Interview Advice (v.76) and Piercing the Judicial Veil

To make themselves seem versatile, law professor candidates will often list many courses as their "teaching interests."  They are told to do this because committees routinely have curricular needs that are somewhere in someone's mind -- and a school's needs can't help but be relevant in the hiring process (even at schools that give the "we'll hire the best athlete" spiel).  Accordingly, it is usually good to make it seem that you can teach outside your note topic and your article topic.  The list most candidates produce is usually wider than their narrow writing interests suggest and candidates will often be asked how the committee is supposed to assess or give credibility to their interests in teaching, say, civil procedure, if all they have written about is, say, constitutional law and genetic privacy.   

In my experience, it is dangerous to point the committee to some judicial opinion you helped draft, even if it shows your facility in a given doctrinal area and shows where your research may be heading in that area of interest.  Although almost every law professor knows that judges rarely write their own opinions from scratch -- and almost every judicial opinion is a work of "co-authorship" functionally (which one would assume that people evaluating your legal writing might wish to read) -- most law professors will view you as some kind of jerk if you try to take credit for an opinion in any way. 

I wouldn't judge someone who said at an interview "I wrote this opinion with my judge and it shows how comfortable I am with the governing doctrines in administrative law, which I hope to teach even though I haven't written in the subject yet."  But, then, I like thank-you notes and clearly have idiosyncratic views of ethics and manners.  Still, beware: I think most law professors are suspicious of those who pierce the judicial veil.