PrawfsBlawg

Lawsky Entry Level Hiring Report 2024

Following is a data summary of Reported Entry-Level Law School Hiring as of Spring 2024. To remain consistent with past years, while the spreadsheet contains all hiring information received, the data analysis includes only tenure-track hires at U.S. law schools. The data analysis also includes several hires who requested not to be included in the spreadsheet as of the date of this posting.

This report and the spreadsheet are freely available under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license, cited as Sarah Lawsky, Reported Entry-Level Law School Hiring Spring 2024, PrawfsBlawg, https://prawfsblawg.blogs.com/prawfsblawg/2024/05/lawsky-entry-level-hiring-report-2024.html.

Here is the full spreadsheet:

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There were 117 tenure-track hires at U.S. law schools reported, at 76 different law schools.

Q: How does 117 reported hires compare to past years?

A: Roughly consistent with the last two years; at this point, 2014-2021 looks different than 2022-2024. The average number of hires per year in the full 2014-2024 span is 88. But the average number of hires per year in the 2014-2021 span (inclusive) is 76, and the average number of hires per year in the 2022-2024 span (inclusive) is 121.

It would useful to know the percentage of those on the market who got jobs. While the AALS does not provide that information, the number of forms in the first distribution of FAR AALS forms is not a terrible proxy. The x-axis here is Hiring Year; thus, for example, if the Hiring Year is 2024, the FAR forms were released in 2023.

As that graph suggests, the hires per FAR form were roughly comparable to 2019 and onward; last year seems to have been an anomaly.

As is true every year, some people who received entry-level jobs and are represented in this data did not participate in the AALS/FAR process.

Q: You say the hires were at 76 law schools. How does that compare to previous years?

A: Comparable to previous relatively recent years.

Q: How many reported hires got their JD from School X?

Yale: 23; Harvard: 13; NYU: 8; Georgetown: 6; Chicago: 5; Berkeley: 4; Michigan: 4; Hebrew University: 3; Baylor: 3; Penn: 3; Virginia: 3; Fewer than Three: 41

Schools in the “fewer than three hires” category with two JD/LLBs who reported hires: Chicago Kent; Minnesota; Northwestern; UCLA; Vanderbilt; William & Mary

Schools in the “fewer than three hires” category with one JD/LLB who reported hires: Adam Mickiewicz University; Alabama; Arizona; Arizona State; Brooklyn; Cardozo; Columbia; FGV Direito São Paulo; Geneva; Houston; ITAM; Kogi State University; LSE; Lahore University; Marie Curie-Sklodowska; McGeorge; Nanchang; Nat'l Law University Jodhpur; Notre Dame; Ohio State; Pepperdine; Reichman; San Francisco; Stanford; Tel Aviv; Tennessee; UNLV; Universidad Torcuato Di Tella; Washington & Lee

A high percentage of hires every year get their degree from Yale, Harvard, Stanford, or NYU.

However, over time, many schools are represented as the source of entry-level hiring.

The schools with four hires include: BYU; British Columbia; CUNY; Cardozo; Chicago Kent; Indiana-Bloomington; Iowa; LSU; Tel Aviv; Tulane; USC; Washington (St. Louis).

The schools with three hires include: American; Arizona; Arizona State; Arkansas-Fayetteville; Baylor; Brooklyn; Davis; Emory; Florida; George Mason; Howard; ITAM; Miami; Mitchell Hamline; Northeastern; Pittsburgh; Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile; Washington (University of).

The schools with two hires include: Cambridge; Colorado; East China University; Florida State; Georgia; Kansas; Kentucky; Lewis & Clark; Nat'l Law School of India; New Mexico; New South Wales; Nigeria Law School; North Carolina; North Dakota; Oklahoma; Oregon; Queen's University; Queensland; Reichman; San Diego; Seoul Nat'l U; Sorbonne; St. Louis; Suffolk; Thomas Jefferson; UNLV; Universidad Torcuato Di Tella; West Virginia; William & Mary.

The schools with one hire include: Adam Mickiewicz University; Ain Shams Fac of Law; Alabama; Aristotle U; Athens; Augsburg; Barry; Belarusian State U; Bonn; Catholic (Portugal); College of Mgmt Acad Stud; Cologne; Connecticut; Dayton; DePaul; Democritus of Thrace; Denver; Diego Portales; FGV Direito São Paulo; Freiburg; Fundacao Getulio Vargas; Geneva; Genoa; Georgia State; Ghent; Haifa; Hamburg; Hawaii; Hofstra; Houston; Humboldt; Idaho; Inter-American; Irvine; Kogi State University; LSE; Lahore University; Lisbon; Louisville; Loyola-Chicago; Loyola-LA; Loyola-New Orleans; Maine; Marie Curie-Sklodowska; McGeorge; McGill; Melbourne; Montana; Nanchang; Nat'l Chengchi U; Nat'l Law University Jodhpur; Nebraska; New Hampshire; Ohio State; Passac (Germany); Penn State; Pepperdine; Phillipines; Pontificia Universidad Javeriana; Richmond; Rutgers; SMU; San Francisco; Sao Paulo; Sapienza; Savannah; Shandong; Shenzhen; South Carolina; Southern; Southern Illinois; Sydney; Tehran; Toronto; Trinity; Tsinghua; Tulsa; UCL; Universitat Pompeu Fabra; University of Ljubljana; Utah; Vermont; Vienna; Wayne State; Whittier; Zimbabwe.

Again, this is a partial list, as over time I am certainly missing hires. This is just an aggregation of the information reported to me in the spring of the year in which I do each report.

And each year, there are relatively many unique schools represented.

The number of unique schools may be in part a function of the number of hires. Unique schools as a percentage of total hires is comparable to recent years. (This graph represents the number of unique schools from which hires got their JD in a given year divided by total number of hires for that year. If in a particular year there were five total hires, and each came from a different law school, the graph would show 5/5 = 100% for that year. If in a given year there were five total hires, and three of those hires came from School X and two came from school Y, then the graph would show 2/5 = 40% for that year.)

This information comes with two related caveats.

First, the spreadsheet reports the number of hires who received a JD from a particular school who accepted a tenure-track job, but not the number of JDs on the market who received a tenure-track job offer.

Second, the spreadsheet reports the count of JDs from a particular school, but not the rate at which JDs received (or accepted) offers. A smaller school with a high placement rate thus might not appear on the chart, whereas a larger program with a low placement rate might appear. This caveat means that smaller schools may be undervalued if one relies only on this data, while larger schools might be overvalued.

Q: How many reported hires had a fellowship, degree, or clerkship?

88 (about 75%) had a fellowship; 57 (about 49%) had a clerkship; 70 (about 60%) had a higher degree. 5 people had none of these credentials. The percentage of each of these credentials was consistent with but slightly lower than percentages in recent years.

Venn diagram. Of the five people who did not have a fellowship, clerkship, or advanced degree, at least four of the five had significant, extensive academic experience (three were non-tenure-track to tenure-track hires and one was a current professor in another field).

Comparing two categories of the Venn diagram related to fellowships, degrees, and clerkships--hires that have all three credentials, and hires that have none of the credentials--last year seems to have been an anomaly.

Q: From what law schools did people get these fellowships?

I count here any law school at which a person reports having a fellowship. So one person could account for two schools’ being listed here. For example, if a single individual had a fellowship at Columbia followed by a fellowship at NYU, that would be reflected below as +1 to Columbia and +1 to NYU.

NYU: 16; Harvard: 14; Stanford: 5; Columbia: 5; Penn: 4; Chicago: 4; Georgetown: 4; DePaul: 3; Gonzaga: 3; UCLA: 3; Yale: 3; George Washington: 3; Berkeley: 3; Fewer than Three: 39

This information comes with the same two caveats as the JD numbers.

First, the spreadsheet reports the number of hires who received a fellowship from a particular school who accepted a tenure-track job, but not the number of fellows who received a tenure-track job offer. This caveat likely applies to all or nearly all fellowship programs. Presumably, someone choosing between fellowships cares more about how many people received tenure-track job offers than about how many people accepted those offers.

Second, the spreadsheet reports the count of fellows, but not the rate at which fellows received (or accepted) offers. A smaller program with a high placement rate thus might not appear on the chart, whereas a larger program with a low placement rate might appear. This caveat means that smaller programs may be undervalued if one relies only on this data, while larger programs might be overvalued.

Q: Tell me more about these advanced degrees.

Okay, but first a caveat: Although some people had more than one advanced degree, the following looks only at what seemed to me to be the "highest" degree someone earned. For example, someone with a Ph.D. and an LL.M. would be counted only as a Ph.D. for purposes of this question. (This tracks the "Other Degree (1)" column.)

That said, looking only at what seemed to be the most advanced degree, and including expected degrees, the 70 “highest” advanced degrees broke down like this:

Doctorate: 41; Masters: 21; LLM: 7; MBA: 1

Topics ranged all over the maps. For the 41 Doctorates, a number of topics had multiple hires, including Law: 16; Philosophy: 6; Political Science: 6; History: 4; Health: 2. The other doctorate topics, each of which had one hire, were Education; Psychology; Finance; Literature; Religion; Sociology; Environment.

Q: That's a lot of doctorates, and that goes along with a lot of fellowships! How many people had a doctorate, or a fellowship, or both?

82% of the hires had either a doctorate (Ph.D., SJD, JSD, D.Phil.), a fellowship, or both. The percentage of reported hires with doctorates is roughly comparable to years since 2017, though still below 40%.

The percentage of doctorates who also had a fellowship is 80%, which is comparable to recent years (except for last year).

Q: How long ago did these reported hires get their initial law degrees?

Zero to Four Years (Graduated 2020-2024): 16; Five to Nine Years (Graduated 2015-2019): 49; Ten to 19 Years (Graduated 2005-2014): 45; Twenty or More Years (Graduated before 2005): 6

Q: How do the "years since initial degree" numbers compare to previous years?

Consistent with prior years.

Q: This is all wrong! I know for a fact that more people from School Y were hired!

Yes, this report is certainly missing some information. It is without question incomplete. If you are aware of an entry-level hire who is not reported, please let me know and I will add that person.

If you want to know about real entry level hiring, I commend to you Brian Leiter's report (hiring 1995-2011), the Katz et al. article (all law professors as of 2008), the George and Yoon article (entry level, 2007-2008 hiring year), and the Tsesis Report (entry level, 2012-2013 hiring year). This is just a report about entry-level hires reported to me as of the spring before the school year starts.

Originally posted 5/14/2024. Updated 5/15/24 to fix the JD school over time graph and add text for schools with fewer than five hires over time. Updated 5/16/24 to add hires and add text related to NTT to TT hires. Updated 5/29/24 to add one fellowship to fellowship school information. Updated 6/1/24 to fix FAR/percent graph. Updated 6/14/24 to add hires and to update the averages information in the "reported hires" question. Updated 5/19/24 (approximately), 5/23/24, 5/31/24, 6/1/24, 6/11/24, 7/2/24, 7/19/24 to add hires.

Lawsky Entry Level Hiring Report 2024 - Call for Information

Time once again for the entry level hiring report.

 

I will gather the following information for tenure-track, clinical, or legal writing full-time entry-level hires: 

Basic Information: Name, Hiring School, JD Institution, JD Year of Graduation

Other Degrees: Type of Degree,  Degree Granting Institution, Degree Subject

Fellowship, VAP, or Visiting Professorship: Institution and Type (e.g., VAP, name of fellowship, etc.)

Clerkship: Court (e.g., 9th Circuit, Texas Supreme Court, etc.)

Areas of Speciality (up to four) (if you are a clinical or LRW hire, please list this as your first Area of Specialty)

Type of Position: Tenure Track or Non-Tenure Track (if you are clinical or LRW and also tenure-track, please indicate this)

The information will be aggregated on this spreadsheet (which is reproduced below and which you can view and download by clicking on this link); scroll across to see all of the information that will be aggregated.

The spreadsheet includes some information that I pulled from public sources, such as Twitter or law school websites. When that is the case, I've included the relevant link (in a column to the right--just scroll the spreadsheet over). If I have included your information from a public source and you would like me to correct or update it, please just let me know.

You can either leave information in the comments or email it to me. You cannot edit the spreadsheet yourself.

If you leave information in the comments, please sign the comment with your real name. (Ideally, the reporting person would be either the hired individual or someone from the hiring committee at the hiring school.)

If you would like to email information instead of posting it, please send it to Sarah Lawsky at sarah *dot* lawsky *at* law *dot* northwestern *dot* edu.

Remember: you can't edit the spreadsheet yourself. To get your information into the spreadsheet, you must either post in the comments or email me.

If you see any errors, or if I have incorporated your information into the spreadsheet but you are not yet ready to make it public, please don't hesitate to email me, and I will take care of the problem as soon as I can.

Clarifications:

[This paragraph further clarified on March 17, 2024.] The list does not include someone who was a full-time non-tenure track clinician at a school that does not provide tenure to clinicians, and then moves as a clinician to a school that does provide tenure to clinicians, with credit for their prior work experience as a full-time faculty member. This person does not seem to be an entry-level hire. However, someone who was a full-time professor (clinical or otherwise) at one school, and then moved to an entry-level position (clinical or otherwise) with a tenure track or promotional clock that started fresh, would be an entry-level hire.

The list does include people who had a non-professor job in a law school and then moved to a professor job that was tenure track. Thus a person may have worked at a law school for many years, but still be considered an entry level hire. To indicate this situation, I will put their previous job at a law school in the "fellowship" category, and note "non-TT to TT" in the "Notes" category. This is not to indicate that this isn't an entry-level hire, but rather to give information about the nature of the item listed as a fellowship. (I.e., not a temporary position, as fellowships usually are.)

Other links:

This report follows in the tradition of Larry Solum's excellent work over many years.

2023 initial post, 2023 spreadsheet, 2023 report (with graphs).

2022 initial post, 2022 spreadsheet, 2022 report (with graphs)

2021 initial post, 2021 spreadsheet, 2021 report (with graphs)

2020 initial post, 2020 spreadsheet, 2020 report (with graphs)

2019 initial post, 2019 spreadsheet, 2019 report (with graphs).

2018 initial post, 2018 spreadsheet, 2018 report (with graphs).

2017 initial post, 2017 spreadsheet, 2017 report (with graphs).

2016 initial post, 2016 spreadsheet, 2016 report (with graphs). 

2015 initial post, 2015 spreadsheet, 2015 report (with graphs).

2014 initial post, 2014 spreadsheet, 2014 report (with graphs).

2013 initial post, 2013 spreadsheet, 2013 report (with graphs).

2012 initial post, 2012 spreadsheet, 2012 report (with graphs).

2011 initial post, 2011 spreadsheet, 2011 report (with graphs).

All PrawfsBlawg entry level hiring report tagged posts.

Lawsky Entry Level Hiring Report 2023

Following is a data summary of Reported Entry-Level Law School Hiring as of Spring 2023. To remain consistent with past years, while the spreadsheet contains all hiring information received, the data analysis includes only tenure-track hires at U.S. law schools. The data analysis also includes several hires who requested not to be included in the spreadsheet as of the date of this posting.

This report and the spreadsheet are freely available under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license, cited as Sarah Lawsky, Reported Entry-Level Law School Hiring Spring 2023, PrawfsBlawg, https://prawfsblawg.blogs.com/prawfsblawg/2023/05/lawsky-entry-level-hiring-report-2023.html.

Here is the full spreadsheet:

There were 129 tenure-track hires at U.S. law schools reported, at 86 different law schools.

Q: How does 129 reported hires compare to past years?

A: This is most reported hires since the “new normal” began. The average number of hires since 2014 is 85. (I omit 2010 in this and all subsequent cross-year comparisons because insufficient data was collected that year to include it in the report.)

It would useful to know the percentage of those on the market who got jobs. While the AALS does not provide that information, the number of forms in the first distribution of FAR AALS forms is not a terrible proxy--if most people who were on the market used the FAR. This year had fewer FAR forms in the first distribution than any previous year. This might mean fewer people want to be law professors--or it might mean that more people who went on the market decided not to go through the FAR process. The x-axis here is Hiring Year; thus, for example, if the Hiring Year is 2023, the FAR forms were released in 2022.

As that graph suggests, the hires per FAR form were higher than any previous year since I started collecting this information.

Again, though, as is true every year, some people who received entry-level jobs and are represented in this data did not participate in the AALS/FAR process. This graph might represent a higher success rate for those who registered with the AALS and went through the FAR process. However, it may also, or instead, represent an increase in people who got jobs who did not participate in the FAR process.

Q: You say the hires were at 86 law schools. How does that compare to previous years?

A: Higher than previous relatively recent years, and also the highest number of schools hiring since and including 2013. (That is, the most recent year with more schools hiring than this year was 2012.)

Q: How many reported hires got their JD from School X?

Yale: 27; Harvard: 13; Stanford: 6; NYU: 6; Vanderbilt: 3; Indiana-Bloomington: 3; Georgetown: 3; Chicago: 3; Berkeley: 3; Virginia: 3; Michigan: 3; UC Law SF (Hastings): 3; Fewer than Three: 53

Schools in the “fewer than three hires” category with two JD/LLBs who reported hires: Boston University; Colorado; Columbia; Cornell; Duke; Fordham; St. Louis; Tennessee

Schools in the “fewer than three hires” category with one JD/LLB who reported hires: American; Arizona State; British Columbia; CUNY; Chicago Kent; Davis; Emory; Florida State; George Mason; Hawaii; Hebrew University; Illinois; Inter-American; Lewis & Clark; Louisville; Minnesota; New South Wales; Nigeria Law School; Northwestern; Notre Dame; Penn; Penn State; Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile; Queen's University; Reichman; San Diego; Sapienza; Savannah; Shandong; South Carolina; Texas; UCL; UCLA; Washington & Lee; Washington (St. Louis); Wayne State; Zimbabwe

A high percentage of hires every year get their degree from Yale, Harvard, Stanford, or NYU.

However, over time, many schools are represented as the source of entry-level hiring.

And each year, there are relatively many unique schools represented--with more unique schools this year than any year since this version of the report started.

The number of unique schools may be in part a function of the number of hires. Unique schools as a percentage of total hires is on the higher side but comparable to recent years. (This graph represents the number of unique schools from which hires got their JD in a given year divided by total number of hires for that year. If in a particular year there were five total hires, and each came from a different law school, the graph would show 5/5 = 100% for that year. If in a given year there were five total hires, and three of those hires came from School X and two came from school Y, then the graph would show 2/5 = 40% for that year.)

This information comes with two related caveats.

First, the spreadsheet reports the number of hires who received a JD from a particular school who accepted a tenure-track job, but not the number of JDs on the market who received a tenure-track job offer.

Second, the spreadsheet reports the count of JDs from a particular school, but not the rate at which JDs received (or accepted) offers. A smaller school with a high placement rate thus might not appear on the chart, whereas a larger program with a low placement rate might appear. This caveat means that smaller schools may be undervalued if one relies only on this data, while larger schools might be overvalued.

Q: How many reported hires had a fellowship, degree, or clerkship?

91 (about 71%) had a fellowship; 59 (about 46%) had a clerkship; 71 (about 55%) had a higher degree. 5 people had none of these credentials. The percentage of each of these credentials was consistent with but slightly lower than percentages in recent years.

Venn diagram:

Comparing two categories of the Venn diagram related to fellowships, degrees, and clerkships--hires that have all three credentials, and hires that have none of the credentials--there was what seemed to be a shift in 2017, but this year drops down even below 2011 levels for the percentage of hires that have all three.

Q: From what law schools did people get these fellowships?

I count here any law school at which a person reports having a fellowship. So one person could account for two schools’ being listed here. For example, if a single individual had a fellowship at Columbia followed by a fellowship at NYU, that would be reflected below as +1 to Columbia and +1 to NYU.

Harvard: 15; NYU: 11; Yale: 8; Georgetown: 6; Chicago: 5; Stanford: 4; Berkeley: 4; Gonzaga: 3; Duquesne: 3; George Washington: 3; Fewer than Three: 49

This information comes with the same two caveats as the JD numbers.

First, the spreadsheet reports the number of hires who received a fellowship from a particular school who accepted a tenure-track job, but not the number of fellows who received a tenure-track job offer. This caveat likely applies to all or nearly all fellowship programs. Presumably, someone choosing between fellowships cares more about how many people received tenure-track job offers than about how many people accepted those offers.

Second, the spreadsheet reports the count of fellows, but not the rate at which fellows received (or accepted) offers. A smaller program with a high placement rate thus might not appear on the chart, whereas a larger program with a low placement rate might appear. This caveat means that smaller programs may be undervalued if one relies only on this data, while larger programs might be overvalued.

Q: Tell me more about these advanced degrees.

Okay, but first a caveat: Although some people had more than one advanced degree, the following looks only at what seemed to me to be the "highest" degree someone earned. For example, someone with a Ph.D. and an LL.M. would be counted only as a Ph.D. for purposes of this question. (This tracks the "Other Degree (1)" column.)

That said, looking only at what seemed to be the most advanced degree, and including expected degrees, the 71 “highest” advanced degrees broke down like this:

Doctorate: 43; Masters: 21; LLM: 6; MD: 1

Topics ranged all over the maps. For the 43 Doctorates, a number of topics had multiple hires, including Law: 16; Philosophy: 6; Political Science: 5; History: 4; Economics: 3; Sociology: 2; Literature: 2. The other doctorate topics, each of which had one hire, were Criminology; Accounting; Geography; Education; Psychology.

Q: That's a lot of doctorates, and that goes along with a lot of fellowships! How many people had a doctorate, or a fellowship, or both?

83% of the hires had either a doctorate (Ph.D., SJD, JSD, D.Phil.), a fellowship, or both. For the first year since and including 2017, the percentage of reported hires with doctorates is below 40%. (That is, the most recent previous year with less than 40% of hires with doctorates was 2016.)

Q: How long ago did these reported hires get their initial law degrees?

Zero to Four Years (Graduated 2019-2023): 27; Five to Nine Years (Graduated 2014-2018): 50; Ten to 19 Years (Graduated 2004-2013): 48; Twenty or More Years (Graduated before 2004): 4

Q: How do the "years since initial degree" numbers compare to previous years?

Consistent with prior years.

Q: More slicing! More dicing! Different slicing! Different dicing!

Sure--you can do it yourself, or ask questions in the comments and I'll see what I can do, or we'll work it out as a group. [NOTE: Currently I am unable to open the comments; this is a Typepad problem. I will continue to try to open the comments, but in the meantime, if you have questions/comments, feel free to email me.]

Q: This is all wrong! I know for a fact that more people from School Y were hired!

Yes, this report is certainly missing some information. It is without question incomplete. If you are aware of an entry-level hire who is not reported, please let me know and I will add that person.

If you want to know about real entry level hiring, I commend to you Brian Leiter's report (hiring 1995-2011), the Katz et al. article (all law professors as of 2008), the George and Yoon article (entry level, 2007-2008 hiring year), and the Tsesis Report (entry level, 2012-2013 hiring year). This is just a report about entry-level hires reported to me as of the spring before the school year starts.

Updated 5/16/2023, 5/17/2023, 5/18/2023, 5/21/2023, 6/10/2023, 8/8/2023 to add hires. Updated 8/9/2023 to update number of schools hiring. Updated 5/18/2023 to change the language regarding the higher ratio of hires to FAR forms to emphasize the point that this may result from people getting jobs outside the FAR process.

Lawsky Entry Level Hiring Report 2023 - Call for Information

Time once again for the entry level hiring report.

I will gather the following information for tenure-track, clinical, or legal writing full-time entry-level hires: 

Basic Information: Name, Hiring School, JD Institution, JD Year of Graduation

Other Degrees: Type of Degree,  Degree Granting Institution, Degree Subject

Fellowship, VAP, or Visiting Professorship: Institution and Type (e.g., VAP, name of fellowship, etc.)

Clerkship: Court (e.g., 9th Circuit, Texas Supreme Court, etc.)

Areas of Speciality (up to four) (if you are a clinical or LRW hire, please list this as your first Area of Specialty)

Type of Position: Tenure Track or Non-Tenure Track (if you are clinical or LRW and also tenure-track, please indicate this)

The information will be aggregated on this spreadsheet (which is reproduced below and which you can view and download by clicking on this link); scroll across to see all of the information that will be aggregated.

The spreadsheet includes some information that I pulled from public sources, such as Twitter or law school websites. When that is the case, I've included the relevant link (in a column to the right--just scroll the spreadsheet over). If I have included your information from a public source and you would like me to correct or update it, please just let me know.

You can either leave information in the comments or email it to me. You cannot edit the spreadsheet yourself.

If you leave information in the comments, please sign the comment with your real name. (Ideally, the reporting person would be either the hired individual or someone from the hiring committee at the hiring school.)

If you would like to email information instead of posting it, please send it to Sarah Lawsky at sarah *dot* lawsky *at* law *dot* northwestern *dot* edu.

Remember: you can't edit the spreadsheet yourself. To get your information into the spreadsheet, you must either post in the comments or email me.

If you see any errors, or if I have incorporated your information into the spreadsheet but you are not yet ready to make it public, please don't hesitate to email me, and I will take care of the problem as soon as I can.

Clarifications:

The list does not include people who were full-time non-tenure track clinicians who are now moving to a tenure track job at a different school, as these don't seem like true entry-level hires to me. This is the situation where a person is at a school that does not provide tenure to clinicians, and then moves to a school that does provide tenure to clinicians.

The list does include people who had a non-professor job in a law school and then moved to a professor job that was tenure track. Thus a person may have worked at a law school for many years, but still be considered an entry level hire. To indicate this situation, I will put their previous job at a law school in the "fellowship" category, and note "non-TT to TT" in the "Notes" category. This is not to indicate that this isn't an entry-level hire, but rather to give information about the nature of the item listed as a fellowship. (I.e., not a temporary position, as fellowships usually are.)

Other links:

This report follows in the tradition of Larry Solum's excellent work over many years.

2022 initial post, 2022 spreadsheet, 2022 report (with graphs)

2021 initial post, 2021 spreadsheet, 2021 report (with graphs)

2020 initial post, 2020 spreadsheet, 2020 report (with graphs)

2019 initial post, 2019 spreadsheet, 2019 report (with graphs).

2018 initial post, 2018 spreadsheet, 2018 report (with graphs).

2017 initial post, 2017 spreadsheet, 2017 report (with graphs).

2016 initial post, 2016 spreadsheet, 2016 report (with graphs). 

2015 initial post, 2015 spreadsheet, 2015 report (with graphs).

2014 initial post, 2014 spreadsheet, 2014 report (with graphs).

2013 initial post, 2013 spreadsheet, 2013 report (with graphs).

2012 initial post, 2012 spreadsheet, 2012 report (with graphs).

2011 initial post, 2011 spreadsheet, 2011 report (with graphs).

All PrawfsBlawg entry level hiring report tagged posts.

Lawsky Entry Level Hiring Report 2022

Following is a data summary of the Spring Reported Entry Level Hiring Report for 2022. To remain consistent with past years, while the spreadsheet contains all hiring information received, the data analysis includes only tenure-track hires at U.S. law schools. (The data analysis also includes several hires who requested not to be included in the spreadsheet at the date of this posting.)

This report and the spreadsheet are freely available under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 license, cited as Sarah Lawsky, Spring Reported Entry Level Hiring Report 2022, PrawfsBlawg, https://prawfsblawg.blogs.com/prawfsblawg/2022/05/lawsky-entry-level-hiring-report-2022.html.

Here is the full spreadsheet:

There were 119 tenure-track hires at U.S. law schools reported, at 76 different law schools.

Q: How does 119 reported hires compare to past years?

This is a big jump—more than any other year since the market shifted after 2012. The average number of hires per year since 2014 is 81. (I omit 2010 in this and all subsequent cross-year comparisons because insufficient data was collected that year; click on pictures for larger versions.)




It would useful to know the percentage of those who registered with the AALS who got jobs. While the AALS does not provide that information, the number of forms in the first distribution of FAR AALS forms is not a terrible proxy. This graph and chart compares the hiring in Year X to the number of forms in the first distribution in Year (X - 1) (because those are the people who were hired in Year X). Reported hires per FAR form also took a jump.

Q: You say the hires were at 76 different schools. How does that compare to previous years?

More schools hired than any year since 2012.




Q: How many reported hires got their JD from School X?

Harvard: 19; Yale: 18; Stanford: 6; NYU: 5; Duke: 4; Cornell: 4; Chicago: 3; Georgetown: 3; UCLA: 3; Virginia: 3; Northwestern: 3; Berkeley: 3; Penn: 3; George Washington: 3; Fewer than Three: 39

Schools in the “fewer than three hires” category with two JD/LLBs who reported hires: Columbia; Illinois; Michigan; Minnesota; Wisconsin

Schools in the “fewer than three hires” category with one JD/LLB who reported hires: Arizona; Athens; CUNY; Davis; Dayton; Denver; Emory; Freiburg; Ghent; Hastings; Hebrew University; Howard; Humboldt; Irvine; Miami; Nat'l Chengchi U; New South Wales; Nigeria Law School; Richmond; Shenzhen; Southern Illinois; Suffolk; Temple; Trinity; Tulane; Utah; Vanderbilt; Washington & Lee; West Virginia

This information comes with two related caveats.

First, the spreadsheet reports the number of hires who received a JD from a particular school who accepted a tenure-track job, but not the number of JDs on the market who received a tenure-track job offer.

Second, the spreadsheet reports the count of JDs from a particular school, but not the rate at which JDs received (or accepted) offers. A smaller school with a high placement rate thus might not appear on the chart, whereas a larger program with a low placement rate might appear. This caveat means that smaller schools may be undervalued if one relies only on this data, while larger schools might be overvalued. 

Q: How many reported hires had a fellowship, degree, or clerkship?

93 (about 78%) had a fellowship; 59 (about 50%) had a clerkship; 79 (about 66%) had a higher degree. 5 people had none of these credentials. This is consistent with prior years.

Venn diagram:

Comparing two categories of the Venn diagram related to fellowships, degrees, and clerkships--hires that have all three credentials, and hires that have none of the credentials--a shift starting in 2017 is apparent:

2012: 20% all three/8% none; 2013: 17%/4%; 2014: 21%/1%; 2015: 20%/1%; 2016: 17%/1%; 2017: 31%/0%; 2018: 30%/2%; 2019: 30%/0%; 2020: 34%/1%; 2021: 26%/0%; 2022: 24%/4%.

Q: From what law schools did people get these fellowships?

I count here any law school at which a person reports having a fellowship. So one person could account for two schools’ being listed here. For example, if a single individual had a fellowship at Columbia followed by a fellowship at NYU, that would be reflected below as +1 to Columbia and +1 to NYU.

NYU 18; Harvard 14; Columbia 6; Chicago 5; Duke 5; Stanford 5; Penn 4; UCLA 4; Yale 4; Georgetown 3; Michigan 3; Fewer than Three 37.

This information comes with the same two caveats as the JD numbers.

First, the spreadsheet reports the number of hires who received a fellowship from a particular school who accepted a tenure-track job, but not the number of fellows who received a tenure-track job offer. This caveat likely applies to all or nearly all fellowship programs. Presumably, someone choosing between fellowships cares more about how many people received tenure-track job offers than about how many people accepted those offers.

Second, the spreadsheet reports the count of fellows, but not the rate at which fellows received (or accepted) offers. A smaller program with a high placement rate thus might not appear on the chart, whereas a larger program with a low placement rate might appear. This caveat means that smaller programs may be undervalued if one relies only on this data, while larger programs might be overvalued.

Q: Tell me more about these advanced degrees. 

Okay, but first a caveat: Although some people had more than one advanced degree, the following looks only at what seemed to me to be the "highest" degree someone earned. For example, someone with a Ph.D. and an LL.M. would be counted only as a Ph.D. for purposes of this question. (This tracks the "Other Degree (1)" column.)

That said, looking only at what seemed to be the most advanced degree, and including expected degrees, the 78 “highest” advanced degrees broke down like this:

Doctorate: 51; Masters: 19; LLM: 7; MD: 2

Topics ranged all over the maps. For the 51 Doctorates, a number of topics had multiple hires, including Law: 12; Political Science: 9; Economics: 6; Philosophy: 5; History: 5; Anthropology: 3. The other doctorate topics, each of which had one hire, were American Studies; Public Policy; Public Affairs; Psychology; Education; Biology; Criminology; Chemistry; Communications; Business; Social Policy.

Q: What is the percentage of doctorates over time?

Comparable to recent years.

Q: That's a lot of doctorates, and that goes along with a lot of fellowships! How many people had a doctorate, or a fellowship, or both?

86% of the hires had either a doctorate (Ph.D., SJD, JSD, D.Phil.), a fellowship, or both.

Q: How long ago did these reported hires get their initial law degrees?

Zero to Four Years (Graduated 2018-2022) 18; Five to Nine Years (Graduated 2013-2017) 54; Ten to 19 Years (Graduated 2003-2012) 43; Twenty or More Years (Graduated before 2003) 4.

Q: How do the "time since initial degree" numbers compare to previous years?

Consistent with prior years.

Q: More slicing! More dicing! Different slicing! Different dicing!

Sure--you can do it yourself, or ask questions in the comments and I'll see what I can do, or we'll work it out as a group.

Q: This is all wrong! I know for a fact that more people from School Y were hired!

Yes, this spreadsheet is certainly missing some information. Repeat: this spreadsheet is incomplete. It represents only those entry-level hires that were reported to me, either through the comments on this blog or via email. It is without question incomplete. 

If you want to know about real entry level hiring, I commend to you Brian Leiter's report (hiring 1995-2011), the Katz et al. article (all law professors as of 2008), the George and Yoon article (entry level, 2007-2008 hiring year), and the Tsesis Report (entry level, 2012-2013 hiring year). This is just a report about self-reported entry level hires as of the spring before the school year starts. 

Originally posted 5/12/2022; revised 5/13/22, 5/14/22, 5/30/22, 6/12/22, 6/15/22, 6/21/22, 7/4/22, 9/22/22, and 10/8/22 to add hires and to tweak and make numbers slightly more accurate across the board.

An Empirical Analysis of the Environmental Law Hiring Market - Erwin Guest Post

The following is a guest post from Alex Erwin:

As readers of this blog are well aware, Sarah Lawsky annually collects data on the legal academic job market.  Her entry-level hiring reports offer fantastic insight into trends in the overall job market.  I personally found her reports incredibly useful when preparing to go on the market.  That said, I have always wondered how general market trends hold up across subject-specific submarkets.  I have seen discussion in the comments and elsewhere about different fields of law having different hiring standards, but, when I went searching, I did not find anything specific about my own field, environmental law.  When I went on the market last year, I wanted to know more about who was getting hired in environmental law and what kind of credentials they had.  Like any good academic, I funneled my job hunt anxiety into data analysis! 

I pooled the spreadsheets from 2011 to 2022 and filtered them down to include only new hires with an interest in environmental law, natural resources law, and/or energy law.  Since 2011, 62 new hires had a recorded interest in at least one of these subjects.  Environmental law professors (ELPs) were somewhere between 5 – 6% of all hires. 

I found, perhaps unsurprisingly, that the credentials that seem to be important for success on the overall market were still important in the environmental sub-market.  92% of ELPs either had an additional degree and/or did a fellowship/VAP, and 0 ELPs were hired without either an additional degree, a fellowship/VAP, or a clerkship. 

However, I did find some key differences.  Additional degrees were more common among ELPs (79%) than across the market as a whole (58%).  Conversely, fewer ELPs clerked (43%) than the rest of the market (57%).   To me this makes sense.  Environmental law is a highly interdisciplinary field, and many ELPs chose to presume graduate education in a different environmental field rather than increased generalized legal training via a clerkship.  ELPs had degrees in everything from ecology and genetics to philosophy and history. 

Additionally, ELPs were less likely to have gone to a "T-14" law school for their JD.  60% of new ELPs got their law degree from a “T-14” law school.  75% of new hires on the overall market went to a “T-14” law school.  However, only 3 ELPs were hired at schools ranked higher than the one they attended for law school.  So while the degree institute is perhaps less important in this subfield, it still is clearly a limiting factor on where you are likely to be hired. 

Here are a couple of other interesting tidbits: 

• Since 2017, 50% of ELPs hired have a doctoral degree.   
• 66% of ELPs practiced law in some capacity before entering academia. 
• 60% of ELPs hired were women, while women make up only 46% of hires on the overall market since 2011. 

Finally, two of the last three years have been strong for environmental law hiring (9 – 11% of the overall market in 2020 and 2022).  It will be interesting to see if this is the beginning of a new normal for environmental law hiring, or if these are merely outlier years.  It is possible that environmental law as a field has become more in demand as topics like climate change and environmental justice become increasingly prominent in public discourse. 

If you want to know more, please check out the full report (available here on SSRN)!  There are interesting statistics I did not include here and lots of pretty graphics.  Please feel free to reach out to me ([email protected]) with corrections, criticism, or comments, if you just want to chat. 

For any aspiring environmental law professors, good luck!  I hope you find this edifying rather than anxiety inducing.  Feel free to reach out.  I am happy to share whatever advice my many mentors shared with me or to talk about my own experience on the market.  Thanks again to Sarah for letting me guest post here and for collecting all of this data! 

Lawsky Entry Level Hiring Report 2022 - Call for Information

Time once again for the entry level hiring report.

I will gather the following information for tenure-track, clinical, or legal writing full-time entry-level hires: 

Basic Information: Name, Hiring School, JD Institution, JD Year of Graduation

Other Degrees: Type of Degree,  Degree Granting Institution, Degree Subject

Fellowship, VAP, or Visiting Professorship: Institution and Type (e.g., VAP, name of fellowship, etc.)

Clerkship: Court (e.g., 9th Circuit, Texas Supreme Court, etc.)

Areas of Speciality (up to four) (if you are a clinical or LRW hire, please list this as your first Area of Specialty)

Type of Position: Tenure Track or Non-Tenure Track (if you are clinical or LRW and also tenure-track, please indicate this)

The information will be aggregated on this spreadsheet (which is reproduced below and which you can view and download by clicking on this link); scroll across to see all of the information that will be aggregated.

The spreadsheet includes some information that I pulled from public sources, such as Twitter or law school websites. When that is the case, I've included the relevant link (in a column to the right--just scroll the spreadsheet over). If I have included your information from a public source and you would like me to correct or update it, please just let me know.

You can either leave information in the comments or email it to me. You cannot edit the spreadsheet yourself.

If you leave information in the comments, please sign the comment with your real name. (Ideally, the reporting person would be either the hired individual or someone from the hiring committee at the hiring school.)

If you would like to email information instead of posting it, please send it to Sarah Lawsky at sarah *dot* lawsky *at* law *dot* northwestern *dot* edu.

Remember: you can't edit the spreadsheet yourself. To get your information into the spreadsheet, you must either post in the comments or email me.

If you see any errors, or if I have incorporated your information into the spreadsheet but you are not yet ready to make it public, please don't hesitate to email me, and I will take care of the problem as soon as I can.

Clarifications:

The list does not include people who were full-time non-tenure track clinicians who are now moving to a tenure track job at a different school, as these don't seem like true entry-level hires to me. This is the situation where a person is at a school that does not provide tenure to clinicians, and then moves to a school that does provide tenure to clinicians.

The list does include people who had a non-professor job in a law school and then moved to a professor job that was tenure track. Thus a person may have worked at a law school for many years, but still be considered an entry level hire. To indicate this situation, I will put their previous job at a law school in the "fellowship" category, and note "non-TT to TT" in the "Notes" category. This is not to indicate that this isn't an entry-level hire, but rather to give information about the nature of the item listed as a fellowship. (I.e., not a temporary position, as fellowships usually are.)

Other links:

This report follows in the tradition of Larry Solum's excellent work over many years.

2021 initial post, 2021 spreadsheet, 2021 report (with graphs)

2020 initial post, 2020 spreadsheet, 2020 report (with graphs)

2019 initial post, 2019 spreadsheet, 2019 report (with graphs).

2018 initial post, 2018 spreadsheet, 2018 report (with graphs).

2017 initial post, 2017 spreadsheet, 2017 report (with graphs).

2016 initial post, 2016 spreadsheet, 2016 report (with graphs). 

2015 initial post, 2015 spreadsheet, 2015 report (with graphs).

2014 initial post, 2014 spreadsheet, 2014 report (with graphs).

2013 initial post, 2013 spreadsheet, 2013 report (with graphs).

2012 initial post, 2012 spreadsheet, 2012 report (with graphs).

2011 initial post, 2011 spreadsheet, 2011 report (with graphs).

All PrawfsBlawg entry level hiring report tagged posts.

Lawsky Entry Level Hiring Report 2021

Following is a data summary of the Spring Reported Entry Level Hiring Report for 2021. To remain consistent with past years, while the spreadsheet contains all hiring information received, the data analysis includes only tenure-track hires at U.S. law schools. (The data analysis also includes several hires who requested not to be included in the spreadsheet at the date of this posting.)

This report and the spreadsheet are freely available under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 license, cited as Sarah Lawsky, Lawsky Entry Level Hiring Report 2021, PrawfsBlawg, https://prawfsblawg.blogs.com/prawfsblawg/2021/05/lawsky-entry-level-hiring-report-2021.html.

Here is the full spreadsheet:

There were 76 tenure-track hires at U.S. law schools reported, at 53 different law schools.

Q: How does 76 reported hires compare to past years?

This is a drop from the last few years. The average number of hires per year since 2014 is 76. (I omit 2010 in this and all subsequent cross-year comparisons because insufficient data was collected that year.)

It would useful to know the percentage of those who registered with the AALS who got jobs. While the AALS does not provide that information, the number of forms in the first distribution of FAR AALS forms is not a terrible proxy. This graph and chart compares the hiring in Year X to the number of forms in the first distribution in Year (X - 1) (because those are the people who were hired in Year X).

Q: You say the hires were at 53 different schools. How does that compare to previous years?

On the low side.

Q: How many reported hires got their JD from School X?

Yale 13; Chicago 6; Columbia 6; Harvard 5; Stanford 4; NYU 3; Virginia 3.

Schools in the “fewer than three hires” category with two JD/LLBs who reported hires: CUNY, Duke, Georgetown; Michigan, Vanderbilt.

Schools in the “fewer than three hires” category with one JD/LLB who reported hires: American; Aristotle U; Augsburg; Berkeley; Bonn; Boston University; BYU; Cardozo; Democritus University of Thrace; Fordham; Fundacao Getulio Vargas; George Washington; Georgia; Hastings; Illinois; Loyola-New Orleans; Nat'l Law School of India; Northeastern; Southern; Tehran; Temple; Tulsa; UCLA; Vermont.

This information comes with two related caveats.

First, the spreadsheet reports the number of hires who received a JD from a particular school who accepted a tenure-track job, but not the number of JDs on the market who received a tenure-track job offer.

Second, the spreadsheet reports the count of JDs from a particular school, but not the rate at which JDs received (or accepted) offers. A smaller school with a high placement rate thus might not appear on the chart, whereas a larger program with a low placement rate might appear. This caveat means that smaller schools may be undervalued if one relies only on this data, while larger schools might be overvalued. 

Q: How many reported hires had a fellowship, degree, or clerkship?

62 (about 82%) had a fellowship; 46 (about 61%) had a clerkship; 52 (about 68%) had a higher degree. All hires had at least one of these credentials. This is consistent with prior years.

Venn diagram:

Comparing two categories of the Venn diagram related to fellowships, degrees, and clerkships--hires that have all three credentials, and hires that have none of the credentials--a shift starting in 2017 is apparent:

Q: Still a lot of fellowships.

A: Yes, the percentage of fellowships remains high.

Q: From what law schools did people get these fellowships?

I count here any law school at which a person reports having a fellowship. So one person could account for two schools’ being listed here. For example, if a single individual had a fellowship at Columbia followed by a fellowship at NYU, that would be reflected below as +1 to Columbia and +1 to NYU.

NYU 13; Harvard 12; Columbia 6; Georgetown 5; Chicago 4; Stanford 4; Yale 4; Berkeley 3; Tulane 3; Fewer than Three 26.

This information comes with the same two caveats as the JD numbers.

First, the spreadsheet reports the number of hires who received a fellowship from a particular school who accepted a tenure-track job, but not the number of fellows who received a tenure-track job offer. This caveat likely applies to all or nearly all fellowship programs. Presumably, someone choosing between fellowships cares more about how many people received tenure-track job offers than about how many people accepted those offers.

Second, the spreadsheet reports the count of fellows, but not the rate at which fellows received (or accepted) offers. A smaller program with a high placement rate thus might not appear on the chart, whereas a larger program with a low placement rate might appear. This caveat means that smaller programs may be undervalued if one relies only on this data, while larger programs might be overvalued.

Q: Tell me more about these advanced degrees. 

Okay, but first a caveat: Although some people had more than one advanced degree, the following looks only at what seemed to me to be the "highest" degree someone earned. For example, someone with a Ph.D. and an LL.M. would be counted only as a Ph.D. for purposes of this question. (This tracks the "Other Degree (1)" column.)

That said, looking only at what seemed to be the most advanced degree, and including expected degrees, the 52 “highest” advanced degrees broke down like this:

Topics ranged all over the map. For the 31 Doctorates, 11 had degrees in Law (including Law & Economics and Law & Religion); 7 in Political Science (including Politics and Political Theory); 4 in Philosophy; 3 in Economics; 3 in History; 2 in Business (including Business Administration); 2 in Psychology (including Psychology and Business); and the other doctorate topics, each of which had only one hire, were Energy and Resource; English; and Health Policy and Management.

Q: What is the percentage of doctorates over time?

This year continued the now five-year trend of a 40% or higher percentage of reported hires with doctorates.

Q: That's a lot of doctorates, and that goes along with a lot of fellowships! How many people had a doctorate, or a fellowship, or both?

91% of the hires had either a doctorate (Ph.D., SJD, JSD, D.Phil.), a fellowship, or both.

Q: How long ago did these reported hires get their initial law degrees?

Zero to Four Years (Graduated 2017-2021) 10; Five to Nine Years (Graduated 2012-2016) 30; Ten to 19 Years (Graduated 2002-2011) 33; Twenty or More Years (Graduated before 2002) 3.

Q: How do the "time since initial degree" numbers compare to previous years?

Comparable, with a somewhat higher percentage of people who graduated 10-19 years ago.

Q: Could you break the reported hires out by men/women?

Men 37 (49%); women 39 (51%). (Let’s say this is right within +/-2 people.)

Based on a quick count of a number of years of spreadsheets that I happen to have, gender hiring over time follows. (I’ve left out the data labels because I am even less sure than usual of the exactness of the numbers, but they’re roughly right as reflections of self-reported hiring each spring—first Solum’s reports, then mine. And as always, 2010 is left out due to missing data for that year.)

Q: More slicing! More dicing! Different slicing! Different dicing!

Sure--you can do it yourself, or ask questions in the comments and I'll see what I can do, or we'll work it out as a group.

Q: This is all wrong! I know for a fact that more people from School Y were hired!

Yes, this spreadsheet is certainly missing some information. Repeat: this spreadsheet is incomplete. It represents only those entry-level hires that were reported to me, either through the comments on this blog or via email. It is without question incomplete. 

If you want to know about real entry level hiring, I commend to you Brian Leiter's report (hiring 1995-2011), the Katz et al. article (all law professors as of 2008), the George and Yoon article (entry level, 2007-2008 hiring year), and the Tsesis Report (entry level, 2012-2013 hiring year). This is just a report about self-reported entry level hires as of the spring before the school year starts. 

Originally posted 5/17/2021; updated 5/17/2021, 5/18/2021, 5/21/2021, 6/4/2021, 6/24/2021, 7/3/2021, and 8/8/21 to include additional hires; updated 6/8/2021 to remove lateral hire.

 

Entry Level Hiring: The 2021 Report - Final (?) Call for Information

This is, I think, the final call for information for the Entry Level Hiring Report. I currently plan to close reporting on Monday, May 17. If, however, you know that there is ongoing hiring, please let me know, and I will extend that date. Absent any such information, though, I will close the report on Monday, May 17.

If you have information about entry-level hires for this year, or know that there are outstanding entry-level offers that will not be resolved until after May 17, please either email me directly (sarah *dot* lawsky *at* law *dot* northwestern *dot* edu), or add a comment to the original information-gathering post.

Please encourage anyone you know who has accepted a job but isn't reflected on the spreadsheet to contact me.

Also, if you have accepted a job but are not ready to make it public yet, please consider contacting me anyway. Every year, the aggregate report includes information from hires that are not reported on the spreadsheet. That is, I keep the individual's information private and just increase the relevant numbers. (74 people hired rather than 73, etc.) The more information I can include in the aggregate data, the more accurate the report will be.

As a reminder, I am looking to collect the following information for tenure-track, clinical, or legal writing full-time entry-level hires: 

Basic Information: Name, Hiring School, JD Institution, JD Year of Graduation

Other Degrees: Type of Degree,  Degree Granting Institution, Degree Subject

Fellowship, VAP, or Visiting Professorship: Institution and Type (e.g., VAP, name of fellowship, etc.)

Clerkship: Court (e.g., 9th Circuit, Texas Supreme Court, etc.)

Areas of Speciality (up to four) (if you are a clinical or LRW hire, please list this as your first Area of Specialty)

Type of Position: Tenure Track or Non-Tenure Track (if you are clinical or LRW and also tenure-track, please indicate this)

(Comments are closed on this post in order to drive comments to the original post.)

Entry Level Hiring: The 2021 Report - Call for Information

Time once again for the entry level hiring report.

I will gather the following information for tenure-track, clinical, or legal writing full-time entry-level hires: 

Basic Information: Name, Hiring School, JD Institution, JD Year of Graduation

Other Degrees: Type of Degree,  Degree Granting Institution, Degree Subject

Fellowship, VAP, or Visiting Professorship: Institution and Type (e.g., VAP, name of fellowship, etc.)

Clerkship: Court (e.g., 9th Circuit, Texas Supreme Court, etc.)

Areas of Speciality (up to four) (if you are a clinical or LRW hire, please list this as your first Area of Specialty)

Type of Position: Tenure Track or Non-Tenure Track (if you are clinical or LRW and also tenure-track, please indicate this)

The information will be aggregated on this spreadsheet (which is reproduced below and which you can view and download by clicking on this link); scroll across to see all of the information that will be aggregated.

The spreadsheet includes some information that I pulled from public sources, such as Twitter or law school websites. When that is the case, I've included the relevant link (in a column to the right--just scroll the spreadsheet over). If I have included your information from a public source and you would like me to correct or update it, please just let me know.

You can either leave information in the comments or email it to me. You cannot edit the spreadsheet yourself.

If you leave information in the comments, please sign the comment with your real name. (Ideally, the reporting person would be either the hired individual or someone from the hiring committee at the hiring school.)

If you would like to email information instead of posting it, please send it to Sarah Lawsky at sarah *dot* lawsky *at* law *dot* northwestern *dot* edu.

Remember: you can't edit the spreadsheet yourself. To get your information into the spreadsheet, you must either post in the comments or email me.

If you see any errors, or if I have incorporated your information into the spreadsheet but you are not yet ready to make it public, please don't hesitate to email me, and I will take care of the problem as soon as I can.

Clarifications:

The list does not include people who were full-time non-tenure track clinicians who are now moving to a tenure track job at a different school, as these don't seem like true entry-level hires to me. This is the situation where a person is at a school that does not provide tenure to clinicians, and then moves to a school that does provide tenure to clinicians.

The list does include people who had a non-professor job in a law school and then moved to a professor job that was tenure track. Thus a person may have worked at a law school for many years, but still be considered an entry level hire. To indicate this situation, I will put their previous job at a law school in the "fellowship" category, and note "non-TT to TT" in the "Notes" category. This is not to indicate that this isn't an entry-level hire, but rather to give information about the nature of the item listed as a fellowship. (I.e., not a temporary position, as fellowships usually are.)

Other links:

This report follows in the tradition of Larry Solum's excellent work over many years.

2020 initial post, 2020 spreadsheet, 2020 report (with graphs)

2019 initial post, 2019 spreadsheet, 2019 report (with graphs).

2018 initial post, 2018 spreadsheet, 2018 report (with graphs).

2017 initial post, 2017 spreadsheet, 2017 report (with graphs).

2016 initial post, 2016 spreadsheet, 2016 report (with graphs). 

2015 initial post, 2015 spreadsheet, 2015 report (with graphs).

2014 initial post, 2014 spreadsheet, 2014 report (with graphs).

2013 initial post, 2013 spreadsheet, 2013 report (with graphs).

2012 initial post, 2012 spreadsheet, 2012 report (with graphs).

2011 initial post, 2011 spreadsheet, 2011 report (with graphs).

All PrawfsBlawg entry level hiring report tagged posts.

The Initially-Foreign-Trained Law Student and the Legal Academic Job Market - Lubin Guest Post

The following is a guest post by Asaf Lubin.

For those considering a career in legal academia, these are uncertain times. The Association of American Law Schools has recently decided to cancel its 2020 Fall Faculty Recruitment Conference due to COVID-19. Instead, law schools are now invited to rely on the Faculty Appointments Register (FAR) to reach out directly to candidates for scheduling what will most likely be online interviews. Of course, it remains to be seen how many law schools will actually hire next year as “pay cuts, salary freezes, and furloughs are hitting law schools” across the country.

As we look to examine the long-lasting impacts of COVID-19 on the legal academic job market, one category of candidates deserves our special attention. Initially-Foreign-Trained Law Students (IFT or IFTs) on the market have faced unique challenges that have mostly gone unvoiced. While battling visa issues and the emotional and financial costs of relocating a family, this group of candidates also had to endure various forms of explicit and implicit bias. These adversities, and others, make what is already an uphill climb––trying to succeed in a highly competitive buyers’ market––seem insurmountable. Especially at this time, as the growing unemployment numbers due to the coronavirus are triggering a general isolationist sentiment centered on preserving American jobs for American workers, the challenges for IFTs loom larger. This sentiment is one shared by the current administration. President Trump recently signed a “Proclamation Suspending Entry of Immigrants Who Present Risk to the U.S. Labor Market During the Economic Recovery Following the COVID-19 Outbreak.” According to some reports, Trump is expected to only broaden and tighten these foreign worker bans and restrictions, as pressure from conservative lobbying groups to do so intensifies.

Thanks to the dedicated work of Sarah Lawsky, who through this blog annually compiles information and produces reports about entry-level hires, we now have a decade of data easily accessible to us. I therefore set out to explore what the numbers have to say about IFT hires. Given that there are few resources available that exclusively target this group of market goers, the short essay I wrote provides some initial insight into their professional and geographical backgrounds and academic interests as well as offers some general advice.

Full disclosure: I am an IFT who went on the academic job market this fall and recently accepted a position as a tenure track associate professor at Indiana University Maurer School of Law. I am therefore in a good position to tell this story as I have just lived it. Nonetheless, I am also consciously aware that my experience is anecdotal and that the number of IFT hires each year is so small that extrapolating actual trends from them is quite difficult. I am also aware of my own implicit biases as a white cis-gender Jewish Israeli-Polish gay man. IFTs on the market have varied cultural, ethnic, and socio-economic backgrounds and life experiences that I cannot fully capture or aim to represent. I therefore hope that by writing this piece I can encourage others to share their story.

The abstract of the paper is provided in full below. The paper is accessible on SSRN. I welcome any thoughts, feedback, or critique at [email protected].

To be a foreigner in a new country is never easy. Cultural shock and language barriers present an array of obstacles for the incoming individual. Being a foreign law student adds new layers of difficulty as you’re called to learn a completely new legal system in a short period of time. For some, real acclimation to an American law school and to American legal practice, would come at the expense of foregoing a great deal of what it meant to be a lawyer back home.

Initially-foreign-trained law students (IFTs) will undergo many “trials and tribulations of adjustment”, as Professor Damaška once described them, but none are greater than those that await them at the end of the line, if they choose to enter the U.S. legal academic job market.

This short essay offers a first account of the unique experiences that await IFTs on the market. Relying on extensive data accessible through Professor Sarah Lawsky’s Entry Level Hiring Report it offers IFT-specific statistical findings drawn from the past decade of law school hiring. The essay tries to explore a number of relevant points of comparison: (a) the general success rate of IFTs on the market; (b) the geographical origins of IFT hires; (c) their research and teaching areas of interests; and (d) their professional backgrounds.

Given that there are currently no available resources that are tailored to the unique experiences of IFTs, the essay aims to fill this gap by providing some brief insight as to the employability of contemporary IFT students. The essay further contains a few modest suggestions, based on the data, for future IFT students who might be considering a career as law professors in the U.S.

Entry Level Hiring - JD School Total and Over Time

Responding to a question posted on Facebook:

Source of JD by hiring school, total, by percent. This is drawn from the Entry Level Hiring Reports from 2011 to 2020.

Yale 17%, Harvard 15%, NYU 9%, Stanford 6%, Columbia 5%, Chicago 5%, Michigan 4%, Berkeley 4%, Georgetown 3%, Virginia 2%, Duke 2%, Northwestern 2%, Penn 1%, Cornell 1%, Hebrew University 1%, fewer than 1% of hires 22%.

The three schools with the most hires are, obviously, Yale, Harvard, and NYU. Looking more closely at those three schools over time:

As always, I am happy to work with anyone who would be interested in pursuing these or other questions further. Or people should of course feel free to use the data themselves (with the caveat that the numbers from the public spreadsheets may not match the numbers above, as some people have asked not to be posted on the spreadsheets but have given me permission to include them in the data).

This post is freely available under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 license, cited as Sarah Lawsky, Entry Level Hiring - JD School Total and Over Time, https://prawfsblawg.blogs.com/prawfsblawg/2020/05/entry-level-hiring-jd-school-total-and-over-time.html.

 

Spring Reported Entry Level Hiring Report 2020

Following is a data summary of the Spring Reported Entry Level Hiring Report for 2020. To remain consistent with past years, while the spreadsheet contains all hiring information received, the data analysis includes only tenure-track hires at U.S. law schools. (The data analysis also includes several hires who requested not to be included in the spreadsheet at the date of this posting.)

This report and the spreadsheet are freely available under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 license, cited as Sarah Lawsky, Spring Reported Entry Level Hiring Report 2020, PrawfsBlawg, https://prawfsblawg.blogs.com/prawfsblawg/2020/05/spring-reported-entry-level-hiring-report-2020-1.html.

Here is the full spreadsheet:

There were 88 tenure-track hires at U.S. law schools reported, at 66 different law schools.

Q: How does 88 reported hires compare to past years?

It appears that we hit the “new normal” in 2014 and have seen fluctuations from around that level since then. The average number of hires per year since 2014 is 76. (I omit 2010 in this and all subsequent cross-year comparisons because insufficient data was collected that year.)

It would useful to know the percentage of those who registered with the AALS who got jobs. While the AALS does not provide that information, the number of forms in the first distribution of FAR AALS forms is not a terrible proxy. This graph and chart compares the hiring in Year X to the number of forms in the first distribution in Year (X - 1) (because those are the people who were hired in Year X). Reported hires per FAR form is essentially the same as last year.

Q: You say the hires were at 66 different schools. How does that compare to previous years?

The number of schools hiring was somewhat higher than, though still comparable to, previous years since 2014.

Hires per school per year may also be of interest:

Q: How many reported hires got their JD from School X?

Yale 19; Harvard 12; Stanford 9; NYU 6; Hebrew University 5; Berkeley 5; Chicago 4; Georgetown 3; Michigan 3.

Schools in the “fewer than three hires” category with two JD/LLBs who reported hires: Columbia, Hamline, Northwestern.

Schools in the “fewer than three hires” category with one JD/LLB who reported hires: Arizona State, George Washington, Hastings, Illinois, McGill, Miami, Minnesota, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Temple, Texas, Tsinghua, Washington & Lee.

This information comes with two related caveats.

First, the spreadsheet reports the number of hires who received a JD from a particular school who accepted a tenure-track job, but not the number of JDs on the market who received a tenure-track job offer.

Second, the spreadsheet reports the count of JDs from a particular school, but not the rate at which JDs received (or accepted) offers. A smaller school with a high placement rate thus might not appear on the chart, whereas a larger program with a low placement rate might appear. This caveat means that smaller schools may be undervalued if one relies only on this data, while larger schools might be overvalued. 

Q: How many reported hires had a fellowship, degree, or clerkship?

73 (about 83%) had a fellowship; 51 (about 58%) had a clerkship; 67 (about 76%) had a higher degree. One reported hire did not have any of these credentials.

Venn diagram:

Comparing two categories of the Venn diagram related to fellowships, degrees, and clerkships--hires that have all three credentials, and hires that have none of the credentials--a shift starting in 2017 is apparent:

Q: Still a lot of fellowships.

A: Yes, the rate of fellowships remains high.

Q: From what law schools  did people get these fellowships?

I count here any law school at which a person reports having a fellowship. So one person could account for two schools’ being listed here. For example, if a single individual had a fellowship at Columbia followed by a fellowship at NYU, that would be reflected below as +1 to Columbia and +1 to NYU.

Harvard 14; NYU 11; Stanford 9; Chicago 5; Columbia 5; American Bar Foundation 4; Penn 3; Fewer than Three 42.

This information comes with the same two caveats as the JD numbers.

First, the spreadsheet reports the number of hires who received a fellowship from a particular school who accepted a tenure-track job, but not the number of fellows who received a tenure-track job offer. This caveat likely applies to all or nearly all fellowship programs. Presumably, someone choosing between fellowships cares more about how many people received tenure-track job offers than about how many people accepted those offers.

Second, the spreadsheet reports the count of fellows, but not the rate at which fellows received (or accepted) offers. A smaller program with a high placement rate thus might not appear on the chart, whereas a larger program with a low placement rate might appear. This caveat means that smaller programs may be undervalued if one relies only on this data, while larger programs might be overvalued.

Q: Tell me more about these advanced degrees. 

Okay, but first a caveat: Although some people had more than one advanced degree, the following looks only at what seemed to me to be the "highest" degree someone earned. For example, someone with a Ph.D. and an LL.M. would be counted only as a Ph.D. for purposes of this question. (This tracks the "Other Degree (1)" column.)

That said, looking only at what seemed to be the most advanced degree, and including expected degrees, the 67 “highest” advanced degrees broke down like this:

Doctorate (Ph.D., SJD, JSD, D.Phil.) 43; Masters 15; LL.M. 6; MBA 2; MD 1.

Topics ranged all over the map. For the 43 Doctorates, 9 had degrees in Law; 6 in Political Science (including Politics & International Studies), 5 in Economics (including Business Economics and Development Economics), 5 in JSP, 3 in Anthropology, 2 in each of Environment/Environmental Science & Policy, History, Philosophy, and Sociology; and the other doctorate topics, each of which had only one hire, were Criminology, Law & Society; Geography; History and Philosophy of Science; International Relations; Justice Studies; Literacy, Culture & International Education; Psychology.

Q: What is the percentage of doctorates over time?

This year continued the now four-year trend of a 40% or higher percentage of reported hires with doctorates.

Q: Commenters wondered whether there were more JSD/SJDs among the hires this year. Were there?

There were a few more JSD/SJDs than usual, but nothing too anomalous; the average is 4.1. There were 7 reported JSD/SJD hires this year; there were 6 in 2013.

Q: That's a lot of doctorates, and that goes along with a lot of fellowships! How many people had a doctorate, or a fellowship, or both?

92% of the reported hires had either a doctorate, a fellowship, or both.

Q: How long ago did these reported hires get their initial law degrees?

Zero to Four Years (Graduated 2016-2020) 8; Five to Nine Years (Graduated 2011-2015) 53; Ten to 19 Years (Graduated 2001-2010) 24; Twenty or More Years (Graduated before 2001) 3.

Q: How do the "time since initial degree" numbers compare to previous years?

This is very similar to previous years. There are somewhat fewer people who graduated zero to four years ago than usual, and correspondingly more people who graduated five to nine years ago, but a similar distribution was seen in some previous years.

Q: Could you break the reported hires out by men/women?

Men 51 (58%); women 37 (42%). (Let’s say this is right within +/-2 people.)

Based on a quick count of a number of years of spreadsheets that I happen to have, gender hiring over time follows. (I’ve left out the data labels because I am even less sure than usual of the exactness of the numbers, but they’re roughly right as reflections of self-reported hiring each spring—first Solum’s reports, then mine. And as always, 2010 is left out due to missing data for that year.) 

Q: More slicing! More dicing! Different slicing! Different dicing!

Sure--you can do it yourself, or ask questions in the comments and I'll see what I can do, or we'll work it out as a group.

Q: This is all wrong! I know for a fact that more people from School Y were hired!

Yes, this spreadsheet is certainly missing some information. Repeat: this spreadsheet is incomplete. It represents only those entry-level hires that were reported to me, either through the comments on this blog or via email. It is without question incomplete. 

If you want to know about real entry level hiring, I commend to you Brian Leiter's report (hiring 1995-2011), the Katz et al. article (all law professors as of 2008), the George and Yoon article (entry level, 2007-2008 hiring year), and the Tsesis Report (entry level, 2012-2013 hiring year). This is just a report about self-reported entry level hires as of the spring before the school year starts. 

Q: Is this available in an easy-to-print format?

A: I am waiting until the report is more finalized to put up the easy-to-print format; I will probably add it in June.

Originally posted 5/15/2020; edited 5/17/20 to add one hire; edited 5/21/20 to add one hire and remove the PDF report, to be added back in June; edited 5/27/20 to add one person and to clean up fellowship/doctorate graph to reflect percentages of all hires, instead of just doctrinal hires, for consistency with other portions of the report.

 

Entry Level Hiring: The 2020 Report - Second Call for Information

In the larger scheme of things right now, this report is, of course, trivial compared to what is happening right now around the world. After much consideration, I will nonetheless continue to compile the data and create the report, as a way of saying, to myself and others, that what we are all experiencing right now will end, and this year's report will both follow and precede many other reports. That is, I continue with the report this year as an act of optimism, not of denial.

This a reminder of the Entry Level Hiring Report.

If you have information about entry-level hires for this year, please either email me directly (sarah *dot* lawsky *at* law *dot* northwestern *dot* edu), or add a comment to the original information-gathering post.

Please encourage anyone you know who has accepted a job but isn't reflected on the spreadsheet to contact me.

As a reminder, I am looking to collect the following information for tenure-track, clinical, or legal writing full-time entry-level hires: 

Basic Information: Name, Hiring School, JD Institution, JD Year of Graduation

Other Degrees: Type of Degree,  Degree Granting Institution, Degree Subject

Fellowship, VAP, or Visiting Professorship: Institution and Type (e.g., VAP, name of fellowship, etc.)

Clerkship: Court (e.g., 9th Circuit, Texas Supreme Court, etc.)

Areas of Speciality (up to four) (if you are a clinical or LRW hire, please list this as your first Area of Specialty)

Type of Position: Tenure Track or Non-Tenure Track (if you are clinical or LRW and also tenure-track, please indicate this)

(Comments are closed on this post in order to drive comments to the original post.)

Entry Level Hiring: The 2020 Report - Call for Information

Time once again for the entry level hiring report.

I will gather the following information for tenure-track, clinical, or legal writing full-time entry-level hires: 

Basic Information: Name, Hiring School, JD Institution, JD Year of Graduation

Other Degrees: Type of Degree,  Degree Granting Institution, Degree Subject

Fellowship, VAP, or Visiting Professorship: Institution and Type (e.g., VAP, name of fellowship, etc.)

Clerkship: Court (e.g., 9th Circuit, Texas Supreme Court, etc.)

Areas of Speciality (up to four) (if you are a clinical or LRW hire, please list this as your first Area of Specialty)

Type of Position: Tenure Track or Non-Tenure Track (if you are clinical or LRW and also tenure-track, please indicate this)

The information will be aggregated on this spreadsheet (which is reproduced below and which you can view and download by clicking on this link); scroll across to see all of the information that will be aggregated.

Please leave the information in the comments, and, to protect those on the job market, please sign the comment with your real name. (Ideally, the reporting person would be either the hired individual or someone from the hiring committee at the hiring school.) If you would like to email information instead of posting it, please send it to Sarah Lawsky at sarah *dot* lawsky *at* law *dot* northwestern *dot* edu. Remember: you can't edit the spreadsheet yourself. To get your information into the spreadsheet, you must either post in the comments or email me.

If you see any errors, or if I have incorporated your information into the spreadsheet but you are not yet ready to make it public, please don't hesitate to email me, and I will take care of the problem as soon as I can.

Clarifications:

The list does not include people who were full-time non-tenure track clinicians who are now moving to a tenure track job at a different school, as these don't seem like true entry-level hires to me. This is the situation where a person is at a school that does not provide tenure to clinicians, and then moves to a school that does provide tenure to clinicians.

The list does include people who had a non-professor job in a law school and then moved to a professor job that was tenure track. Thus a person may have worked at a law school for many years, but still be considered an entry level hire. To indicate this situation, I will put their previous job at a law school in the "fellowship" category, and note "non-TT to TT" in the "Notes" category. This is not to indicate that this isn't an entry-level hire, but rather to give information about the nature of the item listed as a fellowship. (I.e., not a temporary position, as fellowships usually are.)

Other links:

This report follows in the tradition of Larry Solum's excellent work over many years.

2019 initial post, 2019 spreadsheet, 2019 report (with graphs).

2018 initial post, 2018 spreadsheet, 2018 report (with graphs).

2017 initial post, 2017 spreadsheet, 2017 report (with graphs).

2016 initial post, 2016 spreadsheet, 2016 report (with graphs). 

2015 initial post, 2015 spreadsheet, 2015 report (with graphs).

2014 initial post, 2014 spreadsheet, 2014 report (with graphs).

2013 initial post, 2013 spreadsheet, 2013 report (with graphs).

2012 initial post, 2012 spreadsheet, 2012 report (with graphs).

2011 initial post, 2011 spreadsheet, 2011 report (with graphs).

All PrawfsBlawg entry level hiring report tagged posts.

Reported Entry Level Hiring 2020 - Spreadsheet

Here is the spreadsheet for 2020 entry-level hiring. This information is drawn from what seemed to be public postings (for example, tweets) that announced entry-level hires. I have included the link to the relevant public source (for example, the tweet announcing the hiring).

As always, if you are the person listed and would like the entry changed or removed, just send me an email and I will immediately change or remove the listing.

I'm happy to add other reports of hires anytime, if people want to email me with their own information (or if someone wants to point me toward a public source for the information, such as a tweet or announcement by a school); in addition, the usual call for information will be posted in early March.

AALS on Entry Level Hiring

Update, 7/16/19: I have been directly in touch with AALS, and they were extremely willing to update the site. I am going to leave this post up, because I'm generally opposed to putting things down the memory hole, but I will close comments.

I have long hoped that the AALS would report on entry-level hiring. After all, they are the ones who collect all the information. They are well positioned to do true statistical analysis on the candidate pool and the successful candidates. (They used to do so but stopped for some reason and scrubbed the information from the website, though of course it's available through the Wayback Machine.)

So I was happy to see that they have created a new website, which will, they promise, "mak[e] the process of obtaining a teaching job as transparent as possible, and provid[e] as much information to potential candidates as we can."

Imagine my surprise when I clicked through to the website and found, not statistical analysis based on actual information to which they have direct access, but rather the data and graphs that I, Sarah Lawsky, have been posting on this blog for the past ten years. My work is acknowledged through a single asterisk, which leads to this text at the bottom of the page: These data, which are self-reported by recently hired law faculty or, in some cases, their schools, was collected by PrawfsBlawg and provided as a downloadable spreadsheet. PrawfsBlawg data include “information for tenure-track, clinical, or legal writing full-time entry level hires.” (There is a link to the spreadsheet through the words "downloadable spreadsheet," but there's no formatting to indicate it's a link.)

To be clear: I want people to use this data. That's why I make it downloadable. But it would be nice if AALS would name me, because PrawfsBlawg does not actually collect anything: it's a website. And it would be nice if they link to the website, as well as to the data. It would have been really nice if they had reached out first to talk to me about the data, using it, and perhaps even collaborating, but I guess I understand why they didn't(?).

I've sent an email to AALS, and I hope they make changes to their webpage. More importantly, I really, really hope that instead of just taking self-reported hiring information, they use their vast store of information and give us accurate information about the pool of potential hires, the success rates of various groups, and so forth. They are uniquely positioned to do so.

Spring Self-Reported Entry Level Hiring Report 2019: Years Since Graduation - School Rank

On Twitter, Matthew Bruckner: "This was the first time I've noticed that the "too much practice experience is bad"-trope does not seem grounded in the data."

Lawprawfblawg: "Is it distributed evenly across schools, or does the trope apply to a greater degree depending on ranking?"

Matthew Bruckner: [Power Rangers Shrug .gif]

The following looks at all tenure-track hiring that's been reported to the entry-level report since 2011, inclusive. Years since graduation will provide a rough proxy for practice experience (though given the rise of fellowships and PhDs, not to mention clerkships, many hires have significantly fewer years of practice experience than they do years since graduation--that is, some number of years since graduation will, for many people, have been spent clerking, doing fellowships, getting other degrees, etc.)

That said, there do appear to be some real differences in years since graduation depending on rank of school. For example, while hires with 20 or more years since graduation are relatively uncommon in general, Top 14 schools have no reported hires of someone with 20 or more years since graduation during these years. Additionally, Top 14 schools are much more likely to hire someone with zero to 4 years since graduation than are other ranks.

The usual caveats regarding school rank apply. Rankings are deeply problematic. In the categories above, T30 means "Top 30 but not Top 14 or Top 20," etc. I was very expansive in categories, so, for example, in my list, more schools than 14 are in the T14; more schools than 30 are T14 + T20 + T30; etc. My list of law schools with ranking categories (which I drew loosely from the US News rankings, keeping in mind that the US news rankings are very stable over time) is available here. I'm sure one can quibble around the edges that a particular school should be higher or lower ranked, but moving a school or two shouldn't change the overall general sense above. 

Edited 6/8/19 to clarify that the information relates to years since graduation, not practice experience.

Spring Self-Reported Entry Level Hiring Report 2019: Doctrinal, Fellowship, Doctorate

Jessica Erickson proposes looking at doctrinal hires with either a doctorate or a fellowship (or both). As she explains in the comments to the main post:

I was interested to know the percentage of doctrinal (aka podium*) hires at U.S. law schools this past year who have a Ph.D. or SJD and/or have done a fellowship/VAP. This is slightly different than the Venn diagram...because (i) it does not include other types of advanced degrees, such as an LLM or Master’s degree, and (ii) it only includes doctrinal tenure-track hires, not clinical or LRW hires. I am also not including clerkships in this count because I don’t think that they serve the same function as a Ph.D./SJD or fellowship/VAP program....

*There isn’t a good term for this category of faculty, especially as I fully recognize that all faculty teach legal doctrine and few faculty always teach behind a podium. My point is simply that VAPs and fellowships are not as much of a required hurdle for faculty who want to teach in a clinic or legal writing program, so I wanted to focus on the particular category of faculty for whom this is the standard path. 

As Jessica suggests, this category (doctrinal + or(doctorate, fellowship)) includes almost every hire these days, and the percentage with these characteristics, while always high, has increased over time (click on chart for larger version):

Spring Self-Reported Entry Level Hiring Report 2019: Venn Over Time

A commenter on the main entry level hiring report drew attention to the fact that no reported entry level hires this year have no fellowship, clerkship, or advanced degree. It struck me that it might be interesting to look over time at two categories of the Venn diagram related to fellowships, degrees, and clerkships: hires that have all three credentials, and hires that have none of the credentials.

As the commenter suggested, there does appear to have been a shift in each of these two groups over time.

 

Spring Self-Reported Entry Level Hiring Report 2019

Following is a data summary of the Spring Self-Reported Entry Level Hiring Report for 2019. To remain consistent with past years, while the spreadsheet contains all hiring information received, the data analysis includes only tenure-track hires at U.S. law schools. (The data analysis also includes several hires who requested not to be included in the spreadsheet at the date of this posting, although the people will eventually be included in the spreadsheet.) 

Here is the full spreadsheet:

The data includes 82 tenure-track hires at U.S. law schools, at 60 different law schools.

Here are answers to some frequently asked questions:

Q: How does 81 reported hires compare to past years?

A: Quite similar. It appears that we hit the “new normal” in 2014 and have seen fluctuations from around that level since then. The average number of hires per year since 2014 is 74. (I omit 2010 in this and all subsequent cross-year comparisons because insufficient data was collected that year.)

The ratio of hires to first-round FAR forms is up slightly (click chart for bigger version):

Q: You say the hires were at 59 different schools. How does that compare to previous years?

A: The number of schools hiring was comparable to previous years since 2014.

Hires per school per year may also be of interest:

Q: How many reported hires got their JD from School X?

Yale 12; Harvard 11; NYU 7; Stanford 7; Michigan 6; Chicago 5; Berkeley 3; Vanderbilt 3; Virginia 3.

Schools in the “fewer than three hires” category with two JD/LLBs who reported hires: Boston University, Columbia, Georgetown, Northwestern.

Schools in the “fewer than three hires” category with one JD/LLB who reported hires: Arizona, Arkansas-Fayetteville, Cornell, DePaul, Duke, East China University, Haifa, Hamburg, Kansas, Penn, Pontifical Catholic, Rutgers, Seoul Nat'l U, Tel Aviv, UCLA, Washington & Lee, Washington (St. Louis).

This information comes with two related caveats.

First, the spreadsheet reports the number of hires who received a JD from a particular school who accepted a tenure-track job, but not the number of JDs on the market who received a tenure-track job offer.

Second, the spreadsheet reports the count of JDs from a particular school, but not the rate at which JDs received (or accepted) offers. A smaller school with a high placement rate thus might not appear on the chart, whereas a larger program with a low placement rate might appear. This caveat means that smaller schools may be undervalued if one relies only on this data, while larger schools might be overvalued. 

Q: How many reported hires had a fellowship, degree, or clerkship?

64 (about 78%) had a fellowship; 51 (about 63%) had a clerkship; 54 (about 66%) had a higher degree. Every reported hire had at least one of these credentials.

Venn diagram:

Q: Still a lot of fellowships.

A: Yes, the rate of fellowships remains high.

Q: From what law schools  did people get these fellowships?

I count here any law school at which a person reports having a fellowship. So one person could account for two schools’ being listed here. For example, if a single individual had a fellowship at Columbia followed by a fellowship at NYU, that would be reflected below as +1 to Columbia and +1 to NYU.

NYU 14; Columbia 8; Harvard 7; Yale 6; Chicago 5; Stanford 5; Berkeley 4; Penn 3; Virginia 4; Fewer than Three 24.

This information comes with the same two caveats as the JD numbers.

First, the spreadsheet reports the number of hires who received a fellowship from a particular school who accepted a tenure-track job, but not the number of fellows who received a tenure-track job offer. This caveat likely applies to all or nearly all fellowship programs. Presumably, someone choosing between fellowships cares more about how many people received tenure-track job offers than about how many people accepted those offers.

Second, the spreadsheet reports the count of fellows, but not the rate at which fellows received (or accepted) offers. A smaller program with a high placement rate thus might not appear on the chart, whereas a larger program with a low placement rate might appear. This caveat means that smaller programs may be undervalued if one relies only on this data, while larger programs might be overvalued.

Q: Tell me more about these advanced degrees. 

Okay, but first a caveat: Although some people had more than one advanced degree, the following looks only at what seemed to me to be the "highest" degree someone earned. For example, someone with a Ph.D. and an LL.M. would be counted only as a Ph.D. for purposes of this question. (This tracks the "Other Degree (1)" column.)

That said, looking only at what seemed to be the most advanced degree, and including expected degrees, the 52 "highest" advanced degrees broke down like this:

Doctorate (Ph.D., SJD, JSD, D.Phil.) 41; Masters 9; LL.M. 2; MBA 1; MD 1.

Topics ranged all over the map. For the 41 Doctorates, 8 had degrees in Law; 3 in Economics, 3 in History, 3 in Philosophy, 3 in Political Science, 3 in Sociology; 2 in Politics; and the other doctorate topics, each of which had only hire, were African-American Studies, Anthropology, Business & Public Policy, Corporate Law, Criminology, Ecology, Empirical Legal Studies, Government, International Relations, Law & Econ, Legal History, Managerial Econ & Strategy, Mgmt Sci & Engineering, Modern Thought & Literature, Religious Studies, Rhetoric.

Q: What is the percentage of doctorates over time?

There are a notably higher percentage of doctorates over the last three years. It will be interesting to see whether this trend continues.

Q: How long ago did these reported hires get their initial law degrees?

Zero to Four Years (Graduated 2015-2019) 19; Five to Nine Years (Graduated 2010-2014) 34; Ten to 19 Years (Graduated 2000-2009) 28; Twenty or More Years (Graduated before 2000) 1.

Q: How do the "time since initial degree" numbers compare to previous years?

A: They are very similar.

Q: Could you break the reported hires out by men/women?

Men 50 (61%); women 32 (39%). (Let’s say this is right within +/-2 people.)

Based on a quick count of a number of years of spreadsheets that I happen to have, gender hiring over time follows. (I’ve left out the data labels because I am even less sure than usual of the exactness of the numbers, but they’re roughly right as reflections of self-reported hiring each spring—first Solum’s reports, then mine. And as always, 2010 is left out due to missing data for that year.) 

Q: More slicing! More dicing! Different slicing! Different dicing!

Sure--you can do it yourself, or ask questions in the comments and I'll see what I can do, or we'll work it out as a group.

Q: This is all wrong! I know for a fact that more people from School Y were hired!

Yes, this spreadsheet is certainly missing some information. Repeat: this spreadsheet is incomplete. It represents only those entry-level hires that were reported to me, either through the comments on this blog or via email. It is without question incomplete. 

If you want to know about real entry level hiring, I commend to you Brian Leiter's report (hiring 1995-2011), the Katz et al. article (all law professors as of 2008), the George and Yoon article (entry level, 2007-2008 hiring year), and the Tsesis Report (entry level, 2012-2013 hiring year). This is just a report about self-reported entry level hires as of the spring before the school year starts. 

Q: Is this available in an easy-to-print format?

A: Why, as it happens, yes!

Originally posted 6/5/19; updated 6/10/19, 6/13/19, 6/18/19 to reflect one additional hire each time.

Entry Level Hiring: The 2019 Report - Call for Information

Time once again for the entry level hiring report.

I will gather the following information for tenure-track, clinical, or legal writing full-time entry-level hires: 

Basic Information: Name, Hiring School, JD Institution, JD Year of Graduation

Other Degrees: Type of Degree,  Degree Granting Institution, Degree Subject

Fellowship, VAP, or Visiting Professorship: Institution and Type (e.g., VAP, name of fellowship, etc.)

Clerkship: Court (e.g., 9th Circuit, Texas Supreme Court, etc.)

Areas of Speciality (up to four) (if you are a clinical or LRW hire, please list this as your first Area of Specialty)

Type of Position: Tenure Track or Non-Tenure Track (if you are clinical or LRW and also tenure-track, please indicate this)

The information will be aggregated on this spreadsheet (which is reproduced below and which you can view and download by clicking on this link); scroll across to see all of the information that will be aggregated.

Please leave the information in the comments, and, to protect those on the job market, please sign the comment with your real name. (Ideally, the reporting person would be either the hired individual or someone from the hiring committee at the hiring school.) If you would like to email information instead of posting it, please send it to Sarah Lawsky at sarah *dot* lawsky *at* law *dot* northwestern *dot* edu. Remember: you can't edit the spreadsheet yourself. To get your information into the spreadsheet, you must either post in the comments or email me.

If you see any errors, or if I have incorporated your information into the spreadsheet but you are not yet ready to make it public, please don't hesitate to email me, and I will take care of the problem as soon as I can.

Clarifications:

The list does not include people who were full-time non-tenure track clinicians who are now moving to a tenure track job at a different school, as these don't seem like true entry-level hires to me. This is the situation where a person is at a school that does not provide tenure to clinicians, and then moves to a school that does provide tenure to clinicians.

The list does include people who had a non-professor job in a law school and then moved to a professor job that was tenure track. Thus a person may have worked at a law school for many years, but still be considered an entry level hire. To indicate this situation, I will put their previous job at a law school in the "fellowship" category, and note "non-TT to TT" in the "Notes" category. This is not to indicate that this isn't an entry-level hire, but rather to give information about the nature of the item listed as a fellowship. (I.e., not a temporary position, as fellowships usually are.)

Other links:

This report follows in the tradition of Larry Solum's excellent work over many years.

2018 initial post, 2018 spreadsheet, 2018 report (with graphs).

2017 initial post, 2017 spreadsheet, 2017 report (with graphs).

2016 initial post, 2016 spreadsheet, 2016 report (with graphs). 

2015 initial post, 2015 spreadsheet, 2015 report (with graphs).

2014 initial post, 2014 spreadsheet, 2014 report (with graphs).

2013 initial post, 2013 spreadsheet, 2013 report (with graphs).

2012 initial post, 2012 spreadsheet, 2012 report (with graphs).

2011 initial post, 2011 spreadsheet, 2011 report (with graphs).

All PrawfsBlawg entry level hiring report tagged posts.

Who Stopped Hiring?

In 2011, 155 entry-level law professors were hired. In 2018, 76 entry-level law professors were hired. Who stopped hiring?

The answer is perhaps not surprising: lower-ranked law schools. In the top 30 (very loosely defined to include many more than 30 law schools), hiring remained steady. In the lower-ranked law schools, hiring dropped off significantly.

The key jumps to look at are 2012 to 2013, and then again 2013 to 2014.

Here's another way to look at it: in 2011, schools in the top 30 and above represented 23% of the law schools overall, and did 30% of the hiring. In 2018, those same schools did 45% of the hiring. (And some years it was even starker: in 2016, those schools did 53% of the hiring.)

My list of law schools with ranking categories (which I drew loosely from the US News rankings this year, keeping in mind that the US news rankings are very stable over time) is available here. I'm sure one can quibble around the edges that a particular school should be higher or lower ranked, but moving a school or two shouldn't change the overall result above.

2018 Hiring Report - Subject Areas Over Time

Jeremy Bearer-Friend commented: "I wonder whether there are certain patterns over time for entry-level hiring by area of law. For example, whether tax hiring is constant even when total number of hires dips, or whether civ pro is generally 20% of the hires each year, etc. Some categories may be more consistently coded over time so this could be tricky to do but thought worth asking!"

I went through and cleaned up the data a little so that the categories were consistently coded over time and then did a cross-year comparison of hiring areas. Results follow. Note that these are the results for U.S., tenure track hires only--the same group on which I usually run the data aggregation.

Each year, candidates can list between zero and four subject areas in which they work. (In 2011 they were allowed to list a maximum of three; in all other years, a maximum of four.) 

First, I looked at all subject areas ("All Areas") that candidates listed in a given year. For example, if Candidate A listed "Tax, Con Law, Civ Pro" (interesting candidate!), then this person would be responsible for three entries in the below compilation. As you can see, Crim and Civ Pro lead the pack each year. Other 1L subjects are also very popular. (Click for bigger graphics.)

I did not see any areas where the raw number of hires stayed fixed across time, though the percentage of hires did seem to remain roughly steady.

Second, I looked at just Area 1 -- that is, the subject area that the candidate listed first. So, for example, Candidate A, our "Tax, Con Law, Civ Pro" candidate, would be responsible for only one entry on in this compilation: Tax. This might represent the person's main area of interest. The results were similar here. (Click for bigger graphics.)

Below the fold, a list of every subject area listed in any year. And for those of you who really want to play around with this, here is a link to the raw data, cleaned up a little. It is yearning for more pivot charts.

All Areas, All Years

Academic Success

Accounting

Admin

Admiralty

Advertising

Agency & Partnership

Agricultural

American Indian Law

American Legal History

Antidiscrimination Law

Antitrust

Appellate Practice

Arbitration

Arctic Law

Art Law

Banking

Banking

Bankruptcy

Behavioral Law & Econ

Bioethics

Biotech

British Legal History

Bus Orgs

Business Ethics

Business Law

Business Reorgs

Capital Markets Regulation

CED

Child/Family & State

Chinese Law

Civ Pro

Civil Litigation

Civil Rights

Civil/Comparative Law

Climate Change

Clinical

Collateral Consequences

Commercial Arbitration

Commercial Law

Community Property

Comparative Con Law

Comparative Law

Complex Litigation

Con Law

Conflicts of Law

Constitutional Design

Consumer Finance

Consumer Law

Contracts

Copyright

Corporate

Corporate Finance

Corporate Fraud

Corporate Governance

Corporations

Crim

Crim

Crim Justice Administration

Crim Pro

Criminal Defense

Critical Legal Studies

Critical Legal Theory

Critical Race Theory

Cross-Border Business

Cross-Border Insolvency

Cultural Property

Cyber Law

Cybersecurity

Death Penalty

Debtor and Creditor

Disability Law

Disaster Law

Dispute Resolution

Diversity & Law

Domestic Violence

Education

Elder Law

Election Law

Empirical Legal Studies

Empirical Methods

Employee Benefits

Employment Disc

Employment Law

Energy Law

English Legal History

Enivronmental

Entertainment Law

Entrepreneurship

Environmental

Ethics

Evidence

Experiential Learning

Experimental Methods in Law

Extradition

Family Law

FDA Law

Fed Courts

Federal Sentencing

Federalism

Feminist Legal Theory

Finance

Financial Institutions

Financial Reform

Financial Regulation

Financial Stability

Financial Transactions

First Amendment

Food Law & Policy

Foreign Relations

Freedom of Expression

Gender & Law

Genetics and the Law

Health Care

Health Care Financing

Health Care Reg

Health Law

Healthcare

History of Common Law

Housing Finance

Housing Law

Human Rights

IBT

Immigration

Immigration

Indigent Defense

Information Law

Information Privacy

Institutional Structures

Insurance Law

International Law

International Trade

Internet Law

Int'l Arbitration

Int'l Business Transactions

Int'l Civil Litigation

Int'l Con Law

Int'l Crim

Int'l Development

Int'l Economic Law

Int'l Economics Law

Int'l Energy Law

Int'l Financial Reg.

Int'l Human Rights

Int'l Humantarian Law

Int'l IP

Int'l Law & Dispute Settlement

Int'l Orgs

Int'l Trade and Investment

Investment Funds

Investment Law

IP

Islamic Law

Judicial Administration

Judicial Behavior

Judicial Writing

Jurisdiction

Jurisprudence

Juvenile Justice

Labor & Employment

Labor Law

Land Use

Law & Anthropology

Law & Development

Law & Econ

Law & Finance

Law & Gender

Law & Lit

Law & Neuroscience

Law & Philosophy

Law & Psychology

Law & Religion

Law & Science

Law & Sexuality

Law & Social Movements

Law & Social Science

Law & Society

Law & Sociology

Law & Statistics

Law & Tech

Law & the Economy

Law and Citizenship

Law Firm Management

Law of Democracy

Law of the Sea

Law of War

Law of Warfare

Legal Anthropology

Legal Ethics

Legal History

Legal Philosophy

Legal Profession

Legal Theory

Legal Writing

Legislation

Litigation

Local Government

Machine Learning

Maritime Law

Media & Communications Law

Media Law

Mediation

Medieval Law

Mergers and Acquisitions

Military Law

National Security

Natural Resources

Negotiation

Neuroscience & the Law

Nonprofits

Oil & Gas

Patent Law

Police Accountability

Political Theory

Post-Conflict Justice

Post-Conflict Obligations

Post-Conviction Crim Pro

Poverty Law

Poverty, Inequality, Race & the Law

Presidential Powers

Prison Law and Policy

Prisoner's Rights

Privacy

Private Int'l Law

Prof Resp

Property

Public Int'l Law

Public Law

Race & the Law

Real Estate Law

Real Property

Refugee Law

Regulation

Regulation of Police

Regulation of Risk

Regulation of Vice

Remedies

Roman Law

Rule of Law

Rural Development

Science & Law

Sec Reg

Secured Transactions

Sentencing

Sentencing Reform

Separation of Powers

Social Enterprise

Social Welfare Law

Sociology

South Asian Law & Politics

Statutory Interpretation

Tax

Tax Exempt Orgs

Technology Law

Telecommunications

Torts

Torts

Trade Law

Trademarks

Transnational Litigation

Trial Ad

Trusts & Estates

Venture Capital

Veterans Law

Water Law

White Collar Crime

Wills & Trusts

Work & Family

Workplace Law

Wrongful Convictions

Entry Level Hiring 2018 - PhDs and Clinical Hires

In the comments below, Orin Kerr raises two interesting questions. First, "One interesting question to see would be percent of hires over time that have a doctorate degree. "

Here, I've broken out the degrees by law doctorates (not counting JDs, of course) and other doctorates. In recent years the Yale PhD has come on the scene, thus increasing the law doctorates. (Click for larger image.)

There are indeed a higher percentage of PhDs, both law and otherwise, over the last two years. It will be interesting over the next few years to see whether this is a trend.

Orin also asks: "Am I right that these numbers are for all tenure-track hiring, whether for clinical positions or for non-clinical positions? I ask that because I have a vague impression of a trend toward making entry-level clinical positions tenure-track instead of non-tenure track. If that trend is happening -- a big if, of course --I wonder how that may be changing the tenure-track numbers you find." Below I've broken out the clinical tenure track hires over the years. There doesn't seem to me to be a notable change in this percentage in the last few years.

Spring Self-Reported Entry Level Hiring Report 2018

Following is a data summary of the Spring Self-Reported Entry Level Hiring Report for 2018. To remain consistent with past years, while the spreadsheet contains all hiring information received, the data analysis includes only tenure-track hires at U.S. law schools. (The data analysis also includes one hire requested not to be included in the spreadsheet at the date of this posting, although the person will eventually be included in the spreadsheet.)

Here is the full spreadsheet:

The data includes 77 tenure-track hires at U.S. law schools, at 57 different law schools.

Here are answers to some frequently asked questions:

Q: How does 77 reported hires compare to past years?

A: This is an improvement from 2017, and with this last year, it begins to look like we hit the “new normal” in 2014 and have seen fluctuations from around that level since then. The average number of hires per year since 2014 is 73. (I omit 2010 in this and all subsequent cross-year comparisons because insufficient data was collected that year.)

The ratio of hires to first-round FAR forms is also up slightly (click chart for bigger version):

Q: You say the hires were at 57 different schools. How does that compare to previous years?

A: Many more schools hired this year than last year. The number of schools hiring was comparable to previous years since 2014.

Hires per school per year may also be of interest:

Q: How many reported hires got their JD from School X?

Yale 18; Columbia 8; NYU 8; Harvard 6; Stanford 4; Vanderbilt 3.

Schools in the “other” category with two JD/LLBs who reported hires: BYU, Chicago, Georgetown.

Schools in the “other” category with one JD/LLB who reported hires: American, Belarusian State U, Berkeley, Boston College, Boston University, Chicago-Kent, Cologne, Duke, Fordham, Georgia, Hebrew University, Kentucky, Lisbon, LSU, Michigan, Northeastern, Northwestern, Notre Dame, Penn, Texas, Queensland, UBC, UCLA, USC.

This information comes with two related caveats.

First, the spreadsheet reports the number of hires who received a JD from a particular school who accepted a tenure-track job, but not the number of JDs on the market who received a tenure-track job offer.

Second, the spreadsheet reports the count of JDs from a particular school, but not the rate at which JDs received (or accepted) offers. A smaller school with a high placement rate thus might not appear on the chart, whereas a larger program with a low placement rate might appear. This caveat means that smaller schools may be undervalued if one relies only on this data, while larger schools might be overvalued. 

Q: How many reported hires had a fellowship, degree, or clerkship?

56 (about 74%) had a fellowship; 42 (about 55%) had a clerkship; 54 (about 70%) had a higher degree. Three reported hires didn’t have either an advanced degree or a fellowship.

Venn diagram:

Q: Not as many fellowships...

A: Yes, the rate of fellowships remains high, though lower than it has been since 2012.

 Q: From what law schools  did people get these fellowships?

I count here any law school at which a person reports having a fellowship. So one person could account for two schools’ being listed here. For example, if a single individual had a fellowship at Columbia followed by a fellowship at NYU, that would be reflected below as +1 to Columbia and +1 to NYU.

Columbia 10; NYU 8; Yale 7; Harvard 6; Chicago 4; Georgetown 4; Other 25.

This information comes with the same two caveats as the JD numbers.

First, the spreadsheet reports the number of hires who received a fellowship from a particular school who accepted a tenure-track job, but not the number of fellows who received a tenure-track job offer. This caveat likely applies to all or nearly all fellowship programs. Presumably, someone choosing between fellowships cares more about how many people received tenure-track job offers than about how many people accepted those offers.

Second, the spreadsheet reports the count of fellows, but not the rate at which fellows received (or accepted) offers. A smaller program with a high placement rate thus might not appear on the chart, whereas a larger program with a low placement rate might appear. This caveat means that smaller programs may be undervalued if one relies only on this data, while larger programs might be overvalued.

Q: Tell me more about these advanced degrees. 

Okay, but first a caveat: Although some people had more than one advanced degree, the following looks only at what seemed to me to be the "highest" degree someone earned. For example, someone with a Ph.D. and an LL.M. would be counted only as a Ph.D. for purposes of this question. (This tracks the "Other Degree (1)" column.)

That said, looking only at what seemed to be the most advanced degree, and including expected degrees, the 52 "highest" advanced degrees broke down like this:

Ph.D., SJD, JSD, D.Phil. 36; Masters 7; LL.M. 9; MBA 1.

Topics ranged all over the map. For the 32 Ph.D.s, 7 had degrees in History or US History; 4 in Philosophy, 3 in Law, 2 in economics, 2 in sociology, and the other Ph.D./D.Phil. topics, each of which had only hire, were Anthropology, Comp Lit, Ethnomusicology, Government, JSP, Law and Economics, Law & Society, Literature, Policy Studies, Political Philosophy, Political Science, Politics, Psychology, and Statistics in Law and Government.

Q: How long ago did these reported hires get their initial law degrees?

Zero to Four Years (Graduated 2014-2018) 24; Five to Nine Years (Graduated 2009-2013) 31; Ten to 19 Years (Graduated 1999-2008) 20; Twenty or More Years (Graduated before 1999) 2.

Q: How do the "time since initial degree" numbers compare to previous years?

A: They are very similar.

Q: Could you break the reported hires out by men/women?

Men 38 (49%); women 39 (51%). (Let’s say this is right within +/-2 people.)

Based on a quick count of a number of years of spreadsheets that I happen to have, gender hiring over time follows. (I’ve left out the data labels because I am even less sure than usual of the exactness of the numbers, but they’re roughly right as reflections of self-reported hiring each spring—first Solum’s reports, then mine. And as always, 2010 is left out due to missing data for that year.) 

Q: More slicing! More dicing! Different slicing! Different dicing!

Sure--you can do it yourself, or ask questions in the comments and I'll see what I can do, or we'll work it out as a group.

Q: This is all wrong! I know for a fact that more people from School Y were hired!

Yes, this spreadsheet is certainly missing some information. Repeat: this spreadsheet is incomplete. It represents only those entry-level hires that were reported to me, either through the comments on this blog or via email. It is without question incomplete. 

If you want to know about real entry level hiring, I commend to you Brian Leiter's report (hiring 1995-2011), the Katz et al. article (all law professors as of 2008), the George and Yoon article (entry level, 2007-2008 hiring year), and the Tsesis Report (entry level, 2012-2013 hiring year). This is just a report about self-reported entry level hires as of the spring before the school year starts. 

Q: Is this available in an easy-to-print format?

A: Why, as it happens, yes!

Originally posted 5/21/2018; revised 5/24/2018 and 5/28/2018 to add one hire each time and fix some errors; revised 7/12/2018 to make the written numbers under the graph for "Year of JD" match the graph (the PDF was already correct); revised 1/2/2019 to correct numbers in the Venn diagram and similarly update the PDF.

Entry Level Hiring: The 2018 Report - Final (?) Call for Information

This is, I think, the final call for information for the Entry Level Hiring Report. I currently plan to close reporting on Friday, May 18. If, however, you know that there is ongoing hiring, please let me know, and I will extend that date. Absent any such information, though, I will close the report on Friday, May 18.

If you have information about entry-level hires for this year, or know that there are outstanding entry-level offers that will not be resolved until after May 18, please either email me directly (sarah *dot* lawsky *at* law *dot* northwestern *dot* edu), or add a comment to the original information-gathering post.

Please encourage anyone you know who has accepted a job but isn't reflected on the spreadsheet to contact me.

As a reminder, I am looking to collect the following information for tenure-track, clinical, or legal writing full-time entry-level hires: 

Basic Information: Name, Hiring School, JD Institution, JD Year of Graduation

Other Degrees: Type of Degree,  Degree Granting Institution, Degree Subject

Fellowship, VAP, or Visiting Professorship: Institution and Type (e.g., VAP, name of fellowship, etc.)

Clerkship: Court (e.g., 9th Circuit, Texas Supreme Court, etc.)

Areas of Speciality (up to four) (if you are a clinical or LRW hire, please list this as your first Area of Specialty)

Type of Position: Tenure Track or Non-Tenure Track (if you are clinical or LRW and also tenure-track, please indicate this)

(Comments are closed on this post in order to drive comments to the original post.)

Entry Level Hiring: The 2018 Report - Second Call for Information

This a reminder of the Entry Level Hiring Report.

If you have information about entry-level hires for this year, please either email me directly (sarah *dot* lawsky *at* law *dot* northwestern *dot* edu), or add a comment to the original information-gathering post.

Please encourage anyone you know who has accepted a job but isn't reflected on the spreadsheet to contact me.

As a reminder, I am looking to collect the following information for tenure-track, clinical, or legal writing full-time entry-level hires: 

Basic Information: Name, Hiring School, JD Institution, JD Year of Graduation

Other Degrees: Type of Degree,  Degree Granting Institution, Degree Subject

Fellowship, VAP, or Visiting Professorship: Institution and Type (e.g., VAP, name of fellowship, etc.)

Clerkship: Court (e.g., 9th Circuit, Texas Supreme Court, etc.)

Areas of Speciality (up to four) (if you are a clinical or LRW hire, please list this as your first Area of Specialty)

Type of Position: Tenure Track or Non-Tenure Track (if you are clinical or LRW and also tenure-track, please indicate this)

(Comments are closed on this post in order to drive comments to the original post.)

Entry Level Hiring: The 2018 Report - Call for Information

Time once again for the entry level hiring report.

I will gather the following information for tenure-track, clinical, or legal writing full-time entry-level hires: 

Basic Information: Name, Hiring School, JD Institution, JD Year of Graduation

Other Degrees: Type of Degree,  Degree Granting Institution, Degree Subject

Fellowship, VAP, or Visiting Professorship: Institution and Type (e.g., VAP, name of fellowship, etc.)

Clerkship: Court (e.g., 9th Circuit, Texas Supreme Court, etc.)

Areas of Speciality (up to four) (if you are a clinical or LRW hire, please list this as your first Area of Specialty)

Type of Position: Tenure Track or Non-Tenure Track (if you are clinical or LRW and also tenure-track, please indicate this)

The information will be aggregated on this spreadsheet (which is reproduced below and which you can view and download by clicking on this link); scroll across to see all of the information we will be aggregating.

Please leave the information in the comments, and, to protect those on the job market, please sign the comment with your real name. (Ideally, the reporting person would be either the hired individual or someone from the hiring committee at the hiring school.) If you would like to email information instead of posting it, please send it to Sarah Lawsky at sarah *dot* lawsky *at* law *dot* northwestern *dot* edu. Remember: you can't edit the spreadsheet yourself. To get your information into the spreadsheet, you must either post in the comments or email me.

I will also gather the names of schools that are doing no entry-level hiring this year (that's the second tab on the spreadsheet), so if you know for sure that your school is not doing entry-level hiring, please post that in the comments or email me.

If you see any errors, or if I have incorporated your information into the spreadsheet but you are not yet ready to make it public, please don't hesitate to email me, and I will take care of the problem as soon as I can.

Clarifications:

The list does not include people who were full-time non-tenure track clinicians who are now moving to a tenure track job at a different school, as these don't seem like true entry-level hires to me. This is the situation where a person is at a school that does not provide tenure to clinicians, and then moves to a school that does provide tenure to clinicians.

The list does include people who had a non-professor job in a law school and then moved to a professor job that was tenure track. Thus a person may have worked at a law school for many years, but still be considered an entry level hire. To indicate this situation, I will put their previous job at a law school in the "fellowship" category, and note "non-TT to TT" in the "Notes" category. This is not to indicate that this isn't an entry-level hire, but rather to give information about the nature of the item listed as a fellowship. (I.e., not a temporary position, as fellowships usually are.)

Other links:

This report follows in the tradition of Larry Solum's excellent work over many years.

2017 initial post, 2017 spreadsheet, 2017 report (with graphs).

2016 initial post, 2016 spreadsheet, 2016 report (with graphs). 

2015 initial post, 2015 spreadsheet, 2015 report (with graphs).

2014 initial post, 2014 spreadsheet, 2014 report (with graphs).

2013 initial post, 2013 spreadsheet, 2013 report (with graphs).

2012 initial post, 2012 spreadsheet, 2012 report (with graphs).

2011 initial post, 2011 spreadsheet, 2011 report (with graphs).

All PrawfsBlawg entry level hiring report tagged posts.

Spring Self-Reported Entry Level Hiring Report 2017

Following is a data summary of the Spring Self-Reported Entry Level Hiring Report for 2017. To remain consistent with past years, while the spreadsheet contains all hiring information received, the data analysis includes only tenure-track hires at U.S. law schools. (The data analysis also includes one hire requested not to be included in the spreadsheet.)

Here is the full spreadsheet:

The data includes 62 tenure-track hires at U.S. law schools, at 42 different law schools.

Here are answers to some frequently asked questions:

Q: How does 62 reported hires compare to past years?

A: Fewer than any year previously reported.

The ratio of hires to first-round FAR forms also fell:

 

Q: You say the hires were at 42 different schools. How does that compare to previous years?

A: Also lower.

Hires per school per year may also be of interest:

Q: How many reported hires got their JD from School X?

NYU 9; Harvard 9; Yale 9; Northwestern 4; Columbia 3; Michigan 3.

Schools in the “other” category with two JD/LLBs who reported hires: Berkeley; Georgetown; Hebrew; Penn; Stanford; Virginia.

Schools in the “other” category with one JD/LLB who reported hires: Duke; Cardozo; Catholic (Portugal); Emory; Fordham; Genoa; ITAM; Seoul National; Texas; Vanderbilt; University of Washington.

This information comes with two related caveats.

First, the spreadsheet reports the number of hires who received a JD from a particular school who accepted a tenure-track job, but not the number of JDs on the market who received a tenure-track job offer.

Second, the spreadsheet reports the count of JDs from a particular school, but not the rate at which JDs received (or accepted) offers. A smaller school with a high placement rate thus might not appear on the chart, whereas a larger program with a low placement rate might appear. This caveat means that smaller schools may be undervalued if one relies only on this data, while larger schools might be overvalued. 

Q: How many reported hires had a fellowship, degree, or clerkship?

51 (about 82%) had a fellowship; 32 (about 52%) had a clerkship; 42 (about 68%) had a higher degree. Only one reported hire didn’t have either an advanced degree or a fellowship.

Nonproportional Venn diagram:

Q: A lot of fellowships!

A: Yes.

 Q: From what law schools  did people get these fellowships?

I count here any law school at which a person reports having a fellowship. So one person could account for two schools’ being listed here. For example, if a single individual had a fellowship at Columbia followed by a fellowship at NYU, that would be reflected below as +1 to Columbia and +1 to NYU.

Harvard 10; NYU 9; Georgetown 6; Penn 5; Columbia 4; Other 30.

This information comes with the same two caveats as the JD numbers.

First, the spreadsheet reports the number of hires who received a fellowship from a particular school who accepted a tenure-track job, but not the number of fellows who received a tenure-track job offer. This caveat likely applies to all or nearly all fellowship programs. Presumably, someone choosing between fellowships cares more about how many people received tenure-track job offers than about how many people accepted those offers.

Second, the spreadsheet reports the count of fellows, but not the rate at which fellows received (or accepted) offers. A smaller program with a high placement rate thus might not appear on the chart, whereas a larger program with a low placement rate might appear. This caveat means that smaller programs may be undervalued if one relies only on this data, while larger programs might be overvalued.

Q: Tell me more about these advanced degrees. 

Okay, but first a caveat: Although some people had more than one advanced degree, the following looks only at what seemed to me to be the "highest" degree someone earned. For example, someone with a Ph.D. and an LL.M. would be counted only as a Ph.D. for purposes of this question. (This tracks the "Other Degree (1)" column.)

That said, looking only at what seemed to be the most advanced degree, and including expected degrees, the 42 "highest" advanced degrees broke down like this:

Ph.D., SJD, JSD, D.Phil. 26; Masters 8; LL.M. 7; MBA 1.

Topics ranged all over the map. For the 26 Ph.D.s and expected Ph.Ds, 4 had degrees in Economics; 2 in sociology; and the other Ph.D./D.Phil. topics, each of which had only hire, were American History; American Studies; Comparative Law; Criminology; Finance and Economics; History; History of American Civilization; JSP; Law; Law and Economics; Near Eastern Languages and Civilization; Neuroscience; Philosophy; Political Science; Rhetoric; Social Anthropology and Law & Society.

Q: How long ago did these reported hires get their initial law degrees?

Zero to Four Years (Graduated 2012-2016) 13; Five to Nine Years (Graduated 2007-2011) 28;  Ten to 19 Years (Graduated 1997-2006) 20; Twenty or More Years (Graduated before 1996) 0.

Q: How do the "time since initial degree" numbers compare to previous years?

A: They are very similar.

 

Q: Could you break the reported hires out by men/women?

Men 30 (about 48%); women 32 (about 52%). (Let’s say this is right within +/-2 people.)

Based on a quick count of a number of years of spreadsheets that I happen to have, gender hiring over time follows. (I’ve left out the data labels because I am even less sure than usual of the exactness of the numbers, but they’re roughly right as reflections of self-reported hiring each spring—first Solum’s reports, then mine. And as always, 2010 is left out due to missing data for that year.) 

Q: More slicing! More dicing! Different slicing! Different dicing!

Sure--you can do it yourself, or ask questions in the comments and I'll see what I can do, or we'll work it out as a group.

Q: This is all wrong! I know for a fact that more people from School Y were hired!

Yes, this spreadsheet is certainly missing some information. Repeat: this spreadsheet is incomplete. It represents only those entry-level hires that were reported to me, either through the comments on this blog or via email. It is without question incomplete. 

If you want to know about real entry level hiring, I commend to you Brian Leiter's report (hiring 1995-2011), the Katz et al. article (all law professors as of 2008), the George and Yoon article (entry level, 2007-2008 hiring year), and the Tsesis Report (entry level, 2012-2013 hiring year). This is just a report about self-reported entry level hires as of the spring before the school year starts. 

Q: Is this available in an easy-to-print format?

A: Why, as it happens, yes!

Originally posted 6/1/2017.

Entry Level Hiring: The 2017 Report - Final Call for Information

This is the final call for information for the Entry Level Hiring Report. I will close reporting on Thursday, June 1. 

If you have information about entry-level hires for this year, please either email me directly (sarah *dot* lawsky *at* law *dot* northwestern *dot* edu), or add a comment to the original information-gathering post.

Please encourage anyone you know who has accepted a job but isn't reflected on the spreadsheet to contact me.

As a reminder, I am looking to collect the following information for tenure-track, clinical, or legal writing full-time entry-level hires: 

Basic Information: Name, Hiring School, JD Institution, JD Year of Graduation

Other Degrees: Type of Degree,  Degree Granting Institution, Degree Subject

Fellowship, VAP, or Visiting Professorship: Institution and Type (e.g., VAP, name of fellowship, etc.)

Clerkship: Court (e.g., 9th Circuit, Texas Supreme Court, etc.)

Areas of Speciality (up to four) (if you are a clinical or LRW hire, please list this as your first Area of Specialty)

Type of Position: Tenure Track or Non-Tenure Track (if you are clinical or LRW and also tenure-track, please indicate this)

(Comments are closed on this post in order to drive comments to the original post.)

Entry Level Hiring, The 2017 Report - Not Last Call for Information

The hiring season is not yet over, so I will not be closing the Entry Level Hiring report today. Rather, I will leave it open until the end of May.  As always, please submit information regarding entry-level hiring to me via email or the original post.

Entry Level Hiring: The 2017 Report - Final (?) Call for Information

Update, 5/5/17: It appears that the hiring process at several schools will not be over until at least the end of the month, so I will hold off closing the report until then.

 

This is, I think, the final call for information for the Entry Level Hiring Report. I currently plan to close reporting on Monday, May 8. If, however, you know that there is ongoing hiring (last year, for example, I was told that some schools were working on hiring until mid-May), please let me know, and I will extend that date. Absent any such information, though, I will close the report on Monday, May 8.

If you have information about entry-level hires for this year, or know that there are outstanding entry-level offers that will not be resolved until after May 8, please either email me directly (sarah *dot* lawsky *at* law *dot* northwestern *dot* edu), or add a comment to the original information-gathering post.

Please encourage anyone you know who has accepted a job but isn't reflected on the spreadsheet to contact me.

As a reminder, I am looking to collect the following information for tenure-track, clinical, or legal writing full-time entry-level hires: 

Basic Information: Name, Hiring School, JD Institution, JD Year of Graduation

Other Degrees: Type of Degree,  Degree Granting Institution, Degree Subject

Fellowship, VAP, or Visiting Professorship: Institution and Type (e.g., VAP, name of fellowship, etc.)

Clerkship: Court (e.g., 9th Circuit, Texas Supreme Court, etc.)

Areas of Speciality (up to four) (if you are a clinical or LRW hire, please list this as your first Area of Specialty)

Type of Position: Tenure Track or Non-Tenure Track (if you are clinical or LRW and also tenure-track, please indicate this)

(Comments are closed on this post in order to drive comments to the original post.)

Entry Level Hiring: The 2017 Report - Second Call for Information

This a reminder of the Entry Level Hiring Report.

If you have information about entry-level hires for this year, please either email me directly (sarah *dot* lawsky *at* law *dot* northwestern *dot* edu), or add a comment to the original information-gathering post.

Please encourage anyone you know who has accepted a job but isn't reflected on the spreadsheet to contact me.

As a reminder, I am looking to collect the following information for tenure-track, clinical, or legal writing full-time entry-level hires: 

Basic Information: Name, Hiring School, JD Institution, JD Year of Graduation

Other Degrees: Type of Degree,  Degree Granting Institution, Degree Subject

Fellowship, VAP, or Visiting Professorship: Institution and Type (e.g., VAP, name of fellowship, etc.)

Clerkship: Court (e.g., 9th Circuit, Texas Supreme Court, etc.)

Areas of Speciality (up to four) (if you are a clinical or LRW hire, please list this as your first Area of Specialty)

Type of Position: Tenure Track or Non-Tenure Track (if you are clinical or LRW and also tenure-track, please indicate this)

(Comments are closed on this post in order to drive comments to the original post.)

Entry Level Hiring: The 2017 Report - Call for Information

Time once again for the entry level hiring report.

I will gather the following information for tenure-track, clinical, or legal writing full-time entry-level hires: 

Basic Information: Name, Hiring School, JD Institution, JD Year of Graduation

Other Degrees: Type of Degree,  Degree Granting Institution, Degree Subject

Fellowship, VAP, or Visiting Professorship: Institution and Type (e.g., VAP, name of fellowship, etc.)

Clerkship: Court (e.g., 9th Circuit, Texas Supreme Court, etc.)

Areas of Speciality (up to four) (if you are a clinical or LRW hire, please list this as your first Area of Specialty)

Type of Position: Tenure Track or Non-Tenure Track (if you are clinical or LRW and also tenure-track, please indicate this)

The information will be aggregated on this spreadsheet (which is reproduced below and which you can view and download by clicking on this link); scroll across to see all of the information we will be aggregating.

Please leave the information in the comments, and, to protect those on the job market, please sign the comment with your real name. (Ideally, the reporting person would be either the hired individual or someone from the hiring committee at the hiring school.) If you would like to email information instead of posting it, please send it to Sarah Lawsky at sarah *dot* lawsky *at* law *dot* northwestern *dot* edu. Remember: you can't edit the spreadsheet yourself. To get your information into the spreadsheet, you must either post in the comments or email me.

I will also gather the names of schools that are doing no entry-level hiring this year (that's the second tab on the spreadsheet), so if you know for sure that your school is not doing entry-level hiring, please post that in the comments or email me.

If you see any errors, or if I have incorporated your information into the spreadsheet but you are not yet ready to make it public, please don't hesitate to email me, and I will take care of the problem as soon as I can.

Clarifications:

The list does not include people who were full-time non-tenure track clinicians who are now moving to a tenure track job at a different school, as these don't seem like true entry-level hires to me. This is the situation where a person is at a school that does not provide tenure to clinicians, and then moves to a school that does provide tenure to clinicians.

The list does include people who had a non-professor job in a law school and then moved to a professor job that was tenure track. Thus a person may have worked at a law school for many years, but still be considered an entry level hire. To indicate this situation, I will put their previous job at a law school in the "fellowship" category, and note "non-TT to TT" in the "Notes" category. This is not to indicate that this isn't an entry-level hire, but rather to give information about the nature of the item listed as a fellowship. (I.e., not a temporary position, as fellowships usually are.)

Other links:

This report follows in the tradition of Larry Solum's excellent work over many years.

2016 initial post, 2016 spreadsheet, 2016 report (with graphs). 

2015 initial post, 2015 spreadsheet, 2015 report (with graphs).

2014 initial post, 2014 spreadsheet, 2014 report (with graphs).

2013 initial post, 2013 spreadsheet, 2013 report (with graphs).

2012 initial post, 2012 spreadsheet, 2012 report (with graphs).

2011 initial post, 2011 spreadsheet, 2011 report (with graphs).

All PrawfsBlawg entry level hiring report tagged posts.

Originally posted 3/16/17.

 

Spring Self-Reported Entry Level Hiring Report 2016

Following is a data summary of the Spring Self-Reported Entry Level Hiring Report for 2016. To remain consistent with past years, while the spreadsheet contains all hiring information received, the data analysis includes only tenure-track hires at U.S. law schools.

Here is the full spreadsheet:

The spreadsheet includes 83 tenure-track hires at U.S. law schools, at 55 different law schools.

Here are answers to some frequently asked questions:

Q: How does 83 reported hires compare to past years?

A: Better! (I omit 2010 in this and all subsequent cross-year comparisons because insufficient data was collected that year.)

 

Not only were more people hired, but there were also fewer people in the first round of the FAR forms, so the ratio of hires to first-round FAR forms was better this year than in recent years:

 

Q: You say the hires were at 55 different schools. How does that compare to previous years?

A: About the same as the last two years.

Hires per school per year may also be of interest:

Q: How many reported hires got their JD from School X?

Yale 18; Harvard 11; NYU 9; Stanford 8; Columbia 6; Chicago 6; Other 25.

Schools in the “other” category with three JD/LLBs who reported hires: Berkeley.

Schools in the “other” category with two JD/LLBs who reported hires: GW, Michigan, UCLA, Virginia.

Schools in the “other” category with one JD/LLB who reported hires: Ain Shams Faculty of Law, Boston College, Brooklyn, Cambridge, Cornell, Georgetown, Hastings, Hebrew University, Iowa, Nebraska, Pittsburgh, Thomas Jefferson, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, USC.

This information comes with two related caveats.

First, the spreadsheet reports the number of hires who received a JD from a particular school who accepted a tenure-track job, but not the number of JDs on the market who received a tenure-track job offer.

Second, the spreadsheet reports the count of JDs from a particular school, but not the rate at which JDs received (or accepted) offers. A smaller school with a high placement rate thus might not appear on the chart, whereas a larger program with a low placement rate might appear. This caveat means that smaller schools may be undervalued if one relies only on this data, while larger schools might be overvalued. 

Q: How many reported hires had a fellowship, degree, or clerkship?

66 (about 80%) had a fellowship; 41 (about 49%) had an advanced degree; 44 (about 53%) had a clerkship.

Nonproportional Venn diagram:

Q: A lot of fellowships!

A: Yes.

 Q: From what law schools  did people get these fellowships?

I count here any law school at which a person reports having a fellowship. So one person could account for two schools’ being listed here. For example, if a single individual had a fellowship at Columbia followed by a fellowship at NYU, that would be reflected below as +1 to Columbia and +1 to NYU.

NYU 12; Columbia 11; Harvard 9; Stanford 6; UCLA 5; Penn 4; Other 28.

This information comes with the same two caveats as the JD numbers.

First, the spreadsheet reports the number of hires who received a fellowship from a particular school who accepted a tenure-track job, but not the number of fellows who received a tenure-track job offer. This caveat likely applies to all or nearly all fellowship programs. Presumably, someone choosing between fellowships cares more about how many people received tenure-track job offers than about how many people accepted those offers.

Second, the spreadsheet reports the count of fellows, but not the rate at which fellows received (or accepted) offers. A smaller program with a high placement rate thus might not appear on the chart, whereas a larger program with a low placement rate might appear. This caveat means that smaller programs may be undervalued if one relies only on this data, while larger programs might be overvalued.

The Bigelow Program at the University of Chicago illustrates these two related points, though it is by no means unique. This year, all Bigelows on the market received tenure-track job offers. But (1) the Bigelow is a small program and (2) not all Bigelows who received offers accepted an offer. Thus only two Chicago fellows appear on the spreadsheet. But the relevant information for someone considering fellowships isn’t the raw count, but rather the overall success rate of Bigelow fellows on the job market: according to Brian Leiter, every Bigelow since at least 2008 has received at least one tenure-track offer. (Leiter has been at Chicago only since 2008, and believes this is true going back to the early 2000s, but isn’t certain.)

Q: Tell me more about these advanced degrees. 

Okay, but first a caveat: Although some people had more than one advanced degree, the following looks only at what seemed to me to be the "highest" degree someone earned. For example, someone with a Ph.D. and an LL.M. would be counted only as a Ph.D. for purposes of this question. (This tracks the "Other Degree (1)" column.)

That said, looking only at what seemed to be the most advanced degree, and including expected degrees, the 41 "highest" advanced degrees broke down like this:

Ph.D., SJD, JSD, D.Phil. 21; Masters 16; LL.M. 3; MBA 1.

Topics ranged all over the map. For the 21 Ph.D.s, five had PhDs in Law (one JSD, one SJD, and three Yale Law Ph.D.s); History had three hires; Economics and Philosophy each had two hires; and the other Ph.D./D.Phil. topics, each of which had only hire, were Business, Criminology, English and Comparative Literature, Evidence-Based Social Intervention, Financial Economics, German, Medieval English, Psychology, and Sociology.

Q: How long ago did these reported hires get their initial law degrees?

Zero to Four Years (Graduated 2012-2016) 6; Five to Nine Years (Graduated 2007-2011) 49;  Ten to 19 Years (Graduated 1997-2006) 28; Twenty or More Years (Graduated before 1996) 0.

Q: How do the "time since initial degree" numbers compare to previous years?

A: They are very similar.

Q: Could you break the reported hires out by men/women?

Men 44 (about 53%); women 39 (about 47%). (Let’s say this is right within +/-2 people.)

Based on a quick count of a number of years of spreadsheets that I happen to have, gender hiring over time follows. (I’ve left out the data labels because I am even less sure than usual of the exactness of the numbers, but they’re roughly right as reflections of self-reported hiring each spring—first Solum’s reports, then mine. And as always, 2010 is left out due to missing data for that year.) This year, unlike the last two years but like every year before that for which I have data, there were more men hired than women.

Q: More slicing! More dicing! Different slicing! Different dicing!

Sure--you can do it yourself, or ask questions in the comments and I'll see what I can do, or we'll work it out as a group.

Q: This is all wrong! I know for a fact that more people from School Y were hired!

Yes, this spreadsheet is certainly missing some information. Repeat: this spreadsheet is incomplete. It represents only those entry-level hires that were reported to me, either through the comments on this blog or via email. It is without question incomplete. 

If you want to know about real entry level hiring, I commend to you Brian Leiter's report (hiring 1995-2011), the Katz et al. article (all law professors as of 2008), the George and Yoon article (entry level, 2007-2008 hiring year), and the Tsesis Report (entry level, 2012-2013 hiring year). This is just a report about self-reported entry level hires as of the spring before the school year starts. 

Q: Is this available in an easy-to-print format?

A: Why, as it happens, yes!

Originally posted 5/11/16; updated 5/11/16 to reflect accurately the areas of Ph.D.s.

Entry Level Hiring: The 2016 Report - Final (?) Call for Information

This is, I think, the last call for information for the 2016 Entry Level Hiring Report. I currently plan to close reporting on Wednesday, May 11. If, however, you know that there is ongoing hiring, please let me know, and I will extend that date. Absent any such information, though, I will close the report on Wednesday, May 11. 

If you have information about entry-level hires for this year, or know that there are outstanding entry-level offers that will not be resolved until after May 11, please either email me directly (slawsky *at* law *dot* uci *dot* edu), or add a comment to the original information-gathering post.

Please encourage anyone you know who has accepted a job but isn't reflected on the spreadsheet to contact me.

As a reminder, I am looking to collect the following information for tenure-track, clinical, or legal writing full-time entry-level hires: 

Basic Information: Name, Hiring School, JD Institution, JD Year of Graduation

Other Degrees: Type of Degree,  Degree Granting Institution, Degree Subject

Fellowship, VAP, or Visiting Professorship: Institution and Type (e.g., VAP, name of fellowship, etc.)

Clerkship: Court (e.g., 9th Circuit, Texas Supreme Court, etc.)

Areas of Speciality (up to four) (if you are a clinical or LRW hire, please list this as your first Area of Specialty)

Type of Position: Tenure Track or Non-Tenure Track (if you are clinical or LRW and also tenure-track, please indicate this)

(Comments are closed on this post in order to drive comments to the original post.)

Entry Level Hiring: The 2016 Report - Second Call for Information.

This a reminder of the Entry Level Hiring Report.

If you have information about entry-level hires for this year, please either email me directly (slawsky *at* law *dot* uci *dot* edu), or add a comment to the original information-gathering post.

Please encourage anyone you know who has accepted a job but isn't reflected on the spreadsheet to contact me.

As a reminder, I am looking to collect the following information for tenure-track, clinical, or legal writing full-time entry-level hires: 

Basic Information: Name, Hiring School, JD Institution, JD Year of Graduation

Other Degrees: Type of Degree,  Degree Granting Institution, Degree Subject

Fellowship, VAP, or Visiting Professorship: Institution and Type (e.g., VAP, name of fellowship, etc.)

Clerkship: Court (e.g., 9th Circuit, Texas Supreme Court, etc.)

Areas of Speciality (up to four) (if you are a clinical or LRW hire, please list this as your first Area of Specialty)

Type of Position: Tenure Track or Non-Tenure Track (if you are clinical or LRW and also tenure-track, please indicate this)

(Comments are closed on this post in order to drive comments to the original post.)

Entry Level Hiring: The 2016 Report - Call for Information

Time once again for the entry level hiring report.

I will gather the following information for tenure-track, clinical, or legal writing full-time entry-level hires: 

Basic Information: Name, Hiring School, JD Institution, JD Year of Graduation

Other Degrees: Type of Degree,  Degree Granting Institution, Degree Subject

Fellowship, VAP, or Visiting Professorship: Institution and Type (e.g., VAP, name of fellowship, etc.)

Clerkship: Court (e.g., 9th Circuit, Texas Supreme Court, etc.)

Areas of Speciality (up to four) (if you are a clinical or LRW hire, please list this as your first Area of Specialty)

Type of Position: Tenure Track or Non-Tenure Track (if you are clinical or LRW and also tenure-track, please indicate this)

The information will be aggregated on this spreadsheet (which is reproduced below and which you can view and download by clicking on this link); scroll across to see all of the information we will be aggregating.

Please leave the information in the comments, and, to protect those on the job market, please sign the comment with your real name. (Ideally, the reporting person would be either the hired individual or someone from the hiring committee at the hiring school.) If you would like to email information instead of posting it, please send it to Sarah Lawsky at slawsky *at* law *dot* uci *dot* edu. Remember: you can't edit the spreadsheet yourself. To get your information into the spreadsheet, you must either post in the comments or email me.

I will also gather the names of schools that are doing no entry-level hiring this year (that's the second tab on the spreadsheet), so if you know for sure that your school is not doing entry-level hiring, please post that in the comments or email me.

If you see any errors, or if I have incorporated your information into the spreadsheet but you are not yet ready to make it public, please don't hesitate to email me, and I will take care of the problem as soon as I can.

Other links:

This report follows in the tradition of Larry Solum's excellent work over many years. 

2015 initial post, 2015 spreadsheet, 2015 report (with graphs).

2014 initial post, 2014 spreadsheet, 2014 report (with graphs).

2013 initial post, 2013 spreadsheet, 2013 report (with graphs).

2012 initial post, 2012 spreadsheet, 2012 report (with graphs).

2011 initial post, 2011 spreadsheet, 2011 report (with graphs).

All PrawfsBlawg entry level hiring report tagged posts.

Added 3/21/15: Some clarification: the list does not include people who were full-time non-tenure track clinicians who are now moving to a tenure track job at a different school, as these don't seem like true entry-level hires to me. This is the situation where a person is at a school that does not provide tenure to clinicians, and then moves to a school that does provide tenure to clinicians.

The list does include people who had a non-professor job in a law school and then moved to a professor job that was tenure track. Thus a person may have worked at a law school for many years, but still be considered an entry level hire. To indicate this situation, I will put their previous job at a law school in the "fellowship" category, and note "non-TT to TT" in the "Notes" category. This is not to indicate that this isn't an entry-level hire, but rather to give information about the nature of the item listed as a fellowship. (I.e., not a temporary position, as fellowships usually are.)

[Originally posted 3/14/16; edited 3/21/15.]

 

Spring Self-Reported Entry Level Hiring Report 2015

Following is a data summary of the Spring Self-Reported Entry Level Hiring Report for 2015. To remain consistent with past years, while the spreadsheet contains all hiring information received, the data analysis includes only tenure-track hires at U.S. law schools.

Here is the full spreadsheet:

We have reports of 70 people being hired, at 52 different law schools.

(As of May 18, 2015, one person is not listed on the spreadsheet but is included in the data. This person will certainly receive a job this year, and at a school that is not otherwise hiring. The only question is which school. Thus I am able to incorporate this person's information into the analysis below.)

In general, this year’s report looks incredibly similar to last year’s.

Here are answers to some frequently asked questions:

Q: How does 70 reported hires compare to past years?

A: Bad, but not much worse than last year. (I omit 2010 in this and all subsequent cross-year comparisons because insufficient data was collected that year.)

Q: It would also be good to know the percentage of those who registered with the AALS who got jobs. 

Good question. I don't quite have the necessary information, but I do know the number of forms in the first distributions of the FAR AALS forms, which probably isn't a terrible proxy. In this graph and chart, I compare the hiring in Year X to the number of forms in the first distribution in Year (X - 1) (because those are the people who were hired in Year X).

Q: You say the hires were at 52 different schools. How does that compare to previous years?

A: Slightly more than last year’s report, and, of course, much less than other years'.

Hires per school per year may also be of interest:

Q: How many reported hires got their JD from School X?

Harvard 21; Stanford 6; Yale 6; Berkeley 5; Chicago 5; NYU 5; Other 21.

Schools in the "other" category with three JD/JJBs who reported hires: Georgetown.

Schools in the "other" category with two JD/LLBs who reported hires: Columbia, Virginia.

Schools in the "other" category with one JD/LLB who reported hires: BYU; Cambridge; Davis; Duke; Florida; Illinois; Iowa; Loyola-Chicago; Loyola-LA; Michigan; New Hampshire; Penn; Pittsburgh; Tulane.

Q: How many reported hires had a fellowship, degree, or clerkship?

58 (about 83%) had a fellowship; 36 (about 51%) had an advanced degree; 42 (60%) had a clerkship.

Nonproportional Venn diagram:

This is similar to last year’s Venn diagram.

Q: That seems like a lot of fellowships. How does it compare to previous years?

A: It's a lot of fellowships, though comparable to 2014.

Q: Tell me more about these advanced degrees. 

Okay, but first a caveat: Although some people had more than one advanced degree, the following looks only at what seemed to me to be the "highest" degree someone earned. For example, someone with a Ph.D. and an LL.M. would be counted only as a Ph.D. for purposes of this question. (This tracks the "Other Degree (1)" column, for the two people out there who are actually following along on the spreadsheet.)

That said, looking only at what seemed to be the most advanced degree (apologizing in advance for mischaracterizing the relative advancement of anyone's multiple degrees), and including "expected" degrees, the 35 "highest" advanced degrees broke down like this:

Ph.D. 18; LL.M. 8; Masters 10.

Topics ranged all over the map. For the 18 Ph.D.s, for example, Economics had three hires; History, JSP, and Political Science each had two hires; the other Ph.D. topics, each of which had only hire, were American Culture, Anthropology, Chemistry, Ethics and Health Policy, Government, Neuroscience, Philosophy, Social Psychology, and Sociology.

Q: How long ago did these reported hires get their initial law degrees?

Zero to Four Years (Graduated 2011-2015) 14; Five to Nine Years (Graduated 2006-2010) 36;  Ten to 19 Years (Graduated 1996-2005) 19; Twenty or More Years (Graduated before 1996) 1. The year-by-year break-out is on the spreadsheet ("Years Since Hire" tab).

Again, this is very similar to 2014.

Q: Could you break the reported hires out by men/women?

Women 39 (about 56%); Men 31 (about 44%). (Let's say this is right within +/-2 people.) 

Based on a quick count of nine years of spreadsheets that I happen to have, gender hiring over time follows. (I've left out the data labels because I am even less sure than usual of the exactness of the numbers, but they're roughly right as reflections of self-reported hiring each spring--first Solum's reports, then mine. And as always, 2010 is left out due to missing data for that year.)

Q: More slicing! More dicing! Different slicing! Different dicing!

Sure--you can do it yourself, or ask questions in the comments and I'll see what I can do, or we'll work it out as a group.

Q: This is all wrong! I know for a fact that more people from School Y were hired!

Yes, this spreadsheet is certainly missing some information. Repeat: this spreadsheet is incomplete. It represents only those entry-level hires that were reported to me, either through the comments on this blog or via email. It is without question incomplete. 

If you want to know about real entry level hiring, I commend to you Brian Leiter's report (hiring 1995-2011), the Katz et al. article (all law professors as of 2008), the George and Yoon article (entry level, 2007-2008 hiring year), and the Tsesis Report (entry level, 2012-2013 hiring year). This is just a report about self-reported entry level hires as of the spring before the school year starts. 

Originally posted 5/19/15 9 a.m.; edited 5/19/15 11:40 a.m. to add Hires/First Round FAR Forms.

Entry Level Hiring: The 2015 Report - Actual Final Call for Information

This is the actual final call for information for the 2015 Entry Level Hiring Report. I will close reporting on Monday, May 18.

If you know that you will be hired this year but haven't yet decided where you'll work (that is, you are considering multiple offers and won't have things resolved by Monday, May 18), please send me your information (other than "hiring school") anyway. I will leave you off the public spreadsheet, but I can still include the information in the data analysis.

Please encourage anyone you know who has accepted a job (or knows that they will accept a job) but isn't reflected on the spreadsheet to contact me, either in the comments to the original post or at by email, at slawsky*at*law*dot*uci*dot*edu.

As a reminder, I am looking to collect the following information for tenure-track, clinical, or legal writing full-time entry-level hires: 

Basic Information: Name, Hiring School, JD Institution, JD Year of Graduation

Other Degrees: Type of Degree,  Degree Granting Institution, Degree Subject

Fellowship, VAP, or Visiting Professorship: Institution and Type (e.g., VAP, name of fellowship, etc.)

Clerkship: Court (e.g., 9th Circuit, Texas Supreme Court, etc.)

Areas of Speciality (up to four) (if you are a clinical or LRW hire, please list this as your first Area of Specialty)

Type of Position: Tenure Track or Non-Tenure Track (if you are clinical or LRW and also tenure-track, please indicate this)

(Comments are closed on this post in order to drive comments to the original post.)

Entry Level Hiring: The 2015 Report - Final (?) Call for Information

This is, I think, the final call for information for the 2015 Entry Level Hiring Report. I currently plan to close reporting on Friday, May 1. If, however, you know that there is ongoing hiring (last year, for example, I was told that some schools were working on hiring until mid-May), please let me know, and I will extend that date. Absent any such information, though, I will close the report on Friday, May 1.

If you have information about entry-level hires for this year, or know that there are outstanding entry-level offers that will not be resolved until after May 1, please either email me directly (slawsky *at* law *dot* uci *dot* edu), or add a comment to the original information-gathering post.

Please encourage anyone you know who has accepted a job but isn't reflected on the spreadsheet to contact me.

As a reminder, I am looking to collect the following information for tenure-track, clinical, or legal writing full-time entry-level hires: 

Basic Information: Name, Hiring School, JD Institution, JD Year of Graduation

Other Degrees: Type of Degree,  Degree Granting Institution, Degree Subject

Fellowship, VAP, or Visiting Professorship: Institution and Type (e.g., VAP, name of fellowship, etc.)

Clerkship: Court (e.g., 9th Circuit, Texas Supreme Court, etc.)

Areas of Speciality (up to four) (if you are a clinical or LRW hire, please list this as your first Area of Specialty)

Type of Position: Tenure Track or Non-Tenure Track (if you are clinical or LRW and also tenure-track, please indicate this)

(Comments are closed on this post in order to drive comments to the original post.)

Entry Level Hiring: The 2015 Report - Second Call for Information

This is a reminder of the Entry Level Hiring Report. The numbers will be low this cycle, but the spreadsheet as it stands as of April 6 is certainly not anywhere near the final list.

If you have information about entry-level hires for this year, please either email me directly (slawsky *at* law *dot* uci *dot* edu), or add a comment to the original information-gathering post.

Please encourage anyone you know who has accepted a job but isn't reflected on the spreadsheet to contact me.

As a reminder, I am looking to collect the following information for tenure-track, clinical, or legal writing full-time entry-level hires: 

Basic Information: Name, Hiring School, JD Institution, JD Year of Graduation

Other Degrees: Type of Degree,  Degree Granting Institution, Degree Subject

Fellowship, VAP, or Visiting Professorship: Institution and Type (e.g., VAP, name of fellowship, etc.)

Clerkship: Court (e.g., 9th Circuit, Texas Supreme Court, etc.)

Areas of Speciality (up to four) (if you are a clinical or LRW hire, please list this as your first Area of Specialty)

Type of Position: Tenure Track or Non-Tenure Track (if you are clinical or LRW and also tenure-track, please indicate this)

(Comments are closed on this post in order to drive comments to the original post.)

Entry Level Hiring: The 2015 Report - Call for Information

Time once again for the entry level hiring report.

I will gather the following information for tenure-track, clinical, or legal writing full-time entry-level hires: 

Basic Information: Name, Hiring School, JD Institution, JD Year of Graduation

Other Degrees: Type of Degree,  Degree Granting Institution, Degree Subject

Fellowship, VAP, or Visiting Professorship: Institution and Type (e.g., VAP, name of fellowship, etc.)

Clerkship: Court (e.g., 9th Circuit, Texas Supreme Court, etc.)

Areas of Speciality (up to four) (if you are a clinical or LRW hire, please list this as your first Area of Specialty)

Type of Position: Tenure Track or Non-Tenure Track (if you are clinical or LRW and also tenure-track, please indicate this)

The information will be aggregated on this spreadsheet (which is reproduced below and which you can view and download by clicking on this link); scroll across to see all of the information we will be aggregating. 

Please leave the information in the comments, and, to protect those on the job market, please sign the comment with your real name. (Ideally, the reporting person would be either the hired individual or someone from the hiring committee at the hiring school.) If you would like to email information instead of posting it, please send it to Sarah Lawsky at slawsky *at* law *dot* uci *dot* edu. Remember: you can't edit the spreadsheet yourself. To get your information into the spreadsheet, you must either post in the comments or email me.

I will also gather the names of schools that are doing no entry-level hiring this year (that's the second tab on the spreadsheet), so if you know for sure that your school is not doing entry-level hiring, please post that in the comments or email me.

If you see any errors, or if I have incorporated your information into the spreadsheet but you are not yet ready to make it public, please don't hesitate to email me, and I will take care of the problem as soon as I can.

Other links:

This report follows in the tradition of Larry Solum's excellent work over many years. 

2014 initial post, 2014 spreadsheet, 2014 report (with graphs).

2013 initial post, 2013 spreadsheet, 2013 report (with graphs).

2012 initial post, 2012 spreadsheet, 2012 report (with graphs).

2011 initial post, 2011 spreadsheet, 2011 report (with graphs).

All PrawfsBlawg entry level hiring report tagged posts.

[Originally posted 3/2/15]

Who Would Hire Kingsfield?

Over the years, it has become widely discussed that seasoned lawyers are continuing to have a tough time with getting hired as law faculty.  It seems that many very experienced lawyers who would offer valuable work experience are, surprisingly, viewed as somehow less desirable candidates than the under-35 set.  With the myriad discussions currently afoot about the importance of graduating “practice-ready” lawyers, aren’t some of the best teachers the ones who have been out in the world using their law degrees, either in practice or in alternative legal careers?  Are seasoned lawyers wasting their time by going on the market?  If Charles W. Kingsfield were on the market today, which schools (if any) would extend him an offer?

"For Prospective Fellows and VAPs"

The below comment to the hiring report post deserves to be excerpted it in its own post. (The commenter was anonymous--if you are the author of this comment and would like me to credit you in this post, please email me.)

Perhaps the biggest limitation [of this report] is that the denominators of the categories - fellowships, clerkships, advanced degrees, Yale JDs, etc. - are essentially unknown....

So, for example, we see that 85% of those who got a teaching job had at least a fellowship.... But nobody knows how many fellows were on the market this year, so we can't figure out what a prospective fellow would really want to know, which is what percentage of fellows got jobs.... It might be that 25% of fellows got jobs this year, which would be helpful for a prospective fellow to know....

We can say that not having a fellowship is a massive disadvantage, because only 15% of those hired got their jobs without it. But if you're weighing your career options, that doesn't really tell you whether to take a fellowship if you don't know what proportion of fellows are getting jobs.

In short, it would be wise to ask your prospective program about their outcomes, and to do as much research as you can on fellowships that offer a roughly comparable experience (not just eliteness of school, but mentors and support).

(Emphasis added.)

Necessary and sufficient are different, and pay attention to base rates: words to live by!

More specifically, as the commenter suggests, while it would be nice to know the percentage of fellows/VAPs on the market that received jobs, if you're considering taking a fellowship, that isn't too interesting to you. What matters to you is how many fellows from the fellowship you are considering got jobs over the past few years. 

Some fellowship programs (NYU's tax Acting Assistant Professorship, Chicago's Bigelow program, along with others, I am sure--feel free to provide additional helpful links in the comments!) provide this information right on their web pages in an easy-to-digest fashion, so it's easy to see that they have excellent placement rates. If the fellowship you are considering doesn't provide you with historical placement information, including percentage of fellows hired, you should ask. 

Spring Self-Reported Entry Level Hiring 2014 - JD Schools, All Law Schools

Here is the breakout of what schools hires went to for their initial law degree for all tenure-track law school hires (i.e., not limited to U.S. law schools):

Yale 20; Harvard 12; Columbia 8; NYU 7; Stanford 6; Chicago 4; Michigan 4; Berkeley 3; Other 17.

Schools in the "other" category with two JD/LLBs who reported hires: Northwestern; UCLA.

Schools in the "other" category with one JD/LLB who reported hires: Ateneo de Manila (Phillipines); Cornell; Duke; Florida State; Fordham;  ITAM (Mexico); North Dakota; Thomas Jefferson; Tulane; Universidad Torcuato Di Tella; Virginia; no JD.

And here is the break-out for all tenure-track hires, whether or not in a law school, and whether or not in the United States:

Yale 22; Harvard 12; Columbia 8; NYU 7; Stanford 6; Chicago 5; Michigan 4; Berkeley 3; Other 17.

Schools in the "other" category with two JD/LLBs who reported hires: Northwestern; UCLA.

Schools in the "other" category with one JD/LLB who reported hires: Ateneo de Manila (Phillipines); Cornell; Duke; Florida State; Fordham;  ITAM (Mexico); North Dakota; Thomas Jefferson; Tulane; Universidad Torcuato Di Tella; Virginia; no JD.

Originally posted 5/2/14; edited 5/3/14 to reflect additional hire and to add second graph (of all tenure-track hires); edited 5/4/14, 5/6/14 to reflect three additional hires.

Spring Self-Reported Entry Level Hiring Report 2014 - Men/Women over Time

Orin asked in the comments below about the split between male and female hires over time. Based on a super-quick count of what is, disturbingly, nine years of spreadsheets that I happen to have, here's what I found. I've left out the data labels because I am even less sure than usual of the exactness of the numbers, but they're roughly right as reflections of self-reported hiring each spring (first Solum's reports, then mine). And as always, 2010 is left out due to missing data for that year.

For what it's worth, I consider last year and this year to represent essentially equal splits of men and and women--last year it was 54% men, this year it was 49% men, both in very small pools.

Edited 5/4/14, 5/6/14 to add two hires and reclassify one person.

Spring Self-Reported Entry Level Hiring Report 2014

Following is a data summary of the Spring Self-Reported Entry Level Hiring Report for 2014. To remain consistent with past years, while the spreadsheet contains all hiring information received, the data analysis includes only tenure-track hires at U.S. law schools.

Here is the spreadsheet:

73 people were reported hired, at [between 50 and 52] different law schools. 

[As of May 1, 2014, two people, one Yale JD and one Harvard JD, are not listed on the spreadsheet but are included in the data. These two people will certainly have jobs this year—the only question is where. Thus I am able to incorporate their information into the analysis below. I will add them to the spreadsheet when they decide where they will be working.]

Here are answers to some frequently asked questions.

Q: 73 self-reported tenure-track hires? What the…?

A: Yes, even worse than last year. (I omit 2010 in this and all subsequent cross-year comparisons because insufficient data was collected that year.)

Q: How many reported hires got their JD from School X?

Yale 20; Harvard 11; Columbia 8; NYU 6; Chicago 4; Michigan 4; Stanford 3; Berkeley 3; Other 14.

Schools in the "other" category with two JD/LLBs who reported hires: Northwestern; UCLA.

Schools in the "other" category with one JD/LLB who reported hires: Cornell, Duke, Florida State, ITAM (Mexico), North Dakota, Thomas Jefferson, Tulane, Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, Virginia, no JD.

Q: How many reported hires had a fellowship, degree, or clerkship?

61 (about 84%) had a fellowship; 37 (51%) had an advanced degree; 44 (about 60%) had a clerkship.

Venn diagram:

Q: That seems like a lot of fellowships. How does it compare to previous years?

A: It's a lot of fellowships.

Q: Tell me more about these advanced degrees. 

Although some people had more than one advanced degree, the following looks only at what seemed to me to be the "highest" degree someone earned. For example, someone with a Ph.D. and an LL.M. would be counted only as a Ph.D. for purposes of this question. (This tracks the "Other Degree (1)" column.)

That said, the 37 "highest" advanced degrees broke down like this:

D.Phil or Ph.D. 18; D.Phil. (Law), SJD, or JSD 1; LL.M. 4; Masters 13. 

Topics ranged all over the map. For the 19 Ph.D.s, for example: 

Q: How long ago did these reported hires get their initial law degrees?

Zero to Four Years (Graduated 2010-2014) 16; Five to Nine Years (Graduated 2005-2009) 37;  Ten to 19 Years (Graduated 1995-2004) 17; Twenty or More Years (Graduated before 1995) 2; Blank 1. The year-by-year break-out is on the spreadsheet ("JD/LLB Year" tab).

Q: Could you break the reported hires out by men/women?

Men 36 (about 49%); Women 37 (about 51%). (Let's say this is right within +/-2 people.) 

Q: There were 31% fewer reported hires in 2014 than 2013 (a drop of 33 reported hires, from 106 to 73). How do you account for that drop?

There are a bunch of different ways to think about this. Here I compare the percentage change of various categories to the overall percentage change (click for larger version):

 

Notwithstanding the 31% drop in hires compared to 2013, certain raw numbers stayed roughly the same or increased, including PhDs and Yale JDs.

There was a disproportionate drop in hires of people who had fellowships only. While fellowships continue to be extremely common among hires (84% of hires have fellowships), a fellowship was, even more so than in the past, no guarantee of a job. 

Comparing 2014 to 2012, the last pre-contraction year (again, click to enlarge):

Notice the stability in the number of PhDs and Yale JDs, and also the contraction in clerkship-only, degree-only, and fellowship-only hires between 2012 and 2014. 

Q: More slicing! More dicing! Different slicing! Different dicing!

Sure--you can do it yourself, or ask questions in the comments and I'll see what I can do, or we'll work it out as a group.

Q: This is all wrong! I know for a fact that more people from School Y were hired!

Yes, this spreadsheet is certainly missing some information. Repeat: this spreadsheet is incomplete. It represents only those entry-level hires that were reported to me, either through the comments on this blog or via email. It is without question incomplete.

If you want to know about real entry level hiring, I commend to you Brian Leiter's report (hiring 1995-2011), the Katz et al. article (all law professors as of 2008), the George and Yoon article (entry level, 2007-2008 hiring year), and the Tsesis Report (entry level, 2012-2013 hiring year). This is just a report about self-reported entry level hires as of the spring before the school year starts. 

Originally posted 5/2/14; edited 5/4/14, 5/6/14 to add two additional hires and reclassify one person already included in data.

Entry Level Hiring: The 2014 Report - Final (?) Call for Information

This is, I think, the final call for information for the 2014 Entry Level Hiring Report. I currently plan to close reporting on Thursday, May 1. If, however, you know that there is ongoing hiring (last year, for example, I was told that some schools were working on hiring until mid-May), please let me know, and I will extend that date. Absent any such information, though, I will close the report next Thursday, May 1.

If you have information about entry-level hires for this year, or know that there are outstanding entry-level offers that will not be resolved until after May 1, please either email me directly (slawsky *at* law *dot* uci *dot* edu), or add a comment to the original information-gathering post.

Please encourage anyone you know who has accepted a job but isn't reflected on the spreadsheet to contact me.

As a reminder, I am looking to collect the following information for tenure-track, clinical, or legal writing full-time entry-level hires: 

Basic Information: Name, Hiring School, JD Institution, JD Year of Graduation

Other Degrees: Type of Degree,  Degree Granting Institution, Degree Subject

Fellowship, VAP, or Visiting Professorship: Institution and Type (e.g., VAP, name of fellowship, etc.)

Clerkship: Court (e.g., 9th Circuit, Texas Supreme Court, etc.)

Areas of Speciality (up to four) (if you are a clinical or LRW hire, please list this as your first Area of Specialty)

Type of Position: Tenure Track or Non-Tenure Track (if you are clinical or LRW and also tenure-track, please indicate this)

(Comments are closed on this post in order to drive comments to the original post.)