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Law School Admissions / Re: Ranking of Top 40 Law Schools by Student (Numerical) Quality 2008 Brian Leiter
« on: May 22, 2008, 12:37:13 PM »"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
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).