Academic

A potential opportunity for recent (unemployed) law graduates

By Jeff Yates

Recent unemployed law graduates or 3rd year law students who are working to find a job in this tough market will likely need to think outside of the box in order to find gainful employment. This can take many forms and law students may have advantages on the broader job market because law school training can improve a myriad of skills including, writing, organization, and communication. These skill often translate well in the business and public sector in jobs that have little to do with the law. However, getting your foot in the door and convincing potential employers that hiring a lawyer is a good idea can take some work.

Another possibility for 3rd year law students and recent graduates is graduate school. I know that those words make your ears hurt - more schooling, staying poor, and still having risk - not very appetizing. However, plenty of people with a JD find graduate school and an academic career to be a rewarding investment of their time. I will not dwell on my personal narrative too long, since you got a good deal of it in the last post, but after a couple of years of working a legal job I was looking for a lateral move - to law jobs at first, but that market was still pretty dry and I was getting nowhere. So, one weekend, I dropped by one of those testing centers and took the Graduate Record Exam (GRE). I ended up doing okay, and eventually got a couple of offers to go to graduate school with a stipend. As one professor told me when I visited Florida State University (where I eventually attended) - "Getting a Ph.D. on somebody else's dime aint a bad deal."

Let me say up front that I anticipate getting some heat in the comments for proposing this idea. (Of course, this assumes that people actually read my post). Graduate school has gotten some of the same criticisms that law schools currently receive about taking peoples' money, time, and hard work and giving them a degree that is not marketable. There is certainly some truth to this criticism for both law schools and graduate programs. However, I would like to stress that in both situations there is a great degree of self-determination for students in how outcomes are distributed. I will not talk about graduate school generally, since I do not know enough about all programs to make broad generalizations, but, rather, I will speak about what I do know - political science programs, and specifically, the subfield of Law & Courts within political science.

The average time to obtain a Ph.D. (across all fields) is 8.2 years. However, I this number is quite a bit lower in most political science programs, assuming normal progress. In a typical program, the coursework time is approximately between 2.5 and 3.5 years. Then, you write your dissertation - the time is pretty much up to you - and your committee. Most programs offer funding for at least four years. At Binghamton political science this means free tuition and about $15,000 per year. Binghamton is lower than average on the stipend, but it's also an incredibly cheap place to live. The coursework a person studying Law & Courts at Binghamton might take would include courses in social science research methods and statistics, American government, and judicial politics, among others. 

But, you might ask, how marketable is the degree? An old saying is that if you ask a pre-law student a legal question, then he'll reply "I don't know" and if you ask a newly minted JD a legal question, then he'll say "it depends." That's my answer here, "it depends." As I stated before, there is a tremendous amount of self-determination in graduate school and placement success. In other words, to a large degree, you control your own destiny. This is hard news for many, because there are a lot of inequities in the academic market place. However, suffice it to say that unless you are graduating from a top ten program, you will need to publish in graduate school to be viable on the tenure track market. You will also need to do some self promotion and networking (e.g. going to lots of conferences and being involved in professional activities). Graduate students studying Law & Courts who have done these things have traditionally been pretty successful in placing in academia. This does not mean that you get your dream job. One aspect of an academic career is that you really need to be completely geographically flexible in your job search - and this simply doesn't work for some people. You may also not place in a research oriented university (assuming that this is something you desire). If you want to move to a research university from a teaching college, then you will have to "publish your way up" (this while teaching a 3 t0 4 course per semester load). 

Do graduate students place? Well, we've had some pretty good success at Binghamton pol sci in recent years, placing graduate students at University of North Texas, Kansas State University, University of New Orleans, Yale University (post doc), University of Colorado,  University of Massachusetts, LSU, and University of California (Irvine), among others. (Note, this is in all fields; we have a fairly small program). My alma matter, FSU, has its placements listed here and my former employer, UGA, has its placements listed here. Obviously, Yale and Harvard are going to have much more impressive lists of placements, but that's really my point - you don't necessarily have to go to these schools to get a job in political science academia. I've served on two search committees for Law & Courts in the past five years and in each instance we had less than 25 applications for the position. 

Do graduate programs guarantee you a tenure track position? Absolutely not. Is it a viable career path? Yes. Just a few JDs who went back to school and got the Ph.D. and placed in political science - Stefanie Lindquist (Ph.D. from South Carolina - was at UGA and Vanderbilt, now at U Texas Law); Robert Howard (Ph.D. from SUNY Stonybrook, now at Georgia State U); and Eileen Bramen (Ph.D. from OSU, now at U of Indiana). There are more and I apologize for not listing them all here, but you get the idea.

Full post as published by The Faculty Lounge on September 07, 2009 (boomark / email).