Determining the Size of Top Environmental Faculties

 
Before I became an Associate Dean, I never contemplated that taking a faculty headcount could be complicated.  But I have become (too) familiar now with the ABA Annual Questionnaire on which a law school must report its “student/faculty ratio.”  On the faculty side, that requires a break-down into categories of (1) tenured and tenure-track folks, (2) clinicians and legal writing instructors not on the tenure track, (3) adjuncts, emeriti and non-tenure track administrators who teach, librarians who teach, and teachers from other parts of the university.  With that in mind, I should not have been surprised at the difficulties I encountered in determining the relative size of the “environmental faculty” at my school compared to environmental faculties at other schools with strong programs in this speciality. 

My goal was to benchmark the size of our faculty for informational purposes, as we were coming into a new faculty recruiting season.  My intended methodology was somewhat simple.   Get the list of the “Top Environmental Programs” from the latest US News rankings and count up the number of faculty members at each school who were listed in the 2009-2010 American Association of Law Schools Faculty Directory as teaching “Environmental Law” (I did this before the issuance of the most recent directory).  How naïve of me!

Using my own faculty as a test case, I quickly determined that the AALS Directory lists of “Environmental Law” teachers might be both over-inclusive and under-inclusive.  For example, two of my faculty colleagues were listed, even though they hadn’t taught environmental courses in over a decade.  Other key environmental faculty members weren’t listed at all.  (As to why that was the case, I know that depending on the school, responsibility for confirming listings in the AALS Directory usually is the responsibility of the Dean’s Office or individual faculty members.  You won't drag it out of me.)

My colleague Emily Gold Waldman and I then consulted the website of each school with a "Top Environmental Program" (in US News lingo).  In several cases, the school’s web-list of “Environmental Law” faculty members included adjuncts, “affiliated” faculty members who did not seem either to teach or write in the environmental law area, or program administrators who were not tenured or tenure-track faculty members.  What’s a data-head to do then? 

We decided to make a person-by-person determination about each individual listed either in the AALS Faculty Directory or on the school’s website as teaching "Environmental Law."  If the faculty member’s bio page revealed any information that would suggest that she or he teaches or writes in the area of “environmental law,” construed as broadly as possible, we counted them as "Environmental Law" faculty members.

Because Emily and I are  not environmental law folks ourselves, we then asked two colleagues with experience in environmental law to review and confirm my person-by-person classifications, refining the data as necessary.

Our preliminary counts are shown in the chart above.  The raw data -- with notations of any discretionary determinations -- are available here.  Comments, corrections and suggestions very welcome.

Comments

[Alfred Brophy]

Thanks for this, Bridget.

Classification is tough in a lot of cases, I think, because there are so many people whose work touches on parts of a field. Brian Leiter dealt with this in regard to legal historians recently: http://leiterlawschool.typepad.com/leiter/2010/11/best-faculties-in-legal-history.html

I would think that self-identification (perhaps from the AALS directory) as an environmentalist or a legal historian or whatever would be a good starting point. I guess it also has the virtue of a uniform standard, even though it may under-count the number of faculty working in environmental law on a campus (and it obviously misses faculty outside of the law school and adjuncts).

[b]

I can't open the data file.

[Bridget Crawford]

I have fixed the link (I hope). Comments, corrections and suggestions welcome. If any reader is having trouble opening the file, I'll be happy to send it via email.

[b]

Thanks. Practitioner here, not a professor, but...
1. I'd think it hinges most on what the C.V. indicates. Placing articles in the environmental specialty journals is a pretty solid test of self-identification.
2. I think a more interesting measure would be the number of environment, natural resources, land use and energy courses each school is offering in the course of a year. That would include the courses taught by adjuncts, obviously.

[tjh]

Wow. Seems like making 10 phone calls would have been much easier.