Teaching law without a Yale degree

I attended a lunch organized by Debevoise & Plimpton for its summer associates, on a panel of Debevoise alumni of various kinds who’d gone into academia. There I heard a question that I know students have at NYU and Georgetown, and I’m sure elsewhere: Given the dominance of Yale grads among law professors, what should I do if I’m interested in teaching?

NYU has several initiatives to inform and encourage its graduates to teach, including the Furman Fellowship, and Georgetown has some similar endeavors (fellowships, seminars for working on publishable writing, etc.). But here are two key points: (1) Yale grads, while vastly overrepresented in law teaching purely on the numbers, are not even a majority. The modal law professor may be a Yalie (I haven’t checked the statistics recently) and certainly is either a Harvard or a Yale alum, but that leaves a lot of slots to fill. (2) Every single fulltime professor from whom a law student has taken a class knows how to find a law teaching job. There are caveats: a senior professor who isn’t much involved in hiring won’t be a great guide. Because of what Yale is, information about how to get a teaching job transmits from all the professors more by osmosis than explicit instruction, though even Yale has formal policies. Nonetheless, students at any law school who are interested in teaching should be able to find some professors they liked to consult.

No post on this topic would be complete without mention of Brian Leiter’s excellent and honest guide.

Comments

[Lawrence Solum]

Yale and Harvard combined usually account for about 25% of entry level hires. The top 10 "feeder" schools account for about 70% of entry level hires.

[Jack Payne]

Nowhere is "legal" crime ever mentioned in the teaching of law. Not even at Harvard or Yale. Hard to comprehend. With such little experience in the "street" side of the law, though, I guess this shortcoming on the part of law profs figures.

With a little luck law schools will soon start teaching these elements that make up this huge gray area of society.

--Jack Payne
www.legalthriller.blogspot.com

[Ethan S. Burger]

Greetings:

I provide below the citation for an article that some of you might find of interest:

The Future of Law School Education in Light of Smith v. City of Jackson, 13 Va. J. Soc. Pol'y & L. 1, (2005). It deals with a number of issues, including age discrimination.

My co-author is a Senior VP at AON Insurance, has 40 law review articles, teaches adjunct at Northwestern Law and has tried over 30 cases as first chair (winning about 2/3).

Neither of us have had much luck through AALS, though we readily acknowledge that that not all schools are the same on the issue of age policy and as in everything in life connections are more important than merit.

In the course of writing the piece, we had approximately 10 law professors and 2 Associate Deans read it before submitting it, since we did not want to seem like whining wannabees. Most of them acknowledged the validity of the fact of age discrimination in academia (not just law schools -- in fact a professor of English at LSU had a funny piece on the subject). We took the first (of several) publication offers we received since we were also offered a symposium on the topic of age discrimination as part of the offer.

Over the years, we have received numerous favorable e-mail messages in response to the piece, not to mention scores of invitations to speak on a wide range of topics (legal ethics, international economic crime, the future of the legal, judicial corruption, etc.

Incidentally, I teach on an adjunct basis now at GULC and am a member of GULC '89.

Best wishes,

Ethan S. Burger

[Ethan S. Burger]

Greetings:

You might find the following link of interest:

works.bepress.com/context/allen_kamp/article/1000/type/native/viewcontent/.

The author is on the faculty of John Marshal Law School Chicago.

The views expressed in his piece are similar to the comments made to me by more than 12 tenured faculty members who read Doug Richmond and my law article on the future of law school faculty hiring published by the Virginia Journal of Social Policy and the Law (which is referred in the above-referenced paper) before during the research and writing process. In our article, we deal in part with the ADEA -- which is the law of the land.

Regards.