With the scant time before I turn into a pumpkin on Monday, I’m going to try to add a few final thoughts on this series of legal academia advice. But in the meantime I wanted to respond to a couple of points and queries that have come up.

1. Does this advice ignore legal writing and clinical professor positions? Yes. I don’t feel as qualified to give such advice, though I know and love great people who have these jobs. If you have advice for legal writing or clinical professors you’d like to share, email us.

2. Is it a good idea to read a bunch of student notes to get a sense of what beginning scholarship looks like? No, this is a bad idea. Student notes may or may not be worth writing, but they are a different genre and they can teach you bad habits. Many journals force students to recapitulate existing doctrine and scholarship and spend too little space on their own novel contribution. They often impose artificial constraints on the topic and arguments that are permitted. I’m sure there are exceptional journals and exceptional notes, but surveying notes as a field will teach you bad habits.

   If you want to get a sense of how specifically beginning research should look, focus on reading published articles fellows, law clerks, or untenured professors. You might also see if your school will let law students sit in on job talks, and also ask to see a copy of the job talk papers.

3. Doesn’t the system need to be reformed? Yes, in some respects, though I don’t think everybody will like our reform advice either! For now let me just reiterate that I find it useful to break down discussion of the hiring market into three different questions. What should aspiring professors do, given the world we live in? What should hiring committees and faculties do, given the world we live in? What should all of us participants do to change the world of legal academia?

   The answers to all three of these questions should be different. For instance, I said earlier that aspiring professors should try to go to a school that produces law professors. But in my view hiring committees should ignore this advice — if a candidate has direct evidence of their teaching and scholarly ability, the law school they went to is basically irrelevant.