Legal Commentary

I'm very excited to be invited to start the new year with a return visit to PrawfsBlawg. I teach criminal law, criminal procedure, constitutional law and ethics at Gonzaga Law School, although my online musings for 2008 may extend well beyond these topics -- not that they haven't already in the past. To begin, I thought I'd share a practical question that recently was presented to me by a friend on a subject very familiar to this blog: law professor career advice.

Now that I've been teaching for a couple of years, friends who are thinking about a similar career path have begun to ask advice questions of me. One friend recently asked a question I felt a bit under-qualified to answer with much certainty: He seeks to become a law professor after about a decade of practice. His post-JD accomplishments are top-rate: distinguished firm experience, assistant U.S. attorney, clerkships with big-name district and circuit court judges, and published articles in solid journals. He got his JD, however, from a law school outside of the first tier. He has an opportunity to pursue an LLM degree from a top-5 law school, but he has been given conflicting advice on whether this degree would enhance his marketability substantially at this point in his career. Thoughts?