Being a Law Professor

Compare the average law professor to the average university professor. In general, law professors, like their university counterparts, concern themselves primarily with teaching and scholarship as well as talking with students outside of class, serving on committees, and, for some, consulting (or practicing) on the side. In their particulars, the jobs differ significantly.

Teaching


Unlike liberal arts professors who attended graduate school in a particular specialty, virtually all law professors began their careers as generalists. A graduate student in history might concentrate her studies on Europe in the twentieth century and expect to teach courses exclusively in that area. In contrast, it would not be unusual for a law professor to teach a subject that he or she never even took in law school-a fact that probably instills little confidence in the prospective law student. But legal education is perceived as largely a matter of process rather than substance. Most law school subjects, especially in the first year, concern themselves with the process of legal analysis. Thus comes the trite expression that law schools teach students to think like lawyers. Law schools teach students to think critically, a skill useful in many aspects of life. Law school consists of much substance, of course, but the primary mission of law schools is to prepare students to research, understand, and, perhaps, affect evolving legal doctrine.

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What subjects law professors teach depends on a combination of factors, including the interests they developed in law school or practice and the needs of the institution at which they began their careers. Although law professors spend approximately the same amount of time in the classroom as their liberal arts colleagues, they spend more time on class preparation and management. First, teaching is valued relatively highly in law schools, especially when compared to liberal arts departments in major universities where graduate students teach many of the introductory classes. In addition, lacking the luxury of graduate teaching assistants means that law professors prepare and teach all of their classes themselves and grade all exams and papers without assistance. This fact undoubtedly contributes to the continuing law school practice of basing class grades on a single exam. Indeed, grading exams is the only truly distasteful part of law teaching. But it must be endured only twice a year. Until graduate teaching assistants become part of the law school experience, you will not hear any proposals for more frequent examinations from me.

The traditional style of law school classes also contributes to a greater need for preparation. Many law professors eschew the lecture format of undergraduate education for the more open-ended Socratic dialogue discussed briefly above. The Socratic professor guides selected students through various legal thickets in order to assist them in the exploration of various analytical paths and to enable them to do the same in the future on their own. This method actually requires many more hours of preparation than the standard lecture. If the standard lecture resembles a straight road navigated by the professor and leading to a single destination, the Socratic dialogue resembles a series of intersecting roads navigated by the class and leading to several possible destinations.

Teaching law students is, on the whole, an enormously satisfying experience. They are extremely bright, highly motivated, and, at least in the first year, enthusiastic about the material. There are, however, disappointing aspects. Foremost, law students tend to be highly competitive and extremely grade conscious. The more prestigious the school the less this is true. But given the fact that employers are fixated on grades, students can hardly be faulted for their preoccupation with them. In addition, unlike graduate students in the liberal arts, law students are not uniformly interested in the law, although this is understandable. Graduate students in history, for example, want to be history professors and can expect to make about $25,000 a year after six or seven years of graduate study-they had better like history! Most law students, in contrast, do not aspire to become law professors, and they expect to make considerably more than $25,000 after three years of law school. In my experience, however, the money in law practice is not enough to compensate for the job if it otherwise makes you miserable.

The principle of "publish or perish" applies to law professors as it does to all other professors, but with significant differences. Because teaching is relatively more important in law schools than in many liberal arts departments, it is also a substantial factor in tenure decisions. Still, in most major law schools, faculties are expected to publish regularly. And, on average, the more prestigious law schools attach greater importance to scholarship. This fact results in the irony that the "better" schools, which attract the "better" students, arguably do the poorest job educating. In fact, Socrates himself would probably not have received tenure in a major law school, because he did not put his great ideas into writing; Plato, who brought us many of Socrates' ideas, on the other hand, probably would have received tenure.

Law schools presume that junior professors will get tenure. In marked contrast, most liberal arts departments place a heavy burden on their junior colleagues to prove their academic worthiness. This cultural difference makes law school faculties less Darwinian in character and thus contributes to a more comfortable working environment.

Law professors also have vastly greater resources at their disposal. They earn from one-and-a-half to two times as much in salary as their liberal arts colleagues, supposedly enough to lure them from the lucrative world of practice. Even though law professors do without the convenience of graduate teaching assistants, law student research assistants contribute much to ease the rigors of the job. Money for everything from the necessity of xeroxing to the amenity of travel is greater in the law school.

You do not need an advanced research degree in order to teach law. Indeed, many of the "elite" law schools frown upon advanced degrees in the law (e.g., the LL.M.), perceiving them to be what they are: a way to buttress otherwise weak academic credentials.