November 30, 2005

Harvard Law Listing to Right: New York Observer

Link: NYO - News Story 3.

What has followed is a hiring spree: 20 offers to full-time professors have been extended—with nine acceptances so far, according to Michael Armini, the school’s director of communications. There are currently 81 full-time professors at the school, the same number as when Ms. Kagan joined, mostly because of retirements. According to John Coates, a corporate-law professor, the hiring logjam has been lifted because the “false sense of scarcity has been eliminated.” “I think, in the past, there was this dynamic where people were sometimes supporting and sometimes opposing for reasons that didn’t have as much to do with the merits, but had to do with the sense of limited budget,” said Mr. Coates, who joined the faculty in 1997. Of the nine new professors, six have been appointed with tenure. To the left of center are environmental-law expert Jody Freeman, from UCLA, and Daryl Levinson, a constitutional-law theorist. But recent hires have also added to the conservatives’ ranks. There is John Manning, 44, an expert on the separation of powers and the structure of government, who advocates for a strict reading of the U.S. Constitution, and 43-year-old Jack Goldsmith, an international-law expert known for questioning the efficacy of the International Criminal Court.

In addition to Messrs. Manning and Goldsmith, joining next year is Adrian Vermeule, a constitutional, statutory-interpretation and administrative-law specialist who takes a social-science approach, reading empirical research and looking for counterintuitive solutions. Mr. Vermeule is currently at the University of Chicago, where he has won various teaching awards. He has written about constitutional issues in the context of national security, arguing that restricting some liberties isn’t at odds with the freedoms Americans enjoy, that people overreact in what he calls “libertarian panics.” He has also argued for the death penalty on “pro-life grounds,” citing studies that show it deters would-be killers. Yet he has also criticized some of what others see as the court’s conservative activism.

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Students and faculty point to professors who have tipped their hats to conservative causes: Mary Ann Glendon, an anti-abortion feminist; law and economics scholars like Steven Shavell and J. Mark Ramseyer, on the basis that they’re believers in free-market economic concepts. Einer Elhauge, an antitrust expert who litigated on behalf of the Republican-dominated Florida legislature alongside Mr. Fried in Bush v. Gore.

Posted by Anupam Chander on November 30, 2005 at 05:21 PM in Law School | Permalink