Yale has a different decision set than other law schools.


Yale Law School’s $1.2 billion share of the Yale University endowment provides approximately $63 million in operating funds, which translates into $106,000 per student, though this amount appears to be headed up due to the 40.2% increase in Yale’s endowment in 2021. See “Yale endowment earns 40.2% investment return in fiscal 2021,” Yale News, Oct 14, 2021; Evan Gorelick, “Yale’s endowment, explained,” Yale Daily News, Oct 22, 2022 (discussing Yale endowment’s 5.25% target payout and policy of smoothing returns over multiple years).

To be clear, these are the funds available before Yale Law collects its first dollar of tuition.  Nonetheless, as the top-ranked law school in the US News rankings for more than 30 years, Yale has a superabundance of highly credentialed students who would be willing to pay or borrow the current cost of attendance. For the 2021-22 admission cycle, Yale admitted only 5.6% of applicants; of those admitted, 81% enrolled, making Yale the most selective and elite law school in the nation. See YLS, “Statistical Profile of the Class of 2025.”
Continue Reading The dollars and math behind Yale Law’s withdrawal from USN rankings (340)


To date, this highly influential stakeholder has had very little to say.


The fierce and fascinating struggle underway in the American states over legal services reform brings to the table a large collection of interest groups.  These groups include law firms, legal aid organizations, entrepreneurs who might benefit financially from the liberalization of entry rules, and of course the gatekeeper entities, including state bar authorities and the state supreme courts, whose decisions are crucial to the evolution and shape of reform.  See Posts 239 (beginning of a four-part series on serious challenges of bar federalism).

The identity of these specific groups may differ from state to state, as the legal ecosystem has contours often tailored to a particular state’s history and objectives, but the configuration of stakeholders has some rather common elements.

What remains somewhat opaque in this robust and interconnected battle over the reform of legal services is the voice of legal educators and the law schools.  These are, after all, the places in which future lawyers are educated and professional values are instilled.  It is had to imagine a more fertile and opportune time to discuss the ambitions and philosophies of this next generation of legal professionals.
Continue Reading Legal education as a key stakeholder in legal services reform (276)


Hal, Val, and the lawyer governance problem that’s hindering AI in law


Oscar Reutersvärd is the “father of the impossible figure.”  Some of his impossible figures are captured on the Swedish stamps shown above.  The figures are, of course, quite possible — they’re just ink on paper.  But our brains turn quickly from seeing some shapes to the “realization” that they are “impossible” because the 3-D world our minds are trying to construct cannot exist.

Our powerful, broken minds

The problem is in our brains, of course.  Not only do humans use analogy and inference to build world models, as I discussed in the first two installments of this book review series on AI (Posts 232 and 237), we do it involuntarily.  (Part III of this four-part series is Post 250, which focused on opportunities and challenges of expert systems.)
Continue Reading My mind is just a broken machine: Part IV of book review series on AI in law (263)