CAREERS IN LAW TEACHINGThis website is designed to present information to University of Pennsylvania Law School graduates who are interested in careers in law teaching. It will focus on five areas:
Law School Tenure Track Teaching PositionsThe process for gaining a full tenure faculty position at an American law school is very competitive. In a country that is graduating almost 40,000 law students each year, there are possibly a few hundred positions available, nationwide, in any given year, and many of these will be filled by those who are already on faculty at other institutions. The supply of excellent, talented, scholarly law graduates interested in teaching far exceeds the demand. With that said, there are steps you can take to make yourself as strong a candidate as possible for that job market. Many of these steps are outlined in a bi-annual spring volume of the Michigan Journal of Race & Law entitled "Breaking Into the Academy: The 2000-2002 Michigan Journal of Race & Law Guide for Aspiring Law Professors." (Please call to request a copy if you are unable to obtain one locally.) As that publication makes clear, there are certain essential steps you must take prior to entering the job market. Perhaps the first and foremost is clearly articulating your scholarly agenda. It is not enough to have a strong academic record, to have had a good clerkship and excellent employment to date, and to enjoy teaching. Law schools are not interested in hiring lawyers who have great backgrounds but whose interest in teaching is generated from their lack of satisfaction practicing law. Rather, they are interested in hiring academics. You must have an agenda for your own academic work; you must be able to describe the field to which you would like to contribute through your research and teaching, and the scholarly direction this contribution will take. Faculty members at Penn advise writing out a short-term and long-term plan for your scholarship. Where do you see your work taking you within the first two years of teaching? Within five years? Ten years? What research methodology will you use? (empirical, interdisciplinary, etc.) What will the results of your work look like? How would you speak about your scholarly goals with the academics that will be interviewing you for positions? In creating your agenda, you may be wise to consider that some areas are easier to break into than others. It is very difficult to gain entry level positions in Constitutional Law and Civil Procedure; these positions do not become available that frequently. Areas that are more open today include securities regulations, the technical areas of property law, intellectual property, law and cyberspace, and law and medicine. As these last categories would indicate, the areas that are currently "hot" change as issues in the legal marketplace change. Those who can take a look into the future can position themselves well by selecting an upcoming field to target for their scholarly agenda. You would be wise to consider how your previous work and experience, particularly academic work and experience, will combine with your law degree to contribute to your scholarly work. A current trend, and very important, in law faculty hiring is the attraction of candidates who have training in some discipline in addition to law. More and more frequently, law schools are hiring candidates with Ph.D.s or other graduate degrees in other disciplines. These candidates bring an interdisciplinary approach to their legal academic work that has become very attractive. Here, too, however, the combination of knowledge bases has to inform the legal scholarship of that candidate B it is not enough to have or add another graduate degree to your credentials unless the work of that degree influences your legal scholarship in important ways. Formulating a clear academic agenda will better inform your choices about your written work. As the "Guide for Aspiring Law Professors" makes clear, publication of a scholarly piece of writing has become almost an absolute requirement for incoming law teachers. In fact, at many of the top tier law schools, recent hires often have two or more publications to their credit before joining the faculty. Dissertations and theses on law-related subjects give some candidates a decided advantage. Publishing while working full time is an intense endeavor. "Writing Scholarship While You Practice Law," an article in the "Guide," has some practical advice on how you can make it happen. It is imperative, however, that you publish or have completed work of publishable quality, and that your written work has a relationship to your overall scholarly agenda. Contacts with current law school faculty members are a very important part of this process. It is very important that faculty know of your interest. Appointment committees exchange information about candidates. Any candidate needs to have the active and vocal support of people who are currently teaching law. If you are not in regular contact with your former faculty instructors here at the Law School, you will need to reacquaint yourself with them and them with you. Your contact with faculty members is essential for several reasons: they can help you fine-tune and clarify your scholarly agenda; they can help you identify good areas for writing and scholarship as well as journals that might welcome your articles; they can help your prepare for your interviews; and they can help you by speaking on your behalf with their colleagues at other institutions. References are particularly crucial to the law faculty hiring process. The Hiring ProcessThe hiring process at law schools has been standardized somewhat by the Association of American Law Schools (AALS). The AALS holds an annual Faculty Recruitment Conference each fall (typically held in late October in Washington, D.C. at a large conference hotel). Most law schools and representatives from their appointments committees attend the Conference. Additionally, the AALS has a faculty appointments register, in which it collects information about candidates interested in law teaching positions. The register is then circulated to law school deans and hiring committees. Information about the AALS faculty recruitment services is available at the organization's Web site: http://www.aals.org. You can also learn about positions in the Chronicle of Higher Education, a weekly newspaper with articles on issues in higher education and an extensive advertisement section listing opportunities in the field. The Chronicle is also available on line: http://www.chronicle.org. Typically, schools interested in particular candidates will invite them to interview with them during the AALS Recruitment Conference. It is also possible to pick up additional interviews (or at least have opportunities to meet representatives from additional schools) during the Conference. The screening interviews generally last 30-45 minutes. The most successful candidates at the Conference are those who can clearly articulate their scholarly agenda and can tie that to their published work. Schools that are interested in candidates will invite them for additional interviews, generally at the law school itself. At this point, candidates meet with a wider range of faculty members. Occasionally at this step, but certainly at any additional meetings, the candidate will be asked to do a scholarly presentation to the faculty and will be invited to meet with the school's dean. We would be pleased to host alumni to faculty presentations at the Law School to give you the flavor of these presentations and to experience the give and take between the presenter and the faculty members in attendance. In fact, members of the faculty would be happy to speak to alumni who have interviews to help you prepare for those interviews. Please call the Career Planning Office at (215) 898-7493 if you would like an invitation to a presentation or would like to speak with a member of the faculty in order to prepare for your interviews. Should you have any questions or concerns after reviewing "Breaking into the Academy: The 1998-2000 Michigan Journal of Race & Law Guide for Aspiring Law Professors," please be in touch with us. Teaching Positions at Non-Law Schools in Higher EducationWe have a number of graduates who hold law teaching positions, tenured and otherwise, at schools other than law schools. These graduates have gained employment teaching law in business schools and departments, history departments, philosophy departments, economics departments, etc. The credentials for gaining these positions do not differ much from those outlined above:
You can take one of two approaches to looking for position at non-law schools: after researching a particular school and the department you think would be most interested in your work, you can write directly to the chair of that department outlining your scholarly agenda and proposing some courses that you would teach. You might also seek out openings at schools after they have identified a need in a particular area. One of the most effective ways to learn about these openings is through the Chronicle of Higher Education, a weekly newspaper that has an extensive advertising section in which schools post their current openings. To learn more about subscribing, contact the Chronicle at 1225 Twenty-Third Street N.W., Washington, D.C., 20037 or via the internet at chronicle.com. There is a good book available to help you craft an academic job search outside of law schools. The Academic Job Search Handbook, by Mary Morris Heiberger and Julia Miller Vick, is published by the University of Pennsylvania Press and is available in major bookstores. Teaching as an Adjunct ProfessorMany law school graduates satisfy their interest in teaching by presenting a course in their area of interest on an annual or more occasional basis. Law schools often add to their course choice by bringing in practitioners to teach in areas where their own faculty do not have expertise or where the hands-on knowledge of someone in the field is valuable to students' learning. If you are interested in teaching a course, try to identify the associate dean or the faculty member who plans curriculum and assigns faculty to courses. You may be able to call the law school's general information line to get this information. If you cannot learn the name of the person with this responsibility, write directly to the dean. Specify what you want to teach and giving specifics about what that course might look like. In order to maximize your chances, you might want to include information about other fields that you would feel prepared to teach as well. Adjunct teaching positions will not make you rich. Typically, the stipend for a semester's work ranges in the $1,500 to $4,000 range, depending on the school, the number of credit hours, etc. Given the extensive preparation time needed to prepare the course, particularly the first time through (a rule of thumb is three hours of preparation for every one hour of course time), these are not highly competitive wages. Also, it should be noted that adjunct teaching positions rarely, if ever, serve as stepping stones into a tenure track teaching position at that institution. It may be a way to add to your curriculum vitae, but it will not serve as a substitute for any of the credentials mentioned in the sections above. Nonetheless, teaching a course can be intellectually stimulating. Many graduates who have taught comment not only on the hard work, but also on how rewarding the experience was, working with bright students who can give you a fresh perspective on your own fields of interest. Other Opportunities At Law SchoolsLegal Writing and Legal Methods ProgramsIncreasingly, law schools have been hiring attorneys or academics to teach or direct their legal writing programs. These programs take many forms. In some, legal writing instructors are hired for several years; in others, permanent positions for a director of the program are the norm. Instructors may have a group of students that they teach directly or they may supervise other instructors, either students or other attorneys. In the "Guide," there is a chapter on these programs, "Legal Methods Teaching Programs," which lists some schools and their programs. Clinical ProgramsLikewise, many schools hire practicing lawyers for work in their clinical programs. Again, these positions are often for a term of years. Many clinical programs deal with specific subject matter and look for experienced practitioners in those fields. Clinical faculty members and instructors often teach in some areas while supervising students who are handling cases. They also usually maintain their own case load as well. Teaching Fellowship and Graduate Degree ProgramsSome schools have teaching fellowships, described in the “Guide”, to introduce prospective candidates to the academic world. Penn Law has two such fellowships, the Penn Law Faculty Fellowship and the Sharswood Fellowship, funded by the University of Pennsylvania Law Review. Details about these fellowships can be found at http://www.law.upenn.edu/cf/faculty/fellowships/. You will also find a chapter in the “Guide” on graduate degree programs – programs that have a track record of getting people into teaching upon graduation. Should you decide to pursue an additional degree at one of these schools, you will want to do due diligence into their placement rates. Another resource for identifying these programs is the fellowship guide on www.pslawnet.org. Academic AdministrationMore and more lawyers are returning to law schools these days as a member of the administration. From Career Services professionals, to Dean's of Students to Admissions Officers, these careers can be an excellent way to utilize your law degree. For job postings in academic administration, you can refer to the Penn Law Job Postings online at: https://www.law.upenn.edu/cpp/alumni/alumsecure/joblistings.html, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the AALS Bulletin, or the monthly NALP Bulletin which are available in the CP&P office. Resources for Job Seekers in AcademiaCV vs. Resume Should you have any additional questions or concerns after reviewing these materials, please call the Career Planning & Professionalism Office at (215) 898-7493. Best wishes. |
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