The path to academia — is practical experience disqualifying?
posted by Jennifer Collins
Over at the Volokh Conspiracy, Orin Kerr writes about an interesting talk recently given by Harvard Law professor Darryl Levinson to aspiring law professors. Like Orin, I was particularly struck by the following remarks from the article: “practical legal experience is not a good predictor of scholarly ability, and, Levinson noted, ‘is pretty nearly disqualifying.’ Levinson pointed out that today’s younger professors have no significant practical experience, and that if they tried to become involved in the world, ‘the world would probably recoil in horror.’” Since today is the start of the infamous meat market, I don’t want all those aspiring law professors with practical experience to be discouraged! First, I think that many, although certainly not all, younger professors do have significant practice experience. I worked for a long time as both a defense attorney and as a prosecutor, and I know that both my teaching and my scholarship are far richer for the experience. At least in the criminal field, I can think of numerous colleagues who have experience on either the prosecution or the defense side (or both). Second, if we are indeed moving to a world where new professors do not have any practical experience, I think that would be a tremendous loss for students, for law schools, and for the profession. We are after all training most students to be lawyers, not academics. I wish that we could move away from this view that having practice experience, in other words being a good attorney, and being a great scholar are incompatible. I believe that it is eminently possible to be both.
October 26, 2007 at 8:49 am
Posted in: Uncategorized
Print This Post
Responses (4)
Wanna-Be Law Prof - October 26, 2007 at 11:11 am
Levinson said pretty much the same thing at an HLS alumni conference in May. As someone with a couple of years’ practice under his belt, and who would prefer to practice for two more years (to gain experience/insight, and to pay school debt), I found his routine to be deeply discouraging.
That said, I’m very glad to hear your contrary view.
In the same vein, a few thoughts on the current state of practice/consulting among professors would be most welcome. While I very much would like to go on the market in the next year or two, I hesitate out of concern that I won’t be able to make legal practice a consistent (which is not to say prominent) part of my career.
Bruce Boyden - October 26, 2007 at 1:12 pm
I wonder if there’s a distinction here between schools; practical experience might be anathema at Harvard and other places, but less of a “disqualifier” elsewhere.
I for one am very thankful when I teach class that I have some idea of how what I am talking about actually works in practice.
Geoff - October 26, 2007 at 2:54 pm
Levinson said that significant practice experience is “disqualifying,” not that it was a “disqualifier”, and I think there is a difference. I find it had to believe that any school — even Harvard — would hold against a candidate practical experience. The wisdom, insight, and sometimes useful (although sometimes boring and irrelevant) war stories that come with extensive practice experience certainly add value to a law school.
But significant practice experience may be “disqualifying” (in practice) because it tends not to co-occur with some of the other things that schools are requiring these days for new hires. There are of course countless exceptions, but I think it’s fair to say that:
(1) Many top schools are now almost exclusively looking at joint degree (J.D/Ph.D) types. This is true even as you get into the “second tier”. Realistically, most joint degree types will not have both a Ph.D. (4-8 years) and “significant” practice experience (which I would probably define as more than six years of legal practice, not counting clerkships). Those candidates do exist, but they are rare. To the extent that interdiciplinary approaches are so highly valued, and graduate study gives time for publication, the joint degree and Ph.D. types may just be squeezing out the more seasoned practitioners.
(2) The other problem that seasoned practitioners sometimes face is, have they written? To be credible, they must have written SOMETHING. But to a law faculty, for better or for worse, bar journal articles largely don’t count. The problem someone out of law school for a decade or more may face is that, if they haven’t found time to publish recently, their notes and other academic writing are a decade old. While such a person might be in touch with “real world” concerns, they are likely out of touch with “academic” concerns. Choosing between someone whose legal scholarship agenda is current, and someone whose isn’t, I think faculties (again, rightly or wrongly) tend to go with the person they can imagine seeing plugged in to a current thread in the literature.
(3) People with long term practice tend to have more geographic roots and are less mobile. If you have lived and practiced for a decade in a particular city, are you willing to pick up and move to some far off state to teach? If you are, you’ll have a chance at a job. If you aren’t — and your AALS form is filled with restrictions and conditions — you’re dead. I have not done the empirical work on this, but my strong suspicion is that candidates with the longest tenures in practice also tend to be the ones most likely to embrace self-defeating geographical restrictions (that may be viewed with suspicion even by those schools in the preferred geographical area).
Daryl Levinson - October 26, 2007 at 7:20 pm
For what it’s worth, the Record’s summary of what I said is a bit misleading. The quote they used was taken from my parodic description of recent hiring trends at HLS in particular—where it is true that most (though not all) of the entry-levels hired over the past few years are PhDs without significant practice experience. This was in the broader context of my describing the general trend in legal academia away from the profession and towards the academy, and the concomitant decline (obviously not to zero, but still remarkable) in the number of entry-level hires who come with high-level practice experience (i.e., more than a few years in practice). I actually expressed some normative doubt about whether this trend has been good for legal education. That’s certainly a point worth debating, but the present reality of the situation is important to recognize as well.
Leave a Reply