The Law Faculty

If you want to know what kind of people law professors are, ask yourself this question: "What kind of a person would give up a salary of a jillion dollars a year in a big firm to drive a rusted-out Ford Pinto and wear suits made out of old horse blankets?" Think about this carefully before asking your professor's opinion on any subject.

A law professor is a person whose greatest aspiration is to be like Professor Kingsfield in the movie The Paper Chase. When Professor Kingsfield died, he donated his heart for transplantation. The hospital charged an outrageous sum for the heart. It justified the price on the theory that the heart had never been used.


One professor who saw The Paper Chase decided (this is a true story) to act out one of the scenes from the film in his class. He called on a student, who replied that he was unprepared. The professor said, "Mr. Jones, come down here." The student walked all the way down to the front of the class. The professor gave the student a dime, and said, "Take this dime. Call your mother. Tell her that your chances of ever becoming a lawyer are seriously in doubt." Ashamed, the student turned and walked slowly toward the door. Suddenly, however, he had a flash of inspiration. He turned around, and in a loud voice, said, "NO, Clyde. [He called the professor by his first name.] I have a BETTER idea! YOU take this dime, and you go call ALL YOUR FRIENDS!!!" The class broke into pandemonium. The professor broke the student into little bitty pieces.

Politics are often divisive at law schools. In the 1%0's the faculties were conservative and the students were liberal. In the 1980's the students were conservative and the faculties were liberal-the professors having spent their formative years wearing love beads and attending Grateful Dead concerts. The 1970's were a difficult transitional period during which, for an awkward moment, faculties and students were able to communicate. They discovered that they did not like each other.

When law professors are not doing important things like writing commercial outlines, they are writing casebooks. Of course, they make you buy their casebook for their class. One of the cardinal rules of casebooks is that they must have as many authors as there are soldiers in the Montana National Guard. For example, a well known casebook is Druid, Crustacean, Head-swell, Schmo, Vacuous & Geekman, Cases, Materials, and Inscrutable Footnotes on Doozle and Hombeagle's Law of Rural Chicken Diseases. The publisher recruited six authors so that the book would be adopted in six classes. The book costs $59.95, but it's not a total loss. At the end of the year, the bookstore will buy it back for $3.87.

Law professors spend a lot of time writing because law schools have adopted the rule of "publish or perish." That's why law professors' "office hours" for student consultation have been reduced to "office nanoseconds." It's also why your school keeps professors whose classroom performance consists entirely of mumbling inaudibly and soaking the front of their clothes with drool. They add to the prestige of the school by writing impenetrable tomes about such subjects as the law of insect matrimony. These books are read by three people in the entire world, two of whom are the professor's children.

Law schools claim that their promotion and tenure criteria also include citizenship and teaching ability, but this is a ruse. "Good citizenship" means "no indictments." "Good teaching ability" means that the teacher can explain how to sign the seating chart. One professor left the dean's office and puzzled, "Did the dean say that I am noted for my humorous delivery, or humored for my notorious delivery?"

It's not completely the law professors' fault, however. They have no training whatsoever in teaching. Law school deans claim that attending law school itself is enough to qualify a person to teach law school. Fortunately, we don't hire our elementary school teachers that way. We require extensive training in education before we let anyone stand even in front of a kindergarten class. This is true at every level of the educational system except where teaching is the most complicated-the university. There, we let everyone wing it.

The law faculty can be divided into three groups:

1. The Youngsters. Hip, nuclear magnetic surges of energy. At least, they think they're hip. They're actually about as hip as Elmer Fudd singing the music of Janet Jackson. Clothing: Indistinguishable from the students'.
   
   Hobby: Having multiple panic attacks about getting tenure. Students call them by: Their first names.
2. The Middle-Agers. Sixty-watt bulbs who consider themselves to be airport searchlights. Law professors have enormous egos.
   
   Question: What's the fastest way to die?
   
   Answer: Get between a law professor and a camera. Clothing: Rumpled tweed and Hush Puppies. Hobby: Complaining that if it just weren't for all those students, university life would be okay. Students call them by: Their last names.
3. The Senior Faculty.

Clothing: Elephant molt.

Hobby: Sitting in their office with the light off. They were not sleeping; they explain when you knock on their door. They just have sensitive eyes.

Students call them by: Their name, which they can't remember at the moment.

However, you won't get to know the professors very well. Faculty-student relations are very distant, mostly because the student-faculty ratio is so high. Law school is like a Cecil B. DeMille movie: a cast of thousands, wandering in the desert. Because it can be done in such large numbers, legal education is the cheapest form of graduate education. For some unknown reason, however, the savings are not passed on to the students.

To try to prove that at heart they are really gentle, fun-loving people, professors will occasionally do something a little bit zany, like wear a costume to class on Halloween. This makes the students laugh and cheer. Before you laugh and cheer, however, you should check your calendar. It is often difficult to tell whether a professor is wearing a costume or not.

All of this leads to one question: If getting into law teaching is so highly competitive, why aren't the professors any better than banana slugs with hair? This is one of the secret mysteries of the law.

Find Law Faculty jobs on LawCrossing.