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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