Posted by Randy Barnett:
Getting a Law Teaching Job III:
I received the following thoughtful email from a lawyer reader:
I have been reading with interest your and others' blogging on
getting a position as a law professor. One point that I have not
yet seen made, and that I think is important, is that no one should
be going that route unless he has a passionate interest in his
field. Choosing to go into teaching is different from choosing
between litigation and corporate, or between private practice and
government. Because law professors must publish, the professor with
nothing to say is forced to make himself heard through unneeded
articles that "shed pseudo-light on non-problems" (if I recall
correctly from Lucky Jim).
I tend to agree with this sentiment. You will be much happier as a law
professor if you are a successful scholar, and much more successful as
a scholar if you have something to say. You must love the subject you
choose to specialize in and it is much better if you teach in the same
subject you write about.
However, the most common result of being a professor with nothing to
say is that you stop writing after tenure. I would not be surprised to
learn that less then 5% of tenured law professors still write
regularly. Many (but far from all) who do not write resent the
attention paid to those who do. Sometimes they will claim that they
care more about teaching than those who write, as if these two
activities are mutually exclusive. Indeed, I think most would agree
that if you are a skillful classroom teacher, you would be even better
if you are also a scholar in the field in which you teach. I know I do
a better job in the classroom teaching subjects I write about than
those I do not, and my teaching performance skills are the same in
both courses.
Another sad fact generally unnoticed by law students is that the vast
majority of professors who teach the first year subjects (Contracts,
Property, Tort, Criminal Law and Civil Procedure) are not scholars in
these fields. This is as true, if not truer, at the more elite schools
as the dominant attitude there is that "anyone" smart can teach those
subjects. Little effort is made to hire laterally established scholars
in those fields, or entry level candidates with genuine interests in
specializing in scholarship about first year subjects. Consequently,
very few students at any law school are taught in the first year by
professors who are also scholars in the field. For that, students must
wait until their upper class courses. (This disconnect between
teaching and scholarship in the first year also explains why
first-year courses have shrunk to one semester in length as those who
teach them would rather teach them less, and certainly have no
incentive to resist proposals for one-semester courses that are easier
to staff.)
And because law professors must have students to earn a living,
marginal professors help to support marginal law schools that
accept students who will realize too late that they are unlikely to
find jobs worth what they've paid in tuition and are even unlikely
to pass a bar exam. There is a predatory aspect to the lowest
stratum of law schools, just as there's a predatory aspect to the
lowest stratum of lawyers.
Here I disagree. Of course, there may be some unaccredited law schools
that fit this description, but all law schools, even lower status
ones, turn out many graduates who are excellent lawyers and
professionally successful, and all law schools turn out graduates who
are bad lawyers or who fail in their legal careers. Lower status law
schools give students with weaker credentials the opportunity to
practice law. It is an open question whether one should be forced by
law to attend law school to be admitted to the bar, but assuming this
is a good idea, it is a good thing that if you want to go law school
badly enough there is a law school somewhere for you to attend. What
you do with that opportunity after admission is up to you.
And because the baby boomers are growing old in their jobs at the more
elite schools where mandatory retirement policies are now illegal,
very smart law professor-scholars are teaching at law schools with all
levels of status. Indeed, it is no longer the case that you can safely
judge the quality of a law professor--as either a teacher or a
scholar--by his or her affiliation as once you could, especially if
the professor is on the younger end of the spectrum.
This is yet another reason why one should not be snobbish about where
one gets a job teaching law. While there are certainly advantages to
teaching at an upper-tier school, one advantage that has greatly
diminished is the ability to become known and respected as a scholar
while teaching at a lower-status law school. It is not only possible
these days, it is quite common. And as more of the elite law journals
move towards blind review--and even policies of favoring submissions
by young undiscovered authors--it is becoming more feasible than ever
before to be a successful scholar no matter where you teach.
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