Most applicants to law school expect to practice law; and faculty publication, the basis of Leiter’s ranking, is increasingly removed from the concerns important even to practitioners, let alone to students, though this phenomenon is more pronounced at the elite schools. Current faculty scholarship is, for example, disproportionately concentrated in constitutional law, which few practicing lawyers specialize in.
Why does the research quality of the faculty at my law school matter?
I agree one is "better" at, or more comfortable, teaching a subject which one is familiar with, and doing research on a subject makes one very familiar with a subject. However, almost all the profs at a law school, and particularly ones in the top 40 like Leiter looks at, have done good enough research to land a tenure-track position. I think the correlation breaks down between research quality and teaching quality when you are comparing the-best-of-the-best versus an average researcher.As Posner points out, most legal scholars focus on the constitution. You would therefore expect a heavy weighting towards strong constitutional faculties in a faculty ranking. Constitutional research is important, and I want to understand it well, but in my day-to-day duties as an attorney there are probably other areas that will be more helpful.
Quote from: jwilcox1024 on July 29, 2005, 11:11:02 PMI agree one is "better" at, or more comfortable, teaching a subject which one is familiar with, and doing research on a subject makes one very familiar with a subject. However, almost all the profs at a law school, and particularly ones in the top 40 like Leiter looks at, have done good enough research to land a tenure-track position. I think the correlation breaks down between research quality and teaching quality when you are comparing the-best-of-the-best versus an average researcher.As Posner points out, most legal scholars focus on the constitution. You would therefore expect a heavy weighting towards strong constitutional faculties in a faculty ranking. Constitutional research is important, and I want to understand it well, but in my day-to-day duties as an attorney there are probably other areas that will be more helpful.I dispute Posner's assertion. Doubtless, many law professors are interested in Constitutional law and/or legal theory/history (who isn't, on some level?). But I am reasonably sure that a law professor whose primary interest is in, say, employment law will probably write a hell of a lot more on interpretations of or amendments to ERISA than anything in the US Constitution. Heck, even the SCOTUS isn't doing a hell of a lot of constitutional law of late (under Rehnquist's Chief Justiceship, we have seen a mared drop not only in the number of cases heard, but also in the proportion of cases granted cert which concern constitutional issues. Most of the cases now concern statutory or administrative law interpretation, I think). You may already know of this, but for a look at what law professors are currently researching/publishing, please read the Legal Theory Blog by Lawrence Solum (a law professor at San Diego) at http://lsolum.blogspot.com/. Lots of really good stuff there.
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