Getting a Prawf Job: Laying the Foundation

Orin, Dan Solove, David Zaring, and Ethan have weighed in on these pages already with lots of useful advice for the aspiring prawf.  Let me add one thing based on my own experience that I found uniquely helpful and it will be of interest especially to law students who are now in school.  For each of my last three semesters at HLS, I took four credits of supervised independent writing.  The expectation was that for each credit of writing, one had to write about 25 pages of manuscript.  12 credits=300 pages=3 full-length articles.  Most schools should allow you to do this as long as you take enough credits to satisfy the ABA or some other blah-blah organization.

The first piece I worked on was supervised by none other than Rob Howse -- and that piece later became my first major publication (about the S. African truth commission and the philosophy of punishment).   As it happened, that piece was published in a peer-reviewed journal, the University of Toronto Law Journal.  I mention this only to highlight that for students who are writing, it may be easier and wiser to submit your first article(s) to peer-reviewed journals rather than the student law journals.  I know this has worked well especially for a few others, such as my friend Yair Listokin, who published in JLS while in law school--though I'm not sure his strategy was to first avoid the student law journals.  In any event, once you place in a good peer-reviewed journal, it becomes easier to signal to student editors later that they should not dust-bin your submissions to them.

Also, be savvy about what you take and when you take it: try to make sure that work you do for regular classes can morph into a publication.  For example, my law review note, about the intersection of criminal law and intellectual property, was written for credit as part of my Entertainment and Media law class. 

One last thing and it's about the importance of path dependence. I initially thought I would go to law school to become a comparative religion and law scholar.  Because of the research I did with Rob Howse early on, though, I kind of got hooked on philosophy of punishment and discovered, hey, this is interesting.   When I was thinking about switching back to religion and law stuff, though, a wise mentor said: you've built all this intellectual capital, why run away from it right now if you still find it interesting?  So here I am now, seven or eight years later, still writing about these things.  I wouldn't do this if I didn't continue to think it's fascinating stuff, and if you find yourself bored by what you're doing, switch tacks quickly.  But oftentimes, you'll find that developing a specialization is actually fun, and it redounds to your benefit when you go on the market.  Good luck!

Update: Glenn Reynolds from Instapundit makes the following shrewd observation regarding the dissemination from here on Prawfs and on other blogs of information about academic hiring :

It occurs to me that the wider availability of this kind of information from academic bloggers -- information that used to be available mostly to people who attended a few top schools that groom their graduates for academic careers -- will serve to weaken the relative position of the top schools. Just another example of the Internet's hierarchy-flattening effect.

Larry Ribstein adds his thoughts here.