Getting good advice on how to become a law professor is much harder than getting good advice about succeeding in most other academic disciplines. The reason is simple: peers give the best advice.
When you start graduate school in fields like economics, philosophy, or political science, there are ample opportunities to interact socially with students that are further along in the program. It’s not only easy to get advice from them; it would be impossible not to. Over weak coffee and cheap beer, there are constantly conversations full of tips on how to get ahead.
Want to know what classes are worth taking? What conferences are worth trying to attend? Where to find extra funding? What kind of research projects are hot on the job market? Other students will know, and they’ll be happy to talk about it. And perhaps most importantly, every year, the students that are furthest along in the program will go through the job market, so you can learn from their experiences.
It’s also easier to get good advice from professors. Young professors will socialize with graduate students in a way that I never see happen with law students, and even senior professors are frequently on a first name basis with graduate students in their departments.
But law school just doesn’t work that way. When you’re a 1L, the 3LS will have good advice on how to prepare for finals, bid on classes, succeed on law review write-on competitions, or land a clerkship. They have spent years learning how to game law school, and most are pretty good at it by their last year. That doesn’t mean that academically inclined students won’t offer advice to their peers about how to become a law professor—they just don’t know what they’re talking about.
This brings me to Brennan’s book, Good Work If You can Get it: How to Succeed in Academia. It’s full of advice that’s likely old news to people with peers and professors that give blunt advice; but it’s still valuable for people that don’t have those networks. And in law, most people don’t have those networks. So I’m hoping these posts can help people trying to figure out if they want to be a law professor, and, if so, how to become one.
So tomorrow we’ll start dishing out our thoughts on succeeding in the legal academy. But throughout, there are two principles from Brenna’s book that will inform my posts.
First, giving advice and debating reforms are different conversations. My experience has been that people often quickly pivot from advice about how to succeed in legal academia to debating how legal academia should be reformed. For instance, my advice to (almost) anyone that wants to be a law professor is that they should do a fellowship. Now, it’s true that the de facto fellowship requirement may systematically disadvantage certain kind of candidates, and maybe we should reform them. But that doesn’t mean a current aspiring law prof shouldn’t be told fellowships are the surest path to success.
Second, the entry level market isn’t a lottery. That doesn’t mean that luck doesn’t play a role. We all know people that we think over or under placed (or that we think are excellent but failed to place entirely). But there are actions that people can take to improve their odds of success on the market. I’m going to focus on the steps people can take to do better; not on pointing out that there is some randomness in the process.
To be clear, I’m on board with reforming the legal academy and making the job market less arbitrary (and I’m collaborating with other profs on several research projects on those topics). But these posts aren’t about what should be changed; they’re about how to succeed in the current system.