"How to Grow a Law Professor"

Harvard Law Today has this piece, "How to Grow a Law Professor," available online.  It's about the Harvard Law School's Climenko Fellowship Program (and, I suppose, by extension, about the increasing number of similar programs).  Here's a bit:

In the 1990s, law schools began hiring in greater numbers those who had proved their methodological chops by earning a Ph.D. in another field. But that approach disadvantaged smart lawyers who were working at private firms, nonprofits, or the government and had not had time to write. A decade ago, then HLS Dean (and now Supreme Court Justice) Elena Kagan ’86 proposed a middle path, one on which practicing lawyers could return to the academy for two years and begin creating their own body of scholarship. In 2004, she established the Climenko Fellowship Program with funding from a bequest from attorney Jesse Climenko ’27. . . .

As much as anything, . . . the program offers its participants an opportunity to steep themselves in a legal academic environment, giving them the confidence and instincts that can come only from participating in a scholarly community and developing their own work in conversation with colleagues and mentors. “When you hit on a thesis that illuminates the connections among seemingly unrelated questions, you begin to understand who you are as a scholar,” says [Jacob] Gersen. “Our job is to try to teach the craft of research and to allow the fellows’ intellectual identities to emerge. Then when it is time for them to go on the job market, hiring committees know who they are and why they do what they do—and more importantly, the fellows know it themselves.”