Welcome back to Ahead of the Curve. I'm Karen Sloan, legal education editor at Law.com, and I'll be your host for this weekly look at innovation and notable developments in legal education.

This week I'm looking at a new law review article that concludes law schools may be a bit too generous in their tenure decisions, and that the quality of scholarship would improve if a higher percentage of candidates didn't make the cut. Next up is Regent University's somewhat unusual decision to get its next law dean from the bench—the North Carolina Supreme Court, to be precise. Finally, Albany Law School, Vanderbilt Law School and the University of Pennsylvania Law School have announced multi-million donations in recent days. 

Please share your thoughts and feedback with me at [email protected] or on Twitter:@KarenSloanNLJ

Let's Talk About Tenure

Last week, I discussed a law review article that pegged tenure as one of the many reasons that meaningful change is difficult to achieve in the legal academy. (As in, law professors with lifetime gigs aren't always receptive to innovation.)

So I thought it fitting this week to take up another law review article that looks at tenure, but from a different angle. More specifically—does that fact that elite law schools grant tenure to nearly everyone on that track actually hurt them in the long run? The short version, from the article Rethinking Law School Tenure Standards, is yes. The authors, University of Chicago law professors Adam Chilton, Jonathan Masur, and law school fellow Kyle Rozema, conclude that law professors would pump out better scholarly work if schools were stricter about who they bestow tenure upon. The “academic impact” of an elite school's median law professor would increase by 50 percent if school's upped their tenure denials by 10 percent, the trio concluded. (Which all sounds well and good unless you're the tenure-track professor who gets the thumbs down. Ouch.)

I'm not going to delve too far into the weeds of the authors' data, but here are some highlights.

➤➤They identified 1,720 law professors who received tenure at a top 100 law school between 1970 and 2007, then collected data on their publications and citations before and after getting tenure. (Fun fact, law profs tenured in the 1970s and early 80s published three articles before getting the nod, on average. That number rose to six for the group granted tenure in the 2000s.)

➤➤They looked at tenure rates at the top 14 law schools for those hired between 2000 and 2012, and found that about 95 percent of tenure-track faculty made the cut—a rate the authors say is higher than the norm in other academic fields.

➤➤They ran lots of fancy calculations that I don't fully understand (I was told there would be no math!) to determine how different the scholarly impact picture would look if schools cracked down on tenure and didn't give it so liberally. Another way to think about this is that they calculated a school's academic impact by subbing out lower performing professors and putting in average ones.

So what did they find out? Quite a bit, but here are a few things that caught my eye:

Law professors who published more before getting tenured also tended to be more prolific afterward. Similarly, those whose work landed in top-20 law journal pre-tenure were also more likely to get published after getting tenure. In short, a professor's pre-tenure record is a pretty good indication of how they will perform after reaching the brass ring. Thus, law schools presumably have the data they need to make relatively informed tenure decisions.

And small changes in tenure rates make a big difference, hence the 50 percent increase in academic impact with 10 percent more tenure denials. “Our estimates suggest that law schools could have drastically enhanced the academic impact of their median faculty member by increasing tenure standards even modestly,” the study reads.

The authors issue a slew of caveats with their research, most notably that they aren't advocating for strict tenure cutoffs overnight. And tenure committees also consider teaching and service when making decisions. But they say their findings should open the door to further research on the topic. And they also point out some unusual features of tenure in the legal academy. First, the pre-tenure period for law professors is shorter than in most others fields, so schools don't have as long of a track record to weigh. Second, the law review system is run by second-year law students, whereas most other academic journals are peer-reviewed. So law students with a year and change on campus hold the fates of tenure hopefuls in their hands. (That's an exaggeration, but you get the point.)

My thoughts: There's a lot to unpack here. My gut reaction is that of course law schools shouldn't automatically greenlight everyone for tenure, because it's students who ultimately suffer when faculty deadwood get a job for life. (Whether academic scholarship should be the primary criteria for tenure is a discussion for another day.) But tenure supporter and USC law prof Michael Simkovic raises some good points over on Brian Leiter's Law School Reports, which is that people aren't going to want to work at law schools with a reputation for higher tenure denial rates. Schools would have to overcome that reluctance by paying higher faculty salaries. That makes sense to me.

Less persuasive for me is Simkovic's argument that pre-tenure professors at schools with higher tenure denial rates might shy away from controversial scholarship in order to preserve their career prospects outside academia.

From the High Court to the Dean's Suite

This was a bit under the radar last week, so I want to highlight the news that Regent University has named current North Carolina Supreme Court Chief Justice Mark Martin as its new dean. He'll be taking over on March 1. Martin has sat on the state's high court for the past 20 years, and is the youngest person ever elected as a North Carolina justice.

Martin's move from the bench to academia is fairly unusual. We have seen law schools experiment with hiring from the judiciary, Big Law and prosecutor's offices, but it doesn't happen all the often. Off the top of my head, I recall former Duke Law School Dean David Levi, who came from the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California. (It's no coincidence that Duke now has a Center for Judicial Studies and the only country's only master program specifically for judges.) Then you had former Pepperdine University law dean Deanell Tacha, a veteran of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit. And let us not forget Royal Ferguson, who retired from the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas to become the founding dean of the University of North Texas at Dallas College of Law.

The powers that be at Regent clearly believe that Martin brings something to the table that a career academic can't. The law school has a history of outside-the-box hiring. Former dean Jeffrey Brauch, who stepped down in 2015 after 16 years as dean, was a litigator at Quarles & Brady at the time of his hiring.

“We are delighted to welcome this public servant whose vast experience and Constitutional advocacy will infuse a standard of excellence by every measure into our law program,” said Regent Chancellor Pat Robertson in an announcement of Martin's hiring. (Yes, it's that Pat Robertson.)

Keep That Dough Rolling

It has been a good few weeks on the law school donations front. Here's a quick rundown.

Albany Law School unveiled a $15 million gift from a donor who wishes to remain anonymous (mysterious!). The school plans to use the funds to bolster its clinical offerings. It's the single largest donation in the school's history, and is part of a larger, $30 million fundraising campaign.

Not to be outdone, Vanderbilt Law School has received a $12.8 million donationfor alumnus Mark Dalton, who graduated in 1975. Dalton is now the co-chairman of Tudor Investment Corp. Dalton's gift is earmarked for the school's Law and Business Program.

Last but not least, the University of Pennsylvania Law School snagged a series of sizable donations, totaling nearly $6 million. The largest chunk of that –$3 million—is from Osagie Imasogie, who obtained his LL.M from the law school in 1985. His gift will establish a professorship in law and technology. The remaining gifts will go toward student scholarships.

Extra Credit Reading

Brigham Young University Rueben J. Clark Law School is launching the first ever national storytelling competition for law students, with the idea that storytelling is a key skill for successful lawyers.

Students at Yale Law School have prevailed in their three-year battle to add gender-neutral bathrooms to the law campus. Their goal put them at odds with Connecticut's building codes.

A new Netflix documentary about Ted Bundy serves as a reminder that the serial killer was a student at the University of Utah's law school for a time.

Thanks for reading Ahead of the Curve. Sign up for the newsletter and check out past issues here. I'll be back next week with more news and updates on the future of legal education. Until then, keep in touch at [email protected]