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. [By the way, I know some of these links have broken, but I’m too lazy to hunt down the new references. If you have a URL for a broken link and want to send it to me, I’d be grateful.]
(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.
The
A 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 (
Currency. Really, I never intended for this to be the most reliable source of information – it was always written as my off-the-cuff thoughts. Nevertheless, it has a certain amount of staying power, and probably should be updated to reflect changes in the academic market since the time it was first written (2002 or so) and now (Fall 2010). Since I first wrote this, I’ve also had the experience (arguably the misfortune) of serving on the faculty appointments committee three times at Cornell and chairing it once, and I’ve learned a great deal from that. I’ll put updated material in brackets, for ease of reference. I will also go through and try to bring some of the links up to currency, but that may take a while, so please be patient. In the meantime, just google “law teaching” and you’ll get a zillion hits.
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,
The rankings-obsessed Brian Leiter recently ran an internet poll attempting to “settle for once and for all” (hah!) the top 40
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.
[This might have been true at one time, but it is no longer becoming a requirement only at better schools if you want to be in serious contention. Now, you simply have to have publications. Maybe at some schools a student note will suffice provided that you have a job talk paper ready to go at the time of the Meat Market. In general, however, one or two solid law review articles is a requirement to get your FAR form pulled for interviews. You also have to have a research agenda – see below about the
(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.
[If you are just starting law school and considering going into law teaching, I cannot emphasize strongly enough that you need to establish good working relationships with faculty members, at least one of whom knows something about your area of scholarly interest. Schools are making a concerted effort to push their graduates on the teaching market, but faculty members need to know something about you, and by “something” I don’t just mean that you got an A in torts – rather, you have to have an idea that your recommenders take seriously and a good research project they can talk about. Practical ways of doing this include working as a research assistant, doing a directed writing or independent study project, or taking a seminar with a faculty member.]
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
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
[When I first wrote this, Northwestern and
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.
[A couple of quick update thoughts on this, reflecting several years on the committee at Cornell: First, if you intend to do certain kinds of scholarship, a Ph.D. is required. If you want to do serious law and economics scholarship, fuhgeddaboutit without a Ph.D. in economics. The cutting edge stuff in law and economics is in areas like formal modeling and empirical studies, not the (relatively) accessible applied microeconomic theory that characterized the first generation of law & econ scholarship. Same deal with the now very trendy field of empirical legal studies. Without graduate-level training in rigorous social science methodology, it’s going to be impossible to produce scholarship that passes the peer review process in that field. Empirical legal studies has done a good job of institution-building, so that there are now refereed annual conferences and a peer-reviewed journal, ensuring that high-quality work gets recognized. The second thought is, if you are doing interdisciplinary scholarship without formal training in the coordinate discipline, you should assume that there will be someone in the audience at any given talk who does know the other discipline at a Ph.D. level. If you’re not prepared to work at that level, you risk having your work come across as amateurish.]
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
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
[After a few more years of observing the market, I’ll hazard the generalization that candidates with non-U.S. law degrees underplace significantly in comparison with candidates with
An alert reader from
UPDATE (Feb. 2011): Oops, somehow I went a year without noticing an outstanding series of posts on PrawfsBlawg about the
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, the Faculty Appointments Register (FAR) form, which is essentially a condensed CV. Recently this process has been moved entirely on-line. The FAR 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.
[After looking at hundreds of these forms for several years, it’s hard to overstate how poorly designed they are to convey the relevant information. Everyone who screens these forms develops a “scan” for the most important stuff. I tend to glance first at line #17 to check on publications first – no writing, no dice – and then to line #12 to see if this person is interested in writing or teaching about something we’re interested in. Then I’ll look at line #6 for JD school and line #8a for other graduate degrees, take a quick look at #5 for diversity, and maybe see if the references in line #19 are good scholars. That’s about it. From my point of view (which I think is widely shared), publications are the most important thing, so if you run out of space on line #17, stick more writings into line #20. Otherwise try to avoid cluttering up the FAR form with extraneous information – you don’t need to propose a half-dozen esoteric seminars you’d like to teach in the “comments” section of lines #12-14. To repeat something stated above, it’s a pain in the tuches to download the full CV from the AALS website, so you have to assume that the only thing committees will see is the FAR form.]
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.)
[Across-the-Transom Applications: Committees are now getting a fair number of application packets directly, either by hard copy or email. These generally include a cover letter, full CV, writing samples (PDFs, if by email), and maybe references. The advantages are that the full CV’s are a lot easier to read than the FAR forms and that someone may glance through a writing sample that looks really interesting. The disadvantages are that this is basically an arms race, so that as other candidates start to do it, there is less of an individual advantage to investing the effort and resources in the mailings; and that committee members have to shuffle all of these materials back and forth among themselves when screening the FAR forms. My bottom-line thought on these materials is that they can’t hurt, but in most cases don’t help. A really good FAR form is going to get flagged for further review.]
[Follow-up Emails: Again, committees have procedures. We’ve looked at your FAR form, and if you’ve sent in materials, we’ve considered those too. If you have recommenders calling or emailing, we know who you are. It’s unlikely that you’ve truly fallen through the cracks. Emails to committee chairs saying, “I’m kind of surprised that I haven’t heard from your school” are not likely to yield an interview in D.C. I should note, however, that my wife is a career counselor and said it would be pretty standard advice to tell job candidates to contact employers, express continuing interest, and remind them that you’ll be in town for the Meat Market; in any event given the low cost (potential slight and transient annoyance of appointments chairs) and potential upside (another interview), she thinks the cost-benefit analysis tips in favor of sending these emails.]
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
This hotel has several different towers, requiring you to go down to the ground floor and find the right tower for your next interview. Get to the Meat Market early and scout out the hotel. If you are retentive like me, you could even do a "dry run" to learn the path you have to take between interviews. You laugh now, but you'll thank me later. At this hotel, everyone looks terrified -- it's like arriving at a convention of well dressed deer caught in the headlights – except for the faculty interviewers, who are praying silent thanks that they are on the other side of the desk. This is the screening interview – the first stage in the process.
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.) Committees, or at least individual members, will likely have read your writing sample and will be prepared to grill you on it. 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.
[Committees get a lot of questions in advance of the Meat Market, wondering whether we’re looking in a particular area. In general schools can do two kinds of entry-level hiring: (1) Slot-driven or “curricular” or (2) open or “best available athlete.” Many schools claim they do only the second category and really aren’t focused on filling curricular needs. It’s true that focusing too much on filling gaps in the curriculum can be a recipe for mediocrity in hiring. If you tell a committee to hire the best soft IP person on the market that year, they’ll hire the best soft IP person, but that person may not be as good as someone else who could have been hired without consideration for subject area. On the other hand, you can’t run a law school with only con law teachers + adjuncts to teach the rest of the curriculum, so eventually curricular needs will play a role. It’s common to talk in terms of a thumb on the scale for particular areas – i.e. a committee will get marching orders from the dean to look generally, but to pay particular attention to promising tax or contracts scholars, because we have a hole to fill in the curriculum or retirements coming up. Having said all of this, some schools are hard-core slot-driven. I have been out for job talks for “the ethics position,” and it was clear that by golly the school was going to hire in ethics that year even if they had to hire a monkey. I guess the takeaway point from all of this is that if interviewers at the Meat Market are focused on your answers to these questions on the FAR form, and are grilling you to find out whether you’re really keen on teaching securities law, you can assume there is at least a thumb on the scale for securities law people.]
(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.
[As noted previously, I have to significantly strengthen my comments re publications: Now it is not the case that your chances of getting an interview will increase if you have publications. Rather, it is a prerequisite almost everywhere. So prepare to be thoroughly questioned about your work. Prepare as if you’re going to give your job talk in
[(5) What can we tell you about our school?
I really don’t think I need to say much here, because candidates on the last several years’ worth of Meat Markets have obviously figured out the game: The question you ask is supposed to reveal you as an ambitious scholar who is nevertheless humble, intellectual confident but cognizant of her status as a beginner, keen but not too much of a gunner, and collegial to a fault. For example, people ask: “What kind of support do you offer untenured scholars?” “Are there formal mentoring relationships or is it all informal?” “Do you offer grant-writing assistance if I want to do a big, ambitious empirical project?” and so on. We all know you really want to ask questions like the following (from this hilarious post by Tim Zinnecker):
Why did your academic dean ask you to serve on the hiring committee, and how can I avoid the same mistake you made?
Why are YOU asking ME about scholarship, given our respective output in the last three years? [zing!]
If I were to ask your students how your institution could be improved, what would they tell me?
Can you envision any (ANY!) situation arising in the next 50 years that would require me to teach a UCC course?
If you could jettison some of your faculty deadwood, which three colleagues would be gone by tomorrow?]
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. [In today’s market (2009), you’re going to be competing with a lot of people coming out of Ph.D. programs and various kinds of VAP’s and fellowships at law schools. Many, if not most serious candidates will have experiencing giving academic papers.]
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
[If you are fortunate enough to receive an offer, Brian Leiter has some thoughts on information you should gather as part of assessing the decision whether to take the offer. I agree with his advice at the end that no one wants to hire a prima donna. Most entry-level job offers are relatively fixed in terms of salary and benefits, although there may be room for some negotiation around course packages, start dates, and things like that. There’s not that much room for bargaining, however, so it is wise to approach the process in a spirit of collegial discussion, not a hardball negotiation.]
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 October 8, 2010.
P.S. I have corresponded about law teaching with many people who have stumbled upon this web site. If you are one of those people, please feel free to send me a note. I'm always happy to talk about the strange but fascinating world of legal academia. My e-mail address is bradley-wendel “at” lawschool.cornell.edu. I usually try to respond personally (if briefly) to questions, but it may take a while for to get around to it, since maintaining this site is strictly recreational.
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