Lawyerly characteristics of American law students

 The Americans With Disabilities Act requires schools to make accommodations for students whose disabilities require extra time for completing exams.  Apparently such disabilities are common among law students: over a third of law students at Pepperdine require extra time, according to this article:

How Cheating Spreads at Law Schools.  Noah Werksman asked why so many peers got extra time on tests. Pepperdine accused him of bullying.   By Jillian Lederman 

"Law schools don’t disclose their rates of accommodations, but a 2023 Oregon Law Review paper reports data on public law schools obtained through state public-records laws. As of 2021—before the post-Covid rise in disability accommodations—the accommodations rates were 21.3% at the University of California, Hastings (now UC Law San Francisco) and 25.5% at UC Irvine. Private law schools like Pepperdine aren’t subject to public-records laws.

The Law School Admissions Council reports that only 12% of first-year law students nationwide said they had a mental or physical disability in 2023, suggesting that many students who don’t need accommodations are using them to get a leg up. The California Bar Exam’s accommodations rate, by contrast, is around 7%.
...

"students at the school told me it’s common knowledge that the accommodations system is easy to manipulate. 

...

"That has consequences. Law students are assessed on a highly competitive curve. Not only do grades determine job prospects, but at many law schools students receive conditional scholarships that can be reduced or revoked if their grade point averages fall in the bottom 20%, or even the lower half, of the class. Pepperdine students say many of their classmates who ranked near the top of the class, made it onto the law review, and secured competitive jobs at major law firms received extended time on tests. The university denied that students with disabilities are disproportionately represented in these groups."

#####

Of course, needing extra time may not be a disadvantage in a profession that bills by the hour.

Coffee and science at Stanford

 Julio Elias is welcomed home by the Universidad del CEMA after a great visit to Stanford.

Julio Elías, Director del MAE, fue Tinker Visiting Professor en Stanford University [Julio Elías, Director of the MAE, was Tinker Visiting Professor at Stanford University]

Featured in the story is this photo of Stanford's weekly market design coffee.

Workshop in Memory of YingHua He, July 7-8

 The Paris School of Economics, the Center for Economic and Statistical Research, and the Toulouse School of Economics are organizing a Workshop in Memory of YingHua He , July 7-8, in Paris and online.

The academic program, for July 7-8 is here:

July 7

09:00-10:30 – Session 1

• Bernard Salanié (Columbia University in the City of New York)
  Empirical Methods for Matching with Transferable Utility: A Progress Report
  With Pierre-André Chiappori and Linh Nguyen
• Hessel Oosterbeek (University of Amsterdam)
  Using principal stratification to analyze repeated treatment assignment
  With Nadine Ketel, Edwin Leuven and Bas van der Klaauw

10:30-11:00 – Coffee break

11:00-12:30 – Session 2

• Marek Pycia (University of Zurich)
  Ordinal and Cardinal Allocation Mechanisms: A Progress Report
• Antonio Miralles (Università degli Studi di Messina)
  Within Public School Segregation: A Simple Model and an Application to Italian Schools

12:30-14:00 – Lunch

14:00-15:30 – Session 3

• Arnaud Maurel (Duke University)
  Sequential College Admission Mechanisms and Off-Platform Options
  With Olivier De Groote, Anaïs Fabre and Margaux Luflade
• Chao Fu (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
  Information, Match Quality, and Priority Rules in Student-School Assignment
  With Dong Woo Hahm and Minseon Park

15:30-16:00 – Coffee break

16:00-17:30 – Session 4

• Dorothea Kübler (WZB Berlin Social Science Center)
  Fairness in Matching Markets: Experimental Evidence
  With Tobias König (Lydia Mechtenberg)
• Yan Chen (University of Michigan)
  Social Media and Job Market Success: A Field Experiment on Twitter
  With Jingyi Qiu (University of Michigan), Alain Cohn (University of Michigan) and Alvin Roth (Stanford University)
  

 July 8:

8:30-09:00 – Welcoming coffee

09:00-10:30 – Session 5

• Shruti Sinha (Amazon)
  Identification and estimation in many-to-one two-sided matching without transfers
  With YingHua He (Rice) and Xiaoting Sun (Simon Fraser University)
• Estelle Cantillon (Université Libre de Bruxelles)
  Modifying priorities for more equitable outcomes in England
  With Simon Burgess (Bristol), Mariagrazia Cavallo (University of Luxembourg) and Ellen Greaves (Exeter)

10:30-11:00 – Coffee break

11:00-12:30 – Session 6

• Olivier De Groote (TSE)
  Matching disadvantaged children to day care: Evidence from a centralized platform
  With Minyoung Rho
• Fuhito Kojima (The University of Tokyo)
  How to Integrate Fragmented Matching Markets for Welfare Improvement

12:30-14:00 – Lunch

####### 

 Yinghua died on July 2, 2024. May his memory be a blessing.

Thursday, July 4, 2024 YingHua He 何 英华 has died.

Mark Granovetter retires

 Mark Granovetter's retirement from the Stanford Sociology department was celebrated yesterday with a meal and many toasts.  Two pictures will give you the idea:

The one below compares Mark's citations with Marx (Karl) and Max (Weber): the 3M's in sociology :)

Universities under attack, in Israel and the U.S., by warfare and lawfare

Both the U.S. and Israel have distinguished universities, some older than the country in which they sit.

Both have universities that have recently been under attack from their enemies.

 Two stories:

This, from Haaretz:

'We Were Targeted': Iran Put Israel's Scientific Research High on Their Kill List  by Gid'on Lev and Noa Limone

“Even before the war with Iran, Israeli universities and research institutes were suffering their two toughest years ever. Hundreds of faculty members and students were killed or wounded in Gaza, while tens of thousands were diverted from their studies and research by reserve duty, or were forced to leave their homes near Gaza or the Lebanese border. 

"Compounding this were the government's efforts to curb academic freedom – and then the 12-day war with Iran raised the bar to a record high. "For the first time, we were really targeted," says the chairman of the Association of University Heads, Prof. Daniel Chamovitz. 

“This began with a direct hit on the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot southeast of Tel Aviv, and continued with two strikes on Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in the south. A week ago, Iranian missiles damaged Tel Aviv University, and during the war Tehran put out a warning suggesting it was targeting the Technion.”

####

And this, from the NYT (one of many):

Trump Administration Finds Harvard Violated Civil Rights Law  By Michael C. Bender and Alan Blinder

Dog walking (and driving with dogs) in Iran

As we wait to see if the Israel-Iran cease fire will hold, we can hope that the new normal will become better than the old normal, in both Israel and Iran, in so many ways.

 Here's some  not-so-urgent Middle East news from the NYT (just before the latest outbreak of hostilities) that gave some idea of what was on the minds of authorities in Iran when relative peace prevailed.

‘Dog Walking Is a Clear Crime’: Iran’s Latest Morality Push
The government regards pet dogs as a sign of Western cultural influence. They are also considered impure, in Islam. Now there is a crackdown.  By Amelia Nierenberg and Leily Nikounazar  June 9, 2025

"When Iran banned dog walking in 2019, few dog owners were all that worried about the order. But after years of lax enforcement, officials in recent days have pledged to crack down, according to the state news media.

Prosecutors in at least 20 cities cited public health risks and threats to public safety in announcing the heightened enforcement of the bans, which include both dog walking and driving with dogs.

“Dog walking is a clear crime,” Mohammad Hossein Doroudi, the prosecutor in Mashhad, told reporters on Monday as he announced that city’s plan,  according to IRNA, a state-owned news outlet. "

Harvard's finances (Endowment, expenses, revenue by school)

 Harvard Magazine has a collection of stories related to Harvard's ongoing battle with the Trump administration:  Harvard in the Crosshairs

Here's the introduction to the collection:

The Standoff: Harvard’s Future in the Balance
Introducing a guide to the issues, players, and stakes.  

 Here's a look at Harvard's finances:

Harvard’s Standoff: The Financial Stakes. Putting Harvard’s $53 billion endowment into perspective
by Jonathan Shaw

 "Harvard’s $53.2-billion endowment might sound limitless, but not when compared to the University’s annual expenses: $6.5 billion. If Harvard relied entirely on the endowment to fund its operations (ignoring investment returns), the total would be depleted in a little more than eight years. Nor does the endowment seem large when considering that it is not a single pot of money but 14,600 separate funds. Eighty percent of those funds are restricted to specific uses defined by the original donor. And most belong not to the Harvard president, but to the individual schools, which maintain separate budgets under a principle known as “every tub on its own bottom.”

Harvard, if taxed on endowment investment gains at the 21.4 percent rate discussed in Congress in May, would pay about $850 million annually on an average investment gain of 7.5 percent. That sum is greater than Harvard’s total federal support for research in fiscal year 2024 ($686 million, now frozen) and larger than the last fiscal year’s $525 million in annual gifts for current use. But even philanthropic sources of income would likely diminish if the tax treatment of donations were to change. And while the loss of federal grants and contracts would cost the University about $2.2 billion over the next five years (the typical length of a federal grant), taxing the endowment would result in lost income of more than $4.25 billion by the end of that period—combined blows from which the country’s premier academic research institution might not recover, scientists say."

 

Endowment (2024)

Operating expenses (2024)

Revenue by school (2024)