Professor Feinberg held many major fellowships during his career and lectured by invitation at universities around the world. He was an esteemed and highly successful teacher, and many of his students are now prominent scholars and professors at universities across the country.

Professor Feinberg is survived by his wife, Betty, daughter, Melissa, and son, Ben. The family is planning a memorial to be held later this week on a date to be determined."

Jules Coleman (Yale), one of Professor Feinberg's many students, is preparing a longer memorial notice, which I'll link to when it is available.

Political Philosopher Darby from Northwestern to Texas A&M;

Derrick Darby (moral and political philosophy), currently an assistant professor at Northwestern University, has accepted a tenure-track appointment at Texas A&M; University.

Law School Rankings--Mine and Theirs

U.S. News will release this year's ranking of law schools to the schools themselves on Thursday, followed by public release on Friday. There's been no change in methodology, so, except for arbitrary fluctuations or particularly aggressive fibbing (or, shall we say, "creative" data reporting) by the schools, there really shouldn't be any changes in the overall rankings--though I'm sure there will be a few.

I'm most interested to see what the feedback effect was, if any, between last year's survey of more than 150 leading legal scholars (including Richard Posner, Saul Levmore, Mark Tushnet, Daniel Farber, John Coffee, Roberta Romano, and many others) and the "academic reputation" surveys that are part of the U.S. News rankings. Evidence of some feedback would be, e.g., noticeable increases (more than .1) in the academic reputation score for schools like San Diego and George Mason, and noticeable decreases (.1 or more) for schools like Duke. We'll see...

Meanwhile, various students have sent friendly e-mails inquiring about when my law school ranking site will next be updated. This one is representative:

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Needs to Raise Money

Details here. Help them out if you can, it really is an excellent resource.

It Doesn't Have the Ring of "Texas Taliban"...

...but this article on "the Christian Taliban" comes to the same thing. The author writes:

"During the Taliban rule of Afghanistan the world got a good look at what happens when religious zealots gain control of a government. Television images of women being beaten forced to wear burkas and banned from schools and the workplace helped build strong public support for the President's decision to invade Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11.

"But even as President George W. Bush denounced the brutal Islamic fundamentalist regime in Kabul, he was quietly laying the foundations for his own fundamentalist regime at home. For the first time far right Christian fundamentalists had one of their own in the White House and the opportunity to begin rolling back decades of health and family planning programs they saw as un-Christian, if not downright sinful.

"Since 2001 dozens of far-right Christian fundamentalists have been quietly installed in key positions within the Department of Health and Human Services, the Federal Drug Administration and on commissions and advisory committees where they have made serious progress. Three years later this administration has established one of the most rigid sexual health agendas in the Western world."

Read the whole thing for all the ugly details.

Philosopher Tim O'Connor Staying at Indiana

Timothy O'Connor (philosophy of mind and action, metaphysics, philosophy of religion) has declined the offer from the University of Colorado at Boulder, and will be remaining at Indiana University at Bloomington.

"One Nation Under God"

Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments about whether it is constitutional to require those who want to pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States to also affirm that the nation exists "under God." My colleague Douglas Laycock, primary author a number of years ago of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (designed to enhance religious liberty protection beyond what the Supreme Court provides), submitted a brief on behalf of clergy arguing that the inclusion of "under God" in the pledge is unconstitutional. At a recent debate, he observed:

"In the Pledge of Allegiance, we ask every child in the public schools in America every morning for a personal profession of faith. You don't have to take out your coin and read and meditate on "In God We Trust." You don't have to pay any attention when the politician is talking, and lots of us don't.

"But this asks for a personal affirmation: I pledge allegiance to one nation under God. Now if God does not exist, or if I believe that God does not exist, then that isn't one nation under God. We can't have a nation under God unless there is a God. It doesn't say one nation under our god, or some gods, or one of the gods. It pretty clearly implies there is only one God, and if there is only one God, then the God of the Pledge is the one true God, and other alleged gods around the world are false gods.

Welcome Episteme, a new journal of social epistemology

I see that Episteme is now up-and-running; quite some time ago, it now seems, I happily accepted an invitation to be one of the many Consulting Editors for this new venture. One indication of the timeliness of this journal is the Intelligent Design debate in the United States, where, it appears, there are large numbers of otherwise well-educated people who believe utter falsehoods about evolutionary biology--indeed, where there is a well-funded political movement devoted to spreading these falsehoods. This is certainly one of the most striking of recent cases where social mechanisms which should be inculcating true beliefs have completely failed.

More Fallout from the Harvard Law Review ID Scandal

Details here: "An effective program to prevent misstatements of fact in the context of stating opinions is also a critical component of credibility, even if it is not specifically identified as such. Exhibit A: The raging controversy over Van Dyke's deceptive—even mendacious—'book note', which has probably resulted in serious harm to the credibility of not just the Harvard Law Review, but of student contributions to law reviews across the country."

Having started the raging on this controversy, let me observe that I think the lesson to draw is that, where partisan political or religious positions are at stake, what appears in law reviews--and not just by students--should be approached with caution and skepticism. I also have the impression that most law reviews engage in more rigorous cite-checking than, it appears, does the current editorial board of the Harvard Law Review . But the sins of HLR--which are real in this case--shouldn't be visited on student-edited law reviews generally.

A Humanitarian Case for War in Iraq?

Generous reader Rob Sica wrote months ago as follows:

"As a great admirer of your acute work on Nietzsche, I'm particularly well-disposed towards being disabused by you of my long-standing conviction that the humanitarian warrant for the war in Iraq trumps the countervailing considerations of its critics. As far as I can tell, David Rieff's July 27, 2003 New York Times Magazine article "Were Sanctions Right?" assembles the fundamental data on the basis of which liberals should, in perfectly good conscience, have supported, and continue to support, the war:

* The UN sanctions regime, refracted by Saddam, simultaneously took an increasingly unacceptable humanitarian toll upon the Iraqi people and enabled Saddam to augment the efficiency and severity of his control within Iraq.

* Tightening the UN sanctions regime would have aggravated both of these trends.

* Loosening the UN sanctions regime would have further enabled Saddam to augment the efficiency and severity of his control within Iraq.

Perhaps you might consider this matter worthy of address in your piquant blog."

Mr. Sica and I have corresponded a bit about this during the intervening months. As luck would have it, Chomsky addresses this argument here. Briefly, Chomsky rejects the third premise, above, and also notes:

"It was predicted by just about every serious specialist that the invasion of Iraq would increase the threat of terror as well as proliferation of WMD. The first prediction has been amply verified, with terrible consequences and probably more to come, and Iraq itself has admittedly become a 'terrorist haven' for the first time. The second prediction is also considered to have been confirmed by many regional specialists and strategic analysts, and is unfortunately all too plausible. There is more. Uncontroversially, the invasion struck a serious blow at the system of international law and institutions that offers at least some hope of saving the world from destruction. And though victors do not tabulate the consequences of their crimes, there is little doubt that the numbers of Iraqis killed is in the tens of thousands. And there is a good deal more."

I would add only a few observations to Chomsky's:

first, there is nothing humanitarian about war, since it involves the killing and maiming of human beings--in this case, as Chomsky notes, tens of thousands of human beings (perhaps more, we really don't know);

second, the circumstances where this kind of guaranteed carnage would be justified by some greater gain for humanity will be rare and, for obvious reasons, ought to be presumptively deemed rare;

third, in calculating humanitarian consequences as a justification for inhumanitarian actions like war, we need to weigh the predictable but collateral consequences, like the damage to the international law system and the legitimization of lunatic doctrines like that of preventive war; and

On Gay Marriage

This is not bad from Bob Herbert in the New York Times:

"In the [1967] Loving case a mixed-race married couple was charged with violating Virginia's Racial Integrity Act. The judge who sentenced the couple wrote:

"'Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangements there would be no cause for [interracial] marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.'

"Now we're told that he doesn't want gays to marry. That there is something unnatural about the whole idea of men marrying men and women marrying women. That it's abhorrent to much of the population, just as interracial marriages were (and to many, still are) abhorrent."

This does get to the heart of the matter. There is no doubt that the idea of two men or two women being married seems strange and unfamiliar (well, it is unfamiliar, after all), that it is upsetting to many, that it provokes hard-to-articulate feelings of unease and, in some, revulsion. It is, in that regard, no different than the feelings very common fifty years ago, and still sometimes found today, regarding interracial marriage. In both cases, it is impossible for anyone to give a rational explanation for their opposition. (A good illustration are the postings at this conservative site.)

It seems to me there have been three general kinds of attempts to offer a rational basis for opposition to gay marriage: appeals to religion, tradition, and the "essential" nature of marriage.

Assuming that religious faith can be rationally defended--I will assume, arguendo, that it can be--it's not at all clear that those defenses suffice to underwrite the rationality of claims about God's intentions on matters like gay marriage. Belief in God is one thing; claims to authoritative epistemic access to God's intentions is another. The rationality of claims of the latter sort has never been adequately defended.

Reliance on "tradition" is not rational in the absence of (a) a defense of the rationality of the tradition, or (b) a defense of the rationality of deference to tradition. Obviously if the rationality of the tradition could be defended there would be no need to appeal to the tradition in the first place. And the only defenses of the rationality of deference to tradition--assuming they're successful--establish, at best, that tradition is a defeasible guide to what we should do today, and thus can not themselves fully dodge the question of why tradition should not be defeated in this instance. (Again, I'm assuming, arguendo, that the "tradition" supports the claims of the opponents of gay marriage: for some pertinent doubts, see the interview with Sanford Levinson linked at the end of this posting.)

Finally, arguments based on claims about the essential nature of marriage--like those by John Finnis and Robert George--are, it is fair to say, generally recognized as reductios: the arguments are so tortured and so wrought with bizarre premises as to lead one agnostic on the subject to be highly suspicious. (A thinner version of these arguments from Doug Kmiec is here. Larry Solum [San Diego Law] comments on some of the peculiarities of the Kmiec argument here.)

Philosophers on the Move: Lots of News

Andy Clark (philosophy of mind/cognitive science), currently at Indiana University at Bloomington, has accepted the Chair in Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Edinburgh, previously held by Huw Price (who is now back at the University of Sydney) and, before that, by Timothy Williamson (who is now Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford). Clark's spouse/partner Josefa Toribio (philosophy of mind and language), an Associate Professor at Indiana/Bloomington, has also accepted an appointment at Edinburgh. Clark and Toribio have moved a lot in the last decade: from the University of Sussex to Washington University, St. Louis, back to Sussex, then to Indiana, now to Edinburgh. That's certainly a major set of appointments for Edinburgh, and a notable loss for Indiana.

Michael Glanzberg (philosophical logic, philosophy of language), currently at the University of Toronto, has accepted the tenured offer from the University of California at Davis.

Christopher ("Kit") Wellman (political, legal and moral philosophy), currently at Georgia State University, has accepted a tenured offer from Washington University, St. Louis. Wash U is having a busy year, having also added John Heil to the senior ranks and Gillian Russell to the tenure-track ranks. The Department has one other tenured offer outstanding to a moral philosopher as well. With other recent additions of Bermudez from Stirling and Des Chene from Emory, I would expect Wash U to return squarely to the top 50 American PhD programs in next year's survey, and possibly the top 40. (Interesting sidenote: Kit Wellman's father, the political and legal philosopher Carl Wellman, was a longtime member of the philosophy faculty at Wash U as well.)

Busy: Freud, David Lewis Syndrome, Epistemology of Proof, etc.

There's been light posting as I'm just coming off two very busy days, though busy in the ways that make scholarly life so very satisfying. On Thursday, I spoke to the Philosophy Department at Texas A&M; University about "The Hermeneutics of Suspicion: The Case of Freud," and I'm grateful to the graduate students and faculty--especially (and with apologies for omissions) to Colin Allen, Max Cresswell, Ted George, John McDermott, Roger Sansom, and Robin Smith--for making it so intellectually rewarding; what a congenial intellectual community they appear to have in College Station! My paper--excerpted from a longer piece that discusses Marx and Nietzsche as well (and which will appear in The Future for Philosophy volume out from OUP in the fall, with other essays by Annas, Pettit, Railton, Williamson, Chalmers, Kim, Goldman, Hurka, Cartwright, Kitcher, Garrett, and Langton covering almost all aspects of our discipline)--addressed three main topics: it argued against a whole family of what I call "moralizing" readings of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, in favor of naturalistic readings; it gave an account of the connection between explaining the causal genesis of a belief and having grounds for suspicion about the belief (the essence, on my reading, of a "hermeneutics of suspicion"); and it also argued against one important, recent moralizing reading of Freud--David Velleman's--which marries a quasi-Freudian account of moral motivation to a quasi-Kantian view of morality. (Velleman's ingenious work on these topics manifests a condition that deserves a formal, clinical name, which I hereby propose: "David Lewis Syndrome." Philosophers manifest David Lewis Syndrome when they bring extraordinary dialectical ingenuity to bear on behalf of completely implausible philosophical theses.)

I rushed back from College Station yesterday morning for a fabulous 3-hour workshop here in Austin with Larry Laudan, and faculty and students in the Law & Philosophy Program, on Laudan's paper on "Benefit of the Doubt." Laudan's work on the epistemology of proof is ground-breaking and will, I hope, get a wide audience among law professors (his paper on "Beyond a Reasonable Doubt" is appearing in Legal Theory shortly). Laudan notes, plainly correctly, that legal scholars simply take for granted that showing that a rule of evidence or procedure will reduce the number of false convictions suffices as an argument for changing the rule. Against this "error-distributionist" concern--a concern for how mistaken verdicts are distributed as between false convictions and false acquittals (with an overwhelming preference for minimizing the former)--is the error-minimizing objective of designing rules of evidence and procedure that maximize the number of true verdicts and minimize the number of mistaken ones, however they are distributed across convictions and acquittals. Laudan's proposal is to build all the error-distributionist concerns in to the standard of proof, leaving error-minimization as the only error-related consideration in crafting other rules of evidence and procedure. (There are, of course, a range of rights- and policy-based considerations that inform the rules of evidence, that are unrelated to either error minimization or error distribution; Laudan takes up the issue of how to navigate through these considerations, in conjunction with epistemic ones, in his forthcomng book on these topics.)

One nice pedagogical anecdote courtesy of Professor McDermott from Texas A&M.; He often asks his students to write down on a piece of paper which of their central beliefs they "chose" and which they simply "inherited." As he put it, some of the students are (figuratively) "reduced to tears" by the exercise. Interesting!

Smith Zaps Ackerman

Tom Smith (San Diego Law) brings his wicked wit to bear on Bruce Ackerman (Yale Law) who, together with my former colleague James Fishkin, has proposed a national "deliberation day" holiday prior to elections. Smith has another idea:

"As an alternative, I propose that Congress appropriate $500,000, to be paid to Bruce Ackerman on the condition that he not come up with any dumb ideas for a period of one year....

"I'm sorry. Maybe there's something wrong with me. I went to Yale Law School and attempted to take a class from Prof. Ackerman and ended up dropping it because after listening to R.M. Hare, Jeremy Waldron, Ronald Dworkin, HLA Hart and Charles Taylor at Oxford, it was just too depressing. I went around thinking, 'why does everybody think this guy is so smart?' I still do not understand. It's not just politics. Some conservatives think he's smart. I admit he is very charming if you can stand to suck up to him like your life depends on it. But not everyone has that kind of energy. What if you just ate?"

And some people think I'm a bit rough on my targets....

Major Law Faculty Moves: A Summary

UPDATED AS OF 3/30

Various prospective law students have e-mailed indicating they value this information, so with decision time drawing near, let me give a summary that reflects, to the best of my knowledge, where things stand. Please e-mail me with corrections or additions. I list only tenured offers, though most hiring in any given year is at the tenure-track or "junior" level. A complete list of lateral hiring by the top 25-or-so schools since 1995 is here.

OFFERS ACCEPTED

Yale has hired Henry Hansmann (corporate law, law & economics) back from New York University.

Stanford has hired Robert Daines (corporate law) from New York University and Mark Lemley (intellectual property) from Berkeley.

Michigan has hired Steven Ratner (international law) from Texas.

Berkeley has hired Christopher Edley (administrative law, civil rights) from Harvard as the new Dean.

Cornell has hired Mitchell Lasser (comparative law) from the University of Utah and Brad Wendel (professional responsibility) from Washington & Lee University.

Aleinikoff to be new Georgetown Law Dean

T. Alexander Aleinikoff, a leading immigration law scholar who moved to Georgetown from Michigan about a decade ago, has been named the new Dean of the law school at Georgetown. Details here.