Reproduction of hierarchy? A social network analysis of the American law professoriate

Journal of Legal Education

Volumn 61, Issue 1, 2011, Pages 76-103

  Katz, Daniel Martin ^a   Gubler, Joshua R ^b   Zelner, Jon ^c   Bommarito II, Michael J ^d   Provins, Eric ^e   Ingall, Eitan ^f  

^a MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^c PRINCETON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^d UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN   (United States)

^e WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^f CHILDREN S HOSPITAL OF PHILADELPHIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 79960757528     PISSN: 00222208     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (56)

1. Brandwein identifes the case method as signifcant for locking in the dominant account of the Waite Court's state action jurisprudence. See Pamela Brandwein, A Judicial Abandonment of Blacks? Rethinking the "State Action" Cases of the Waite Court, 41 Law & Soc'y Rev. 343, 374-375 (2007) ("So what did the case method mean for study of the Civil Rights Cases (1883) ? It meant that the decision was slated for study, isolated from legal materials crucial for understanding the Waite Court's 'state action' jurisprudence. This isolation can be seen in the very frst constitutional law casebook, the two-volume cases on Constitutional Law (1895) by Thayer.... Thayer's casebook thus exemplifes the practice of isolating the study of the Civil Rights cases."). Mark Graber, Transforming Free Speech: The Ambiguous Legacy of Civil Libertarianism (Univ. of California Press 1991). In describing the development of modern First Amendment theory, Graber highlights the pivotal role played by Harvard Law Professor Zechariah Chafee.
2. In addition to these important works, additional historical institutionalist scholarship exists analyzing other important constitutional narratives. For example, consider the analysis of the Supreme Court's decision in Lochner v. New York, 198 U. S. 45 (1905).
3. See Howard Gillman, The Constitution Besieged: The Rise and Demise of Lochner Era Police Powers Jurisprudence (Duke 1992), as well as the examination of New Deal "Switch in Time", Barry Cushman, Rethinking the New Deal Court: The Structure of a Constitutional Revolution (Oxford 1998). Evaluating the record, these historical institutionalist scholars place longstanding and dominant accounts under signifcant stress. (Pubitemid 38842826)
4. See Pamela Brandwein, Reconstructing Reconstruction: The Supreme Court and the Production of Historical Truth (Duke 1999).
5. Self-organization is a term of art commonly used to describe the collective behavior of a variety of social and physical systems. While there exist slightly varying defnitions, the term is often used to describe a system whose behavior becomes increasingly organized without being directly managed by an outside source. Examples of self-organization can be seen in physical science felds such as chemistry (molecular self-assembly), physics (spontaneous magnetization), and biology (homeostasis). Such ideas have also been invoked in the social sciences to describe focking behavior (sociology) and the behavior of markets (economics). For example, the often-quoted Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek described capitalism as a self-organizing system of voluntary cooperation. See Friedrich A. Hayek, The Use of Knowledge in Society, Am. Econ. Rev. Sept. 1945, at 519.
6. A growing literature demonstrates that various components of American law display properties consistent with a complex system. E.g., Daniel M. Katz & Derek K. Staford, Hustle and Flow: A Social Network Analysis of the American Federal Judiciary, 71 Ohio St. L. J. 457 (2010);
7. J. B. Ruhl, Law's Complexity: A Primer, 24 Ga. St. U. L. Rev. 885 (2008);
8. Bernard Trujillo, Patterns in a Complex System: An Empirical Study of Valuation in Business Bankruptcy Cases, 53 UCLA L. Rev. 357 (2005);
9. David G. Post & Michael B. Eisen, How Long is the Coastline of the Law? Thoughts on the Fractal Nature of Legal Systems, 29 J. Legal Stud. 545 (2000);
10. J. B. Ruhl, The Fitness of Law: Using Complexity Theory to Describe the Evolution of Law and Society and Its Practical Meaning for Democracy, 49 Vand. L. Rev. 1407 (1996).
11. See James H. Fowler, Bernard N. Grofman & Natalie Masuoka, Social Networks in Political Science: Hiring and Placement of PhDs, 1960-2002, PS: Pol. Sci. & Pol., Oct. 2007, at 729.
12. E.g., Thomas A. Smith, The Web of the Law, 44 San Diego L. Rev. 309 (2007);
13. Elizabeth A. Leicht, et al., Large-Scale Structure of Time Evolving Citation Networks, 59 Eur. Physical J. B. 75 (2007);
14. Daniel A. Farber, Earthquakes and Tremors in Statutory Interpretation: An Empirical Study of the Dynamics of Interpretation, 89 Minn. L. Rev. 848 (2005); Post & Eisen, supra note 5;
15. Jack Balkin, The Promise of Legal Semiotics, 69 Tex. L. Rev. 1831, 1835-36 (1991).
16. see Reka Albert & Albert-László Barabási, Emergence of Scaling in Random Networks, 286 Science 509 (1999).
17. Computational legal studies is a sub-feld dedicated to applying tools from computer science, applied physics, informatics, complex systems and applied mathematics to help enrich positive legal theory. See http:// computationallegalstudies.com/. The approaches highlighted herein are but a small slice of the wider set of available methods. Such tools include agent based modeling, network analysis, machine learning, evolutionary computation, natural language processing, and data mining. While the approaches have analogs to traditional techniques, there are important distinctions between commonly used analytical methods and a computational legal studies approach. For recent relevant work outlining the new age of "computational social science,"
18. see David Lazer, et al., Computational Social Science, 323 Science 721 (2009). A special themed issue of Science Magazine entitled "Complex Systems & Networks" was recently devoted to methods relevant to the feld.
19. See, e.g., Adrian Cho, Ourselves and Our Interactions, 325 Science 406 (2009);
20. Albert-László Barabási, Scale-Free Networks: A Decade and Beyond, 325 Science 412 (2009);
21. Carter Butts, Revisiting Foundations of Network Analysis, 325 Science 414 (2009);
22. Elinor Ostrom, A General Framework for Analyzing Sustainability of Social-Ecological Systems, 325 Science 419 (2009);
23. Alessandro Vespignani, Predicting the Behavior of Techno-Social Systems, 325 Science 425 (2009).
24. ij: m×n where a loop occurs when i = j. For relevant work on such self-loops see Ted Eisenberg & Martin Wells, Inbreeding in Law School Hiring: Assessing the Performance of Faculty Hired from Within, 29 J. of Leg. Stud. 369 (2000).
25. E.g., Richard E. Redding, "Where Did You Go to Law School?" Gatekeeping for the Professoriate and its Implications for Legal Education, 53 J. Legal Educ. 94 (2003);
26. Robert J. Borthwick & Jordan R. Schau, Gatekeepers of the Profession: An Empirical Profle of the Nation's Law Professors, 25 Mich. J. L. Reform 191 (1991);
27. Jerome A. Barron & Elyce H. Zenof, So You Want to Hire a Law Professor? 33 J. Legal Educ. 492 (1983).
28. See Katherine J. Strandburg, Gabor Csardi, Jan Tobochnik, Peter Erdi & Laszlo Zalanyi, Patent Citation Networks Revisited: Signs of a Twenty-First Century Change?, 87 N. C. L. Rev. 1657 (2009);
29. Katherine J. Strandburg, Gabor Csardi, Jan Tobochnik, Peter Erdi & Laszlo Zalanyi, Law and the Science of Networks: An Overview and an Application to the "Patent Explosion", 21 Berkeley Tech. L. J. 1293 (2007).
30. Daniel F. Spulber & Christopher S. Yoo, On the Regulation of Networks as Complex Systems: A Graph Theory Approach, 99 Nw. U. L. Rev. 1687 (2005).
31. Daniel Katz, Derek Staford & Eric Provins, Social Architecture, Judicial Peer Efects and the 'Evolution' of the Law: Toward a Positive Theory of Judicial Social Structure, 23 Ga. St. U. L. Rev. 975 (2008).
32. Michael James Bommarito II, et al., Distance Measures for Dynamic Citation Networks, 389 Physica A 4201 (2010); Smith, supra note 7.
33. See Peter Eades, A Heuristic for Graph Drawing, 42 Congressus Numerantium 149 (1984);
34. Tomishia Kamada & Satoru Kawai, An Algorithm for Drawing General Undirected Graphs, 31 Info. Processing Letters 7 (1989).
35. See supra note 6; see also Stephen Borgatti & M. G. Everett, Models of Core/Periphery Structures, Soc. Networks, 1999, at 375;
36. Michael G. Bisciglia, Scott L. Feld & Marcus Ynalvez, Why Your Department Has Placed Fewer Students Than The One That Trained You: Principles of Directed Mobility as a Consequence of In-Out Variation (La. St. U. Dep't. Soc., Working Paper, 2003).
37. To view a high quality color rendering of this image and other related supplementary materials, please visit http://computationallegalstudies.com/jle- law-prof-article/.
38. To view a high quality color rendering of this image and other related supplementary materials please visit http://computationallegalstudies.com/jle- law-prof-article/.
39. Brian Leiter, Brian Leiter's Best Law Schools for the "Best" Jobs in Law Teaching, May 25, 2006, available at http://www.leiterrankings.com/ jobs/2006job-teaching.shtml.
40. See Jefrey Stake, The Interplay Between Law School Rankings, Reputations, and Resource Allocation: Ways Rankings Mislead, 89 Ind. L. J. 229 (2006). As an example of the wider critical literature, the author ofers perhaps the most stinging indictment of the U. S. News Rankings.
41. For a useful description of the U. S. News Rankings, see Theodore P. Seto, Understanding the U. S. News Law School Rankings, 60 SMU L. Rev. 493 (2007).
42. See Stanley Wasserman & Katherine Faust, Social Network Analysis: Methods and Applications (Cambridge 1994).
43. See Jon Kleinberg, Authoritative Sources in a Hyperlinked Environment, 46 J. Ass'n Computing Machinery 668 (1999).
44. We implemented the Kleinberg algorithm in the statistical program R using the igraph package. For access to the igraph package see The Igraph Library, available at http://igraph. sourceforge.net/.
45. Aaron Clauset, M. E. J. Newman & Cosma R. Shalizi, Power-Laws Distributions in Empirical Data, 51 SIAM Review 661 (2009) (ofering a detailed description of these various distributions).
46. E.g., Joshua M. Epstein, Generative Social Science: Studies in Agent-Based Computational Modeling (Princeton 2007);
47. John H. Miller & Scott E. Page, Complex Adaptive Systems: An Introduction to Computational Models of Social Life (Princeton 2007).
48. E.g., Charles Tiebout, A Pure Theory of Local Expenditures, 64 J. Pol. Econ. 416 (1956);
49. Ken Kollman, John H. Miller & Scott Page, Political Institutions and Sorting in a Tiebout Model, 87 Am. Econ. Rev. 977 (1997). By social sorting, we are contemplating the sort of intellectual homophily generated when individuals with similar intellectual commitments gravitate to the same institution.
50. For a classic examination of the Reed-Frost model, see H. Abbey, An Examination of the Reed-Frost Theory of Epidemics, 24 Hum. Biology 201 (1952).
51. E.g., Duncan Kennedy, Legal Education and the Reproduction of Hierarchy: A Polemic Against the System (Afar 1983);
52. and Elizabeth Mertz, The Language of Law School: Learning to "Think Like a Lawyer" (Oxford 2007).
53. As we believe replication is a hallmark of the scientifc enterprise, we will happily provide our Python code upon request. A Netlogo based implementation of the model is also available in the online supplement: http://computationallegalstudies.com/jle-law-prof-article/.
54. E.g., Robert Dahl, Decision-Making in a Democracy: The Supreme Court as a National Policy-Maker, 6 J. Pub. L. 279 (1958);
55. Jefrey A. Segal & Harold J. Spaeth, The Supreme Court and the Attitudinal Model (Cambridge 1993).
56. E.g., Mark Graber, Transforming Free Speech: The Ambiguous Legacy of Civil Libertarianism (University of California 1991); and Brandwein, supra note 3 (2007).