Legal Commentary

As I am preparing to get on a plane to DC later today to interview faculty candidates, it occurs to me to ask a question that has bothered me since the last time I served on the appointments committee a few years ago: When do you sit down to read a candidate's scholarship?

In the past, my practice was to read a few pieces here and there before the AALS interviews, usually when a candidate had written something in my field and/or was particularly interesting to me on paper. I get the sense that many people don't read any scholarship until after a candidate has been scheduled for a call-back (or maybe before definitely deciding to call them back), which strikes me as pretty defensible, given that committees can see as many as 30 candidates in 2 days (or schedule as many as 30, some of whom drop out in the final days), and that many of those candidates will disqualify themselves based on the interview (which is also too brief to discuss anyone's scholarship in great detail anyway).

But I also seem to recall a friend of mine who teaches at a top-10 school saying that she had been trying to read the scholarship of everyone her committee was seeing in DC. I suspect that this latter approach may be more common at the very top schools, where presumably few candidates drop out of the mix shortly before the conference, and where candidates who are offered callbacks are pretty likely to accept.

I generally feel like I can get a better sense of a candidate and get more out of the screening interview if I have read something he or she has written, but the practical considerations I outlined above tend to militate against doing this for every candidate. What do others think? What is your practice?