At the same time, we seek to steep our students in the culture of the law. To be an effective and thoughtful lawyer, one must understand the forces and ideas that influence legal thought, judgment, and culture. This includes some familiarity with such disciplines as legal history, jurisprudence, economics, sociology, and political theory. We do not presume such knowledge of our entering students, but in classes, workshops, and conferences (always open to our students) our students quickly pick up interdisciplinary approaches to law.

There is much more that we do. But perhaps you can sense or have heard that our faculty pushes our students to be the best thinkers and lawyers they can be - and that both groups enjoy this pushing process. The University of Chicago Law School has been fortunate to be home to a long line of distinguished scholars. It is also home to a large group of exciting, challenging, accessible, and brilliant teachers. Our is likely the finest teaching faculty in the nation. This is not a place with tens of untested visitors in the classrooms, all convinced that their future careers depend on their research and not on their teaching. It is instead a place with devoted teachers who are also great scholars. In evaluations of courses taught here in the last two years, the students have rated 90 percent of the courses as either excellent or good and 100 percent as satisfactory. I doubt many other law schools can match those evaluations. In fact, based upon a national survey of law school students, The Princeton Review's Guide to the Best Law Schools reported that our teaching ranks first among the nation's leading law schools. We are proud of these achievements, for they have maintained and perhaps even strengthened the Law School's long-standing leadership role in the field of legal education.

Dean Saul Levmore

Research: Every few years someone produces a rather extravagant study of the scholarly productivity and impact of the faculties of American law schools. Leaving no stone unturned, these studies examine several years of publications and analyze measures of academic success ranging from the number of times faculty members are cited by other scholars to the level of productivity per faculty member. By virtually every measure, the University of Chicago Law School ranks first. Consequently, studies also place us at the top in terms of "faculty reputation" and similar characteristics. These studies hardly offer a complete picture of a great law schooland no doubt our own faculty will write articles about why these studies are flawedbut they do reflect the truth of the assertion that the University of Chicago Law School has long been, and continues to be, an unequalled producer of legal scholarship, not to mention important, provocative, and influential legal scholarship.

Why is this so, and why should a prospective student care? What is it about the University of Chicago Law School that preserves and nurtures this extraordinary tradition? The easy answer is that we have a shared conviction, passed on from one generation of faculty and students to the next, that legal scholarship is important and that it makes a difference. It is impossible to be a self-respecting member of the University of Chicago Law School faculty without being actively engaged in the scholarly enterprise. Such a consensus about the value of scholarly research is essential if the scholarly enterprise is to succeed, for original, cutting-edge scholarship is difficult, even painful work. The terror of the would-be scholar is the blank screen. One can always fill the time with committee reports, judicial opinions, and colleagues' articles, but serious scholarly work requires self-discipline, imagination, confidence, and persistence. The task is to probe, to question, and to follow a line of analysis wherever it leads. The good scholar never evades or oversimplifies.

The scholarly enterprise is most likely to thrive in a collegial environment, because the very best academic work often reflects the creator's own ideas as improved by the comments and criticisms of others. The University of Chicago Law School is unique in this regard. Whether at the faculty roundtable (a lunchtime experience every other day or so), in numerous scholarly workshops open to our students (in Criminal Justice, Law and Government, Law and Economics, Law and Philosophy, Legal Theory, and Legal History), in informal discussions in the hallways, or in constant dialogue with students, interaction and constructive criticism improves us and our work. Our whole is greater than the sum of our parts, and the result is a truly great law school.

And as for the question of why a prospective student should care about this fabulous scholarly record and atmosphere, there is a long term and a short term answer. Academic scholarship enables us to understand who we are, how we got here, and where we seem headed. It illuminates and defines our legal, political, intellectual, and social cultures. Through readers and students it plays a role in the evolution of law. Legal scholarship also strengthens legal teaching by bringing an immediacy, a freshness, and an excitement to the classroom. Interesting research makes for interesting teachers, because the productive and imaginative legal scholar is a teacher who is open to new ideas, ready to reevaluate legal doctrines, and eager to share an enthusiasm for ideas. Finally, legal scholarship plays an essential role in the evolution of the law. We hope to attract students who care about these things and who wish to be a part of the understanding as well as the practicing of law. Have a look at a list of recent faculty publications available through our website and elsewhere. If the subjects and approaches reflected in these titles interest you or provoke you, then this is likely to be a good place for you. Many areas of law have been shaped by the scholars who have worked at the University of Chicago Law School, and the same will surely be true in the future. Ours is a different and, indeed, better world because of this academic work, often fulfilled or tested in the careers of alumni who have learned in our classrooms and who take great pride in the ideas fashioned here.

Dean Saul Levmore