One month ago, Tess Wilkinson-Ryan wrote an essay explaining the high costs that “look-see” visits place on law professors. (For anyone not familiar, look-see visits are the practice of requiring a professor from another school — e.g. Penn — to visit for a semester — e.g. teach contracts at Stanford for the fall — so the faculty can get a good look at the professor as a colleague before offering them a job.) Tess’s fantastic essay sparked debate across the legal academy — in tweets, blog posts, and, anecdotally, in repeated conversations — about whether it was time to stop requiring visits before making lateral offers.
As many have persuasively argued, the personal costs of visits born by the candidates are extremely high, the information visits provide about how the candidate will be as a colleague is noisy, and insisting on visits likely disproportionately limits the mobility of certain candidates (e.g. women, people will small children, people with limited resources or support networks, etc). For these reasons, I am in favor of eliminating the strong norm of requiring semester long visits.
But changing this norm requires a major shift in the legal academy’s practices. It is thus worth first asking why law schools developed this norm in the firm place. Notably, social science departments and other professional schools largely do not require look see visits. So why do law schools? The answer is that unique features of law schools make them necessary to build coalitions willing to vote for candidates.
Law schools have faculties with a diverse range of educational backgrounds, methodological commitments, and subject matter expertise. A single law school faculty may include moral philosophers, legal historians, applied micro-economists, and even a few lawyers. But unlike business schools or public policy schools, we are not divided into defined “groups”. Although business schools may have economists and phycologists on the faculty, the finance group will decide on the best person to hire to teach finance and the marketing group will decide on the best person to hire teach marketing.
The fact that law faculties don’t operate this way is relevant for two reasons.
First, it is more difficult for us to judge the research record of lateral candidates in different fields. If the constitutional law “group” at a school were asked whether to make a lateral offer to a professor at another school, they could likely form consensus without a long visit being necessary. This is because they can read and understand the candidate’s research and trust their own judgements about its quality.
But many people on a law faculty will be expected to cast a vote on the candidate despite having no way of directly judging the quality of their research. Moreover, they can’t just rely on the candidate’s publication record to tell them anything about the quality of the work. Business school professors can assume that a paper in the Journal of Finance is good because it went through a demanding peer review process, but there is no reason to make a similar assumption about a paper published in a leading student-edited law review.
Second, professors do not always directly benefit from the research done by colleagues that are not in their area. For instance, a tax scholar benefits from having other tax people around to give knowledgable feedback on their research or to expose them to new methods. A constitutional law scholar, however, might not care about those aspects of having a tax scholar as a colleague.
But that doesn’t mean that a constitutional law scholar is indifferent to which tax scholars are their colleagues. They are just looking for different things. Things like whether the tax scholar will go out of their way to offer feedback when they can on constitutional law research, pull their weight in institutional service, be fun to have around for lunches and dinners, and generally be a pleasant presence in the building (or, at very least, not be a jerk).
Both of these problems — difficulty assessing scholarship and looking for qualities beyond research — are ameliorated by visits. Even if I cannot read a constitutional law paper and know if it makes an important contribution, I can get a sense of whether a constitutional law scholar is a smart and curious person after being around them for a while. And even if I don’t care about research on constitutional interpretation, I can figure out if the constitutional scholar will be fun to have at meals. In other words, the visit is needed to build a coalition of people outside the lateral candidates area willing to support them.
So, how law professors be convinced to vote for people outside their area without the visit to win them over? The answer is that we should rethink short visits (whether a few days or a few weeks) to focus on exposing candidates to people outside their field. For instance, schedule a potential lateral candidate in tax to visit on a day they can attend a law and philosophy workshop and participate in the discussion, send the tax scholar to dinner with the criminal law scholars, and in general, focus a lot more on scheduling meals than office interviews.
Finally, beyond trying to recreate these kind of cross-subject interactions, we should also just all learn to trust the judgment of our colleagues with relevant academic expertise more instead of demanding that lateral candidates takes months out of their lives to charm us.