What Gender is Trusts and Estates?

 

As I'm sitting here grading trusts and estates exams, I'm thinking again about an exchange from earlier in the semester....

Thanks to Jason Mazzone for raising important questions about the gender differences in faculty across the curriculum (in an aptly-named post over at co-op, "Constitutional Law As Computer Science").  Pretty interesting to ask why women are better represented as faculty in some areas (like family law) than others (like constitutional law).  I've been worried about the under-representation of women in legal history for some time.  

But what motivates this particular post is our friend Liz Glazer's comment.  She  references  Ann McGinley's study that found trusts and estates is  a "girl" class--I guess it's disproportionately taught by women.  Then I see that "Sarah L." cited a couple of articles have also depicted trusts & estates as a low prestige subject.  (The articles are Marjorie E. Kornhauser, Rooms of Their Own: An Empirical Study of Occupational Segregation by Gender Among Law Professors, 73 UMKC L. Rev. 293 (2004) (available here for those with a subscription to Hein On-Line) and Deborah Jones Merritt and Barbara F. Reskin, Sex, Race and Credentials: The Truth About Affirmative Action in Law Faculty Hiring, 97 Colum. L. Rev. 199 (1997) (here)).  Kornhauser shows that, though more men than women taught trusts and estates in 2000-01,  women are disproportionately highly represented in trusts and estates.  That is, more women taught in trusts and estates than you'd expect given their proportion in the legal academy--even though there were still more men teaching t&e overall than women.

I suppose there may be some connection between those issues--who teaches and who takes and whether the subject is low or high prestige.  So this leads me to a couple of questions:  is trusts and estates low prestige?  It's certainly very hard to staff--people have to be dragged into teaching it, in my observation over many years on hiring committees.  (I often give the advice that if you want to advance in this business, pick an area where there aren't a lot of people already teaching and writing ... like trusts and estates.)  But hard to staff (read faculty don't want to teach) doesn't necessarily mean low prestige.  Tax is even harder to staff--but it's close to the top of the pecking order, I imagine.

I know that areas of interest shift over time--t&e used to be at the center of the law school curriculum.  John Chipman Gray mean anything to anybody here?

And what, by the way, do we mean by a high prestige area?  The people who work in it publish well?  They're heavily cited?  They are respected for rigorous analysis?  Ah, the possibilities for research are endless. 

The image of John Chipman Gray is from wikipedia.

 

Comments

[aspiringprof]

The common wisdom is that trusts and estates is a low prestige subject. And while I don't know the answer to this question, do law schools feel a burning need to hire trusts and estates profs in the same way that they feel the need to hire for the high prestige subjects? I get the sense that law schools' hiring priorities are for the high prestige subjects and that the hiring needs for the low prestige subjects are subordinated. That is, law schools will often make do with existing faculty and thus press someone into service to teach one of these so-called low prestige subjects--even if they are learning it themselves as they go along. Is that right? If so, then why are law schools pushing women into teaching these subjects in disproportionate numbers?

[Alfred]

Hi Aspiring--thanks for joining the conversation.

I suspect that hiring priorities are set in a lot of different ways, perhaps in some relation to the rank (or maybe self-image) of the school. The high end places see themselves (perhaps) as hiring more for intellectual area; the lower end places perhaps look more for subject area. I'm not sure about this--and maybe the "lower end" starts pretty close to the top. When I think about hiring, I'm certainly very interested in what a person will do for us in terms of teaching. That's by no means my only concern, but it is a big one.

However, I think there is a lot of attention to subject areas at many places (the AALS job announcements often make reference to subject matter, for instance). I would think that many--perhaps most--hiring committees look to match candidates expressed interest (and publications) up with the schools' teaching needs.

So I might phrase the question, why do women disproportionately choose t&e? And does that have something to do with the field being considered low prestige? I want to blog some more about this--because I think there's some really interesting stuff to talk about in terms of how the field defines itself and how students perceive it--as well as whether those perceptions meet up with the reality of practice.