Hiring Committee Topics of Interest 2024-2025

As of September 2, 2024, there are 134 unique schools represented in the hiring committees sheet. (If your committee is not represented on the spreadsheet, please fill out the Google form or send me an email!) Many, though not all, of these schools expressed interest in particular subject or subjects for hiring. Of course, that a school expresses interest in a particular area does not mean that the school will hire in that area. And schools may hire in areas that they do not list. Nonetheless, to see in what areas schools expressed interest, I classified all the topics listed to general classifications, and then counted the numbers of times each general classification was mentioned (graph below; see a spreadsheet with the full list and count; you could do this one-by-one in the filtering tool if you wanted to for some reason).

A few notes about how I approached this.

• Every subject mentioned was classified to a general topic; you can see the full list of classifications, which are the same as those I use for the tool to sort and filter the spreadsheet. For example, "Business Organizations," "Corporations," and "Business/Commercial Law" are all "Business Law."
• A given topic can be classified in up to three areas. Thus "Business/Commercial Law" is classified not only as "Business Law" but also as "Commercial Law," and this would show up as two separate data points on the graph.
• If a single school mentioned 10 topics in non-overlapping areas, that would show up as 10 different data points on the graph.
• If a single school mentioned five Business Law topics, that shows up as "Business Law" just one time.
• If a school said they were interested in all areas, or did not state an area in which they were interested, that was classified as "Multiple/Undetermined." Some schools said "all" and also listed specific areas; that listing would be counted as one for "Multiple/Undetermined" and also one for each of the other topics mentioned.

The graph shows only areas where more than five schools expressed interest. "Other" captures all of the topics where five or fewer schools expressed an interest. In "Other," there was no subject in which five schools expressed interest. Four schools expressed interest in each of Civil Rights, Dispute Resolution, Finance/Accounting, and Real Estate Law. Three schools expressed interest in each of Compliance, Law and Inequality, Sports Law, and Statutes and Regulations. Two schools expressed interest in each of Academic Success, Appellate Advocacy, Comparative Law, Election Law, Entertainment Law, Experiential Learning, Privacy Law, Private Law, and Remedies. One school expressed interest in each of Animal Law, Elder Law, Gender, Law and Economics, Law and Philosophy, Law and Religion, Legal History, Library, Maritime Law, Public Law, Trial Practice, and Youth Law.