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Saturday, August 26, 2006
Only 68 Days to the Meat Market!
I am little cross-eyed from reading 300 FAR forms over the past couple of days. (For the uninitiated, these are the forms filled out by prospective law professors in anticipation of the "meat market"--a national law faculty hiring conference.) This is the third year I have gone through the process as a member of my law school's appointments committee, so I have a pretty clear idea of what I am looking for now. Ultimately, I will cast my vote at the faculty hiring meeting based on these factors: scholarly potential, teaching potential, collegiality, curricular needs, and diversity needs. At this preliminary stage in the process, however--where my committee is merely deciding with whom to schedule interviews at the meat market--I am thinking almost entirely about scholarly potential.
Why the particular emphasis on scholarship? For one thing, scholarship seems to be a dominant consideration in tenure decisions, and the last thing I would want to do is hire a new prawf who does not have what it takes to succeed in this business. For another, I have a hard time making judgments about teaching potential and collegiality based on the FAR forms. I'll be in a better position to assess those characteristics after an interview and call-back.
So, how should scholarly potential be assessed based on the bare-bones information available through the FAR? I look first and foremost to the past record of scholarship. Prior academic publications (not, say, bar journal articles) seem an especially helpful predictor of future academic publications. In particular, if a candidate has managed a well-placed article or two during a clerkship or while in practice, there seems every reason to believe that the candidate will be at least as successful if transplanted to an academic setting (which will likely offer far more support for scholarly activities).
Of course, there aren't that many entry-level candidates with impressive bodies of scholarship already in print. So, I also look to other credentials that seem suggestive of serious academic interests and capabilities, i.e., whether the candidate attended an elite law school, got good grades, had a leadership position on a law review, has an advanced degree in law or another field, or did a post-JD fellowship of some sort. To be perfectly blunt, though, there is a superabundance of these credentials in the FAR. A candidate should not expect law schools to be fighting over her just because she has a degree from Yale, or was editor-in-chief of a law review, or has a Ph.D. In my book, at least, a candidate without significant prior academic publications needs to have multiple distinguishing credentials in order to get any serious attention at this stage. I speak here only for myself (and certainly not for my committee), but my impression is that most law schools are employing similar criteria.
Posted by Michael O'Hear on August 26, 2006 at 03:31 PM in Life of Law Schools | Permalink
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Comments
For what it's worth, I don't really distinguish between coauthored and solo authored work at this stage. Getting a more precise handle on a candidate's contribution to a coauthored work might be something to accomplish in an interview or through a reference check.
Posted by: Michael O'Hear | Aug 29, 2006 2:59:58 PM
how do co-authored articles fit in the evaluation?
Posted by: curious | Aug 29, 2006 1:22:33 PM
Interesting question, Andy. I think I might find that information useful in marginal cases. Do bear in mind, though, that the decision now is just who gets one of many invitations to interview. I suspect that most candidates who have substantial numbers of citations and downloads would probably be easy "yes" decisions on other grounds.
Posted by: Michael O'Hear | Aug 29, 2006 9:43:44 AM
Prof. O'hear,
Assuming one is pressed for time, and needs to take a shortcut, to what extent do you value these other "shortcuts" for measuring an article's quality- 1) # of citations in other law journals, 2) # of citations in judicial opinions, 3) # of SSRN downloads.
i'm sure all would agree that these are imperfect measures, but, if the data were presented to you, would you use them (i.e. if a candidate says "I wrote X, which has received 300 downloads, and was cited in support of the court's holding in Plaintiff v. Defendant.")?
Posted by: andy | Aug 28, 2006 11:36:26 PM
An interesting and thoughtful discussion Michael, but I'm afraid that you're certainly in the minority in your views- there's just too much evidence to the contrary - too large a proportion of law profs coming from a few, top tier schools, and personal knowledge of prior publication success not leading to interviews.
Posted by: Anona | Aug 28, 2006 6:06:58 PM
I appreciate the many interesting comments and questions in response to my original post. To be clear about a couple of points: (1) I was only describing the criteria I use for purposes of winnowing several hundred FAR forms down to several dozen invitations to interview at the meat market, and (2) decisions here are ultimately made on a committee basis, so my personal views are not necessarily institutional views at this or any other law school. As some of the commenters suggested, I think the numbers are the real challenge at this stage, making it necessary (in my view) to use some shortcuts in evaluating candidates, including (collective groan) article placement. But do bear in mind that this is not really being used for fine-grained distinctions; the goal of the decisionmaking process is not making a job offer to one particular candidate, but a bunch of half-hour interview offers to a great many candidates. In this process, I doubt there is much real difference in effect between a "top 20" placement and a "top 100" placement; either way, the candidate has an impressive and unusual credential for an entry-level person and likely gets a closer look. However, if the candidate's one and only publication is in a journal that is clearly nowhere near the top 100, and there are no other credentials that suggest a high level of scholarly potential, then--in a world in which it is not feasible to read everyone's work (or even introductions)--I am comfortable drawing the conclusion that the candidate is not among the strongest.
I think everyone recognizes that article placement is a much-less-than-perfect proxy for quality, but I don't think it is an entirely random process, either. I wouldn't read much into the fact that 20 or 40 sets of articles editors took a pass on an article, but 120 or 140? Of course, low placement may simply reflect a lack of market savvy on the part of the author; maybe, for instance, the author only submitted to a small number of lower-ranked journals, and was not rejected by dozens of higher-ranked journals. For that reason, I tend to give less weight to article placement by people moving into academia directly from practice, and more to people who are trying to move from nontenure-track to tenure-track positions, who are more likely to understand the way the market works.
Do I read cv's? Not routinely, but perhaps in a dozen or two marginal cases. Do I care about teaching potential? Absolutely! But not so much at this stage in the process. Few candidates have any teaching experience, and fewer still have law-school teaching experience, so there is usually not much to go on until one meets the candidate in person, asks questions about teaching philosophy, sees a job talk, and so forth. A scholarship-focused initial winnowing process has never failed to turn up many candidates for us who prove also to have outstanding teaching potential. That said, my views of a candidate even at this stage may be positively influenced by prior law-school teaching experience.
Do candidates outside the top 20 schools stand a chance? Yes. I, for one, do not have any firm cut-off in the ranking of the candidate's school, and people are hired out of lower-ranked schools every year. I've seen empirical studies suggesting that prior publications are a better predictor of later scholarly success than law school attended. This makes sense to me, and I do tend to weigh prior publications more heavily at this stage than other factors. However, it should be said that someone without either an "elite" degree or prior publications faces an uphill battle in getting noticed.
Do student evaluations of candidates count? Here they do. We always discuss the student evaluations of candidates at every hiring meeting. I should add that our students are enthusiastic about the great majority of our candidates, which may reflect the fact that we have traditionally given considerable weight to teaching potential when we make call-back decisions.
Are three publications an eye-catcher? Yes, if they are academic publications, i.e., not bar journal articles or op-eds.
Anona, it's conceivable that all of your hypothetical candidates would get interviews. None is a non-starter. In my book, B (the only one without publications) is the most marginal.
Posted by: Michael O'Hear | Aug 28, 2006 5:30:35 PM
Since we are talking about FAR winnowing, maybe some of the posters involved might be willing to talk about what the cues are beyond "a few well placed publications". A few pointed questions:
1) First of all do you ever actually look at the attached vita or is that completely a waste of time for candidates? If you do, how often?
2) Does a certain amount of scholarly work make it very difficult to pass up a candidate (i.e. not advance them to the first round review)? What would you say is a real eye catcher? There's a bit of a problem in looking at quantity given that the FAR limits candidates to listing 3 pubs. Does 3 get you a look at your attached vita?
3) Are there certain factors that mean no further review (e.g. non top 20 school)?
4) In the spirit of law school teaching, a hypothetical:
Candidate A - top 10 school grad; 1 publication in a top 50 journal; clerkship w/ fed ct app judge
Candidate B - top 3 school; no publications; clerkship w/ fed ct app judge; top firm associate
Candidate C - top 20 school grad; 2 publications; public defender or legal services
Candidate D - non top 30 school grad; 5 publications; regional firm associate
Candidate E - non top 30 grad; PhD (non top 30 in discipline); 8 publications split between peer review and law reviews; assist prof in PhD disipline (5 years out)
Candidate F - top 10 grad; PhD top ten in discipline; 1 publication in law review 1 peer review; assistant prof in PhD discipline (4 years out)
The position is open ended "best athlete"; the info here isnt too different than what's available in FAR. Which ge interviews?
Posted by: anona | Aug 27, 2006 6:08:33 PM
It's interesting that commentators have assumed that the articles would be placed in student-edited law reviews. The OP didn't specify where the articles were placed. A "well-placed" article could be in the top peer-reviewed journal in the field. This presents the reverse problem one commentator raises: When faculty read articles and determine them to be insufficient despite the fact that they have theoretically been approved by independent specialists in the relevant field. Some schools give more weight to the experts on the faculty who are in the relevant field, but at many schools the review is conducted de novo with only a bare acknowledgment of the lack of substantive knowledge on the part of the faculty reviewing the case. Perhaps this is a well-deserved critique of the peer-review process, which in some disciplines is almost as bad, if not worse in terms of ideological purity, as having second-year law students make the determinations (i.e., random).
On the actual subject of the post, however, many of the commentators are either speaking of the later stages of review or simply have never been on an appointments committee. When you have to winnow down from 1000 resumes to the few you will support for an AALS interview, you simply have to find reasons to discard certain resumes without reading everything they have listed as a publication on their resume. This means some gems are left undiscovered, which is usually why the lateral market is fairly robust at the bottom.
Posted by: anon | Aug 27, 2006 4:46:08 PM
Well, at least those forms are only 1 page. From a candidate's point of view, it's bit annoying that there are only 3 slots for those all-important articles and (effectively) zero slots for that in-progress piece up on SSRN. Having to cope with veritable mountains of information is, I think, an unforseen consequence of our computer age.
Posted by: Thomas W. Briggs | Aug 27, 2006 4:46:06 PM
I'm also skeptical that "placement" in law reviews is a decent proxy for quality. In evaluating colleagues for tenure and promotion, or in which candidates to make offers to of the folks brought back for interviews, I am a strong advocate for faculty reading the pieces.
The problem for hiring committees (and I'm chair of one), is, as Rachel suggests, in the initial culling -- deciding who the committee will meet with in DC. Between the FAR books and the other ways to get resumes, hiring committees must cull from an original bunch of well over 1,000. And a lot of the folks in the FAR book have a lot going for them. Even if you can eliminate half by some other criteria, nobody is going to read 500 articles -- even introductions -- and make good judgements. Ironically, this is one of reasons it's hard to take law review placements all that seriously -- law review editors have too many submissions to review carefully.
Posted by: JosephSlater | Aug 27, 2006 4:45:29 PM
"While I agree in theory with the critique, and I presume that people read the scholarship of the finalists from the book, how do you suggest winnowing the list without some sort of proxies for quality?"
Oh, I don't know, how about an equally good proxy for the quality of an article? Like perhaps the number of freckles that are on the author's nose?
Any good article, in its introduction, should cogently explain why the issue it discusses is important, why the issue remains unresolved, and how the author purports to resolve it.
Many articles-- across all tiers of journals do not do this. A good article-- irrespective of its publication’s tier-- does do this.
For me, if an article deals with a *legal* issue, it is not very hard for me to take a look at the introduction and get a feel for the article as a whole—or at least a much stronger sense than can be gleaned by “Penn L. Rev” versus “Penn State L. Rev.”
I think a problem might be that many articles have nothing to do with law or reality, and so that the only thing to go on is the selection preferences of 2Ls. If an article is on anthroprocritirealifeminism, I agree that it will be impossible to judge its merits by reading the introduction, and perhaps one must defer to the selection preferences of idle 2Ls.
But, if a paper actually deals with the law, it's shocking (and, frankly, frightening) that a group of *law* professors will insist on winnowing the stack down not on a quick review of the article's legal arguments, but instead the selection preferences of 2Ls.
What does it say about legal scholarship generally if even *law* professors cannot get a sense of an article's merits from a very quick review of it? Of course, I do think that professors can get a sense of such merits, but it seems like many insist that the selection preferences of 2Ls are somehow a better measure.
If, as the OP suggests, the capacity for scholarship is the *crucial* factor in hiring, how can such a poor method of evaluation be justified? If scholarship is ancillary, I can understand why one might not be willing to perform a quick review, but if it’s 80% of the game?
Posted by: andy | Aug 27, 2006 11:53:41 AM
I am interested in hearing about the role that students play in evaluating faculty candidates. At my school, there was no formal student involvement. Instead, a professor with whom I have a close mentoring relationship and who was chair of the appointments committee simply asked me and a few other students she knows whether we could meet with the candidates for about half an hour. We provided feedback and I do think she took it into consideration -- where it went beyond that I don't know. The reason I personally felt it was important to meet with the candidates when my schedule allowed is because my sense was that the law school faculty was most interested in scholarship, while us students wanted good teachers.
Lastly, how about a discussion of the evaluation of a candidate's law school? It seems that most law school faculties are dominated by people who went to a small number of schools. But I personally don't believe that good professors can only come from the usual "top" schools. In fact, I firmly believe that people from all types of law schools can be excellent professors -- given that many things contribue to being a good teacher or scholar or being able to contribue to the life of a law school and its students, including other aspects of a person's career path. I might be willing to concede that people from the "top" schools are more academic/scholarship-minded, but that's the nature of those institutions. And I would argue that people from lower-ranked schools are just as good, or even better, at being "teachers" in many respects; at a minumum, isn't it possible that these people might approach the teaching/scholarship balance from a different perspective if they didn't go to Harvard, Yale, etc., where scholarship is paramount? I think that this issue is also important for "diversity" -- that is, having a faculty that is diverse in its legal education experiences. A variety of views and experiences on how legal education works best would surely be valuable, no? Is this considered at all?
Posted by: LadyLawyer | Aug 27, 2006 11:29:46 AM
Kate and Andy,
While I agree in theory with the critique, and I presume that people read the scholarship of the finalists from the book, how do you suggest winnowing the list without some sort of proxies for quality?
Posted by: Rachel Godsil | Aug 27, 2006 10:35:24 AM
Ah, I was biting my tongue when I saw the reference to the article placement too. It's good to know that some appointments committees are outsourcing the evaluation of candidates’ scholarship to second-year law students.
Posted by: Kate Litvak | Aug 27, 2006 4:01:49 AM
"well-placed article or two..."
is the quality of the article ever considered? would you ever consider reading a candidate's work? do you consider if the article has ever been cited by a court or anything? or are the selection preferences of 2ls and 3ls who know little to anything about the law given the most weight? thx.
Posted by: andy | Aug 27, 2006 3:39:34 AM
Michael, I had a similarly cross-eyes-causing experience last year, when I was on our appointments committee. And, like you, I recall being struck -- overwhelmed and humbled, really -- by the number of strikingly well-credentialled applicants, and very promising (in some cases, already accomplished) scholars.
Posted by: Rick Garnett | Aug 26, 2006 4:57:39 PM
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