Best Schools for Aspiring Legal Academics

July 31st, 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.

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Tulane

On November 6th, 2008 Visitor says:

With respect to Tulane, I would guess several things are in play. First, it's always had a strong national reputation relative to its selectivity and has several notable faculty members.

But second, and more importantly, it has top-shelf programs in admiralty law and sports law. it seems very feasible to me that a school who relies about Yale or Chicago grads to teach torts would have a tulane grad teaching admiralty law