NYU Law Is The Place To Be

In what looks like another coup for NYU Law, it was announced this week that visiting professor Richard A. Epstein will be making a permanent move from Chicago to New York. From NYU Law's website:

Professor Richard Epstein, the James Parker Hall Distinguished Service Professor of Law at the University of Chicago, will join NYU School of Law as a permanent member of the faculty in Fall 2010.

Epstein, who is currently visiting the Law School for the fourth time, is considered to be one of the most influential thinkers in legal academia. He is well known for his research and writings on a broad range of constitutional, economic, historical, and philosophical subjects

'I am honored to be able to join the NYU faculty whose collegiality and seriousness of purpose has been evident to me since I first started visiting at NYU four years ago,' Epstein said.

It's sad to see Chicago Law lose another libertarian thinker in its continuing metamorphosis from a bastion of conservative thought into one that teaches "Law and Poverty or other made up stuff" (This is Scalia talking ... I'm really just trying to fit this in the post and still think Chicago is a hell of a school).

In any case, NYU has made a habit out of coaxing great professors away from other prestigious schools lately. They don't kid around either. Columbia lost Catherine Sharkey to us after NYU sweetened the move downtown with a bad ass $4.2 million dollar floor of a turreted apartment complex near the park. Some other notables include Arthur Miller from Harvard (many believe he is the inspiration for Scott Turow's Perini in One L), Estlund from Texas (now working on the NLRB Obama transition), Hills from Michigan, and now Epstein from Chicago.

Maybe Epstein's move is a signal that NYU is moving in a new direction; away from that which made me name my blog after a shitty Gene Hackman movie.

Naming Epstein as my hero in a previous post and creating three articles in as many weeks about him may make some of my readers think I have turned into a fanboy of the man; and maybe you're right - I'll try to restrain myself from now on. But in any event, I'm glad he's staying at NYU ... we need at least a smidgen of libertarianism here in the Village.