Specialization in law school faculties

In a comment on one of Paul's typically adroit and artful posts, Kevin Heller made a comment that went in a somewhat different direction -- and one worth responding to a separate post, I think, to benefit those who don't check the comments. In brief, Kevin asserted both from personal preference and as advice to those on the market that there are frequently excellent reasons, besides geography, to choose a "lower ranked" school over one that's higher ranked: the faculty at the former might have more and better people doing work that shares a methodological or theoretical approach to yours, or that is in the same doctrinal or policy area. In addition to the advantage of creating a stronger community of interest that will aid your own development, it might indeed be better for promotion and tenure purposes to be at a place where senior faculty really support your work if your particular commitments would be an outlier at the "higher ranked" school.

This raises a bunch of really interesting issues. First, I don't think you see this kind of specialization as much in law schools as in graduate or even undergraduate programs. George Mason's methodological and political commitments, for example, are so striking because it's so rare in law schools to commit to that degree, while many graduate programs sell themselves based on the single or limited number of approaches that their key faculty offer. Law schools tend to be generalist institutions that offer the same general variety of courses -- frequently because they have to under accreditation requirements -- and that are composed of a typically motley crew of faculty members hired over the course of several generations. And over those generations and appointments seasons, those hires have served either a variety of curricular needs or are based on some notion of a "best athlete" available at the time -- an athlete whose quality and work are likely to be defined based on that which is prevalent on the law hiring market and in the larger world of academia at the time they're hired. As a result, specialization is more difficult to achieve. I also think there's also much less interest on the demand side, among students and alumni, than in grad and undergrad programs. (I have mixed feelings about special programs and institutes and the like within law schools, but that's a whole nother set of issues.)

Second, I think this goes to some of the oddities of the law hiring process we've discussed on this blawg in the past couple of weeks. If law school faculties tend not to be focused, they have a difficult time sorting candidates whose work has a particular focus. How can a faculty with a small number of legal [fill in the blank: economists, cognitive psychologists, humanists, etc.] decide the merits between different candidates within that specialty, muche less choose between, say, candidates for a torts slot that each claim to do work in different fields of law-and-[blank]? One way to do so is to lean on other credentials that speak little, or not at all, to the candidate's value as a law-and scholar: law school, clerkship, law review placement of the article they just published.

But to return to Kevin's comment:

I agree with him, to a point. Legal academia's generalism is a weakness, certainly -- it allows all kinds of mediocre work to pass through the cracks, and it means that every loud-mouthed legal academic can feel empowered to stand up in the middle of the talk and deliver what he (gender chosen intentionally) considers the absolutely cutting critique that instead demonstrates his own ignorance of a field. And there's real value in finding in a home institution a core group of like-minded souls who can read your work and challenge it on its own terms, and with whom you can converse regularly.

But generalism can be a strength, too. Narrowly focused graduate programs can produce brilliant work, yes, but they can also become echo-chambers, and opting into a lively but narrowly-focused community can also fence out those who might bring an important external challenge. To me, the ideal law school would be one where there are a few people whose work is like mine, but lots of really interesting and open and brilliant people whose work and whose politics are somewhat and even completely different from mine. As a student, law school felt like a much more diverse and varied world than graduate school did, and I liked that; I think law school faculties, at least as an ideal, can provide the same thing precisely because of their tendency towards generalism.

One can try to develop a community of friends and colleagues across the country (and, thanks to Kevin, halfway around the world) with whom you can share work and get insightful commentary. It's much more difficult to build that kind of network among people working in different fields and from different perspectives. Having those folks in your home institutions is really great and really important, too.