The First Summer.

  With the academic hiring market having finally dwindled to some manner of finality, scores of newly enlisted assistant professors of law are now wandering about the country.  To you I say: Greetings, colleagues, and congratulations!  To me, you may reply, what happens next?  More specifically, you may be wondering what to do with this hulking great expanse of time that stretches out ahead of you before you're obliged to report for duty at your new law school.

  Perhaps you harbor some self-improving notion of gobbling down every treatise in sight or of churning out your first tenure piece.  If so, I would counsel caution.  From what I can tell, almost everyone wants to read those treatises during that first summer, but very few get very far.  And anything you write in these early days could probably stand to be improved by the huge increase in knowledge you'll soon gain from actually teaching a course in your area.

  So what should you do with your summer?  Here are a few suggestions:

1. Embrace the logistics.  Unless you already happen to reside in the city and home where you will live as a professor, you face a series of logistical challenges in getting yourself to those new places.  The moving process is all-consuming and horrible.  Just acknowledge that unpleasant reality and apply yourself to getting yourself sorted.  The big decision is whether to move early or late in the summer.  Moving late might appear to have the benefit of deferring pain but, alas, the psychic dread of worrying about the move will be pretty painful in its own right.  I recommend that you try to get situated in your new home as early as possible.

2. Take a vacation.  Once the move is complete, go celebrate.  Don't wait until all the boxes are unpacked -- that could be years.  Just take care of most of the big items, then reward yourself.  The first year of teaching often involves a great deal of work, very little sleep, and zero sympathy from anyone who is not an academic, so this gap between the end of the hiring process and the beginning of the new job is perhaps the ideal time to savor doing naught.

3. Choose (carefully) your arrival date.  The first time you walk through the halls of your new school, your colleagues are likely to greet you with this statement: "Oh, are you here now?"  You may be thinking, "Well, not really, I just thought I'd pop in every now and then before I really start."  Unfortunately, that basically cannot be done: people will expect to be able to stop by and say hello, to welcome you, to invite you to summer talks and events, &c.  So you are either there or you are not yet there.  Take some time to pick a start date after which you are comfortable being full-time at your new job -- part-timing is awfully difficult to pull off.

3. Meet your colleagues.  Once you are there, throw yourself into the process of meeting your new colleagues.  Some schools remain busier than others over the summer, but you are likely to be invited to lunch almost anywhere you go.  You won't know exactly why, but during the school year, going on social lunches will feel like a much greater strain on your schedule, so this is the time to do it when everyone is relaxed and eager to meet you.

4. Learn how to learn your subject.  If you are able to read all the relevant casebooks, treatises, articles, and opinions in the subject you will first be teaching, wonderful!  You scare me.  If you aren't, perhaps the next best thing is to learn how to learn your material.  In my experience, subject-matter blogs were a wonderful source all throughout my first year.  So perhaps you might take some time to find out what the best ones in your area are.  I subscribed to daily tutorials of corporate law wisdom generously broadcast to the world by Professors Stephen Bainbridge, Larry Ribstein, Gordon Smith, Victor Fleischer & Christine Hurt.  And, as the year went on, I learned yet more from the sages at Truth on the Market, the HLS Corporate Governance Blog, and Securities Law Prof Blog.  The only difficulty with all this information was that I often felt like one of B.F. Skinner's pigeons pecking maniacally away at my RSS feed reader.

5. Explore your city.  Beyond just your immediate colleagues, you may be lucky enough to be in a city with multiple law schools.  And while academic schedules are often less ambitious during the summer, you may be able to find out what sorts of workshops, symposia, colloquia, or other events take place during the school year.  Chicago, for instance, features a junior faculty workshop for untenured law professors and fellows at Chicago, Northwestern, Chicago-Kent, Loyola, DePaul, and John Marsall, with appearances by some faculty from as far north as Marquette.  Northwestern and the University of Chicago also host law & economics workshops with visitors from all over the country.  These venues can often be daunting, but they do a great job of showing beginners how things are done outside of the classroom.

6. Buy yourself something nice.  Finally, one benefit of teaching is that you now work largely for yourself.  So, while academics are reputed to shuffle about the place in shabby bits of frayed carpeting, you may have stylish colleagues near and far who set a rather high standard.  Opinions vary, but I felt that putting on a suit helped convey a sense of seriousness about the project going on in the classroom.  Also, Shanghai has some wonderful tailors.