Posted by Randy Barnett:
Getting a Law Teaching Job IV:
Eric Goldman of Marquette has some very insightful things to say on
the topic of getting a teaching job in a series of blog posts that you
can access [1]here. He and I agree about a whole lot, but there is one
cliche he invokes that I resist: "Law professors," he writes, "say
that we have the best job in the world and that we can't believe we
get paid to do what we do." If you like to teach and publish then
indeed we have do a wonderful job. I would rather be a law professor
than anything else, including a judge. But being a law professor is
lots of work (or it is if you do the whole job) and I fully expect to
get paid for it. Especially as I am hopefully making it possible for
lots of students to get paid lots of money over the course of their
careers, while bringing credit to the law school with which I am
affiliated which, in turn, increases the value of the degree we are
imparting on students. Moreover, since you can always do more reading
and writing and speaking--and the more successful you are the more
opportunities you have to write and speak--in a sense a law
professor-scholar is never really off the clock. So lets leave the "I
would do it for nothing" rhetoric to the movie actors (who demand
millions in salary).
Second, and more seriously, a junior professor from a school ranked by
US News in its Tier 4 (the lowest) writes:
Thanks for making the point about affiliation and faculty quality.
. . . I�d also like to second your observation about scholarship.
One of the worries I had about coming here concerned whether I�d be
able to place articles in journals where they�d be likely to get
noticed. . . . But I�ve submitted two articles since I�ve been
here, and they�ve both ended up in �top 20� journals. In fact, with
this most recent article I had the experience of my dreams: three
offers from very good journals within the first week of sending it
out (and, I subsequently learned, I was likely to have received
offers from at least a couple others if I hadn�t shut the process
down). So yes � it is very possible to place things well and, I�m
hoping, to get noticed as a scholar.
I am pleased to hear this confirmation, but not surprised. This was
not always the case, but thanks to the enlightened policies of many
top law reviews, and the fact that smart intellectually-inclined law
professors-scholars now teach at all tiers of legal education, it is
certainly true today. Those who have the hardest time publishing well
these days are scholars writing in specialized fields, or using
technical methods, that law review student editors find hard to
appreciate or evaluate. But that is another story.
References
1.
http://blog.ericgoldman.org/personal/archives/life_as_a_law_professor/index.html
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