This is the first in a series of posts this month remembering law professors who influenced us.

When I looked over the courses for my first semester of law school, I realized I had a fellow named Robert Bork for Constitutional Law. This meant nothing particularly important to me at the time. It was well before his nomination for the United States Supreme Court, and he was just another professor in my mind. However, I soon realized that the good professor would be quite different than others to whom I was assigned. The politics of the law school in those days were for the most part toward liberal or even to the left of liberal, but Professor Bork was a staunch conservative. Each of his classes was an intense argument about what the Constitution meant or should be understood to mean, and he never gave an inch in a room full of students who for the most part did not agree with him. Still playing in my mind is the whole week of classes in which Professor Bork insisted cases championing the principle of one man, one vote were inconsistent with the Framers’ intent.

Bork never convinced me that he had the correct read on the Constitution, and I actually moved farther and farther away from his conservatism the longer I studied with him. Yet Professor Bork demonstrated for me a way to teach law. He insisted the law had to be taken seriously and that it had ramifications. He didn’t come to class to show us how smart he was or to play stylized teacher-student games. He closed the door, loosened his tie, and tried to articulate what was the best and most valuable way to understand what we were studying. It was a variety of earnest, engaged teaching that I wish was a bigger part of the contemporary legal academy.

Law professors, and particularly law school deans, love to complain about the law school rankings done every year by U.S. News & World Report. (Unless their school rises in the rankings, in which case they are an objective measure of merit.) It’s been pretty well demonstrated that, more than a decade into the rankings project, the primary thing the U.S. News rankings measure is how well the school did on previous years’ rankings. In other words, there’s a massive feedback loop going on that is difficult for any one school to break out of. Nevertheless, schools try, because students and even professors, despite their complaints, rely on the rankings to evaluate the worth of various schools.

People have been wondering how to change this dynamic for a long time. Some, like Brian Leiter, have set up their own rankings, although Leiter’s system only measures the top 40 schools or so, where rankings are arguably less important. But what if U.S. News folded? The company seems to be in deep trouble. It’s recently given up on competing with Time and Newsweek in the weekly magazine market, becoming biweekly instead. Today’s New York Times reports that it’s giving up on that plan, too, even before it went into effect: now USN&WR will become a monthly magazine instead. A monthly news magazine? I think the likely next step will be for USN&WR to announce that it’s becoming a magazine with an infinitely long publication cycle, i.e., folding up shop.

If that happens, who will law professors have to kick around anymore?

From Clinicians with Not Enough to Do, this post discusses a new program at Harvard Law School, reported in the Harvard Crimson.  The graduating class of 2011 will be eligible for the program, and over 100 students expressed initial interest.  Students who commit to working for five years in the public interest would be eligible for tuition waivers for the last year of law school.  In addition, forty-eight third-year students signed commitments to five-year public interest careers, and they will receive in exchange $5,000 towards their current tuition.  

The average student graduating from Harvard leaves with $109,000 of educational debt, the Crimson article reports, so the waiver seems like a real help for students who want to take a lower-paying public interest job but otherwise could not afford to do so because of their debt burdens.  

The idea is interesting, reducing the debt load at the outset for those committed to public interest work, rather than providing assistance with loan repayments to those students after graduation.  Loan Repayment Assistance Programs are in place at many law schools; Marquette, for instance, has had one for several years. I have never heard of a program like the Harvard tuition waiver, though, and I would be interested to hear what students think about the idea.