2010 Law School Faculty Lateral Moves

Todd Bruno from LSU to the Charleston School of Law

Wow… looks like no women hired as laterals this cycle…

My last name is spelled Lash, not Lasch. And I'm excited to be moving to Illinois from Loyola Law School, Los Angeles.

Anthony Niedwiecki will be moving from Nova Southeastern to John Marshall in Chicago.

Wow… looks like no women hired as laterals this cycle…

That is striking, although this is only a partial and incomplete list of a still ongoing process. Assuming it's accurate, though, what do you think it shows?

Yes, some others of us had also notice the "no women" thing – also no/not many women even commenting on this thread.

It either means that people are not interested in interviewing women (which would be weird) or that women are more difficult to move because many have "trailing husband" issues and these are difficult economic times. I assume the problem is not as bad moving men with "trailing wives" because a number of wives are probably still home-makers or caring for children these days, although I may be wrong about that statistically. I just don't know.

Or are schools just hiring more this year in fields that happen to be dominated by men? Some of the moves (but not as many as usual) are IP folks with somewhat of a patent focus. I'm sure that women are largely under-represented in patent law for example.

Adam Feibelman from North Carolina to Tulane

http://www.law.tulane.edu/tlsNews/newsItem.aspx?id=12386

Gregg Polsky from Florida State to North Carolina.

My school was interested in a woman lateral candidate, but we couldn't afford to match her salary.

Couldn't afford it, or didn't wish to spend the money?

Re: Jacqueline's comment — it can't be trailing spouse issues, or at least not entirely. Not everyone has a spouse & not all partners are opposite sex.

On my school's appts committee, lists of possible laterals are generated largely by word of mouth, and people suggest folks they like. One colleague has only suggested men, and the only "diverse" candidates come from women. It ends of looking like a new version of the old boys club. Only we're supposed to be past all of that, so the topic doesn't come up.

Not all female faculty members are married.

Law schools like to fill their "female" quota with junior women to keep them as powerless as possible.

BTW, I wasn't meaning to suggest that all women are married or that all academics are in heterosexual relationships. I was just hoping that the problem was more to do with logistics of moving women than of "old boys' club" issues arising. I'm sorry to hear that I'm probably wrong on that score. At least my school looked at lots of women this year and actually made offers to more women than men. But it sounds like that's not the experience at many schools.

"Couldn't afford it, or didn't wish to spend the money?"

The professor in question makes more significantly more money than anyone on our faculty. So first of all given the budget crunch, couldn't afford it in general, and moreover couldn't afford the inevitable demands among equally accomplished colleagues to raise their salaries to match the newcomer. No professor, man or woman, is going to get hired under those circumstances. But the good news is that at least one woman professor is already very well paid.

St. John's has hired Peggy McGuinness from U. Missouri.

"Law schools like to fill their "female" quota with junior women to keep them as powerless as possible."

I don't follow this. Given that tenure is very easy to get in law schools,entry-level hiring in law schools is essentially an offer of life employment, including all the powers that go along with tenure, based on only relatively modest accomplishments. In light of that, Isn't hiring a particular group at the entry-level likely to be a strategic way to empower a group rather than a way to keep them powerless?

Jacqueline wrote: "It either means that people are not interested in interviewing women (which would be weird) or that women are more difficult to move because many have 'trailing husband' issues and these are difficult economic times."

As a logical matter, it could also mean a third thing: that women are themselves not looking for lateral positions at a rate proportional to their numbers in legal academia. That's subtly different from Jacqueline's second possibility (that women are "more difficult to move," which implies that the women are just as eager as men to want to move but the "wooing" schools find it hard to "move" them).

My own main reason for not looking for lateral positions (apart from that small matter of my phone not ringing, alluded to in an earlier comment on this blog) is that I have not wished to bring on my wife and our children the enormous upheaval of relocation.

Now I'm a guy and all, so I could be totally wrong about this, but I've long sensed that this "not wanting to bring upheaval upon my family" is a concern considerably more common (or at least more commonly voiced) among/by women than by men. (I'm not defending that, or critiquing it, or suggesting that it's as it ought or ought not be, or saying it's the natural order of things, or the unnatural order of things. I'm just making an observation about what I've seen in my life.)

If I'm right about this, then it would stand to reason that (assuming roughly equal rates of marriage and parenting as between male and female law faculty members), the "seekers" in the lateral movement market would tend to be rather disproportionately male — and this not because they're "easier to move" but because they're more eager to move.

I note with permission that Andrea Dennis is moving to University of Georgia from Kentucky.

Still, the gender difference in lateral hires is discouraging. Based on anecdotal evidence men are being pursued for lateral hires at much higher rates than women, possibly based in part on the assumption that "women won't move," which is a pretty handy assumption if you want to avoid hiring them for other reasons.

Ann writes:

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"Based on anecdotal evidence men are being pursued for lateral hires at much higher rates than women, possibly based in part on the assumption that "women won't move," which is a pretty handy assumption if you want to avoid hiring them for other reasons."
****

As you have noted, Ann, the placements of scholarship in top journals are disproportionately of articles written by men. I'm curious, has anyone compared the the number of articles and placement of articles among lateral hires by gender? That might be interesting.

Ann has reported overrepresentation of male authors in top journals, but the gender gap here is even bigger than the one in law reviews.

"The professor in question makes more significantly more money than anyone on our faculty. So first of all given the budget crunch, couldn't afford it in general, and moreover couldn't afford the inevitable demands among equally accomplished colleagues to raise their salaries to match the newcomer. No professor, man or woman, is going to get hired under those circumstances."

In my experience, law professors say "she's expensive" a lot more often than they say "he's expensive." The word expensive sounds demeaning, a bit nasty, when applied to a man. As for the reasons you give for not hiring this high-paid woman: they're challenges, but at most schools a hypothetical male candidate would be eased through them more readily than a female one.

I also doubt that law professors considering whether to go forward with the hire would think of themselves and people already on the faculty as this man's "equally accomplished colleagues." Au contraire: his being paid "significantly more money" would be understood as more proof of his superiority.

In the same vein, I wonder whether anyone knows of a law school where the highest paid faculty member (on the regular faculty, I mean, not the dean) is female. I've never heard of one.

Anita writes: "Ann has reported overrepresentation of male authors in top journals, but the gender gap here is even bigger than the one in law reviews."

That's interesting. I think it would be useful to compare those stats — not only for this year, but for several years.

On under-representation of women in Top 10 law reviews, see also Minna Kotkin's empirical study on this (http://works.bepress.com/minna_kotkin/21/).

Since entering this discussion I've heard lots of anecdotal stories from people at other schools about only hiring "stars" who publish in Top 10 or Top 20 law reviews, which does seem to be very biased against women.

Additionally, re Eric's comment about women not wanting to move, rather than being harder to move, I wonder if there's a third reading on this. Perhaps schools ASSUME that women don't want to move or are harder to move before ever picking up the phone and calling them. I have recently heard some stories that it wasn't worth even asking a woman if she'd be interested in a move because her husband is settled in his job and she has kids so "there's no way she'd move even if we approached her".

Eric Muller wonders whether, for reasons we might call "cultural", "the 'seekers' in the lateral movement market would tend to be rather disproportionately male…"

I would say perhaps — but for a different reason than family issues. I can't imagine there are stats on this, but in my experience the real self-promoters tend to be men. I've had male colleagues and friends who are in everyone's face with their c.v. and accomplishments, and their interest in making a move. I just haven't had female colleagues like this.

Are women quietly waiting for someone to notice their wonderful scholarship, while men tend to do more to get the word out? Add to this the word-of-mouth aspect of the lateral market. And the fact that appointments committee members are often considering people not in their own field, so they are less likely to be able to rely on their own previous knowledge of who's doing interesting work.

These sorts of dynamics could help produce the result we're seeing so far this year, across so many schools.

It might also be a warning to law schools about appointments: if you're just concerned about "best athletes," your efforts will be impaired if you're not looking at the entire pool of talent. If women are disproportionately not making it into serious consideration, then not only are the women disadvantaged, but law schools are missing out on top scholars.

Appointments committees are in a better position to address this than female scholars. It is, of course, a faux pas to send out your c.v. for the lateral market, in most circumstances. Since openings are not advertised, what's a candidate to do? But committees can proactively work on generating broad, inclusive lists of candidates.

Anon makes a really good point that I don't think has been made yet in this thread and I want to echo it because it's a point that should be made forcefully.

It's not just that women might feel that it's "not fair" or that they're "disadvantaged" or that their "phone doesn't ring" during the hiring season. It's also the fact that schools do miss out on the best scholars if they mainly focus on men, and if they only see quality in terms of Top 10 law review placements which do seem to disproportionately reflect men's work for whatever reason.

Orin, I have little doubt that the proportional failure of top journals to publish scholarship written by women, and the proportional dominance of men on the lateral market are related and indeed self-reinforcing.

Orin writes: "I'm curious, has anyone compared the the number of articles and placement of articles among lateral hires by gender? That might be interesting."

Interesting in what way? Unless you know the specific pool from which a given lateral candidate was hired, how would you make any valid comparisons?

If I could ask a related, but possibly "out in left field" question:

Have people on appointments committees has the experience with jointly authored publications of faculty candidates that male co-authors are given more deference as having made the most significant contribution to a joint authored piece than females? I've heard of one or two instances of this but wouldn't want to extrapolate more generally. Personally, as an appointments committee member I like to see a good amount of sole-authored work by a candidate, but I know that doesn't always work out in empirical fields for example.

Based on my anecdotal experience as a faculty member, I agree with the last anon that generally speaking my male colleagues are much more aggressive about talking up their accomplishments, asking to be invited to conferences, having friends on other faculties push journals to take their papers, even finding ways to “up” their ssrn download counts, such as by having students download their papers from ssrn for classes or asking friends to download them.

The lateral move thing also connects up to pay disparities. Again anecdotally, I’ve seen a handful of men in recent years secure pay raises without even getting a lateral offer. It was enough that they made a show of being “in talks” with other schools to get the dean to agree that they were a flight risk and up their pay. I can’t think of any time I’ve seen a woman do the same thing.

I don't know if there's a reason why male laterals would systematically be reported earlier than female laterals, but I know for a fact there are more female laterals to be announced (in addition to the women mentioned by previous posters). So let's see how things look when the dust settles. It may not end up being proportionate to the proportion of female law professors out there, but it won't be as bad as it currently looks either.

I agree with Ann that the underrepresentation of women with respect to top-journal placements and the in the lateral hire pool is self-reinforcing. I also think it is related to a gender-duality with respect to self-promotion. Self-promotion as a tool for gaining recognition for one’s work (aside from being a poor proxy for, or predictor of, quality) is not available to female faculty in the same way that it available to male faculty members. Female (and I think particularly junior) faculty members who self-promote are received differently by their academy-wide colleagues than their male counterparts. Self-promoting female faculty are more likely to be perceived as overly-ambitious and unpleasantly aggressive, while male counterparts engaged in identical behaviors are seen as energetic and productive. It is a classic Hopkins catch-22.

Further I think the self-promotion duality extends to journal placements. Male colleagues are more likely to aggressively promote their work to journals directly, to contact students by phone, walk their work “down the hall” to the journal office when they are in town, and so forth. I think these kinds of self-promotion tactics succeed in getting early initial offers which turn into expedite requests from top journals. But I do not think that these tactics are as available to female faculty as they are to male faculty (and they should probably not be available to anyone if we are interested in publishing the best scholarship rather than the most aggressively promoted scholarship).

If we are really interested in resolving the disparate outcomes for women in the legal academy, we should be looking at eliminating practices which provide opportunities for male colleagues to exploit (however unwittingly) underlying gendered conventions/expectations regarding appropriate behaviors for men and women. In the context of scholarly placement, this would require a (truly) anonymous submission process (which in turn would likely require a peer review system). In terms of the word-of-mouth-lateral-selection problem, it would require many things, including a more thoughtful evaluation of the apprentice-system in the legal academy (whereby established scholars work closely with/co-author pieces (that place in top journals) with students or other junior scholars) as this system also disproportionately disadvantages women (women are much less likely to be selected as “apprentices,” and when they are selected, the criteria by which they are selected is more likely to be called into question). The apprentice system (which is widespread and quite successful in assisting less-established scholars in the lateral market) disproportionately disadvantages women in terms of placements, developing a network of well-regarded scholars who will go out of their way to recommend the less-established scholar to appointments committees, and so forth.

In other words, if we want to see different lateral move statistics a decade from now, I think we should wonder less about the willingness of women (who, after all, were ambitious enough to earn a place in the academy in the first instance) to “uproot” children they may or may not have, and focus more on some of these more institutional/systemic concerns.

Leticia Saucedo to U.C. Davis from University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Christopher Lasch from Suffolk (visitor) to Denver (tenure-track)

Patience Crowder from Tulsa to Denver

FWIW, my colleagues and I would welcome expressions of interest in joining the FSU Law faculty from women laterals (regardless of their seniority or "expensiveness"). If you are interested, or know someone who is or who might be, please let me know. Of course, we'd be interested to hear expressions of interest from people of all backgrounds too. Thanks.

Is it now fair to say that this year's lateral market is not as thin as we once thought it was? How does it compare with previous markets?

I can't speak for anywhere else, but on my faculty the first two paragraphs below are complete nonsense.

Anita wrote:
In my experience, law professors say "she's expensive" a lot more often than they say "he's expensive." The word expensive sounds demeaning, a bit nasty, when applied to a man. As for the reasons you give for not hiring this high-paid woman: they're challenges, but at most schools a hypothetical male candidate would be eased through them more readily than a female one.

I also doubt that law professors considering whether to go forward with the hire would think of themselves and people already on the faculty as this man's "equally accomplished colleagues." Au contraire: his being paid "significantly more money" would be understood as more proof of his superiority.

In the same vein, I wonder whether anyone knows of a law school where the highest paid faculty member (on the regular faculty, I mean, not the dean) is female. I've never heard of one.

Julie Steiner from St. John's to Western New England (tenure track move)

"Tenure status" alone does not equal status or high pay. My law school frequently finds the funds to hire higher paid lateral men and has never done so with a woman. The effect is a constant flow of highly paid men coming in at salaries above tenured women.

Adam Steinman from the University of Cincinnati to Seton Hall.

UNLV continues to lose folks:

Peter Reilly from UNLV to Texas Wesleyan

David Thronson from UNLV to Michigan State

jessie owley lippmann from Pace to Buffalo

Aya Gruber from Iowa to Colorado

Zak Kramer from Penn State to Arizona State.

Lesley Wexler from Florida State to Illinois.

Gregory McNeal from Penn State to Pepperdine.

Add Kim Diana Connolly to Buffalo from South Carolina.

Both of the laterals hired by Buffalo are women.

Do VAPs who weren't hired (or even eligible to be hired) as tenure track faculty count as laterals? I ask because I see at least one in the comments section who during the last year of his contract as a VAP received a tenure track offer elsewhere via the AALS process. It was never in question that this was his last year as a VAP at his current school; the only question was what kind of offer he might get elsewhere.

It would seem to me that including such hires along with true lateral moves muddies up the data set.

VAPs moving to tenure track jobs are not laterals in the true sense. They are newbie academics who have succeeded in getting their first tenure track jobs in the way it happens these days. While that's a cause for pride and celebration, it's not a lateral move.

UNLV loses another one: Leticia Saucedo to U.C. Davis.