Alright, I've had a few days, engaged in some venting subtweets, and it's time for some thoughts on Penn Law's renaming gift.

1/

At the bottom, this is an unrestricted gift of a huge sum of present $$ from a foundation that has historically engaged in continuing and more generous partnerships with its donees.

So, as a transaction, it's a net win for generations of humans who work and study at Penn.

Having a buffer is a big win for Penn's stability. The future is unknown, but I doubt it will be kind to law schools or the profession. I'd short our collective debt.

This sum will give future administrators room to maneuver, and benefit the students and faculty accordingly.

Unlike @OrinKerr, I'm not fussed about naming schools in general. We were all unnamed once.

My guess that law schools will increasingly be renamed in the next decade+ as financial pressures make tuition-only-models unsustainable.

Will Yale Law regret not taking the rumored $500M it was offered? Probably not. But there will be a number. So, basically, objections to naming alone are a depreciating argument.

In that likely future, it seems obvious that it's a huge advantage to get a gift from a foundation as compared to a living or dead donor who puts restrictions on uses or requires constant reassurance.

Carey seems like an especially reasonable and thoughtful group.

Finally, and I think this has to be said explicitly, even though I'm not sure how it will come off.

I spent most of my career at an amazing institution ( @TempleLaw) that was like Penn every way except in that it was significantly more resource-constrained.

As a result of that history, I tend to think that all of the measures of quality that people put out there ("fancy", "elite," "national reputation," "scholarly," "T14") really just mean "wealthy." (Literally, USNWR is driven largely by differences in spending!)

Any opportunity to have a big gift is one that reinforces the existing tilt of the world, and the recipients of that privilege are a bit badly placed to complain that the arc of the moral universe doesn't bend even more toward them!

Faculty in particular are badly positioned to complain. We've got insanely privileged jobs, and the status competition we engage in has almost no real stakes.

Of course some of our students are paying enormous sums to be a part of this rich community, and the big worry is that gift somehow will make it so that they don't get what they bargained for.

So let's talk about that.

First, the law school has done a terrible, no good, job of communicating what the plan is for the money, which means that the message to the world has been that we sold our name for $125M. Not only is that not a positive message, it might reflect an underlying truth.

I hope that we quickly say some substantive things -- even if they aren't fully-fleshed-out about the particular ways we imagine growing/building/supporting differently. The answer can't be that we're going to go from super-rich to super-richer without changing anything.

Second, the law school has done a terrible, no good, job of managing the last few days of rollout. Just operationally very bad.

I am grateful that the students who run @pennlaw and @pennlawadmiss have been mostly kind to us so far.

Third, the school needs to solve some of the optics stuff -- e.g. what should the short name be?

As someone pointed out, "Penn Law" itself was a rebranding from the late 1990s.

I think Penn's Carey School of Law is fine, but am sure there are even better options.

I do think "Penn" should be in the short name, but mostly because there is another Carey School of Law very close by. It's not fair to them (or the market) to have confusion.

Just fwiw, as we live in an incredibly status-focused field, the optics aren't a trivial problem. But they are a short run one if corrections can be made.

The biggest thing that troubles me - and that I don't know how I feel about - is opportunity costs. Look, 125M is a lot of money. But I am sure there are many out there who think that you don't sell an old, rich, law school's name for "that little."

Selling today means you can't sell for more tomorrow. And I'm sure that there will be a bigger gift in the near future which will make us think, "if only we'd waited."

At some point, though, I'm just a faculty member. I'm not on the inside of these discussions. I have to trust that Penn's administration thought about this opportunity cost question really carefully.

What I'd like to see on social media and in the world is a more robust defense of this transaction as one that will clearly benefit the Law School's many stakeholders. As I've suggested above, I think there are many good stories to tell.

We just got an enormous sum of money to hire new faculty, significantly reduce tuition, and build out our engagement with the broader world. Let's do those things.

I have colleagues here whose visions to make the world better, to make Penn serve the world as well as produce amazing lawyers, simply need infusions of resources -- @DorothyERoberts, my friends @QuattroneCenter, @NatashaRSarin, @MaggieBlackhawk, @TheRegReview, etc.

When I think about what's possible, I think about what they will be able to do.

(Also, I want to buy some databases for my leases project, to be perfectly fair.)

Or, at the very, very, least, let's spend money to correct the law school temperature. It's either boiling hot or incredibly cold every day. Today it's freezing.

How about burning cash to fix that problem? @Pennlaw, what do you think? @careylawupenn, care to chime in?