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Wednesday, February 06, 2008

Law Reviews and Lateral Hiring

Over at Concurring Opinions, workplace blogger extraordinaire Paul Secunda is doing a series of guest posts on the elusive lateral hiring market (here and here).  I want to piggy back on Paul's illuminating posts by offering another possible explanation for how potential lateral candidates make it onto a school's radar for a lateral move.

Recall Liz Glazer's post on C.V. Surfing/Stalking.  As an admitted C.V. surfer/stalker, I spend a fair amount of time trying to keep up with other people's scholarship.  One trend I've noticed--and perhaps trend isn't the right word--is that professors sometimes lateral to schools shortly after they publish in or are accepted for publication by a school's law review.  For instance, take Professor Awesome, who is at School of Law.  Shortly after Professor Awesome either places or publishes an article in College of Law's law review, Professor Awesome leaves School of Law for College of Law, whether for a visit or a permanent position.

Although I could give more concrete examples, I hesitate to do so because not only do I not know any of these people personally, but also I can't say for sure whether there really is a causal relationship in any of these cases.  After all, as Paul's posts explain, it's impossible to pin down exactly how schools target potential lateral hires.

Of course, I could be way off base here.  It may just be a coincidence, or perhaps there is some other explanation.  Let's consider it a hypothesis.  Hopefully those of you with better information on the subject will share your thoughts.  So I ask, in the words Dave Letterman, is this anything?

Posted by Zachary Kramer on February 6, 2008 at 12:17 PM in Life of Law Schools | Permalink

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Comments

Lateral hiring - I think this concept is really awesome to get hired multiple kind of talents in organizations. As your article is published in 2008, but unfortunately still some of the recruiters are not aware of benefits of lateral hiring.

Posted by: Prasad Joshi | Aug 8, 2014 5:30:50 AM

This is all good stuff. Thanks for the comments, Rob, Andrew, Anon, and Orin. Now I wish we could get the law review editor perspective.

Posted by: Zak Kramer | Feb 7, 2008 12:33:16 AM

II think Andrew Perlman and anon have it right: It's the interest from the school that leads to the placement, not the placement leading to interest from the school. That's my sense, at least.

Posted by: Orin Kerr | Feb 6, 2008 6:11:03 PM

A third possibility is that the College of Law faculty like the professor from School of Law already and invite that professor to give a paper as a lecture or as part of symposium that will be published in the school's law review. Some law reviews even want their professors to help identify rising stars when they put together their symposia.

Posted by: anon | Feb 6, 2008 3:54:25 PM

Another possibility is that lateral candidates sometimes have look-see visits before being hired. During the look-see year, the professor gets to know students who are on the school's law review, making it more likely that the professor will place an article in that school's journal at around the time of the permanent move.

Posted by: Andrew Perlman | Feb 6, 2008 2:24:08 PM

Zachary --

Interesting post, and I have noticed this as well, but here's an alternative hypothesis -- maybe the law review published the piece because the faculty was interested in hiring the professor; I think that's a more likely scenario than a faculty taking notice of a candidate because the school's law review published one of her pieces. For example, a faculty member might like a job talk and recommend the article to the editors of the school's law review ("I just read this paper by so and so and it was really good; you should consider publishing it.") When I worked on a journal, we got some article recommendations from professors -- it seems plausible that some portion of those article recommendations were spurred by job talks (as opposed to workshops, conferences, etc.).

Posted by: Rob Mikos | Feb 6, 2008 1:26:13 PM

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