Usually when Adam and I blog about the same thing we disagree. But not here. I share Adam’s view that the costs of the semester long visit system exceed its benefits. I also applaud Adam for following the wisdom that one can’t eliminate an institutional as irrational or unjustified without first trying hard to understand why people adopted it. And I agree that one big contributor is the way a law school faculty pools together a lot of different kind of researchers into one voting body.

But here are a few additional hypotheses:

The visit as costly signal. Many law school professors want things — money, time, status — from their home institutions and sometimes they need bargaining power to get it. Getting an offer from a competing school gives them bargaining power, but it can waste the time, energy, and political capital of faculty at the competing school. Making people visit is a way of making sure they are seriously interested and worth spending the time to evaluate them and build a coalition to hire them. Again, I’m not convinced these costs are worth it, especially given how unevenly they are borne. But I hear it as a reason for requiring the visit.

Is there any reason this would be more true in law schools than other academic departments? Maybe. Given the breadth of law schools and even of positions within each field, it seems plausible to me that there would be more fluidity in the lateral market and more opportunities for fake expressions of interest. But I’m just guessing.

We need the teaching. Teaching law students is at the center of a mission of a law school. The set of canonical courses is relatively large. And unlike other departments, law schools can’t or don’t require on non-professor lawyers or on graduate students to cover a lot of these courses. So one way to staff these courses is with visiting faculty from other schools. And yet to induce these faculty to visit, one sometimes must offer them more than just money; one must dangle the possibility of a lateral offer, even if only a rare few visitors get it. I can think of some major law schools that seem to staff their courses in this way.

Do we have objective standards? Finally, I think Adam may be unduly optimistic in imagining that even the constitutional law faculty or the tax faculty at most law schools can agree among themselves about who is doing objectively excellent work in the field. Differences in areas of study and in basic methodology run deep in law, and I’ve known schools where the two faculty experts on a given subject were almost completely unable to agree that any other person was excellent. Maybe the personal factors and collegiality that can be judged on a visit provide a way for people who disagree on methodology to agree on a candidate nonetheless.

I’m not sure how much work each of these hypotheses are doing, if any, but they can help us through the kinds of transparency and institutional culture that may be necessary to improve law school hiring and move away from semester-long visits.