Co-Authoring with Students

Once a year, once every other year, I publish something with a student co-author.   My co-authored pieces have not been high-level theoretical pieces like the ones Akhil Amar writes with his future law-prof students (E.g., this piece on prosecutions of presidents with Brian Kalt,  this piece on Bakke with Neal Katyal).   These tend to be case-crunchers, typically based on some legal doctrine I've run across that annoyed me.   I'll only work with a student on an idea I came up with; if it's the student's idea and they write the first draft, there's little justification for me putting my name on it.  So Saira Rao, who recently wrote Chambermaid, a comic novel about a  federal clerkship year,  and I wrote about a loyalty oath I had to take in order to visit at NYU--clearly unconstitutional in our opinion.  Mike Blanchard and I criticized a line of cases allowing "experts" to offer opinions in criminal cases that based on their visual inspection--an eyeball evaluation--a white powder seen on the street but not seized or lost before trial, was heroin or meth or cocaine  (Since neither of us were scientists, we called Dr. Henry Lee, and got a good quote from him about how no one could tell anything just by looking.).  Last year, several students and I published a report on Jim Crow Laws still on the books in the former Confederacy; four states repealed their laws in response to the report; others decided to keep them.  Overall, this seems like a good use of my time.   It combines teaching and scholarship.  It's fun.  The students typically work very hard; they are too inexperienced to have shortcuts they are confident in, so they research the issues to death.  Unlike an attorney-co-author, the students tend to take direction without too much argument.  A publication  credentializes the students; all have landed great positions.   Co-authoring lets me write more than I could by myself--even though revising student work for publication takes time.    On the other hand, in the long run, writing a larger number of focused, doctrinal pieces diverts time and energy from more ambitious projects.   

With a couple of recent papers, I have involved students with projects at the core of my scholarly agenda.  Rick Holmes and I published a sixth amendment piece in Cornell, and Randy Wagner and I are circulating a race and law paper that has been my focus for two years.   If my best work comes in pieces co-authored with students, will my school's Peer Review Committee and others wonder if, or assume that, any meritorious qualities are from Wagner and Holmes, not Chin?  Thoughts?