Going on the Academic Job Market - Part 1: The Initial Decision

In early 2022, I left a career in civil litigation in Los Angeles for a temporary faculty position at the University of Idaho College of Law. Starting in law school at UCLA, I had become interested in pursuing a career in legal academia. Using Eugene Volokh's book, Academic Legal Writing, as a guide, I began writing and publishing legal scholarship in UCLA's journals and elsewhere. But when I began practicing, especially when I began practicing in litigation, writing took a distant backseat to my job. I had to learn the ropes of litigation, firm dynamics, billable hours, and a host of other things. I worked in several jobs with less-than-stellar work-life balance dynamics. Only when I made it to my last firm, Glaser Weil, was I able to find a balance that let me get back into writing, and to the realization that an academic career might be possible. After making the move to Idaho, I went on the job market, ultimately ending up at St. Mary's University School of Law, where I will begin teaching in August.

This is meant to be the start of a series of blog posts detailing my experience in going on the legal academic job market--starting with my initial determination to take a visiting teaching position, and moving into the hiring process itself. I plan for these posts to be divided between summarizing my own experience, and laying out pieces of advice that I think might be helpful to those going through the same process. While there's some good advice on the topic out there (some of which I list at the end of this post), a lot of what I've seen and heard tends to be directed to a standard sort of job applicant. 

The Standard Applicant

Don't be fooled by the label, "standard." These applicants are far from uniform, average, or unqualified. Indeed, the "standard" legal academic job applicant is uniformly someone with a collection of top credentials.

The standard applicant is a person who's gone to a top law school. As Brian Leiter writes here, Yale leads law schools in producing law professors, and is followed by Harvard, Stanford, and Chicago, which in turn are followed by NYU, Columbia, Berkeley, Michigan, Virginia, University of Pennsylvania, and Northwestern. 

There is a fair probability that the standard applicant went into a clerkship right out of law school (often appellate, often multiple clerkships). This qualification, however, has declined in recent years, with data compiled by Sarah Lawsky indicating that of successful applicants in the 2022-23 hiring year, 47 percent had clerkships, while 50 percent of applicants hired in 2021-22 had clerkships. In years prior the percentage of successful applicants with clerkships fluctuates between 50 and 60 percent. Accordingly, while clerkships are common, they may not be common enough to count as "standard."

The standard applicant perhaps spent a year or two at a large law firm before transitioning into a prestigious fellowship (often at a top law school, often a multi-year program) designed primarily around providing a place to write, workshop, and publish scholarship, and to perhaps get some initial teaching experience. The standard applicant often has an advanced degree along with a fellowship--often a PhD in a topic relevant to their scholarship. As a result, the standard applicant often enters the job market with a fair amount of scholarship already published, with more on the way. The fellowship and advanced degrees give the applicant a ready-to-go network of academic contacts and recommenders.

These posts may be of help to the standard applicant, but they're not the audience I have in mind. Indeed, I suspect that between their prestigious law schools, fellowships, and advanced degrees, these applicants will have plenty of detailed advice on how to approach the job market--advice likely far more detailed and helpful than anything I can provide.

Instead, these posts are meant to inform (and, I hope, inspire?) the nonstandard applicants--those who may not have gone to a top law schools, those without prestigious clerkships, and those who instead of spending years pursuing advanced degrees chose instead to practice as lawyers.

My Background

This section and the next are a narrative describing my background and experience applying for my first teaching position. If you aren't interested in the background, feel free to skip below to where I've distilled points of advice that I hope are generally applicable to people in similar situations.

I count myself as a nonstandard applicant. I went to UCLA for law school--a great school, but not a typical source of legal academics. My interest in legal academia, which began in law school, was largely spontaneous and originated in a realization that I enjoyed writing legal scholarship. At the time (2011-2014) I was not aware of any presentations or programs geared toward those interested in academia. Instead, I got my initial advice by making appointments with professors during office hours early in the semester, in which I would ask about their own experiences and advice. One of these meetings was with Jennifer Mnookin, then my evidence professor, and eventual dean of UCLA Law and Chancellor of University of Wisconsin-Madison. As it turned out, she was in charge of the hiring committee that year, and provided some excellent insights into applicant trends and success tips. Most notably, she pointed out that the vast majorities of those making it to advanced interview stages had advanced degrees--a quality that she suggested might be a proxy for a body of written work.

With this advice, I dove even deeper into writing. I also worked as a teaching assistant for some undergraduate philosophy courses during my third year, which gave me experience running a classroom, drafting quiz/exam/essay questions, and grading. An advanced degree was out of the question--I had a lot of debt and I hadn't gotten a job during the on campus interviews, so my top concern was simply finding a place to work. I ended up in a one-year fellowship at the Orange County District Attorney's Office, where I spent the bulk of my time trying misdemeanor cases at all stages, including nine jury trials. From there, I transitioned to civil litigation.

While I'd been able to keep up some writing at the DA's office, this ended once I shifted over to civil litigation. Billable hours took some adjustment, and it took me a few years before I became efficient enough to meet my targets without a significant excess of nonbillable hours. I started at a small firm, then moved to a larger firm--but found that the work (insurance defense in personal injury, landlord-tenant, and professional liability cases) to be unsatisfying. 

My last firm, where I worked for about four-and-a-half years, changed all of this. I worked for a variety of partners on a wide range of cases, including high-profile cases in a variety of interesting fields like entertainment law, civil rights litigation, and environmental law. And I became efficient enough to get back into writing, which I turned to in earnest when the pandemic hit. 

Initially, I wrote about what I found interesting or fun, without much regard to a future academic career (which I wasn't really considering when I started writing again in 2019). This led to some oddball scholarship, starting with what is still my favorite article, Shooting Fish. But it also made it far easier to balance writing with work, as the writing was more of a hobby than a second job. And as time went on, I found that one paper led to another and that I had soon built up some consistent work (and had plans for future papers) that told a relatively clear scholarly story. Additionally, through writing and promoting scholarship on Twitter, I began to build contacts with other legal academics, such as Brian Frye who invited me onto his podcast, Ipse Dixit, to discuss the Shooting Fish article.

In late 2021, I began thinking more seriously about taking the leap from practice to academia. I did not consider myself ready to go on the job market. While I had a decent number of publications, many of them had been written several years earlier during and immediately after law school. And, more importantly to me, I did not think I would be a credible applicant without some teaching experience. In early 2022, I began the process of applying to visiting positions around the country.

Applying for the First Teaching Position

In seeking out visiting spots at law schools, I tried looking for positions that billed themselves as fellowships meant to prepare applicants to eventually go on the job market. At the same time, I was informed of some unwritten rules or expectations of certain, prestigious fellowships which, while purportedly open to all, often were quite credential-focused themselves. Getting a prestigious fellowship may be a feasible option for the standard applicant from Yale, Harvard, or Stanford, but those from schools that don't often produce academics would likely have lower chances of admission.

As a result, I cast a wide net in seeking out visiting positions. I'd already been able to produce a fair amount of scholarship while meeting my billable hour requirements, so I figured I'd be able to do the same if my eventual position focused on teaching rather than on developing scholarship. I found that visiting positions were closely tied to school's regular hiring practices, and were often posted in the winter and early spring as applicants were hired (or as positions remained unfilled) and teaching needs became more apparent. I applied as positions were announced--I believe the bulk of my applications went out between February and April.

One disadvantage I had in the application process (for which I was to blame) was a lack of academic references. I graduated from law school in 2014, and didn't get back into writing scholarship until 2019. I didn't begin applying for visiting positions until 2022. In those intervening years, I had not kept up contacts with my former law professors, and I could have communicated more regularly with those in the fields in which I was working. Additionally, I couldn't really ask partners at my firm to be references because they didn't know I was applying for another job. Ultimately, I cobbled together references from a professor I'd begun communicating with who I'd met virtually once I began writing again, a childhood friend who'd gone on to get a PhD in rhetoric and with whom I'd coauthored an article, and a former partner at my firm who'd recently left to a different firm.

One of the schools to which I applied was Idaho. The position was a one-year temporary faculty spot, focused entirely on teaching (with no scholarship requirement or expectation). Still, the teaching subjects were constitutional law and criminal procedure, which aligned perfectly with my research interests. I applied, and ended up getting an interview in early May. 

My biggest concern going into the interview was my lack of teaching experience. For a candidate for a visiting position, I felt that my publications were sufficient, but I'd never taught a law school course. To make up for this, I emphasized what I thought to be transferable experiences, including my prior experience as a teaching assistant, as well as my experiences mentoring more junior associates in my practice.

It seems that I was able to convince my interviewers, as I received an offer shortly thereafter. Suddenly, things were real and I began planning my exit from my firm. I had good relationships with the partners and while they were sad to see me go, they told me that I could always return if academia didn't work out. This ended up helping me out a great deal in the long run by removing a great deal of stress and uncertainty once I finally went on the market. If things didn't work out, I could always return to my previous job.

Considerations Before Making the Leap

Below are some points of advice that I've distilled from my experience of deciding to make the initial leap from practice to a visiting position. These points only address this initial stage (although some may also be relevant to later stages of the process). I'll be providing similar points of advice for the later stages of the application process in later posts. 

• The Type of Fellowship or Visiting Position: Not all temporary academic positions are created equal. Some positions have a primary focus of getting an applicant ready for the job market. These positions will focus on developing and workshopping scholarship by creating time to write and interact with a school's faculty. Frequently, these are multi-year positions, where one develops scholarship in the first year and goes on the market in the second, while maybe teaching a course or two along the way. When I hear "fellowship," this is generally what I think of. On the other hand, there are visiting positions where a school is simply looking to get a teaching spot filled--either a hire fell through or someone left, and they need someone to teach a certain set of courses. These positions won't be built around preparing you for the market, and are often going to be one-year positions. I've found that the description of the visiting position tends to indicate whether it's a fellowship or visiting teaching position: look for language regarding whether scholarship will be supported and workshopped, as well as language indicating that part of the position will involve preparation to go on the teaching market. If you went to a top school or have other solid credentials like a graduate degree or solid clerkship, you should seriously consider applying to the more prestigious fellowships (Bigelow, Climenko, etc.), as you will have a huge advantage when you eventually go on the market through resources and name-recognition. But if you can only get into a visiting teaching position, you can still be well-positioned when you eventually go on the market. At PrawfsBlawg, Jessica Erickson breaks down the different types of visiting position, and provides helpful advice for applicants in determining whether a particular posting falls into each category.
• Take Initiative at a Visiting Teaching Position: While visiting teaching positions may not have the advantages of a full-on fellowship, they are still good opportunities! My position at Idaho was like this, and it still got me in touch with professors who could advise me on the job application process, look over my scholarship, and serve as references. Still, going on the market from one of these teaching-centric positions can be more of a challenge, especially if you're expected to take on a full teaching load and still make time to continue writing and preparing your academic materials. You will need to take initiative to shape the position to be as much like a fellowship as you can by finding time to write, reaching out to professors to ask them to review your scholarship, seeing if they can arrange workshops for you to practice presenting your work, and asking them to watch you teach so they may serve as effective references. If you can put in the work, you can transform a visiting teaching position to carry many of the benefits of a fellowship.
• Credentials: Even at the early stage of finding an initial teaching job, credentials are important. Those who went to lower-ranked schools will likely face an uphill journey for positions. I've heard from some people that not having a clerkship may be a further obstacle, but others more often tell me that a clerkship is not the necessary credential it used to be. Some of the most prestigious fellowships may be effectively out of reach for applicants who graduated from certain schools. Still, there are strategies one may take if they, like me, don't have the standard set of credentials or graduate degrees. Writing and publishing before applying to the initial job signals your interest in academia--even if you're applying for a position where scholarship isn't part of the job. I was able to refer back to my scholarship to demonstrate my interest in academia and enthusiasm for the teaching role. Additionally, casting a wide net--both regionally and with types of visiting positions--increases the chances of landing an initial role, although it may not be an ideal, scholarship-focused fellowship. 
• Teaching Subjects: If you are applying to visiting teaching positions rather than fellowships, focus on positions that align with your scholarly interests. Teaching a subject complements research on a subject--it often forces one to revisit fundamentals, question assumptions, and refresh oneself on the relevant case law and statutes. Even if a position requires you to have a full courseload, aligning those courses with your research will end up enhancing your scholarly output. It will also give you more credibility on the job market, as you'll have something to point to as evidence of why you want to teach a particular type of course.
• Location Flexibility: To take full advantage of the visiting positions that may be available, you should be prepared to move just about anywhere. Instilling this flexibility at this stage will also help when on the market for a permanent position. For the initial teaching job, however, there can be even more flexibility, as you will likely only be in that location for a year or two. It's also worth keeping in mind that a more rural location will likely have cheaper living expenses, which may ease the transition into academia. However--keep in mind that you may need to travel frequently when you're on the job market, so ready access to an airport should be a key consideration as well.
• Costs: If you have the ability to save up before making the leap, I recommend doing so. Visiting position pay isn't very high, and relocation costs are high. In this way, non-standard applicants coming from firm practice have a bit of an advantage, as I was able to save up a decent amount before applying to my visiting position. If you are in a government or public interest position where this may be more of a challenge, this isn't the end of the world. Even at the visiting level, you can still negotiate things like reimbursement for moving expenses. I've found that a gentle inquiry into what may be possible is the best way to get these negotiations going, and I suspect that many schools will be able to offer at least something so they can get necessary teaching positions filled.
• Backup Plan: The job market is an uncertain place, especially for non-standard applicants, and even if you get a visiting position or fellowship, there's no guarantee that you'll end up with a permanent position. Accordingly, develop a backup plan going into the process in case things don't work out. Ask around the school where you're considering visiting to see if visiting faculty tend to be re-hired for second and third years. See if your firm will give you the option of a one-year leave of absence rather than leaving altogether (this was an option that several of the partners floated to me when I left). And consider how you will frame your visiting position if you try to reenter the market--which, on the private side, may be wary of such a departure from practice. For me, the story would have gone: "I decided to take a risk after the pandemic caused me to rethink my life priorities, but decided that academia wasn't for me, and I want to return to litigation where I have all this experience and know I can succeed." At the very least, you should think of a line like this that you'll use should you need to reenter your initial field.
• Understand that People Want to Help: Throughout the application process, I found that many people--even if I hadn't spoken with them for a long time, or if I had only interacted with them a few times--were willing to give their time and advice to support my move to academia. Don't be afraid to ask for help! The vast majority of law professors and others in legal academia will be happy to help you however they can, and will often point you in the direction of resources or people with even more knowledge.

Additional Resources

Here, I'm compiling a list of resources helpful at various stages of the process--not just the initial leap into a first teaching position. I'll likely be copying this section and expanding it as these posts continue.

Sarah Lawsky's compilations of entry-level hiring information and hiring plans and committees are invaluable to those entering the job market. Her data relies on her own investigation and self-reporting and, while therefore incomplete, captures a lot of information regarding the layout of the job market and available positions. Follow her on Twitter, or look for her posts on Prawfsblawg to stay up to date.

Orin Kerr's podcast/video series, The Legal Academy, is a collection of interviews with various legal scholars with a consistent focus on the nature of legal academia and strategies for those seeking to enter academia. I especially recommend his interviews with Emma Kaufman and Sarah Lawsky.

The AALS--especially their information regarding the Faculty Appointments Register (FAR), which you will need to fill out if you are seriously considering going on the market. This is a centralized set of one-page summaries of applicants that gets sent out to all member schools. By registering and inputting your information, your information will be included in this distribution. I'll go into more detail on the process in a dedicated post, but make sure to register before the first distribution deadline (this year: August 11, 2023).

I'm happy to chat with anyone interested in entering legal academia--especially those who may not be typical candidates. You can find my contact information on my faculty page.

[EDITED July 17, 2023: I revised the descriptions of "standard" applicants to revise the list of schools that tend to produce legal academics, as well as to add qualifying language to the discussion of whether standard applicants tend to have clerkships]