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

Most law professors I know (Including my wife) are more frustrated with the focus many law schools take.

Cranking out policy makers, over sound legal scholars seems to not just be the norm, but policy in general. (At least in most schools I’m aquainted with.)

For those that take research as a necessary component to sound judgment, many of the kids cranked through law school seem to lack the motivation to make those judgments.

That would certainly attribute to some turn over amongst Professors.

I have to agree with Bainbridge on this.  Law professors are likely to be very happy.  Those who work hard feel relevant to the students they teach.  Those who kick back at least have a cushy job post-tenure.

The biggest countervailing factor is likely to be ego.  Many law professors were very successful in college and pretty successful at a top law school, but then found themselves teaching at an institution that they consider inferior.  The work itself isn’t the problem—teaching, research, and ocassional pro bono practice could be meaningful in themselves.  The problem is that it’s tough for Yale/Harvard folks to accept being at a less prestigious university.

Having spent my career in both the “real world” and academia, I find professors in general to be whiners, despite their privileged status and easy workload.

Whenever I got the urge to whine I just remembered my wife’s work as an RN. Professors do not wrestle violent Alzheimers patients on Christmas eve.

Having worked with a couple of hundred lawyers, I would guess that law professors have largely egos and grievances than others.

My later father, a professor of art & design for 40 years, often said that professors had privileged lives envied by all but perhaps the very rich. He always enjoyed going to work, even during the many years he served as a department head. Law professors should feel the same way about their jobs. We are paid considerably more than our colleagues in art, music, history and other departments on campus, our students are, for the most part, bright and hard working, our faculty colleagues are interesting and engaging, we work in nice surroundings, and the hours are hard to beat. I doubt there is a better job in higher education than being a tenured law professor. A law professor who is unhappy with his or her work needs some kind of reality check. There are not many law faculty eager to join law firms, but there are 1000s of lawyers who would love to trade places with us.

I think there are three flaws in the responses to Lencioni and myself:

i.  the assumption that people can be trusted to evaluate how happy or unhappy they are in a professional (or quasi-professional survey)

ii.  the assumption that surrogates like number of articles published, teaching evaluations, etc. will have much do do with personal happiness, particularly for a group of people that has already rejected a more obvious surrogate (money) in making their career choice

iii. the assumption that most professors “choose” legal teaching because it is more desirable than law firms or Government rather than (say) because they didn’t fit in well in the other areas

None of this means law professors are indeed particularly unhappy, and--as I’ve noted before--their supposed dissatisfaction may well be a deliberate pose designed to increase their apparent sophistication and up their market value.  But one would need much, much deeper research to establish this.  The mere assertion by a few highly visible people that “I feel great” doesn’t do much to address the issue.

It may be worth considering the new “happiness” research (e.g., Dan Gilbert), which suggests that happiness has more to do with internal predispositions than situational factors.  To know if law professors are unhappy, we need to answer the question as to whether unhappy people are more or less likely to end up in legal academia rather than what the experience of being a law professor is like.

Can I ask you law professors a question?
While you sit on your tush, in one of the most cush jobs ever, where you earn well over six figures for a few hours of work a week, and one paper a year . . . do you ever wonder why no one else in society gets such an easy life? Do you know of anyone else who does jack all day and makes six figures?
do you ever ask who has to sacrifice to pay for this largesse?
I’m in $150,000 of debt, and after three years of hard work all I have to look forward to is the job below. All that stuff you “taught” me - preparing motions, interrogatories and so on - is worth a whopping $14 an hour. I paid a fortune in tuition to learn a skill no one wants to pay for. So while you’re depressed about your anonymity and immeasurement, know that the people you taught are depressed because they don’t know how they’re going to eat.

...........................
Employer Name:
Contact Name: x
Address: x
City:
Telephone: x
Facsimile: x
E-Mail: x
Description: HOURS: Part-time (20hrs/week) SALARY: $11-$14 per hour. STUDENT LEVEL: 2L, 3L JOB DESCRIPTION: Small Monrovia automobile accident defense law firm looking for part-time law clerk to primarily assist in preparation of discovery responses. Responsibilities will include communicating with clients, preparing draft interrogatory and document request responses, and limited research and motion preparation work. HOW TO APPLY: Please fax resume to 626-471-1094.
Date Entered: 12/20/07
Job ID: 421929

Loyola2l

No one ever said just because you have an education, that you get to use it. Or that an education is a guarentee for employment. There is nothing out there stopping you from generating your own wealth, if that is what you desire.

The US cranks out over 6000 PhD’s/year. MANY do not go into teaching. Many end up as secretaries for others.

My wife and I are both Professors. Myself in molecular biology, my wife in legal history.

Neither of us only work a few hours/week. That perception, though common, is a myth.

And while I know several associates who have left teaching for industry, many are grateful for the ‘luck’ in landing a tenure tracked professorship. Most work part-time (and not by choice), and many in multiple schools to carry a full load.

If anything, much of the turn over maybe accountable to professors giving up, after waiting years for FULL TIME work. And some just don’t play politics well.

Baingridge is correct in that there are many reasons for changing careers. Why should law be any different than any other industry?

Caron’s initial idea was just nuts. If some law profs are miserable, I’d imagine they’d be miserable just about anywhere. For a non-celebrity occupation I’d imagine law professors is one of the best types of jobs to have. I have a JD/MBA/LLM graduate degrees from Temple University and am a full time tenure track community college professor. Our contact hours are 15 a semester (not 6 like a law prof) and we tend to teach overloads as well. We make modest 5 figure salaries (not 6-figures like law profs) but have very flexible schedules, summers off and the like. And despite not being nearly as desirable as a law prof job these positions are absolutely coveted. Any time a full time position opens up we will be flooded with JDs who’d love to teach full time even at this level.

Even in the position that I am in I’d consider my quality of life to be better than 90+% of “real world” private sector jobs. Though I don’t make as much $$ I would in the real world. Law profs, however, make 6-figures with only 6 contact hours. I can’t see what more law profs could ask for.