Archive for the ‘Law School (Hiring & Laterals)’ Category

Job Talk Alternatives?

posted by Dave Hoffman

The hour-long job talk is the market standard measure of a candidate’s presentation skills.  As Solove explained,  ”[i]t begins with the candidate lecturing for about 20 to 30 minutes and is followed by about 30 minutes of Q&A.”  There are advantages to this format: it permits the candidate to get his or her thesis on the table before being interrupted by faculty, who, being who they are, aren’t accustomed to listening to other people talk and who would otherwise interrupt with the first thought that pops into their heads.  There are disadvantages as well — a shorter 20 minute grace period may be insufficient to make any particularly complex argument; a longer 30-40 minute speech risks boring the room.  Plus, to the very limited extent that the job talk is a good predictor of how well a candidate will teach, longer talks are particularly unrepresentative of a well-functioning and open classroom.

I thought I’d ask the audience whether they know of truly different models.  I know that in 2004, when I was on the market, Lewis and Clark had candidates speak to a full room of students and faculty (75+), with no constraints that I can recall on the Q&A.  (My god did I bombed that talk!)  Conversely, I’ve heard that some schools permit questioning from the first minute, but insist that all comments until the 30 minute mark be merely clarifying.  Whether and how that rule is enforceable is beyond my ken.  Some schools are rumored to entirely ban powerpoint.  Others, I hear, ask the candidates to teach as if they were talking to a classroom of law students.

But these are largely rumors.  Does anyone know of different models and have thoughts about what works particularly well?

I’ll add that I’d prefer that the thread not devolve into a criticism of the idea of job talks — though I agree with the critique in many respects.

  October 18, 2011 at 10:27 pm   Posted in: Law School (Hiring & Laterals), Law School (Scholarship), Law School (Teaching)   Print This Post   9 Comments

“So, do you have any questions for us?”

posted by Dave Hoffman

A very common question at the end of a typical AALS interview prompts the interviewee to ask the hiring committee questions of their own.  Obviously, this presents the candidate with an opportunity to show their interest as well as to actually gather information.

As I’m on Temple’s hiring committee this semester, I’ve noticed that several candidates’ first response to this question starts with some version of the following: “well, the internet basically answers most of questions that I might otherwise have had.”  And, of course, that’s true.  So I figured I’d open a thread for folks to suggest questions that they find to prompt useful answers.  Here’s mine: what is [X] law school doing about rising tuition, and consequent borrowing?

  September 23, 2011 at 8:17 pm   Posted in: Law School (Hiring & Laterals)   Print This Post   19 Comments

GW’s Junior Scholars Finalists

posted by Lawrence Cunningham

Thanks to my colleague, Lisa Fairfax, GW has finalized the program for this year’s Junior Faculty Business and Financial Law Workshop and Prize (detailed here).   Of the more than 100 papers submitted, the following dozen presenters were chosen.  [Commentators appear in brackets; I've shortened some paper titles.]  

 The workshop will take place at GW on April 1 and 2, 2011.  We are delighted by the submissions, congratulate those chosen, and stress that making the selections was difficult because of the volume of amazing papers.  We encourage everyone interested to attend and look forward to the weekend.

Adam Leviton (Georgetown), In Defense of Bailouts [George Geis (Virginia) & Art Wilmarth (GW)]

Jodie Kirshner (Cambridge), A Transatlantic Perspective on Regional Dynamics and Societa Eurpoea [Francesca Bignami (GW) & Theresa Gabaldon (GW)]

Alan White (Valparaiso), Welfare Economics and Regulation of Small-Loan Credit: Lessons from Microlending in Developing Nations [Michael Pagano (Villanova) & Lawrence Mitchell (GW)]

Nicola Sharpe (Illinois), Corporate Board Performance and Organizational Strategy [Deborah Demott (Duke) & Michael Abramowicz (GW)]

Julie Hill (Houston), The Rise of Ad Hoc Bank Capital Requirements [Anna Gelpern (American) & John Buchman (E*Trade Bank & GW Adjunct)]

Michael Simkovic (Seton Hall), The Effects of Ownership and Stock Liquidity on the Timing of Repurchase Transactions [Richard Booth (Villanova) & Henry Butler (Mason)]

Michelle Harner (Maryland), Activist Distressed Debtors [Donna Nagy (Indiana Bloomington) & Lisa Fairfax (GW)]

Saule Omarova (UNC), The Federal Reserve Board’s Use of Exemptive Power [Patricia McCoy (Connecticut) & Arthur Wilmarth (GW)]

Heather Hughes (American), Suburban Sprawl, Finance Law and Environmental Harm [Scott Kieff (GW) & Lawrence Cunningham (GW)]

Robert Jackson (Columbia), Private Equity and Executive Compensation [Norman Veasey (Weil Gotshal) & William Bratton (Penn)]

Brian Quinn (BC), Putting Your Money Where Your Mouth Is: Post Closing Price Adjustments in Merger Agreements? [Gordon Smith (BYU) & John Pollack (Schulte Roth)]

Mehrsa Baradaran (BYU), Reconsidering Wal-Mart’s Bank [Heidi Schooner (Catholic) & Renee Jones (BC)]

This is one of many events sponsored by GW’s Center for Law, Economics and Finance.

  February 28, 2011 at 8:53 pm   Posted in: Corporate Finance, Corporate Law, Law School, Law School (Hiring & Laterals), Law School (Law Reviews), Law School (Scholarship), Law School (Teaching), Law Talk, Securities, Securities Regulation   Print This Post   One Comment

New Jersey’s Law Faculty Can Stay Put

posted by Dave Hoffman

Some time back, a few blogs reported on an early draft of a New Jersey bill that would seem to have required New Jersey state employees, including the law faculties of Camden-Rutgers and Newark, to maintain a New Jersey residence.  Not surprisingly, the final draft of the bill, now before Gov. Christie for his signature, contains provisions providing schools an easy way to claim exemptions for newly hired faculty (older hires being entirely grandfathered).

Though faculties will be spared, the law is incredibly stupid.  Mobile employees – that is, the cream of the crop – will be motivated to leave the State’s workforce so they can live where they want.  Though there many good reasons to shrink the size of government’s payroll, especially if the State is going to underfund its workers’ pensions, this seems like a pretty foolish way to go about it.  Maybe Governor Christie will pass up on the opportunity for cheap populism and make an articulate case for a well functioning government in the long term … but I sort of doubt it.

  December 23, 2010 at 10:29 pm   Posted in: Law School (Hiring & Laterals)   Print This Post   4 Comments

Paying for Tenure Letters?

posted by Lawrence Cunningham

Most schools don’t pay honorariums to outside scholars to write tenure letters (that vital component of a professor’s application for promotion and tenure), whether on internal promotions or about lateral recruits. At least that’s been my experience, based on writing about 25 of them since my own first tenure 15 years ago and requesting them on behalf of a couple of schools.

Instead, this task seems to be a service duty each tenured academic has to the broad academy as a whole. True, writers invariably receive a warm “thank you” note from the Dean at the requesting school and appreciation from the home Dean and Provost as part of their annual review of faculty contributions. There’s also the intrinsic reward of engaging deeply with a single scholar’s body of work and writing a report for an audience not necessarily expert in the particular field.

On the other hand, writing a thoughtful and fair tenure letter requires many hours of work, at least five and often ten or sometimes more. As a result, at least one school pays $250 for the service.

Should other schools pay money too or should that school stop spending money it need not spend? My vote is to save the money. If offered the honorarium, I favor asking the school to reallocate it to PILF (the Public Interest Law Foundation) to fund stipends for law students working in the public interest.

What do you think?

  October 28, 2010 at 10:11 am   Posted in: Law School, Law School (Hiring & Laterals), Law School (Scholarship), Law Talk, Uncategorized   Print This Post   4 Comments

AALS Hiring Meeting

posted by Gerard Magliocca

I’ll be there later this week.  Since I’m not the chair of our committee this year, I might actually have some free time.  Send me an email if you’ll be there and want to meet up.

Interviewing faculty candidates for two days is a bear (and the same is true for the candidates, of course).  As Steve McCroskey said in Airplane! — “I picked the wrong week to quit drinking.”

  October 26, 2010 at 8:53 am   Posted in: Law School (Hiring & Laterals)   Print This Post   One Comment

Paul Caron’s Fellowships for Aspiring Law Professors: 2010-2011 Edition

posted by Daniel Solove

Paul Caron has posted an update to his useful guide to fellowships and visiting associate professorships for aspiring law professors.

  August 31, 2010 at 10:47 am   Posted in: Law School, Law School (Hiring & Laterals)   Print This Post   No Comments

Faculty Recruitment (Low Cost) Wish List

posted by Glenn Cohen

Thanks to Dan, Angel, and the rest of the Concurring Opinions crew for inviting me to blog this week.  I’ll try to vary posts between scholarship/ideas, faculty life, and pop culture (and all permutations thereof).

With the FAR form due later this week,  all those of us who went through this process as entry-levels can commiserate with our students, fellows, etc, just beginning the process. Love or hate the entry-level recruiting process, one thing seems obvious to me: we can make it better. To that end I invite readers to add to this thread with their suggestions for improving this process, with one proviso: make it cheap! If you could change something in the process at low or zero cost, what would it be? I give a few of my own answers below, but hope others will contribute through the comments:

1. Re-work the course listings to be selected on the FAR form. As I recall there were 4-6 differently named courses in my primary field (law and medicine, health law), while for others their field was not an option at all. I recognize that nomenclature is fluid, but it seems to me it would not be that hard for someone at AALS to compare their categories to course offerings at 5 member schools and bring them more into accord.

2. One tower, please. Did you know the Faculty Recruitment process measures not just legal acumen and collegiality but athletic ability? You have if you have ever tried to get from the top floor of one tower of the Marriot Wardman tower to the top floor of the other in less than 5 minutes using the stairs. Candidates are stressed and late, interviews go over, chaos ensues. Is it really impossible to put every committee in one tower, if you are booking the conference several years in advance? I know committees are of different size, and also opt for rooms of different grandeur, but a tighter squeeze or less opulence would be easy prices to pay for less rushing.

Read the rest of this post »

  August 2, 2010 at 9:37 am  Tags: FAR form, Recruitment  Posted in: Law School, Law School (Hiring & Laterals), Law Talk, Uncategorized   Print This Post   2 Comments

Author Order in Law Reviews

posted by Dave Hoffman

Other disciplines don’t kid around about the ordering of authors in publications.  In political science and economics, alphabetical or reverse-alphabetical ordering is the dominant approach, even though it distorts hiring decisions.  In science, the first and last names matter – woe to the middle men!  Harvard is so concerned about the trend that it instructs its faculty to “specify in their manuscript a description of the contributions of each author and how they have assigned the order in which they are listed so that readers can interpret their roles correctly [and] prepare a concise, written description of how order of authorship was decided.”

In law, lacking a tradition of co-authorship, there appears to be at best a weak norm that the first author is the primary contributor. That results in a set of interrelated problems:

1)  To law audiences, the first author did the most work, and is rewarded in two ways.  The first is qualitative, and pops up at tenure, promotion, and lateral review — “he was the driver on that piece,” or “she was just the second author.”  Quantitatively, the bluebook foolishly permits multiple author works to be et al’d, meaning that the second through nth authors never get to see their name in the citation print.  Given the rudimentary nature of impact citation analysis in the legal academy, this mean that people who are listed first get the citations and the people who aren’t don’t. This might be less troublesome if the “first author” norm was correct — that is, if first authors in law reviews actually did more work. But my bet is that given letter head bias, many co-authored pieces list as the first author the most prominent author (or at least the author at the best-ranked school).  The upshot: first authors in law reviews are rewarded for being first in both qualitative and quantitative terms, though it’s not clear they ought to be.

2)  To other disciplines, this is fundamentally screwy and is another reason not to publish in a law review.  But interdisciplinary co-authored work published outside of the law reviews becomes that much more difficult as a result.  If a law professor and a non law professor were to publish in an economics journal, my sense of the norm is to alphabetize. [Correct me if I'm wrong here.]  Non legal audiences look at this and understand that it doesn’t signify relative contribution.  Law audiences don’t have that filter on, and the result (again) is that the second author is punished, here for having a last name at the back of the alphabet.

3)  Making sense of this mess requires coordination, which is quite hard because we lack a learned society that is sufficiently respected to impose change from above.  We do have, however, a few very strong journals that have had remarkable success in changing otherwise intractable scholarly pathologies like article bloat.  If the Harvard Law Review could -almost singlehandedly – impose a 25,000 word limit, surely it could fix this problem too.  In my view, the top few journals (HYS) ought to, as a part of their blue-booking project, agree to impose something like the Harvard faculty author order guidelines on folks who are publishing joint projects in their pages. The default ought to be reverse alphabetical listing.  Each article should state the respective contributions of the authors and, to the extent that they have deviated from the alphabet, why.  Finally, HYS ought to reform the bluebook to insist that the first citation of any work include the names of all contributors to the piece, rather than permitting et al. treatment.

  July 15, 2010 at 1:55 pm   Posted in: Law School (Hiring & Laterals), Law School (Law Reviews), Law School (Rankings), Law School (Scholarship)   Print This Post   6 Comments

The Six Figure Law Review Article

posted by Lawrence Cunningham

What’s the economic value of that scholarly article many law professors will write this summer? For the many schools that award scholars summer research grants, it is at least the value of that allocated to the piece—usually $12,500 to $20,000 at most US law schools.

But an excellent article well-placed also often translates into annual salary increments above a school’s merit pay raise pool. That can bump a raise up anywhere from 1% to 3%, or more, depending on the article and how one’s home-school peers do.

For a mid-career scholar earning a base salary of $200,000, say, that means as much as $6,000 or more. For that person, adding $6,000 a year for life, the article’s economic value gets well into the six figures (even discounting to present value). Read the rest of this post »

  May 25, 2010 at 11:47 am   Posted in: Law School (Hiring & Laterals), Law School (Scholarship), Law Talk   Print This Post   7 Comments

The Irrelevance of Kagan’s Modest Scholarly Record

posted by Lawrence Cunningham

How many scholarly articles (five, four or three) has Elena Kagan, the President’s Supreme Court nominee, published? How many years had she been an academic before becoming Solicitor General last year (eight, eighteen or something in between)? What does it matter?

In her career, Kagan has written a total of about 350 pages of legal scholarship that has been cited a total of about 600 times. People seem to disagree about what this scholarly oeuvre adds up to: close to nothing (e.g., Paul Campos), something quite substantial (e.g., Eugene Volokh), or not particularly remarkable in either direction (e.g., Erin Miller).

People also disagree about which of her various pieces count as major articles (the foregoing commentators count three, four and five, respectively) and even disagree about how to define her years in the academy (eight, netting out all government and decanal service, or as many as 18, dating from her first appointment).

There is no mystery about what Kagan has published—a full list including every sort of piece appears at the SCOTUS site; a more selective one appears at the Harvard Law site; another appears below. Disagreement concerns what it means—like the couple receiving marriage counseling in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall.

In my view, as a scholarly record, though it warranted awarding promotion and tenure to a junior faculty member, it would not warrant offering Kagan a lateral tenured appointment at most national law schools in the country today.  But that opinion and the record are simply irrelevant to the question of her qualifications to serve as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Read the rest of this post »

  May 11, 2010 at 4:31 pm   Posted in: Current Events, Law School (Hiring & Laterals), Law School (Scholarship), Supreme Court   Print This Post   11 Comments

Getting Over Academic Anxiety: Menand

posted by Lawrence Cunningham

To law professors, what’s more important, placing an influential article in a leading law journal for teaching everywhere or serving with distinction on the Appointments Committee (and knowing what serving with distinction means)?

A consensus might say the Committee service is more important as an institutional matter but the article more important as a professorial matter, though institutional and individual virtues appear in both. But if there is a tension, should it be expected to produce much anxiety?

Can the tension be dissolved simply by declaring that academic identity and job description require attention to both, contributing to knowledge and its dissemination, plus appointing excellent or promising new colleagues—who will likewise contribute and disseminate knowledge?

Support for the dissolution view appears in a surprising context in a chapter in the erudite new book, The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University, by Harvard University English professor, Louis Menand, author of the 2002 book The Metaphysical Club. The surprising context is one chapter in this four-chapter book exploring the current academic vogue of interdisciplinary inquiry. This phenomenon pervades all academic disciplines, quite clearly in law, though Menand’s focus is the humanities.

Menand notes that amid enthusiasm for this vogue, however, is a sense of anxiety about it. He probes the meaning of this anxiety and discovers it as a displaced anxiety about professorial identity. The vogue may be a critique of the disciplinary divisions of the modern university, a quest for the unification of knowledge.

But that is neither a new vision nor a particularly promising result. Something else seems to be going on and Menand considers that the vogue, and especially discussion about it, may be a screen for something else that is bothering academics: a perceived but unnecessary tension between professors as knowledge generators and as institutional and professional reproducers. Read the rest of this post »

  April 30, 2010 at 6:24 pm   Posted in: Articles and Books, Law School, Law School (Hiring & Laterals), Law School (Scholarship), Law School (Teaching)   Print This Post   No Comments

Larry Solum’s Entry Level Hiring Report

posted by Daniel Solove

Larry Solum has posted the first draft of his Entry Level Hiring Report 2010.

  April 13, 2010 at 9:09 pm   Posted in: Law School, Law School (Hiring & Laterals)   Print This Post   No Comments

Welcome to the Blogosphere: 20th & H Blog by Dean Fred Lawrence

posted by Daniel Solove

My dean, Fred Lawrence of George Washington University Law School, has started a new blog called 20th & H.  He writes:

20th and H was conceived as a place for me, as dean, to share with the GW Law community occasional thoughts about the Law School, legal education, and the legal profession, and to talk with you about some of the perspectives and insights I’ve gained through my work on campus and on the road.

Great idea!  Welcome to the blogosphere.

Fred has a recent post about laptops in the classroom:

For many of our students, the laptop has become almost an extension of their selves.  It’s how they take notes, research, write, and communicate; like it or not, those of us who were students in a pre-computer age simply can’t roll back the clock to a time when faculty members enjoyed the sight of rows of rapt faces and suffered at worse some inattentive doodling, note passing and an occasional nodding head.

Read more over at 20th & H.

  March 15, 2010 at 5:59 am   Posted in: Blogging, Law School, Law School (Hiring & Laterals), Law School (Rankings), Law School (Scholarship), Law School (Teaching)   Print This Post   No Comments

Larry Solum’s Entry Level Hiring Report

posted by Daniel Solove

Over at Legal Theory Blog, Professor Larry Solum is seeking information to compile this year’s entry level hiring report for law school faculty hires.   Here’s his post.  To take the survey, click here.

  March 3, 2010 at 7:55 am   Posted in: Law School, Law School (Hiring & Laterals)   Print This Post   No Comments

The Academic Destiny of Educated, Irreligious, Jewish, Tolerant Non-Capitalists

posted by Dave Hoffman

A sure-to-be-blogged article from the NYT hypes the purported findings from the paper “Why Are Professors Liberal.”  According to the Times, the paper (by Fosse/Gross), the paper uses

“data from the General Social Survey of opinions and social behaviors and compare professors with the rest of Americans . . . to [link] … to the broader question of why some occupations — just like ethnic groups or religions — have a clear political hue. Using an econometric technique, they were then able to test which of the theories frequently bandied about were supported by evidence and which were not . . . The academic profession ‘has acquired such a strong reputation for liberalism and secularism that over the last 35 years few politically or religiously conservative students, but many liberal and secular ones, have formed the aspiration to become professors’.”

The theory is plausible — indeed, it is often advanced by those who deny that intentional discrimination has caused the political inbalance in the faculty lounge.  But as the paper admits, and the Times neglects to mention, the data collected – “provide[s] no direct evidence that [the] theory of professorial liberalism is correct.” (p. 50).  Rather, it draws on other studies, which used surveys to argue that conservatives students did not want to emulate their professors (while liberals did).  That, combined with the clustered cultural characteristics strongly associated with being an academic, lends some support to the selection hypothesis.  But it’s not a true test of the hypothesis.  Indeed, I don’t know how you could test such a selection hypothesis cleanly with observational data.

Moreover, I think the paper understates the role that intentional selection plays: the more time I’ve spent in as an academic, the less sure I am that high education’s anti-conservative tilt  is benign or situational.  (That said, I continue to think that conservative scholarship by pre-hiring candidates places over its weight.)

  January 18, 2010 at 11:53 am   Posted in: Education, Empirical Analysis of Law, Employment Law, Law School (Hiring & Laterals)   Print This Post   One Comment

Overheard at AALS

posted by Dave Hoffman

Here are a few thoughts inspired by conversations I participated in or listened to at AALS (it’s not my fault that people persist in having very loud & irritating conversations over coffee, despite my dirty looks):

(1) A hiring committee chair talked about doing Google background checks on candidates for inconvenient facts. The rationale was that students would like come across pictures/stories themselves, and it was better to know than not. This struck me as an inevitable development, though sad.

(2) Many people complained about how the nametag culture at AALS encourages attendees to feel bad about themselves.  One solution offered was color-coded nametags that were keyed to the kind of social interaction you might expect.

Red: Individuals who, if spoken to, will inform you in great detail about a recent political fight on their faculty. Possible crazy. Avoid.  If you are engaged in a conversation with them, nod vigorously and say nothing.

Blue: Individuals who want a job at your school. Will laugh at your jokes and won’t look over your shoulder for at least two minutes. Engage as needed for a boost.  But don’t commit to anything.

Green: Individuals at schools you want to visit or move to. Will try to avoid you. Elevators are their weakness.

Black: Friends. Meet them later.

Orange: People who won’t deign to make eye contact with you.  There is no point in trying to hunt them down, except after they speak at a session, when they may treat you like a particularly dimwitted student.  Flattery will get you everywhere at that moment.

Purple: Members of your blog. Shouldn’t you know who they are?

Silver: Deans. Also known because they wear suits, and because they are looking at your pockets. Be careful. Their social skills are so much better than yours, that simply being near them makes you look more than ordinarily goofy.

Brown: AALS organizers, looking harried.  If you are outraged, consider engaging them at prepaid lunch over terrible food, when they are at a moral disadvantage.

(3)  I heard one professor telling another than she believed we were working “nine month” jobs since that is how the typical professor contract is worded (and since summer writing is rewarded through “grants” or “bonuses”).  I couldn’t disagree more.  Discuss.

  January 12, 2010 at 11:44 am   Posted in: Conferences, Law School, Law School (Hiring & Laterals), Law School (Rankings), Law School (Teaching)   Print This Post   6 Comments

PhD/JDs: Fads or Future?

posted by Dave Hoffman

My post on the value of having a PhD in the academic hiring market of 2015 has gotten a surprising amount of attention. I thought I’d respond to some of that feedback here.

By email and by blog, I’ve gotten pushback from those who continue to contest that we’re in an empirical “bubble.”  I take that to mean a fad – a passing interest –rather than an empirical claim that we are valuing work or candidates at more than their intrinsic worth. (How could we get any handle on either side of that equation!) My point about the economics of supply-side data is that it’s a trend that is only going to get stronger in the future. Larry Ribstein certainly is correct to observe that this creates a “looking-under-the-lampost” problem. But of course, legal academics have been in a century-long crouch under a lamppost of their very own. As Llewellyn said:

“I am a prey, as is every may who tries to work with law, to the apperceptive mass . . . [T]he appellate courts make access to their work convenient. They issue reports, printed, bound, to be had all gathered for me in libraries. The convenient source of information lures.” (Bramble Bush)

Looking at newly cheap data about legal institutions encourages people to run fast regressions without thinking. But reading opinions, which are free, has encouraged thousands of legal articles about a dataset which is biased & shaped by selection. (Irrational behavior in response to a “radical price“? Nah.)  Truly sophisticated empirical work doesn’t discount the role of opinions in shaping legal norms, but it does conclude that opinions are skewed and rhetorically hot versions of what judges do, and thus unrepresentative of how practically-grounded lawyers make judgments about how to litigate their cases. Making that insight concrete is but one of the many projects undertaken by the New Legal Realists. Others – law and psychology, law and criminology, cultural cognition, etc. – together convince me that the future of the empirical revolution is pretty bright. And having a PhD/JD is an increasingly important entry credential in the field.

Read the rest of this post »

  December 9, 2009 at 9:32 am   Posted in: Economic Analysis of Law, Law and Psychology, Law School (Hiring & Laterals), Law School (Scholarship), Law School (Teaching), Legal Theory, Philosophy of Social Science   Print This Post   4 Comments

To JD/PhD or Not to JD/PhD, That Is the Question

posted by Dave Hoffman

The last few comments on this Prawfs thread raise an inquiry as old as the legal blogosphere: does it maximize to get a PhD on top of a JD if you want to get a job in the legal academy, or can you achieve the same ends with a fellowship, or by publication alone? Five years ago, as law fellowships themselves exploded onto the scene,  the purely strategic choice weighed decisively against the PhD outside of a few specialized fields –e.g.,  law and history, law and philosophy, law and corporate finance — where the PhD was a huge value-added on the entry-level market.  But now consider today’s market, and put yourself in the position of an individual about to choose between applying for a two year fellowship or a PhD program, and your goal is to maximize the chance of getting a job at an American law school.  In my view, it’s an easy choice (with a few qualifications): go PhD or go home.   Here’s my reasoning:

(1) The empirical revolution: fellowships generally won’t teach methods.  You need training in methods because it’s no longer socially acceptable to write a one or two methodologically irregular pieces before you get your feet under you.  (A bad trend.)  Moreover, though Larry Ribstein thinks that ELS may be a bubble, I think he’s missing a critical supply-side fact: there’s more work involving legal data than there was previously  in part because it’s cheaper to do, and that economic  trend is accelerating.  If law professors don’t write about courts, contracts, crimes, or property using statistics, then political scientists will do so, badly, and will eat our market in shaping legal policy.

(2) VAP positions are the new fellowships: more people than ever are taking as their first teaching job a VAP following a fellowship.  The resulting time-to-tenure-track is starting to look much like the rest of academia, reducing the opportunity costs of a PhD.  Plus, in fellowships you often have to teach courses that are truly unrelated to your research interests.

(3) There are more PhDs in the legal academy every year.  They’ve all of the motivation in the world to demand the training as a credential for entry level hires, and as they age in their schools they will begin to flex their muscles.  Looking ahead to 2015, I’d say that the current cutoff of schools that softly demand a PhD for entry level hires (i.e., 1-10 or thereabouts) will trend toward all of the top tier.  It’s those mid-level schools which are going to be increasingly tied into central universities as budgets crunch, with resulting Provostian pressures.

(4) The job market for non-law academics continues to be worse than that for law professors, creating an ever-larger and more qualitifed pool of folks migrating our way.  Fellows simply can’t easily compete with people with dissertations.

(5) A contrary argument would rely on the Carnegie movement’s focus on increasing skills-education.  But, largely for economic reasons, I think that Carnegie is most likely to change the overall structure of law faculties, with far more use of adjunct instruction. That is, it won’t change who we hire, but it will reduce the number of entry level tenure-track slots we have.

These considerations intentionally ignore the important  question — is this a good thing, or a bad thing, for legal education.  I don’t have a thing to say about that big question which is both novel and interesting.  Maybe you do.  Also, I don’t think that the PhD rule applies (or will) to some kinds of conlaw, evidence, employment law, crim  (where it looks like big theory is holding strong), or tax teachers, and I’m sure there are other nooks I’ve missed.  I’m thinking here of advice for people who want to teach the traditional common law topics, any business or commercial  law subject, or environmental law, health law and international law. That’s a big part of the market, but it’s not all of it.

An entirely separate topic is whether junior scholars without PhDs should get them.  That, my friends, is a question that has been occupying me for some time. And I have no idea what the answer is.

p.s.:  I forgot to mention a key assumption. Someone with a PhD who doesn’t have a JD has almost no chance of landing a job in the legal academy.

p.p.s.:  Larry Ribstein responds to this post here, and makes some characteristically great points. I’ll reply when I can.  [Update: I've now replied.]

  December 6, 2009 at 7:28 pm   Posted in: Law School (Hiring & Laterals)   Print This Post   8 Comments

Reputation and Citation (Warning: Insular Post)

posted by Dave Hoffman

An interesting paper is making the rounds in the economics blogging community, called Markets for Reputation: Evidence on Quality and Quantity in Academe, by Hamermesh and Pfann.  As Cowen summarizes:

“1. Adjusting for citations and other measures, “reputation” (defined both in terms of awards and the quality of the department you inhabit), does not rise with the quantity of articles published by an individual.

2. Adjusting for citations and other variables, having your citations in a single dominant piece, rather than scattered across a greater number of pieces, does not predict reputation.

3. The quantity of articles published does predict mobility and salary (adjusting for quality), even though it does not predict reputation.”

Since law professors don’t have access to a central citation clearinghouse for our work, we can’t exactly replicate the analysis.  But  I am skeptical that these findings would translate well to law schools:

First, we don’t have a tradition of counting citations as a proxy for quality, and for good reason.   Leiter’s rankings may influence that norm over time, but I tend to doubt it because he doesn’t attempt to fully capture citations across the web of science or other indisciplinary journals. In a world where most of the most active scholars are co-authoring across departments, JLR citation counts are increasingly irrelevant.  At best, JLR counts are probably decent proxies for the influence of older scholars.  If someone could develop a law database that was both wide and deep, citation counts would be a useful tool for hiring.  That database would have to extend back in time, covered all of the possible citation outlets, and it incorporate professors at both elite and non-elite institutions.  In the absence of such a database, citation analysis of law review articles for the purpose of inferring professor quality or reputation is currently unreliable, and often silly.  (Not yours, BL!)

Second, I do think that many of the top scholars in my sub-field — BLE, empirics of private law — are known for one or two dominant works, and not (necessarily) a greater number of smaller pieces. In part this is because traditionally law review articles are much longer than articles in other disciplines, and take much more time to write.  A typical star academic in the 1980s and 1990s wrote 3-5 pieces before receiving tenure.  With fewer bullets came more pressure to hit the target: you really could make or break a reputation on one piece.  This may be changing.  I hope so!  Given the letterhead effect, the dominant piece norm significantly biases reputation markets in favor of people originally hired at super-elite institutions.

Third, I tend to think that the legal academy is a significantly more hierarchical and static market than other parts of the academy, in part because lawyers are much more conservative (small-c) than other professions, in part because scholarship in the legal academy was until very recently concentrated at a few schools, and in part because law schools face unique pressures to hire locally (to promote employment and alumni relations).

Still, it’s an interesting project. Check the paper out.

For more on this topic, see this link-rich short article by Paul Caron.

  December 2, 2009 at 3:07 pm   Posted in: Law School (Hiring & Laterals)   Print This Post   5 Comments

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