Inbreeding in Law School Hiring: Assessing the Performance of Faculty Hired from Within
![handle is hein.journals/legstud29 and id is 381 raw text is: INBREEDING IN LAW SCHOOL HIRING:
ASSESSING THE PERFORMANCE OF
FACULTY HIRED FROM WITHIN
THEODORE EISENBERG and MARTIN T. WELLS*
ABSTRACT
This study compares the scholarly impact of inbred entry-level law school faculty
members with the scholarly impact of noninbred entry-level law school faculty
members. The sample includes 32 law schools and approximately 700 entry-level
faculty members. By our measure of performance, scholarly impact as measured by
citation frequency, inbred entry-level law school faculty members do not perform
as well as noninbred entry-level faculty members.
LAW school faculty hiring is rational in at least two respects. First, one's
chance of being initially hired by an elite law school correlates positively
with the strength of one's credentials.' Second, one's chance of being later-
ally hired correlates positively with one's scholarly impact.2 The greater
one's scholarly impact, the more likely one will have been hired by at least
one school after one's initial faculty position. Both results are consistent
with using available information to filter faculty candidates. More informa-
tion improves hiring, and the information is used in the expected manner.
A positive relation between information about candidates and hiring deci-
sions ought to manifest itself especially strongly in hiring one's own gradu-
ates. After all, faculties have the best possible information about their own
* Eisenberg is Henry Allen Mark Professor of Law, Cornell Law School. Wells is profes-
sor, Department of Social Statistics, Cornell University. We would like to thank Kevin M.
Clermont and Ronald G. Ehrenberg for their comments.
Deborah Jones Merritt & Barbara F. Reskin, Sex, Race, and Credentials: The Truth about
Affirmative Action in Law Faculty Hiring, 97 Colum. L. Rev. 199, 240 (1997). [E]lite
schools stressed many of the credentials traditionally assumed to influence law faculty hiring.
Graduation from a prestigious college and law school, experience as a Supreme Court clerk,
and possession of a doctoral degree in a field other than law all significantly increased the
likelihood that a professor would teach at an elite law school.
2 Theodore Eisenberg & Martin T. Wells, Ranking and Explaining the Scholarly Impact
of Law Schools, 27 J. Legal Stud. 373, 412 (1998).
[Journal of Legal Studies, vol. XXIX (January 2000)]
© 2000 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0047-2530/2000/2901-0016$01.50](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/legstud29&div=24&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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Inbreeding in Law School Hiring: Assessing the Performance of Faculty Hired from Within
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