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N.B. The following post is meant to be offered strictly in my personal and professorial capacity, but not as indicative of my views or others sitting on the appcomm at FSU.

I'm a rank amateur in this realm (at least so far), but in the realm of agency theory, my understanding is that agents are frequently encouraged to "assure the principal that certain actions inconsistent with the principal's interest will not be taken."  These are referred to, in the jargon, as "bonding costs." My sense is that this concept could be useful in an area near and dear to our hearts: hiring prawfs, a topic of special interest this week with the rookie meat market happening now.

Although a candidate (rookie or lateral) is not really an agent of the prospective law school -- because the candidate is instead a possible future agent (or more accurately, in the realm of tenured prawfs: a possible co-principal) --  the idea of trying to encourage candidates to incur some bonding expenses may make sense (at least ex ante). Otherwise, schools might be "used" by lateral candidates for simply seeking raises or other retention deals from their current school, and schools might be "used" by rookies for practice on the job market, so that they get more feedback on their work and more experience giving talks, fielding questions, etc.  Candidates who are not serious about the law school they might interview with are a good bit like (though not necessarily identical) to those who send their papers to law reviews with whom have no desire to publish. The hiring scenario raises the question: what kinds of bonding costs, if any, are reasonable to ask candidates to incur to signal their genuine interest? *So how can schools reasonably try to reduce situations where candidates are not genuinely interested?

A few options:

first, require some co-payment on the part of the candidate for the travel expenses. Say: 250$. Tell candidates that they will be reimbursed that co-payment if the candidate is offered a job and it is accepted, or alternatively, if the candidate is not offered a job.  This or some similar gambit might work for deciding who to invite to campus. (Instead of a co-payment for travel, the school could just as easily, though perhaps less reliably, say please make a donation of X dollars to one of the following charities (or a charity of your choice) in order to signal your non-trivial interest in us; this might seem a bit more paternalistic because the donation to charity is non-refundable, or so I would suppose.  One senior academic has indicated another bonding cost that lateral candidates should incur is requiring them to come on a day that they normally teach, so that they have to reschedule their class and do a makeup, which generates a small but nontrivial expense/burden to them.

This still leaves open the question of which candidates' work should you consider before deciding to bring them to campus. Schools already rely to some extent on the signal sent when candidates at the rookie level send packets to specific schools, instead of just using the FAR form. But even packets are a pretty weak signal of interest, and it also offers no help in the context of hiring laterals.

I think asking rookie applicants to make a 5 or 10 dollar donation to a charity in your school's name is a potentially useful sorting device to decide whose work to read carefully. It's somewhat trivial in money terms but the very fact of having to do something for 10 minutes extra hassle could be a useful signal. I'd even be in favor of giving them back the money once they do it, or alternatively, those who plead paupery should be spared the expense but not the time by having to just write: I wish I could pay this "application" fee but I need relief; but by this statement, I am genuinely interested in working at your school and hope you will consider my candidacy.

The same tactic might work at the lateral level, but here, more due diligence up front could benefit both parties: appcomms should ask all interested lateral candidates to provide not only the cv and pubs, but also some teaching evaluations and names of 3-4 references so that candidates who are brought in are brought in because the committee has already done most of its homework, or at least had the opportunity to do most of its homework, and people don't have to fly out to campus only to get killed in committee after the job talk based principally on information that was available to the committee before the job talk. [This leaves the committee some flexibility to stymie a candidate based on the job talk or the interviews but hopefully not on the substance of the job talk, which, in my mind, should have been vetted before an invitation was extended--but that's another post.]

Anyway, I'd be curious to hear reactions to this proposal (good concept, but poor implementation; bad concept, but interesting implementation? etc.). Also, I'll let this post be a placeholder for a different post on whether committee attitudes to rookies should be different than those to lateral invitees (for example, rookies should be treated as applicants who need to impress the faculty whereas laterals should be treated as guests whom the faculty hopes to recruit).

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*Conversely, is it possible that sometimes schools bring candidates through (whether for hiring faculty or even more especially in the dean market?)  even though there is no genuine interest in hiring that person but are simply brought in to show efforts were made to achieve X goal. One reason the second kind of costs is less likely to present itself is that schools spend a couple thousand dollars on travel and food expenses for each candidate brought in for a day of interviews, plus the value of the time for each of the faculty members spending any time with that candidate. Hiring faculty is a costly and time-sucking endeavor.  To be sure, some colleagues may feel fine with externalizing those costs onto their faculty, but it's not a best practice, so far as I can tell!

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