Aspiring Law Professors: The PhD

In my prior post I discussed how candidates with non-elite JD's could build a record of scholarship to overcome the presumption that their lack of pedigree signals a lack of ability to be a law professor.  This post is also aimed at the pedigree challenged, but I hope it will be generalizable to most candidates. 

When I was contemplating becoming a law professor I received the aforementioned "You need to write" advice, and I also received this piece of advice:  "You need to degree cleanse."  What exactly is degree cleansing?  It's really a two part endeavor, it involves enrolling in an advanced degree program such as an LLM or PhD, mostly to separate yourself from your pedigree (a form over substance consideration) and using that time to publish scholarship and develop a unique theoretical perspective that will inform your research and your research agenda.  Some faculty members will think merely the first step is enough...e.g. getting a PhD or LLM is sufficient to overcome your pedigree.  However, most faculty members are a bit more sophisticated and will want to see that you've used that "time off" to produce scholarship.  Finally, there is a small but growing group of very sophisticated faculty members who will ask "Why does your PhD/LLM matter?  Why should I care about [whatever it was you did for 1-4 years of additional schooling]?"  Focusing on answering these last questions is the smart way to approach these degree programs.   

I chose the PhD route, but also considered an LLM.  This post will therefore focus mostly on my experiences with a PhD program.  First, here's why the PhD won out over an LLM.  In general (note the qualifier):

1. PhD's are oftentimes fully funded.
2. PhD's provide methods training.
3. PhD's provide a unique theoretical perspective. 
4. If you strike out as a law professor, a PhD may provide you a home elsewhere in the academy. 
5. I already had a Masters degree, so the time-line to PhD completion was accelerated by four semesters.
6. The trend seems to be towards PhD's (See "Should Aspiring Law Profs Go For A JSD?").

DOES A PhD MATTER?

Let's start with the questions I raised above, which a committee member posed to me during an interview:  "Greg, why should I as a law professor care about a PhD?  We are a law school, we're training lawyers.  What value does your PhD provide to our students?  Isn't this a fad?" These are great questions that more committees should be asking.  Let's consider my own research:  I focus on national security law and criminal law, my doctoral work in institutional and organizational theory informs my scholarship.  Specifically I am interested in rule and norm compliance within social groups and everything that flows from that, to include: the influence of structure, culture, incentives, power and politics (just to name a few).  When I decided to pursue a PhD I made a conscious choice to focus my studies on a subject that would complement my legal scholarship and anticipated research agenda.  My doctoral work allows me to talk about my experiences conducting organizational culture studies, and how those studies reveal the factors that cause attorneys and investigators to comply with ethical norms (or whether they comply with them at all).  I can talk about how incentives influence the behavior of members of the intelligence community and how their behavior differs from the law enforcement community.  I can also talk about all manner of things that influence public policy, and illustrate those things empirically.  All of these issues (ethical compliance, incentives, public policy) come up in class discussions (for example, discussions about police and prosecutor incentives, binding and non-binding ethical rules, cost benefit analysis in regulations, enforcement discretion, etc.), and in that respect my doctoral work complemented my teaching.  I could probably do some of this without enrolling in a PhD program (there are great examples of this kind of work done by other scholars who I don't believe have formal training: Richard Posner and Nathan Sales to name a few), but I think my doctoral work helped prepare me for research projects ranging from basic to very complex, I think it made me a better legal scholar, and I think it makes me a better teacher.  Necessary?  No.  But very helpful.   

Now of course, I'm biased, but I believe the skills and knowledge that come with some PhD's are valuable to the legal academy...I do not believe though, that all PhD's are inherently valuable.  The value comes from a candidate carefully contemplating how their PhD makes them a better law professor, and then pursuing a research agenda consistent with that consideration.  This means that some doctoral work won't naturally sell itself and you'll need to do some work to make the case for why your extra time in a degree program matters.  For example (I'm sure these will make someone mad), a PhD in human rights will sound to a committee member like a PhD in law, which they believe they already have.  A PhD in Nutrition may fit perfectly for someone whose research agenda is focused on FDA regulatory issues, but not all law professors will see the fit.  As more candidates with PhD's enter the market, I expect more committees to be asking the question that was posed to me above.  Candidates pursuing another degree should recognize that merely having the PhD (or LLM) alone is not enough, you must make the case for why that degree matters.  

THE VALUE OF TIME

Let's assume that I've convinced you that PhD's can have value.  The next consideration to weigh is the value of time.  There are substantial costs associated with unplugging from legal practice to pursue another degree.  If you're lucky enough to find funding for a PhD the cost is time and lost wages.  If you can't find funding, you're looking at time, lost wages, and debt!  Moreover, the decision to pursue another degree that is viewed as an academic degree is pretty much a decision to leave practice, perhaps for good.  One to four years in an LLM or PhD program is not the path to partner or supervisory D.A., so there is a career change perhaps career ending risk involved.  I was willing to take the leap, and in the end it all worked out because I luckily landed a VAP and admission to a PhD program at the same place, allowing me to earn an income while also completing my doctoral work.  That is a rare find, but with some searching (very tedious, program to program website scouring) you can find an arrangement that will accommodate at least part time work while you're enrolled full time in your doctoral studies.   

While there are high costs associated with pursuing another degree, the time it takes also provides some benefits.  First, it takes some of the pressure off, because you know you'll have X number of years before you have to go on the market.  That will allow you to plan this phase of your career and budget your time (nothing focuses the mind like the prospect of multiple years of Ramen noodle dinners).  It will also allow you to be very deliberative in what you read, what you write, and how you want to approach your scholarly agenda.  Second, it gives you the opportunity to network, to get involved in your research area, and to get to know legal academics.  Third, it gives you opportunities within your program to establish relationships with your professors.  Doing so will oftentimes lead to opportunities to take classes that are paper based rather than exam based.  If you entered with an idea of what type of legal scholar you want to be, your papers may form portions of a law review article or even a book. 

IS A PhD THE KEY TO THE CASTLE?

Will a PhD get you a job?  Nope.  Will it help?  Maybe, but only if you are fairly strategic in how you approach your pursuit of the degree.  All of the advice from my prior post still applies.  If you want to be a law professor, you will need to publish law review articles ---even while pursuing your doctoral work.  The PhD alone probably won't cut it, you will still need to show that you can write and that you want to write legal scholarship.  In fact by pursuing a PhD you may have inadvertently raised the bar on yourself.  You will be in a small subset of the applicant pool comprised of driven JD/PhD's and you'll need to stack up by comparison.  Many of those competitors will have articles and maybe a book contract.  Even worse, some faculty members at law schools will wonder if you really want to be a law professor.  They will see your PhD and think "He/She's really just a [political scientist or historian or sociologist or org theorist or....] looking for a bigger paycheck, he/she's not a serious legal scholar."  That may not be fair, that may feel like moving goalposts, but it's reality.  A PhD may be worth it if you need time to write or you need to separate yourself from your pedigree but it's not worth the effort if you do not have a very clear plan regarding how a PhD will make you a better legal scholar and how you will prove that to committees. 

PRIOR RELATED POST:

Aspiring Law Professors:  The Non-Elite JD

Comments

[Mary Dudziak]

This is all good advice. While schools will differ, having a PhD is an advantage with my school for candidates on the market. And in my field (legal history), some candidates without PhDs can compete with the JD/PhDs, but most do not fare as well. It's also the case, though, that for those with more academic training, more is expected. If I see an entry-level JD/PhD without substantial publications, or a lateral JD/PhD without a book (or the equivalent of a book for fields in which books aren't the norm), they don't compare as well with others. PhDs are expected to have something to show for it -- and it they don't it doesn't come off as a good sign regarding future productivity.

But the main reason to pursue a PhD has to be that you can't help yourself. You are so passionate about that field, that you just have to devote years of your life to it. For all the discussion about advantages/disadvantages on the job market, if you don't feel that way, don't do it.

[David Case]

Excellent post. I also went the Ph.D. route (after having been previously unsuccessful with the LL.M. route) and was very fortunate to be able to specifically tailor my course of study and my dissertation research and writing to a specific legal field. The fact that my Ph.D. was an interdisciplinary studies degree helped immensely in that regard, as well as the fact that my doctoral advisers understood and bought into the notion from the outset that my entire purpose in pursuing the degree was to break into the entry level law school teaching market. If the motivation for the Ph.D. is to improve your ability to compete in the legal teaching market, then you most certainly must be able to demonstrate to hiring committees how the doctoral work will add value to your future path as a law professor and scholar.

[Matt Lister]

I'd agree with most of this but would add some words of caution about this bit:

I already had a Masters degree, so the time-line to PhD completion was accelerated by four semesters.

I don't know about the regular practices in fields other than philosophy, but in philosophy this can't be taken as a matter of course. Many PhD programs in philosophy will, at most, let the applicant out of some distribution requirements because of MA work, but not out of course requirements in general. Some won't even go that far. Some programs will give some credit, but very few would give four semesters, I think. And, the likelihood of getting credit depends a lot on the relative (perceived) strengths of the MA program and the PhD program. There is a lot of variation here, even w/in philosophy, but this is something that applicants should investigate and not assume.

[Anonymous Phd]

As a faculty member who has been on the committees of a few aspiring law professors, I have a quick question about the first post. While it does vary by discipline, is it really critically important that an entry-level JD/PhD have "substantial publications?" I am not a JD or connected to the legal academy much but in my field, articles are nice but what you are supposed to have done during your PhD is write a dissertation - and that is what you get hired on.

I often have to advise students to stop spending their time working on conference papers and such and devote their energy to their dissertations. Is this wrong for a JD/PhD? I know I must be missing something, as I had a student get a great law job with a few articles but only a mediocre chapter of their dissertation done, and another who had a fabulous dissertation but no articles who fared poorly.

Such a norm would seem ridiculous from a scholarly point of view given what is needed to get even an interdisciplinary law review article published compared to a dissertation. But if this is the case, I want to be able to advise my students in their interests. Many thanks.