Jonathan Masur, Kyle Rozema, and I recently published a paper in the Journal of Legal Studies titled Rethinking Law School Tenure Standards that should hopefully be of some interest to all current or aspiring law professors. Why? We go hard at the fact that something like 95 percent of law professors are granted tenure.

To the handful of people reading this blog that are on the tenure track, this might sound like a good thing. After all, being on the tenure track is stressful as hell, especially during a pandemic. So, I’m sure it would be infuriating to about any research concluding that the bar should be raised.

But to the other handful of people reading this that are either aspiring to be law professors or currently teach at schools that aren’t their first-choice, it’s the current tenure equilibrium that should be infuriating. Because the fact that tenure denials are so rare is a big part of why it’s become impossibly hard break into teaching at law schools and why so many amazing law professors have limited lateral opportunities.

But instead of just writing down our views about how to improve law school labor markets and adding footnotes so that it would look like serious research, we tried to empirically assess what would have happened if law schools had imposed tenure standards more in line with other academic departments. To do so, we combed through various sources to build a dataset of law professors hired from 1970 to 2007 and a year-by-year record of the papers they published, where they published them, and citations those papers received each year.  

Using this data, we produce two main findings. First, professors’ research records when they’re up for tenure are highly predictive of their future research output. In other words, law schools have the necessary information at the time of tenure decisions to make reliable predictions about who are going to be stars, median faculty members, or below average performers. Second, if law schools had tenure denial rates comparable to the hard sciences, it could more than double the law schools’ median post-tenure academic impact.

Now, you might think that imposing these higher standards would be a mistake because there would be a lot of false negatives (i.e., people that go on to be great that would accidentally be denied tenure) or that it would hurt the diversity of the law school faculties. But we find that these problems wouldn’t have to materialize.

There’s a lot more going on in the paper, so stay tuned for a few more posts about the data, methods, and results of our research.

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*Jonathan and Kyle are busy, careful scholars with better things to do than write blog posts. They had no knowledge that I was writing this post or approval of its contents. So feel free to blame them for the things you don’t like about the actual paper, but please don’t hold my commentary about it against them.