Movers & Shakers: Update

Professor Sklansky is returning to Boalt, at least for Fall '08.

3L Town Hall Meeting Report

The 3L Town Hall meeting had a very low turnout; maybe a dozen students (at most). Dean Edley, Professor Bundy, the LRAP guy, K. V.Heuvel, Dean Ortiz, and P. Patterson were present to answer questions.

Here's a partial non-literal transcript of some of the questions and answers:

Question: How do we retain faculty?
Edley: If faculty has an offer from a peer institution, campus will let us match salary -- but it's the other parts of compensation (e.g. tuition for kids, mortgage deal for primary AND vacation homes) that we can't match. There are also professional issues (e.g. wall-street connection in NYC for business profs). Then there's the prestige advantage that Yale, Harvard, and Stanford have. Bottom line is that faculty stay because they love the students, people love the Bay Area.

Edley: Faculty loves our students! Right?
Bundy: [silence]
[Edley gives Bundy a look]
Bundy: Right! we love the students!

Bundy: The extra dimension of compensation matters, and prestige matters to some extent.

Question: Do we have a poaching program of our own?
Edley: Yes - for example, Ken Gergen (sp?) from Texas. We poached 2 last year for the JSP faculty.

Question from 2L: How can students have better communication with the administration and vice versa?
Edley: Main route is Dean O's office; Mindi & Dean O are the main channels.
3L #1: There seems to be a disconnect between students and administration. Some students have the chutzpah to walk into the Dean's office, but not all students do. It would be nice to get more emails from the Dean. [Edley response: That's a great idea.]
3L #2: Best way to communicate with students and get feedback is with a weblog.
Edley: So would emails be better than more meetings?
3Ls: Yes.

At some point, discussion shifted to the Registrar's Office. A couple students (and Dean O) defended the Registrar's Office (they're overworked, students come to the registrar's office with unreasonable demands), while others argued the folks in the Registrar's Office were inefficient and unnecessarily rude. Nothing was resolved, but Dean O admonished students for "looking down" on and acting rudely to staff.

Question: How will we choose a replacement for Dean O?
Edley: Berring is heading up a search committee, which will include 2 students and one recent grad.

At the meeting, Edley passed out a memorandum (which will be emailed to all students) discussing last-year's low bar passage rate. The memo doesn't explain reasons for the low-passage rate but instead offers observations and assurances that the School is still looking into the problem. One of the interesting insights it offers is that class rank appears to be correlated with success on the bar. Specifically, on the July 2007 test, 100% of Boalt test takers in the top 1/3 of the class passed, 94% in the middle of the class passed, and 51% from the bottom 1/3 of the class passed. So really, only 1/3 or 2/5 of the class needs to start freaking out.

Movers & Shakers Part II: Departures

Who will be leaving Boalt next year, either temporarily or permanently? So far we know:

Rumor has it that Jan Vetter is retiring.

Ian Haney-Lopez, who apparently likes to plan ahead, will be at NYU in Fall '09 and HLS in Spring '10, per his CV.

Gillian Lester and Eric Talley will be visiting at HLS all next year.
Lester will be teaching Employment Law at Harvard in Spring '09. Talley will be teaching: Corporate Finance in Fall '08, and Corporate Law and Finance Seminar and Corporations in Spring '09.

Professor Howard Shelanski will be teaching Telecommunications Law at Georgetown in Fall '08, and teaching Antitrust in High-Tech Industries and Antitrust Law at NYU in Spring '09.

Sklansky is presumably outta here (no official word on whether he'll be at Harvard, but we suspect that's the case).

No word on what's up with Professor Linda Krieger, who visited at Harvard last year is currently listed as a member of the Univ. of Hawaii faculty.

And of course, Dean Ortiz will be leaving us for UC-Irvine.

Also of note:
Professor Aaron Edlin taught Antitrust Law at Harvard for the Winter Term '08, and Jesse Fried taught Law and Finance of Corporate Reorganizations at Harvard for the Winter Term '08 (though both are teaching at Boalt in Fall '08).

Who else do you know of who's leaving Boalt next year?

EDIT: [updates in bold]

New Blog for reviewing Boalt Profs

There's a new Blog for offering comments and feedback on Boalt profs at http://boaltprofs.blogspot.com/. Thanks to Abony from The Shark for putting this together!

If I may add my two cents, I think this is a great idea. It would be nice if we could get something password protected so that the reviews aren't made public, but this is certainly filling a much needed void at Boalt.

Fall 2008 (Secret) Course List Up

1. Go to the Spring 2008 Course Listings.
2. Select a category.
3. In the URL, where it says "B&termYear=2008" change the "B" to "D"
4. Voila! You have the Fall 2008 Course Listings.

UPDATE: Full Course List (not by category) available here. Thanks to Matt for pointing this out.

UPDATE #2: The "Official" List is now up.

Breaking News: Dean Ortiz to leaveBoalt

Dean O. has announced that she's leaving Boalt in May to become Assistant Dean of Students Services and Director of Admissions at the new UC-Irvine School of Law.

Reactions? Will Dean O's departure impact the school at all? I say: Let's just hope the next person is as willing as Dean O to sign off on extra units for various projects (though I've heard conflicting accounts on this point.)

Now, Back to Yoo...

Is John Yoo closer to being indicted for war crimes in the wake of the Pentagon's recent release of a torture memo he authored in 2003? Libertarian-conservative journalist Andrew Sullivan of The Atlantic thinks so. On this morning's Chris Matthew's show he said that the "latest revelations on the torture front show the memo from John Yoo...means that Don Rumsfeld, David Addington and John Yoo should not leave the United States any time soon. They will be, at some point, indicted for war crimes."

I bet an indictment would make this guy really happy. Then he could stop writing letters and forwarding op-eds to Dean Ortiz, Louise Epstein, Dean Edley, Professor Jonathan Simon, and a number of other Boalt faculty and admins as part of his to campaign to "drive John Yoo from the Faculty at Boalt Hall." He writes:

...I would embarrassed to be in the same company as Mr. Yoo, and would work to encourage him to leave Boalt Hall faculty voluntarily. I believe his continued presence on campus and as a member of the faculty is a stain on the University’s reputation, and suggests that students who take his classes will be ill-prepared to meet their duties as lawyers.

Do you think John Yoo will be indicted for war crimes? Do you think he should be kicked off the faculty if he is? Do you think he should be kicked off the faculty anyway?