Todd’s post cause me to think about how I got into law teaching. The first time I went through the AALS job market as an assistant Cook County State’s Attorney I got no job offers. I did not even get any call backs. The next year, I took a leave of absence from the State’s Attorney’s Office to be a research fellow at the University of Chicago School of Law. This was not a formal program and I had no defined responsibilities. I was just there to study. As a way of transitioning from criminal law to contracts, I spent the year reading the classic contracts scholarship and wrote a draft of what became A Consent Theory of Contract.
What caused me to remember this was Todd’s suggestion that law professors first read the classics. This was a year spent reading, as well as acclimating myself to academia. And I made use of the background in the literature that I gained from all this reading for years and years afterwards. And I got a teaching job to boot! (I had many more interviews and several call backs before I even did any work. Merely the change of status from county prosecutor to research fellow at the U of C seemed to have made the difference.)
While I do not think we need PhD’s or even M.A.’s to teach law–and I doubt that peer reviewed journals would make that much difference–it is too bad that a year of reading in the field in which you want to teach is not required before becoming a professor. Perhaps one day a law school will decide it can better compete with Harvard, Yale and Stanford (who together produce nearly half of all law professors) in placing their graduates in teaching jobs by creating such a program for its most promising students.
Comments are closed.