Paul Secunda:

[A]s long as you do not have concerns about people knowing your looking, you might as well go forward with all the approaches: get known, file a FAR, and target letters/emails to appointment committees. Although I think letters are by far the least effective method (no one wants to be added to a long stack of paper), you just never know.

And that, my friends, sums up the lateral market in general: you just never know – sometimes you try to put yourself “out there” without actually being “out there,” and other times you do nothing proactive and are “out there” anyway.

or Darian Ibrahaim:

To lateral candidates, do not write directly to schools you’re interested in, and [...]]]> Who has the better approach to the lateral hiring “market”?

Paul Secunda:

[A]s long as you do not have concerns about people knowing your looking, you might as well go forward with all the approaches: get known, file a FAR, and target letters/emails to appointment committees. Although I think letters are by far the least effective method (no one wants to be added to a long stack of paper), you just never know.

And that, my friends, sums up the lateral market in general: you just never know – sometimes you try to put yourself “out there” without actually being “out there,” and other times you do nothing proactive and are “out there” anyway.

or Darian Ibrahaim:

To lateral candidates, do not write directly to schools you’re interested in, and do not go through the AALS process. You do not want to appear anxious to escape your current situation, even if you are. The best way to get the word out that you’re open to a move is to let your well-respected friends at other schools know that. These folks will inevitably be contacted by appointments committees looking for people who might be moveable. Also, the standard advice about going to conferences, publicizing your papers all holds true. If you’re doing good work, getting yourself out there, and are at a school from which one would reasonably assume you are extractable, you’ll get calls.

My view: Darian is correct on the tactics.  And he’s equally right about the appropriate move for entry-level faculty: “write directly to schools you’re interested in.”  This is a real change.  When I was on the entry market in 2003, I had no sense that it was appropriate to write to schools directly, though I lacked a mentor so I could have missed many tricks.  Now, writing directly to committees is apparently almost necessary (though not sufficient).

[Update: An earlier version of this post credited David Zaring for Darian Ibrahim's post.  I have no idea how I made that mistake.  Sorry guys!]

The subjects that are in demand at law schools these days are Tax, Bankruptcy, Commercial Law, and Corporate Law.  The resumes that I am seeing are mostly focused on con law and international law. There are two lessons here.  First, your odds of getting a teaching job are greater if you focus on the former set of topics.  Second, it’s going to be tough sledding if you’re on the market as a con [...]]]> So as the hiring chair at my school, I’m currently wading through hundreds of resumes.  I thought I’d make a few observations about them as a group, though this is obviously an “inside baseball” post that won’t be of interest to many of you.  Thus, the rest of it is after the jump.

The subjects that are in demand at law schools these days are Tax, Bankruptcy, Commercial Law, and Corporate Law.  The resumes that I am seeing are mostly focused on con law and international law. There are two lessons here.  First, your odds of getting a teaching job are greater if you focus on the former set of topics.  Second, it’s going to be tough sledding if you’re on the market as a con law or international law person — there just aren’t enough jobs to go around.

Next, if you go on the market without any published articles in a law review, you’re going to have a hard time.  There are people who can pull that off (say, if you were a Supreme Court clerk), but many faculties are going to take a pass because they believe (righly or wrongly) that past is prologue when it comes to publishing.

Finally, I’m amused by the following comments on some resumes:  (1) “I am willing to teach any first-year subject.”  Lots of people find that implausible (Are you really an expert in every 1L class?); (2) “I am widely cited.”  That’s sort of like saying, “I’m really famous, though you may not know it;” (3) “I will only live in the following places . . .”  Maybe that will work out for you, but you’re setting yourself up for some serious disappointment.

Our curricular needs include Tax, Criminal Law and Procedure, Trusts and Estates, Property, Real Estate Transactions, Professional Responsibility, Corporate Finance, Commercial Law, Administrative Law, and Conflict of Laws.  We are strongly committed to achieving excellence through intellectual diversity and strongly encourage applications from persons of color, women, persons with disabilities, the LGBT community, and members of other groups that are under-represented on university faculties.  The law school is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Institution and offers [...]]]> I wanted to mention that I’ll be the hiring chair at IU-Indianapolis for the 2009-2010 year.  We are looking to hire up to four people.  After the jump I’ll list the subjects that we’re looking for.  The comments section would be a good place for other hiring chairs to declare themselves!

Our curricular needs include Tax, Criminal Law and Procedure, Trusts and Estates, Property, Real Estate Transactions, Professional Responsibility, Corporate Finance, Commercial Law, Administrative Law, and Conflict of Laws.  We are strongly committed to achieving excellence through intellectual diversity and strongly encourage applications from persons of color, women, persons with disabilities, the LGBT community, and members of other groups that are under-represented on university faculties.  The law school is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Institution and offers domestic partner benefits. 

The short answer is “No, your non-Yale J.D. does not absolutely doom you. It does lengthen your odds, and it increases the importance of other factors, but it absolutely does not shut you out of the process.”

Really? Yes. Let’s go over it.

First, let’s start with the good news. Would you like some empirical proof that a Yale J.D. is not required? Just look at Larry Solum’s latest [...]]]> I get a variation of this e-mail at least once a year, from friends or acquaintances in law practice. It always starts out the same way. Basically, “I didn’t go to law school at Yale or Columbia, and I’m wondering whether that means I can never become a law professor.”

The short answer is “No, your non-Yale J.D. does not absolutely doom you. It does lengthen your odds, and it increases the importance of other factors, but it absolutely does not shut you out of the process.”

Really? Yes. Let’s go over it.

First, let’s start with the good news. Would you like some empirical proof that a Yale J.D. is not required? Just look at Larry Solum’s latest hiring numbers. Don’t stop at the first line (Yale 26, Harvard 26). Or the second, or third. (Cal, Michigan, Columbia, NYU, Chicago.) Skip down to the two’s. And you’ll see something interesting.

Two hires each in 2009 came from UCLA, Duke, GW, Georgia, McGill, Penn, Texas, and Tulane. Now, not to knock on those schools — they’re a solid group of schools. But many of them are also less represented, statistically, in academia.  The point is that if you got your degree at GW or Georgia or Tulane or some other not-traditional-feeder school, you need not give up right now. There’s a chance that you’ll break into the market. It’s not a great chance — for every GW hire last year, there were 13 Yale hires — but you’re not completely shut out, either.

(The 2009 numbers don’t seem to be particularly anomalous. 2008 saw two hires each from multiple less-traditionally-represented schools as well. The two-placements list from 2008 is Duke, Emory, Hastings, Tulane, Illinois, Minnesota, Georgia, and Vandy. And of course, the one-hire list includes a whole lot more schools: BU, Case Western, Florida, Cincinnati, Iowa, Kansas, Washington, Notre Dame, Loyola, UNC, and so on.)

Okay, you’re up to speed on the good news. You know (1) that you’re not completely shut out, but (2) that the odds are against you. How do you beat those odds?

Of course, one way of beating those odds is to “sanitize” your J.D. by getting an LLM from NYU, or by getting a Ph.D. in economics or the like. But let’s say that’s not on the table — then what’s next?

I’d advise a multi-prong strategy.

First, read and become familiar with all of the material that’s out there.

Start with Eric Goldman’s resource page. Make sure to read Dan Burk’s excellent advice. Read Dan Solove’s Top 10 tips.  And continue from there.  Scour the internet. Keep regular tabs on blogs that discuss law hiring (at the very least, let’s see — us, Prawfs, Legal Theory Blog, Leiter, Caron, LawProfession, and Faculty Lounge). Know your goal, and what it will take to get you there.

Second, write write write. And then write some more. The odds are against you already, you’re going to need publications to beat them. Make sure that you have a handle on the submission process. Go buy Volokh’s book Academic Legal Writing. And write.

(If you’ve graduated and are working and Westlaw is a problem, check with your institution. The top schools have a streamlined process for getting research support to alumni who are aspiring academics; your school may not have a system set up, but your mentor at your school can probably help you.)

Third, use every other advantage you can find. Network wherever you can — through your undergrad alumni association, church connections, local bar associations, whatever you can get.  (Asking bloggers for advice is a good start, but don’t stop there — talk to everyone you can find.)  Try to connect with mentors at your school. Ask for feedback from people in your area. Keep up to date on the SSRN. Look for opportunities to present a work in progress. Investigate the various types of fellowships (Bigelow, Clemenko, and so on).  And when you do go on the market, aim for the easier areas to break into, subject wise. Do not try to break into tougher areas like con law or fed courts.

Your candidacy is going to be a longshot, but not an impossibility. Don’t despair, but do take every step you can to better your odds. Remember that statistically speaking, it’s all but certain that dozens of non-top-10-JD candidates will be hired this very winter, and again next winter. One of them could be you.

Finally, don’t quit your day job. Remember, breaking into legal academia is to some extent a toss of the dice, no matter who you are.

Good luck!

Which got me thinking: Do all law professors secretly yearn to return [...]]]> I assume that many of us are following the list of lateral faculty moves over at The Faculty Lounge and are eagerly anticipating Larry Solum’s list of entry-level hires. The laterals list includes Mark Janis’s move from Iowa to Indiana. Now I don’t know Professor Janis or his work, but I’m always interested in finding new scholarship to explore. In reviewing Professor Janis’s bio, I noticed something: He graduated from Indiana Law, the place to which he is now returning. Professor Janis is not alone – for example, several years ago my friend Bob Lawless returned to Illinois, from which he holds his JD. And these are just a couple of potentially numerous examples.

Which got me thinking: Do all law professors secretly yearn to return to the schools from which they graduated? There are reasons to think many do. First, while there are surely exceptions, those of us who became professors probably really enjoyed our law school experiences (if not we’d be far away from the hallowed halls). Second, we likely held those professors who taught us in the highest regard, and the chance to become their colleague has an allure that an unfamiliar school might not be able to match. Third, we may have family in the geographic area or just generally prefer it (after all, we chose to go there in the first place). And finally, our home school may have been especially supportive when we were trying to enter academia and since.

Perhaps this inquiry is largely theoretical since most law professors graduated from the very top schools where few wind up. But just for fun, if you graduated from Stanford would you pick it over Harvard if you had the choice? Do you secretly yearn to return home to the school that started this whole experience for you? Due to the sensitive nature of the inquiry, my guess is that the “anon”s will dominate any comments. But I thought it would be fun to ask…

As several recent posts have already noted, the faculty hiring process is underway. My first reminder was last week, when I walked past a conference room and saw the Appointments Committee studying sheets from the FAR. Concurring Opinions has always been a great resource for job-seekers; you can find some of our advice here.

But back to the Appointments Committee. They are going to be busy in the upcoming weeks and some of that busyness will occur at the expense of other projects that are related to scholarship, teaching, or both. But most appointments committees don’t talk much about administrative work, and neither will the candidates they interview. This [...]]]> It’s great to be back at Concurring Opinions, especially as a permanent contributor.

As several recent posts have already noted, the faculty hiring process is underway. My first reminder was last week, when I walked past a conference room and saw the Appointments Committee studying sheets from the FAR. Concurring Opinions has always been a great resource for job-seekers; you can find some of our advice here.

But back to the Appointments Committee. They are going to be busy in the upcoming weeks and some of that busyness will occur at the expense of other projects that are related to scholarship, teaching, or both. But most appointments committees don’t talk much about administrative work, and neither will the candidates they interview. This is true despite the lengthy list of potential administrative tasks: serving on the admissions or library or [you fill in the blank] committee, advising a law journal or the Woman’s Law Forum, directing a speciality institute, pitching in when a skills program needs an enhanced faculty presence, supervising externships, stepping up when an Associate Dean’s office is suddenly vacant. And so on. And so forth. And on. And on. Etc.

I want to make clear before the jump that I am NOT suggesting that talking about administrative work is a means of getting an offer. For that, follow the advice in the link above: appear to be an insightful and thoughtful person who will write and teach well. But you should nonetheless give some thought to administrative tasks, both to figure out where you would prefer to work and what you might want to do after you start there.

First of all, despite my tone, not all administrative work is unpleasant. “Institution building” is another phrase to describe administrative responsibilities. At least early in our careers, most of us ride on our institution’s coattails. Later in our careers, many of us care a lot about the fate of the institution we’ve called home. Moreover, some administrative work might be particularly geared to your strengths or likely to produce results you find rewarding. Some individuals who start out as professors like administrative work so much that they become deans.

In the short-term, however, the most defining characteristic of administrative work is that it needs to get done, whether faculty like it or not. So it pays to figure out how willing you are to take on administrative tasks and how much a particular institution is likely to expect. My impression is that all institutions expect faculty to assume some administrative tasks (with quite a lot of variation on how much) and that an institution’s rank is not necessarily indicative of its administrative expectations.

It is difficult to measure institutional expectations prior to receiving an offer. The last thing you want is to come across as someone who is unwilling to do administrative work; at some places, that will count as a significant black mark against you. During the interview process, probably the most you can do (if truthful) is to send signals that you are willing to pitch in. But if you reach the stage where you are trying to decide between offers, start asking questions that are more telling than simply, “On how many committees will I serve?”

Identify a few people on the faculty who have impressed you and whose careers you might want to emulate. Ask them how much administrative work they do in a typical year, what the work consists of, and whether they have had years where they had significantly more administrative work than usual. Ask how administrative assignments differ before and after tenure. Ask whether administrative assignments tend to be lighter in the year immediately before the tenure application. Compare the total number of faculty committees at each institution you are considering; larger numbers may suggest more administrative work.

Once you have a handle on how much administrative work you will be expected to do, think hard about what kind you are most likely to enjoy and then communicate your preferences to the individual in charge of arranging your first year. Do you want responsibilities that increase the amount of interaction you have with students or prospective students? With alums? With the practicing bar? Does your law school have a program that connects with one of your scholarly interests? Remember that at many institutions, faculty divide themselves between scholarship, teaching, and administrative service. Prepare accordingly.

Thanks to Dan and company for agreeing to let me blog here again. During my stint, I promise to talk about the law (and in particular, the threat to privacy posed by Internet Service Providers) but let me warm up with some lighter, more navel-gazing fare:

I’m serving for the first time on our Appointments committee this year, which means I get to look at the FAR form database from the other end of the microscope. Rick Garnett asks about the weaknesses of the form itself, but I wanted to comment instead on the awful user interface AALS provides for those of us perusing the forms.

The FAR form database’s user interface recalls the aesthetic of most of the phishing scam websites I have ever seen. It [...]]]>

Thanks to Dan and company for agreeing to let me blog here again. During my stint, I promise to talk about the law (and in particular, the threat to privacy posed by Internet Service Providers) but let me warm up with some lighter, more navel-gazing fare:

I’m serving for the first time on our Appointments committee this year, which means I get to look at the FAR form database from the other end of the microscope. Rick Garnett asks about the weaknesses of the form itself, but I wanted to comment instead on the awful user interface AALS provides for those of us perusing the forms.

The FAR form database’s user interface recalls the aesthetic of most of the phishing scam websites I have ever seen. It is ugly, which itself is not much of a sin for such a utilitarian site, but it makes me wonder whether AALS is putting care into other aspects of the database, such as privacy and security. It is also very hard to use, and I will venture to guess that schools are missing some candidates they might otherwise want to interview because of the lousy interface. Here are some specific criticisms:

1. The site’s search engine interface is bizarrely designed and very hard to use. For one thing, the search page is entitled “Untitled Document.”

Worse, it appears that the search form was once a single page about which someone decided, “wouldn’t this look better with tabs?” Clicking on one of the five tabs–”Personal,” “Education,” “Teaching,” “Employment,” and “Bar”–displays the desired subform but not at the top of the screen; instead, the visible subform floats where it once sat on some gone-but-not-forgotten untabified version of the form. (e.g., the “Education” subform sits approximately two-fifths of the way down the blue field.) (See this screenshot with the “Teaching” tab selected to get a better idea of what I am describing.) On my screen, the last two subforms, “Employment” and “Bar,” fall off of the bottom of the screen, so the user gets what looks like an empty blue field, with the search fields visible only to those who scroll down. I bet quite a few professors have abandoned their searches when faced with this “empty” page.

In addition, the tabbed interface leaves a user wondering whether the search terms specified under one tab (say Education) are “ANDed” with the terms specified under another tab (say Teaching). As it happens, the terms are ANDed, which is good, but this behavior is not obvious without testing it.

2. If you want to search for publications, you look under the “Bar” tab, naturally.

3. For some categories of information (JD-granting institutions, Course preferences) you can select from possible entries in a check-box; for other categories of information (Publication Titles, First Name, Last Name) you can perform text searches; and for yet other categories of information (Employment) you can only search broad categories of information. This inconsistency is maddening. Worse, the third category is especially limiting, because although I can tell that somebody served as a Judicial Clerk or Government employee, I can’t search for a particular judge, court, or agency.

4. While searching or browsing, I can save the FAR forms of interesting candidates in “portfolios,” but it appears that these portfolios are shared with everybody else on my committee. This might be specific to the way we set up our accounts here, but if it is system-wide, this makes portfolios less useful. Committee members aren’t able to keep a scratch pad of their favorite candidates (unless they literally scribble it down somewhere else) unless they want their fellow committee members to be able to watch.

5. The page is NOT hosted at aals.org. This is not unusual, of course, but what is unusual is that the page is hosted by a company called omnicontests.com. Omnicontest’s home page does not scream, “company you should hire to design a web page.” It has the aesthetic appeal of a Microsoft FrontPage-designed website, circa 1998.

6. Omnicontests.com touts itself as “The premier solution that streamlines the registration, payment and judging of your awards contest.” There you have it, folks: the AALS hiring process is at bottom an elaborate sweepstakes with entrants, judges, winners, and losers. Of course, we already knew that, but it’s interesting to see AALS admit it so publicly.

I could go on. What points am I trying to make? First, AALS should probably redesign the site to make it easier to use. For example, every field in the database should be text searchable. Second, AALS should audit the system to make sure they are protecting the privacy of the applicants as best as they can. Third (although this advice won’t help those who have already submitted their forms) next year’s applicants might want to try to “test drive” the search engine, if they can find a current committee member willing to let them, to see the various ways the different parts of the form may be searched. It may surprise Supreme Court Clerks, I imagine, to know that committee members cannot single them out, at least using AALS’ interface. (Although please correct me if I’m wrong about this.)

Soon after [losing in the primary for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives], the faculty saw an opening and made him its best offer yet: Tenure upon hiring. A handsome salary, more than the $60,000 he was making in the State Senate or the $60,000 he earned teaching part time. A job for Michelle Obama directing the legal clinic.

Your political career is dead, Daniel Fischel, then the dean, said he told Mr. Obama, gently. Mr. Obama turned the offer down. Two years later, he decided to run for the Senate. He canceled his course load and has not taught since.

Another interesting [...]]]> There’s a very interesting NY Times article about Barack Obama’s time teaching law at University of Chicago Law School. From the article:

Soon after [losing in the primary for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives], the faculty saw an opening and made him its best offer yet: Tenure upon hiring. A handsome salary, more than the $60,000 he was making in the State Senate or the $60,000 he earned teaching part time. A job for Michelle Obama directing the legal clinic.

Your political career is dead, Daniel Fischel, then the dean, said he told Mr. Obama, gently. Mr. Obama turned the offer down. Two years later, he decided to run for the Senate. He canceled his course load and has not taught since.

Another interesting fact:

Mr. Obama arrived at the law school in 1991 thanks to Michael W. McConnell, a conservative scholar who is now a federal appellate judge. As president of The Harvard Law Review, Mr. Obama had impressed Mr. McConnell with editing suggestions on an article; on little more than that, the law school gave him a fellowship, which amounted to an office and a computer, which he used to write his memoir, “Dreams From My Father.”

The article also has posted some of Obama’s class materials.

Jim (unlike his commentators and some of ours) doesn’t quibble with the finding that tenure doesn’t itself reduce scholarly output. That was the relatively minor point I [...]]]> Dean Jim Chen, over at MoneyLaw’s hall of doom headquarter’s, has responded to my post about tenure and Pat Burrell. (So has Michael Heise, at ELS). Jim gently critiques me for offering an overly simplistic view of MoneyLaw’s posture toward tenure. As he points out, tenure is “academia’s third rail,” and he’s no fool: [o]ne’s ability to accomplish things and to effect genuine change is inversely related to the extent to which one speaks one’s mind.” I take it that his message to me is: be mindful . . . young padawan. Thanks!*

Jim (unlike his commentators and some of ours) doesn’t quibble with the finding that tenure doesn’t itself reduce scholarly output. That was the relatively minor point I was making – tenure doesn’t cause shirking & negligence. Jim’s response is, essentially, well, ok, but it does “eliminate[e] meaningful sanctions against odiously selfish, institutionally destructive faculty members.” It also, by insulating faculty members from market pressures, makes us bad at helping our graduates to understand the actual practice of law.

Although I’d like to disagree, just to provoke a good exchange, I can’t. Jim hits the nail right on the head: tenure’s most pernicious consequence is that it permits some faculty to be reckless or intentionally terrible. Now, tenure doesn’t cause these bad eggs (or “rodents” as Jim calls them). It just makes it hard to get rid of them, making evident the need to do a better job in hiring and screening candidates. As a commentator at MoneyLaw notes, it’s “hard to appreciate how horrible these are or how widespread the phenomenon is.” My guess: 10-30% of many faculties would be fired, de-equitized, or otherwise let go if employed as lawyers. Of that 10-30%, some smaller percentage are “odiously selfish” or “institutionally destructive.” I’ve heard that new Deans are told that if you can count on one hand the number of faculty members who are truly problems, you are lucky. That sounds about right.

Whether that percentage would be smaller given market pressures is the open question. And we have no way of really knowing. If tenure disappeared by fiat, certainly some folks would be let go, and some would turn the corner from recklessness to mere negligent performance. But I still think that the improvement in overall output over the academy as a whole would be trivial.

Jeff H., in his comment to my post, pointed to a study he did of tenure and law faculty productivity. He found a statistically significant negative relationship between tenure and pages of scholarly work produced (R2=.25). This is an interesting preliminary result, but I have some doubts that it would hold if Jeff repeated it while controlling for professors’ age. Also, the relevant measure isn’t pages produced but impact, which should be relatively easy to measure using newly developed scales. The theory here is that long-term employment contracts do not reduce output where monitoring is easy (i.e., performance is widely measurable). Since scholarship falls in this category, I’d hypothesize that tenure doesn’t much affect its production. Since teaching is rarely publicly measured, I guess my prior would be that tenure does, in fact, have a relationship with bad teaching. (This is a good argument for putting teaching evaluations online and sharing them with the public.) But overall, the factor with the strongest influence on output should be age. This relationship isn’t necessarily linear – you’d expect a strong correlation between reduced writing and having young children at home, a rally as the kids age, followed by a decline again later in life. (Interestingly, this effect sounds something like explanations offered by some folks when discussing gender and blogging).

That doesn’t mean, as Solove pointed out in a comment to my post, that we wouldn’t expect the rare outlier: someone who really produced pre-tenure and who didn’t write much after tenure. Such outliers exist. But I bet that if you looked closely at the pre-tenure record of the “dead wood” professors you know, you’d see all the tell-tale signs. Past performance predicts, after all.

As I hoped I’ve made clear, I’m not defending tenure against all comers, just against the idea that it has measurable effects on productivity of the tenured. I suppose I should weigh the benefits of tenure (purportedly, better and bolder scholarship) against its costs (to those already discussed add increasing the cost of education, and decreasing innovation in the way it is produced). At this point, I think most folks who have thought about the problem sort of wave their hands skeptically at the benefits and then throw the issue to the comment thread. Which is precisely what I’m going to do.

(Photo credit: MSNBC, via this blog).

*Fair enough. I should disclose too. I’m up for tenure this fall. Since I see tenure as a straightforward tradeoff against the money I could be making as a lawyer, I certainly want it!

That odd rite the AALS Faculty Recruitment Conference (sorry the page is not built for some reason) is really around the corner. Now some may know that the conference itself is in October. But the key for you all is that the Faculty Appointments Register has deadlines [...]]]> So it’s July. Summertime. I hear the livin’ is easy, fish are jumpin’, and the cotton is high. The different pace of summer allows me to reflect and write. Not exactly easy livin’ but I like it quite a bit. Still, this time of year slips away all too easily. August looms with syllabi to plan and lectures to prepare. For those interested in applying to become a professor the game, I am afraid to say, is on.

That odd rite the AALS Faculty Recruitment Conference (sorry the page is not built for some reason) is really around the corner. Now some may know that the conference itself is in October. But the key for you all is that the Faculty Appointments Register has deadlines next month. August 8 to be precise. These dates matter. Being in that first group is fairly important.

Today is July 7. That means about one month until the FAR information is due. TAKE A LOOK NOW. For trying to squash all you have done into a few small fields AND having a polished resume requires much more time than one might think.

One more tip: create a check list of each bit of information you want to have on the FAR form and no matter what make sure that whatever publications you have are on that FAR. The education, employment, and interests are more familiar so you may not miss those fields (although they should be on your list). The other fields, especially publications, do not always show up on a resume so pay attention for items that schools want but that you may not have encountered before. Again starting now will allow you to have that moment of “Oh God, I have not thought about that area.” From there you can often find you have experience or ask folks about what is appropriate rather than filling in the form with place holders that say little.

As always good luck to all.

UPDATED POST: Law Professor Hiring: Statistics on JD Placement

The table below has more information.

LAW SCHOOL

TOTAL JD APPLICANTS 1997-2007

AVERAGE JD APPLICANTS PER YEAR

% OF TOTAL JD APPLICANTS FROM US LAW SCHOOLS

Harvard

675

61

8%

Yale

435

40

5%

Georgetown

376

34

4%

Columbia

307

28

4%

Michigan

271

25

3%

NYU

262

24

3%

Virginia

253

23

3%

Berkeley

228

21

3%

Chicago

190

17

2%

Stanford

176

16

2%

Penn

167

15

2%

Duke

148

13

2%

Texas

134

12

2%

Cornell

122

11

1%

GW

122

11

1%

Northwestern

114

10

1%

Boston U

112

10

1%

American

109

10

1%

Tulane

104

9

1%

Florida

91

8

1%

The 20 schools above comprise 4397 of the [...]]]> I’ve been posting data about law professor applicants (see here and here), and I thought I’d share some more data that I have that AALS provided me with. Here is data about the schools with the most applicants from 1997-2007. During 1997-2007, there were 8675 applicants with JDs from US law schools. This is not the total number of applicants, as the statistic does not include applicants without JDs and from foreign law schools. The average number of applicants with JDs from US law schools from 1997-2007 is 789 per year.

The table below has more information.

LAW SCHOOL	TOTAL JD APPLICANTS 1997-2007	AVERAGE JD APPLICANTS PER YEAR	% OF TOTAL JD APPLICANTS FROM US LAW SCHOOLS
Harvard	675	61	8%
Yale	435	40	5%
Georgetown	376	34	4%
Columbia	307	28	4%
Michigan	271	25	3%
NYU	262	24	3%
Virginia	253	23	3%
Berkeley	228	21	3%
Chicago	190	17	2%
Stanford	176	16	2%
Penn	167	15	2%
Duke	148	13	2%
Texas	134	12	2%
Cornell	122	11	1%
GW	122	11	1%
Northwestern	114	10	1%
Boston U	112	10	1%
American	109	10	1%
Tulane	104	9	1%
Florida	91	8	1%

The 20 schools above comprise 4397 of the 8675 applicants from 1997-2007 — about 51% of all the applicants. An additional 164 schools comprise the remaining 49%.

The first 10 schools above comprise 37% of all applicants. The first 4 schools above — Harvard, Yale, Georgetown, and Columbia — comprise 21% of all applicants.