Category Archives: Law School

PrawfsBlawg takes up a subject near and dear to my heart: job searches by legal academic couples. Or does it? The post is titled Ariela Migdal on Feminism and the comments veer in all sorts of directions….

Once upon a time it was next to impossible for academic couples to find jobs in the same institution, or even the same city. Now it's just difficult.

Interestingly, the University of Miami School of Law has a proud history of hiring academic couples and making them feel at home. When Caroline and I got hired (she as a visitor with tenure elsewhere, then as a tenured prof, me as a brand new junior hire), we became the third, yes third, academic couple serving on the faculty, and that was not counting the professor-administrative Dean couple, or the previous couple that had since divorced. It was comforting to know that we need not be trailblazers. Even so it took a few years to educate some members of the community that we don't think in lockstep, and that while we can sometimes be trusted to convey messages to the other, neither of us ever speaks for the other.

I have found that our having different surnames and not flaunting the connection at work sometimes leads to interesting conversations, especially with students. We both find that it also tends to cut short all sorts of other potentially interesting professional conversations, especially the ones that start, “we were wondering if you would consider moving to…”.

Having just served on the entry-level hiring committee, I've had a chance to see the couple-hiring question from the buyer as well as the seller side. One thing I like about the way UM dealt with us was that we were treated independently, and the place went to some pains to ensure that we knew we were each being considered on our own merits, rather than treating me as an appendage of my more-accomplished LSE-tenured spouse. We tried to do the same in our entry-level hiring this past year. Sometimes that meant making an offer to only one half of a couple, sometimes it meant the full court press for both.

The Blog Formerly Known as “Random Acts of Meanness” discusses course selection in law school:

Registration went OK. Now I'm in 8 a.m. admin law but I think I'm near the top of the waitlist for B.A. at 6:30 p.m. I think both classes will be immensely dull but I will probably take both eventually.

Nooooooooooooooooooooooo!

Administrative Law is not dull. Don't let this atypical incident fool you. Adlaw is complex, and confusing, perhaps frustrating, but endlessly fascinating. It's the only class I've taught continuously since I entered teaching and the only one that never gets boring. Well, Internet Law never gets boring either, but that's because it's a whole new subject every three years.

Administrative Law is applied constitutional law. It's the instantiation of our shared commitment to the almost impossible project of having an executive that both effective and yet controlled. That does what past Congresses commanded, yet adjusts to the times. That has the discretion to act, but not the ability to tyrannize. Nothing this difficult and important could be boring.

Every law student should take Adlaw — even if you have to take it from me. (For more course selection advice see my unofficial advice about course selection in law school.)

It appears that Eric Muller has a much better effect on students (at least while a visiting lecturer in France) than I do (here in Miami).

Then again, all is not roses on his current visiting gig.

Note to any French university readers: French is my first language, although it gets rusty, and I will be on leave next Spring.

David Bernstein writes in Friends in High Places that

“A well known tactic in getting a good placement for a law review article is for the author to thank in the first footnote important friends and colleagues who read and commented on the piece.” The message to student editors is, “you may know who I am, or anything about the subject matter, but this article must be important or these important people would not have bothered to read it.”

I'm such a dope that this never even ocurred to me. Perhaps because when I was a student law review editor I couldn't have cared less who was in the starred footnote.

Oh. Wait.

Perhaps Heidi Bond has better advice.

Letters of Marque asks,

Let us suppose that you are a law professor, and that we decide to reject your piece within hours of receiving it.

OK, so far this sounds all too plausible.

Would you be offended if you received the rejection right away? If so, how long would you want to wait before receiving a rejection?

Please note that this need not imply that we didn't read your piece; it might also mean that we thought it interesting enough to pluck from the pile, but then decided to reject it later on.

I want to know right away. Unless you are willing to send substantive comments, I don't care that much why you rejected it — although if it's just because your issue was full, then it would be handy to be told when are the best times to (re)submit articles. Rejecting me now saves me the bother of phoning you for a rush read once I get another offer if I'm playing that game. Or, if I am working the system in a different way, and sending out only a few copies at first to save paper, knowing that I bombed helps me work out when it's time to send out that second wave.^{1, 2}

But that's easy for me to say: it's not that my ego is, in relative terms, necessarily any more hardy than average, although I've been accused of that. No, the fact is that these days I rarely submit articles to law reviews any more. Nearly 100% of my articles are solicited for symposia (and these days I have to very regretfully turn down more requests than I can accept if I want each one to be sufficiently original). Yes, I know how lucky I am. And, yes, it can't last. Can it?

¹ You can play this either way. Start low, get some acceptances and then ask for rush reads for the 'better' journals to whom you just sent the article — on the theory that it's more likely to be rejected, or disfavored on rush, if it has been lying around. Or, you can be arrogant, start high, and if that doesn't work then work your way down the pile. This can save more paper, but means you don't get to engage in as much strategic behavior.

² There's something about writing about law reviews that makes me want to footnote.

The other day I worried out loud that the new law review orthodoxy in favor of short articles would have some bad consequences in practice, especially as regards writing by junior faculty. Here's the first piece of real-world evidence that I was right to worry:

Conglomerate: Musings on Page Limits and Tenure Standards With some painful editing, I've gotten my article on VC compensation down to a svelte 25,000 words. All I had to do was take out the stuff that appealed only to people in my field (who also happen to be the only people who will read it other than student editors …). The key turning point for me was when I realized I could take out the empirical and quasi-empirical stuff and publish it as a separate paper in a specialty journal.

This experience makes me wonder … what's going to happen to tenure standards? How many short articles equal a long article?

Here at UCLA, it used to be the case that two articles was enough for tenure. No one really believes that anymore, but at the same time no one knows what the new standard is. Two may still be enough if they're really, really long. With 50 page limits, I'd guess the new standard will be more like four articles, or even six. Plus, no one knows how to count things like symposium articles and book reviews. I suppose in this case, uncertainty is good, as it drives people to “over-comply” to make sure they clear the hurdle. But it does create some anxiety among the junior ranks.

[Note: when I originally posted this, the date and time somehow got messed up, so I later corrected it.]