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11 J. Empirical Legal Stud. 1 (2014)

handle is hein.journals/emplest11 and id is 1 raw text is: JOURNAL OF EMPIRICAL LEGAL STUDIES Journal of Empirical Legal Studies Volume 11, Issue 1, 1-38, March 2014 The Labor Market for New Law Professors Tracey E. George and Albert H. Yoon* Law school professors control the production of lawyers and influence the evolution of law. Understanding who is hired as a tenure-track law professor is of clear importance to debates about the state of legal education in the United States. But while opinions abound on the law school hiring process, little is empirically known about what explains success in the market for law professors. Using a unique and extensive data set of survey responses from candidates in the 2007-2008 legal academic labor market, we examine the factors that influence which candidates are interviewed and ultimately hired by law schools. We find that law schools appear open to nontraditional candidates in the early phases of the hiring process but when it comes to the ultimate decision-hiring-they focus on candidates who look like current law professors. 1. INTRODUCTION Every year in the United States, approximately 1,000 people apply to become a tenure- track law professor.' Nearly all hold law degrees, often from the most selective *Address correspondence to Tracey E. George, Vanderbilt Law School, 131 21st Ave. S., Nashville, TN 37203; email: tracey.george@vanderbilt.edu. George is Charles B. Coxx III & Lucy D. Cox Family Chair in Law & Liberty, Professor of Political Science, and Director of the Branstetter Litigation and Dispute Resolution Program at Vanderbilt University; Yoon is Professor of Law, University of Toronto. We are indebted to the Association of American Law Schools and especially former Executive Directors Carl Monk and Susan Westerberg Prager, Managing Director Jane LaBarbera, and Registration Manager Kai Baker for their assistance. The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the AALS or its staff. We are grateful to Chris Bransford and Linda Reynolds for their assistance with creation and implementation of the survey, and to Ashley Dennis, Ellen Hunter, and Uros Petronijevic for research assistance. We presented earlier versions of this article at Georgetown, Houston, Northwestern, and Vanderbilt law schools and benefited from their faculties' and students' thoughtful feedback. We also received valuable input from the American Bar Foundation Research Group on Legal Diversity. We thank Ronit Dinovitzer, John Goldberg, Mitu Gulati, Chris Guthie,Joni Hersch, Lonnie Hoffman, Edward lacobucci, Helen Levy, David Madigan, Tom Merrill, Richard Posner, Fred Tung, and Alan Wiseman for their helpful comments. This project benefited from the generous financial support of the Russell Sage Foundation and Vanderbilt Law School. All remaining errors are our own. 'New law professors are hired either through a formal process organized by the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) or by informal applications submitted directly to law schools. From 2000-2010, the AALS market has averaged 967 applicants. AALS Statistical Report on Faculty, http://www.aals.org/resourcesstatistical.php. In 2012, 875 appli- cants participated in the AALS market. We do not have an accurate count of how many applications are sent to law schools by candidates who bypass the AALS process, but we do know that some new professors are hired outside the AALS process. Thus, 1,000 annual applicants is a reasonable estimate of the number seeking a tenure-track post each year. 1

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