For S/He's A Jolly Good Fellow!

My erstwhile colleague Larry Solum has published the first iteration of his annual new faculty hiring report at Legal Theory; the link is here.  In the past, Larry's analysis has usually focused on the law schools from which the new hires graduated and the number of advanced degrees parceled out among them.  But I thought I'd get a jump on him and point to another interesting data point in the first set of new hires that he has so usefully disclosed: of the 47 names of new hires that Larry has provided, 24 of them are coming from fellowships, visiting assistant professorships, and other untenured means of entry into law school teaching (not counting one clinical fellowship; plus I admit it was a rough and dirty count, so feel free to correct me if I was off by a digit or two).

This strikes me based on anecdotal experience as a significantly high number, although it's not generally the sort of data I've seen collected before.  Of course, it's primarily interesting because many of our readers have asked about getting into law teaching -- understandably, as it's one of the best jobs in the world.  So, as you resume-build toward that goal or consider whether to go directly on the job market or do something else first, you will have to reckon very seriously with the possibility that a fellowship will help you achieve that job in law teaching.  Of course, the plums are still the Bigelow and (in my view) the Associate in Law position at Columbia, but Larry's data make clear that an increasing number of elite schools are offering one form of fellowship or another, and also that in some cases fellowships at non-top 10 schools can lead to teaching positions.

There are pros and cons to the fellowship experience.  (I should note that I had an offer of an associate in law position a while back before entering teaching and ultimately declined it for personal reasons; I don't know whether that hindered my later job prospects or not.  I can say that my visiting teaching jobs before entering the market did ultimately help.)  They generally pay poorly, and many of them require you to spend considerable time teaching legal research and writing, which is actually a very valuable course in educating the fledgling teacher, but can be time-consuming and certainly won't count as work in your chosen field.  There is also the danger that some teaching fellows may be viewed as second-class citizens by their institution. 

But they also provide a wonderful opportunity to make friends in the legal academy, to get some writing done, and -- perhaps most importantly -- to learn the lingo and cultural characteristics of the legal academy; to acculturate yourself within the academy, to learn how to "talk the talk", which will make you much more facile (in both senses of the word, probably) on the job market, at job talks, and so on.  In that sense, I would guess that the most valuable part of a fellowship is not the teaching experience you gain, but the time you spend attending faculty workshops -- where, so to speak, you can observe (and ultimately imitate) the beast in its natural habitat. 

I would also note that an increasing number of fellowships seem to be pure research fellowships, without an obligation to teach legal research or writing (or, sometimes, anything).  And I think that as this becomes a recognized route to teaching, and as more impressive people apply for these positions, the second-class citizen problem is likely to decrease or disappear; indeed, I suspect this is already happening.

Current or would-be teaching fellows, or professors on hiring committees with thoughts on the subject, are welcome to post comments, questions, pleas for information and so forth here.  One more thought below the jump, of perhaps less interest to job-seeking readers.    

My last thought is this.  A constant theme in the law school's identity crisis, as opposed to the general identity crisis of the academy (and as I noted in my previous post, I'm not sure the "crisis" is real), is to wonder how much like the rest of the university the law school should be, and how much it should retain the character of a professional training school.  Probably one of the areas in which we have differed the most, traditionally, has been in the hiring process (I think here of Martha Nussbaum's wonderful piece in the Green Bag a few years back).  I think the rise of the fellowship route to teaching suggests that we are a little closer to the rest of the academy than we may sometimes think, since it seems to me that these fellowships may, somewhat invisibly, have created a form of the doctoral/post-doc community in the law schools.  I don't want to overstate the similarities, since full-time faculty still do the vast majority of the teaching at the law schools (and still want to, for the most part).  But it does look as if the legal academy too is creating its own brand of the finishing process for would-be academics, and this might demand further study from those who are interested in the institutional and sociological aspects of the legal academy.

One parenthetical final note: I do think that the number of hires from fellowships that Larry reports is significant, but I don't want to be completely ahistorical about it.  Schools like Harvard and Yale have always had some fellowships floating around, and they have often been taken up by promising graduates who stayed for a year or two to work with a particular professor, then often entered law teaching.  Still, the sheer number of folks hired from fellowships so far this year, combined with the institutionalization of fellowships and the opening up of the application process, do make this generation of fellowships different from those few hand-picked fellowships that were available in the more distant past.