So I’m pretty much giving up at this point. Other than inventing a time machine and trading my full scholarship to a top tier but not top-20 law school (which I had to accept for financial reasons) for a more prestigious pedigree (and I really do have to wonder if any hiring committee members ever stop to consider that those of us from low-income backgrounds have to go where the scholarship is, not where the pedigree is, not realizing at age 21 how much that lack of pedigree would come back to punish us years later…)… there’s not much more I can do at this point to improve my chances.

Thanks for all this info-it’s very helpful. I’d like to ask you about applicants with a foreign law degree.

My field is EU and international law, and I have a PhD in EU law from a top UK University. I’d like to know whether it is totally impossible to get a job at a good US law school in any of these fields (EU, international law) without having a US degree.

Thanks!

Any of you out there have a different take?

(2) Someone with a JD from a low-ranked school and a well-published prior academic career in a non-law field is going to have difficulty getting his or her foot in the door. The non-elite credentials are going to be problematic for the elite schools, and too much publishing and not enough practice experience is going to turn off the low-ranked schools. (More generally, yes you can look TOO GOOD for many low-ranked schools.)

Any thoughts on the effect that starting an academic career in a B-school would have on ultimately transitioning to a law school? Would law schools still consider a candidate seriously if s/he has a strong publication record during his/her time at the B-school? Or does going down the B-school road largely foreclose the possibility of a law school appointment?

Also, how realistic are the chances that one could slowly transition their way into a co-appointment at both a university’s B-school and law school?

Thanks.

Also, I should clarify one thing: When saying that the very strongest candidates tend to have a couple existing publications plus a job talk piece in the pipeline, I did not mean to claim that appointments committees formally disqualify people with more publications simply on account of the volume of writing. When committees look at a candidate with 10 publications on his/her resume, they don’t simply say, “That’s too many; s/he’s out.” Rather, my point is that when committees actually read the stuff written by entry-level candidates with such long publication records, invariably it turns out that too much of it is substandard. But of course one must actually read to know for sure.

Very interesting take on article quantity; I think you’re right that this is one of those questions on which opinions generally will diverge. I think it also may depend on how strong a candidate’s resume is without writing: I think it may be that the stronger the CV without publishing, the greater the risks are with writing a lot of articles.

1. Re “publishing your way out of a non-elite JD”: I don’t think I’ve ever held this up as a viable path, and in fact I have serious doubts about it. Rightly or wrongly, many schools do seem to treat a JD from an “elite” law school (which doesn’t mean just Yale or Harvard, but probably does mean one of the 16 or so schools that think they’re in the “top 10″) as something approaching a necessary (though certainly not sufficient) condition for hiring. There are exceptions, of course, but I think this is a fair description of the practice among most schools in the “top 50″ or so.

2. That said, if someone wanting to write themselves out of a non-elite JD were asking me for advice about how to do it, I would suggest trying to land a VAP or other teaching/writing fellowship at a higher ranked school. This will help deliver some institutional prestige and will also provide space and time to write a job talk piece. Of course, landing one of those positions is no mean feat, but it does tend to be easier than landing a tenure-track job at a comparable school.

3. As for having 20 publications in “very highly ranked, peer-reviewed journals in the subject area of [a candidate's] PhD,” my sense is that a record like this will often not help very much. I concede that my initial comment about the trouble that is likely to befall someone with such a long publication record was based on the assumption that we were talking about bar journal pieces. But if we’re now talking about a candidate with (a) a “non-elite” JD and (b) a lengthy publication record from another discipline, it’s easy imagine problems. Law faculty often aren’t experts in the candidate’s PhD field, so they need to find a way to decipher that part of the candidate’s file. So they will ask questions like: Is the PhD from an elite program in that field? Does the candidate have the strong support of his/her PhD advisor? Are the publications in the PhD field co-authored? Is this a field where co-authorship is common and where some co-authors may not have done much work on the project? To the extent the candidate did really well in the PhD field (by, e.g., having substantial involvement in 20 peer-reviewed publications in the field), why isn’t s/he seeking an academic position in that field? To the extent the candidate did really well in a top PhD program, why did s/he attend a “non-elite” law school? And finally, is there any evidence that the candidate’s legal writing has made, is making, and/or will make good use of the PhD?

It’s possible, of course, that the candidate has good answers to all of these questions. But if s/he does not, there are likely to be problems. E.g., if appointments committees come to conclude that this is a candidate who decided to seek a law teaching position only after not succeeding in his/her PhD field, the PhD could end up being more of a liability than an asset.

4. Finally, there’s the question of anti-conservative bias. I don’t doubt that such bias could exist in some quarters. But I join others who have said that the influence of any such bias tends to be significantly overstated by people complaining about the teaching market.

My god, what does this say about the Academy then? And what does it say about the whole idea of being able to publish your way out of a non-elite JD?

literally no one — can sustain sufficient quality across so much quantity. The lesson here is to write less, but better.

Really? You presume that the quality of my scholarship is poor because of the number. Would it make any difference if I told you that my other publications were not in bar journals, but very highly ranked, peer-reviewed journals in the subject area of my PhD?

Frankly, the questions I got at the market told me a lot about my chances for callbacks – it was obvious at during many of the interviews that they had very little real interest in hiring me. I was even asked why I was a member of (gulp) the Federalist Society! I only wish they had not interviewed me to begin with so that I could have saved the $2,000 I spent going to that B.S. process known as the “market.” It’s a fraud.

Look, people can say that the market is competitive and that’s why HLS/YLS, etc al. grads dominate the market. It may also be the case that the student who graduates at the last of their class at these institutions are still a Yale/Harvard law school graduate in the final analysis. But don’t insult people and say that law schools aren’t obsessed with prestige and people who attended less prestigious schools can “write they’re way in” – it’s a lie and everyone know it. If you talking about quality over quality, then how do you explain this nonsense? It can be explained entirely by the political message advocated.

Yeah, no prestige bias or bias against conservatives… Well, that’s why lawyers have bad reputations I guess.

The other classic piece, focused on those with long practice records aspiring to enter teaching after their JD (LLB?!) does not have that just-fresh-feeling, is Jeff Lipshaw’s How Not To Retire And Teach. Again it serves up some apparently bad news but nothing that cannot be faced and overcome; it’s just that some of the things candidates assume will *sound* good to committees may not (the 18 articles, the years in partnership, the word ‘retire’) but ultimately can be made plusses or fixed. Links:

http://ww3.lawschool.cornell.edu/faculty-pages/wendel/teaching.htm

http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/legal_profession/2007/06/how_not_to_reti.html

I acknowledge that there is prestige gap, but I think it matters more at schools higher up in the rankings. It is very unlikely that a Top 20 law school will hire a candidate from a second or third tier law school. But that candidate will not face as much difficulty at many other schools. In other words, the prestige gap is greater at the top, and while it still exists even lower down, it is not nearly as large.

Regarding quality vs. quantity, I think we’re not in as much disagreement as you think we are. Certainly, quantity matters and helps. But the articles must be good. As you point out, most entry level articles are not particularly stellar, which is true — in fact, most law review articles in general are not all that stellar. Music has its Mozarts, literature has its Shakespeares, and law reviews have . . . well, nothing quite the equivalent. So things are graded on a curve! I strongly believe that my quality beats quantity advice is sound. In a choice between publishing 5-6 rather poor articles or 2-3 articles of good (or even moderate) quality, I’d recommend the latter.

That said, I think it is important for a candidate to demonstrate productivity. I’d recommend having 2 or more publications. While some candidates can still be successful with just 1 publication, that is becoming increasingly rare.