To followup Todd’s post, here is an excerpt from National Review’s piece [not online, though Lexis will have it eventually] on George Mason Law School:
To use a baseball metaphor, [former Dean Henry] Manne was a scout who specialized in the minor leagues. Whereas his competitors were obsessed with signing big-name free agents in hot fields such as feminist legal theory, Manne quietly assembled a team of undervalued unknowns. “If the market discriminates against conservatives, then there should be good opportunities for hiring conservatives,” says [current Dean Daniel] Polsby. This is exactly the sort of observation one would expect a market-savvy law-and-economics scholar to make. Manne and his successors were able to act on this theory, and though Mason has in recent years expanded its recruitment of non-economics specialists [in part because law and economics scholars have gone from undervalued in the market when Manne was dean to a highly desired commodity], it has stuck by the core observation that law schools routinely overlook raw talent. Associate professor Craig Lerner, for instance, studied under the political theorist Allan Bloom at the University of Chicago and worked for Kenneth Starr on the Whitewater investigation. Listing either of these experiences on a résumé might easily turn off a hiring committee dominated by liberals, which is to say a hiring committee at just about every other law school. And so Lerner turns out to be exactly the type of candidate that attracts GMU. “Have you read Moneyball?” asks Todd Zywicki, another one of Mason’s bright young profs, in reference to the best-selling book by Michael Lewis on how the Oakland Athletics franchise assembled playoff-caliber teams on a limited budget. “We’re the Oakland A’s of the law-school world.”
Todd’s right. As a rule, we don’t have the cash to recruit big-name laterals, and our top AALS (law school hiring market) choices routinely get offers from top 10 schools that we can’t compete with. But we manage to consistently hire top candidates by thinking outside the box about appointments to take advantages of inefficiencies in the market (e.g., not overweighting clerking for the USSC–only 2 former clerks on the faculty, despite our location–worrying more about proven scholarly ability than what law school the candidate attended, plus some trade secrets I won’t reveal here).
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