Anonymous User wrote: ↑Fri Jul 24, 2020 11:03 pm
soft blue wrote: ↑Fri Jul 24, 2020 9:55 pm
Please do not go to law school if you want to be a professor but have no interest in practicing.
What about Yale?
Pretty sure the point isn't about the school that you go to, but that students who want to go into legal practice benefit from having profs who actually understand legal practice. That's probably true even at Yale, where most people are still going to go into legal practice, even if in a lot loftier gigs than many other grads' jobs.
soft blue wrote: ↑Fri Jul 24, 2020 9:55 pm
1.) The downside case is real. Legal academia is brutal to get into generally and getting a job at a "good" school requires truly extraordinary credentials, good research, and a whole lot of luck.
What would you say is the worst jd credential you could have and still get hired at a reputable law schol?
This is super super super contingent on all kinds of factors.
It depends on what you consider a reputable school.
It depends on what other credentials you bring to the table (did you get a PhD? from where and in what field? do you have any other graduate degrees? have you published? do you have some kind of relevant experience, like if you want to teach environmental law, have you actually litigated environmental cases, or advised big corporations on how to comply with environmental regulations, or lobbied for new environmental legislation?).
It depends on what field of law you want to research . Everyone and their dog wants to do sexy things like con law or maybe criminal law, so that's going to be incredibly tough.But if you want to publish about tax, or many kinds of transactional corporate law where the top jobs offer way more money than profs get paid, or some other field that fewer people want to work in, you may have better odds.
It depends on who you know. If you go to a slightly lower ranked school but that school has one of the top profs in field of study X, and you RA for that prof and co-write an article with them and they push to help you get a fellowship/visiting assistant prof gig, you may well do better than someone at a higher ranked school who fails to make a strong connection with their profs.
Most of all, it depends on whether you can place articles in highly-ranked law reviews. And that depends on the name on your transcript, the support and training you can get at that school, and your own ability to produce highly-regarded scholarship. (Law schools aren't actually very good at training you to do this.)
The bulk of profs come from Harvard and Yale (Stanford maybe a little less just because they're smaller than Harvard and a lot of academic types will self-select into Yale), but there are profs from all over the T14. There are even profs from below the T14. I'm not going to say that going to Harvard or Yale doesn't improve your odds - it absolutely does - but it's also possible to go into academia from other schools.
What is impossible is to give some kind of cut off and say that "this is the lowest possible JD you can have." Like sure, clearly you shouldn't go to Cooley or Thomas Jefferson School of Law if you want to be an academic (really, probably at all), and obviously, the higher ranked school, the better. It's going to get progressively harder outside of HYS and definitely outside of the T14. But it's really hard for people at those schools, too. It's a tough field. Anyone interested in going to law school to be a prof should have a realistic backup plan that they're genuinely willing to follow.