Monday, October 10, 2011

How law faculty get hired

I've had a few requests to discuss the law school entry level faculty hiring process, which obviously has a great deal of relevance to why law schools are the way they are.  Rather than describe the process, I'm going to link to this fairly exhaustive account of it, and make a few comments on Prof. Wendel's on the whole very accurate description (although his account features one huge omission, on which see below).

(1)  An outsider to American law school culture would no doubt find Prof. Wendel's most striking revelation to be that actually knowing something about the practice of law is considered an undesirable characteristic for a tenure-track candidate at most law schools, and that this becomes even more true as the prestige of the school in question increases.  This is not hyperbole: it is a literal description of the situation, as Prof. Wendel (who to put it mildly does not appear to have what could be called a critical perspective on the process) quite candidly admits. Here is his description of an ideal tenure track candidate's ("the classic resume") legal work experience:

A couple of years of practice experience, often at one of the top firms in New York, D.C., Chicago, L.A., or San Francisco.  Some firms, such as Covington & Burling in D.C., Cleary Gottlieb in New York, Ropes and Gray in Boston, and Gibson Dunn in Los Angeles, have a reputation for producing law teachers.  Alternatively, practice experience can be with a high profile government agency like the SEC, EPA, or the Department of Justice, or with a U.S. Attorney's or federal public defender's office (a few state agencies, like the Manhattan D.A. and the Public Defender Service in Washington D.C., satisfy this requirement).  You don't want to have too much practice experience, though.  (Emphasis added)
 Of course as anyone who has done it will readily admit, "a couple of years of practice experience" at a BIGLAW firm is as close to have no actual experience in the practice of law as it's possible to have, while still having gotten paid at some point to do a job that requires a law degree.  Junior associates at big firms are only "practicing law" in the loosest sense, since with rare exceptions a couple of years in such a job will equip someone to do almost nothing that real lawyers do (Imagine expecting a junior BIGLAW associate to handle an actual piece of litigation, or a piece of transactional work, on his or her own from start to finish!).

Now this ought to strike us as a truly extraordinary situation. What could account for the remarkable fact that schools which exist for the purpose of training people to practice a profession not only don't value, but go out of their way to avoid, hiring teachers who know anything about practicing that profession? Prof. Wendel's explanation if anything only deepens the mystery:

One of the oddities of the legal teaching market is that candidates for classroom positions are considered tainted if they have too much of a background in practice.  Because of the obsession, noted above, with being perceived as legitimate by their colleagues in the arts and sciences, law faculties are not looking for people with extensive practice experience as classroom teachers.  One may bemoan the effect this has on legal education, as Judge Harry Edwards did in a famous article on the "growing disjunction" between the academy and the profession, but it is a fact of life.  Only in clinical teaching is practice experience truly valued, as opposed to being viewed with some suspicion.
 Why in the world would relevant professional experience on the part of the faculty of a professional school hurt the perceived legitimacy of that faculty in the eyes of other university faculty?  To the extent it makes sense to locate professional schools within research universities at all, surely the first priority of such schools must be professional training.  I find it difficult to imagine that the typical professor of English or Chemistry would consider it anything other than bizarre to fill law school faculties with people that know next to nothing about being lawyers.  Now it's true that, as Prof. Wendel hints at rather delicately, law schools have a tradition of being treated with some contempt by the academic departments of research universities, because of the suspicion that law school faculty were for the most part not real academics.  And this suspicion was well warranted:  what reason would there be to think that what Prof. Wendel describes as "the classic resume" (high grades at a top law school, a federal clerkship, a couple of years of paper pushing at a big firm) would tend to produce genuine academics?

Of course there's no reason to think this resume would tend to produce genuine lawyers either: hence the absurdity of the contemporary law school, which features faculties full of academic lawyers who are neither academics nor lawyers.

(2) The process described by Prof. Wendel allows us to make certain predictions about it.  First, this process will tend to be strongly self-replicating and self-reinforcing.  This sort of hyper-neurotic obsession with the most superficial paper credentials, in which essentially meaningless gradations in the quality of law schools and law school performance are treated as having enormous significance, will for reasons that should be too obvious to state lead to the continual intensification of that neurosis as a matter of an all but formal institutional policy. If two of your main accomplishments in life are having gotten good grades at a top law school and having secured a federal judicial clerkship you will be strongly impelled to treat these facts as having far more meaning than they actually do. (On the other hand I'm a bit heartened to see that even someone as conventionally-minded as Prof. Wendel is somewhat skeeved out by Brian Leiter's level of obsessive credential-mongering).

Second, it's actually not surprising that genuine experience in the practice of law is so devalued by tenure-track law school faculty, especially at higher-ranked schools.  The contemporary law school has evolved in a fashion that puts almost all of its tenure-track faculty into social positions shot through with bad faith, and the anxiety bad faith tends to generate. Basically, we are supposedly training people to do something we have no idea how to do.  (I should add that even those law faculty that acquire some sort of practice experience beyond a couple of years of scut work at a big firm tend to do things like write memos for the OLC, i.e., frou-frou legal jobs that have little relation to anything the vast majority of their students will ever do).  The last thing we need is anybody around to remind us of this fact (This is one reason why the clinical faculty tend to be institutionally and even physically segregated from the tenure-track faculty).

Third, it's also not surprising that, despite the recent spate at top schools of hiring people with Ph.D.s, legal academia has done almost nothing to reform the ridiculous publication system for legal scholarship.  Law review publication continues to be considered the ne plus ultra of law school faculty scholarship for the very simple reason that this system so strongly protects the interests of tenure-track law faculty.  With fairly rare exceptions, tenure-track law faculty don't have to worry about getting their work published, since it's almost literally true that any putative scholarship a tenure track faculty member produces will be published by some law review somewhere (there were something like 800 of them the last time I checked).   Furthermore, the law review publication system spares the vast majority of faculty from the work of having to participate in the peer review process, on either the productive or the evaluative side. 

(3) Prof. Wendel's otherwise exhaustive treatment of his subject  pretty much completely ignores the role of affirmative action in law school hiring.  This very powerful factor in the process goes unmentioned in his several-thousand word account.  That omission is quite telling, but this post is too long already, and that will have to be a subject for another day.

78 comments:

  1. "Prof. Wendel's otherwise exhaustive treatment of his subject pretty much completely ignores the role of affirmative action in law school hiring. This very powerful factor in the process goes unmentioned in his several-thousand word account. That omission is quite telling, but this post is too long already, and that will have to be a subject for another day."

    Nobody wants to discuss this for fear of being branded "racist", but pretending this isn't a factor in hiring across the board, not just for law profs, is delusional.

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  2. You ask: "Why in the world would relevant professional experience on the part of the faculty of a professional school hurt the perceived legitimacy of that faculty in the eyes of other university faculty?"

    One might answer: Return of the Repressed. Profs have done so much - psychologically and behaviorally - to distance themselves from the dirty world of practice that their entire psyche is based on maintaining that split. IF practitioners infiltrate law/biz schools, they will naturally look around and start asking "Do ya'll have ANY IDEA how messed up this whole system is?" In order to forestall this eventual day of reckoning, the outside world must be rejected at all costs.

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  3. Thanks for posting this. It would be hilarious if tuition weren't so high.

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  4. @10:46 No on would deny it's a factor-- there are many "factors". The question is how big a factor it is. The fear of the discussion likely comes because the person who wants to raise it ( in this context and others) knows deep down that they are attributing more significance to the phenomenon than it warrants. "The blacks are taking over", when nothing approaching that is really happening, suggests that an irrational force is at play. So, it makes sense to wonder about people who think that having 1 black person on a faculty of 50 (or 2 or 3 blacks) is evidence that affirmative action is a driving force in faculty hiring.

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  5. @11:02

    My point was that ignoring it as a factor is delusional, not that "the blacks are taking over".

    Campos just posted a link to a "several-thousand word account" regarding the hiring process for law faculties that did not even mention this factor in the hiring process. That is indicative of what I claimed, which is fear of raising the subject matter for fear of being branded "racist". Or we can assume that the author has no idea that AA plays any role worth mentioning in the hiring process, which is absurd.

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  6. How many angels could fit on the head of a pin?

    I paid 2014.65 this month in student loan payments.

    Can we get back to that please.

    I know that professors of all stripes believe that what goes on inside their insular debt funded greenhouse is jersey shore riveting.

    It isn't.

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  7. Related to the topic of professors who can't teach, look at what Berkeley does (they are the only law school in the country who does this as far as I know).

    http://www.law.berkeley.edu/php-programs/faculty/facultyList.php

    They publish every professor's student reviews on the professor's bio page.

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  8. Since it seems that you're taking requests can you do a post on the possibility of unionizing attorneys as a counterweight to the ABA? The possible advantages and disadvantages and if this is even possible?

    As interesting as the hiring process of law profs is to some I'm more interested in understanding how to combat the disastrous outcomes forced onto us by legal/govt elites. Is collective action even a possibility or desired?

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  9. I don't have a lot of experience practicing law so does that mean I have a better chance of being hired as a professor? Just kidding!

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  10. Terry, don't underestimate the many ways in which the nature of this process helps make reform even more difficult than it would otherwise be, for among other reasons those suggested by 10:47.

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  11. I'm interested in the law prof hiring process, thanks for writing about it and please write more in the future.

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  12. Terry, I agree that it's odd to be discussing how one can profit from a scam, in a blog devoted to elucidating the scam. But it was still interesting information that LawProf shared and a lot of readers were asking about it so whatever I guess.

    P.S. The fact that you had to pay $2,000 this month for your law degree is horrifying. That's a seriously large amount of money that you could have spent in so many other worthwhile ways. Did your law degree provide *any* benefit to your life?

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  13. "I'm interested in the law prof hiring process, thanks for writing about it and please write more in the future."

    Why? Are you actually considering getting a job as a tier 2/3/4 law professor?

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  14. Lawprof, please continue to write about whatever the hell you want to, these people can take it or leave it. Why they think its up to them, I have no idea.

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  15. "Terry, don't underestimate the many ways in which the nature of this process helps make reform even more difficult than it would otherwise be, for among other reasons those suggested by 10:47."

    Ba-Zing!

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  16. Speaking of Terry's $2,000 per month bill, I'll ask a question that came up on prawfsblawg. Terry, if you could go back in time and redo your life to avoid law school, but the cost would be that you get stabbled or raped, would you take such a deal?

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  17. The law prof hiring process is relevant to LawProf's blog because, in addition to being an essential element of what is currently passing for legal education, it is directly related to the cost of tuition: Law school hiring committees collectively drool (as a poster a few days ago aptly put it) over the same small group of JD/PhD candidates from HYS -- and that goes straight to what are effectively bidding wars and the ridiculously high salaries that this new breed of law professors commands (not to mention spousal hires of mixed quality, guarantees of preposterously cushy teaching loads, creation of directorships of Centers for This and That that don't even do anything except raise even more the compensation levels of Prof JD/PhD).

    So, in short.....law prof hiring process > increased law prof salaries > increased tuition > increased student loans.

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  18. I second that Ba-Zing!, 11:36.

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  19. I would love to see an expose of the Centers for This and That racket. At the TT school where I used to work (it's also my alma mater, ugh), the administration threw away thousands upon thousands on that kind of ego-boosting crap, and most of it had virtually no relevance to THE LAW. Not that a bunch of dudes who never practiced law would recognize that little problem.

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  20. Prof. Campos,

    I think you have no chance changing the incoming professor profile. At least not by petition. If you blow up law schools through good data, then there may be some pressure on schools to change their business model with respect to professor profile. Until then, the soft hands get softer, no matter how well reasoned your critique.

    @10:48,

    Stabbed, yes. Raped, No. Rape seems like more of a psychological trauma than a physical one.

    I would cut off at least one non-thumb finger to not have gone to law school. Maybe two.

    I pay 2K to get out in 10 years total after graduation. Started with 143K.

    If I wouldn't face any consequences, I would wrap my JD around a brick and throw it though my school's front window.

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  21. Lawprof--am I right that your practice experience basically matches Prof. Wendel's description? Looking back, do you feel that you should have been hired?

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  22. I seriously wish that LawProf and the moderators at Prawfs would at least edit out the worst of the sexist, misogynist vitriol about post-law school unemployment being equivalent to rape. I think there are 0.0000000000001% odds that any woman would make this contention. For men who face no serious chance of sexual assault to trivialize it in this manner is egregiously offensive and has no place in this dialogue.

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  23. Data from the 2008-2009 AALS Statistical Report on Law Faculty

    Of the total, 10,965 faculty who reported race, 344 were African American males, and 409 were African American females. 199 Hispanic males,138 Hispanic females, 158 Asian males, 112 females, 30 Native American males, 21 females. 5090 white males, 2741 females. The categories of "other races" and multiple races were in the two digits.

    Here's the citation in case I typed any of the numbers wrong in haste.

    http://www.aals.org/statistics/2009dlt/gender.html

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  24. 12:38,

    I am sorry that I veered into your gender studies masters thesis.

    How do you think the SEC gets people to co-operate with an investigation? Threaten a white collar guy with some time in the prison showers, and he gets real chatty.

    And a question, individuals kill themselves rather than go on with the diminished life that law school debt and prospects after law school, shouldn't that be worse than rape?

    Or can men just not say the word. Like a taboo that only women can discuss.

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  25. add an "offer" after law school and before shouldn't

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  26. 20 years of IBR isn't so bad...

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  27. Most men are not white collar criminals, and will not face the same possibility of rape as the average woman free and walking in the general population.

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  28. Mr. Malloy,

    I'm not going to engage with your misogynistic, offensive trivialization of rape. Period. I repeat my request for LawProf and Prawfs' Prof. Horwitz to edit these offensive, inappropriate posts.

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  29. And 1:14, that's even before we consider the fact that white-collar offenders are held in federal prison camps or minimum-security facilities where prison rape is almost nonexistent. While prison rape is a tragic reality in some high-security facilities (especially state facilities), it is not a serious risk faced by white-collar male defendants who are first-time offenders/not flight risks.

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  30. I see. It's a taboo that only women can discuss. And sexual assault doesn't happen to men. Thanks for the clarification.

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  31. There is research on affirmative action in law school hiring--including an extensive empirical study of tenure-track hiring that I conducted with Barbara Reskin. Our work is now out of date (it was based on professors hired 1986-1991), but I suspect some of what we found is still true today. Professors definitely are not afraid to discuss this subject--or even to spend years collecting data on it! I'll share a little about what we found.

    One of our basic findings was interesting in light of comments on this blog: We found that being a white female gave a hiring "plus" equivalent to having an MA in a nonlaw field; that being a minority male gave a hiring plus equivalent to having a PhD in a nonlaw field; and that being a minority female gave no plus at all. The pluses occurred after controlling simultaneously for a large number of other factors in regression equations--and the regression approach allowed us to compare the relative impact of race, sex, and other credentials.

    We found those analogies interesting at the time because the preferences for non-law MAs/PhDs were relatively modest in those years. My personal guess is that PhDs count much more heavily today, while sex and race count less than they did in the late 80s--but other hiring criteria have shifted as well. Notably, publications didn't matter nearly as much in hiring 20 years ago as they do today.

    The pluses noted above applied to the prestige of the school where the candidates were hired. We also looked at two other outcomes: initial professorial rank and subjects taught. We found that men were significantly more likely to be hired as associate professors; women with equivalent credentials were hired as assistant profs (longer tenure track and lower pay). Race did not affect professorial rank. Finally, we found some sex and race correlations with courses taught (again after controlling for credentials and work experience).

    It's hard to believe that our work is now 20 years old (I still feel so young!) but if readers are interested, you can find the basic results at 97 Columbia L. Rev. 199 (1997). A later study, 29 Journal of Legal Studies 345 (2000), looks at sex, race, publications, and citation counts in the same group. Although the articles are dated, they might at least offer a framework for discussing affirmative action in legal academia. And I urge anyone interested in this topic to look at research in the area--plenty of other scholars have carried on the work. Affirmative action is one of those subjects on which people develop strong anecdotal impressions; quantitative research surprises almost everyone, whatever their pre-existing beliefs.

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  32. 1:22: Mr. Malloy - I do not contend that men never experience sexual assault. My point is that men who believe themselves at risk of sexual assault (whether in a prison context, a gay abusive context, or otherwise), are not going to trivialize it as you are. Only men who believe themselves not at risk of sexual assault would be as absurd and offensive as to contend that sexual assault is equivalent to, or not as bad as, failing to obtain a J.D.-required job following law school.

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  33. It is important to mention that a lot of data is out there on topics discussed here as if they were matters of first impression.

    I will take a look at your article, and you may answer this. But how did you determine what amounted to a "plus"? There were not that many black faculty members in the 1980s. It appears that the talk about wanting to hire blacks, for example, gives the impression that this is being done in large numbers and law schools are full of black faculty who have taken jobs from white men. The suggestion in this post, and from other comments, is that affirmative action has been a malign influence on the fortunes of white men. One man commenting on his experiences at the meat market suggested that he probably did not get a job because law schools were expressing an interest in hiring minorities.

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  34. "or just a malign influence" on the legal academy, period, if not specifically on white men. The comments have introduced that angle.

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  35. 1:42: The "plus" consisted of the prestige level of the school. We didn't have information about people who weren't hired, so we couldn't compare the "not hired" to the "hired" (although I think some later studies have looked at that). Instead, we assigned the law schools a prestige ranking and looked at how different factors (prestige of JD school, law review, clerkships, other work experience, sex, race) related to the prestige of the hiring school. Our assumptions were that (1) people were interested in this outcome in itself--i.e., they wanted to know whether women or minorities got jobs at more prestigious schools than white men with similar credentials, and (2) prestige was a partial proxy for getting hired at all.

    But there's obviously a lot of detail in an empirical study like this--even I have trouble remembering all the details at this point! Thanks for your interest.

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  36. Thanks for your answer.

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  37. Wow, genius topic. Corrupt institutions are corrupt in more ways than one.

    For the language police - if you don't like colorful language or are easily offended stay off the Internet. But you won't.

    @11:56 - you have it stupendously backwards. If not for student loans the rest wouldn't be possible.

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  38. Just to add a personal note to the empirical data: My anecdotal experience is as blinkered as anyone else's, but I have never found affirmative action for women or minorities a malign influence in law school hiring. Individuals with these characteristics were terribly underrepresented in legal education, and their perspectives matter in teaching, researching, and practicing law. Both groups also suffered--and still suffer--from various degrees of unconscious bias. I.e., people will unconsciously discount certain credentials when held by women or minorities. Just one of many persuasive studies on this appears here: http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/mullainathan/files/emilygreg.pdf

    Over the years, I have seen law schools try to a greater or lesser degree to combat both of these forces (underrepresentation and unconscious bias). Even when they tried hard, I have never seen anything near excessive numbers of women or minorities hired into tenure-track positions. If anything, I would say that the academy as a whole still falls short in many ways. One of the surprises in my research, for example, was that minority women did not benefit from a "double plus," as many people believed. On the contrary, they fared less well than white women or minority men.

    I have other criticisms of law school hiring, including some of the ones shared in the initial post. But I personally do not see affirmative action as an evil influence in law school hiring. In fact, I think the empirical evidence shows that it has much less force (for good or bad) than many people anecdotally believe.

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  39. I bet many people assume that professor hiring works like law school admissions where minorities are able to get into better schools when compared to white applicants with similar numbers.

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  40. Lawprof:

    If you know, was it always thus so? Was there ever a time when law schools valued actual experience? Was there ever a time when a law school would hire, say, Clarence Darrow? How did it come to this?

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  41. "I seriously wish that LawProf and the moderators at Prawfs would at least edit out the worst of the sexist, misogynist vitriol about post-law school unemployment being equivalent to rape."

    That's not your decision to make. I guarantee you that at least some graduates would have choose rape over law school. Mr. Malloy above said himself that he would prefer to have gotten stabbed, or to have lost two fingers.

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  42. A full analysis of AA's impact on hiring legal professors would need to look at the following to get a better gauge of the impact:

    1. URM preference in undergraduate college admissions;

    2. URM preference in law school admissions;

    3. URM preference in hiring for positions that led to the law prof gig (like clerkships);

    4. URM preference for certain forms of financial aid;

    5. Non URM's impacted by numbers 1 through 4.

    Simply looking at the end of the spectrum and basing conclusions on that is not getting the full picture.

    That said, it is probably not possible to get a full picture of the impact because of the difficulty in obtaining such data, hence the reliance on anecdotal evidence.

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  43. You would have to start back earlier than the things you are listing. You would have to consider the individuals'experiences in life with racism from childhood on, the experiences of their parents, who may have been prevented by law from attending certain schools or were shut out of job opportunities and neighborhoods where good public schools were available-- who were not able to vote with any degree of freedom until the mid-1960s, and not even then.There are a whole lot of things to consider beyond the things you list, and they start before college and before this century, even.

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  44. @ 2:58

    My points were centered on evaluating the impact of AA on hiring legal professors. You're bringing in historical justifications for the program.

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  45. @3:15 That's a big part of how it works, not all but part. The college component does not start out of nowhere.

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  46. @ 3:32

    I drew the line @ college admissions for two reasons:

    1. The potential pool of future law profs comes from those seeking to obtain higher education;

    2. The AA program's "preferences" kick in for future law profs at this level first.

    Again, throwing in the historical backdrop is more of a justification for the program's existence rather than a tool with which to analyze the impact of the program.

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  47. The road to professional life begins way before college. I do not think-- and, again you do-- that starting at college to explain the numbers of black professors makes sense. The number of African American law professors, the relatively small number, is a function of things that happen before college, as well. You pick college because it gives you the chance to talk about "preferences". You don't want to go before that, or consider things outside of that, because then you would have to talk about disadvantages. The only interest is in why there are any black law professors at all, not why there are relatively so few.

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  48. 4:22,
    In a lot of other areas I would agree with you, but not law prof hiring. Think about the pool they are drawing prof hires from (elite schools). Most, if not all, of the minorities at my T-14 law school were from affluent families as were most of the students in general. Since someone is going to ask, I don't know nor do I really care if these people received a benefit from AA. At any rate, I don't think the vast majority of the minorities (or whites for that matter) being hired for prof positions suffered very many injustices prior to entering college.

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  49. @ 4:22

    If you want to analyze the impact that AA has had on URM (not just black) law profs, then you have to examine when the program kicks in. Going back before the time frame that the program kicks in introduces other factors into the analysis.

    These factors have a place in discussing whether government policy should promote the goals of AA, but they simply do not have any role in evaluating the impact of the program in society the way it currently sits. The argument that URMs are disadvantaged is one of the reasons for having the program.

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  50. Well, again, we disagree. Nothing wrong with that. Relative affluence is not the whole story when discussing race and the life histories and experiences of individuals. Talk to some privileged blacks about whether their privilege has always shielded them from discrimination during the course of their lives. But, anyway, we aren't going anywhere with this. My only reason for commenting is that I found it strange that the push to have more diverse faculties would show up as one of the bad parts about today's legal academy.

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  51. 4:57: To be clear, I pointed out that Wendel's article didn't discuss the significance of minority/gender in faculty hiring, when this is a major factor in the sorting process (I haven't read Deborah Merritt's paper but will look at it).

    It wasn't intended as an argument against or for AA per se.

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  52. "How do you think the SEC gets people to co-operate with an investigation? Threaten a white collar guy with some time in the prison showers, and he gets real chatty. "

    Brilliant retort, and by the way when the hell is the US going to fix the problem of male prison rape? I mean seriously why is this accepted, and even joked about?

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  53. The thing about AA in hiring, is that it's something white professors complain about (I can recall some rants) but really how much of it could there be when we have so few black law professors?

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  54. @ Law Prof. You can see how it could be taken as that, appearing at the end of a litany of other things that are clearly being offered as problems with the legal academy-- the supposed hostility toward people who have experience in practice, the new interest in JD-PhD candidates. Why include a practice that you thought was neutral or positive in a list of things that you clearly think are bad. Why announce Wendel's failure to discuss this as a "big omission". I have not read the piece, but I am sure there are other issues not discussed in it.I could say, "Why didn't you talk about "A"? If I did that, it would be because I have deep feelings about "A"'s importance. Wendel may not have thought it important, or that it was such an accepted part of the law school culture that it did not warrant a separate discussion. I don't know. But raising this along with other problems in today's academy, I think, points to its being categorized as a problem.

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  55. Also, if I am remembering correctly, you broached this topic before when describing reports of average debt among students. I remember your making a side comment to the effect that you could guess the ethnic makeup of the people who got loans that lessened their debt. If I am wrong in my memory of this, I apologize.

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  56. You are mistaken -- I never said anything like that. Also, I noted Wendel's omission because it's one of the unfortunate aspects of AA issues that many people avoid them altogether in situations where they're obviously germane. Minority status is a very big factor in whether people get hired but he doesn't even mention it, in a situation where he mentions just about every other possible factor.

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  57. This is what I was talking about in your "Road to Serfdom II" post

    "(4) It's interesting to try to tease out some ethnographic generalizations from the percentages of students who don't have law school debt at particular schools. I'm pretty sure I can guess what it tells us that two out of five SMU law students graduated with no law school debt at all, for instance."

    Maybe I misunderstood what you were driving at, what did that mean? Why would the ethnographic generalizations be of interest?

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  58. SMU is a school full of rich kids.

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  59. You are saying that SMU students are well off? Would that be ethnographically based?

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  60. And how big a factor is race in hiring?

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  61. Of course, that makes sense. The SMU thing, I mean. That's why I offered the statement tentatively.

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  62. Law school faculties are still OVERWHELMINGLY white. That's how big a factor.(Also, I think it's possible LawProf meant ethnography in its broadest sense - studies of cultures/groups of peoples - including, perhaps, wealthy and mostly white student bodies. He'll have to tell us, though, if that's what he meant.)

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  63. Ah. You just said the same thing (that he might have meant that). Nevermind ...

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  64. Well, yes it's a factor when you consider the numbers I posted above from the AALS statistical analysis of the profession. There are 10,965 law professors, roughly 853 are black, 337 are Hispanic, 270 are Asian and 51 are Native Americans. Then there are small numbers of other groups and people who say they are of mixed origin. At the same time, roughly 7,831 are white. You can focus on the relatively small numbers of non-whites, or you can say that the policy that brought us these small numbers is a bad "factor".

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  65. "Maybe I misunderstood what you were driving at, what did that mean? Why would the ethnographic generalizations be of interest?"

    wth? how did you read race into that comment?

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  66. By a mistaken memory of ethnic instead of ethnographic. Ethnicity is sometimes used in racial terms, although it has a different meaning. That is why I was tentative and said I apologize if my memory of the comment was mistaken. It was.

    ReplyDelete
  67. Although ethnography does have to do with race, as well.

    ReplyDelete
  68. Wendel's post makes being a law professor sound like the worst job in the world. Even more than in Biglaw, you have to suck up to a bunch of douchebags in the hopes of joining the ranks of the douchebag elite. Ugh.

    The best part is when he slags on schools that do not aspire to be more than bar prep for in-state practitioners and emphasizes that teaching is secondary and being a law professor is not a teaching job. But teaching is the only reason anyone outside the law professor circle jerk cares what any law professor has to say -- and even at that, only insofar as the professor has a grade to grant to a supplicant.

    There are some things you can't unsee. I wish I never read Wendel's post. I thought I hated the law school machine before, but that just filled me with pure rage.

    ReplyDelete
  69. Interview tips at Prawfsblawg

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  70. I like how the only thing discussed from this post and the associated article are AA and rape(which unsurprisingly wasn't even in the post to begin with).

    One of these things has nothing to do with law school hiring and its effects on tuition/student loans and the other would probably qualify as the least concerning aspect of all the retarded practices listed.



    @6:12, Nice try. I'm guessing your a law prof?

    ReplyDelete
  71. LawProf. You hinted at a future post on affirmative action. A word of advice. Don't. You are already a controversial figure in the legal academic culture. A white person can say nothing substantive about affirmative action without being branded a racist. A lot of people already want to stick a knife in your back. If you discuss affirmative action, that knife will be race.

    ReplyDelete
  72. 10:43: "Wendel's post makes being a law professor sound like the worst job in the world."

    I second that. Personally, I'm glad that I read it; it has removed any desire to shift from being a lawyer to being a law professor.

    ReplyDelete
  73. @LawProf : Paper on the dominance of the T-14 in hiring - Reproduction of Hierarchy? A Social Network Analysis of the American Law Professoriate

    http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1352656

    ReplyDelete
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