Oh why can't the law schools?

Jennifer Mnookin’s recent post on “exploding offers” in law school hiring provokes a reflection on the practices of law school searches and offers in general. For the last twenty years or so, Arts & Sciences faculties have been held to fairly stringent rules designed to level the playing field for job candidates, especially at the entry level, and to ensure that affirmative action means something. All positions are publicly advertised (in the Modern Language Association Job Information List and the Chronicle of Higher Education, for instance), candidates’ dossiers are requested from his or her university’s dossier service, the search committee reads (at least skims) letters of recommendation and written work, then makes up an interview list. There is no longer, in my experience, much back-channel communication on candidates. There’s an effort at least to give the appearance of openness, fairness, and a clean break with the old-boy network.

Contrast the law school, where the telephone call from a mentor at one of the “top-ranked” schools tells you who is really worth considering. And think about the “look-see” visit that remains obligatory for lateral hires in most law schools: it is bound to disadvantage women with school-age children, for instance, for whom a move for a year or a semester can be enormously complicated. The visit requirement in any case smacks of the worst kind of cronyism—choosing colleagues on the basis of their club-ability. Such a requirement would be unthinkable in Arts & Sciences—if proposed, any Affirmative Action Office would veto it. But do law schools really have affirmative action offices?

Why don’t the schools that consider themselves repositories of the law play by the rules? I suppose they might respond that law schools take teaching with great seriousness, and thus must see potential colleagues in action, but this is a lame excuse. The problem may be more that the elite law schools are wedded to a notion of hiring the brightest people on the market, whatever their field. That is, there are no criteria but sheer brilliance. Which is fine, it is the best standard—but unfortunately as interpreted, in reality, leads to a kind of mediated desire: is the most brilliant who is the most desired by another institution, preferably several others, from among the top-ranked.

And what part of the university takes the U.S. News and the other dubious rankings most seriously? The law school, to be sure.

Peter Brooks

Comments

[RCinProv]

I've watched hiring on the "more level" playing field for twenty years and the grass isn't all that much greener, in my experience. True, we do not ask people to come for a semester of "look see." But the interview dinner can constitute the same kind of club-ability assessment that you describe. We just do it with much less information.

And back channel communications are more than alive and well; they are absolutely routine. I can't think of a case where phone calls were not placed at strategic points in the "fair and open" process.

And while we have seemingly strict Affirmative Action rules, we also have a loophole that, at my institution, carries that almost Orwellian name "pre-select." While we never "pre-select" at the junior level, truly open searches above the junior ranks are less and less common.