A Reminder: The Other Legal Academy Hires Teachers/Scholars

Three years ago, frustrated by the advice that people at top law schools were giving potential academic job candidates, I wrote three posts about life in the Other Legal Academy. Having completed our two-year quest to find an Executive Director for our new Tribal Sovereignty Institute, the Oklahoma City University School of Law is running a search for regular tenure-track faculty for the first time in three years. This seems like a good time to remind people what it means to teach in the Other Legal Academy and what it takes to be a viable candidate for a position at law schools like mine. 

An updated version of the original post follows:

I have taught at five different law schools. None of the law schools at which I have taught were ranked in the Top 100 at the time I taught there. One now is (good for you, Drexel!).  Increasingly, I have come to believe that there are (at least) two legal academies. When I tell people at top law schools that we do not have the same job, they reject the proposition as absurd. I suppose it depends on how much overlap you think there has to be. Yes, we teach the same courses. We may even teach the same cases and have similar conversations about those cases with our students. And yet, so much about the way lower-ranked schools operate differs from the way top-tier schools operate. As a result, the routines and responsibilities of law professors at the two kinds of institutions are really different.

The gap between the top law schools and lower-ranked law schools has widened dramatically over the course of my career. When I started teaching at the Valparaiso University Law School (RIP), I and most of my colleagues still were giving one winner-takes-all exam at the end of the semester.  Some of us were able to publish consistently in top 80, or top 50, law reviews.  One of my colleagues was a Bigelow Fellow who had never practiced (but was a spectacular teacher). I had time to write articles during the school year.  

Much of that is no longer true. As the bar passage rate for Valpo Law grads declined, for reasons I have discussed here, we dramatically changed the way we taught. We reformed our curriculum so that all first-year courses were seven weeks long (a change about which I blogged here, here, and here), guaranteeing students early feedback, so that our student support faculty and staff could engage in early interventions. I did not care for the seven-week courses, because I preferred (and prefer) to give my students feedback throughout the semester, and grading 70 -140 contracts exams in the middle of the Fall semester was just really difficult, especially as our teaching loads also increased at that time. I can hardly believe now that this really happened, but there was a semester when I taught six classes in one semester at Valpo, including two different legal writing courses. Because Valpo Law collapsed, it is easy to dismiss our efforts as rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, but the collapse was not related to our curricular changes. 

In any case, my current approach to teaching involves reading and commenting on weekly homework, offering to read any practice problems that students care to turn in, a short midterm, and a final.  As a result, this Blog is the closest I come to writing scholarship during the semester, and to my great regret, I have almost no opportunity to read other people’s scholarship during the school year.  I had more to say about the two legal academies and scholarship in another of the posts in this series.

When I was at Valpo, we managed to hire a couple of Visiting Assistant Professors (VAPs) who had been at Stetson and Chicago Kent. People who had prestigious VAPs at places like Harvard, Stanford, and Chicago were out of reach, as were people who had clerked on the Supreme Court.  Three years ago, when I wrote the original post, I was chairing the search committee for my current law school, the Oklahoma City University School of Law. About a third of the people we invited for screening interviews declined our invitations. Most of the top people that we invited for on-campus interviews declined to come. We were delighted with the two people we hired that year, but if either of them had turned us down, we had nobody left in the pool. It would have been a failed search. 

While I was toiling away trying to get people to accept our invitations to interview here, two stories grabbed my attention. Two years earlier, the University of Virginia’s law school had hired seventeen new faculty members. Not to be outdone, the following year, the University of Michigan’s law school hired twenty new faculty members, in addition to three new clinical fellows. Michigan Law’s announcement of new faculty members also provided a non-exhaustive list of six additions in “recent academic years.” Meanwhile, my entire law school has thirteen full-time doctrinal faculty members, including our Associate Dean. If you include legal writing instructors and librarians with teaching duties, we get up to 21, still two short of Michigan’s one-year hiring haul.  

The difference between the experience of hiring in the Legal Academy and the Other Legal Academy hit especially hard the year I wrote my posts because there were only 272 candidates in that year’s first distribution through the AALS’s Faculty Appointments Register (FAR).  If the top schools were picking their new hires from that register, one top school that goes on a Michigan-like hiring spree could take nearly 10% of the candidates.  But of course, Michigan and Virginia do not, for the most part, hire the people in the faculty register. They make lateral hires.  I intend no criticism of these two great law schools.  The groups of legal practitioners and scholars that those two schools attracted are amazing on every level. 

I merely note that I would be surprised if any of the 40 immensely knowledgeable, talented people who took positions at Michigan or Virginnia would consider teaching at my law school, even if that were the only long-term academic offer they had.  They would elect to take a short-term position or return to/stay in practice rather than to take a job like mine, which is striking because my job is so much better than 95% of the jobs in this country. I am well-paid, I have pretty good benefits, I make my own hours, and I have a great deal of autonomy in terms of how I teach and what I write about. I have my own gorgeous office, and I close the door whenever I like. Since my law school does not offer classes on Fridays, every weekend when I don’t have a faculty meeting is a long weekend. And then, of course, I have summers to do with as I like. Mind you, I work hard in the summer, but that is a choice.

Brian Leiter provided some theories to explain the small pool in the first FAR distribution three years ago. Brian’s first theory was that there is a lot of need in the private sector, and so people might want to make money in that market while they can. Things may have changed. In my experience, a surprisingly high percentage of well-compensated lawyers in private practice felt trapped and would have loved to jump ship for academia, if they knew how to do it. I would be surprised if that has changed, just as I would be surprised if the legal profession had escaped the general crappification of work, a concept explored here. One commentator on Brian’s thread opines that the ability to work remotely has made working for law firms more tolerable.  To him I ask, why is being able to tolerate work your goal? I enjoy my work. Maybe government jobs are still okay, but that is not where the money is, and life in the public sector is increasingly precarious. Nonetheless, I find Brian’s second theory does more suggestive:

The barriers to successful entry to the tenure-track market have risen significantly over the last 25 years, and even over the last ten years.  25 years ago, plenty of folks got good tenure-track jobs on promise.  Now, of course, one needs publications in most cases, and often the kind of profile one would associate with a graduate of a PhD program (one reason JD/PhDs are increasing their share of the market).  I suspect it is harder now for even the typical very strong JD from an elite law school to contemplate the moves (e.g., to VAPs or Fellowships), or carve out the time (for writing), that is now required.   

Many of the commentators agree with this theory, and the estimable Orin Kerr goes farther, commenting “To have a realistic chance, a candidate usually needs either a VAP/fellowship or a PhD. — and everyone knows it.”  When Orin Kerr says something this wrong about the job market in which I am involved, it can only be because he in involved in a different job market, in fact, a different Legal Academy, about which I had more to say in the other posts in the series. 

So let me make this clear.  Speaking on behalf of the current chair of the hiring committee of the Oklahoma City University School of Law, Maria Kolar (left), you do not need a VAP or a Ph.D. to be qualified to teach at our law school.  What we are looking for is academic excellence, teaching ability, practice experience, and a demonstrated commitment to one-solid-article-every-year-or-two scholarship.

If you would like to learn more about teaching in the Other Legal Academy, you can have a look at my other posts in the series or reach out to me by e-mail.

The second post in the series, on scholarship in the Other Legal Academy, is here.

The third post in the series, on teaching in the Other Legal Academy, is here.