In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Regina Austin L’73 took a traditional path to a career as a law professor. After graduating from Penn Law, she clerked for Judge Edmund B. Spaeth, of the Superior Court of Pennsylvania, and then practiced at Schnader, Harrison, Segal & Lewis in Philadelphia before joining the Penn faculty in 1977.

"That's what people did when I started teaching,” says Austin, the William A. Schnader Professor of Law at Penn. “They did well in law school; they did a clerkship; they spent a brief amount of time at a law firm; and then they went into the academy. That’s not the pattern today.”

Now, says Austin, junior faculty are more likely to have completed graduate work in a related discipline before, during, or after law school than to have practiced law. “I think that the nature of the legal profession has changed as well,” explains Austin. “There is a kind of dialectic going on, so the lawyer of tomorrow is more likely to be a policymaker, a business person, less likely to keep the same job forever the way folks did when I was coming along."

As Austin and her colleagues in the law professorate have seen, aspiring law professors need new credentials, among them interdisciplinary skill, high grades, and serious writing experience, to succeed today. Penn Law is working to prepare up-and-coming law professors, while they earn their JDs, for the new expectations of the legal academy.