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Academic

: The Faculty Lounge

What Gender is Trusts and Estates?

By Alfred Brophy

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As I'm sitting here grading trusts and estates exams, I'm thinking again about an exchange from earlier in the semester....

Thanks to Jason Mazzone for raising important questions about the gender differences in faculty across the curriculum (in an aptly-named post over at co-op, "Constitutional Law As Computer Science"). Pretty interesting to ask why women are better represented as faculty in some areas (like family law) than others (like constitutional law). I've been worried about the under-representation of women in legal history for some time.

But what motivates this particular post is our friend Liz Glazer's comment. She references Ann McGinley's study that found trusts and estates is a "girl" class--I guess it's disproportionately taught by women. Then I see that "Sarah L." cited a couple of articles have also depicted trusts & estates as a low prestige subject. (The articles are Marjorie E. Kornhauser, Rooms of Their Own: An Empirical Study of Occupational Segregation by Gender Among Law Professors, 73 UMKC L. Rev. 293 (2004) (available here for those with a subscription to Hein On-Line) and Deborah Jones Merritt and Barbara F. Reskin, Sex, Race and Credentials: The Truth About Affirmative Action in Law Faculty Hiring, 97 Colum. L. Rev. 199 (1997) (here). Kornhauser shows that (more men than women taught trusts and estates in 2000-01), women are disproptionately highly represented in trusts and estates. That is, more women taught in trusts and estates than you'd expect given their proportion in the legal academy--even though there were still more men teaching t&e overall than women.

I suppose there may be some connection between those issues--who teaches and who takes and whether the subject is low or high prestige. So this leads me to a couple of questions: is trusts and estates low prestige? It's certainly very hard to staff--people have to be dragged into teaching it, in my observation over many years on hiring committees. (I often give the advice that if you want to advance in this business, pick an area where there aren't a lot of people already teaching and writing ... like trusts and estates.) But hard to staff (read faculty don't want to teach) doesn't necessarily mean low prestige. Tax is even harder to staff--but it's close to the top of the pecking order, I imagine.

I know that areas of interest shift over time--t&e used to be at the center of the law school curriculum. John Chipman Gray mean anything to anybody here?

And what, by the way, do we mean by a high prestige area? The people who work in it publish well? They're heavily cited? They are respected for rigorous analysis? Ah, the possibilites for reasech are endless.

The image of John Chipman Gray is from wikipedia.

Full post as published by The Faculty Lounge on May 04, 2009 (boomark / email).