2010 Law School Faculty Lateral Moves

Updated 9/30/10 and moved to the top

It's that time again: the annual compilation of law school faculty movement.   As always, I am indebted to the other bloggers who publish this information and those of you who reach out to give me news.  Brian Leiter - at this point, my primary source for this chart  - suggested, back in August, that this year's list might be thinner than in prior years.  Jacqui  Lipton recently concurred.  We shall see.  You can review the progress of this year's law school dean searches here.

Please send any lateral hirng updates to my [email protected] address.

Alabama

Andy Morriss from Illinois

American

Jenny Roberts from Syracuse

Arizona

Glenn George from North Carolina

Arizona State

Daniel Bodansky from Georgia

Zak Kramer from Penn State

Kimberly Holst from Hamline

Baylor

Luke Meier from Drake

Boston College

Brian Galle from Florida State

Boston University

Fred Tung from Emory

Brigham Young

Brigham Daniels from Houston

Brooklyn

Adam Kolber from San Diego

Buffalo

Jessica Owley Lippmann from Pace

Kim Connolly from South Carolina

California - UC Davis

Leticia Saucedo from UNLV

California - UC Irvine

Sarah Lawsky from George Washington

California - UCLA

Angela Riley from Southwestern

Cardozo

Susan Crawford from Michigan

Brett Frischman from Loyola-Chicago

Charleston

Todd Bruno from LSU (moving to tenure track)

Colorado

Aya Gruber from Iowa

Connecticut

Jill Anderson from Western New England

DePaul

Joshua Sarnoff from American (moving to tenure track)

Denver

Annecoos Wiersma from Ohio State

Tom Romero from Hamline

Patience Crowder from Tulsa

Drexel

Norman Stein from Alabama

Duke

Samuel Buell from Washington University in St. Louis

John de Figueiredo from UCLA

Elon

Michael Rich from Capital

Robert Parrish from Indiana - Bloomington (moving to tenure track)

Florida State

Reid Fontaine from Arizona (from psych dept./secondary appt in law school)

George Mason

Henry Butler (from Searle Center at Northwestern Law)

George Washington

H. Jefferson Powell from Duke

Georgetown

Robert Thompson from Vanderbilt

Georgia

Andrea Dennis from Kentucky

Gonzaga

Jason Gillmer from Texas Wesleyan

Scott Burnham from Montana

Harvard

Grainne de Burca from Fordham

Annette Gordon-Reed from New York Law School

Illinois

Kurt Lash from Loyola LA

Lesley Wexler from Florida State

IIT - Chicago Kent

Edward Lee from Ohio State

Indiana - Indianapolis

Carlton Waterhouse from Florida International

John Marshall - Chicago

Anthony Niedwiecki from Nova Southeastern

Kansas

Lou Mulligan from Michigan State

Loyola - New Orleans

John Blevins from South Texas

Miami

Scott Sunby from Washington and Lee

Michigan State

David Thronson from Nevada - Las Vegas

Minnesota

R.A. Duff from Stirling (Philosophy)  (part time lateral)

Hari Osofsky from Washington & Lee

Nevada - Las Vegas

Stacey Tovino from Drake

New South Wales (Australia)

Colin Picker from Missouri - Kansas City

NYU

Daryl Levinson from Harvard

North Carolina

Gregg Polsky from Florida State

Northwestern

J.J. Koehler from Arizona State

Ohio State

Steven Davidoff from Connecticut

Oxford

Jeremy Waldron from NYU (half time lateral)

Penn

William Bratton from Georgetown

St. John's

Keith Sharfman from Marquette

Peggy McGuinness from Missouri

St. Thomas (Florida)

Patricia Hatamyar from Oklahoma City

Jennifer Martin from Oregon

St. Thomas (Minnesota)

Mark Osler from Baylor

San Francisco

Tristan Green from Seton Hall

Santa Clara

David Hasen from Penn State

Seattle

John Eason from Tulane

Seton Hall

Adam Steinman from Cincinnati

Stanford

John Donohue from Yale

Texas

Matthew Spitzer from Southern California (and Cal Tech)

James Spindler from Southern California

Texas Wesleyan

Gabriel Eckstein from Texas Tech

Peter Reilly from Nevada - Las Vegas (into tenure track position)

Cynthia Alkon from Appalachian

Touro

Samuel Levine from Pepperdine

Tulane

Adam Feibelman from North Carolina

Vanderbilt

Sean Seymore from Washington and Lee

John Owen Haley from Washington University

Edward Cheng from Brooklyn

Vermont

Gus Speth from Yale (Forestry and Environmental Studies)

Villanova

Michael Risch from West Virginia

Virginia

Douglas Laycock from Michigan

Wake Forest

Jonathan Cardi from Kentucky

Washington

Rafael Pardo from Seattle

Mary De Ming Fan from American

Washington University in St. Louis

Peggie Smith from Iowa

Kevin Collins from Indiana-Bloomington

Western New England

Julie Steiner from St. John's

William & Mary

Jason Solomon from Georgia

Wisconsin

Jonathan Lipson from Temple

Comments

[Richard Gershon]

Todd Bruno from LSU to the Charleston School of Law

[Anon Prof]

Wow... looks like no women hired as laterals this cycle...

[Kurt Lash]

My last name is spelled Lash, not Lasch. And I'm excited to be moving to Illinois from Loyola Law School, Los Angeles.

[anon]

Anthony Niedwiecki will be moving from Nova Southeastern to John Marshall in Chicago.

[Orin Kerr]

Wow... looks like no women hired as laterals this cycle...

That is striking, although this is only a partial and incomplete list of a still ongoing process. Assuming it's accurate, though, what do you think it shows?

[Jacqueline Lipton]

Yes, some others of us had also notice the "no women" thing - also no/not many women even commenting on this thread.

It either means that people are not interested in interviewing women (which would be weird) or that women are more difficult to move because many have "trailing husband" issues and these are difficult economic times. I assume the problem is not as bad moving men with "trailing wives" because a number of wives are probably still home-makers or caring for children these days, although I may be wrong about that statistically. I just don't know.

Or are schools just hiring more this year in fields that happen to be dominated by men? Some of the moves (but not as many as usual) are IP folks with somewhat of a patent focus. I'm sure that women are largely under-represented in patent law for example.

[Green Wave]

Adam Feibelman from North Carolina to Tulane

http://www.law.tulane.edu/tlsNews/newsItem.aspx?id=12386

[Anon Prof]

Gregg Polsky from Florida State to North Carolina.

[Anon]

My school was interested in a woman lateral candidate, but we couldn't afford to match her salary.

[anonalso]

Couldn't afford it, or didn't wish to spend the money?

[anon]

Re: Jacqueline's comment -- it can't be trailing spouse issues, or at least not entirely. Not everyone has a spouse & not all partners are opposite sex.

On my school's appts committee, lists of possible laterals are generated largely by word of mouth, and people suggest folks they like. One colleague has only suggested men, and the only "diverse" candidates come from women. It ends of looking like a new version of the old boys club. Only we're supposed to be past all of that, so the topic doesn't come up.

[Anon Prof]

Not all female faculty members are married.

[anontx]

Law schools like to fill their "female" quota with junior women to keep them as powerless as possible.

[Jacqueline Lipton]

BTW, I wasn't meaning to suggest that all women are married or that all academics are in heterosexual relationships. I was just hoping that the problem was more to do with logistics of moving women than of "old boys' club" issues arising. I'm sorry to hear that I'm probably wrong on that score. At least my school looked at lots of women this year and actually made offers to more women than men. But it sounds like that's not the experience at many schools.

[Anon]

"Couldn't afford it, or didn't wish to spend the money?"

The professor in question makes more significantly more money than anyone on our faculty. So first of all given the budget crunch, couldn't afford it in general, and moreover couldn't afford the inevitable demands among equally accomplished colleagues to raise their salaries to match the newcomer. No professor, man or woman, is going to get hired under those circumstances. But the good news is that at least one woman professor is already very well paid.

[anon prof]

St. John's has hired Peggy McGuinness from U. Missouri.

[Orin Kerr]

"Law schools like to fill their "female" quota with junior women to keep them as powerless as possible."

I don't follow this. Given that tenure is very easy to get in law schools,entry-level hiring in law schools is essentially an offer of life employment, including all the powers that go along with tenure, based on only relatively modest accomplishments. In light of that, Isn't hiring a particular group at the entry-level likely to be a strategic way to empower a group rather than a way to keep them powerless?

[Eric Muller]

Jacqueline wrote: "It either means that people are not interested in interviewing women (which would be weird) or that women are more difficult to move because many have 'trailing husband' issues and these are difficult economic times."

As a logical matter, it could also mean a third thing: that women are themselves not looking for lateral positions at a rate proportional to their numbers in legal academia. That's subtly different from Jacqueline's second possibility (that women are "more difficult to move," which implies that the women are just as eager as men to want to move but the "wooing" schools find it hard to "move" them).

My own main reason for not looking for lateral positions (apart from that small matter of my phone not ringing, alluded to in an earlier comment on this blog) is that I have not wished to bring on my wife and our children the enormous upheaval of relocation.

Now I'm a guy and all, so I could be totally wrong about this, but I've long sensed that this "not wanting to bring upheaval upon my family" is a concern considerably more common (or at least more commonly voiced) among/by women than by men. (I'm not defending that, or critiquing it, or suggesting that it's as it ought or ought not be, or saying it's the natural order of things, or the unnatural order of things. I'm just making an observation about what I've seen in my life.)

If I'm right about this, then it would stand to reason that (assuming roughly equal rates of marriage and parenting as between male and female law faculty members), the "seekers" in the lateral movement market would tend to be rather disproportionately male -- and this not because they're "easier to move" but because they're more eager to move.

[Ann Bartow]

I note with permission that Andrea Dennis is moving to University of Georgia from Kentucky.

Still, the gender difference in lateral hires is discouraging. Based on anecdotal evidence men are being pursued for lateral hires at much higher rates than women, possibly based in part on the assumption that "women won't move," which is a pretty handy assumption if you want to avoid hiring them for other reasons.

[Orin Kerr]

Ann writes:

****
"Based on anecdotal evidence men are being pursued for lateral hires at much higher rates than women, possibly based in part on the assumption that "women won't move," which is a pretty handy assumption if you want to avoid hiring them for other reasons."
****

As you have noted, Ann, the placements of scholarship in top journals are disproportionately of articles written by men. I'm curious, has anyone compared the the number of articles and placement of articles among lateral hires by gender? That might be interesting.