The Legal Employment Market: Determinants of Elite Firm Placement, and How Law Schools Stack Up

Data collected on 15,293 law firm associates from 1295 employers who graduated from law school between 2001 and 2003 were used to develop a “total quality score” for every ABA-accredited law school, both nationally and for nine geographic regions. Quantitative methods were then used to identify factors that help explain the variation in a law school’s national career placement success at elite law firms. The findings revealed that while a law school’s academic reputation is the single biggest predictor of placement, several other factors were also highly significant. Differences in grading system, class rank disclosure policies, and the number of first year courses required were responsible for significant variation. Numbers grade systems, such as those used at the University of Chicago, and honors/pass/fail grading systems, such as those used by Yale, both have a strong negative impact on placement when all else is held equal, likely because both systems impair the middle of the class’s job prospects relative to traditional letter grade systems. Law schools that do not disclose class rank to students or employers place better than schools that disclose rank, when all else is held constant, although it is unclear whether this is due to employer preferences or due to disparate psychological effects on students that impact their career placement strategies. Law schools that require a greater number of first year classes, however, can make up for deficiencies in these other areas

Needful Rules and Regulations: Originalist Reflections on the Territorial Clause

There are few areas where the current state of the law is as inconsistent, incoherent, and intellectually bankrupt as the law of U.S. territories. The seminal cases in the field are the infamous Insular Cases, where the Supreme Court of the United States held that the “half-civilized,” “savage,” “ignorant and lawless” “alien races” that inhabited the United States’ overseas territories were not entitled to the same constitutional rights and protections afforded to Americans residing in the mainland United States—holdings that were based on the white man’s burden and similar then-prevalent theories of white supremacy. Despite being firmly entrenched within the constitutional anticanon and having “long been reviled” by all corners of the legal community, the Supreme Court has never expressly overruled the Insular Cases; rather, it has repeatedly implored that they “should not be further extended.” Yet notwithstanding this instruction, the lower federal courts continue—sometimes begrudgingly, but at other times enthusiastically—to apply them as binding precedent, typically because of the principle that only the Supreme Court may overrule its own precedents

TERRITORIAL PATERNALISM

This Article strives to deconstruct and dismantle the most prominent misconceptions and outright lies being used to justify the continued withholding of constitutional rights and liberties from American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Part II addresses the claim that territories are not self- governing or are otherwise effectively ruled from Washington, D.C., by a Congress that is completely unresponsive to any of their concerns. Part III examines the portrayal of the territories as geographically isolated, crumbling, lacking safe drinking water, and otherwise substantially underdeveloped compared to the mainland United States. Finally, Part IV proposes several empowering strategies that the territories and their allies could pursue to improve their current status-quo, which are not grounded in paternalism and would not require surrendering the long-term struggle for equal rights

Judicial Antifederalism

The United States has a colonies problem. The more than 3.5 million Americans who live in the U.S. territories of American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands lack some of the most fundamental rights and protections, such as the right to vote. This is due to a series of decisions decided more than a century ago, collectively known as the Insular Cases, in which the U.S. Supreme Court held that the “half-civilized,” “savage,” “ignorant and lawless” “alien races” that inhabited America’s overseas territories were not entitled to the same constitutional rights and protections afforded to Americans residing in the mainland United States, based on the idea of the white man’s burden and similar, then prevalent theories of white supremacy. For decades, the Insular Cases have had “nary a friend in the world,” with even the Supreme Court repeatedly imploring that they “should not be further extended.” Yet despite their firm placement within the constitutional anticanon and having “long been reviled” by all corners of the legal community for several decades, the Insular Cases have never been overruled by the Supreme Court. Perhaps most surprisingly, the lower federal courts in recent years have ignored the Supreme Court’s admonition and extended the Insular Cases to cover a whole host of new situations. The failure of the Supreme Court to overrule the Insular Cases—and the lower federal courts’ extension of them even after the Supreme Court instructed them to the contrary—is unprecedented. Why, then, do the Insular Cases not only persist, but thrive, despite virtually unanimous condemnation from all sides of the political and legal spectrums? This Essay attributes the longevity of the Insular Cases to an unlikely source: the failure of Congress to timely extend the well-known principle of judicial federalism, operative in all fifty states, to the five presently unincorporated territories

The structure of 2D semi-simple field theories

I classify all cohomological 2D field theories based on a semi-simple complex Frobenius algebra A. They are controlled by a linear combination of kappa-classes and by an extension datum to the Deligne-Mumford boundary. Their effect on the Gromov-Witten potential is described by Givental's Fock space formulae. This leads to the reconstruction of Gromov-Witten invariants from the quantum cup-product at a single semi-simple point and from the first Chern class, confirming Givental's higher-genus reconstruction conjecture. The proof uses the Mumford conjecture proved by Madsen and Weiss.Comment: Small errors corrected in v3. Agrees with published versio

Hayek a Buenos Aires: sulle origini globali del neoliberalismo argentino

Questo saggio intende indagare le origini globali del neoliberalismo al di fuori dell’Europa e degli Stati Uniti, analizzando lo specifico caso argentino. Prendendo in esame le prime istituzioni e riviste neoliberali argentine, la prima parte del saggio analizza non solo i circuiti che hanno permesso le visite degli intellettuali neoliberali occidentali in America Latina e la traduzione e diffusione delle loro idee, ma anche la loro trasformazione in armi ideologiche contro le forme locali di dirigismo statale: il peronismo e lo sviluppismo. La seconda parte si sofferma sulle conferenze di Friedrich von Hayek in Argentina gettando luce sulle tesi che ha sostenuto e sulle contraddizioni cui è andato incontro, in particolare legittimando la temporanea sospensione del rule of law per ristabilire l’ordine di mercato, fuori dalle democrazie occidentali. La terza parte, infine, indaga il modo in cui il pensiero di Hayek è stato ricevuto e riadattato da Alberto Benegas Lynch, mettendone in evidenza la radicalizzazione conservatrice e autoritaria, in relazione all’articolazione, rispettivamente, con la tradizione liberale argentina del XIX secolo e con i regimi militari instaurati nel 1955 e nel 1976. Complessivamente, il saggio mostra come la dottrina neoliberale, sin dagli anni Cinquanta, ha iniziato a circolare nel Sud globale, ma anche la forma specificatamente conservatrice e autoritaria che essa ha originariamente assunto e che conserva ancora oggi in Argentina.This article aims to investigate the global origins of neoliberalism outside of Europe and the United States, analyzing the specific case of Argentina. Examining the early Argentine neoliberal institutions and journals, the first part of the article analyzes not only the networks that facilitated the visits of Western neoliberal intellectuals to Latin America and the translation and dissemination of their ideas, but also the transformation of these ideas into ideological weapons against the local forms of state dirigisme: Peronism and developmentalism. The second part focuses on Friedrich von Hayek’s lectures in Argentina, the arguments he presented and the contradictions it faced, particularly legitimizing the temporary suspension of the rule of law to restore market order outside Western democracies. The third part investigates how Hayek’s thought was received and adapted by Alberto Benegas Lynch, highlighting its conservative and authoritarian radicalization in relation to both the 19th century Argentine liberal tradition and the military regimes established in 1955 and 1976. Overall, the article shows how neoliberal doctrine began to circulate in the global South since the 1950s, as well as the specifically conservative and authoritarian form it originally took and still retains today in Argentin