The Labor Market for New Law Professors

Abstract

Law school professors control the production of lawyers and influence the evolution of law. Understanding who is hired as a tenure-track law professor is of clear importance to debates about the state of legal education in the United States. But while opinions abound on the law school hiring process, little is empirically known about what explains success in the market for law professors. Using a unique and extensive data set of survey responses from candidates in the 2007-2008 legal academic labor market, we examine the factors that influence which candidates are interviewed and ultimately hired by law schools. We find that law schools appear open to nontraditional candidates in the early phases of the hiring process but when it comes to the ultimate decision-hiring-they focus on candidates who look like current law professors.

The Hog Cycle of Law Professors: An Econometric Time Series Analysis of the Entry-Level Job Market in Legal Academia

“…We show that the German market for law professors fulfils the theoretical conditions for the emergence of a hog cycle, and test empirically whether academics allow themselves to be governed by the brute logic of supply and demand, or whether their job market behavior is mitigated by additional forces that are not part of the neoclassical model. This endeavor contributes to a growing literature which addresses the fact that even today we still “know surprisingly little about the market for law professors” [ 1 ]:4.…”

“…Given how “little is empirically known about what explains success in the market for law professors” [ 1 ]:1, professors-to-be have to take decisions in a complex market based on very few observables. The most salient such observable is the number of positions available when the candidate considers embarking on her academic career.…”

“…To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to put this hypothesis forward, let alone test it. There is one predecessor paper on the German market for law professors, covering the period from 1949 to 1969 [ 28 ], but it only reports aggregate descriptive statistics; a more recent empirical study of the US job market for law professors [ 1 ] did not gather time series data.…”

The Legal Academy’s Ideological Uniformity

“…As we noted in our introduction, our analysis here was purely descriptive in nature. This was in part due to data limitations (e.g., we do not have data on law professor candidates as in George and Yoon (2014) or on specific outcomes). However, we feel that the question of what causes these patterns is ripe for future examinations.…”

Rethinking Law School Tenure Standards

“…11 This might be particularly surprising given that only one in seven entry level candidates obtain a position each year (George and Yoon, 2014) and claims that problems in the entry level academic market in law schools lead to highly inefficient outcomes (Redding, 2003). student run law reviews, 12 suggests that placement may signal limited information about the quality of the research.…”