PrawfsBlawg

Harvard Law School Program on Corporate Governance Fellowship Announcement

From the Harvard Law School Program on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation: 

The Harvard Law School Program on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation is pleased to announce the availability of positions of Post-Graduate Academic Fellows in the areas of corporate governance and law and finance. Qualified candidates who are interested in working with the Program as Post-Graduate Academic Fellows may apply at any time and the start date is flexible.

Candidates should be interested in spending two to three years at Harvard Law School (longer periods may be possible). Candidates should have a J.D., LL.M., or S.J.D. from a U.S. law school, or a Ph.D. in economics, finance, or related areas by the time they commence their fellowship. Candidates still pursuing an S.J.D. or Ph.D. are eligible so long as they will have completed their program’s coursework requirements by the time they start. During the term of their appointment, Post-Graduate Academic Fellows work on research and corporate governance activities of the Program, depending on their skills, interests, and Program needs. Fellows may also work on their own research and publishing in preparation for a career in academia or policy research. Former Fellows of the Program now teach in leading law schools in the U.S. and abroad.

Interested candidates should submit a CV, transcripts, writing sample, list of references, and cover letter to the coordinator of the Program, Ms. Jordan Figueroa, at [email protected].harvard.edu. The cover letter should describe the candidate’s experience, reasons for seeking the position, career plans, and the kinds of projects and activities in which he or she would like to be involved at the Program. The position includes Harvard University benefits and a competitive fellowship salary.

Want this job? Move five times in eight years

As usual, Professor Sarah Lawsky's tireless diligence here at Prawfs has yielded a treasure trove of information regarding entry-level hiring. Browsing this year's report, I can't help but notice the serial credentials that these impressive hires have: a fellowship (maybe two), an advanced degree (maybe two), a clerkship (maybe two), not to mention law firm, government, corporate, or public interest jobs wedged in between. (Most have some non-clerkship legal experience, and many have five or more years' experience.)

But, as I look at the litany of jobs, I can't help but wonder about a major barrier to entry into the legal academy: the flexibility to move several times in a short period of time early in one's career. Few of these hires stacked all their experiences in a single city. Many moved time after time after time for one- or two-year jobs, before heading off to grab the next credential.

I think about my own experience: South Bend to Saint Louis to Chicago to State College to Malibu (and it easily could have been more), one- and two-year stints along the way. Four children born in four different states. And others have far more experiences than I had. I was very fortunate to have an extraordinarily flexible spouse and the financial ability to handle these transitions (at least for as long as I needed to do so).

But it's also made me reflect that many do not have this flexibility. Those who secure a concentration of experiences in a single (usually very large) city; those who postpone family life; those with socioeconomic means to take low-paying clerkships and fellowships, and to move repeatedly; those with a mobile spouse or children not yet enmeshed in a social group--these are just a few of the groups that can enjoy what one might (uncharitably) call a kind of hazing: "Want this job? Move five times in eight years."

Candidly, I understand that there's a kind of arms race out there among schools and prospective law professors. The candidates get still more glowing credentials, and it becomes very easy to rely on those proxies (e.g., clerkships, advanced degrees, and fellowships). The market has grown ever tighter over the last decade, and with fewer openings comes tougher expectations. Candidates remain on the market for longer periods and cycle through additional fellowships. And that leads to candidates with ever-longer publication records, which in turn requires future prospective candidates to take the time (and a move or two) to improve their own publication records. (Indeed, some come to the market with tenure-worthy track records!)

I don't really have easy answers to this. Maybe today's entry-level law professors are simply better than they were a decade ago because of these many accomplishments. Maybe we can't de-escalate the arms race of credentials--and maybe the backlog of prospective law professors is not going away anytime soon. Maybe these proxies are simply a better way of measuring future quality (then again, maybe a clerkship is just a job). And existing publication records are, I think, better than guesses about future scholarly ability.

All the same, I wonder if the pendulum has swung too far to often demanding far too much of too many would-be law professors. And while I'm not sure what the right result is, or whether it's something law schools can even control, I do think we underestimate how much the present system may be shaping the market of prospective law professors, and perhaps in ways that are not only unanticipated but perhaps even undesirable. If that's the case, I hope it's something law schools (and hiring committees in particular) can begin thinking how to address.

Tulane Forrester Fellowship

From Tulane Law School:

Tulane Law School invites applicants for the Forrester Fellowship. Forrester Fellows are promising legal academics who teach in the first-year legal writing program. Fellows teach legal writing to two sections of 25 to 30 first-year law students in a program coordinated by the Director of Legal Writing. Fellows are invited to participate in all aspects of the intellectual life of the law school. Fellows are encouraged to present their work at faculty workshops and “brown bags,” and members of the full-time faculty serve as mentors to fellows. Fellows receive a stipend to support travel and research.

Fellows are appointed to a one-year term with the possibility of a single one-year renewal and are expected to enter the law-teaching market.

Applicants must have an outstanding record of academic and professional achievement, a J.D. from an ABA-accredited law school, and at least three years of law-related practice and/or clerkship experience. Tulane is an equal opportunity employer and encourages women and members of minority communities to apply.

Please apply at this link by April 2 and direct any queries to Erin Donelon, director of Tulane Law School’s legal research and writing program.

2018 Research Scholar Position, Columbia Law and Economics of Capital Markets Program

The Columbia Law School/Columbia Business School Program in the Law and Economics of Capital Markets is seeking a full time Capital Markets Research Fellow. The appointment will run from July 1, 2018 to June 30, 2020.

This position is intended for a person who expects to begin a law school teaching career at the start of the 2020-21 academic year and who desires an interim position that would help the person prepare for such a career by offering the time and facilities needed to do serious research and to develop further expertise.

More information is available here.

VAPs and Fellowships: Open Thread, 2017-2018

On this thread, comments can be shared regarding news of appointments to VAPs or similar fellowships (for example, the Climenko and Bigelow).  Here is last year's thread.

You may also add information to the spreadsheet.

Originally posted November 17, 2017.

Harvard Law School Program on Corporate Governance Fellowship Announcement

From the Harvard Law School Program on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation: 

The Harvard Law School Program on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation is pleased to announce the availability of positions of Post-Graduate Academic Fellows in the areas of corporate governance and law and finance. Qualified candidates who are interested in working with the Program as Post-Graduate Academic Fellows may apply at any time and the start date is flexible.

Candidates should be interested in spending two to three years at Harvard Law School (longer periods may be possible). Candidates should have a J.D., LL.M., or S.J.D. from a U.S. law school, or a Ph.D. in economics, finance, or related areas by the time they commence their fellowship. Candidates still pursuing an S.J.D. or Ph.D. are eligible so long as they will have completed their program’s coursework requirements by the time they start. During the term of their appointment, Post-Graduate Academic Fellows work on research and corporate governance activities of the Program, depending on their skills, interests, and Program needs. Fellows may also work on their own research and publishing in preparation for a career in academia or policy research. Former Fellows of the Program now teach in leading law schools in the U.S. and abroad.

Interested candidates should submit a CV, transcripts, writing sample, list of references, and cover letter to the coordinator of the Program, Ms. Jordan Figueroa, at [email protected].harvard.edu. The cover letter should describe the candidate’s experience, reasons for seeking the position, career plans, and the kinds of projects and activities in which he or she would like to be involved at the Program. The position includes Harvard University benefits and a competitive fellowship salary.

Law School Hiring, 2017-2018, Reminder

Recall that you can post information about interviews, callbacks, etc. on the spreadsheet.

For general questions, comments, or discussion about the teaching market, see A Clearinghouse for Questions. Here is a link to a late-ish page of comments on that thread. (I can't put a link that auto-refers to the last page of comments--the trick I was using no longer works. If you know a way to do this, please email me.)

The Carolina Postdoctoral Program for Faculty Diversity University of North Carolina School of Law

The University of North Carolina School of Law strongly encourages individuals interested in becoming law professors to apply for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Carolina Postdoctoral Program for Faculty Diversity. This is a university-wide program aimed at helping scholars from underrepresented groups prepare for and secure tenure-track appointments. The University places postdoctoral fellows across departments at UNC-Chapel Hill. The School of Law seeks to participate in this program by hosting and mentoring a postdoctoral fellow who is interested in becoming a tenure-track law professor.

Interested applicants must have completed their JD and/or PhD degree no later than July 1, 2018 and no earlier than July 1, 2013. Fellows will be appointed for a period of two years, and they are expected to be in residence for both years. A fellow placed at the School of Law would be engaged full-time in research and would teach one course per year. The course to be taught would be determined based on the fellow’s interests as well as the needs of the school. The School of Law would provide mentorship to prepare the fellow for the tenure-track job market. The fellow would fully participate in faculty scholarship workshops and all other aspects of the school’s intellectual life. During the second year of the program, the fellow would be expected to apply for tenure-track positions through the Association of American Law Schools’ annual faculty recruitment process. Depending on the hiring needs of the law school, the fellow might also be considered as a possible tenure-track candidate at the UNC School of Law.

The stipend for fellows is $47,476 per calendar year. Additional funds are available for research expenses, including travel. Candidates must submit their application to the University’s Office of Postdoctoral Affairs via the website provided below. The Office of Postdoctoral Affairs will ask the School of Law to review materials submitted by applicants who express interest in spending their fellowship at the School of Law. Based on the submitted materials and interviews with candidates, the School of Law will nominate a candidate for further review. (The School of Law may also decline to nominate someone if no suitable applicant is identified). A selection committee, consisting of staff and faculty from different UNC-Chapel Hill units, will then review all materials associated with department nominations and make fellowship offers.

The primary criterion for selection is evidence of scholarship potentially competitive for tenure-track appointments at the University of North Carolina and other research universities. Preference will be given to U.S. citizens and permanent residents. The University strongly encourages applications from African American, Native American and Hispanic/Latinx American scholars. 

Interested applicants should apply online at https://apps.research.unc.edu/postdoc_fd/.

Directions for the electronic submission are provided at the application site.  For additional information, please visit the program website at http://research.unc.edu/carolina-postdocs/index.htm. Questions may be directed to Program Coordinator Jennifer Pruitt in the Office of Postdoctoral Affairs at [email protected]. Questions about the School of Law may be directed to Holning Lau, Associate Dean for Faculty Development, at [email protected].

The application deadline is 5:00PM EST Tuesday, November 15, 2017, including three letters of recommendations due by November 15, 2017.

 

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is an equal opportunity and affirmative action employer.  All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, color, disability, gender, gender expression, gender identity, genetic information, race, national origin, religion, sex, sexual orientation, or status as a protected veteran.

Law School Hiring, 2017-2018, Thread One

Those on the market are invited to leave comments on this thread regarding whether they have received:

(a) a first round interview at a school (including the subject areas the school mentioned, if any, as being of particular interest, and whether the interview offer was accepted);

(b)  a callback from a law school and/or accepted it; or

(c) an offer from a law school and/or accepted it; feel free to also leave details about the offer, including teaching load, research leave, etc. A school listed as "offer accepted" may have made more than one offer and may still have some slots open.

Law professors may also choose to provide information that is relevant to the entry-level market.  

Four miscellaneous things:

1. If you don't want your contact information displayed, enter [email protected] or something like that as an email address.

2. There is a separate thread, "A Clearinghouse for Questions," for general questions or comments about the teaching market. Please do not use the thread below for general questions or comments. (Such comments will be deleted, not out of hostility or in a judgy way, just to keep this thread focused.)

3. There's quite a cache of materials relevant to the law job market under the archive categories Getting a Job on the Law Teaching Market and Entry Level Hiring Report.

4. Anyone can edit the spreadsheet; I will not be editing it or otherwise monitoring it. It is available here:

 

Originally posted September 14, 2017.

Number of FAR Forms in First Distribution Over Time - 2017

The first distribution of the FAR AALS forms came out this week. Here are the number of FAR forms in the first distribution for each year since 2009.

(All information obtained from various blog posts, blog comments, and Facebook postings over the years and not independently verified. If you have more accurate information, please post it in the comments and I will update accordingly.)

First posted September 7, 2017.

A Clearinghouse for Questions, 2017-2018

In this comment thread to this post, you can ask questions about the law teaching market, and professors or others can weigh in.

Both questions and answers can be anonymous, but I will delete pure nastiness, irrelevance, and misinformation. If you see something that you know to be wrong, please feel free to let me know via email, sarah*dot*lawsky*at*law*dot*northwestern*dot*edu.

After the AALS hiring conference, there will be a different thread in which candidates or professors can report callbacks, offers, and acceptances. That thread should be used only for information relevant to hiring, not for questions or comments on the process. This is the thread for questions.

You may want to take a look at the many questions and answers in the threads from 2014-2015, 2015-2016, and 2016-2017.

Update, January 2, 2018: I am unable to add a link to the last page of comments. Typepad has killed the trick for adding "last page" links. Here is the last page of comments as of January 2, 2018; this will not remain the last page of comments, but at least you will be able to click through fewer pages.

Another approach: here is a link to the last page of comments as of January 2, 2018: 

http://prawfsblawg.blogs.com/prawfsblawg/2017/09/a-clearinghouse-for-questions-2017-2018/comments/page/19/#comments

Substitute a higher number for the "19" and you will be taken to a later page of comments. If you guess too high, you will be taken to the first page of comments.

Originally posted September 1, 2017. 

Hiring Committees 2017-2018

Please share in the comments the following information related to the 2017-2018 law school faculty hiring season:

(a) your school;

 

(b) the chair of your hiring committee (please note if you have different chairs for entry level and lateral candidates--we hope that this information will be useful for both entry level and lateral candidates);

 

(c) other members of your hiring committee (again, please note if there is a distinction between entry level and lateral committees); and

 

(d) any particular subject areas in which your school is looking to hire.

Additionally, if you would like to share the following information, candidates might find it helpful to know:

(e) your committee's feeling about packets/individualized expressions of interest (affirmatively want to receive them, affirmatively don't want to receive them, or don't care one way or the other); 

 

(f) your committee's preferred way to be contacted (email, snail-mail, or phone); and/or

 

(g) the number of available faculty positions at your school.

I will gather all this information in a downloadable, sortable spreadsheet. (Click on that link to access the spreadsheet and download it; you can also scroll through the embedded version below.)

If you would like to reach me for some reason (e.g., you would prefer not to post your committee information in the comments but would rather email me directly), my email address is sarah dot lawsky (at) law dot northwestern dot edu.

Remember, you cannot edit the spreadsheet directly. The only way to add something to the spreadsheet is to put the information in the comments or email me directly, and I will edit the spreadsheet.

VAPs and Fellowships: Open Thread, 2016-2017

On this thread, comments can be shared regarding news of appointments to VAPs or similar fellowships (for example, the Climenko and Bigelow).  Here is last year's thread.

You may also add information to the spreadsheet.

Originally posted November 5, 2016.

Law School Hiring, 2016-2017, Thread Two

Please leave comments on this thread regarding whether you have received:

(a)  a callback from a law school and/or accepted it; or

(b) an offer from a law school and/or accepted it; feel free to also leave details about the offer, including teaching load, research leave, etc. A school listed as "offer accepted" may have made more than one offer and may still have some slots open.

Five miscellaneous things:

1. If you don't want your contact information displayed, enter [email protected] or something like that as an email address.

2. There is a  separate thread, "A Clearinghouse for Questions," for general questions or comments about the teaching market. Please do not use the thread below for general questions or comments.

3. There's quite a cache of materials relevant to the law job market under the archive categories Getting a Job on the Law Teaching Market and Entry Level Hiring Report.

4. The year's first hiring thread is here. Comments to that thread are now closed.

5. If you would like to enter the information on a spreadsheet, the spreadsheet is available here: 

You can also add your information to the spreadsheet via this Google form, which was created by someone on the market this year.

Here is a link to the last page of comments.

Originally posted October 17, 2016.

Number of Schools at FRC Over Time - 2016

In 2012, there were 142 AALS member or approved schools at the FRC.

In 2013, 94 schools.

In 2014, 81 schools.

In 2015, 89 schools.

In 2016, 86 U.S. law schools (the list provided by AALS was categorized differently this year but this is roughly equivalent to AALS member or approved schools).

(Say +/- 2 for each year due to vagaries of counting.)

Follow Up on Academic Vitas

Just because of the comments and interest the original post elicited, a few more thoughts.

I’m grateful for the comments, which helped me understand both the problem and also at least one way in which I was unclear.

I’d begin though by expressing my heartfelt sympathy for how frustrating the market is.  I spent much of my earlier career on hiring committees, but most of my last decade and a half helping prepare academic candidates for the market.  I know just how maddening it can be, and how difficult it has become with the relative scarcity of jobs.  As I assist candidates, year after year, I feel the pain.

I will say there is no magic.  As opaque as it can appear, committees and faculties want good minds and folks who will be good colleagues and teachers.  I get frustrated with many of the purveyors of advice who are looking for a silver bullet, some clever new tactic, when it is primarily about hard work and preparation and putting your best foot forward in logical ways.  (I also have many thoughts about the way the market has moved, and its preferences, maybe for another day.)

But on this subject of vitas, I was partly understood and partly misunderstood – my bad of course, I should have been clearer.

I don’t actually think it matters hugely what order the blocks on the vita come in, i.e. whether professional positions come before publications come before education.  I agree with our stellar director of academic careers that there is no one right answer.  I suppose if I had my preference – but it is just that and little more – it would be education, professional positions, publications, courses, references.  Maybe with presentations tossed in toward the end.  (For what it is worth that is how my vita still is, though I’ve wondered if I should just toss education down below – does anyone care anymore?)

What I and others have noticed this year – and I agree there has been gradual creep – is the profusion of subcategories (academic positions, professional positions, clerkships; academic writings, professional writing; other).  Even this would be fine; but what really gets my goat is how categories that are logically-grouped (all jobs together; all publications together) are on some vitas divided up and scattered throughout the vita. I see why it is happening – folks want to shove any conceivable academic aspects up top – but I still think it is a bad idea.

What anyone reading your vita wants to be able to do is understand the arc of your career.  How you were trained, what positions you have held and experience you have had, and what you have been writing.  It is important for a reader to get that.  To get you.  And when the various aspects of a vita are subdivided and scattered in an effort to get anything academic-y up top, it gets difficult to get a grasp on the whole person.

That’s my only point.  The rest is preference and reasonable strategy.

With that, good luck.

What’s Happened With Academic Job Market Vitas?

            What is up with the CVs that academic job market candidates are circulating this year?  Something seems seriously off the rails, and I hope folks will take note and consider fixing it for the future.

            This year’s job market CVs are a weird mash-up in which job market candidates are shoving to the front anything that seems to them relevant to an academic job, and then pushing down below a variety of other information including most of a person’s professional career.  Work experience, publications, presentations, all are broken into strange, small, and often unfathomable categories.

            Although the intention seems to be to put one’s qualifications for an academic job up top, the real effect is to make it extremely difficult (and in some cases impossible) to piece together the candidate’s professional career.

            Take note:  I’m not the only person thinking this is bizarre.  Our entire hiring committee is scratching its head, and I’ve yet to talk with any hiring committee member who believes it makes any sense.  (I’m confident a contrarian will surface here in the comments, blogging being what it is, but still, market candidates, take note.)

            I’m not sure who started this trend, or who is promoting it as the right thing to do.  But here’s a pro tip:  it is not helping you, and folks should stop it.  Indeed, my free legal advice is to think about getting to schools that are seeing you an old-fashioned vita, the kind that actually tells people how your career has proceeded.

            That’s what a CV is.  A summary of your professional life.  It’s designed to let readers know what you have done. It is fine to rework the CV to emphasize aspects of your career that favor the particular job for which you are applying.  But it is quite another thing to design it in a way that hides essential information.

            Schools want to know what you have done professionally.  They want to be able to make logical sense of your career and education to date.  They very much want to know if you have professional experience, including practicing law.  Indeed, I do not know one school where having actually worked in some practice setting is a negative.  It is almost always a positive.  It is true that we are hiring PhDs without this experience.  (And we are even hiring non-PhDs without this experience, though I for one am dubious of candidates who neither have PhDs nor some serious practice experience, even if only for a couple of years.)

            When I look at a CV I want to know about someone’s education, about their professional positions, and about their publications.  Divided into those three categories and those three alone, not subdivided into tiny pieces, so that I can make sense of it.  I don’t want clerkhips in one place, practice in another, and random teaching gigs yet somewhere else.  I want publications to all fall in one place on the CV.   And sure, I’m happy to learn about presentations – though I don’t care that much – or about other things that may be worthy of mention.  But if I can’t get the basics, I’m frustrated and not likely to be impressed.

            And, again, I don’t think I’m alone in this.

            So I’d suggest we let go of the latest trend, and go back to the old-fashioned way with CVs.  I’m all for innovation, but not when it is a step backward.

Blinding and Bias in Law Hiring

As some of you may know, I inadvertently started a heated debate over what students should call professors, see here, and here, (Eugene Volokh’s take here) and here (Orin Kerr’s take).

This debate has turned into a larger one about trying to improve respect and even reduce bias in the classroom and has led to some really interesting conversations.  Without fail, my male colleagues are shocked when I tell them that I routinely introduce myself as Professor Baughman and am in turn called “Shima.” They could never imagine a student not thinking their first name was professor even when they first started teaching. Even Volokh’s post acknowledges that though he asks students to call him Eugene, they don’t take him up on this offer. Could this possibly be because he's a white male (and also really famous)?

I actually remember wishing early on in teaching that I was white, much older, and a man.  I still wish this sometimes when I speak at certain events.  Obviously, I can’t do anything about that in teaching and presenting and luckily it has not presented a big obstacle in my career.  But part of that is because at least some of what helps us achieve our success is done in a blind manner. 

We receive our grades in law school blindly.  The bar is graded blindly. And even now as a professor, my articles are submitted and judged (at least to some law reviews) presumably blindly (I say presumably because there is always a lot of doubt that the schools that claim blind judging of law review articles are truly doing this (fully) in a blind manner. I’m not entering that fray today).

But still a lot of what we do as lawyers and law professors is not done in a blind manner. I’ve written about this blinding issue with Sunita Sah and Chris Robertson in the context of prosecutors. We believe prosecutors should be blinded to the race of victims and defendants at the initial charging decision (before they actually meet defendant). Blinding has caught on in other fields.  Just a few examples in our article: doctors blind the race of patients because that has biased their treatment in clinical experiments. Musicians often audition behind a screen so they are solely judged by their music and not their appearance—or gender or race. And so on. In our article we discuss the fact that in some tech job searches, companies have blinded the resumes from the reviewer to try to avoid any implicit bias in hiring.  Why go through this trouble? Well, studies have demonstrated that we all have bias and even being aware of, or trained against this bias, does not help (and can in some contexts actually make it worse).  I would argue, that whenever possible, we should at least consider blinding in decisionmaking.

Recently I spoke at a diversity panel hosted by a large law firm in Salt Lake City.  The discussion centered around how we could create more diversity and reduce bias in hiring at big firms.  But it is a live issue in legal academia, which is something more present on my mind since I am on the Appointments Committee at Utah. Obviously there is a lot that can be done on this front. One suggestion I brought up that I haven’t heard discussed is—what about blinding the initial screening committee at a firm or among an appointments committee to the names of the individuals applying (or other information that indicates their race or gender)? Could that possibly reduce bias?  Could it avoid the famous resume bias documented in studies or even bias documented in hiring research assistants (where women and minorities with similar resumes received less offers? Or could it backfire because at least at some law schools (like ours) or firms, they are hoping for gender and racial diversity and look for these cues on resumes (Black Student Union, Women’s Law Forum, or simple race indicators on FAR forms.)?  Is there any way to use blinding in legal hiring that would help decrease bias and increase diversity?

A Clearinghouse for Questions, 2016-2017

In this comment thread to this post, you can ask questions about the law teaching market, and professors or others can weigh in.

Both questions and answers can be anonymous, but I will delete pure nastiness, irrelevance, and misinformation. If you see something that you know to be wrong, please feel free to let me know via email, sarah*dot*lawsky*at*law*dot*northwestern*dot*edu.

We have a different thread in which candidates or professors can report callbacks, offers, and acceptances. That thread should be used only for information relevant to hiring, not for questions or comments on the process. This is the thread for questions.

You may want to take a look at the many questions and answers in the threads from 2014-2015 and 2015-2016.

Here is a link to the last page of comments.

Originally posted August 25, 2016.

Law School Hiring, 2016-2017, Thread One

Those on the market are invited to leave comments on this thread regarding whether they have received:

(a) a first round interview at a school (including the subject areas the school mentioned, if any, as being of particular interest, and whether the interview offer was accepted);

(b)  a callback from a law school and/or accepted it; or

(c) an offer from a law school and/or accepted it; feel free to also leave details about the offer, including teaching load, research leave, etc. A school listed as "offer accepted" may have made more than one offer and may still have some slots open.

Law professors may also choose to provide information that is relevant to the entry-level market.  

Four miscellaneous things:

1. If you don't want your contact information displayed, enter [email protected] or something like that as an email address.

2. There is a  separate thread, "A Clearinghouse for Questions," for general questions or comments about the teaching market. Please do not use the thread below for general questions or comments. (Such comments will be deleted, not out of hostility or in a judgy way, just to keep this thread focused.)

3. There's quite a cache of materials relevant to the law job market under the archive categories Getting a Job on the Law Teaching Market and Entry Level Hiring Report.

4. Finally, in each of the previous years, someone who is on the market has volunteered to aggregate the information on a spreadsheet. If you would like to volunteer, please contact me directly at sarah *dot* lawsky *at* law *dot* northwestern *dot* edu, and I will get you set up.

Update: No aggregator this year; instead, anyone can edit the spreadsheet. It is available here:

 Here is a link to the last page of comments.

Update: You can also add your information via this Google form, which was created by someone on the market this year.

Originally posted August 25, 2016; updated September 1, 2016, to add spreadsheet, and September 16, 2016, to add the link to the Google form.

Number of FAR Forms in First Distribution Over Time - 2016

The first distribution of the FAR AALS forms came out this week. Here are the number of FAR forms in the first distribution for each year since 2009.

(All information obtained from various blog posts, blog comments, and Facebook postings over the years and not independently verified. If you have more accurate information, please post it in the comments and I will update accordingly.)

Edited 8/18/16, 10:06p, to correct number to 382 forms.

Hiring Committees 2016-2017

Please share in the comments the following information related to the 2016-2017 law school faculty hiring season:

(a) your school;

 

(b) the chair of your hiring committee (please note if you have different chairs for entry level and lateral candidates--we hope that this information will be useful for both entry level and lateral candidates);

 

(c) other members of your hiring committee (again, please note if there is a distinction between entry level and lateral committees); and

 

(d) any particular subject areas in which your school is looking to hire.

Additionally, if you would like to share the following information, candidates might find it helpful to know:

(e) your committee's feeling about packets/individualized expressions of interest (affirmatively want to receive them, affirmatively don't want to receive them, or don't care one way or the other); 

 

(f) your committee's preferred way to be contacted (email, snail-mail, or phone); and/or

 

(g) the number of available faculty positions at your school.

I will gather all this information in a downloadable, sortable spreadsheet. (Click on that link to access the spreadsheet and download it; you can also scroll through the embedded version below.)

If you would like to reach me for some reason (e.g., you would prefer not to post your committee information in the comments but would rather email me directly), my email address is sarah dot lawsky (at) law dot northwestern dot edu.

Update: to clarify, you cannot edit the spreadsheet directly. The only way to add something to the spreadsheet is to put the information in the comments or email me directly, and I will edit the spreadsheet.

AALS Recruitment - An International Perspective

I received the following correspondence from Professor Dennis J. Baker, head of the School of Law at the University of Surrey. This may be of interest to some on the job market.

I thought I would bring the international perspective to your attention. This year, I attended AALS and made 10 offers....Seven of ten candidates accepted my offers and will start at the University of Surrey Law School from June to September 2016. I also recruited several people from the UK, but found the oversupply of incredible talent at AALS very useful for building up our Law School. We will attend again this year looking again to make several appointments.

Out of the 3 candidates who declined our offers, two decided to chance VAPs in the USA....However, one young star who declined our offer instead took a post in the Economics Department at at the University of Warwick in the UK.

Some of those we hired are listed on our Philosophy and Public Affairs Institute page.

 

The Job Market Didn't Work Out This Year. What Now?

On the Clearinghouse for Questions thread, someone posted: "here is a request: a blog post discussing what to do after you have struck out on the market. What do you do next? Especially if you're committed to legal academia? After all, most of candidates will be facing this question."

Please share your thoughts about this question in the comments to this post.

Originally posted November 9, 2015.

VAPs and Fellowships: Open Thread, 2015-2016

On this thread, comments can be shared regarding news of appointments to VAPs or similar fellowships (for example, the Climenko and Bigelow).  Here is last year's thread.

(If someone wants to aggregate this information, email me, slawsky *at* law *dot* uci *dot* edu, and I will set you up with an embedded spreadsheet.)

Originally posted November 9, 2015.

Law School Hiring, 2015-2016, Thread Two

For the most recent comments, go here.

Please leave comments on this thread regarding whether you have received:

(a)  a callback from a law school and/or accepted it; or

(b) an offer from a law school and/or accepted it; feel free to also leave details about the offer, including teaching load, research leave, etc. A school listed as "offer accepted" may have made more than one offer and may still have some slots open.

Five miscellaneous things:

1. If you don't want your contact information displayed, enter [email protected] or something like that as an email address.

2. There is a  separate thread, "A Clearinghouse for Questions," for general questions or comments about the teaching market. Please do not use the thread below for general questions or comments. (Such comments will be deleted, not out of hostility or in a judgy way, just to keep this thread focused.)

3. There's quite a cache of materials relevant to the law job market under the archive categories Getting a Job on the Law Teaching Market and Entry Level Hiring Report.

4. The year's first hiring thread is here. Comments to that thread are now closed.

5. In each of the last five years, someone who is on the market has volunteered to aggregate the information on a spreadsheet. If you would like to volunteer, please contact me directly at slawsky *at* law *dot* uci *dot* edu, and I will get you set up.

Update: We once again have an aggregator! Below is the spreadsheet, which you can view and download here.

All information should come in through the comments. Our aggregator will use the spreadsheet to aggregate the information.  Only the aggregator will be able to edit the spreadsheet, but when the aggregator edits the spreadsheet, those changes will be reflected in the embedded, downloadable version below.

The aggregator will update the spreadsheet approximately once a week.

You can reach the aggregator at aalsaggregator (at) gmail (dot) com.

Originally posted October 18, 2015; edited October 22, 2015, to add aggregator information.

Number of Schools at FRC Over Time - 2015

In 2012, there were 142 AALS member or approved schools at the FRC.

In 2013, 94 schools.

In 2014, 81 schools.

In 2015, 89 schools.

(Say +/- 2 for each year due to vagaries of counting.)

Job Talk Advice - From the Archives

This post excavates two "job talk advice" posts that aren't tagged with "Getting a Job on the Law Teaching Market" and so might escape notice. These posts are old (in Internet time) but not dated.

Orin Kerr on "Getting a Teaching Job: The Job Talk" (July 9, 2005).

Daniel Solove on "More Job Talk Advice" (July 9, 2005).

I've closed comments on this post to try to minimize proliferation of comment threads; if you have thoughts or comments on these posts, please share them over at  this year's Clearinghouse for Questions.

Edited 10/19/15 to add: 

Another post by Orin, this one candidates' choosing whether and how to specialize in a particular area of law--the comment thread is also very good.

Podcast on Entry-Level Hiring Market

I've recorded a podcast on entry-level hiring as part of UCI Law's podcast series.

Hiring Season Posts - Reminder

The hiring committee thread is here. It includes a spreadsheet that lists, among other items, names of the members of hiring committees as well as particular areas of interests a school might have. If your school and its committee is not yet listed, please consider either emailing me or posting the information in the comments to that post, and I will make sure it gets on the spreadsheet.

At the Clearinghouse for Questions, available here, people may post general questions and information about the job market.

The informational thread is here. People may choose to share information about interview requests they have received or issued.

 

A Clearinghouse for Questions, 2015-2016

In this comment thread to this post, you can ask questions about the law teaching market, and professors or others can weigh in.

Both questions and answers can be anonymous, but I will delete pure nastiness, irrelevance, and misinformation. If you see something that you know to be wrong, please feel free to let me know via email, slawsky*at*law*dot*uci*dot*edu.

We have a different thread in which candidates or professors can report callbacks, offers, and acceptances. That thread should be used only for information relevant to hiring, not for questions or comments on the process. This is the thread for questions.

You may want to take a look at the many questions and answers in the threads from 2013-2014 and 2014-2015. 

Here is a link to the last page of comments.

Originally posted August 27, 2015.

Law School Hiring, 2015-2016, Thread One

Those on the market are invited to leave comments on this thread regarding whether they have received:

(a) a first round interview at a school (including the subject areas the school mentioned, if any, as being of particular interest, and whether the interview offer was accepted);

(b)  a callback from a law school and/or accepted it; or

(c) an offer from a law school and/or accepted it; feel free to also leave details about the offer, including teaching load, research leave, etc. A school listed as "offer accepted" may have made more than one offer and may still have some slots open.

Law professors may also choose to provide information that is relevant to the entry-level market.  

Four miscellaneous things:

1. If you don't want your contact information displayed, enter [email protected] or something like that as an email address.

2. There is a  separate thread, "A Clearinghouse for Questions," for general questions or comments about the teaching market. Please do not use the thread below for general questions or comments. (Such comments will be deleted, not out of hostility or in a judgy way, just to keep this thread focused.)

3. There's quite a cache of materials relevant to the law job market under the archive categories Getting a Job on the Law Teaching Market and Entry Level Hiring Report.

4. Finally, in each of the last five years, someone who is on the market has volunteered to aggregate the information on a spreadsheet. If you would like to volunteer, please contact me directly at slawsky *at* law *dot* uci *dot* edu, and I will get you set up.

Update: We once again have an aggregator! Below is the spreadsheet, which you can view and download here.

All information should come in through the comments. Our aggregator will use the spreadsheet to aggregate the information.  Only the aggregator will be able to edit the spreadsheet, but when the aggregator edits the spreadsheet, those changes will be reflected in the embedded, downloadable version below.

The aggregator will update the spreadsheet approximately once a week.

You can reach the aggregator at aalsaggregator (at) gmail (dot) com.

Originally posted August 27, 2015; aggregator and spreadsheet added 9/3/15.

Number of FAR Forms in First Distribution Over Time - 2015

The first distribution of the FAR AALS forms came out this week. Here are the number of FAR forms in the first distribution for each year since 2009.

(All information obtained from various blog posts, blog comments, and Facebook postings over the years and not independently verified. If you have more accurate information, please post it in the comments and I will update accordingly.)

Reminder: Hiring Committees 2015-2016

The post listing hiring committees for 2015-2016 is available here. If your school and its committee is not yet listed, please consider either emailing me or posting information the comments at that post.

Hiring Posts - Schedule

An approximate schedule of other posts follows, based off the dates of the first FAR submission (Thursday, August 20) and the AALS conference (October 15-17). 

Monday, July 13 (today): Hiring committee thread posted. Available here.

Thursday, August 27: Law School Hiring, Thread One (reporting interview requests; last year's thread here). As usual, I will be looking for someone to volunteer to aggregate the information reported on this thread.

Thursday, August 27: Clearinghouse for Questions (last year's thread here). 

Monday, October 19: Law School Hiring, Thread Two (reporting callback requests; last year's thread here). As usual, I will be looking for someone to volunteer to aggregate the information reported on this thread.

Wednesday, November 11: VAP thread (last year's thread here).

Late February/early March: Begin entry level hiring report data collection.

Hiring Committees 2015-2016

Please share in the comments the following information related to the 2015-2016 law school faculty hiring season:

(a) your school;

(b) the chair of your hiring committee (please note if you have different chairs for entry level and lateral candidates--we hope that this information will be useful for both entry level and lateral candidates);

(c) other members of your hiring committee (again, please note if there is a distinction between entry level and lateral committees); and

(d) any particular subject areas in which your school is looking to hire.

Additionally, if you would like to share the following information, candidates might find it helpful to know:

(e) your committee's feeling about packets/individualized expressions of interest (affirmatively want to receive them, affirmatively don't want to receive them, or don't care one way or the other); 

(f) your committee's preferred way to be contacted (email, snail-mail, or phone); and/or

(g) the number of available faculty positions at your school.

I will gather all this information in a downloadable, sortable spreadsheet. (Click on that link to access the spreadsheet and download it; you can also scroll through the embedded version below.)

You can't make changes to the spreadsheet directly, so please post the information in the comments, or email me directly, slawsky *at* law *dot* uci *dot* edu.

Additionally, in 2011, someone very kindly submitted a spreadsheet of addresses of a subset of law schools, if folks want to create their own mail-merge. You can download it here. (If anyone wants to update or expand it and send me a new version, that would be awesome.)

Originally posted July 13, 2015.

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]

The Price is Right

December marks the start of the season for faculty job offers – as few and far between as they may be in this economy.  In the “old” days, salaries and perks were likely much more flexible.  Is there much room for negotiation, or will candidates jump at the chance to accept any offer, just to have a foot in the door?  In our current economy, what can one realistically ask for and receive? 

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?

Tattoo . . . You?

I was reading an interesting article about lawyers and tattoos, which led me to question the practice among law faculty.  Although dress codes have certainly become more relaxed since the days of wingtips and shoulder pads, some of the old taboos remain.  Are tattoos one of them?  After all, I cannot recall ever seeing a lawyer or a professor with a tattoo.  Have you? Perhaps more importantly, should it matter?

VAPs and Fellowships: Open Thread, 2014-2015

On this thread, comments can be shared regarding news of appointments to VAPs or similar fellowships (for example, the Climenko and Bigelow).  Here is last year's thread.

(If someone wants to aggregate this information, email me, slawsky *at* law *dot* uci *dot* edu, and I will set you up with an embedded spreadsheet.)

Originally published 11/12/14.

The push for quantity

Zak's post, Howard's post, Bridget Crawford's post, and Orrin's post and the comments to them pose some questions and some answers about the quantity of publications law professors and candidates for teaching positions have. Underlying these is a tension about tradeoffs between quantity and quality and concerns about the source of the pressure to produce. I would even go farther than any of them, and suggest there is something of an arms race afoot that we ought to be concerned about. Based on my experience as a VAP and on the hiring committees of two schools, I also think there are reasons in addition to those already suggested for that arms race, and I'll list them in no particular order. There is a lot of overlap among these, but I use a list for convenience (quantity over quality).

1. Labor market competition. There aren't very many desirable positions available in any given year. Something like fewer than 10% of those who apply through the AALS (which is the only easy place to track hiring stats) are successful, and especially as faculties are shrinking, the market is only getting tighter. Given that scarcity, candidates need to be ever more accomplished to even be considered.

2.  Publications are the coin of the realm. Most, even if not all, law schools use scholarship (defined relatively narrowly) as a central criterion for evaluation of law professors. This might be because the universities law schools are a part of consider scholarship to be the hallmark of an academic discipline and so put significant pressure on their law faculties to demonstrate that they are academics rather than practitioners. It might also be because U.S. News, by giving so much weight to faculty peer evaluation, creates an incentive for more scholarship. In addition, because the focus on scholarship and "productivity" have been part of law school culture for a fairly long period of time, law faculties take for granted the central importance of publishing--and tend to expect more and more of their newer colleagues as a matter of course.

3. Tenure has weird effects. The meaning and value of tenure is subject to serious debate right now, and I don't intend to make any value statements in this post. That said, job security of any kind is unusual in the U.S. system of employment, and so requires special justification to exist at all. Tenure is thought to be a way to protect academic freedom--the ability to say unpopular things--that helps ensure that as much data and full debate can happen as a way to contribute to knowledge. Scholarship is seen as the justification for tenure, and also, then, the consideration for tenure. And because it's the quid pro the quo of tenure, schools want to ensure that even after tenure, professors continue to contribute to knowledge through scholarship. What better way to predict future productivity than past productivity? It's kind of like content validity of employment testing--the best predictor of job performance is the chance to perform a sample of the job for a period. And because denying someone tenure means essentially firing them, and maybe ending their career at least as a teacher, no one wants there to be any question about whether tenure will be awarded. So, the pressure to demonstrate future productivity moves to the point of hire (or even before, ever earlier) to ensure no problems in achieving tenure later.

4. Quantity as equalizer. One of the commenters noted that it's easier to count than to evaluate quality, and this is especially true across disciplines. But that is not the only way that quantity is used as an equalizer. Hiring decisions are based on proxies for qualities schools think are valuable--merit badges, in the words of my friend Brannon Denning (as noted by John Nelson in this comment to a thread on the nontradition JD candidate). Traditional badges of merit have been the ranking of the law school one went to, class rank, membership on law review, clerking for a federal judge or possibly a state supreme court judge, and short experience in a big firm. They are almost literally stamps of approval by some other person who has judged the intelligence or abilities of  the candidate. Because of the system of student-edited law reviews (and the number of outlets for publication), those of us without those merit badges have the opportunity to make our own by engaging in the conduct that law faculties say they value. And that conduct is much more within our own control. That pushes those even with the merit badges to also engage in that conduct to remain competitive. It also gives a more diverse group of candidates access to opportunity. Finally, it allows law faculties to rely on what looks like a more objective measure of candidate quality.

5. Increasing requirements in faculty evaluation. Schools continue to increase the number of publications as a requirement for tenure. At one time, a single work in progress was enough in some schools for a person to be awarded tenure. Now, the expectation seems to be 1-2 articles published per year. And those expectations are being "codified" into tenure and review requirements.

6. Technology. This may sound trite, but it is simply so much easier to produce and disseminate our writing that we do it a lot more. The advent of the word processor spawned a revolution in the length and number of briefs filed in cases and the length and number of court opinions. It just became so much easier to draft and revise writing that writing proliferated. The ability to transmit that writing via the internet spawned another revolution. Access to readers and avenues for writing meant more of it.

Working all together, these create a lot of pressure to publish early and a lot.

Law School Hiring, 2014-2015, Thread Two

Please leave comments on this thread regarding whether you have received:

(a)  a callback from a law school and/or accepted it; or

(b) an offer from a law school and/or accepted it; feel free to also leave details about the offer, including teaching load, research leave, etc. A school listed as "offer accepted" may have made more than one offer and may still have some slots open.

Five miscellaneous things:

1. If you don't want your contact information displayed, enter [email protected] or something like that as an email address.

2. There is a  separate thread, "A Clearinghouse for Questions," for general questions or comments about the teaching market. Please do not use the thread below for general questions or comments. (Such comments will be deleted, not out of hostility or in a judgy way, just to keep this thread focused.)

3. There's quite a cache of materials relevant to the law job market under the archive categories Getting a Job on the Law Teaching Market and Entry Level Hiring Report.

4. The year's first hiring thread is here. Comments to that thread are now closed.

5. In each of the last five years, someone who is on the market has volunteered to aggregate the information on a spreadsheet. If you would like to volunteer, please contact me directly at slawsky *at* law *dot* uci *dot* edu, and I will get you set up.

Update: We once again have an aggregator! Below is the spreadsheet, which you can view and download here.

All information should come in through the comments. Our aggregator will use the spreadsheet to aggregate the information.  Only the aggregator will be able to edit the spreadsheet, but when the aggregator edits the spreadsheet, those changes will be reflected in the embedded, downloadable version below.

The aggregator will update the spreadsheet approximately once a week.

You can reach the aggregator at aalsaggregator (at) gmail (dot) com.

 A link to the last page of comments is here.

 

Number of Schools at AALS FRC Over Time

 

In 2012, there were 142 AALS member or approved schools at the FRC.

In 2013, 94 schools.

In 2014, 81 schools.

(Say +/- 2 for each year due to vagaries of counting.)

Squids, Whales, and the FRC

I watched part of Squid and the Whale this morning. I couldn't bear to watch the whole thing; it's just too awkward and painful. As soon as I finish this post, I will promptly go shave my beard and throw away my corduroy blazer. The Metamorphosis is very Kafkaesque.

Speaking of corduroy blazers, the FRC is this weekend. This will be my eighth visit to the meat market--once as a candidate, the rest on the interviewing side of things.

Best of luck to all the faculty candidates. I hope you can make the best of an awkward process. There's lots of good advice swimming out there about how to succeed in these interviews. 

I don't remember seeing much about interviewer best practices, however. Like, for instance, don't read the newspaper during an interview. That happened to me.  The dean in one of my interviews didn't even get up to shake my hand, just read and crumpled a copy of USA Today for twenty minutes. It's hard to be cooped up in a room for two days straight. It's hard to sit on an uncomfortable coach, scarfing down overpriced cookies while your colleagues aren't looking. It's hard to muster an enthusiastic answer to the "How do you support junior faculty question" on Saturday afternoon. But I guess a good rule of thumb is to remember that this is a big moment for the candidates. They've got a lot invested in these interviews. So please, if you must, read a more reputable news source.

The Wardman Tower is the filet of the hotel.

AALS Recruitment Conference Advice

Before I sign off, I thought I'd put out a request on behalf of my fellow job market candidates for advice about the upcoming hiring conference.  I've come across a number of helpful posts from a few years ago, but didn't find as much from the immediate past, and I think it would be particularly interesting to hear from anyone who was on the market in one of the recent down years.  But of course all tips are welcome!

Here are a few helpful posts with interview tips from Lyrissa Lidsky (2011), Tim Zinnecker (2011), and Daniel Solove (2005).  And here's a collection of teaching market advice posted on Prawfsblawg back in 2005.

Thanks again to the Prawfs team for giving me the opportunity to guest-blog, and best of luck to everyone going on the market this year!

ASU Aspiring Law Professors Conference

Yesterday I attended the sixth annual Aspiring Law Professors Conference at Arizona State University.  I thought I would share a little about my experience for those who might want to attend in future years.  Overall, I found the conference to be very helpful to me as someone who is on the market this year, and I really appreciated the enthusiasm and generosity of Dean Doug Sylvester and all the professors who attended.  They are doing all of us aspirants a great service by spending their free time on a Saturday trying to prepare us as effectively as possible for the process that lies ahead.  (I haven't attempted to reproduce most of the specific advice that we received, but a quick Google search reveals that past conferences were recapped in further detail by permanent Prawfs bloggers here and here.)

The day began with a keynote address by my Pepperdine colleague, Paul Caron, titled Law School Rankings, Faculty Scholarship, and the Missing Ingredient.  The address started by asking a question Paul had previously raised with a co-author in What Law Schools Can Learn from Billy Beane and the Oakland Athletics, namely how we can better measure faculty contributions to a law school’s success.  Paul went on to argue that, while existing rankings based on faculty scholarship are undoubtedly important, more metrics need to be developed to assess other aspects of a professor’s value to the institution, particularly with regard to the student experience (the “missing ingredient” in existing rankings).

After Paul’s address, we broke into three concurrent sessions: one for people who are on the market this year, another for clinical or legal writing candidates, and a third for people who are thinking about going on the market in a future year.  I of course went to the first session.  The panelists there shared helpful tips on issues such as how to prepare thoroughly but still have a natural conversation in the interview, how to ask thoughtful questions, and how to stay energized and be your best self for the duration of the hiring conference.  I’d picked up a decent amount of similar advice from friends and colleagues who have gone on the market recently, but I still found it helpful to hear some additional perspectives.

After lunch, all the participants were invited to sign up for a mock interview, mock job talk, or both, and all the sessions were open to everyone to observe, including current and future candidates.  I watched three of my fellow candidates deliver 10-minute versions of their job talks and answer a few questions each before receiving feedback.  Apart from the very useful suggestions I received on my own talk, I found it more helpful than I expected to watch other people deliver their presentations and get feedback on what they did well and where they could improve.  Doing and watching some mock interviews likewise helped me to better appreciate the unique challenges of that setting, and I left with a good plan on what I needed to prepare between now and October 17.

All in all, I found the conference to be very worthwhile.  For those who are considering whether to attend in the future, I think the conference would be essential for anyone going on the market straight from practice or perhaps a Ph.D. program.  I also think the conference would be useful for people, like me, in a smaller or relatively new VAP program.  I have been very fortunate to get lots of advice and tremendous support from my colleagues at Pepperdine, but it was still helpful to have a chance to practice my job talk in front of an additional audience and to get advice from people at a few different law schools.  Not surprisingly, there were fewer attendees from some of the larger fellowship programs, and I imagine people at such programs have multiple opportunities to do practice job talks and watch their colleagues do the same.  But even for them I think the conference could be useful in giving opportunities to practice with strangers, as a past conference speaker pointed out. 

As for people who are only thinking about law teaching or planning to go on the market in a future year, I don’t know exactly what was covered in the concurrent session, but I think the usefulness of the conference will depend on how much you already know about the process.  If you went to panels on how to become a law professor as a student in the relatively recent past, then the main value of the conference would be the chance to watch some mock interviews and job talks, and I’m not sure that alone would justify the trip for anyone who has to travel a long distance.  But if you didn’t get this advice as a student, then the ASU conference would seem to be a great opportunity to get firsthand insight that’s not otherwise readily available, and then the chance to observe the afternoon mocks will give you a nice headstart on the process.

Thanks again to Dean Sylvester and all the professors who came to this year’s conference!

A Clearinghouse for Questions, 2014-2015

In this comment thread to this post, you can ask questions about the law teaching market, and prawfs or others can weigh in.

Both questions and answers can be anonymous, but I will delete pure nastiness, irrelevance, and misinformation. If you see something that you know to be wrong, please feel free to let me know via email, slawsky*at*law*dot*uci*dot*edu.

We have a different thread in which candidates or prawfs can report callbacks, offers, and acceptances. That thread should be used only for information relevant to hiring, not for questions or comments on the process. This is the thread for questions.

You may want to take a look at the many questions and answers in the threads from 2012-2013 and 2013-2014. 

Here is a link to the last page of comments.

First posted 8/28/14.

Law School Hiring, 2014-2015, Thread One

Those on the market are invited to leave comments on this thread regarding whether they have received:

(a) a first round interview at a school (including the subject areas the school mentioned, if any, as being of particular interest, and whether the interview offer was accepted);

(b)  a callback from a law school and/or accepted it; or

(c) an offer from a law school and/or accepted it; feel free to also leave details about the offer, including teaching load, research leave, etc. A school listed as "offer accepted" may have made more than one offer and may still have some slots open.

Law professors may also choose to provide information that is relevant to the entry-level market.  

Four miscellaneous things:

1. If you don't want your contact information displayed, enter [email protected] or something like that as an email address.

2. There is a  separate thread, "A Clearinghouse for Questions," for general questions or comments about the teaching market. Please do not use the thread below for general questions or comments. (Such comments will be deleted, not out of hostility or in a judgy way, just to keep this thread focused.)

3. There's quite a cache of materials relevant to the law job market under the archive categories Getting a Job on the Law Teaching Market and Entry Level Hiring Report.

4. Finally, in each of the last five years, someone who is on the market has volunteered to aggregate the information on a spreadsheet. If you would like to volunteer, please contact me directly at slawsky *at* law *dot* uci *dot* edu, and I will get you set up.

We now have an aggregator, and we will thus continue our spreadsheet approach: All information should come in through the comments. Our aggregator will use a spreadsheet to aggregate the information.  Only the aggregator will be able to edit the spreadsheet, but when the aggregator edits the spreadsheet, those changes will be reflected in the embedded, downloadable version below.

Here is the spreadsheet, which is downloadable.

Please be patient with the aggregator, who will try to update this spreadsheet once a day, but may have a job, and perhaps may even be on the market.

Good luck!

First posted 8/28/14.

Number of FAR Forms in First Distribution Over Time

The first distribution of the FAR AALS forms came out this week. Here are the number of FAR forms in the first distribution for each year since 2009.

(All information obtained from various blog posts and blog comments over the years and not independently verified. If you have more accurate information, please post it in the comments and I will update accordingly.)

2009: 637

2010: 662

2011: 592

2012: 588

2013: 592

2014: 492