The Market for New Law Professors

Through the Legal Theory Blog, I learned of Tracey E. George & Albert Yoon's forthcoming article, The Labor Market for New Law Professors.  Here is the 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 non-traditional 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.

Brian Leiter reacts here, and in related news, Matt Bodie looks ahead to the 2013 hiring season and wonders whether law schools will look to more than teaching interests and research agendas.

Because of their focus on all stages of the hiring process, George & Yoon's results were mixed when it came to the effects of PhD's, clerkships, and publications on the hiring process, though they note in the conclusion:

The current study can help us to evaluate the law school crisis through its focus on how law schools hire tenure-track faculty. As law schools are called upon to reevaluate our goals and pedagogy, they rely on law professors who have a limited range of experiences. Nearly all new hires in our study attended a small set of schools which are more likely to emphasize theory over practice. And, the new hires have a shared set of professional experiences, especially time as a law teaching fellow and a judicial law clerk. Missing from those experiences is substantial time outside of a law school. The lack of real-world experience affects the capacity of new hires to teaching skills courses and to assist students making the transition to those real-world jobs.