Mississippi Secunda and the Lateral Market of Doom

My friend and soon-to-be ex-Mississippian Paul Secunda has written an excellent article on negotiating the vagaries (treacheries?) of the law school lateral hiring market. The article is available on SSRN here. I highly recommend it as general reading for pretty much anyone interested in how law schools work--students, professor wannabees, current profs, and so on.

As Paul points out in the article, there has been a good deal of commentary on the entry-level hiring market for law faculty, but there is a paucity of literature on the lateral hiring market (the market for law profs who move from one school to another). So Paul, who is in the process of moving from the University of Mississippi School of Law to Marquette University Law School, has bravely set out to rectify that.

Personally, I think the article is great for a number of reasons. First, as already stated, it is a great resource. Second, it is an easy and fun read--not a common characteristic of scholarly writing. Third, while the advice is focused specifically on the law school lateral hiring market, some of the advice translates well to any interviewing scenario. Especially helpful, I think, is Paul's point that many of the variables in the hiring process are beyond the interviewee's control. Understand that, accept it, and focus instead on the factors you can control. That likely will increase your chances of success, and it certainly will reduce your stress level a good bit.

And finally, the article is a perfect example of how blogging can directly promote scholarship: parts of the article appeared as a series of blog posts by Paul on Concurring Opinions (see his first of eleven posts here). After all, novels by Dickens first appeared in serialized form, so why not law review articles? Dickens might even have been a blogger were he alive today--although perhaps not a law prof.

Potpourri

There has been so much going on with the start of the new semester that it raises a problem: what to talk about? Like studies about consumers who, faced with a plethora of choices tend to freeze and make no choice, I find myself bombarded with an embarrassment of riches in terms of blogworthy topics. So much interesting stuff to blog about, so little time.

So here are two subjects that have been on my mind this week. One is a follow-up to my last post; the other is new.

AALS Panel on Junior Faculty, January 4, 2008. In my last post I blogged about a panel I was on at the Association of American Law Schools' Annual Meeting in New York City, for which I presented an article entitled The Comparative and Absolute Advantages of Junior Law Faculty in the Classroom: Implications for Teaching and the Future of American Law Schools. As the article's name implies, it is a fusion of my interest in international trade theory and my interest in/dedication to quality teaching. The paper can be accessed online from my Social Science Research Network (SSRN) page here. (You may need to register for SSRN if you have not used it before, but registration is free.) The panel went well--no hecklers, and there was good feedback. I am looking forward to the article being published this year in the BYU Education and Law Journal.

Good Lookin' Lawyers. The ABA Journal and Legal Blog Watch have reported on a study which concludes that good-looking lawyers make more money, on average, than those considered less good looking. This sounds like one of those "master of the obvious" studies, doesn't it? In a separate study, the FDA has concluded, after five years of intensive research, that the color of most oranges is . . . wait for it . . . orange.

But on a more serious note, it is disturbing that looks should matter in a skills-based profession like the law. I do not care what my doctor looks like; I care about whether she or he is competent. (Although come to think of it, having a healthy-looking doctor is somewhat reassuring, I suppose). It's especially disturbing that looks should matter in a profession that conducts so much of its business via e-mail and telephone.

Perhaps law firm hiring committees do not have entirely the same set of interests as their clients. Maybe their hiring decisions are based in part on their own visual preferences, instead of the best interests of their clients. Or perhaps it's subconscious on their part, and all other factors being relatively equal, looks tip the scale between two similar candidates. Or maybe there is a subconscious effect on the candidates' side as well: maybe better looks breed more confidence, and thus better interview results. Or maybe all three. I am not an expert in psychology, but it does seem likely that these factors play a part.

If we accept the fact that appearance matters to us, and I think that's largely incontrovertible, perhaps the question is whether anything should be done about it. Is this something that simply "is what it is," or should law firms, and law schools, take steps to try and counter this bias in favor of people perceived to be more attractive?

And for those who may be wondering, I will not be writing an article on the comparative or absolute advantages of better-looking junior faculty in the classroom. Some areas of interdisciplinary study are better left untouched.

The Comparative and Absolute Advantages of Junior Law Faculty

As I write this post I am sitting in my hotel room in New York, where I am attending the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) annual meeting. The theme of this year's meeting is "Reassessing Our Roles as Scholars and Educators in Light of Change." There certainly is a lot of change occurring at American law schools these days, and that topic is a key focus of this blog.

Because of my interest in this subject, I am speaking at the conference on a panel sponsored by the AALS Section on New Law Professors, entitled New Law Faculty as Catalysts for Change. The title of my piece is The Comparative and Absolute Advantages of Junior Law Faculty in the Classroom: Implications for Teaching and the Future of American Law Schools. The paper can be accessed online from my Social Science Research Network (SSRN) page here.

This piece is actually a blend of two areas of interest to me: international trade theory, and law school teaching theory and practice. My piece, as the name indicates, applies the concepts of comparative and absolute advantage to the subject of law school teaching, to see what they might tell us about how junior faculty can be used to improve law school teaching and how we might rethink law school teaching overall. Here's an abstract of the article:

In the ongoing debate about how to improve law school teaching, there is a general consensus that law schools should do more to train junior faculty members how to teach. While this may be the case, this consensus inadvertently leads to an implicit assumption that is not true—that in all facets of law teaching, junior faculty are at a disadvantage compared to senior faculty. In fact, there are aspects of law teaching for which junior faculty can be better suited than their senior colleagues. This Article reviews scholarship concerning law teaching and identifies three teaching factors that generally favor junior law faculty: generational proximity to the law school student body; recency of law practice experience as junior practitioners; and lower susceptibility to the problem of “conceptual condensation”—extreme depth of subject matter knowledge that makes it difficult to see subjects from the students’ perspective.

This Article employs the economic concepts of (a) economies of scale or productive efficiency and (b) absolute and comparative advantage to suggest how these junior faculty advantages could be harnessed to improve law school teaching. With respect to productive efficiency, it is suggested that greater intra-faculty dialogue can increase a law faculty’s output of effective teaching. Currently, senior faculty members often provide assistance or advice to junior faculty in areas of senior faculty expertise or advantage—such as depth of knowledge in a course’s subject matter—but this is largely a one-way flow of information. However, if junior faculty were also to provide insight and advice to senior faculty regarding areas of junior faculty advantage, the quality of law school teaching might be significantly enhanced. Junior-senior faculty dialogue might be promoted through a variety of means, including faculty workshops and even perhaps teaching reviews of senior faculty by junior faculty.

With respect to the concepts of absolute and comparative advantage, this Article suggests that law school teaching could be improved through the specialization of teaching functions. Instead of professors individually teaching separate courses, professors might coordinate their teaching (that is, team-teach) across a number of courses in the law school curriculum, as a means to more effectively harness the respective strengths (and minimize the respective weaknesses) of junior and senior faculty in the classroom. Through the leveraging of junior faculty advantages, overall law school teaching might be significantly improved. This Article concludes by discussing the implications of these recommendations for law school culture in general and for the legal profession as a whole.

(Note: If you are not already a user of SSRN you will need to register to use SSRN, but the registration is easy, and it's free. For those unfamiliar with SSRN, it's an online network through which scholars distribute and share up-to-the-minute research. It's a great and free resource for scholarship in the social sciences.)

Also on the panel with me are Emily Hughes of Washington University School of Law in St. Louis, Geoff Rapp of The University of Toledo College of Law, and Ben Madison of Regent Law School. Moderating the panel is Michael Schwartz of Washburn University School of Law. Having him as moderator is excellent, since he is a leading scholar in the area of law school teaching and an all-around good guy.

I will post more about the panel after it occurs. In the meantime, I welcome any thoughts or input about the article.

Scholarship Update

I'm back from a brief blogging hiatus after finishing my grades, and summer is in full swing. Here's a quick update on what I have been doing in terms of research.

I have had a law review article and book review published this month. Both articles can be accessed via my faculty home page or my author page on the Social Science Research Network (SSRN). You have to register to use SSRN, but the site is free.

The law review article is entitled Thinking Outside the Border: Homeland Security and the Forward Deployment of the U.S. Border, 44 Houston Law Review 189 (2007). In it, I discuss U.S. cargo security programs and their extraterritorial application. The book review is entitled Seeing the Forest and the Trees: Reconceptualizing State and Government Succession, 51 New York Law School Law Review 403 (2007). It is a review of Professor Tai-Heng Cheng’s new book, State Succession and Commercial Obligations, which addresses the disconnect between state practice and international law doctrine concerning state and government succession. Both pieces explore issues concerning global interdependency and interconnectedness that are central to my research.

In addition, I am currently hard at work on a new law review article on U.S. export controls, entitled Winning the Battle but Losing the War? Reflections on Extraterritorial Jurisdiction in U.S. Export Control Laws. The thesis of this article is that the United States' application of its export control laws to foreign reexports of U.S. origin goods and technology (something that is quite controversial legally and politically) is legally justified but strategically imperfect, and that changes therefore need to be made. While the extraterritoriality of U.S. export controls was debated at length by scholars in the 1980s and early 1990s (with most commentators opining that such jurisdiction was impermissible), there has been less focus on the subject in recent years. In light of the rapid and continued growth in international trade and the birth of e-commerce, as well as changes to the post-Cold War and post-9/11 national security landscape, this is a subject worth revisiting. (Note: for background information concerning U.S. export controls, see my 2004 law review article entitled E-Mails, Servers and Software: U.S. Export Controls for the Modern Era, 35 Georgetown Journal of International Law 320 (2004)).

Later this month, I will be presenting this article as a work-in-progress at the American Association of Law Schools’ Midyear Conference on International Law in Vancouver, Canada. The theme of the conference is "What is Wrong with the Way We Teach and Write International Law?" As Professor Mark Drumbl points out on Prawfsblawg, "[t]he conference is for folks teaching and writing in international law to rethink what we're doing, and equally for folks teaching and writing outside of international law (whether as legal academics or as academics outside law entirely) to engage with the subject and discuss what could be done better." The conference promises to be very interesting, and I am pleased to be one of its presenters.