Law Faculty Hiring Advice, Part Zillion: Wait Til You’re Strong So You Don’t Apply Twice

Brian Leiter is hosting a good conversation right now about whether VAP candidates ought to enter the market with at least one post-Note publication.  His view is that the committees that consider VAPs stay the same, year after year, so that individuals who apply with weak resumes the first year may be hobbled in subsequent attempts.  That is, a weak first package leaves a lasting impression that cannot be fully ameliorated by subsequent good work.

I don’t know if that’s true, but it makes sense to me.  It does lead me to wonder whether tenure-track candidates should exhibit the same caution.  It’s my view, and I think the received wisdom, that the answer is yes.  In part, this may be because of the relative stability of hiring committee membership.  It’s my anecdotal sense that most law school faculty search committees maintain some consistency in membership over the course of a several year period.  One reason for this is to make sure that the committee doesn’t revisit the same candidates.  (There are other ways of course – like cross-checking lists – but you’d be surprised at the state of disorganization sometimes!)   Once a candidate has been considered and rejected the first year, it creates at least a presumption against reconsideration.  I can remember numerous times in which a candidate is suggested by a new committee member, only to be dismissed by committee veterans.  In part this pure efficiency: with so many highly qualified candidates (my guess is that 75% of the people in the first AALS book would have gotten a teaching job 20 years ago) why spend the time on someone who was passed over by the market, and your own school, the prior year?  The entire candidate review process is heuristic central (imagine people blurting "Yale summa!"  "Garland clerkship" "EIC" "book coming out from Yale" again and again.)  In the world of heuristics, "passed over last year" sounds awfully compelling.

As a side note,  the chairs of appointments committee chairs  do change a good deal from year to year – if Dan Markel’s incredibly useful lists of hiring chairs from 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2008 are a good sample.   This is probably because the job is so time consuming that it can derail a professor from his or her research – a particular problem given that hiring chairs are often among the more committed scholars on a given faculty. 

And one last cautionary note which bears all the repetition it gets.  There are a lot of really accomplished people on the teaching market.  It’s getting harder and harder to get attention in the absence of a PhD, fellowship, or multiple publications.  The two best pieces of advice I could give anyone seeking a job in legal academia are: write and choose a relatively underpopulated subject area.  And it’s better to do the latter first, so your articles make your claimed interest in the UCC credible.