Becoming a Law Professor: A Candidate's Guide.

• Author: Buell, Samuel W.
• Position: Book review

BECOMING A LAW PROFESSOR: A CANDIDATE'S GUIDE. By Brannon P. Denning, Marcia L. McCormick, and Jeffrey M. Lipshaw. Chicago: American Bar Association. 2010. Pp. xv, 145. $99.95.

INTRODUCTION

What does it take to become a law professor? With the publication of Brannon Denning, Marcia McCormick, and Jeffrey Lipshaw's Becoming a Law Professor: A Candidate's Guide, (1) we can now say--as academics do--that there is a literature on this question. Previously, much of the advice on this topic consisted of postings to blogs and other websites, which comprise probably the most detailed set of writings law professors have created in that medium. (2)

The arrival of a monograph pulls this body of advice together, organizes it, adds substantially to it, and supplies a handy tool for the kit of any aspiring professorial candidate. The guide's authors have performed a service for which the hundreds of teaching aspirants who enter the Association of American Law Schools ("AALS") pool each season will owe them gratitude. Written in the style of a backpacker's guide--with the voice of intrepid reporters whose blisters have turned to calluses--Becoming a Law Professor hits the key points one needs to know to pass through the land of hiring in the legal academy without falling victim to common injuries, fatigue, hazards, and mistakes that are easily avoidable with proper preparation and local knowledge.

But Becoming a Law Professor and its progenitors in the blogosphere tend to slip much too quickly past a question that must arise well before one begins packing one's bags for this journey. The question of what it takes to become a law professor turns on what kind of law professor one means to be. This prior question extends deeper than the standard formal distinctions among categories of law faculty that the literature does a good job of explaining. (3) Even among tenured faculty, there is--if we are honest with ourselves--a distinction between those with the goal of a professorship only and those who strive to become scholars of law. The latter category includes the professor whose work will be read and valued by those who do valuable work in her field and the professor whom other faculties would be eager to have present her work at their schools, perhaps visit for a semester or a year, or even hire laterally. The distinction here has at least a partial connection to quality of law school, but we need not turn to rankings; it is sufficient to agree that the distinction exists.

Becoming a Law Professor crystallizes two related issues that have been bothering me about the emerging literature on how to become a law professor, one having to do with the production of law professors and the other having to do with the American meritocracy more generally.

My first difficulty is that the literature, despite being crammed to the gills with pointers and commands of all sorts--from how to cultivate persuasive recommenders (pp. 34-35, 43-44) to how to navigate the elevators of a particularly crucial hotel in Washington, D.C. (p. 48 n.4)--does not give the poor candidates an answer to their real question: How does one become a law professor and preferably one who is a genuine scholar of law?

The answer, as anyone who has been through this market in the last decade or two knows well, can be expressed in a single word: write (before you seek a job). Every bit of guidance to the market emphatically says this, including Becoming a Law Professor (p. 28). Of course, "write" is no answer at all. That's like telling someone who wants to know how to become a pianist, "play."

Let's call this deficit in the literature the "Rumpelstiltskin problem." Like the king in the Grimms' tale, the existing guidance tells the candidate (the miller's daughter) what she must do in order to realize her intense desire for a teaching job (keen wish not to be executed): publish serious work (spin straw into gold). And then it reminds her of this at the top of every hour.

The literature does not seem to do a lot more on this front than the fairy tale. It sends the candidate off to, one imagines, a shuttered and perhaps bleak place and tells her to come back with gold. Indeed, reality is worse than the fairy tale. There will be no magical being who appears in the grim chamber to offer the aspiring professor publication in the Harvard Law Review in exchange for her firstborn child. (At least I hope there is no such creature, for I have met a few people who I fear might have accepted its bargain.) Thus there is now a literature, but--as the work of only lawyers can do--it explains in painstaking detail how to master procedure while barely addressing matters of substance.

Such advice could be adequate only for those whose ambition is just a professorship--any professorship--and maybe not even then. The literature does not address the question of what sort of job at what sort of school one might hope to get if one's plan is simply to publish something, or some several things, in some law journals somewhere. And I wonder how many candidates comprise the audience for such a message: those who enter the market hungry to internalize book-length advice on how to become a law professor but with their sights set low, on a job or school that will expect only the minimum of them.

My second difficulty is that this literature has taken on the qualities of a phenomenon in our meritocracy that seems of questionable value and perhaps even costly. For lack of a better term, let's call this "Kaplanization." (4)

The process goes something like this. At the first stage, there is a credential or position that becomes more comparatively desirable, and thus more competitive, than it used to be. Achieving it involves running some sort of evaluative gauntlet. Many people want to know how to survive that evaluative process in order to acquire the cherished position or credential. A cottage industry sprouts up in instructing people on how to navigate the gauntlet. Typically the industry (as cottage industries go) offers a product that promises not only to help one pass through the gauntlet but also to help one travel it more easily and at less cost in time and effort, suffering fewer wounds along the way. The idea is to simplify the process, to demystify it, to debug it--ultimately, to show the aspirant how to outfox her evaluators.

Then the second stage arrives. The cottage industry's product is widely available and well known. Everyone has access to it. (5) It becomes not just helpful to be instructed on the process but essential. What used to be a leg up becomes a price of admission, a minimum baseline for entry into the discussion. And, more worrying, the focus seems to grow on all the little tricks and secrets that help one defang a process that is for good reason meant to have a serious set of fangs.

There are not yet (heaven forbid) any marketed programs in preparing for the law teaching market. But the volume and tactical quality of the advice out there is beginning to take on shades of Kaplan. It is a bit worrying, in this regard, that the American Bar Association is charging such a steep price for Becoming a Law Professor.

In the end, what is achieved by marketing tactical advice? Is value added in terms of the quality of legal scholars and their scholarship, or do entry costs simply grow and become more systematic? My concern is that all we have done is reinserted the superficiality that spawned the movement to make the process more substantive in the first place.

I thus have two complaints about the process-oriented quality of the literature on becoming a law professor, of which Becoming a Law Professor is the current apotheosis. One is that it instructs its readers to spin straw into gold without telling them how such alchemy is possible. The other is that it contributes to a perhaps wasteful or even counterproductive sideshow in which candidates are encouraged to devote energies to dressing themselves up a certain way at the cost of figuring out how to become genuine and original scholars.

It would be an obvious error, of course, to blame the authors of Becoming a Law Professor or its genre for creating these problems. Especially with regard to the problem of Kaplanization, the authors have admirably egalitarian ambitions. The book endeavors at some pains to persuade the "nonstandard" candidate for a law teaching position, who has not embraced the Kaplan-type program early and often in her resume development, that all hope is not lost (pp. 27-38). One can hope the authors' emphasis on the problems involved in being nonstandard--and what might be needed to overcome them--encourages more people than it discourages.

After all, law faculties are collectively responsible for creating the process that this new guidebook only tries to explain. We are as responsible as the authors of the existing literature for not having published the deeper guidance that aspiring legal scholars need. I thus mean in this Review to be at least as introspective as critical. And I realize this Review cannot help but contribute to the very problem about which I complain by making certain points about credentialing only more explicit.

I will now take up my two related worries in turn. I will spend more time on the first, which is likely to be of more practical use to the reader.

1. STRAW INTO GOLD

   1. The Problem

      When it comes to legal scholarship, how does one get from straw to gold? Maybe the available resources have not answered this question because it is too hard. Like everyone else who has written on this subject, I can certainly reflect on my own experience. When I think back to the straw with which I began, it tends to make me cringe rather painfully. Recalling now what I began to put on the page about seven years ago produces much the same effect on me as thinking about myself in high school--or, more precisely, on stage in high school. (6)

      I do know that it was essential advice to be told...