A safe and supportive forum for philosophers.
Owned & Moderated by Marcus Arvan (University of Tampa)
Contact: marvan@ut.edu
Blog mission & moderation policy
In our newest "how can we help you?" thread, a reader asks:
I’m wondering about the requirements for getting a job in a law school.
I work and publish in an area of philosophy of law, but don’t have any law degree. I do know quite a bit about certain areas of the law and think I could in theory teach law courses with some preparation. Do I need a law degree to apply for a job in a law school?
I don't know the answer.
Do any of you? Any other tips or other helpful insights for the OP?
With all due respect, I think this is a question for Brian Leiter.
Here’s one quotation from a relevant job posting:
“Candidates must have earned a doctorate in law or a related discipline, or be a doctoral candidate nearing completion in their program of study. Consideration may be given to candidates who do not have a doctorate, but who show an equivalent level of qualification through a combination of significant professional experience and scholarly activity.”
I’m in a good position to answer. I hold an American JD and a philosophy PhD; I have applied in both tenure track markets.
Logistically, law school hiring is conducted through the AALS Faculty Appointments Register. There is a small but growing trend in favor of applying individually to schools by email (after gleaning their committee info from prawfsblawg.com), but the best bet for being hired is through the FAR. That’s great though because you only have to submit a small amount of information up front, and you’ve effectively applied to every school in the nation. Much easier than juggling Interfolio for philosophy positions.
Cutting to the chase, a junior applicant without a JD is very unlikely to get hired. The small number of law profs who don’t have a JD are typically foreigners or distinguished laterals who are mid to late career.
If you do decide to apply, the criteria are unique in academia. Publications matter, your academic network matters, and your research agenda matters. But in addition to all that, for the typical applicant, the school where you obtained your JD matters immensely (the highest ranked schools dominate the professoriate). Also, there is a general lawyers’ prestige system that looks for markers like law review membership and judicial clerkships . An applicant without a JD won’t have any of that.
These days, successful candidates, aside from their JD, usually have 2-out-of-3 of a clerkship, a PhD, and a fellowship/VAP.
From what I’ve seen, one’s best chances of being hired by a law school without a JD (and they’re really not good!) is to play up your teaching qualifications. Because a fair chunk of law professor applicants did not TA in graduate school and have been practicing law instead of teaching, many PhDs (including road weary adjuncts) can shine based on proven teaching ability. This advice, however, really only applies to the lowest ranked law schools (those under 100 in U.S. News), who are generally more focused on teaching and know that their less curated student body needs prepared, effective teachers.
I’m in a very similar position to the OP, and I’ve applied for law school jobs and got a couple of interviews (not successful yet). I can only speak with any confidence about the UK though, as I’m only applying there. A couple of notes.
Firstly, I think demonstrating an ability to teach at least some doctrinal law topics will typically be very important. In particular, in the UK, one of the ‘Foundations of Legal Knowledge’ subjects (e.g. criminal, tort, contract, etc) that students are required to study to get a ‘qualifying law degree’, i.e. a degree that enables for them to qualify to practice. Jobs that explicitly ask for a specialism in jurisprudence/legal philosophy are rare, and even when they occur, teaching some of these other subjects might still be an advantage. So if your work in philosophy of law enables you with the kind of doctrinal knowledge to teach one of those subjects, that may make a massive difference.
Secondly, I have a sense that places are very different in how open they would be to hire someone without a law degree. The places I’ve been interviewed so far are (non-coincidentally) law departments with a strong legal philosophy element in them. I’ve been told that more research focussed/prestigious universities might tend to be more relaxed about not having a law degree, and more happy for your research to do the talking. But I think the best thing to do is to simply ask the contacts on the relevant advert if they be open to someone without a law degree applying.
I am a philosopher working in a US law school; I previously worked in a UK law school, and I have a JD in addition to my PhD. I agree with much of what JD-PhD says, although I disagree on some points.
I think that, for entry level hiring, having a law degree is pretty much essential for US law schools (though I think it also largely holds for Canadian schools). This is usually a JD, but a foreign law degree plus an SJD (or sometimes just an LLM) from a US school is also fine for the entry level law market.
I would also say that entry level TT hires in US law schools will typically have at least one law review article published or forthcoming and a second law review paper that is fairly polished.
As a general rule, tenure is easier in law schools than in philosophy departments. For this reason–since the vast majority of entry level hires will get tenured–law schools want to be sure that they hire competent teachers of law. Law schools will only hire candidates who they believe can effectively teach at least one large-enrollment doctrinal law class (e.g., torts, property, contracts, civil procedure, constitutional law, criminal law, evidence, professional responsibility, tax, corporations). It is very hard to convince a US law faculty that you can do this if you don’t have a law degree. I could perhaps imagine a fancy law school hiring a very particular sort of economics PhD without a law degree at the entry level, but even this would be very rare.
In the UK, there are more possibilities for philosophers without law degrees to work in law schools, and especially in law schools where Jurisprudence is a requirement for LLB students. I think it is also somewhat easier to prepare oneself to teach doctrinal classes in UK law schools, where one is teaching undergraduates, than in American JD programs.
At the senior level, although rare, it is possible for a US law school to hire someone without a law degree, although this might require that someone have held visiting positions in law schools and taught doctrinal law courses.
All that said, holding a PhD in a related field in addition to a law degree is definitely a plus in the US law market right now.
I agree completely with Assoc. Prof.
Law schools want you to be able to teach at least one large enrollment doctrinal law class. That’s a huge barrier.
I can speak for some EU countries where law is not a post-graduate degree, and hiring people without a legal background is common for some specialties (i.e. phil of law, political economy, etc.). In fact, I got one such position on the strength of my publications.
Now, whether you want to be surrounded by lawyers as a philosopher is another question…
I’m also well-positioned to answer and agree with what’s been said, but I’ll put it differently: no, there’s no chance, unfortunately. This isn’t justified — you don’t really need to attend 3 years of law school to be qualified to teach one law course — but it’s how it is. Don’t waste any time even considering it.
Associate professor with a JD and philosophy PhD here, one who has lived and worked as an academic in law schools in more than one country.
I agree with everything posted above, especially about being competent to teach bread and butter law classes. However, it seems worthwhile to add a more contentious point.
To the extent that law schools will even pay attention to a legal philosopher, and that’s a minority of institutions in America (but not so in the rest of the English speaking world), most of them won’t be interested in a lot of what passes as legal philosophy today in the US, i.e., moral or political philosophy with a toehold in legal issues or concerns. Much of that sort of work exhibits no real understanding of THE law–even when the topic is criminal LAW, or Property LAW, say.
That isn’t to claim that law schools, in America or in other English-speaking countries only want core analytic jurisprudence scholars. On the contrary, the American schools want/probably prefer normative legal philosophers, crits, socio-legal, etc. But, again, much of what’s done in the US under the umbrella of “legal philosophy” won’t be of interest to that subset of law schools that actually care about legal philosophy; such philosophers will also be generally undesirable to (and unhelpful for) other sorts of law schools unless they happen to additionally bring something else that’s useful to the table.
Let me please add a followup. If OP is young (younger than 30, say) AND is in a NTT s/he doesn’t like or a TT position position s/he’s willing to abandon, then I would recommend going to law school.
But only go to a prestigious one. If you get a prestigious law degree (think top 10 US law school, and only the top 10), then your prospects of securing a faculty position in a law school are much better than getting anything in a philosophy department.
The pay will typically also be better, the tenure prospects superior, the teaching loads lighter, etc. Once again, you’ll additionally have improved marketability by virtue of being able to teach something other than philosophy of law that’s actually helpful to the faculty load.
Your non-academic job prospects after attending a prestigious law school (big law, government, etc.), furthermore, will be infinitely better than the philosophy academic market.
Leave a Reply