Many prospective law students, especially the more academically-inclined ones who make extensive use of the EQR, often ask about their prospects for getting in to law teaching. Students should, of course, review the information at Information and Advice for Persons Interested in Teaching Law (November 2002) about paths in to law teaching. But numerical data can also be helpful, especially since some schools apparently misrepresent rather badly their success at placing graduates in law teaching.

Earlier this year, I posted data on placement of graduates as tenure-track faculty at the top 15 law schools for the period 1996 through 2001. We have now expanded the data pool, using the 2001-02 AALS Directory of Law Teachers to identify the first law degree of all current tenure-track academic faculty. (Additional degrees beyond the first law degree are noted, below.) Excluded from the study were tenure-track faculty whose primary responsibilities were clinical or legal writing, since the hiring process for those positions is different from that for regular academic faculty. Also excluded were J.A.G. faculty. The pool of tenure-track faculty studied thus includes almost all who started in a tenure-track position since roughly 1996-in total, about 730 faculty. More than one-third of these faculty earned their J.D. from just three law schools: Yale, Harvard, and Stanford. (Factor in LLM and SJD degrees, and the percentage connected to Yale, Harvard, and Stanford is even higher.) Of course, some of this result is due to a self-selection phenomenon: the students most interested in teaching, students who in many cases already have PhDs in other disciplines and so on, gravitate towards these schools, especially Yale. (Whether this is healthy for the future of legal academia is a different matter, about which there are divergent opinions.)

Schools were evaluated based primarily on two criteria: the total number of graduates in tenure-track jobs for the time period studied and the quality of the jobs. Some consideration is also given to how often graduates who secure tenure-track jobs also earn law degrees beyond the J.D: the question is which JDs are "sufficient" for getting in to legal academia, and which aren't. (Example: nearly one-third of Duke grads in law teaching had earned another law degree, while less than 3% of Yale grads did so.) Note also that many schools do not offer the LLM or SJD, while some (Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Columbia, NYU, Georgetown, Wisconsin, Temple) have large and active LLM and/or SJD programs. (Since LLM and SJD programs select [at least some of their] applicants based on their likelihood of success as legal academics, it is unsurprising that placement in law teaching is typically much higher out of LLM or SJD programs than out of the JD program, even at the very same school. Relative rates of success for such programs would, however, constitute the subject-matter for a different study than the one conducted here.)

Some consideration is also given to the amount of tenure-track placement relative to the size of each school's graduating class. There are, of course, differing views about the significance of per capita measures of placement in law teaching jobs. Per capita measures, it is argued, give you the best indication of how the "average" graduate fares. The difficulty, of course, is that (1) no average graduates get law teaching jobs; in each case, we are talking about the exceptional students, which is a small number at every school, except perhaps Yale; and (2) the prospects of getting in to law teaching are unquestionably enhanced by the existence of a large network of alumni already in law teaching (see, for example, the results for Michigan, below, which historically was a much stronger school than it is now [1]). Faculty on hiring committees often contact the professors they know best from their home institution, and often give most credence to those recommendations. Even simple institutional loyalty plays a role ("I went to Stanford, ergo, I like Stanford grads"). Those considerations mean that gross numbers may be as important as per capita.

Finally, and most seriously, (3) comparing placement in law teaching jobs to graduating class size isn't really the right measure: the unknown factor is how many students from the graduating class even try to get in to law teaching. (Example: not quite two-thirds of UT graduates who actually go on the academic job market in fact secure tenure-track jobs. Anecdotal evidence suggests this percentage is fairly typical for top law schools, with the exceptions of Yale, Harvard, Stanford, and Chicago.) So even if per capita measure were uncontroversially the right measure, we don't, in fact, have access to the relevant data for calculating the per capita rate in any meaningful way.

Yet even allowing for these caveats, it is surely significant that, e.g., Yale and Harvard place almost the same total number of graduates in tenure-track jobs, yet Harvard is three times as big as Yale. Harvard also graduates three times as many students as Stanford and Chicago; only Georgetown graduates more students than Harvard each year.

Quality of jobs is evaluated along three dimensions: the number of graduates placed as tenure-track faculty at the top 15 law faculties, based on EQR measures (Yale, Harvard, Chicago, Stanford, Columbia, Berkeley, NYU, Michigan, Texas, Penn, Cornell, Northwestern, Virginia, Duke, Georgetown); the number of graduates placed as tenure-track faculty at "tier 1" or "top 50" law faculties, again based on EQR criteria; and the number placed at U.S. News tier 1 schools (since there is some arbitrary fluctuation at the margins, we used several years of U.S. News to define tier 1).

Based on these criteria, the top fifteen law schools from which to earn a J.D. for purposes of getting in to law teaching are as follows.

There are also five schools on the cusp of the top 15 for placement in law teaching: University of California at Los Angeles, Vanderbilt University, University of Southern California, and, perhaps surprisingly, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities and University of Wisconsin, Madison. Of course, the Minnesota graduates in law teaching would have graduated from Minnesota before the recent losses of Daniel Farber, Philip Frickey, and Suzanna Sherry. And Wisconsin has long had one of the leading scholarly faculties, with particular preeminence in work at the intersection of law and the social sciences.

Here are the pertinent stats, organized as follows:

SUMMARY TABLES

Total # of Tenure-Track Jobs Secured by Graduates Who Had Not Earned LLMs etc.

Total # of Top Jobs Secured by Graduates Who Had Not Earned LLMs etc.

Total # of EQR or US News Tier 1 Jobs (whichever is more) Secured by Graduates Who Had Not Earned LLMs etc.

DETAILED DATA ON JOB PLACEMENT