Suppose you do want to be a professor. Another chapter in Brennan’s book is devoted to how to succeed in grad school — what you should be doing in grad school to help get a good academic job afterwards. This is one of the places where the structure of legal academia is very different from other fields. In other fields, you go to a graduate Ph.D. program almost exclusively because you want to go into academia afterwards. All of your classmates are there for the same reason, and a good program will be focused on helping you achieve that goal.
By contrast, legal academics start by going to law school. At every law school, most of your classmates are not going to be legal academics. They are going to be lawyers. And law school alone will not be enough to turn you from a person interested in law into a future law professor. Plus, you’ll always have the option of working as a lawyer if academia doesn’t work out. So we should think of your law school choices as opening and closing doors. Here are some choices to keep your door to academia open.
Go to a law school that produces law professors. Most law professors go to a relatively small set of schools. (See here and here.) This might be partly correlation, but it’s at least partly a mix of training and signalling. So if you want to be a law professor, you too should go to one of those law schools. (Others have criticized this fact about legal academia, but again our goal here is advice, not reform.) If you did not get into such a law school, try to transfer to one.
Get good grades. Not all law schools have the same emphasis on grades, but every law school has some way of differentiating among its students. Be one of the better students. By the time you’re applying to be a professor, most schools won’t care so much about your grades, but for now this is helpful. Grades open the doors to clerkships and other more selective legal jobs, which are in turn both good training and good credentials for being a legal academic. They also impress your professors, whose help you’ll want later.
Read widely. Ph.D. programs set a canon of articles in the field you should read. Most law schools don’t. Most classes will focus largely on cases, and even the non-case readings will be idiosyncratic. (There are some exceptions, like Chicago’s class on Canonical Ideas in Legal Thought, but even a single class on the canon can’t actually teach you the canon.)
But if you want to be a law professor, you need to read a lot of articles by law professors. This will help you learn what a successful article sounds like, what ideas have already been covered to death, and what will seen as a real contribution. You can go about this in many ways, systematic or unsystematic, but you need to start reading scholarship even when nobody makes you.
Start writing. Law professors write a lot. But again, law school is not focused on teaching you how to write legal scholarship, so you need to seek it out. Seek out classes where you’ll write a paper, and professors who will give you feedback on it. Take one of your better ideas, and do an independent study with a professor. These papers may or may not be publishable. (I wrote five major papers in law school and four of them have never seen the light of day.) But they are good practice.
Get to know your professors. Getting a job as a law professor requires you to show a bunch of professors that you have good ideas and can produce good scholarship. Who can help you figure out how to appeal to these hypothetical future professors judging you? Your current professors. (Not all of them, of course, some of them are probably clueless; but as a pool, they’re still a really important resource.) If you impress your professors they will also recommend you later, which is helpful, but even putting that aside they can help you learn to do better work.
That said, every year there are law students who wander into the office of a professor they don’t really know and say “I want to be a professor, can you help me?” This is the wrong way to go about it. Professors like to write and talk about ideas. The way to impress a professor is to write and talk about ideas with them. Do a great job in that seminar or independent study. Ask a professor if you can run a few paper ideas by them. In other words, integrate your professors into the process of getting good grades, reading, and writing. You can’t make up for bad work with schmoozing.
If you do these things, then we can talk about the next step . . . .