Academic

Law Faculty Hiring And The Article Placement Timing Problem

By Dan Filler

A recurring challenge for candidates entering the AALS meat market relates to an unfortunate timing quirk.  FAR biographical forms are due during the summer, a couple of months before the August law review submission cycle.  Law school hiring committees then receive these potentially out-of-date forms in late August.  While candidates can submit an updated cv which includes late placements, most hiring committees do their rough cut based on the single page forms.  Most committees only pull cv's for candidates who shine through on the one page form.  If you've got a piece ready to mail out August1, that's a problem.

The scope of the problem is limited.  There are plenty of candidates for whom one new placement is a minor concern and many others for whom a placement is unlikely to help.  Then, too, there are schools for which a "work in progress" or "under submission" will trigger close scrutiny.  But there are candidates for whom that one additional placement may make a crucial difference.  When a candidate lists an article as "forthcoming in the Indiana L.J.", or the like, she does two things.  First, she indicates she has a completed work that she was willing to release to the world at large.  (Historically, a suprising number of entry level hires couldnt even deliver on this challenge - a situation that has a changed a lot as hiring standards have become more rigorous.)  Second, a good placement might conceivably say something about the quality of the work. Not always - or, probably, most of the time.  But as an appointments committee works through the first stage of the hiring process - sifting through 800 short FAR forms - heuristics are essential.  And for better or worse, a well-placed article is an easy one.

What to do about this problem?

The simplest choice is to update all appointments chairs as soon as the article is placed.  Send an email or write a letter, and include a draft of your newly placed article.  Candidates also might consider putting their draft up on SSRN and putting that link onto their FAR form during the summer.  (Note that you can put up an early draft in June, then update it with a final draft before the FAR forms are actually distributed - keeping the same SSRN url.)  While this isn't as good as having a placement, the act of putting an article on SSRN does signal that you were comfortable releasing the work - and it makes it very simple for committee members to read it. 

From the longer perspective, some folks might wait a year to go on the market and others might push a piece out the door the prior February.  All of these are viable strategies, and their necessity varies widely based on a candidates overall package.  I do strongly discourage one choice, however: pushing a crappy piece out in February simply to have a placement.   First, a bad piece may place badly - undermining the whole project.  Second, irrespective of the placement, a bad piece of work is never an attractive part of a candidate's vita.

There is no simple answer to this quandry.  But a savvy candidate needs to know that it exists.

Full post as published by The Faculty Lounge on June 22, 2009 (boomark / email).