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<p>Leiter Reports</p>
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<p>Another fine school appears to be stricken now: UCLA (whose new Dean, Michael Schill, has just moved from NYU--a fact which may simply be coincidental). A brochure has just arrived in faculty mailboxes nationwide announcing UCLA's "new faculty" hires--a good set of hires, as I've noted on two different occasions (here and here)</p>
<p>"UCLA School of Law is emerging as the strongest law faculty in the United States."</p>
<p>What? What about Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Chicago, Columbia, NYU? Not close. What about Michigan, Virginia, Texas, Penn, Berkeley, Georgetown? Perhaps competitive in some ways, in other ways clearly not. I will say this: it seems to me, and I expect other informed observers, that UCLA has a clear edge now over Northwestern, Cornell, and USC (as well as Duke, of course).</p>
<p>By a reliable measure of faculty quality UCLA ranked 14th before these appointments, and by an unreliable measure, it ranked 16th (in "reputation" among academics). The new appointments are, indeed, good ones, and together with recent losses at Cornell, Northwestern, and USC give UCLA a realistic shot at the top ten.</p>