Quote from: greenplaid on May 21, 2008, 04:28:28 PM

Quote from: CLS_1L on May 20, 2008, 01:06:15 AM

http://www.concurringopinions.com/archives/2008/05/law_professor_hiring.html

it's going to be VERY hard, even from HYS -

Do I need stellar grades, a law review position and a top clerkship to go into law teaching?
"No. Excellent performance in law school certainly helps in securing an entry-level job in law teaching but it is not a necessary, nor even the most important, condition. Law school faculty appointments committees look for predictors of scholarly productivity and good teaching. A CLS grad with grades in the B/B+ range who writes and publishes a solid article in a good journal and has the backing of one or more faculty mentors is likely to do better on the job market than an A student who clerked for the Second Circuit but has no scholarly writing and no professor that knows him or her well. This is not to say that conventional measures of achievement in law school are unimportant, but they may be more valuable as pathways than as ends in themselves. Good grades and law journal experience will help you secure a position as a research assistant, which, if you do a good job, will result in a positive recommendation from a faculty member down the line. Moreover, the longer one has been a practicing attorney, the less relevance law school grades have relative to other factors, especially if the prospective law professor intends to teach and write in an area of practice expertise." http://www.law.columbia.edu/careers/law_teaching/faq

I'm not sure I see what you're getting at here. Although getting hired is definitely a function of both publications and grades/clerkship(s), it's very clearly a difficult job to get by any metric, even from HYS. The fact that you can get a teaching position without stellar grades doesn't change that in my opinion (impressing rockstar faculty members enough that they're willing to go to bat for you and getting a good article published in a solid journal is really difficult to do in its own right).

"it's very clearly a difficult job to get by any metric, even from HYS" ABSOLUTELY!

http://www.concurringopinions.com/archives/2008/05/law_professor_hiring.html

Ya'll interested in teaching should check out this site. Includes stats from the last few law prof hiring fairs. Not sure it will tell you anything new - it's going to be VERY hard, even from HYS - but the stats are interesting nonetheless.

The stats are extraordinarily interesting...and revealing.

It seems like the question of job-market dominance is more important than faculty quality...

THE RECORD HLS
Prof. Levinson Demystifies the Path to Legal Academia
By Dina Awerbuch

http://media.www.hlrecord.org/media/storage/paper609/news/2007/10/18/News/Prof-Levinson.Demystifies.The.Path.To.Legal.Academia-3044745.shtml
"...Instead of fancy grades, clerkships, and practical experience, the modern credential of choice for law school hiring committees is a graduate degree in an allied field such as economics, political science, and even English or psychology. Approximately twenty-five percent of entry-level professors hired last year had Ph.D.'s, and a large number had Master's degrees. While this is the biggest credential a candidate can have, don't despair if you haven't found the spare five to ten years to earn a terminal degree in molecular biophysics to help you compete for that intellectual property professorship you have your eye on. Levinson reassured the attendees that fewer than half of last year's hires had any graduate training. Law schools value Ph.D.'s because they indicate that candidates have certain qualities. If a candidate lacks the credential, he or she can still present those qualities independently.


Significant expertise in a field, coupled with interdisciplinary methodologies, is highly valued. Expertise gives an aspiring professor a research agenda, and lets the school know what area the candidate will focus on in future scholarship. While law schools look for professors who are "competent lawyers," often simply graduating from a school like Harvard satisfies this criteria, and schools tend to focus more on whether a candidate has made some substantial progress towards becoming a professor. Levinson emphasized the importance of knowing what field you intend to work in, familiarity with scholarly work in that field, the ability to critique current work, and a sense of what you are going to contribute to the field.

"More than anything else," Levinson concluded, "law schools are looking for promising writing." In order to get a job, a candidate must have written one or two publishable pieces of scholarship...."

The Philosophical Gourmet Report by  Brian Leiter

"...For purposes of students thinking about teaching careers, the most important factor is the scholarly distinction of the faculty. There are some 180 accredited law schools in the U.S., but the top 12 law schools in terms of faculty quality are (in alphabetical order) the following:

Columbia University
 University of Chicago
 
Georgetown University
 University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
 
Harvard University
 University of Pennsylvania
 
New York University
 University of Texas, Austin
 
Stanford University
 University of Virginia
 
University of California, Berkeley
 Yale University
 
On the cusp of the "top 12" are Cornell University; Duke University; Northwestern University; University of California, Los Angeles and, maybe, University of Southern California. Graduates of these 17 schools also dominate the job market for law teachers, though graduates of Yale, Harvard, Chicago, and Stanford have a disproportionately large share of that market as compared to the others...." http://www.philosophicalgourmet.com/lawsch.asp

Right... that's what I was saying... what were you trying to say in your "Holy Trinity" post?

Simply...
A lot of top caliber students attend schools not part of the holy trinity. Some LSDers forget. Hearty congrats Bulldog86 on UVA...and to ManTGeo on Harvard!