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Frequently Asked Questions
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Quite a lot. Each spring we run an open weekly lunchtime session for current students in your position as well as those who are not sure whether a career in law teaching is for them. A different faculty member conducts each session, providing advice and answering questions on a variety of subjects. More broadly, the faculty commitment to individual mentoring of students provides opportunities to develop as a beginning scholar. In concrete terms, funds are available for graduates and, in rare instances, current students, who need time to write a law review-length article in preparation for the teaching market.
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No. Unlike some of our competitors, we do not believe it is our role to identify prospective law faculty at the beginning of the law school experience. Rather, the diverse experiences of our alumni in law teaching and our own faculty suggest that it is nearly impossible to predict in advance the people who are interested and likely to be successful in legal academia. Anyone who is admitted to Columbia Law School as a student has the potential to be a law professor. The purpose of this program is to assist those who are interested in that career path or think that they might be interested in it some day.
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Yes, although it's not offered each year. We offer a seminar on legal education, which considers issues of pedagogy. We also offer a seminar on academic legal writing. Both seminars are open to Associates in Law, second and third year JD students, and LLM students. The faculty committee that oversees the Program on Careers in Law Teaching also urges students to hone their research and writing skills in seminars and working on other projects in subject matter areas that interest them. Students interested in the possibility of a career in law teaching should also view the Major Writing Credit requirement as an opportunity to receive training in producing legal scholarship from Columbia faculty.
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Well, it all depends. Teaching legal writing and research, in and of itself, has little to commend it as an entre to law school teaching unless that is the subject you wish to teach (and a number of schools do have permanent legal writing and research faculty, some tenure-track). A few schools have programs, like Columbia's Associates in Law program, that are specifically structured to appeal to and assist young scholars who aspire to an academic career, but do not yet have the portfolio of writings (and, perhaps, mentors) that will contribute most to their likelihood of success. Recent Associates now teach at American, Buffalo, Cornell, St. Louis, Washington & Lee and other American law schools, as well as at leading schools in Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The program is designed to provide time and support for writing and learning about teaching, and faculty works hard to assure Associates' successful placement. The Bigelow program at the University of Chicago is among those offering similar support.
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In general, adjunct teaching is not a good way to break into the legal academy, although it can help you learn whether teaching will be a source of gratification for you. Few faculties monitor their adjunct teachers closely, or regard them as a source of future full-time colleagues; adjunct teaching at another school will be of minor interest to a faculty you are applying to, save possibly as a source of teaching evaluations.
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This is undoubtedly a real challenge to which there are no easy answers. You might want to consider a fellowship. Some prospective law professors enroll in JSD programs that require a measure of teaching in exchange for a stipend and time to write with input from faculty members. However, the competition for these positions is stiff and the opportunity cost of roughly two years is high. If you have the self-discipline and an accommodating employer, you may do better to give yourself a "fellowship," i.e., to take off roughly three months from work to write an article. If you plan to do something like this, you should develop the idea and do some preliminary research before your leave of absence begins. If this course is not feasible, you may have to write during weekends and evenings, notwithstanding your day job and family obligations. Setting a realistic timetable is essential. The sort of work that a full-time academic could produce in less than a semester may take an aspiring academic a year or two. But given that your writing will play a major role in whether you land a teaching job, you should take the time necessary to produce a paper or papers that showcase your abilities.
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The short answer is: when you have a scholarly agenda and at least one substantial publishable or better yet, published, scholarly work. Some law schools hire academic tenure-track faculty based on promise alone, but increasingly many appointments committees only look at applicants who have already published one or more law review articles. You are seeking a job as both a teacher and scholar, and appointments committees want to see evidence that you are capable of excelling in both roles. Most faculties believe (perhaps erroneously) that they can evaluate your teaching potential on the basis of your "performance" in interviews and an oral presentation followed by Q & A. Most faculties also believe (generally correctly) that the best measure of future scholarship is past and current scholarship. Accordingly, they look closely at what you've written. Student work such as a Note or Case Comment can provide some evidence but is frequently insufficient. In addition to one or more substantial published works, by the time you make it to the AALS appointments conference you should be able to articulate a scholarly agenda, i.e., a general plan for making a distinctive contribution to some field of study.
Note: The foregoing does not apply to most clinical positions, although clinical faculty at some law schools are also expected to produce written scholarship. If you are only applying for clinical positions that do not entail scholarly publication, you should, at the least, have a clear conception of how you will translate your work experience into the classroom.
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No. Excellent performance in law school certainly helps in securing an entry-level job in law teaching but it is not a necessary, nor even the most important, condition. Law school faculty appointments committees look for predictors of scholarly productivity and good teaching. A CLS grad with grades in the B/B+ range who writes and publishes a solid article in a good journal and has the backing of one or more faculty mentors is likely to do better on the job market than an A student who clerked for the Second Circuit but has no scholarly writing and no professor that knows him or her well. This is not to say that conventional measures of achievement in law school are unimportant, but they may be more valuable as pathways than as ends in themselves. Good grades and law journal experience will help you secure a position as a research assistant, which, if you do a good job, will result in a positive recommendation from a faculty member down the line. Moreover, the longer one has been a practicing attorney, the less relevance law school grades have relative to other factors, especially if the prospective law professor intends to teach and write in an area of practice expertise.
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Sure. About half the teaching jobs filled are filled from the AALS process, and the others are filled by other means. Here, the support of your own law school's faculty is especially important. If you are a Columbian proceeding outside the AALS process, it is particularly important that you let us know about your interests and ambitions.
Participation in the AALS process is not free. If you are restricted to a single geographic area, it can make sense for you (or, even better, your mentors) to write the schools directly, sending a full resume, expressing your interest and asking if it would be possible to have a screening interview at the school. Of course you should do this with the AALS's preferences about resume content and timetable in view. Many schools are happy to save interview times at the conference itself for people who come from outside their own geographic catchment area. This course is not without risk; the conference interviews may tend to create a focus, from which people who have interviewed outside them can get lost.
If you have developed your interest in teaching too late in the year to participate effectively in the AALS process, writing directly to the schools of interest to you will be the only course open to you. Again, it will be helpful if a mentor is willing to open the dialog on your behalf. Bear in mind, too, that schools can develop unanticipated needs, too late for their own participation in the process. It is not uncommon, for example, for a school not to learn that one of its professors will be visiting elsewhere the following year, until after mid-March, when AALS guidelines preclude their own offers of visitorship to a person already teaching. Likely these situations will produce only a short-term visitorship, but this can be a useful foot in the door at that school, and also quite useful to have on your resume at the following year's AALS recruitment conference.
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If at all possible, you should complete the AALS form and upload your cv (as well as any other materials) in time for the first submission deadline, usually early August of the year before the year in which you want to teach. The recruitment conference itself is held in late October or early November of each year, in Washington, D.C. The AALS permits participating schools to view forms and resumes beginning in mid-August. Once the recruitment conference is complete, schools follow a call-back routine that is familiar from other hiring contexts; usually they will have completed their deliberations by mid-March.
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An advanced degree in law might be helpful in particular fields (tax comes to mind) where specialist learning can be important. Getting one can also provide important assets other than the degree itself -- time to do the advanced professional writing that is now a virtual requirement of entry to teaching at many if not most law schools, and an opportunity to develop mentoring relationships with particular faculty members who can be helpful to you in your search. In some countries (e.g., Australia, Canada, Israel), a graduate law degree is virtually required for academic success, but this is not the case in the United States; probably most Americans seeking graduate law degrees have received a JD from law schools that, unlike Columbia, do not themselves generate a significant stream of law school teachers, and they are looking to associate themselves with those traditions (gaining access to the support and to the common standards of assessment they imply).
Ph.D's in other disciplines -- notably, Economics, but also Anthropology, English, History, Philosophy, Political Science, Psychology, etc. -- can be very attractive to a faculty seeking to enhance its interdisciplinarity. In recent years, elite American law schools have hired holders of Ph.D's much more frequently than holders of J.S.D's. This is hardly a reason to set yourself off in that direction, however, unless it independently calls you to it. Many such faculty members came to their Ph.D. first, and sought a law degree at later stages in their careers; joint degree candidacies are possible, but so demanding of time and other resources that one cannot conceive their being undertaken for instrumental reasons. The holder of joint degrees deepens her understanding of particular areas, and consequently also may narrow the range over which she will be interesting to a law faculty.
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