Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
In the United States, law schools provide the principal route of entry into the legal profession. Indeed, education in a law school is the only experience that virtually all members of the modern legal profession have in common. The gatekeeping function of law schools places the nation's law teachers in a most influential position. Although law professors play a vital role in selecting and molding the members of the profession, little research has been done on them. This article presents the results of the American Bar Foundation's first major study of law teachers. The author finds them to be a most highly credentialed group of lawyers, the overwhelming majority of whom are graduates of a small group of elite law schools. She also finds that possession of a degree from one of these schools appears to be not only highly determinative of who become law teachers but also of the nature of teachers' academic careers.
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2 A recent treatment of Litchfield and his early law schools throws some doubt, however, on the novelty of Langdell's approach. See Goetsch, Charles G., The Litchfield Law School: A Modern View (paper presented at the 1979 conference of the American Society for Legal History, Williams-burg, Va.).Google Scholar
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11 Even the court is not such an institution. Dan C. Lortie, The Striving Young Lawyer: A Study of Early Career Differentiation in the Chicago Bar (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1958).Google Scholar
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14 Information from the Delaware Law School was received too late to be included in the AALS Directory of Law Teachers, 1975-76 (St. Paul, Minn.: West Publishing Co.).Google Scholar
15 There is a discrepancy between the number of full-time law teachers included in this study (3,850). based on AALS figures (see text at p. 503 supra), and the number given in the ABA Annual Review of Legal Education for 1975 (3,584). The 3,850 figure represents 90 percent of the 4,260 full-time teachers listed in the AALS Directory of Law Teachers as holding tenure track positions during the 1975-76 school year whether or not they were actively engaged in teaching that academic year. The 3,584 figure includes all full-time teachers actively engaged in law school teaching programs during the 1975-76 school year whether or not they held tenure track positions. In addition, the 3,850 figure is based on data from only those MA-accredited law schools conferring the J.D. or LL.B. degree located in one of the 50 states, while the 3,584 figure is based on data that also include accredited law schools that conferred only graduate law degrees as well as accredited law schools in Puerto Rico.Google Scholar
Clinical assistant professors, clinical associate professors, and clinical full professors were included in this study. Clinical lecturers and clinical instructors were not.Google Scholar
I employed tests of significance throughout the analysis of the data on law teachers despite the fact that the data in this study represent the universe of law teachers rather than a sample thereof. As Stinchcombe and others have noted, tests of significance provide estimates of measurement as well as sampling error and therefore should be used with both universe and subgroup data. See Stinchcombe, Arthur L., Creating Efficient Industrial Administrations (New York: Academic Press, 1974). For that reason, I used tests of significance where appropriate in this study.Google Scholar
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24 ABA-accredited Puerto Rican law schools and the Delaware Law School were not included. Information from the Delaware Law School was received too late to be included in the Directory.Google Scholar
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27 The Order of the Coif is the national honorary society for law schools; its membership is restricted to those graduating in the top 10 percent of their classes.Google Scholar
28 Although in general educational terms the J.D. degree is usually a graduate degree in that a baccalaureate is a prerequisite, in terms of legal education the J.D. degree is the basic “undergraduate” or professional law degree. The LL.M. and S. J.D. degrees are graduate law degrees, the former being the master of laws and the latter the doctor of the science of jurisprudence.Google Scholar
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30 These three categories of career experiences are the end product of an elaborate data reduction process. The data on the early career positions of law teachers had initially been coded so that each position a teacher had held had a separate code for personal status (e.g., assistant professor in a law school, associate in a law office, etc.) and work setting (e.g., law firm, federal government, law school, etc.). The first stage of the data reduction process involved combining the personal status and work setting codes for each position into a single coded unit and then placing these units into related groups. This regrouping or collapsing continued until there were only 10 categories of experiences. They were: (1) non-tenure-track teacher at a law school, (2) law clerk at a court, (3) student, (4) private practitioner (solo and firm), (5) legal aid lawyer or public defender, (6) position in government (includes all departments and agencies), (7) nonlaw position in academe, institute, or association, (8) house counsel, (9) military service, and (10) other. The next stage of the data reduction process involved determining whether there was a relationship between what a law teacher had done during his or her early career and the length of that early career. Using a variety of analytic techniques I found that with the exception of clerking, there was no clear relationship between the nature of the activity pursued and the length of time devoted to it. Once I ascertained that time was not a major factor in the analysis of early career activities, I was able to reduce all the various early career activities that teachers had engaged in to a single coded category. For example, it was easy to code teachers' experiences if they had only been in private practice, but how could their activities be coded if they had been in private practice, worked for the government, and clerked for a judge before entering tenure track teaching? After considerable work, I found that the early career activities of virtually all law teachers fell into 17 categories of experience representing various combinations of the 10 activity codes listed above. I analyzed these 17 categories to determine their discreteness, and I found that the many types of law practice were not distinguishable in terms of the credentials and/or careers of the law teachers who had engaged in them. Consequently, I was able to collapse categories 4 (private practitioner), 5 (legal aid lawyer or public defender), 6 (position in government), and 8 (house counsel) into the single category “general practice.” In addition, I collapsed categories 7 (nonlaw position in academe) and 9 (military service), which had very few teachers in them, into the general “other” category. The category “student” proved to be redundant with the advanced law degrees possessed by teachers and non-tenure-track teaching positions at law schools, so I collapsed it, too, into the “other” category. In the end, the number of activity codes was reduced to 3 (practicing, clerking, and non-tenure-track teaching), plus the category “other.” The variable that I ultimately used to describe the total early career experiences of law teachers contained 10 codes (7 that represented the combinations of the 3 activity codes plus the category “other”; see table 4).Google Scholar
31 Of those who had practice experience, 74.4 percent (1,925) had engaged in private law practice (firm or solo), 37.4 percent (967) in government practice (mostly federal agencies and departments), 8.8 percent (228) in legal aid and public defender work, and 9.3 percent (241) in house counsel work for some organization. The figures add up to more than 100 percent, as some had engaged in more than one type of practice experience. I found no significant differences among the types of law practice in terms of the status of the law school that a teacher with a particular kind of experience had attended or the status of the law school where the teacher obtained a tenure track position (see discussion infra.)Google Scholar
32 This study did not include those who entered tenure track teaching, left for some reason, and did not return to tenure track teaching.Google Scholar
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40 Only the effects of possessing the LL.M. degree were considered in this analysis, for the LL.M. degree was more likely to have an impact on one's early teaching career (see discussion of differences between the LL.M. degree and the S.J.D. degree at p. 507 supra), and they were by far the most common advanced law degrees obtained by law teachers. The effects of possessing the S.J.D. degree on law teachers' careers were considered separately and are discussed later in this section.Google Scholar
41 The mean LSAT of the first group was 636; the mean LSAT of the second group was 658 (t= 10.44, df= 1,131, p≤ .001).Google Scholar
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This suggests that either the prior professional experience of women was not counted equally with that of men when determining appropriate academic rank or that women indeed had fewer total years of professional experience, perhaps as a result of interrupting their legal careers to meet family obligations.Google Scholar
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