The Faculty Lounge

Reconsidering the Conventional Wisdom on the Legal Job Market - Part I

Over the past year or so, a conventional wisdom has developed about the status of the legal job market.  This conventional wisdom has at least three components:   (1) Recent graduates are getting law jobs at distressingly low levels.  (2) The legal job market is undergoing a profound structural change.  (3) The lousy job market is a reflection of these long-term changes, and is not just a product of a recession and slow recovery.

In this and subsequent posts, I will push back against certain aspects of this conventional wisdom.  At the outset, however, I want to be very clear about what I am NOT arguing.  I am not arguing that the current legal job market is great – it is not.  I am also not arguing in defense of the status quo in legal education – as I’ve explained in prior posts (here, here, here, and here), I worry about many facets of legal education, not least the student debt problems caused by ever-increasing tuition.

In this post, I will argue that it is highly likely that more recent graduates throughout the country are getting law jobs than the conventional wisdom assumes.  My argument will be based on data about what graduates from my school actually are doing now.  In my next post, I will briefly discuss the claim that the poor job market is due to structural changes in the legal job market.  [Update:  the second post is here].  I will explain why I am skeptical that the structural changes in the legal job market are significantly different than those that have occurred in the past, and why I am therefore skeptical that the current anemic state of the legal job market is the result of structural, rather than economic, factors.  In my third post, I will briefly discuss Bureau of Labor Statistics data on the legal job market, and will explain why caution must be used in interpreting this data in discussion of legal employment.  [Update:  the third post is here].

If you want to see the entire series of blog posts now, I have collected them in this document.  The rest of the first post is below the fold.

Summer Vacation, Comparatively Speaking

Just the other day, I ran into students from my law school at a local café; they asked me why I had my computer with me—school is over!  I’ve repeatedly had some version of this interaction over the years, with students asking me what I am doing for winter vacation, etc., and I’ve always been a bit bemused but also a little concerned that maybe not all students realize the ‘double-lives’ of teachers and scholars which many of us in legal academia lead.  Admittedly, I do perhaps live a bit more of a multi-sited life than others, and it’s not always clear, even to my faculty colleagues, what I’m doing in Delhi, or Islamabad, especially when it’s summer and awfully hot in South Asia (and Saint Louis, let me note!).

As a comparative legal scholar, I’ve always felt it an imperative—one might call it a moral imperative—to be in the places about which one is writing.  I’ve felt this not only in relation to my U.S.-focused work, but especially so with respect to places that often get wildly mis-represented in both popular and academic discussions in the U.S. (and elsewhere), namely India and especially Pakistan.  As a result, I’ve tried to find ways to live and work in Pakistan and India; this used to be easier when I didn’t have a full-time teaching position, and I could spend a year or more at a time abroad, but now I try to make as much as I can during summer and winter breaks.  But these aren’t ‘vacations' in any usual sense.

Yes, I get to meet up with friends and family while in South Asia, but there is also hard work in bringing language skills back up to some workable level (BBC Urdu is a mainstay otherwise), tracking down complete strangers for interviews and informational meetings, conducting interviews, collecting documents, buying books—wondering how this is all going to fit into your suitcases and whether immigration control is going to freak out on you again because you’ve been to Pakistan or have spoken to Muslims in India—and often attending a local activist or academic conference or two.  And not just for a week, but for months.  Doing this kind of work in a megalopolis like Delhi is often especially exhausting; indeed, repeatedly having to cold-call and meet strangers for interviews can be very exciting, but also often awkward and sometimes infuriating as people relate in detail their prejudices about you (an American) or Muslims, or both.

That being said, I can’t imagine another academic life.  I’ve learned an incredible amount about law, religion, and sexuality through the ethnographic enterprise.  I’ve also met some incredible people—such as ‘Ayesha’—who have been interview subjects, but whose personal stories have also provided much motivation for completing my current manuscript project (“The Rule and Role of Islamic Law:  Constituting Secular Law and Governance in India”).  So, this summer I’m staying in Saint Louis to write, but I’m hoping to get back on the road soon enough; there’s a lot of work (and shami kebabs) ahead of me.

Slave Quarters and Student Tours

They're talking about adding the slave quarters to the tour at the University of Alabama again.  The physical surroundings at the campus -- like the slave quarters -- really convey well the connections of the University to slavery.

For those who can't make it to Tuscaloosa for the tour, here's an article that discusses the ideas of education, slavery, and politics in circulation on that campus before the war.  I focus on the addresses -- often given at the beginning of the school year, though also on July Fourth -- that distinguished visitors gave to the students and faculty.  Women and enslaved people were sometimes in the audience at those addresses as well.  Those addresses illustrate the intellectual connections between the University and the defense of slavery.

If you're interested in the ideas in circulation at southern universities before the war, here's an article on addresses at UNC and another one on the ideas of William and Mary history professor Thomas Dew, who wrote a proslavery pamphlet in the wake of Nat Turner's rebellion.

The illustration is from the Library of Congress' fabulous Historic Buildings Survey.  It's one of the slave quarters behind the President's Mansion.

Call For Papers: Workshop For Corporate And Securities Litigation

This call for papers just came in:

FIRST ANNUAL WORKSHOP FOR CORPORATE & SECURITIES LITIGATION CALL FOR PAPERS

The University of Illinois College of Law and the University of Richmond School of Law invite submissions for the First Annual Workshop for Corporate & Securities Litigation. This workshop will be held on Friday, November 8, 2013, in Chicago, Illinois.

OVERVIEW: This annual workshop will bring together scholars focused on corporate and securities litigation to present their works-in-progress. Papers addressing any aspect of corporate and securities litigation or enforcement are eligible. Appropriate topics include, but are not limited to, securities litigation, fiduciary duty litigation, or comparative approaches to business litigation. We welcome scholars working in a variety of methodologies, including empirical analysis, law and economics, law and sociology, and traditional doctrinal analysis.

Authors whose papers are selected will be invited to present their work at a workshop hosted by the University of Illinois College of Law in Chicago, Illinois, on Friday November 8, 2013. Local costs (lodging and workshop meals) will be covered. Participants are asked to pay for their own travel expenses.

The workshop is designed to maximize discussion and feedback. All participants will have read the selected papers. The author will provide a brief introduction to the paper, but the majority of the individual sessions will be devoted to collective discussion of the paper involved.

SUBMISSION PROCEDURE: If you are interested in participating, please send an abstract of the paper you would like to present to Jessica Erickson at [email protected] not later than Friday, May 31, 2013. Please include your name, current position, and contact information in the e-mail accompanying the submission. Authors of accepted papers will be notified by Friday, June 28.

QUESTIONS: Any questions concerning the workshop should be directed to the organizers—Professor Verity Winship ([email protected]) and Professor Jessica Erickson ([email protected]).

 

We Were Not Equals

You can prep a dean all you want for his deposition in a lawsuit regarding a faculty firing, but sometimes he'll still answer entirely candidly.  Background on the case is here.

[Update: Jeff Malkan clarifies that this was testimony before a court, not in a deposition.]

Buffalo Law Dean Makau Mutua  was asked by Jeffrey Malkan's attorney about events that occurred before Mutua was dean...

Dean: I wanted to educate myself more about the various staffing models of the programs and I asked Jeff [Malkan] to provide me with a summary of the various models used by various schools to staff their research and writing programs.

Attorney: And he complied with your request even though he technically wasn't bound to do that for you?  You were equals, right?

Dean: No.  We were not equals.

Attorney: You were not both --

Dean: We were not equals.  This is again, you are coming back to the same problem.  Jeff Malkan, you know, was a research and writing instructor.  I was a professor of law.

More text of the exchange is here.  

Yes, I understand precisely what the dean was saying about faculty status.  But I think plenty of tenured faculty would never imagine that they were anything other than equals of their contract faculty colleagues.  ABA standard 405(c) may (or may not) protect jobs, but it has nothing to say about  respect. 

This Looks Like Your Everyday Ordinary Self-Profile of a Sociopath...

... and then you read in author M.E. Thomas's bio that she's "a law professor who writes regularly for major law journals." 

And then, after a few seconds, you shrug and you say, "yeah, that sounds about right."

Companion to American Legal History: Subjects and Methods

Now that the Companion to American Legal History that Sally Hadden and I co-edited is available, I want to talk a little more about what it says about the field of legal history.  By way of background, the Blackwell-Wiley companion volumes are designed to survey the field and give review essays that talk about what historians have written about; and sometimes at the end they point towards new directions in the field, as well.

I think the volume comes at precisely the right moment for American legal history, because the field is going in so many different directions at once.  A while back -- like when I was in graduate school -- the field was still dominated by studies of appellate opinions and jurisprudence.  So judges, treatise writers, and high brow legal thinkers predominated in the field.  There has been an extraordinary expansion in subjects over the past several decades.  Legal historians are looking closely at enslaved people, women, gay people, immigrants, workers, welfare recipients, as well as lawyers in big firms and small.  And they're looking at the procedures of justice of the peace and police courts, local trial courts, as well as state supreme courts and the United States Supreme Court.  The methods have broadened dramatically, too: we're interested in how fictional literature critiqued law (and in some cases supported it); how the technology of law brought down irrational authority and (more commonly) supported it.  As Sally and I say in the introduction -- and as I've observed elsewhere -- legal history is expanding so much in subjects and methods that it is beginning to look like almost all of history fits somewhere in its boundaries.

There's just a lot of literature to deal with and a great many moving parts.  Most of this is positive -- it's great to be in such a broad field.  One thing, however, is negative here.  And that is that the field is going in search of unifying principles.  Where once we knew how to talk about the pre-Civil War period, now there are so many different themes that it's sometimes hard to see how one important and deep book relates to another, even though they may be on what look like a similar topic.  One of my hopes is that in bringing a lot of the recent literature of legal history together in one place we'll see how people working in different periods are asking similar questions and how people working in the same period but from different vantages (either of sources or subjects) may have something to say to one another.  One of the topics that I'm increasingly interested in, for instance, is how the technology of law is used throughout our history to bring order to the community.

I'm hoping that the volume will spark some serious discussion of unifying questions.

Bradley Manning to be Grand Marshal of 2013 San Francisco Pride Parade

I'll continue with more posts about comparative law next week, but in the meantime I thought I would alert readers to this interesting development; I think it's significant both as a matter of human and democratic rights, but also as a reminder that there are issues other than marriage that many of us in the queer community find crucial, unresolved, and anxiety-inducing.  It's hard to imagine a marriage worth fighting for where the people in the marriage do not have rights to bodily integrity, and the Private Manning situation shows the continuing disregard for bodily integrity—especially for sexual and gender minorities in this country—that the U.S. government perpetuates, both against its own citizens and those who are not.

UPDATE:  The situation becomes murky, with this announcement apparently denying (or rescinding?) the previous announcement.

UPDATE 2:  A reader of this blog alerted me to this scathing analysis of the situation by Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/27/bradley-manning-sf-gay-pride.

The Lawyer Bubble

A lot of people have been talking about Steven Harper's The Lawyer Bubble: A Profession in Crisis.  And in the academy we've been talking about the law school crisis for years now, so the basics of Harper's book will come as no surprise to this community.  

Harper presents a balanced (even as it is harrowing) look at the profession.  There are a couple of things that I particularly like about this book, which I want to call attention to.  First, Harper has a wide vision of the lawyer crisis; he talks about both what's happening in law schools and what's happening in the profession.  And Harper has a particularly clear look at a bunch of issues -- how students often pick law school because it is a path of least resistance and there are a lack of other good opportunities (or at least there is a perception of lack of other opportunities); how law schools' focused on rankings has led misled them; how law firms' increasing focus on profits for partners has led to decreasing opportunities for junior lawyers and decreasing quality of life for associates; how clients' focus on the bottom line has caused constriction in law firms.  This is a picture with a lot of moving parts and  it shows that the problems of the profession can't be solved quickly or by action of one group.

Some people argue that the ABA should be more aggressive in restricting output.  I'm not sure that the ABA could engage in that kind of guild protection.  Harper doesn't suggest that, but he does at one point suggest that law school deans hold the key to the solution: they can admit fewer students. Yet I think our neo-liberal world isn't going to adopt that solution.  As we're seeing, the market is beginning to correct the problem.

Also, you may be interested in Harper's appearance on the Diane Rehm show a few weeks back.

Empirical Studies of Law and Social Change

Scott Cummings of UCLA Law School has an important and very useful field review essay on "Empirical Studies of Law and Social Change" in the Wisconsin Law Review.  One footnote here -- I don't mean to sound like one obsessed with slavery and Jim Crow (which of course I am).  But I think the law and social change literture is about (or should be about) how law stands in the way of social change as well as how law can impel it (or be used by those who seek it).  And related in some ways to Cummings -- and as long as I'm talking about recent work in law reviews -- let me call your attention to Emily Prifogle's Law and Local Activism Uncovering the Civil Rights History of Chambers v. Mississippi, which appeared in the California Law Review.  I hope to say more about Prifogle's piece shortly, because I'm deeply interested in her method -- what one might think of as the social history of constitutional law.  This is an important work in framing how "great cases" affect the local community and draw out reactions from that community.

Savannah Law School: Director of Academic Achievement

Here is a hiring announcement from our friends at the Savannah Law School, which may be of interest to Faculty Lounge readers:

Savannah Law School has an exciting and challenging opportunity for an outgoing, organized and energetic person to serve as Director of Academic Achievement.  The Director of Academic Achievement will facilitate the development of programs to assist students with their transition to law school, employ academic resource tools and exercises for skills assessment, promote successful completion of the J. D. program and teach a bar skills course to prepare them to sit for the bar exam.  A key responsibility will be to maintain an interactive web-based informational site, including the academic TWEN site.  This position also assists the Associate Dean of the Campus with modifying existing academic program offerings to make them more accessible for students.

 The ideal candidate will have a J.D. from an accredited institution and at least 3 years of successful experience in law practice and/or law teaching with a focus on legal writing and analysis.  Preference will be given to candidates with law school academic support experience. 

 SLS is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate in any of its programs or activities on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation, national or ethnic origin, marital status, age, disability, color, or religious belief.  Salary will be competitive based on experience.  Interested candidates may submit their letter of interest, along with a current professional resume and the names of three references, to:  Savannah Law School, Attn: Rose Anne Nespica, Associate Dean, 516 Drayton Street, Savannah, Georgia 31401 or via email at [email protected]

It's Not Quite Dudley & Stephens, But It's Interesting Nonetheless

Four people are on a sinking boat eight miles from shore. They jump in the water with only lifejackets, and are separated by the waves into two groups of two. One pair swims for 12 to 14 hours and survives. The other pair swims for 23 hours and survives. Guess which pair's survival becomes a national news story.

Now guess why.

Non-U.S. Court Building Trivia

Taking inspiration from Alfred Brophy, I thought I'd pose this trivia challenge:  Where is this court building located?

Antebellum College Building Trivia

My last building trivia question was picked off right away -- which I guess isn't surprising since it was the student lounge at the University of Michigan Law School.

I think this is a rather difficult one.  At right is a dormitory built before the Civil War. (I guess that narrows down the number of college campuses).  Where is it?  What building is it?  Mighty impressive for the antebellum era; as I was walking up to it, I figured it was maybe late nineteenth or possibly even early twentieth century.

Am I making this too easy by saying much of the building was built in the 1830s?  The 1830s was really a great time for expansion in higher education, especially in the south.

Dean Search Announcement: Samford / Cumberland

Dan has previously mentioned that Samford / Cumberland will be looking for a new dean to succeed John Carroll, who is stepping down from the helm in 2014.  You can find details on the search at this link.

Materials!

On Tuesday, May 7th at 5:15 PM, Mary Sarah Bilder of the Boston College School of Law will be delivering "Madison's Hand: Revising the Constitutional Convention," as part of the Boston Area Early American History Seminar at the Massachussetts Historical Society. Pauline Maier of MIT will comment. Below is the abstract and further information:

Via H-SHEAR, the listserv of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic:

Mary Sarah Bilder, Boston College Law School

"Madison's Hand: Revising the Constitutional Convention"

Comment: Pauline Maier, MIT

Madison's Notes with his revisions remain the most prominent remnants of

the Convention in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787. What does it mean

to take seriously that Madison's notes on the Convention are notes? Two

hundred and twenty-five years after Madison first wrote the Notes,

changing technology makes it possible to revisit the manuscript. This

paper will suggest that Madison revised his notes far more extensively

than has been previously understood. The revised notes demonstrate that

Madison's understanding of the Convention, the Constitution, and his own

role changed dramatically between May 1787 and the end of the eighteenth

century.

RSVP so we know how many will attend. To respond, email

[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> or call

617-646-0568. In case of inclement weather, phone 617-536-1608 for

information.

All seminars are free and open to the public. Unless stated, all

seminars take place at the Society, 1154 Boylston St., Boston, MA, and

commence at 5:15 p.m. Each seminar consists of a discussion of a

pre-circulated paper provided to our subscribers. (Papers will be

available at the event for those who choose not to subscribe.)

Afterwards the Society will provide a light buffet supper.

As in the past, we are making the essays available to subscribers as

.pdfs through the seminar's webpage,

http://www.masshist.org/2012/calendar/seminars/early-american-history.

Subscribe to the 2012-2013 series online via this page. A $25

subscription will entitle you to the full series of papers, as well as

the papers for the Boston Environmental History Seminar and the Boston

Immigration and Urban History Seminar.

We look forward to seeing you at the seminar!

 

AALS Call For Papers: Intersection of Torts and Insurance

From the AALS sections on Insurance Law and Torts Law:

The AALS Section on Insurance Law and the AALS section on Tort Law will hold a program "On the Unavoidable Intersection of Torts and Insurance" during the AALS 2014 Annual Meeting in New York. The program will feature a panel of leading researchers on the intersection of torts and insurance.

Panelists scheduled to participate include: Kent Syverud (Washington University School of Law), Tom Baker (University of Pennsylvania Law School), and Nora Engstrom (Stanford Law School).

We are looking to add one additional panelist through this Call for Papers.

Submissions: To be considered, a draft paper or proposal must be submitted by email to Ronen Avraham, Program Chair, at [email protected], and Jennifer Wriggins, Program Chair, at [email protected]. A proposal must be comprehensive enough to allow for a meaningful evaluation of the proposed paper. Submissions must be in PDF format.

Deadline: The deadline for submissions is Friday, September 6, 2013. Decisions will be announced by Friday, September 27, 2013. Eligibility: Full-time faculty members of AALS member law schools are eligible to submit. Faculty at fee-paid law schools; foreign, visiting and adjunct faculty members; graduate students; fellows; and non-law school faculty are not eligible to submit. Papers may already be accepted for publication, provided that the paper will not be published before the AALS meeting.

Expenses: The panelist selected through this Call for Papers will be responsible for paying his or her own annual meeting registration fee and travel expenses. Inquiries: Inquiries about this Call for Papers may be submitted to the Program Chairs.

A Pakistani Solution for DOMA?

We all have half-baked research projects that we imagine that we’ll turn our full attention to some day but, in the meantime, they simply provide background mental chatter as we read through the events of the day.  One such (very much) half-baked project of mine is thinking through the implications of legislative efforts to define some of the basic units of biological and, also, family life.  I’ve been interested in this in the context of ‘marriage’—and, in particular, the pluralistic legislative conceptions of marriage that circulate globally and also domestically—but I’ve also been interested in efforts by different U.S. states to legislatively define ‘life.’  It’s seemed to me that—aside from the interesting possibility created by different states’ conception of life that something/one may be ‘dead’ in one U.S. state but ‘alive’ in another—that these legislative efforts open the door to defining ‘life’ not just at conception, but also at, say, 50 weeks.  (Is this where ‘pro-life’ advocates really want to go?)

This is all a way of setting the stage for something I’ve noticed in the backdrop to conversations over the Defense of Marriage Act’s definition of marriage for the federal government, embodied in Section 3 of that Act (“In determining the meaning of any Act of Congress, or of any ruling, regulation, or interpretation of the various administrative bureaus and agencies of the United States, the word ‘marriage’ means only a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife, and the word ‘spouse’ refers only to a person of the opposite sex who is a husband or a wife.”):  Noticeably, this Section 3 definition leaves ‘man’ and ‘woman’ undefined. 

Could, then, President Obama issue an executive order defining ‘man’ and ‘woman,' for federal purposes, as completely contingent on a person’s self-declaration?  In other words, couldn’t one get around DOMA’s imposition of opposite-sex marriage by allowing individuals to identify, for federal purposes, as whatever gender they wanted?  Thus, Alice and Betty could be in a F-F same-sex marriage in a given state, but Alice could elect to be a ‘M’ for federal purposes, thereby positioning her and Betty as in a M-F opposite-sex marriage in the federal government’s eyes?

This brings me to Pakistan, where self-declarations of gender are the (new) law, as I also understand the case to now be in Argentina.  My comparative work has largely been in India, where I’ve focused on non-state Islamic legal institutions and their implications for ideas like ‘the rule of law’ and other liberal values.  But before I started work in India, I was working in Pakistan, and lately I’ve returned to doing work there, focused on a burgeoning movement for ‘transgender’ rights that a 2009 Supreme Court of Pakistan case instigated.  One interesting result of this case, which I have yet to fully explore, is that Pakistan now recognizes 4 (or maybe 5, depending on who you talk to) different official genders, with gender contingent not on birth certificates (largely non-existent in Pakistan) nor medical tests but on self-declaration.  This is all new, so much remains to be worked out, but Pakistan’s example does open up a whole brave new world with respect to gender, family, and perhaps even ‘life’ itself.

Associate Dean Creep

Okay, so now that I'm not an Associate Dean of anything, I suppose I can ask these questions without looking like I'm trying to feather my own nest ...

I'm interested in how many schools have more than one Associate Dean position (i.e. positions held by faculty rather than senior staff) and what portfolios they are divided into.  I've worked at schools with many associate deans - including A.D.s for higher student research (in schools with LL.M. and Ph.D. programs), A.D.s for faculty research, A.D.s for student affairs, A.D.s for international affairs and/or foreign exchange etc.  And I know there are an increasing group of A.D.s for experiential learning and practical legal training these days.

I'm wondering if there is an optimal number of associate deans at any given school and how the portfolios might be most effectively divvied up.  This will obviously vary from school to school.  A lot of the Australian schools I worked at had MANY A.D. positions but also huge student bodies and varied academic programs, whereas a lot of the smaller U.S. schools have only one or two A.D.s  And when there are only one or two portfolios they seem to be academic affairs and research/faculty development.

Does anyone have any thoughts on whether multiple associate deans are a good idea and in what contexts it's most effective to have more than one?  Is it just a factor of how big the school is and how many student programs it offers or are there more issues to take into account?  (And I know I used lots of prepositions to end sentences with in this post but I'm taking a holiday from good grammar through sheer end-of-semester tiredness.)

 

Updated Law School Dean Search List

Here's all the information I have thus far on dean hiring.  I imagine we may see one or two additional hires, and several new openings, before the end of May.