National Law Journal: Cattle Call for Law Professors:
Hundreds of would-be law professors will arrive this week at the
Marriott Wardman Park in Washington, dressed in conservative suits and
clutching résumés and copies of the academic articles they have
painstakingly researched. They will mill around nervously in the
cavernous hotel lobby as they await their 25-minute interviews with law
school hiring committees, which will be the centerpiece of the
Association of American Law Schools Faculty Recruitment Conference [brochure here] — the
"law school meat market" to those in the know.The conference
happens every October, but it's unlikely to prove business as usual this
time around. Legal educators predict that entry-level faculty gigs will
be especially hard to come by, given the dramatically reduced entering
class sizes at many schools and uncertainty about the future. …Approximately 142 law schools have registered to attend the AALS
hiring conference — a 14% decline from the 166 that attended last
year and a 21% decrease from the 179 schools that participated
during pre-recession 2007. The schools that do attend won't necessarily
hire — some use the conference to scout teaching talent for the future.
(It's difficult to tell how many open teaching spots actually exist, as
some schools advertise specific positions in an AALS-published bulletin
but many do not.)At the same time, the number of aspiring law
professors has held fairly steady during the past five years. Thus far,
750 candidates have registered for the AALS' faculty interviews,
although that number does not include the final list of candidates,
which will come out in February. . The total number of registrants has
fluctuated between 824 and 901 in recent years, according to the AALS. …At least one law school is significantly reducing its enrollment while
also increasing the size of its faculty. That shift is part of a
comprehensive plan to improve the University of California Hastings
College of the Law, according to dean Frank Wu. The school, which
reduced its 1L class by 20% [and increased tuition by 15%] this year, plans to hire between two
and four new professors to replace retiring faculty. It boosted the
overall size of its faculty last year to improve its student-to-faculty
ratio. …The entry-level faculty members hired in 2012 are unlikely to receive
many of the perks their predecessors enjoyed, [said Brannon Denning, a professor at Samford University Cumberland
School of Law and co-author of a book about the law school hiring
process [Becoming a Law Professor: A Candidate's Guide]. Guarantees
of four-figure summer research stipends, lower teaching loads for
prolific scholars and pretenure sabbaticals have been on the table for
desirable candidates in the past, but "I think a lot of that stuff might
be cut back, if not eliminated, this year," he said.
