The Big
How to Get a Job in Law Teaching
by Brad Wendel, survivor of the teaching market
Students often ask me, perhaps because I'm a relatively
recent entrant into the teaching profession myself, how they can become law professors.
Here are my responses to some of the most frequently asked questions, as well
as some questions I wish students would ask. They are based on
observation, "conventional wisdom," conversations with many people,
and my personal experience as a graduate student in law, a candidate for
teaching jobs, and a member of a law school appointments committee. Of
course, every rule I state has an exception, and there are plenty of people in
law teaching whose careers seem to defy the advice I am about to give.
Please accordingly understand these comments as advice for the risk-averse,
based on playing the odds, not what is certain to work in all cases. If
you want a second or third opinion, check out some of the on-line resources
linked below. I think you'll find that
my perspective is roughly in accord with that expressed by others. (Now that Brian Leiter
has linked
to this page and sparked a discussion about it in the blogosphere,
I guess I have to take it a bit more seriously.
Just for the record, I don’t hold myself out as a guru of law
teaching – that’s Leiter’s job
– and this page has always been intended as a lighthearted, but I hope
basically accurate, overview of the teaching market. So please don’t take anything on this
page as the gospel truth, at least not without cross-checking all of the other
resources linked from it.)
You may find the
tenor of this advice somewhat negative. I do not want to discourage
anyone from entering law teaching – it's the best job in the world, a
loophole in life, as one of my professors termed it – but it's important
that everyone have realistic expectations about the market and the hiring
process. Better to be pleasantly surprised about the outcome than to be
deluded into thinking that getting a faculty position is easy. It also
may be a bit flippant in places. Law teaching is a serious, important
business, but paradoxically it's important not to take it too seriously.
There is something hilarious (if pathetic) about the Meat Market, with hundreds
of panicky applicants in their Brooks Brothers suits elbowing their way onto
crowded elevators, desperately searching for the room for the University of
North Central West Dakota, and appointments committee members pompously
expounding their own views about the candidate's lifetime of research into the
sexual behavior of bees, and its application to antitrust law. I learned
to laugh about this process with the help of my friend (and fellow teaching
applicant) Mark and a few pints of Guinness. Do try to find something to
help keep things in perspective. Here is
one
successful candidate’s attempt, analogizing himself to a steak and a
house. Whatever works for you.
Second
opinions. Don’t just take it
from me. There are some aspects of the
hiring process that can be objectively quantified, like the data on the JD
school of successful candidates (see below).
But other aspects are matters of taste or interpretation, so you should
read the accounts of others on the hiring side and attempt to synthesize your
own perspective on the market:
(1) Websites: There is an article about the faculty
appointments process from the Journal of Legal Education posted on the
Association of American Law Schools (AALS) web site.
Brian Leiter has long maintained a site for University of Texas
students interested in law teaching.
Another good
resource is the TeachLaw site maintained by Jack Chin at the
LawCrossing has a two-part article on becoming a law professor –
Part 1, Part 2.
For
“official” sources of information see the overview on
the teaching market from the Columbia Law School career services office
(part of an under-construction
site on law teaching careers); and a lengthy (46 pages of a PDF file) guide
prepared by the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University,
entitled Law School and
Beyond: The IHS Guide to Careers in Legal Academia. The last
resource is a bit too long for a quick skim, but it has an in-depth discussion
of many of the issues that concern prospective teachers (for what it’s
worth the advice is “fair and balanced” in the Fox News sense).
Finally, Eric
Goldman, at
(2) Blogs: As law professors have increasingly taken to
the blogosphere, a number have posted insightful
comments about the hiring process: Volokh
Conspiracy (multiple posts); Gordon Smith (Wisconsin), So You Want to Be a
Law Professor? Part I, Part II,
Part III,
Part IV,
Part V;
Eric Goldman, Part
1, Part
2, Part
3, Part
4; Michael Froomkin (
My apologies if
these links are not current; in the future I hope to follow up on an excellent
suggestion and maintain copies of these postings on-site, as a kind of
permanent archive of law teaching-related wisdom.
Q: What kind of credentials does it take to get
a teaching job?
A: The classic resume of a teaching candidate generally has the
following:
(1) J.D.
from one of the 15 or so law schools that can claim to be a prominent national
school: Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Chicago, Columbia, Michigan, NYU,
Berkeley, Virginia, Duke, Penn, Cornell, Georgetown, Northwestern, Texas, and
UCLA. A substantial percentage of plausible teaching candidates comes
from only 4 schools – Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and Chicago -- with a few
more from
If you prefer data to my unscientific
hunches, Brian Leiter has an exhaustively researched
study of the J.D.
schools of all tenure-track law faculty. The study shows that 1/3 of
tenure-track faculty have J.D.'s from Yale, Harvard, or Stanford; the rest of
the top producers of law teachers (in descending order) are Chicago, Michigan,
Columbia, Berkeley, Virginia, NYU, Cornell, Duke, Georgetown, Penn, and Texas;
and a few people get jobs coming out of UCLA, Vanderbilt, USC, Minnesota, and
Wisconsin. The study was updated for
2006, and confirms Yale, Harvard, Chicago, and Stanford as the top
producers. Larry Solum’s
blog features a list of entry-level
tenure track faculty hired in the 2003-04 academic year, which also shows
the J.D. schools and graduate degrees (if any) of new hires. (See this update
for 2004-05 and this update
for 2005-06.) Not particularly
surprisingly, Solum's research shows Harvard, Yale,
and Stanford dominating the J.D. credentials of last year's entry-level
hires. Leiter has aggregated Solum’s
data for the past two years, which reveals that the top 10 producers of law
teachers (in descending order) are Harvard, Yale, Stanford,
Be aware that law schools can be pretty
snooty about your undergraduate record, too, although it is much less important
than your J.D. school. It does help to have a B.A. from an
"elite" institution. Some
readers have quibbled with me on this, and I admit that a candidate's
undergraduate school is pretty low down the list in terms of importance. Still, I've heard many people described in
appointments committee and faculty meetings, and a B.A. from
(2) High
class standing, with "high" understood on a sliding scale – the
better the ranking of the law school, the farther down into the class a
candidate may be. Even at the best school, though, anything out of the
top 25% is deadly. At the "prominent national schools" listed
above, you should aim to be in the top 5% to be competitive.
(3) Law
review service, along with publication of a student note. If you are
still in law school and thinking of teaching, you should angle for one of the
board positions on law review, such as articles editor or editor-in-chief. I've recently been informed that law review
is not really a "must" from the very top law schools, as long as a
candidate has a record of publication and strong recommendations. That would make sense, since all of these
credentials are useful only insofar as they serve as a proxy for scholarly
potential. A published article is a much
better proxy for future success than two years of unpaid drudgery on law
review.
(4) A
judicial clerkship on a federal appellate court or one of the more prestigious
district courts. Clerking for the U.S. Supreme Court is practically a sure-fire
way to be a player on the teaching market, in part because it requires #1
through #3 to be satisfied.
(5) A couple
of years of practice experience, often at one of the top firms in
(6) Increasingly,
teaching candidates must have at least one post-law school publication (i.e.
not a student note) published in an academic law review, not a publication
intended primarily for practitioners. At one time this was considered
icing on the cake. Now, at the better schools, it's becoming a de
facto requirement for serious consideration.
(7) Recommendations
from faculty members (as opposed to judges or law firm partners) who are
familiar with your scholarly agenda and potential to make an impact on your
chosen field. It helps if your referees
are big names, but it helps even more if they are willing to work the phone and
contact their friends on your behalf.
See Gordon Smith's blog posting, and this
follow-up for another (quite similar) perspective.
Q: That pretty much rules me out.
A: Like I said, that's the classic model. There are other ways
to get into law teaching, but you have to understand that you are working
against the odds. There will be hundreds of people on the market who have
the classic resume, so you have to really distinguish yourself from the pack.
Q: You're kidding about this, right?
A: If you don't believe me, do the Wendel Test. I always
recommend that teaching candidates demonstrate for themselves how ferocious the
market is. The Wendel Test is simple. Go to the Web site of the
Association of American Law Schools (AALS, about which more later),
specifically their list of member
schools. Now, scroll down through that list and find the
goofiest-sounding law school you've never heard of – the kind of place
you'd sort of snicker if you told people you worked there. Go to the
page, which they're sure to have, listing their faculty profiles or bios.
Look around until you find a relatively recent hire – they'll have the
title of assistant or associate professor. (More senior faculty may have
been hired when the market wasn't nearly so competitive.) Read his or her
bio. I'll bet you dollars to donuts that their resume resembles the
classic pattern described above and is probably even scarier.
Q: Aren't these all the things that teachers
and advisors are always telling me not to worry about?
A: Yes, if you had ambitions other than working at a huge firm in
Q: Why are law schools so fixated on prestige?
A: Simple microeconomics – supply and demand. Think
about why you want to go into law teaching. It is intellectually
challenging, you work with smart people all day, you have a tremendous degree
of autonomy regarding the subject matter of your research as well as your daily
life, the money and benefits are decent, job security is unbeatable once you
have tenure, there's a fairly high level of social esteem for law professors,
there are no partners screaming at you or telling you not to go hiking this
weekend because you have to stay around and write some ridiculous motion for a
case that is going to settle anyway, and – most importantly – you
get paid to do something cool, namely read about, talk about, and write about
interesting ideas. Now, think about how many other people have
gone through the same mental calculus. That's your competition.
Schools have to weed out applicants somehow, so the first cut they make through
the huge stack of resumes they receive is based on relatively easy-to-quantify
factors such as one's J.D. school and the presence or lack of a federal
clerkship. Appointments committees screen 500-600 resumes in a few
weeks in the fall. Although people try hard not to overlook candidates
with nontraditional credentials, it's awfully easy to look only at the
Harvard/Yale JDs with appellate clerkships, a couple of published articles in
good journals, and references from heavy-hitter professors. Even that
pool contains dozens of candidates. Fairly or not, your resume is likely
to get skipped over if it deviates too much from the classic model.
In an ideal world, appointments committees
would not have to rely on proxies for the one thing they care most about
– promise as a scholar (see below) – and would somehow be able to
measure it directly. But of course there
is no way to directly measure scholarly promise, so traditionally committees
rely on pedigree (fancy school, law review, clerkship) as an indirect
measure. In an interesting post on the
Conglomerate blog, Bill Henderson argues that a rational
committee ought to play “Moneyball”
(as in the book by Michael Lewis) by seeking out candidates who have been
undervalued by the market, but who have indicia of scholarly promise. Although the evidence is somewhat weak, there
are signs that the key indicator of scholarly promise is a record of pre-hiring
publication. I’ve been saying for
a long time that the three most important things an aspiring law professor can
do is publish, publish, publish. As some
comments on the Moneyball post indicate, many
committees are still hung up on pedigree, so that a Yale JD, law review,
Supreme Court clerk would get vastly more interviews than a “mere”
top-15 law school JD with several publications.
This is by no means universal, however, and an increasing number of
committees seems to be using the Moneyball technique
to gain an edge in hiring.
Q: Does getting an LL.M. help?
A: Yes and no. I've heard a lot of people say that an LL.M.
from a top 10 school can "validate" you for the teaching market,
notwithstanding your J.D. school. I actually think it's only the Yale
LL.M. program that has this magical quality. Other LL.M. programs –
even at top schools like Harvard and Columbia – don't do it as well,
although there's certainly no harm in getting a Harvard or Columbia LL.M.
There's really a self-selection process going on here. Yale's program is
very small – they only take 8 or so Americans each year – so it's
insanely competitive. Only people who are likely to do well on the teaching
market anyway are able to get into Yale. Correlation does not imply
causation; it's not the Yale LL.M. that lands these folks teaching jobs, it's
the credentials they had going into graduate school. On the other hand,
I've seen a number of resumes from people who have decidedly mediocre records
at mid-rank law schools and an LL.M. from a top-10 law school. In those
cases, I'd say the LL.M. did not make the candidate significantly more
marketable.
The exception to this generalization is that
if you can use your time in an LL.M. or J.S.D. (the law equivalent of a Ph.D.,
also called an S.J.D. at some schools) program to get some writing done, the
program may be very helpful to you. Again, it's not the graduate degree
itself that is helpful, but the papers you get published. Thus, if you
can find an LL.M. or J.S.D. program that is not primarily coursework-based, you
should favor it over one which involves just taking more classes. The
Yale, Stanford, Harvard, and Columbia J.S.D. programs have a good track record
for producing law teachers. There are also fellowship programs,
like the Bigelow Fellowship at Chicago and the Associate in Law program at
VAP Programs. Two schools
have recently started programs designed specifically to give prospective law
teachers the time, support, and mentoring they need to develop a research
agenda and publish articles. The
stipends, support levels, and teaching loads sound extremely generous. If the schools are committed to the
flourishing of these programs, there should be sufficient formal and informal
contact with full-time faculty, which will be essential for people who do these
fellowships. The programs are the Visiting
Assistant Professor (VAP) program at Northwestern and the Emerging
Scholars Program (ESP) at the
Lior Strahilevitz of Chicago
has recently posted a comment
at PrawsBlawg, to the effect that a savvy
candidate positioning herself to go on the market would be well advised to
consider one of these postdoc-type fellowships. Spending some time as a VAP or teaching
fellow allows a candidate to develop a paper trail, which in turn reassures
potential hiring schools that the candidate will not become unproductive and
either require an ugly tenure denial or become “deadwood” (his
term) post-tenure.
Q: What about Ph.Ds
in other disciplines?
A: When I first put up this site several years ago, I said that
having a Ph.D. didn’t help much.
In a few years’ time, however, that advice has become
outdated. (A commentator
on Leiter’s site recently stated that I
substantially under-value Ph.D.’s in entry-level hiring.) So let me state what seems to be the new
conventional wisdom: There are some
areas in which it is becoming almost impossible to get a job at a top national
law school without a Ph.D. in a relevant discipline. The clearest example of this phenomenon is in
the corporate area. Most newly hired
corporate law professors, at least in top-tier schools, have a Ph.D. in either
economics or a social science discipline that emphasizes rigorous empirical
methodologies. Almost every paper
published recently in the corporate area in a top student-edited or
peer-reviewed law journal reflects graduate-level training in empirical social
science methods. In addition, it has
always been true that jurisprudence positions at top-tier schools require a
Ph.D. in philosophy, but these positions are so rarely open that the
requirement of a Ph.D. here might have been regarded as anomalous. One caveat is in order: There is a difference between two types of
candidates: (1) those with outstanding
J.D. credentials and a Ph.D. in a closely related field (such as economics,
psychology, philosophy) who are being advised by scholars at top law schools
and who will be competitive as entry-level hires at top law schools; and (2)
those whose J.D. credentials don’t satisfy the classical model, who are
thinking about using a Ph.D. to burnish their law school records. My original comment that Ph.D.’s weren’t
all that important probably reflected my experience of talking mostly to
candidates in category #2. Now that
I’m seeing more category #1 candidates, I take the commentator’s
point. Also, I never really intended
this website for candidates who are obviously bound for glory – people
who are near the top of their class at Yale or Chicago, clerking on the Supreme
Court, and being actively groomed for the market by nationally well known
scholars. Instead, I was writing for the
students who aren’t obviously being fast-tracked toward an academic
position and who are bewildered by the whole process. Those folks are less likely to have a tightly
integrated research agenda in which their Ph.D. work will be directly relevant
to their career as legal scholars. In
the hot-shot segment of the entry-level market, however, there is a pronounced
trend toward requiring Ph.D.’s in closely related disciplines.
For a bit of (now somewhat outdated)
anecdotal evidence, I attended a workshop for junior faculty – i.e.
untenured recent hires on law faculties – and of the 16 presenters
(selected by a blind peer-review process), 7 had Ph.D.'s in other disciplines
(4 economics, 1 English, 1 sociology, 1 history), 3 had J.S.D.'s,
1 had an LL.M. in tax, and 1 had an M.B.A. That leaves only 4 whose only
graduate degree was a J.D. Significantly, the people with other graduate
degrees also had J.D.'s from excellent schools, along with the usual
accoutrements of law review, clerkships, and so on. From this, I think
it's fair to conclude that (1) a substantial majority of the newly minted law
professors who are judged to be doing interesting work by senior scholars in
their fields have come to legal education with some graduate training beyond
the J.D. and (2) additional graduate degrees do not make up for a crummy J.D.
record, but are icing on the cake.
See this post
on PrawfsBlawg and the voluminous comments for
additional perspectives on this question.
Q: Does it make a difference what subject I want
to teach?
A: It can. Subject areas are like law teaching generally
– if something sounds really cool to you, it probably sounds cool to
other people. Many prospective law teachers enjoyed constitutional law
for the intellectual stimulation, theoretical content, and engagement with the
"big issues." As a result, everyone and her cousin wants to
teach con law. On the other side of the fence, there are only 2 or 3
sections of con law taught each year, not including specialized seminars.
Chances are, those slots are filled, and there are existing faculty members
plotting behind the scenes to take over one of the con law slots.
International law is the same way. It sounds interesting, and as an added
bonus you get to travel to conferences in places like
It's a different situation in some of the
seemingly lowly, workaday subjects that all law schools offer, such as corporations,
commercial law, bankruptcy (and debtor-creditor law), remedies, and tax.
These are actually fascinating subjects, and people can get pretty passionate
about them, but many prospective law teachers shy away from them.
Consider the law school's perspective, though. Students demand that these
courses be taught, and many of the candidates for teaching positions are
clamoring to teach con law. If you have a genuine interest in one of
these subjects, particularly if you can combine practice-related experience
with an interesting theoretical or interdisciplinary approach to the field, you
could have a real leg up on the market. Keep an eye on the AALS Placement
Bulletin (see below) for a rough idea of what schools are looking for in any given
year. If I had to generalize, though,
I’d say that business organizations, corporations, securities regulation,
commercial, tax, and bankruptcy have been consistently strong on the demand
side for the past few years.
Thinking about what you want to teach should
obviously be linked with thinking about your scholarly agenda. Although
you are perfectly free to write on a subject you never teach, the synergy
between classroom teaching and writing will improve your scholarship
tremendously. You should be aware, however, that some subjects have
dominant methodologies in which you must be conversant to do any serious
scholarship in that area. Torts, antitrust, corporate law and
intellectual property have been colonized by the law and economics movement,
and it would be difficult to publish work that gets noticed in one of those
fields without either working in law and economics, or mounting a sustained
critique of the law and economics paradigm. (The situation in corporate
law may be changing; I’m told by people in the field that most serious
work is now heavily based on empirical methods, even if economic analysis still
plays a substantial role.) Other fields,
such as con law and criminal law, are more ecumenical, although it may be the
case that the big shots within the discipline are all reading the same books
and fighting about the same problems. The result can be stagnant
scholarship, and you may have an opportunity to shake things up by taking a
different perspective, but you will still need to be sufficiently familiar with
the dominant methodology that you can intelligently address its strengths and
deficiencies.
Ideally your teaching and scholarly
interests (and practice experience, if applicable) form a coherent package, encompassing several core
first-year and upperclass courses. An example might be corporations and business
associations (agency and partnership), securities law, contracts, with a
research interest in law & economics or empirical studies of corporate law. Or, a package could consist of criminal law law, criminal procedure, evidence, and professional
responsibility, with a research agenda on the constitutional and ethical
limitations on the exercise of prosecutorial discretion. Obviously the former package would be
strengthened by having spent a few years as an associate at Sullivan &
Cromwell, and the latter package would make more sense from a former assistant
U.S. attorney. Someone who prosecuted
financial crimes, or did enforcement work for the SEC, might combine the two
packages. Not everyone’s interests
can be tied up in neat bundles like this, but to the extent you can, think in
terms of presenting your teaching and scholarship interests as a package.
Try not to chase trends, because there is a
lag time effect you must consider. If you think law & technology or
Internet law is interesting, understand that hundreds of other people had the
same thought several years ago. There was recently a big spate of
hiring in high-tech, as law schools reacted to student demand and sought out people
with expertise in that area. Now most of the major schools have a
computer law person on board, and are looking in other fields, but the market
is still glutted with people with experience in high-tech law and a desire to
teach it. More generally, if you see a bunch of published articles on a
trendy-looking subject, remember that it takes about a year and a half to two
years between the time someone has a good idea and the appearance of that idea
in print. Although it may seem like
there is a lot of energy and excitement in the area, the circus may already
have left town, and you risk having your work appear dated and unoriginal. The best thing to do is set your research
agenda according to what you think is interesting, and then pursue it without
worrying too much about what is currently sexy.
Maybe your area will come into vogue someday (as happened with the
former backwater of election law after the 2000 presidential election, or with
national security law after 9/11 and the war in
For Orin Kerr’s (similar) thoughts,
see his post
at PrawfsBlog; the comments following are
extremely helpful.
Q: What makes a candidate stand out?
A: If there is one thing that schools are looking for, it is someone
with fire in his or her belly to produce scholarship about some intellectually
significant issue. This matters because at any school with aspirations to
be more than a bar-preparation service for in-state practitioners (which is
most schools at which you'd want to work), the name of the game is
scholarship. Teaching is of secondary importance only. In fact,
I sometimes tell students not to think of their goal as getting a
"teaching" job at all. It's really a writing job.
You will be hired, evaluated, given tenure, promoted, and recognized in the
profession based almost entirely on the quality of your scholarship. Even
at law schools that make a big deal out of classroom teaching, you will be
expected to produce good scholarship. If you are wondering whether a teaching
writing job is for you, try this acid test: Do you have several, maybe
even dozens of good ideas for law review articles that you really have
to write? Do you find yourself reconceptualizing
some theoretical question pertaining to law while you're taking a shower?
Do cases, articles, or books you read make you mad, make you wonder how
seemingly intelligent people can think such silly things? Are you
someone, as Max Weber says you must be, who believes that "the fate of his
soul depends on whether or not he makes the correct conjecture at this passage
of this manuscript"? If the answer to at least one of these
questions is yes, you may be enough of a law geek to make it in this
profession. Without this kind of visceral hunger to be a scholar, you may
be unable to (a) tend to your writing while simultaneously preparing to teach
several classes for the first time, (b) market yourself to others in your
field, and more importantly (c) get in the door in the first place, by
convincing an appointments committee that you will make a big splash in your
chosen field.
You have to understand the nature of the
market: Law schools themselves are evaluated in large part based on the
quality and prominence of their faculties' scholarship. We all hate to
admit it, but the U.S. News rankings have become an entrenched part of life --
prospective students pay close attention to where a school is ranked, and
alumni and alumnae get awfully upset if their school falls in the
rankings. Because significant weight is given to a school's academic
reputation, as measured by surveys given to other professors and deans, law
school appointments committees are very concerned to hire people who will make
a big splash with their scholarship. It's a sad fact of life, but
inspired teaching just doesn't show up in the rankings in the same way.
This is not to suggest that schools are slavishly chasing U.S. News rankings;
rather, most schools regard production of excellent scholarship as a legitimate
part of their educational mission. As a result, though, you have to be
prepared to pitch yourself as a person who is likely to achieve prominence
within your field as a scholar.
Most law students don't get sufficient
exposure to legal scholarship to develop a good sense for whether they will
enjoy producing it. If you are serious about law teaching, you should
make an effort to get acquainted with this sometimes peculiar world. A
place to start is the Current
Index to Legal Periodicals, available on-line. Scan through a couple
of these issues and pay attention to what people are writing about. If
you're really ambitious, pay attention to what is getting published in top
journals. You should also pay attention to the lengthy book reviews
published in top journals – not only will you get a sense for what is
faddish, but a good review will explain the significance of the book in
relation to other trends in legal scholarship, which you should be aware
of. The Michigan Law Review publishes an annual "books relating to
law issue," consisting entirely of book reviews, which will give you an excellent
idea of what people are talking about in the academy. Please note, too,
that "scholarship" does not include articles for bar journals, law
school alumni magazines, or law firm newsletters; CLE materials; or op-ed
pieces in your local paper. Committees are looking for evidence that you
can contribute to the law review literature, preferable in the flagship
journals of good schools.
Remember, it’s not really a teaching
job you’re pursuing – it’s a writing job. Say it with me: It’s a writing job.
Q: What’s
wrong with publishing in bar journals?
What’s so great about law review articles? Do law schools just have a footnote fetish?
A: Law
review scholarship is a justly parodied genre, but you do have to produce
it. And in the eyes of appointments
committees, there’s a significant difference between practical and
theoretical scholarship. In fact
"practical" has an almost pejorative connotation in law school
hiring. This may seem bizarre, in light
of the mission of law schools in training practicing lawyers, but it makes
sense in light of the history of American legal education. At least until the turn of the century, the
vast majority of lawyers obtained their education on the job, essentially as
apprentices, while others studied in proprietary law schools (like Litchfield,
in Connecticut) and a few obtained an education at law departments in
universities like Harvard and Columbia.
From the standpoint of traditional arts and sciences faculties at universities,
law looked like a "trade" – again in the pejorative sense
– and not an academic discipline.
After Langdell at Harvard mounted a massive
public relations effort to enhance the prestige of legal education, more
universities opened law schools, but they were often considered stepchildren by
the rest of the university. It may be a
bit of an exaggeration, but it’s not entirely incorrect to say that the
legal academy has for this reason always had a bit of an inferiority complex
vis-à-vis the wider university, and has sought to defend itself against
allegations of being a "mere" trade school by mimicking the standards
of other university departments. If it
helps to personify the legal academy, imagine it holding up a law review
article and saying to the university, "Look here, we can produce turgid
prose with lots of footnotes, just like you!" The attempt to gain standing in the eyes of
the university helps explain the sexiness of interdisciplinary scholarship like
law and economics, law and social science, law and philosophy, postmodern legal
theory (drawing from literary criticism, cultural studies, and some branches of
sociology and anthropology), and so on.
It also shows why traditional doctrinal scholarship has fallen into
disfavor. In the early part of the 20th
Century, the model of successful legal scholarship was the great treatise, like
Wigmore on Evidence, Scott on Trusts, or Willison on Contracts.
These works did not merely summarize the law, but systematized it,
exposed its underlying structure, and showed its immanent logic. That mode of scholarship is now pretty much
dead (despite a few distinguished contemporary examples like Wright, Miller, et
al., on federal practice and procedure), and many excellent treatises are now
produced by practitioners. Now an
ambitious legal scholar would never set out to write a treatise, but would
instead try to produce the definitive application of economic principles to an
area of law (like Calabresi's The Costs of Accidents) or would do work rooted primarily within
another discipline, with application to law (like the work of Joseph Raz).
This is not to say you have to be Calabresi or Raz to get hired, or
even write articles citing their work.
But it helps quite a bit to have a theoretical foundation for one's
work. At the very least, your work
should do more than just restate the law in some area -- it should criticize
it, propose to reform it, or explain it with reference to something. The problem with the generic bar-journal
article is that it just reports on the state of the law with respect to some
issue. And as useful as this is, it is
not going to help the law school gain glory as an academic division within the university.
For an excellent overview of the law review
article publication process, written by a former articles editor at the
Columbia Law Review, see this on-line
article. This piece has many
excellent tips on the timing of submissions (the spring and fall shopping
frenzy), the expedited review and trading-up process, length, format, and how
to catch the eye of student editors.
Q: I don't relish the thought of spending my
time writing law review articles. Is there still a place in law teaching
for me?
A: Yes, definitely, but probably not in the tenure-track
classroom-teaching ranks. The good news is that there are positions
available in law schools that do emphasize teaching more than
scholarship. The bad news is that they tend to pay less and offer less
job security and status than conventional classroom jobs. Two options are
clinical teaching and teaching legal research and writing.
Clinical teaching has come a long way since its early days as the stepchild of
law schools. In fact, many top schools place a great deal of emphasis on
their clinical programs and, as a result, treat their clinical faculty quite
well. Many clinicians are part of the governing faculty (i.e. they get to
vote at faculty meetings) and have tenure or some sort of quasi-tenure through
a series of long-term contracts. Some schools also permit or require
clinicians to do some classroom teaching as well as clinical work. One
caveat: Since conventional classroom teaching positions are the
paradigmatic high-status job at law schools, if clinical faculty aspire to that
level of status, they generally are expected to behave more like
"regular" faculty -- that is, to achieve a high profile as
scholars. The publication requirements for clinical faculty are sometimes
not as high as those for classroom faculty, but at many schools clinical
teachers are still expected to publish. If this is a turn-off for you,
pay attention to the way in which the clinical track is designed at a
particular school. If clinical teaching sounds interesting, you may want
to check out the website of the Clinical
Legal Education Association, which has some helpful resources.
Another difference between clinical
positions and classroom positions is that candidates for clinical teaching jobs
will be expected to have substantial practice experience. One of the
oddities of the legal teaching market is that candidates for classroom
positions are considered tainted if they have too much of a background in
practice. Because of the obsession, noted above, with being perceived as
legitimate by their colleagues in the arts and sciences, law faculties are not
looking for people with extensive practice experience as classroom
teachers. One may bemoan the effect this has on legal education, as Judge
Harry Edwards did in a famous article on the "growing disjunction"
between the academy and the profession, but it is a fact of life. Only in
clinical teaching is practice experience truly valued, as opposed to being
viewed with some suspicion.
Teaching in a law school's legal research
and writing (LRW) program also offers the opportunity to spend more time in the
classroom and working with students, and less time worrying about
scholarship. At one time, LRW positions had a reputation as stepping-stones
to full-time tenure-track positions. Because of this perception, many law
teacher wannabes would apply for LRW positions, hoping to work their way into
tenure-track positions through the back door. This phenomenon made for
intense competition for LRW jobs. In addition, it is increasingly the
case that LRW teachers are dedicated to being, and remaining LRW teachers. There is a highly specialized pedagogy of
teaching legal skills, which requires a considerable investment of time and
energy to master. Also, LRW teaching is
exhausting. (I did it full-time as a teaching fellow at
The last option is teaching as an adjunct,
in the subject in which you specialize in practice. This can be a lot of
fun, but adjuncts are treated like nobodies by the regular law faculty.
It's a tremendous amount of work to teach a class effectively, and you will be
paid very little and distracted from your main project of billing hours at your
firm to boot. Teaching as an adjunct may help you sell yourself on the
market in subsequent years, however, because it will make you look more serious
about teaching, as compared with the average practitioner, and give you
something to talk about in screening interviews. Beware, however, of
creating the "perpetual adjunct" resume, with lots of teaching
experience but not publications. You must find time to get
something written to be a serious candidate; if this means skipping a couple of
years of adjunct teaching to work on an article, do it.
Q: I've heard law teaching is a club, and you
have to know the right people in order to get in.
A: Like any job search, the academic market thrives on
connections. You can certainly get a job without knowing anyone, but if
you have friends and allies on the faculty of a good school, life will be much
easier for you. This is not to say that invidious clubbiness
pervades the process (although there is some of that). Rather, as with
the case of credentials, the emphasis on connections is a function of sheer
numbers and transaction costs. It's impossible for an appointments
committee to get an accurate picture of every candidate, with respect to the
things that matter, such as: Passion for scholarship, intellectual
curiosity, focus and work ethic, collegiality, extemporaneous speaking ability,
etc. If you have done significant course or independent study work for a
faculty member, or have served that person as a research assistant, your ally
can contact her friends on appointments committees at various schools and vouch
for you. That phone call or e-mail won't be dispositive,
but it can certainly help move your resume to the top of the pile. Making
connections is another good reason to consider doing an LL.M. or J.S.D.
Even if you don't do graduate work at
another law school, you should work hard to establish relationships with
professors at your own school. The world of law teaching is a pretty
small one, and people tend to know people who know people. Within the
proverbial six degrees of separation are likely to be members of appointments
committees at law schools where you would like to work. Your faculty
contacts might be able to noodge someone at your
target school, and move your application along. At the very least, your
faculty advisors can use their professional networks to sound out
opportunities, by trying ascertain which schools are really hiring, and
in what areas.
Q: I graduated #1 in my class from
A: I
get a fair amount of e-mail from foreign-trained lawyers reporting on the
process of obtaining employment at American law schools, and the reports are
almost uniformly negative. Candidates
who encounter the most difficulty are those with civil-law training, but even
graduates of top law schools in English-speaking common-law countries like
An alert reader from Canada says the
situation may be different for Canadian lawyers, many of whom have been hired
by U.S. law firms and have substantial experience with U.S. law. There are several Canadian-trained lawyers
working as law professors in the States, so the odds may not be as long. I don’t know about entry-level
candidates from the U.K., although many American law schools have hired British
scholars at a fairly senior level.
Q: Logistically speaking, how does the hiring
process work?
A: The AALS, which I mentioned above, operates a central
clearinghouse for resumes submitted by law professor candidates. (All of
this information is contained on the faculty recruitment services section
of the AALS web site.) You are given a one-page form to fill out, which
is essentially a condensed CV. Recently this process has been moved
entirely on-line. The form seeks biographical data -- degrees,
publications, etc., and some information about courses you'd be interested in
teaching, geographic preferences, names of 3 references, and so on. The
AALS then photocopies these forms and distributes them in packets for
interested law schools, and makes them available (with password protection) to
appointments committees through its web site. You definitely want to get
your form in on time for inclusion in the first bundle of resumes. The
deadline is generally some time in the summer – maybe July – check
the web site. You also pay a fee of a few hundred bucks, which entitles
you to attend the Faculty Recruitment Conference (universally known as the Meat
Market) in October or November, and to receive copies of the AALS Placement
Bulletin, which comes out six times during the hiring season.
The Form: You have to be careful filling this form
out. Some common pitfalls include expressing too narrow a geographic
preference (you're not the only one who would rather be in New York or Boston
than Spittoon, Kansas); indicating a preference for teaching only elective
courses like sports law and jurisprudence, or idiosyncratic courses that a
school is unlikely to offer (I actually saw a resume that included
"cyber-tax" as a teaching interest); and putting down silly
publications, like a one-page summary of a recent case you wrote for the local
bar rag. As Brian
Leiter points out, it’s also not a good
idea to make crude political appeals, like listing “only blue
states” as a geographical restriction.
For goodness' sake, include citations to your published articles,
particularly if they are in good journals. Also make sure you have
references from people who can comment on your abilities or potential as a
legal scholar. Partners at law firms are much less useful as references
than professors at your J.D. or graduate schools.
Finally, you have the option to include a
full CV along with your one-page form, which is available to interested schools
from the AALS web site. (The site is password protected, so the public
doesn't have access to your biographical information.) However, please
don't rely on the full CV to convey important information -- make sure you get
it on the one-page form. An appointments committee member is going to go
to the trouble of downloading the full CV only if he or she is already
interested in a candidate, and that interest will come from a review of the
one-page form. Most people, even those who are relatively comfortable
with technology, prefer to read hundreds of pages of documents in print form,
rather than on-line. Thus, an appointments committee member is much more
likely to settle down in an easy chair with a pile of resumes, a highligher, and a pad of yellow stickie
notes, than to run a bunch of queries on-line and follow links to additional
documents you provide. Also, if the Web is balky and it's taking a long time to
download your resume, the appointments committee member might just get bored
and move on. Remember, there are 500-600 resumes in the pile -- no one is
going to spend more than a few minutes with yours, at least at the preliminary
stages.
Placement Bulletin: It's not entirely clear what you should do
with these things when you're actually on the market, as opposed to reading them
for background information. Basically, some schools advertise for
openings, others don't. Some of the ads are very specific on the subject
areas for which the schools are hiring, others just say they're looking for
good people. Many, many schools just lurk, reading the piles of incoming
resumes and not advertising positions in the Placement Bulletin. One
school of thought says you should read the P.B. and send targeted, follow-up
mailings to schools that are looking in your area. This method has the
advantage of enabling you to get more information in front of the appointments
committee – a full CV and a reprint of any publications you have. I
had some success doing this, but there were plenty of schools (including the
one that eventually hired me) that called me for an interview even though they
had not placed an ad.
Some people just pay for the Placement
Bulletin and send applications directly to schools, without putting in their
AALS form. The response to this kind of approach will almost certainly be
(if positive), "We'll see you at the Meat Market," in which case
you'll have to pay the money anyway. (Caveat: Some top schools, and
some top candidates bypass the AALS process completely. If you are one of
those candidates, you already know who you are.)
The Meat Market: After you submit your form, you basically sit
around waiting for the phone to ring. Remember that feeling of waiting
for someone to call you and ask you to the prom? That's what the entire
month of September will feel like. Every time the phone rings you will jump 3
feet in the air, collect yourself, answer it in your most professional voice,
and hope that it's a member of law school appointments committee calling to set
up a screening interview at the Meat Market. Here's where some people try
to play it cool: "2 o'clock on Friday? Gee, I don't know
– I'll just be getting out of my Yale interview. Can we make it
3?" Seriously, though, try not to show signs of desperation, such as
admitting that you have a wide-open schedule and can pretty much interview at
any time. If you have a choice, try to slot your interview in the morning
on Friday or Saturday, or soon after lunch. You really don't want to try
to make an impression on appointments committee members at 4:30 in the
afternoon, after they've talked to candidates all day. I've heard stories
of people picking up interviews at the Meat Market itself, but this is
rare. If you only have managed to secure 1 or 2 interviews, you can bag
the conference, or do the interviews for experience and try again next year.
Assuming you have managed to schedule more
than a couple of interviews, you have to get yourself to a hotel in D.C. for
the Meat Market. This is a pretty surreal, Kafkaseque
scene, as hundreds of blue-suited, nervous-looking candidates scramble around,
trying to find their next interview in an incredibly poorly designed
hotel. For the last several years it's been at the
Q: What do they ask you
at screening interviews?
A: You should be clear on
one thing: These are not schmoozy, chit-chat
interviews where you will be evaluated on your ability to sustain social
pleasantries for 20 minutes. Law firm interviews are like this, because
they want to see whether you can be trusted on a cab ride or a business lunch
with the client, but law schools don't care nearly as much about your charming
personality. Quite simply, they want to know if you have the intellectual
firepower to be one of them. (And they will of course have a high opinion
of their own intellectual firepower.) Also in contrast to law firm interviews,
there will be multiple interviewers in the room. Often the whole
appointments committee will be there – I once had 7 people peppering me
with questions simultaneously. Occasionally these interviews degenerate
into squabbling among the committee members. Just keep your head down,
try to regain control over the conversation, and make a mental note to wear a
flak jacket to your job talk, if you get one (see below).
This is not to say you can be downright
bizarre at screening interviews. The appointments committee will be
trying to ascertain whether you can work and play well with others. I
know – you're thinking of all the dysfunctional wackos
who were your professors, and figuring that interpersonal skills cannot be all
that important in hiring. It's true that brilliant people are forgiven
some personality quirks, but if a law school already has a bunch of goofballs
on the faculty, they're probably not looking to add more. Sociability and
charm by themselves will not get you a job, but in every year's Meat Market there
are innumerable smart candidates who don't get invited back for job talks for
the simple reason that they're perceived as weird or arrogant. Remember
the advice given by the experienced catcher Crash Davis to promising young
pitcher Nuke LaLoosh in Bull Durham:
When you win 20 games in the show, you can let the fungus grow back on your
shower shoes, and the press will think you're colorful. Until you win 20
games in the show, it means you're a slob.
For goodness' sake, do some homework before
the Meat Market and learn about the schools with whom you'll be
interviewing. They will probably send you some glossy promotional
materials, but in addition you should prowl around their web site and read
evaluations of the school in the various guidebooks for prospective law
students that are available. You can learn some very useful things.
For example, if you are interviewing at Washington and Lee, it would be helpful
to know that the school prides itself on small class sizes, lots of interaction
between faculty and students, and a faculty that takes teaching very
seriously. It would not be a good idea at this interview to express
disdain for teaching, or to say you want to be a law professor because,
frankly, people bug you and you've always wanted to hole up in a cabin like Ted
Kaczynski and write books. Some schools make a big deal out of
clinics. There will probably be a clinical professor on the appointments
committee, so don't pooh-pooh clinical legal education. Other schools may
talk a lot about technology; if you have interesting ideas for integrating
technology into your classroom teaching, now is the time to talk about
it. You get the picture.
There are a few classic questions, which you
will be asked and to which you must have good answers.
(1) Why do you want to go into law teaching?
You'd be surprised how many candidates give
stupid answers to this question. Do NOT say that you are looking for a
lifestyle change, an escape from billable hours pressure, more time with your
family, or anything else that implies you think law teaching is a cushy
job. You will insult the committee members by implying that they're just
a bunch of slackers who couldn't cut it in the high-pressure world of
practice. More to the point, law teaching is anything but a cushy
job. I worked law-firm hours in my first year of teaching – many
late nights and weekends – and even though the hours have gotten somewhat
better, it's still very hard work. If there is some kind of deadline
pressure, such as a paper you owe to a law review, some class preps you have
been ignoring, or a huge pile of bluebooks to grade, you'll be up until the wee
hours of the morning. Also, just to clear up a misconception, you do not
have summers "off." In fact, summers are when you really earn
your keep (see the note about this being a writing job, above).
(2) What are you working on now?
The answer is not "installing a new
bathroom in the basement." This question is looking for your
research agenda – probably the single most important piece of information
the appointments committee will be seeking. I got a great piece of advice
when I was on the market from a faculty member who used to teach at
Orin
Kerr’s thoughts are similar, although he suggests that some schools
may want to see a written “research agenda” document. Never happened to me, but it’s immaterial
– the written document is far less important than the thought that goes
into preparing it. Finally, this seemed
obvious to me, but occasional comments on blogs
suggests it’s not: No one will
actually hold you to your research agenda once you get a job. Your associate dean is not going to whip it
out of a file folder and wave it in your face, demanding to know what happened
to that empirical study of suicidal ideation among law-firm associates doing
document review. You’re even free
to change your research agenda entirely, if a few years’ of work
convinces you there are greener pastures.
Kate Litvak, in a comment
on PrawfsBlawg, raises a good point: Research agendas that are too ambitious will
raise suspicion. Don’t say
you’re going to re-think the entire field of X in five years. Focus on a little corner of a field which has
broader implications.
(3) What courses do you want to teach?
This is a minefield. If you pitch
yourself too narrowly, as a specialist in some arcane subject, you risk being
rejected for not having a suitable fit with the school's curricular
needs. On the other hand, if you are too broad ("I could pretty much
teach any first-year course"), you sound unfocused. You also imply
that any dolt could teach a first-year course, which will likely offend the
person on the appointments committee who is a committed teacher and scholar of
torts, procedure, or contracts.
Picking up on the advice above, ideally you
want to be able to propose a course package, consisting of (1) a first-year
course that is related to your practice experience or scholarly interest, (2) a
core upperclass subject – one of the courses
that tons of students take and schools are always looking to staff, like
corporations, agency & partnership, evidence, a UCC course such as secured
transactions or commercial paper, tax, bankruptcy, estates & trusts,
environmental law, intellectual property, or family law, and perhaps (3) a
funky, interesting class or seminar, tied directly into your scholarship
– for example, law & economics, critical race theory, international
human rights, or law & religion. Be aware that some schools have more
of these "boutique" course offerings than others. You should
peruse the course catalogue of a school, if it's available on-line or in their
glossy propaganda materials, to get a flavor for what sorts of courses the
school offers.
(4) What do you mean by "professional judgment"
in your 1996 article?
Like a prospective federal judge at a
confirmation hearing, you should be prepared to answer questions about your
"paper trail." If you have published articles (and your chances
of getting an interview will increase dramatically if you have), it is almost a
given that some member of the appointments committee will be tasked with
reading your work and thinking of critical questions to throw at you in the
interview. Do yourself a favor and re-read your stuff before the Meat
Market. If there is anything you have written that is particularly
controversial, or if you have recanted a position you had taken in the past, be
doubly prepared to talk about it.
Remember that some interviewers, either as a
deliberate ploy to see how well you hold up under pressure or because they are
jerks, will ask you the same sort of question, but in a much more hostile
tone: "I've always thought the concept of professional judgment is a
crock. It's just an evasion of the difficult question of how one makes
decisions among plural values. Surely there's something more to say than
just, 'it's a matter of judgment,' right?" This question is the same
as the one above – it's an attempt to draw you out, engage with you
intellectually, and have a mutually satisfying conversation about an
interesting idea. It's not a personal attack, although any number of
academics seem temperamentally incapable of asking questions that do not come
across as hostile.
Gordon Smith’s blog posting on Meat Market interviews is excellent,
and contains pointers on how to respond to some of the classic questions. Daniel
Solove also has a description of the persona an
ideal candidate would convey at a screening interview. Mike Madison has some last-minute
Meat Market advice, too.
Q: What's next?
A: More waiting by the
phone. If the school is serious about your candidacy, you will be invited
back for a "job talk," or
campus visit. A job talk is so named because the centerpiece of the visit
is a scholarly presentation that you make to the entire faculty, often over
lunch. (You'll have to scarf your food or skip lunch. If you do the
former, you look like you have the table manners of a barbarian. If you
do the latter, you will pass out from hypoglycemia right before the concluding
session with the dean.) A very good piece of advice, which I have cribbed
from Eric
Goldman's site on getting into law teaching, but which I wholeheartedly
endorse, is to practice your job talk in front of a friendly audience, such as
other graduate students or fellows in your program, lawyers at your firm, your
co-clerks, or anyone else you can count on to ask really tough questions.
Another good suggestion from Prof. Goldman's site is to think hard about your
job talk before you go to the Meat Market, because you will probably be asked
substantive questions about your presentation at the screening
interviews. You may even want to do your practice job talk before
the Meat Market. Nothing could be better
preparation for screening interviews, because you will be thinking about the
ins and outs of your research agenda.
Although the precise format varies by
schools, the talk itself generally consists of about 20 minutes of you
presenting an idea, followed by a question-and-answer period. Like most academic presentations in law (and
unlike presentations in other arts and sciences disciplines), the presenter
does not read a paper, but gives a somewhat more loosely structured defense of
a particular thesis. The talk should be
substantially self-contained, so that a non-specialist in your field can get a
good idea of the nature of the debate you are engaged with, the arguments for
and against your position, and the implications of your thesis for broader
intellectual issues in law. A good job
talk looks a lot like an oral argument, although most faculties will let you
finish your spiel before interrupting with questions. Like an oral argument, your job will be to
respond respectfully to questioners, tie the answers back into the theme of
your presentation, give ground where necessary to maintain credibility while
also defending your central claim, and be able to think on your feet. Many in the audience will use the talk as a
proxy for your ability to conduct a Socratic dialogue in the classroom; if you
had a particularly good Socratic teacher in law school, think of that style as
a good general approach to the give-and-take of a job talk.
For more details on the format and style of
law school job talks, see this blog post by Orin Kerr (read the comments, too), follow-up
post by Dan Solove, comments by
Christine Hurt at Conglomerate, and advice
from a reader of Leiter’s blog. And for some hilarious suggestions for
job-talk topics, see this post
on Prawfs and comments. In his post, Prof. Kerr makes the good point
that job talks are modeled on faculty work-in-progress workshops, which are
based on a 20 minute presentation to colleagues who may or may not have read
the paper. Thus, you can’t get too
bogged down in the details of the presentation, but have to concentrate on
giving a concise, lucid explanation of (1) your thesis (have one, for Pete’s sake!), (2) the intellectual background
against which your thesis is offered, for the non-specialists, (3) your
argument, and (4) the most important objections you anticipate and your
responses to these objections. In
addition, the presence of many people who may not have read the paper, as well
as non-specialists in your area (some of whom may not have read the paper)
means you have to be prepared for some really off-the-wall questions, as well
as a lot of blather by people who just like to hear themselves talk. On the other hand, you can be sure that some
attendees will have read the paper, and every faculty has at least one member
who specializes in cutting right to the heart of a complex argument and
exposing its most serious weakness. If
you get stumped, just acknowledge it frankly.
If a question is really, really thoughtful, there’s nothing wrong
with saying, “Geez, I hadn’t thought of
that.” If you can improvise the
beginnings of an answer, you’ll be fine, even if you may not be able to
deal with it as well as you might like.
(And, inevitably, you’ll be subject to l’espirit de l’escalier
– you’ll think of the perfect, devastating answer as you’re
walking down the stairs at the conclusion of your campus visit.) Finally, because job talks are modeled on
work-in-progress workshops, you should try to strike a collaborative tone, as
if you and the talk attendees are working together to solve some interesting,
knotty problem. Don’t be
defensive, and don’t act like a (bad) litigator who feels the need to win
every point.
As part of the campus visit, in addition to
the presentation of your scholarship you will meet with every member of the
faculty, often in groups of three or four, as well has have a private chat with
the dean. Sometimes the interview program will include a session with
students, and sometimes also with key administrative staff members, such as
librarians. As with law firm interviewing, treat everyone you meet with
respect, because their reports on you will become part of your dossier, and
will certainly be considered in the hiring decision. Usually the campus
visit includes a dinner at a swanky restaurant, and possibly a tour of the
area. Again, these events are part of the interview process, not merely
social pleasantries. The usual rules about not getting hammered at
dinner, or ordering the lobster special, apply in this context as well.
You may be surprised at the ratio of job
talks to screening interviews. The reason – believe it or not
– is that some schools may interview a lot of people they aren't serious
about hiring. Some schools conduct screening interviews at the Meat
Market just to "show the flag," as it is called. They may not
be anticipating doing a lot of entry-level hiring in that year, but they want
to scout talent and possibly establish relationships with new scholars that may
become stronger over time, and might possibly turn into a lateral hire at a
later date. Or, they may be hoping that funding comes through for a
faculty "line" but know that funding is subject to the vagaries of
institutional politics or even (in the case of state universities) political
wrangling over the budget. Although it sounds somewhat macabre, a school
may also be expecting a faculty member to die or retire soon, and they want to
have a contingency plan in case it happens this year. Finally, although
this is less common, a school may realize that the situation is hopeless and
they can't possibly hire that year, but they want their peer schools to think
that they're still actively recruiting.
In several years of
Q: Am I stuck at
A: The subject of lateral
moves probably deserves its own lengthy discussion, and I'm not sufficiently experienced
to write it, but I can at least give a quick overview of the lateral hiring
market – that is, the process by which schools hire experienced teachers
from other institutions. Suppose your first job is at
In the majority of cases, lateral moves are
preceded by visits by the candidate, who teaches for a semester or a
year at the prospective new school. Some schools dispense with the
necessity of doing a visit first, and may hire just on the basis of an
on-campus interview and job talk, like an entry-level hire, but these are still
unusual cases. The most important thing to know about visits is that they
come in two main varieties – look-see and podium-filler.
Schools may use different labels, and may in fact have a byzantine
classification system, with Category II-A visitors and whatnot, but the basic
idea remains the same: A visitor may be under active consideration by the
appointments committee as a potential lateral hire (a look-see visitor), or may
simply be doing substitute teaching duty, covering an important course while a
member of the faculty is on leave (a podium-filler visitor). It is
essential to clarify the status of the visit in advance. If the school is
coy, try to talk to people with knowledge of its internal procedures and figure
out what signals to look for. For example, whether the visit offer comes
from the appointments committee chair or the associate dean, who is in charge
of filling the course roster, may be the signal for whether it's a look-see or
podium-fill visit. If you are trying to make a lateral move, do not
accept a visit offer if you are not completely satisfied that it will be a
look-see. Occasionally a podium-filler visitor makes such a good
impression that the appointments committee decides to consider making a
permanent offer, but usually it is only look-see visitors that are considered.
(Even if you do receive the assurance that you are a look-see visitor, there
are myriad ways in which a visit can get messed up. Expect the unexpected when visiting.)
Within the category of look-see visitors,
procedures vary tremendously. You will almost certainly have to give a
job talk, and at many places this is make-or-break with respect to the prospect
of getting an offer. Some schools will not vote yes or no on a candidate
until that person has returned to her home institution. Others make the
decision while the visitor is in residence. If the visitor is also being
considered for tenure, the school's internal tenure process becomes an issue as
well, and may create complications. Try to gather as much information as
possible in advance – work your network and try to find someone who has a
friend on the inside. Your "mole" will be an invaluable
resource during your visit, when you will be desperately trying to see which
way the winds are blowing. At the same time, don't overstrategize.
The majority of faculty members just want to see that you have the requisite
intellectual oomph, that you are likely to bring glory to their school through
your scholarship, and that you are a good teacher and a decent person.
Some people make academic politics sound like something out of quattrocento Italian city-states, but in my (admittedly
limited) experience it's not that complicated.
I have no idea how to drum up visit
offers. I've had a couple come my way, but I did not target those schools
or solicit the offers in any way. The AALS has a centralized
resume-circulation process, similar to the entry level Meat Market resumes, for
lateral candidates. To the best of my
knowledge, no one has ever made a move at a top-tier school through this
process – it all happens via the informal, decentralized process of
coming to the attention of appointments committees. The only advice I can offer, from my own
experience, is to market yourself like crazy, but try not to be perceived as
someone who is obsessed with climbing the ladder. When you write a good
article, buy some extra reprints and send them around to the bigshots in your field. Hit the casebook editors, the
chair of your AALS section, all the people you cite in your piece, and people
who are tops in your field (who may not be exclusively at top schools).
Post your works in progress on the Social
Science Research Network. Try to get on the program at
conferences. Be willing to write book reviews or shorter pieces for
symposia. Participate actively in any on-line discussion forums or blogs for professors in your field, but don’t be a
troll. Go to the AALS section program, ask questions, and chat with
people. Don't be obnoxious about it, but the idea is to get on the radar screen
of the people who matter in your discipline. This may sound Pollyanna-ish, but if you are doing this job for the right reasons
– that is, you have a passion for ideas and want to share them with
others – you will end up being part of the conversation in your
discipline and when a school is looking around to hire laterally, your name may
be on the list.
A series of posts on Brian Leiter’s blog (Part
I, Part
II, Part
III) and comments by other law professors, largely supports this advice,
and also discussing the emerging trend of not requiring look-see visits as a
precondition to making a lateral move.
Be sure to read all the comments from professors at various stages in
their teaching careers, which are fascinating.
See also this post
and comments at the PrawfsBlog. My former colleague Darryl Brown summarizes
the conventional wisdom in his post on Leiter’s
blog:
Brian has it exactly right. There's little directly one can do to
get oneself into play as a lateral candidate beyond the obvious things to
increase one's visibility (publishing, mailing reprints, and presenting at
conferences) and old-fashioned networking. But to describe the process a bit
more from the hiring side, here are some strategies we've used recently at
W&L to search for laterals who won't turn up if we merely depend on
ourselves to notice good prospects in the normal course of reading,
conferencing and the like. We search recent top journals for good work by
people who are at schools from which they might plausibly want to move to
W&L, and we query leading scholars in a given field for names of
up-and-comers in the field who might plausibly want to move to W&L. Both
depend on Brian's key points--publishing well and coming to the attention of
leading folks in the field. But it's a bit more systematic than merely hoping
someone on our committee or faculty has noticed a lateral prospect by receiving
a reprint or meeting them at a conference.
Although advice might vary a bit in the
details, everyone agrees that the key to moving laterally is to become known by
people in your field as an up-and-coming scholar. The way to do that is to write a lot, do high
quality, original work, send out reprints and manuscripts, give talks, go to
conferences, be a reasonably socially functional human being, make personal
connections, and then hope for the best.
For other blog-o-riffic
thoughts on visiting, see these posts
and comments at Prawfs, and Christine Hurt’s
posts (Part
1, Part
2) at Conglomerate.
Good luck!
Last updated June 30, 2006.
P.S. I have corresponded about law teaching
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