Penn Law Rises in the
U.S. News & World Report Rankings

The University of Pennsylvania Law School was ranked the 10th best law school in the nation according to the U.S. News & World Report’s 2002 edition of “Best Graduate Schools.” Penn Law School is the only law school in the very top tier to have risen more than one level in the rankings. It is tied with Duke Law School for the tenth position. The rankings are determined by surveying lawyers, hiring partners, senior judges, and the deans and three faculty of each of the 174 accredited law schools. The survey asks for participants’ assessments of the school’s reputation, and analyzes its selectivity (median LSAT and GPA scores of newly admitted students), placement success, and its faculty resources.


Halbertal Delivers Gruss Lectures in Talmudic Law

To kick off Academic Year 2000-2001, Moshe Halbertal, Professor of Jewish Thought and Philosophy of Hebrew University, and a Fellow at the Hartman Institute delivered the first lecture of the semester. Professor Halbertal was the year’s Caroline Zelaznik Gruss & Joseph S. Gruss Visiting Professor. The two lectures that he delivered were “Codifying Repentance: Maimonides’ Laws of Teshuva,” and “Confession and Regret in Jewish Law.” In the first lecture, Halbertal stated that “the project of addressing the past grows out of a growing sense of the politics of recognition – people want more than reconciliation. They want to be recognized.” Paging through the text, at one point Halbertal referenced the first law in Chapter Two to attempt an answer to the question, ‘What is a perfect repentance?’ It involves three parts, Halbertal explained: “First, it must be action-oriented; second, it must be character-directed; and finally, it assumes an existential posture, a movement from fear to love.” To a standing room only audience at the second lecture, “Confession and Regret in Jewish Law,” Halbertal explained that “Confession has an important role in criminal law and literature. It has become connected to notions of introspection. Some say even to the emergence of the modern self.” He addressed the connection of confession and self-incrimination: “Maimonides said there may be some self-destructive force at work when one offers a confession. There are many reasons why voluntary confessions should not be trusted – there should be some healthy suspicion about their reliability.”