Professor Bainbridge...on law, politics, religion, culture & food

Why be a Law Professor? And How to Become One

Harvard Law professor Daryl Levinson:

noted that job satisfaction among academics is much higher than among legal practitioners or even faculty in the Arts and Sciences. Academia gives lawyers time, space, and flexibility to think about the topics they find interesting. Compared to Arts and Sciences faculties, it is easier to get both an entry-level job and tenure at a law school, and law professors are paid at a much higher rate. Professors can largely set their own schedules, and have almost complete autonomy over what they spend their time reading and writing. Levinson characterized the ability to have control over your own time as opposed to being at the mercy of a partner or client as “invaluable.” He said this control makes the same number of hours worked feel “completely different.”

Sounds about right to me. I make less money than those of my law school classmates who made Big Firm partner, but there are serious lifestyle and itellectual advantages. Levinson went on to provide advice on becoming a law professor:

The single most important step while in law school, according to Levinson, is to form a close relationship with at least one member of the faculty, preferably one who works in the general field the student intends to join. A mentor can help a student generate a paper topic, read drafts, and prepare him or her to give a job talk. Schools often decide whom to hire by calling their colleagues. It is absolutely necessary, therefore, for a candidate to have a professor who is willing to speak on his or her behalf. To develop a mentoring relationship, students can volunteer to be a research assistant, take small classes and seminars, and do independent studies.

The second most important step a student can take is to read as much scholarship as possible, particularly from younger professors. A good way to do this is to enroll in reading groups or form informal reading groups. Reviewing articles for a student journal, asking professors for recommended readings, and simply reading on your own are also good strategies.

The final step a candidate should take while in law school is to write. While it is important that a candidate have writing that is publishable, it is not as important to have finished scholarship. Law schools recognize that whether or not a candidate has actually published is largely determined by second-year law students who run law journals and who may not be the best judges of quality scholarship. Levinson recommended that students start by writing two to three-page summaries of ideas, writing reaction papers to seminars, and taking advantage of the Winter Writing Program and summer writing fellowships.

After graduation, students should set aside two to four years to prepare to become a professor. Levinson recommended that students think of this as a “graduate law school” program. Graduates should spent their time reading scholarly articles, and writing one to two articles that can be presented as papers at a job talk. Most students are unable to produce this work during law school, so it must be accomplished after law school.

Again, that sounds about right to me. Especially the first point. I’ve written that:

Each fall the Association of American Law Schools collects resumes from prospective law teaching candidates, which are then transmitted to the appointments committee of each law school. The members of that committee then face the unenviable task of winnowing down well over a 1000 applications to a list of 25 or so candidates with whom the committee will meet at the so-called “meat market” convention. After which, the committee must further winnow those 25 or so down to a smaller number, 3-5, who are invited out to the law school for on campus interviews.

As a result, the hiring process is almost entirely negative. You spend the vast majority of your time winnowing the application pile—i.e., finding reasons not to hire someone. If you have on-site interviews of 0.3% of the applicant pool, any opposition by any committee member is enough to exclude someone. At the early stages of the process, they barely need to posit a reason.

In my experience, it thus is a lot harder to get somebody hired than it is to block them from being hired. The process isn’t as explicit as the blackballing scene in Animal House, but the law school hiring process is just as weighted against hiring. (And I mean hiring anybody, regardless of political affiliation.) Any opposition (for whatever reason) therefore is usually enough, absent a very strongly committed pro-hiring faction.

In most cases, a candidate’s best chance of surviving the winnowing process is for someone on the committee to become the candidate’s champion. The champion will pull the candidate’s resume out of the slush pile and make sure it gets flagged for close review. Because most law schools lack a critical mass of libertarian and conservative faculty members, however, there is nobody predisposed to pulling conservative candidates’ AALS forms out of the slush pile (and a fair number of folks inclined, whether consciously or subconsciously, to bury them). Applicants with conservative lines on their resume—an Olin fellowship, Federalist Society membership, or, heaven help you, a Scalia clerkship—thus tend to be passed over no matter how sterling the rest of their credentials may be.

In contrast, the latest left-leaning prodigy from Harvard or Yale has a mentor at one of those schools who makes calls to his/her buddies and ideological soulmates at other law schools. The recipients of those calls then flag the prodigy’s file, giving them a critical leg-up in the process. Law school hiring tends to be driven by the self-perpetuating network of left-leaning senior faculty.

Even a left-liberal needs a mentor, but its really critical for the center-right and right-of-center candidate.

Additional commentary by Josh Wright and Orin Kerr.