Another Hiring Coup for Harvard Law School?
Under the leadership of the beloved Elena Kagan, Harvard Law School continues to raid other schools for law professor talent. Word on the street is that another big hire is in the works. This past weekend, Dean Kagan crowed about her coup before a group of admitted students, saying it would be announced later this week.
We checked for news and gossip over at Leiter's Law School Reports, the definitive source for information about senior-level appointments in legal academia, but didn't see anything. Any guesses as to who will be snatched by HLS next?
In addition to the Harvard name (and endowment), Dean Kagan has other weapons in her arsenal for doing battle in the recruitment wars. She wooed Feldsuk with a million-dollar mansion, and Cass Sunstein with a million-dollar bab[e]. What fabulous prizes will Kagan bestow upon her latest hire?
Feel free to speculate and opine in the comments, or by email. Thanks.
(99) Comments
First to care less.
BINGO!!
First
Akhil Amar? Jack Balkin? Eugene Volokh? I'm trying to think of someone not currently at HLS who would be a big enough name to be newsworthy to a group of admitted students. Surely she wouldn't tell prospective students to stay tuned to hear about a big coup, only to unveil the hiring of a little-known Corporations professor from Wash. U.
ZZZZZZZZZZ........................
May not be a lateral hire. Eliot Spitzer is available.
Akhil Amar is going to Pepperdine... just wait and see
Akhil Amar is going to Pepperdine... just wait and see
JT will be joining the HLS faculty next fall.
Janet Reno
maybe Nussbaum has decided to accept Harvard's offer afterall. perhaps she wants to win her man back from her much younger rival.
The coup is that she is going to show everyone her balls.
Rick Pildes? HLS needs an election law person and he visited a couple years ago.
Lessig.
Steven Calabresi
Is there any real reason that HLS needs to deprive people who didn't get into HLS of quality professors?
Sandra Day O'Connor's wax dummy from Madame Tussauds
Robert Post and/or Reva Siegel
Silda Wall Spitzer
I have heard rumors that Tim Wu has been being wooed.
I'm putting my money on Ayres (Yale), Herzog (Michigan), Merrill (Columbia), and/or Schanzenbach (Northwestern)
Catharine MacKinnon, it's been rumored that this is her last semester here at Michigan and is going Harvard full time.
Volokh a big name? hahaha. Just because you have a blog does not make you a big name in academia.
Pildes would be great although he was given an offer back in 2004 that he turned down. Persily just visited last semester and would also be amazing.
We definitely need an election law person but I have heard rumors that Issacharoff might be visiting next fall so I would be surprised if we grabbed an election law person right now.
Lessig would be amazing. Maybe he wants to be back on the east coast since he has moved on to his whole "change congress" thing and decided not to run for the seat out in CA?
Tom Merrill and/or Henry Smith. Yale and Harvard are in a dogfight over both.
Rumor at Vandy is that Dean Jonah Goldberg and Prof. Lisa Bressman have flown to Cambridge multiple times to meet with Kagan. Goldberg will probably go.
Mackinnon is indeed the best bet; she was a visiting professor here in the fall, expressed her desire to come full time, and e-mails were sent to students in her class asking for feedback on her.
Steve Calabresi.
Another vote for MacKinnon. It's got to be a name that prospectives would recognize.
Please don't be Caleb Nelson...
Calabresi is a good guess as he already lives in Boston and commutes to Chicago. If it is true, this would be a major blow for NU.
Calabresi is a good guess as he already lives in Boston and commutes to Chicago. If it is true, this would be a major blow for NU.
pildes is too close personally to revesz to jump from nyu.
I heard Harvard got JoPo
harold koh will be looking for a job soon...
It's Klarman. If not Klarman, it's Don Julio Rigo Phillipe of San Juan Marmaduke Escola de Law in Abilene, TX.
richard epstein?!?
I, too, think its Catherine MacKinnon
Probably Catharine MacKinnon
3:48 - Klarman already took tenure at HLS in january.
Why MacKinnon, though? My impression of MacKinnon is that she's from the Critical Legal Studies crowd that was popular in maybe the 90's but aren't as hot properties today. Or maybe there's a push this year to balance the conservative hires of the earlier Kagan period (e.g. Goldsmith, etc.)? Hence Sunstein and possibly another trendy liberal scholar?
Then again I'm not a legal academia maven so could be way off-base.
viet dinh, john yoo, bradford clark, ken starr, doug kmiec...
3:06: because we can, because we can. Ain't life great?
hey 4:04...its not an f'ing guessing game. do you have any reason to think its one of those people or are you just playing "name a legal academic"?
4:09. Couldn't have said it better. Life is great.
Although I really hope it isn't MacKinnon (CLS is so passe) I think that is the smart money.
As a student at Michigan, reading this list of faculty members such as MacKinnon and Herzog who may well be leaving for Harvard and Leiter's blog on Howse leaving for NYU make me feel like a Florida Marlins fan.
MacKinnon is also an idiot. I really hope this isn't true.
4:09 and 4:29 = two law students who still think who you have for contracts matters when it comes to patrolling actual contracts for commas
To quote Prof. Jesus Quintana . . . "Laughable man, laughable."
I saw Henry Smith (Yale) in a Cambridge bookstore a few weeks ago.
Answer: Who cares? You know what would be great, if these schools hired professors who taught any course related to "how to practice law" instead of "my right wing nut job take on Property" or "my pinko commie leftist view on Con Law." Who cares.
It would also be great if they hired actual lawyers. I have always found it odd that the road to scholarly teaching rarely travels through the real world. This would explain the flood of green associates looking to share their useless feelings about theory and ideology. Who cares?
It's Ann Coulter.
4:40: no, I'm a partner [Harvard '99]. Just a snobby, asshole type. But then, I repeat myself. One day you will learn that crushing the little guy is fun every now and then, as long as you're not the one representing him.
At least the Florida Marlins won a couple of World Series', no such luck for Michigan.
Herzog is definitely Miggy Cabrera though.
4:46: I don't know which is funnier, your claim that you are a partner or your claim that you went to Harvard.
I surely hope Harvard partners have a better command of the english language.
4:46 - partner in under 10 years. I'm impressed. I thought the standard track for DUI work in Tuscaloosa was 12 years.
Because of stuff that happened last week, I am almost 100% certain its Merrill.
4:53/4: Amlaw 200 firm. I'm comfortable with who I am. You?
Amlaw 200? You made that up.
who cares?
Merrill's admin class was so dreadful that 50% of the registrants dropped out in the first week. Those who remained regretted their decision.
2:40, I hardly think Volokh would be something to brag about. I had him for 1st Amendment when he visited HLS in 2003. He is a total hack. Waaay below the HLS par. I stopped going to his worthless class (basically the Barbri/black letter fare that apparently passes for teaching at UCLA) halfway through the semester, but I definitely made sure to return on the last day to fill out the form strongly recommending that he not be extended an offer to come to the school permanently. Agreed that Amar or Belkin would be a steal - but I guarantee they're not going anywhere.
NYU is just as good as Columbia.
Harvard is doing a great service by offering these incredible incentives for top scholars. They make young brilliant professors at UVA work ridiculously hard to be the best teachers and scholars in their fields, without caring about current compensation. At UVA the professors have to be accessible and nice to their students, while publishing groundbreaking work. Then they get offered tenure at Harvard, get paid a ton of money, and become inaccessible and lazy. So the UVA students get the best professors in the world when they are at they are at the top of their game, and Harvard subsidizes the whole thing.
UVA is just as good as Fordham.
Also, 5:59, they give us a running topic for at least one skit every Libel Show.
spitzer--he's going to have some time on his hands.
Oliver Wendell Holmes. Man, Dean Kagan has skills.
unlikely it's mackinnon since her course is listed on michigan's course options for fall 08.
David Slansky
Viet Dinh is speaking at HLS on Wednesday and receiving some sort of award. Coincidence?
It's Hillary Clinton.
I hope it's McKinnon. Then she and Kagan can prove once and for all why Harvard will never regain #1 with their quasi-fascistic bullshit.
Pam Samuelson also visited last semester and had reviews solicited from her students.
Merrill is extremely smart and has a great, if understated, sense of humor. It's a shame Columbia is likely to lose him.
It's Obama. He's been rumored to be conceding the primary to Hildog any day now.
HLS Tenure >> Vice Presidency
People who took MacKinnon's course at HLS this year turned into apostles overnight. It was scary. I bet it's her, people speak of her like she's Jesus.
Why the Wash U hating at 2:40? Paredes is a great Corporations professor.
its pamela Samuelson, the copyright guru, from Berkeley
yeah, Paredes is a great corpo professor
The only person who is likely to come and is a big name is MacKinnon. She and Sunstein are good friends and apparently she wanted to stay. Samuelson was a pretty mediocre teacher and while a great academic, is just not that well known.
Calibresi is a good bet. It can't be Epstein, can't be Volokh... can't be Pildes or Koh (haha)... Tom Merrill is a good choice except he wouldn't warrant the fanfare. O'Connor would make sense... but... it's an entirely different workload from the ceremonial position she has at W&M. Calibresi is my bet.
Maybe it will Zolt. Not a huge steal, but I don't want to take tax from anyone else.
MacKinnon is listed on the fall class schedule at Michigan. Herzog is not.
has anyone mentioned barak obama yet? i think it's barak.
IAN AYRES. suck it yale. we have the beautiful man candy now!!!!!!
Class schedules can and will change. It's MacKinnon. Sorry Michigan.
Merrill is a good bet to leave Columbia for Harvard, I have also heard Curt Bradley is being pursued. Add Calabresi and you have a nice conservative trifecta.
Howse is also on the Fall 2008 schedule at Michigan, and we all know that ain't happening any longer.
Herzog is on the Winter 2009 schedule.
I *wish* it were Wu or Lessig. But we're decently staffed for cyberlaw, copyright and feminist BS is more of a need.
But best case scenario is probably Samuelson, with MacKinnon unfortunately more likely.
One of the good things about the MacKinnon possibility is thoroughly entertaining panels on pornography opposite Dersh.
8:50AM: Bradley is visiting this semester, so maybe next year?
MacKinnon is more than just crit -- she'd be one of the most active practitioners on the faculty (not that that's saying much). I took her class when she was visiting, and I wouldn't say I'm an apostle, but I think she'd be a great hire.
Just to fuel the fire, Ayres was on campus today. (His partner Jennifer Brown is teaching here this semester, which kinda cuts both ways on this tip.)
1. Michigan has used MacKinnon as a selling point for years, yet she is hardly ever in Ann Arbor to teach. (For those not familiar with Michigan's propaganda campaign, students are admitted as early as October and inundated with brochures detailing, among other things, the top scholars/rich academic offerings).
It was possible for MacKinnon to be teaching a course for only one semester during one's three year law school career. She's usually visiting Harvard, Columbia, or Chicago or vacationing in the South of France.
2. Herzog's treatise on EU law is very poorly written.
3. Merrill's move from Northwestern to Columbia was pretty recent.
4. By and large, the budding legal academics at Yale are the only law students who have any kind of academic curiosity about legal topics. All other law schools are corporate drone factories whose curricula already cater to biglaw practice.
Herzog's treatise on EU law? what could you possibly be talking about?
oops, wrong Herzog, but it looks like the Herzog at UMich doesn't have a J.D. The law school has him teaching 1l subjects anyway.
1 Smit & Herzog on the Law of the European Union Author(s)
Smit & Herzog on the Law of the European Union
Copyright 2007, Matthew Bender & Company, Inc., a member of the LexisNexis Group.
Publication Information
1 Smit & Herzog on the Law of the European Union Author(s)
Author(s)
Smit & Herzog on The Law of the European Union VOLUME 1
General Editors
Center for International Legal Studies
Hans Smit
Peter Herzog
Christian Campbell
Gudrun Zagel
[Original Authors of The Law of the European Community: A Commentary on the EEC Treaty: Hans Smit and Peter Herzog]
It's Alstott, apparently.
4:44 I couldn't agree with you more
Post on Alstott here:
http://www.abovethelaw.com/2008/03/harvard_law_school_3l_tuition.php