Legal Commentary

I guess I held out pretty well on my New Year's resolution to stop blogging. But now that I've fallen of the wagon, I hope to start posting more again.

Anyway, as a member of my school's appointments committee this year, I've been thinking about how a law school should set its general agenda for hiring. Of course there are a lot of factors to consider, but what I'd like to focus on is how a school can best improve itself as a producer of scholarly writing. (Schools might do this out of a desire to improve the substance of their scholarly output, or a desire to improve their reputation, or both.)

My particular question is this: should a school pursue "breadth" or "depth" in its faculty? Is it better to have a faculty that represents a boradly diversified portfolio of interests, subject areas, methodologies, ideologies, etc., or to have more uniformity along one or more of these axes, thus developing a core strength or a "personality"? If the second of these, should the school simply build on its existing strengths to solidify a comparative advantage, or should it try to anticipate future trends?

The "depth" or "concentration" model makes some degree of intuitive sense, since having several faculty members with overlapping expertise, or using similar approaches, can create synergies that might make their collective work better than otherwise. (On the other hand, modern communications technology might obviate the need for such people to be in the same location.) Certainly some top schools are "stacked" in specific subject areas, and some other schools (e.g., George Mason) seem to have done relatively well for themselves by specializing to some degree. U of Chicago might be an example of the benefits (reputational or otherwise) of having a "personality," though it also seems to me that Chicago's faculty is presently more diverse in various ways than the "Chicago school" label suggests, and maybe after a school has established something like the "Chicago school" identity (real or perceived), it can have a hard time stepping out of its own shadow. And perhaps it's hard to be an "outsider" at a school with a large contingent of people working in a certain area or doing things a certain way, or "insiders" might become a coalition with disproportionate political clout they may not wield to the school's benefit.

On the "breadth" side, a school might specifically feel the need to have "coverage" in a scholarly area (not just a teaching area) where it currently lacks a presence -- not only "we need someone to teach Property," but "we need a law and econ person," or a critical race theorist, or what have you. I sometimes hear people on my faculty expressing views of this general sort, though they don't always agree on what the holes are that we need to fill. Of course, this approach might create positive spillover too, if one person's work benefits from the insights or critiques of someone with a distinct view or approach. (But as an empirical matter, how often do people share their work with colleagues in completely unrelated fields? I observe that happening more with junior faculty than with more established scholars, though I'm sure it varies depending on schools and individuals.)

Do other people have thoughts about this? And do your schools' faculties have conversations about hiring at this level of generality or long-range thinking? I get the sense that for a lot of schools, the hiring process is more ad hoc, responding to (perceived) immediate teaching needs, among other things. Are resource constraints, or the likely levels of disagreement among faculty members about these general issues, such as to make the larger conversation a waste of time?

Also, is either model noticeably better or worse in terms of students' educational experience? Maybe students benefit from exposure to intellectual diversity, but maybe they also benefit by self-selecting into an institution that focuses on the subjects, skills, etc., that they want.