Comments on: More Statistics on Law Professor Hiring

By: Daniel J. Solove

Daniel J. Solove — Wed, 28 May 2008 03:13:28 +0000

Tom — my mistake. I’ve now deleted BC from the table in this post.

By: tom

tom — Wed, 28 May 2008 03:10:11 +0000

Hmm…actually, you repeated a school that you had in your previous post…namely, Boston College, which is still within the top 30 US News Report (26? or something like that).

Why was that?

By: anon

anon — Tue, 27 May 2008 15:26:52 +0000

A brief point–could you be double-counting candidates? That is, if someone was on the market in 06-07, and then again in 07-08, would you have counted them twice, making it look like there were more candidates from a school than there actually were? This could skew your results slightly. (This may be what Alfred was alluding to.)

By: anon

anon — Tue, 27 May 2008 06:53:03 +0000

“Some of the schools below have placed more successful applicants than a number of schools in the top 20.”

Given that GW and Wash-St. Louis placed exactly zero, that is not hard. I think the more intuitive take from these numbers is that, unless you went to a top twenty school (really a top top 20 school), your chance of breaking into the legal academy is no more than 10% at most. The fact that that abysmal chance is true of several top twenty schools also, is cold comfort.

By: Alfred

Alfred — Tue, 27 May 2008 05:57:22 +0000

Dan–thanks for this. You’re doing a great service, as always.

These data are sobering. And I hope we’ll talk some about what this means to our profession.

One question, though, did you think about using the AALS directory instead of Solum’s report? My thought is that you might go through all the people in the 2006-07 registry and see who appears in the 2007-08 AALS directory.

That obviously won’t pick up people who’re hired in 2007-08, but for the earlier years, I’d imagine it’s a complete record of who’s been hired. Also, it would pick up some people who obtained visiting positions and I’d think that would be desirable to include them in your tables, to give a fuller sense of who’s able to “break into” the academy.