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

Prawf Entry Level Hiring Down

posted by Lawrence Cunningham

We have reported on the weak market for lateral law professor hires on several occasions this year (all links can be accessed here).  Now Sarah Lawsky, a former colleague of mine at GW, lately of Irvine, finds an equally weak market for entry level law professors this year.

Prof. Lawsky offers an array of FAQs, graphs and interactive features to make it fun despite the grim news; she is also very careful to stress the limits of her report, which she emphasizes repeatedly is incomplete.   Paul Caron illustrates some of the ways that Prof. Lawsky’s data might be sliced and diced here, as does Brian Leiter, here, and David Zaring, here.

  May 30, 2013 at 7:45 am   Posted in: Law School (Hiring & Laterals)   Print This Post   No Comments

Deep Dive in Prawf Lateral Market Confirmed

posted by Lawrence Cunningham

As anticipated (here and here), 2013 witnessed a deep dive in lateral recruiting by law schools and movements by law professors.

Only 41 schools secured recruits, which totaled 56 prawfs, according to the latest information reported at the Faculty Lounge.

Compare similar information reported since 2006  in the following table.  (Obviously, FL may have missed some results, so the data are not necessarily complete, but that is true for 2013 as well as any prior year.)

Year	Schools	Faculty
2006	71	132
2007	72	131
2008	80	136
2009	68	114
2010	72	92
2011	55	93
2012	56	84
2013	41	56

  May 6, 2013 at 4:03 pm   Posted in: Law School (Hiring & Laterals)   Print This Post   2 Comments

Update on Down Lateral Prawfs Market

posted by Lawrence Cunningham

I promised to update my post from last week about the weak state of the lateral hiring market for law professors.  The Faculty Lounge has updated its figures through March 3, now showing lateral moves of 28 prawfs in recruiting by 21 schools (up from the prior report, through February 4, of 21 prawfs and 17 schools).

We know of at least a few schools/prawfs not yet reported at FL (including two involving Temple University, thanks to Dave Hoffman of this blog, and seven Paul Caron reports knowing about).  All seem agreed, however, that this is a down year, well off from the years when 70 or 80 schools wooed 130 or more prawfs. This reflects the contraction of the legal profession and resulting uncertainties plaguing legal education. The new environment entails a reexamination of past sector-wide practices, which is probably wise.

The signal that lateral recruiting used to send for a school, being competitive to boast the greatest faculty, may nowadays backfire, being a signal of peculiar resource allocation amid tough times for students. Notably, New York University’s John Sexton was a pioneer in the former and these days is getting negative press for sticking with it.  Academic luxuries can no longer be taken for granted.  It remains a difficult balancing act, however, because in many cases a lateral recruit is vital to fill an important need at a school.  It is not always easy from the outside to see the difference.

  March 4, 2013 at 3:46 pm   Posted in: Law School (Hiring & Laterals)   Print This Post   6 Comments

Lateral Market Slowdown; Sign of the Times

posted by Lawrence Cunningham

The lateral market for law professors appears to be substantially curtailed.  In 2006, 2007 and 2008, about 75 law schools annually secured lateral recruits, with 130-134 professors changing schools each year.  After the financial crisis, in 2009 and 2010, the figures fell off, with 68 and 72 schools involved in relocating 114 and 92 professors, respectively.  In 2011 and 2012, the number of such schools dropped more sharply to, respectively, 55 and 56, involving 93 and 84 prawfs.

What about this year? The latest figures, as of February 4, 2013 (and largely unchanged since then), show a mere 17 schools and 21 prawfs reporting final lateral moves.  The figures likely will rise a bit, as the deadline for extending lateral offers under AALS best practices is tomorrow (March 1) and that for accepting the same is two weeks later (March 15). But those figures do signal another, much steeper, decline, than in the past couple of years, reflecting the general decline in student applications to law schools and the considerable uncertainty facing legal education now.

Whatever else critics might say about the legal academy, such a decline shows deans and faculty making big changes in operating procedures.  The import may be mixed, however.  It’s one less way that many schools can demonstrate that they are competing with each other, though schools that are able to compete in such an environment (e.g., Alabama) send a signal that they have the resources and confidence to buck the trend.  It may be one less tool prawfs have to negotiate raises and other perqs, though, again, those that are able to do so may have greater leverage than predecessors.

In any event, the time is probably ripe for an updating of the classic work of Paul Secunda about how the lateral recruiting process operates.  It appears that it’s quite different today than just a few years ago.

 

UPDATE:  For a few additional notes updating this post, click here.  

 

 

 

 

 

  February 28, 2013 at 12:57 pm   Posted in: Law School (Hiring & Laterals)   Print This Post   5 Comments

Temple Faculty Hiring

posted by Dave Hoffman

Ordinarily, CoOp isn’t the forum for hiring announcements. But as the chair of Temple’s lateral committee, I’d be remiss in not posting this here:

Temple University James E. Beasley School of Law invites applications from both entry-level and lateral candidates for full-time, tenure-track faculty positions to commence in the Fall Semester 2013.  We welcome applications from candidates with a wide variety of interests.  Although areas of need are subject to change, priority areas are likely to include securities law, family law, health law, business and commercial law, civil procedure and complex litigation, law and technology, employment law, and torts. We are also seeking to fill a clinical position.

Lateral candidates should contact Professor David Hoffman, Lateral Faculty Appointments Committee (david.hoffman@temple.edu).  Entry level candidates should contact Professor Alice Abreu, Entry Level Faculty Appointments Committee (alice.abreu@temple.edu).  Temple University is committed to a policy of equal opportunity for all in every aspect of its operations.  The University has pledged not to discriminate on the basis of an individual’s age, color, disability, marital status, national or ethnic origin, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, gender identity, genetic information or veteran status.

 

  August 2, 2012 at 11:20 am   Posted in: Law School (Hiring & Laterals)   Print This Post   No Comments

IP Chair Search

posted by Gerard Magliocca

I am pleased to announce that I will be heading up the search committee for the first endowed chair created by the gift of Robert H. McKinney to the (aptly named) Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law.  This chair will be in Intellectual Property, and the chair will also serve as the Director of our Intellectual Property and Innovation Center.  We are looking for a tenured scholar with a distinguished record of teaching, research, and service.  Please forward a cv or any questions to me at gmaglioc@iupui.edu.

  May 14, 2012 at 11:20 am   Posted in: Law School (Hiring & Laterals)   Print This Post   No Comments

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

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