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Academic

: Legal Theory Blog

Should I Stay or Should I Go?

By Lawrence Solum

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Stay at your current law job, or go on the academic job market, that is. Miriam Baer has some good counsel at Prawfs. Of course, it all depends on what kind of academic job you want, but if you are aiming for a position at an "elite" law school or at a law school that aspires to approaching elite status, then Baer's second piece of advice is especially pertinent:

Yes, you were at or toward the top of your law school class. You were on law review too. Your professors loved you -- and you clerked for a terrific appellate judge too. Now, you work for a fabulous law firm/government job. You don't have a complete manuscript, but you've got a killer outline and you're planning to turn it into an article really soon. Surely, you will get a job, right? Well, maybe (probably) not. I have no doubt that there are a few successful candidates out there who took this route (more likely Supreme Court than appellate clerks), but I would gather that they are shrinking in number with each passing year. You will be competing with both VAPs and PhD's on the academic market (not to mention a few practitioner types who manage to bust out an article in their free time) and all of those competitors will have writing that demonstrates their scholarly potential. Even if you have an amazing idea that your mentors have praised, the costs of waiting a year and developing it into an article are relatively slim compared to the costs of going on the market prematurely. Indeed, if you do know you want to be a law professor, but haven't written, you may want to apply for post-doc programs, e.g., a VAP (visiting associate professorship) or fellowship, and (in a sense) this means you do want to go on the market this year--the VAP/Fellowship Market.

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on July 27, 2010 (boomark / email).