Brennan’s book on succeeding in academia starts by asking: Do you really even want an academic job? So that’s where we’ll start too.
For most academic disciplines, this question should be answered before the first day of graduate school. This is in part because, in most disciplines, there are huge differences between possible academic jobs (e.g. being an economist can mean being a community college professor teaching introductory micro or being a MIT professor running experiments in Kenya). This is also in part because the school you attend will have a huge impact on what academic jobs you are likely to obtain. Taken together, these simple facts mean that you need to think about if being an academic is right for you before your post-graduate education kicks off.
But unlike getting most PhDs, getting a JD isn’t a waste of time if you don’t end up becoming a professor. Far from it. Law degrees from good schools create many great career options. Working as a law professor is just one of them. So the relevant considerations for the law version of this question—do you even want to be a law professor—are different than they are for other disciplines.
Or put differently, the key decision isn’t whether you should go to law school; it’s whether you should pursue an academic career or another kind of legal career after law school. There are plenty of trade-offs between these options. For instance, if you become a law professor, you have higher job security, but lower geographic mobility. I won’t try to list them all. But here are three that are worth thinking about.
First, being a law professor is a high average, low variance career. Most tenure track law teaching positions are good jobs. You get to teach professional school students, even the entry level classes are pretty interesting, and there is time for research. But the differences across the profession are pretty small, whether you look between schools or over time. For instance, I spent three years as one of the people responsible for helping the Chicago fellows on the market, and during that time, there was maybe a 2x difference in compensation or teaching loads from the best offers to the worst offers the fellows received. Similarly, whether you’re very junior or very senior, the jobs of people that work at a given school aren’t very different.
This is not true of private legal practice. Whatever metric you care about, once you are mid-career, there are order of magnitude differences between lawyers’ jobs. There are lawyers making four figures and lawyers in working in similar areas of law making eight figures, and there are lawyers that never set foot in a court room and lawyers that argue before the Supreme Court every term. Becoming a law professor makes it highly likely that you have a great career, but the cost of that great career is giving up a lot of the variance.
Second, given the low variance over-time, the relative advantages of being a law professor are greatest at the beginning and end of careers. When I first started as a law professor, I couldn’t imagine trading places with my friends that were associates at law firms. They were getting emails with urgent tasks from partners most nights; I was getting more emails from people pretending to be my dean as part of phishing scams than genuine emails from my actual dean asking me to do things.
But over time, that gap has closed. Each year, my friends at firms have more autonomy, get more important responsibilities, and do more interesting work. But if you are passably competent in academia, over time you will accumulate more service responsibilities and time commitments. (It’s true that responsibilities pile up in other lines of work too; but in academia each new responsibility is replacing freedom, not lower level work.)
The benefits of being an academic also seem to be huge in the last decade or so of your career. This is because, as I mentioned before, the trajectory of an academic career is pretty flat; so you’re ahead again when the curve of other careers takes a downturn.
Third, many legal jobs primarily assess input, but being a law professor means you’re judged exclusively on output. At most firms, some amount of bonuses may be about the quality of your output (e.g. did you get good reviews, did you get a good result for your clients, etc), but the first order determinants of compensation are inputs (e.g. how many hours did you work). This balance may shift over time, and varies some by type of legal career. But at the end of the day, lawyers typically get credit if you’re seen working hard for your clients.
But as a law professor, no one ever cares about your input. It doesn’t matter if you spent five weeks or five years working on an article, it only matters what people think of the final product. The same is true with teaching. There are professors with reputations as being great teachers that are essentially charismatic people that wing it; and professors with reputations as being bad teachers that work tirelessly to prep their classes. Their effort doesn’t matter.
If you’re considering being a law professor, it’s worth asking yourself if you’d thrive in a system where you are evaluated this way. I frequently mention to lawyers that being a professor means that no one cares about your input. The first reaction is always jealousy: “I have to bill my time in six minute increments, but no one cares, or knows, how you spend your time?” My response is to always ask if they’d prefer their bonus to be based on people reading a brief they wrote and deciding if it’s better than a brief written by their peers. People then point out how unfair it would be to not get paid for all the hours you actually work.
Now, I should have probably done this right away, but let me lay my cards on the table. I think being a lawyer is a great job. I’ve talked to plenty of law professors that think actually doing the job they train their students for would be some sort of punishment. I don’t have the data to back this view up, but I always have a hunch that the law professors that look down on practice don’t actually know many lawyers. Or, maybe more realistically, when they interact with the lawyers they do know, they do more talking than listening. Because most lawyers I know—whether they are in big law or working as a public defender—have jobs that seems pretty great. But I do think my job is even better.