More than in any other country or in any time in history, there is today an efficient market for law faculty in the United States. Well-functioning markets of all kinds can be brutal for individual competitors even as they improve competition, and American law schools are no exception. Today an American law dean spends much of his or her time and energy in recruiting and retaining faculty. A small class of faculty who are particularly prominent or in particularly crucial fields of law are commanding salaries far in excess of custom and the salaries of peers. It is becoming more common for tenured faculty to shop for better paying positions, and to move frequently among law schools. Some American law schools are bidding for the best talent on foreign law faculties.
The market for law faculty in the United States is actually eight markets, each of which has its own customs and trends. There are at least eight categories of people who teach law in the United States: Tenure-track entry level faculty; tenured faculty; clinical faculty; legal writing faculty; visiting faculty; adjunct faculty; professional law librarians and information technology specialists; and persons who teach law outside of law schools in contexts such as undergraduate political science departments, business schools, and community colleges. The terms and conditions of employment for each group vary dramatically, as does the market for recruiting them. Less than half of American law teachers are in tenured or tenure-track positions.
Tenure-Track Entry Level Faculty. The traditional way to become a law teacher in the United States is to graduate from an elite law school, practice law or clerk for a judge for one to three years, and then obtain a tenure track position as an assistant professor at a law school. The market for entry-level tenure track faculty is very competitive and well organized. Last year, hundreds of young lawyers filed registration forms with the American Association of Law Schools Faculty Appointments Registry, with most of the filing done electronically. The one page forms are distributed to more than 180 law schools, in an electronic format that is searchable by field (the fields include subjects of interest, degree schools, publications, academic references, and race and gender). Schools review the information on each candidate, and select a group of from 10-50 to interview during a recruitment conference held over a weekend in November in Washington. The best candidates are then invited to campus to be interviewed by faculty and administrators, and a subset receive offers. Less than 10% of the candidates on the market in a particular year will obtain a tenure track position. Starting salaries currently range from $40,000 to over $100,000 per year. (Starting salaries for attorneys at law firms in the United States currently range from $30,000 to over $150,000 per year). Entry-level faculty are usually considered for tenure and promotion to full professor after 5-7 years of employment, through a rigorous process in which scholarly writings are reviewed, teaching is evaluated, and service to the bar, university, and community is expected.
Tenured Faculty: Tenured law faculty move and seek to move among law schools because of a desire for more money, better working conditions, better location, better colleagues and students, and a better intellectual match of scholar and institution. The traditional route to move to another law school was to serve as a visiting professor for a semester or year first. Most major law schools today, however, have recruited prominent scholars without first requiring them to visit. It is not uncommon for a tenured faculty member to move among four or five law schools across a career. The typical law faculty member will move at least once. Numerous law schools have sought to become more prominent, and to assemble a better faculty, by recruiting the best tenured faculty from competitors above and below them in law school rankings. This has led to schools offering salaries and other benefits (college tuition, reduced teaching loads, retirement contributions, housing allowances, research grants, travel funds) far in excess of traditional amounts to a small class of the most sought-after faculty. Salaries for the best paid tenured faculty at the most competitive American law schools now sometimes exceed $200,000, not including associated benefits. The dynamic market for tenured faculty has made law faculties less stable in membership over time, has increased the costs of retaining faculty, and has required that a large fraction of collective faculty effort be devoted to recruitment.
Clinical Faculty: The overwhelming majority of American law schools have full-time clinical faculty, who supervise students in representing live clients in litigation and transactional work, as well as work in skills courses and other parts of the law school curriculum. At a minority of institutions, clinical teachers are tenured or on the tenure-track; at a majority of law schools, some clinical teachers enjoy a security of position similar to, but distinct from, tenure. Participation in faculty governance varies considerably; at most schools, clinical faculty cannot participate in voting on tenured faculty hiring, but tenured faculty can participate in voting on clinical hiring. Clinical faculty are increasingly recruited on a national market, and the more innovative schools are recruiting through means that include visiting positions and salaries more comparable to those of tenured and tenure-track faculty. So far, however, clinical faculty are less likely than tenured or tenure-track faculty to move laterally among schools. At many schools in the next 25 years, clinical faculty will have longer average institutional service, and institutional memory, than the vast majority of tenured and tenure-track faculty. Recently, clinical faculty members have been selected for several law school deanships. It is likely in the future that clinical faculty will continue to assume an ever larger role in the management and governance of American law schools.
Legal Writing Faculty. Many law schools now employ full-time legal writing directors and full-time instructors to teach law students writing. This fast-growing segment of the law teaching profession is also heavily female and enjoys the lowest average salaries among full-time law teachers. Some schools have moved writing faculty to the tenure or clinical tracks among their faculties, but most have not. Some employ part-time instructors. Some employ third-year law students. Some, like the University of Chicago, employ recent law graduates for a year in a graduate fellowship designed to facilitate movement into an academic career. Some schools place fixed caps on the number of years an instructor can work. Jobs are found largely through local markets, list servs, and word of mouth. Legal writing faculty as a group are in the early stages of organizing as a profession and asserting professional norms and goals upon law schools. Given the importance of writing instruction, this segment of law school faculty is likely to grow in authority in the coming years.
Law Librarians: Most law students receive part or all of their instruction in legal research and information technology from professional law librarians, who often have both J.D. and graduate information technology or library degrees. This category of skills instruction is being provided in a bewildering array of methods and configurations. The law library is being transformed by technology, and so are the librarians, including in their instructional mission. Currently, Directors of Law Libraries average $105,000 in salary; starting salaries from professional law librarians range from $35,000 to above $50,000. Hiring occurs largely through the Association of American Law Libraries and a word-of-mouth network, facilitated by list servs. Technology specialists are harder to come by, and are commanding dramatic salaries, particularly when they have good teaching skills and the credentials of traditional librarians.
Adjunct and Visiting Faculty: Most law schools use local attorneys, judges, prosecutors, and public defenders to enrich the curriculum with specialized courses. These adjunct faculty are paid little (usually $2,000 -$5,000 per course), although they benefit from the professional association and usually enjoy the teaching experience. Accreditation standards have traditionally limited the amount of law school teaching that can be assigned to adjuncts; it is likely that, in the future, adjunct faculty will be used more widely and in a broader array of courses. Most law schools also employ visiting faculty for a semester or year. Visitors come from other law schools, other academic disciplines, and from practice. Some schools use visitors to fill a temporary curricular gap; others recruit tenured faculty from among those who have first visited. Increasingly, schools are employing a wide range of visitors every year, including for short courses offered over a few weeks or days. Michigan and New York University have pioneered extensive use of visiting faculty, some of whom return on a regularly scheduled basis and therefore blur traditional lines between visitors, adjuncts, and tenured faculty. There is, as of yet, no formal market for visiting faculty, beyond a little used visiting faculty registry maintained by the American Association of Law Schools.
Faculty Outside Law Schools. Finally, there are a lot of lawyers teaching law at colleges and universities who are not at law schools. The largest groups are in business schools, political science departments, and schools of government or public policy. A random sampling of academic writing in major American journals finds a remarkable percentage of research coming from this group; it also disproportionately accounts for innovation in teaching law. These professors are not tied to the traditional first year curriculum in the United States, and are more likely to pursue ways to teach law to those who are in a hurry to master it. As the dominance of the traditional three-year J.D. model for legal education continues to erode, we can expect this group of faculty, who generally are lower paid and have higher teaching loads, to assert greater importance.
The market for law faculty is dynamic, and will continue to change as legal education transforms itself in the United States. Law teaching careers are going to be more diverse in the future, with many teachers moving across the categories described above. That development should be celebrated. Less comfortable, for many, will be the reality that efficient markets for law faculty threaten both the long-term institutional loyalty on which many law schools have been based and the remarkably privileged status of tenured faculty among law teachers.