Law School Climates: Job Satisfaction Among Tenured US Law Professors

Abstract

In this article, we combine quantitative and qualitative methods to investigate why post‐tenure law professors of color and women professors within the US legal academy are differentially dissatisfied with their work lives. Previous social science research has indicated lingering difficulties for professionals from traditionally marginalized groups as they advance to higher levels. Post‐tenure law professors have been understudied relative to similar senior‐level professionals. Mixed methods allow us to isolate institutional structure and implicit cultural bias as key mediators of this dissatisfaction, converging on issues of respect, voice, and collegiality as crucial. We use the example of the legal academy to show how empirical research can shed important light on the realities of legal professionals—here, the faculty who are training the next generation of US attorneys. Following in the new legal realist tradition, we demonstrate the power of mixed empirical methodologies for grasping social realities pertinent to law.

Persistence Despite Change: The Academic Gender Gap in Australian Law Schools

“…Women are less likely to hold an appointment in an elite law school (Chused 1988;Farley 1996), they publish less (Kotkin 2010;Cotropia and Petherbridge 2017), and they receive lower salaries (Seibel 1996). Relative to their male counterparts, female legal academics have lower levels of job satisfaction, perceive tenure decisions as unfair (Barnes and Mertz 2018), and have higher levels of attrition (Merritt 2000).…”