Visualizing legal employment outcomes in Texas in 2017

This is the third in a series of visualizations on legal employment outcomes for the Class of 2017. Following posts on outcomes in Florida and Pennsylvania here is a visualization for legal employment outcomes of graduates of Texas law schools for the Class of 2017. (More about the methodology is available at the Florida post.) Last year's Texas post is here.

Total jobs in these unfunded bar passage-required and J.D.-advantage positions worsened slightly, from 1551 in 2016 to 1476 in 2017. Despite the addition of the University of North Texas Dallas, overall graduates dropped below 2000 statewide, and the placement rate improved from 74.1% to 75.8% (including a few funded positions). Note that the chart below visualizes Baylor at the top because it exclude school-funded positions; in the table below that UT-Austin is at the top. (Refer to the methodology post for more.)

As always, please notify me of any corrections or errata.

Peer Score School 2017 YoY% BPR JDA LSF 2016 BPR JDA LSF
4.1 University of Texas-Austin 86.9% 1.2 259 18 7 85.6% 289 18 3
2.4 Baylor University 86.2% 5.8 107 4 1 80.4% 122 4 1
2.7 Southern Methodist University 83.1% 1.4 179 17 0 81.6% 176 15 0
1.9 Texas Tech University 78.2% 1.8 137 17 0 76.4% 125 14 0
2.6 University of Houston 77.5% -2.1 153 26 0 79.6% 162 29 0
2.3 Texas A&M University 74.3% 6.0 118 18 0 68.3% 121 19 0
1.7 St. Mary's University 70.9% 2.0 118 20 1 68.9% 144 18 2
1.5 Texas Southern University 65.6% 6.7 76 8 0 58.9% 79 10 0
1.7 South Texas College of Law Houston 61.7% -0.5 157 27 0 62.2% 175 31 0
nr University of North Texas Dallas 51.5% - 17 0 0 - - - -
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Visualizing legal employment outcomes in Pennsylvania in 2017

This is the second in a series of visualizations on legal employment outcomes for the Class of 2017. Following a post on outcomes in Florida, here is a visualization for legal employment outcomes of graduates of Pennsylvania law schools for the Class of 2017. (More about the methodology is available at the Florida post.) Last year's Pennsylvania post is here.

Total graduates were essentially unchanged year-over-year, and the job picture improved slightly, from 82.2% placement in unfunded full-time, long-term bar passage-required and J.D.-advantage positions increased slightly once again, from 82.2% to 83.8%. Most schools are bunched together in the 78%-82% placement range.

As always, please notify me of any corrections or errata.

Peer Score School 2017 YoY% BPR JDA LSF 2016 BPR JDA LSF
4.4 University of Pennsylvania 98.8% 1.5 232 16 5 97.3% 230 17 4
2.7 Temple University 86.6% 3.5 172 15 1 83.2% 135 32 1
2.5 Villanova University 82.4% 0.4 120 11 0 82.0% 119 21 1
2.1 Drexel University 81.5% -2.2 88 13 0 83.7% 111 12 0
1.8 Duquesne University 79.4% 5.2 80 20 0 74.2% 76 16 0
2.2 Pennsylvania State - Dickinson Law 78.7% -9.5 41 7 0 88.2% 28 2 0
2.3 Penn State Law 78.1% 3.3 82 7 0 74.7% 63 8 0
2.7 University of Pittsburgh 77.5% 3.3 87 20 0 74.3% 108 22 0
1.7 Widener Commonwealth 67.2% -0.7 36 5 0 67.9% 26 10 0
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Visualizing legal employment outcomes in Florida in 2017

Following up on a series of posts last year (and previous years), this is the first in a series visualizing employment outcomes of law school graduates from the Class of 2017. The U.S. News & World Report ("USNWR") rankings recently released, which include data for the Class of 2016, are already obsolete. The ABA will release the information soon, but individualized employment reports are available on schools' websites.

The USNWR prints the "employed" rate as "all full-time jobs not school or university funded lasting at least a year for which bar passage was required or a J.D. degree was an advantage.)." It does not give "full weight" in its metrics to jobs that were funded by the law school. (That said, USNWR now has "slighted reduced the discount" for school-funded jobs.) USNWR gives other positions lower weight, but these positions are not included in the ranking tables. And while it includes J.D. advantage positions, there remain disputes about whether those positions are actually as valuable as bar passage required jobs. (Some have further critiqued solo practitioners being included in the bar passage required statistics.)

The top chart is sorted by non-school-funded jobs (or "full weight" positions). The visualization breaks out full-time, long-term, bar passage required positions (not funded by the school); full-time, long term, J.D.-advantage positions (not funded by the school); school funded positions (full-time, long-term, bar passage required or J.D.-advantage positions); and all other outcomes. I included a breakdown in the visualization slightly distinguishing bar passage required positions from J.D.-advantage positions, even though both are included in "full weight" for USNWR purposes (and I still sort the chart by "full weight" positions).

The table below the chart breaks down the raw data values for the Classes of 2016 and 2017, with relative overall changes year-over-year, and is sorted by total placement including school-funded jobs. The columns beside each year break out the three categories in the total placement: FTLT unfunded bar passage required ("BPR"), FTLT unfunded J.D. advantage ("JDA"), and FTLT law school funded BPR & JDA positions ("LSF").

The first state is Florida (last year's visualization here). Western Michigan University-Cooley's Tampa campus did not disclose campus-specific data again this year, so I did not include it. There were 2236 statewide grades, a 10% decline over last year's class. The total placement rate among the graduates was 69.8% with just one school-funded job. That's more than a 4-point improvement over last year, with an assist from the decline class size: total placements shrunk from 1621 to 1561. Importantly, however, J.D. advantage placement dropped from 275 to 196, while bar passage required placement rose from 1346 to 1364.

As always, if I made a mistake, please feel free to email me or comment; I confess there are always risks in data translation, and I am happy to make corrections.

Peer Score School 2017 YoY% BPR JDA LSF 2016 BPR JDA LSF
3.2 University of Florida 86.4% 4.1 246 33 1 82.4% 230 36 0
2.8 University of Miami 82.7% 4.1 195 20 0 78.6% 209 45 0
1.9 Florida International University 80.6% -1.1 112 13 0 81.7% 108 17 0
3.0 Florida State University 80.3% -0.1 150 21 0 80.4% 136 16 0
2.1 Stetson University 77.2% 0.7 167 36 0 76.5% 166 59 0
1.6 Nova Southeastern University 62.4% 4.6 129 12 0 57.7% 117 21 0
1.2 Barry University 61.7% 11.9 75 25 0 49.8% 83 40 0
1.4 St. Thomas University 58.6% 6.6 99 7 0 52.0% 97 8 0
1.5 Florida A&M University 51.9% 1.5 62 7 0 50.3% 56 18 0
1.2 Ave Maria School of Law 49.4% -10.9 32 8 0 60.3% 36 2 0
1.2 Florida Coastal School of Law 46.6% 6.2 97 14 0 40.5% 108 13 0
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Guest blogging at PrawfsBlawg

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A trickle of law school closures

Will any law schools close as a result of the decline in enrollment and the lingering effects of the 2008 recession?

This was how I began a draft of a blog post five years ago. (And that I'm finally revising....) It's a little strange, perhaps, now, to link some of the present status of legal education to an economic event ten years ago, or that we've been discussing the same decline in enrollment problems for many years.

In part, I confess, I had deep skepticism that any law schools would close--at least, any accredited law schools. From my research, I couldn't find a single ABA-accredited law school that had ever closed. The ABA has been accrediting law schools for about a hundred years, and there had been closures of non-accredited or state-accredited schools. I wondered, then, what closures might look like.

I had compiled a few of the most notable predictions concerning law school closures a few years ago.

June 17, 2010, Professor Bainbridge:

If admission applicants drop enough, maybe some of the bottom tier of schools will have to close for lack of qualified applicants. (Or maybe they'll just admit unqualified applicants.) 

October 19, 2010, ABA Journal:

As large law firms continue to hire fewer highly paid associates, law school applications will eventually drop and the number of law schools will likely contract, two professors predict in a recent article.

April 25, 2011, The New Republic:

I'm not saying law schools will go away -- the prestigious ones, especially, will probably come out just fine -- but vast swaths of it [sic] will probably disappear. 

October 3, 2012, Brian Leiter's Law School Reports: 

My own opinion was that we'll see several law schools close during the next decade, but probably not more than ten--and that was the majority view among readers by a wide margin.  Most vulnerable are going to be free-standing law schools that are relatively young.  Relatively young law schools part of universities that are in vulnerable financial shape are also likely candidates.  

Here we are, ten years after the recession, eight years after the peak law school applicant and enrollment cycle, and we've seen some fairly significant movement. (I won't include the list of prospective new law schools that were abandoned before they began in the last decade.)

Cooley closed its Ann Arbor branch campus in 2014, but that was a branch campus, not a full closure.

William Mitchell and Hamline announced a merger in 2015, but I wasn't inclined to call that a "closure," despite two schools becoming one school. And, that said, enrollment looks more like the size of one school than two schools put together.

Indiana Tech announced its closure in 2016--but, in part, I discounted that closure because the school was not fully accredited by the ABA--only provisionally.

Whittier announced its closure in 2017, and there was the first fully ABA-accredited institution to do so.

Charlotte announced its closure in 2017, a second fully ABA-accredited institution, and the first for-profit law school (six for-profit law schools arose since a consent decree in 1995).

Valparaiso announced in 2017 that it would not enroll an incoming class and was looking for future options for the school--whether closure or selling the institution.

And just yesterday, Savannah announced it would be closing--a branch of Atlanta's John Marshall.

It's been a trickle of closures--a merger, a couple of branch closures, a suspension of admissions, a couple of outright closures. It's hard to portend what else might come. Arizona Summit and Thomas Jefferson are on probation status with the ABA, but that might change. Concordia, Lincoln Memorial, and North Texas are provisionally accredited, and we might see an update on their statuses soon. And there might be fully-accredited schools out there making difficult decisions.

Professor Jerry Organ in 2014 presciently compared a historic decline in dental school enrollment and ultimate closures with what he saw to be possible future closures in legal education--the tail was long, he emphasized, before the true change in the quality of students and the long-term financial pressures closed dental schools. Here we are, a decade after the recession, and we are seeing some of the consequences. Yes, next year appears to be a relatively good year for law schools compared to the last several. But that is probably not enough to change what might be still future difficulties at many institutions. Only sustained long-term growth in quantity and quality of law school applicants, driven by a market desire for more such law graduates, will bring much-needed stability.

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Five years old

I published this blog's first post on March 19, 2013, a critique of the theater of oral argument in Shelby County v. Holder. The blog has been a really useful repository of half-baked ideas (as promised in my unchanged "About" page), some of which have turned into op-eds, shorter articles, or components of longer articles. Others have sat quietly on this blog, dormant, awaiting that web search from an intrepid reporter on an obscure topic I thought amusing at one time.

I also wanted an outlet for some of my ideas on legal education, the legal job market, and crude data visualizations. It's been a quite useful medium for that, too.

It's certainly true that blogging has become less popular. (My own blogging waxes and wanes with interest and seasons.) Much discussion (and media attention) has shifted to Twitter. I've described my cutback on the use of Twitter (I've probably trimmed my use 80% or so in 2018), so I won't rehash that discussion. But I'll say that I miss some of my favorite bloggers who've moved away from the more thoughtful, longer form pieces on blogs and into the quick reactions (or Twitter canoe conversations) of social media. That's not to say they're wrong or bad. It's just to say, I miss some of the more carefully constructed longer-form reads. It's also a bit ironic, I think--blogging was seen as the "unserious" medium 15 years ago, of glib takes and hasty reactions, and here I am nostalgic for a return to that medium I view as so much more serious!

My blogging pace is irregular (but I have managed at least one major entry each month), but I'm grateful to the 370,000 visitors and 530,000 pageviews in five years. I've never earned a penny on this site (a reason it should load quickly and be quite readable!), so I am grateful for your feedback, and I hope I've offered some small enlightenment to readers over the years.

(Feel free to browse this blog's archives! Or check out my actual long-form pieces at SSRN.)

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Which Supreme Court justices are the topic of the most academic articles?

A recent draft article about Justice Kennedy's influence and legacy sparked a social media discussion about which justices attract the most academic attention.

I looked at the Westlaw database and searched for "ti(justice /2 [lastname])." The "ti()" field is slightly broader than just looking at the title of the article alone, but for this purpose it captured almost exclusively articles with a justice's name in the title. I didn't distinguish between Chief Justice Rehnquist's time as an Associate Justice (with that title), but I added a "chief" to my Roberts search to separate out hits for Justice Owen Roberts (there was at least one...). This search also would typically remove results for "the Rehnquist Court" or "the Roberts Court," which are less about the chief justices in particular, but it may slightly undercapture articles about those two justices. UPDATE: This methodology somewhat undercaptures references to justices that are more colloquial (e.g., use just the last name without the title "justice") or include the justice's name as an author without a title in a book review, but it eliminates far more false positives for most other justices who have more common names than "Scalia," "Alito," and "Sotomayor."

I imagine there might also a logarithmic effect one might observe--or expect to observe--over the course of a justice's career. As a justice begins, few, if any, articles will be written about her; as her influence increases over time, we would expect to see more articles each year than the previous year. (There may also be separate bursts of scholarship around a justice's retirement and around a justice's death.) This metric is static and treats each year as the same--perhaps someone would spend more time analyzing year-by-year impact! Additionally, the increase in the volume of journals, particularly online journals available on Westlaw, may skew results for justices with more recent histories.

I narrowed my search to the "Law Reviews & Journals" database, which is broad enough to include some practitioners' publications and the ABA Journal but should work for a rough examination of justices. I then developed a charge, "Law Journal Article Title Mentions Per Year," with the denominator the years since that justice first joined the Supreme Court. I selected all of the most recent 13 justices (excluding Justice Gorsuch) to have served on the Court.

UPDATE: I transposed the dates for Justices Sotomayor and Kagan in an earlier version, and their data changed slightly.

I then added in Justice Gorsuch and looked simply at the raw citation totals, regardless of years' services.

I'll leave it to others to discern what these figures might mean, if anything. I'll note that Justice Scalia dwarfs all others, which was not surprising, but a few other results did mildly surprise me. A few pieces about Justice Gorsuch were apparently written in his days as a prospective, or actual, nominee, then converted into pieces with a title about what "Justice Gorsuch," rather than "Judge Gorsuch," has written or said in the past--one reason his number is at 5 after one years' service, to Justice Kagan's 4.

UPDATE: Dave Hoffman rightly points out that there are likely tens of thousands of law journal articles published every single year. Due to the search function in Westlaw, I could not even limit a search of articles mentioning "law" in a given year, because results cannot exceeds 10,000 hits, and I can't narrow the search database to Law Reviews & Journals in WestlawNext. Articles about a Supreme Court justice, then, are a tiny slice of all scholarship. UPDATE: And, of course, this is only a very crude metric that is assuredly overinclusive and underinclusive. But, the relative relationships between justices should be modestly illuminating.

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Quick thoughts from today's oral argument in Minnesota Voters Alliance v. Mansky

Here are a few quick running thoughts from today's oral argument in Minnesota Voters Alliance v. Mansky. This post will be updated. The transcript PDF is here. (As an I aside, I wrote an article about the concept of "ballot speech," or the contents of the ballot itself as communicating expressive and informative content for voters, in this piece in the Arizona Law Review. Mansky involves a related question on restrictions on speech in the polling place.)

Express advocacy? Justice Kagan early in the argument, along with Justice Kennedy, wondered about more narrowly-drawn rules on matters like express advocacy for or against a particular candidate rather than broader political messages. That might be an attractive option for a Court looking to fashion a rule that offers the state some flexibility to regulate in the future.

Content and overbreadth: Justice Alito later pressed on this issue to wonder if candidate-based content might be somehow a separate matter properly subject to regulation. Justice Kagan in particular was concerned about how a proper overbreadth challenge might look. Justice Gorsuch later in the argument wondered about Minnesota acting as "outlier" when examining whether Minnesota had a compelling interest to justify the potential (as he said, "often undocumented") chilling effect.

Scope of intimidation: Chief Justice Roberts wondered about this notion of "decorum" in the polling place, emphasizing that freedom from intimidation is a distinct issue. At the same time, he wondered, "maybe bitter, sharp, political campaign going on, and maybe, just before you cast your vote, you should be able to have a time for some quiet reflection or to do that important civic obligation in peace and quiet without being bombarded by another campaign display." Later Justice Kennedy wondered about the difficulty of enforcing decorum if it largely turned on individualized determinations from polling officials.

Late in the oral argument, Justice Kagan wondered about how to evaluate "decorum." The courtroom was a good place for decorum, she thought. But she wondered why the polling place sounded "a little bit church-like," when it came at the end of "often a rowdy political process."

First Amendment issues at all? Justice Kennedy wondered, "Why should there be speech inside the election booth at all, or inside the what you call the election room?" From a justice usually known for his robust First Amendment views, this struck me as notable. Justice Ginsburg jump in to join the concern.

Facial challenge: One related question to the overbreadth concern was the scope of the challenge, as a facial challenge as opposed to as-applied. The Court's doctrine in this area has not been the most coherent, so I won't dig into issues now. But Chief Justice Roberts wondered about the "tiniest little logo" as being subject to the law and somehow affecting "decorum" as potentially a problem.

Arbitrary enforcement and defining political matters: Justice Alito wondered about the risk of arbitrary enforcement and the difficulty of election officials line-drawing in the application of this statute. In a series of hypotheticals testing this limit, Justice Alito got the state's attorney to say that a T-shirt with "the text of the Second Amendment' Could be viewed as political, but notthe text of the First Amendment. (Oral arg. transcript at 40.) It highlighted a very basic problem with a statute that had as broad a scope as Minnesota suggested--and perhaps suggests that the Court would require something narrower.

Justice Alito later worried about partisan election judges determining the political connotations of materials. The state's response? This is not terrible unusual, given that election judges make all kinds of determinations.

Burson: The Court showed no interest in overruling Burson. (But such things may remain unsaid....) Late in the oral argument, Justice Gorsuch seemed satisfied that Burson would be the narrower case of "campaign speech," compared to Minnesota's law of "additional political speech." But, returning to the definitional concerns of the Court noted earlier, that may not be satisfactory.

Compelling interests: Near the end, Chief Justice Roberts emphasized that it did not appear that the state's interest were "terribly strong." Only time will tell....

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A few thoughts on improving law school test and applicant figures for 2018

Recent data from the Law School Admissions Council shows that Law School Admissions Tests administered in December 2017 were up an eye-popping 27.9% year-over-year. It's worth digging a bit into the figures to see what that really means.

First, they're up slightly more in the United States than Canada--recall that this figure includes all LSATs administered. This represents an increase of 29.1% in the United States year-over-year.

But, second, it represents a slightly less impressive total among first-time test-takers. Recall that the LSAC, as of September 2017, allows test-takers to retake an unlimited number of times. Because LSAC reports the highest score to schools (which is less reliable than the average of scores), there is increased incentive to retake tests. First-time test-takers increased 24.0% year-over-year, but repeaters increased a whopping 35.8%. That said, 24% year-over-year increase in first-time United States test-takers is nothing to scoff at.

Third, the quality of applicants is up year-over-year. Those with an LSAT score of 160-164 are up 10.2% year-over-year as of February 21, and those with a score of 165-169 are up 22.8%. The lowest scores have seen a slight decline in applicants.

This is very good news for the best law schools. Of course, the open question is what happens now: do the very good law schools that have shrunk in recent years maintain their size and improve quality, which trickles down to the benefit of many other schools? Or do those schools increase their size and seize the greatest advantage from the improved quality? Time will tell.

Applicants are up 8.8% year-over-year. This is somewhat lower than one would expect given the significant year-over-year increase in first-time United States test-takers, but it might be that the December bump will be reflected much later in the cycle. (Indeed, as schools have quietly dropped their applicant deadlines, coupled with high incentives to retake tests, we may expect that applications lag slightly in each subsequent cycle.)

Of course, these projections may change dramatically. We may see more applicants (but not as many as the increase in LSAT test-takers, for reasons noted about the higher increase in repeaters than first-time test-takers). But, the advent of the GRE in admissions in law schools may mean that these LSAT figures are less predictive than they once were, and we may see more GRE-only applicants.

Time will tell. In short, the figures offer, with some nuance, an overall good picture for legal education generally for the incoming Class of 2018 (including the cohort taking the bar exam in July 2021). How that translates into individual schools, and how precise these figures look in the months ahead, remains to be seen.

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