Legal Commentary

Paul Caron has compiled a list of pre-teaching fellowships and VAP programs, and Brian Leiter has responded to a question and invited commenters to respond as well regarding strategies for applying to these programs. I'm not going to reiterate the obvious advantages for candidates and hosting schools in these programs, so please assume that I take them as givens. With the increased number of PhD's on the market, I think the programs are likely to result in a more meritocratic academic job market, since decisions will be based more on performance than potential, and junior faculty will be better-trained and more experienced as scholars and teachers.

But what of the downsides for the legal academy? I'm not suggesting these outweigh the benefits, but they should be considered, whether by hiring committees, candidates, or the legal academy generally. Here are a few I've come up with:

A bonus becomes a requirement. When these programs were relatively few, coming out of, say, a Bigelow was a plus on the market. Will the sheer number of candidates on the entry-level market coming out of these programs, and the increased number of publications that they are able to generate during the year(s) in them, raise the entry-level bar, such that those without a PhD or a fellowship will be at a disadvantage?

Costs for candidates, and the effects of those costs for the credentials of entry-level market. Many fellows and VAPs have to move for a short-term position with no or little long-term prospects. Having spent the spring at another school (and having served as a VAP in an earlier academic career), I know that even a perfect moving compensation program doesn't take into account the time and hassle of moving, nor its effect on families, pets, etc. Do these costs in turn mean that some tenure track candidates are better able to take these positions than others? To the extent these programs serve as an increasingly important credential or means to credentialize, those best able to take advantage of them -- the single, younger, and more independently wealthy -- might have something of an edge in the entry-level market.

Lingering effects for tenure decisions. Assuming that the school that ultimately hires candidates post-fellowship/ VAP program doesn't count the program year(s) towards tenure (i.e., they start at year zero and don't go up early, except by choice), one might expect that folks coming out of fellowships in particular not only to have more completed publications out or in the pipeline (which becomes the basis for a hiring decision), but also a more fully developed scholarly agenda and additional work that's further along upon arrival at their tenure track position. This is more than hitting the ground running; in some ways, this is a head start, and unquestionably good for these tenure candidates and the institutions that hired them. Over time, this is likely to be another push towards raising tenure standards -- again, not something that's necessarily a bad thing given the relatively low standards for tenure in the legal academy (and yes, I now have tenure, so that's easy for me to say). But does this not further turn the apparent bonus of fellowships into a requirement, or at least a deficit to those who don't apply or get one?

The adjuncting of the legal academy. One pleasant difference between law schools and undergraduate education is that law schools don't rely on part-time adjuncts for teaching large, basic courses. Instead, the basic courses are where a school deploys its tenure-track faculty most heavily; adjuncts are used, when they're used, for advanced courses, and are usually active practicioners who don't depend on low, part-time pay for their income. Skills courses like legal writing are taught by full-time, non-tenure track faculty, many of whom are paid as much as many tenure-track faculty members in other parts of the university. To the extent that these programs farm out to a revolving door of neophytes coverage of certain courses that the tenure track faculty doesn't want to teach (such as the incredibly important job of teaching legal writing), does this adversely affect teaching?