Getting a Teaching Job: The Job Talk

Probably the hardest part about getting a law teaching job is the last major step: the job talk.   The job talk is a total mystery to most entry-level candidates.   I know it was to me.   With the usual caveat that experiences differ at different schools, I'll try to shed at least a little light on it.

The hardest part about job talks is that they are an alien form of presentation to anyone who is not already a law professor.   Here's a little background.  Law professors often present and refine their working drafts at "workshops," which are short paper presentations followed by extensive question-and-answer sessions.  For a full-time academic, giving a faculty workshop can be a terrific way to improve a draft paper.  You talk for about 20 minutes, giving the basic theory of the paper for those who may not have read it, and then you field questions and criticisms about the paper that can give you good ideas for how to improve it.

Job talks are basically workshops for teaching candidates, given on the day of the final round "callback" interview at the law school.  They harness the format of workshops, but the goal is less to help you improve the paper than  it is for the faculty to assess your scholarly abilities.   Most faculty candidates follow the workshop model and present a work-in-progress, such as a paper that has been (or will soon be) submitted for publication but is not yet published.  The school will  distribute copies of your paper to the faculty a week or two before the jobtalk, just as they do for workshops, although you can't be sure as to how many people in the audience will have read it  by the time of your presentation (this is true for workshops, too -- professors are busy people).

Most job talks happen over lunch.   The faculty comes in to the faculty lounge around noon, and the candidate sits there and tries to make pleasant small talk as the profs come in and get food.  After about 15 minutes of small talk (in theory the candidate is supposed to eat at this point, although most  are too nervous), the appointments chair will introduce the candidate to the assembled faculty for a minute or two, and then hand over the podium. 

Practices vary at most schools, but a good length for the presentation part of a job talk is usually around 20 minutes, at most 25.    I know what you're thinking: 20 minutes seems like an impossibly short period of time.  If you've just written a 60-page paper, you can talk about it for hours.   But the point of the presentation part of the job talk is not to tell the faculty all about the paper.   Substantively, the point is just to give them a good overview of your paper,  its goals, methods, and conclusions.   The short presentation makes sense, if you think about it;  the folks who have read the paper already will pretty much know what you're going to say, and the people who haven't read the paper are probably mostly lost anyway.

Now you're wondering, why do they give you 20 minutes to present the paper at all?  One reason is for the performance itself.  You are being considered for a job as a tenure-track law professor, and faculty members are likely to use your 20 minute lecture to get an idea of how you might be as a teacher and colleague.   Do you act like a professor?  Is your presentation clear?  Nuanced?  Fair?  Are you a good speaker?  Funny?  Arrogant?  Would you do well in front of a large class?  Do you hold the audience's attention?  Is the lecture well-paced, or are you rambling?  Do you finish on time, or do you go on for too long (perhaps until you are cut off by a frustrated member of the appointments committee)?   The presentation helps the faculty get a sense of these things.

The question-and-answer period follows the presentation, and on the whole is more important than the presentation part.   The q-and-a is usually a lively and interactive discussion about various aspects of your argument, often with a critical edge, and can go on for 40 minutes to an hour.   Some of the questions will be by subject matter experts who ask about very detailed issues; others will be by  people who have no background in the topic who have more basic questions or who want to know how your thesis might fit into their fields.  Lots of the questions will try to explore your topic in its broader context, to see if you can draw and assess connections between your work and that of other academics, papers, and scholarly movements.

Doing well in the Q-and-A part of the job talk may be the most important part of a "call back" visit to a law school.  Unfortunately, it's also very hard (at least for me) to come up with useful and  nonobvious advice on how to do well on it.  Here are just a few thoughts, which I hope will be seconded, supplemented, or trashed in the comment thread or on other blogs via trackbacks:

First, know your topic, both at a doctrinal and scholarly level. Know the surrounding scholarly literature cold, and if you're talking about cases, know the cases cold.   This is probably obvious. You need to know your stuff.   

Second, practice, practice, practice.  "Moot" your job talk with a live audience at least once, and preferably two or even three times, ideally with at least some full-time academics in the audience.  If you don't know any professors at local schools who might be willing to help you moot your job talk (I didn't, so I don't think this is unsual), talk to some of your former professors from law school to see if they have any ideas.

Third,  know and acknowledge the nature of your claim, and its limitations.    That is, recognize what "moves" you're making in your argument, the limitations of those moves, why you're making those moves and not making others.   Here's an example.  Let's say you're an election law scholar and you have written a paper arguing that Bush v. Gore was wrongly decided (seems a bit late to pick this low hanging fruit, but hey, it's just an example).  You need to be clear as to exactly what set of scholarly tools you are using to reason to your conclusion.  Maybe you're making a legal process claim that courts are ill-equippped to get involved in chad-counting questions; maybe you're making an originalist claim that the Equal Protection clause wasn't meant to cover this kind of question; maybe you have some other theory of constitutional interpretation that arrives at the same result.  Either way, you need to be very clear as to which analytical tools and methods you are using and why, and what other tools are out there that might point in the same or a different direction (e.g., in the Bush v. Gore example, are there public choice reasons to favor the Court's approach?).  This makes sense, if you think about it: the claim in your paper is just an application of a broader set of analytical tools, and lots of the interesting questions are why you picked those tools, what their limitations are, where those tools will take you on other questions, whether other approaches might have worked equally well or better, etc.

One final piece of practical advice:  On the day of the callback, you may want to be a little wary about discussing your job talk in depth during your morning interviews before the presentation. Your morning interviewers will be in the audience during your talk, and it may interfere with your concentration during the presentation to realize that a decent chunk of your audience just heard you rehearsing it an hour earlier.   As a result, most candidates find that it is better to stay fresh and avoid discussing their job talk in the morning.   In general, morning interviewers understand this and don't expect you to preview the job talk.

Anyway, I hope that's at least a little helpful.  If others have other views or experiences, I hope you will share them.