I’m off to the AALS Faculty Recuitment Conference in Washington, D.C. for two days, where I will try to implement the lessons of our Moneyball article, What Law Schools Can Learn from Billy Beane and the Oakland Athletics, 82 Texas L. Rev. 1483, 1539-44 (2004).  We argued that the only reliable predicter of future scholarly success is pre-hiring publication.  We found no reliable connection to various pedigree variables such as rank of law school attended, law review membership, judicial clerkship, advanced degree.  Larry Ribstein hit the nail on the head in his recent comments about Judge Alito:  "The best indication of what kind of jockey somebody is going to be is whether he’s won horseraces – not whether he’s short and thin."

If you are a regular reader of this blog and are at the conference as either a buyer or seller, please say hello if you see me in the winding hallways of the Marriott Wardman Park or at any of the receptions.

Update:  Bill Henderson has a fascinating take on this at Conglomerate:  A Numbers-Driven Appointments Committee.  Here is part of Bill’s post:

[A]ssuming scholarship is the goal, here is one approach that is sure to horrify many readers—a numbers-driven appointments committee.

This seemingly radical idea was first suggested by Paul Caron and Rafael Gely in a well-known book review of Moneyball, 82  Tex. L. Rev. 1483 (2004).  The operative strategy is identical to Billy Beane’s famous management of the Oakland Athletics: Since most baseball teams (law schools) lack the budget of the New York Yankees (Harvard), the general manager(appointments committee) needs to find baseball players (teaching candidates) who are undervalued by the market.

To illustrate how this might play out in the AALS hiring market, consider the relative attractiveness of four hypothetical candidates:

• Candidate A has a JD from Yale, Yale Law Journal editor, prestigious judicial clerkship, three published articles, including a student note.
• Candidate B has the same sterling credentials as A but only one published article, no student note and a work-in-progress.
• Candidate C has a JD from Stanford, a PhD in a social science discipline, a work-in-progress but no student note or other publications.
• Candidate D went to a Top 15 law school, no clerkship, was an editor on a secondary law journal, but has three published articles, including a student note.

Caron & Gely compared several background characteristics of Leiter’s 50 most-cited young scholars with a random sample of professors who were hired at roughly the same time at comparably ranked law schools. Though their methodology (simple t-tests of means) is too simplistic to yield definitive results, it is worth noting that only two variables had any predictive power for “more and better” scholarship: (1) number of articles before first tenure-track job, and (2) publication of a student note. Judicial clerkships, law review membership, rank of graduating institution, other graduate degrees, and teaching experience were not significant predictors.

Under the typical hiring committee heuristics, however, Candidate A will get lots of AALS interviews, but there will be significant disagreements over B, C, and D. Many committees will prefer B and C because of pedigree (Top 3 law school, PhD, clerkship, law review, etc.). But Caron’s & Gely’s statistics suggest that A and D, because of their publication records, are better bets than B and C. Thus, a number-driven appointments committee would search out more D’s and less B’s and C’s. (Note that many schools will vainly chase after too many A’s.)