Leiter Reports

Like last week’s trip back to the “basement tapes” by Leiter and Williams, this is another song whose lyric is still very timely (“Liars, liars, you’ll set this world on fire”). My favorite bit is the slide guitar that Tommy added in the arrangement.

These are non-clinical/non-LRW appointments that will take effect in summer or fall 2026 (except where noted); (new additions will be in bold.)  Last year’s list is here.  (Link fixed.) *Ted Afield (tax) from Georgia State University to Stetson University. *Yonathan Arbel (commercial law, consumer law, law & economics, AI & law) from the University of […]

…since many people couldn’t vote, but now its about to go back to that totally due to gerry-mandering. Everyone can thank the super-legislature.

These guides proliferate, of course, but this one is very detailed (maybe too detailed for the average undergraduate) and instructive for a student who wants to put in the time. (The author is Jazlyn Cartaya, a PhD student at Princeton.)

This year, the laterals list has about thirty moves, while last year there were more than 100! I assume this is an effect of the Trump war on universities, and the funding uncertainties it created, so that there was less money for hires. Professor Lawsky’s spreadsheet shows about 50 rookie hires as of now, but […]

Longtime reader Kyle Noll, an Associate Professor at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, writes about his interest in online opportunities for learning more about logic: For background, I majored in philosophy and completed a couple of undergraduate courses in FOL and ZF set theory (by your old colleagues at UT in the […]

…gutting the Voting Rights Act–one of the most decent and successful pieces of legislation aimed at counteracting the sorry history of American apartheid–on the basis of a “race neutrality” detached from reality may be among the worst. Justice Kagan’s dissent makes a lot of the correct points. What a disgrace. UPDATE: A useful critique by […]

The 2026 Academic Freedom Index documents it clearly: Of course, there are differences between private and public universities in the U.S. in terms of the collapse of academic freedom, and also differences among public schools depending on whether they are in “blue” or “red” states. One might quibble with aspects of how the report characterizes […]

Capitalist ideologists love per capita GDP, and it inevitably comes up in discussions of the economies of Canada and the U.S. This essay makes some important points (including that most of the higher per capita GDP in the U.S. is due to greater wealth inequality and to Americans having to work about three weeks more […]

…in May 2026 (not January 2027 as the website still says), with new essays by Hasan Dindjer (Oxford), Amanda Greene (UC Santa Barbara), Gabe Mendlow (Michigan), Sophia Moreau (NYU), James Penner (NUS), Ralf Poscher (Freiburg), Sabine Tsuruda (Toronto), and Daniel Viehoff (Berkeley), and covering a wide range of topics in general and normative (or specific) […]

…despite the opposition of a “substantial majority” of the faculty. Oddly, a Kentucky spokesperson suggests that the judge’s opinions constitute his record of “scholarship.”

In addition to the separate posts announcing (generally tenured) faculty moves, I will keep a running list of all lateral moves (and retirements and deaths) not reflected in the faculty lists for the 2024 PGR (some moves that took place after the 2024 PGR were reflected in the faculty list, because the editors knew of […]

Philosopher Sam Baron (Melbourne) discusses. As always, I’m interested to hear what the philosophers of physics make of a bold claim like this.

They are: Julia Driver (UT Austin), Melissa Lane (Politics, Princeton), Jane Maienschein (Arizona State), Paolo Mancosu (Berkeley), James Weatherall (UC Irvine), David Wong (Duke), Gideon Yaffe (Law, Yale), and Lea Ypi (LSE).

They are: William Baude (Chicago), Alison LaCroix (Chicago), Angela Riley (UCLA), Elizabeth Scott (Columbia, emerita), Patricia Williams (Northeastern), and Gideon Yaffe (Yale [elected in the “Philosophy” section]).

Pathetic. Public universities can’t do anything when their legislatures create institutes and schools for the purpose of hiring right-wing faculty. But Harvard departments will need to stand firm in what looks to be massive push for affirmative action for faculty with the right “politics” but not the right scholarly bona fides to be appointed on […]

Here. Mr. Edsall notes many lives that have been or will be loss because of his policies, without even mentioning the many victims of his reckless use of U.S. military power, most recently, in Iran. UPDATE: And more on the most corrupt President in the history of the U.S.