The Foreign Law Degree

You're on the faculty appointments committee this year, and you're plowing through the AALS FAR forms.  You find a candidate who expresses great interest in teaching one or more courses that fit your curricular needs.  The candidate has one or more nice scholarly placements, as well as two-to-five years of great legal experience.  And just as you're getting very excited, you notice it.

The candidate has a law degree from a foreign institution. 

Maybe you've heard of it.  But maybe you haven't.

So what do you do with an otherwise attractive faculty candidate with a foreign law degree?  Does that degree automatically terminate further consideration?  Will it depend on the foreign institution?  Are some perceived as better than others?  Which ones?  Might further consideration turn on whether the candidate has an additional law degree from a U.S. institution?

I'm guessing that many folks on hiring committees are confronting this issue during this faculty recruitment season.  Perhaps this post will generate some useful discussion (in the comments, or in separate posts).  

Comments

[Jacqui Lipton]

Isn't this one of the advantages of the "meat market" hiring system in the U.S., despite some of its craziness and other downsides? A school can take a chance on interviewing a candidate whose CV is otherwise difficult to evaluate at very little cost ie just the cost of setting aside a slot on the schedule in D.C.

I've also noticed over the years that many of the overseas candidates do have higher degrees, like S.J.D.s and Ph.D.s which may be more common for academic lawyers in many other countries - certainly the case in Australia and the U.K., and I think most of Europe. So while it may be difficult to evaluate a foreign candidate's scholarship, at least having a Ph.D. or S.J.D. might tell you something about the candidate's commitment to the scholarly enterprise and ability to engage in a major scholarly project.

I should also note that I speak as one of those people who turned up on the AALS register many years ago as a purely foreign candidate and was pleasantly surprised at how many schools were prepared to interview me despite my lack of any U.S. credentials.