The Law Professor Market: To JD/PhD Or Not To JD/PhD?

Maya Moritz (PhD Student University of Pennsylvania (2023-)), Visualizing Hires in the Law Professor Market (Or, to JD/PhD or not to JD/PhD):

Doctoral candidates face a long, uncertain road. In the between three and infinity years it will take them to complete their education, the market will change. Potential employers will shift their hiring focus, reconfigure their department’s specialty, or have their funding upended. The departure or arrival of a single major researcher or a change of leadership in funding institutions can impact the opportunity and availability of grants for faculty and post-docs. With little intel into the future, candidates facing down tight job markets can often turn only to the past to inform their educational choices, especially for smaller fields.

In order to fill the knowledge gap for one of those markets, the JD/PhD market for law school professorships, I’ve sliced up some of Dr. Lawsky’s collected entry-level hiring data on the law faculty market for anyone considering a JD, pondering a PhD, or just eager to see some diagrams.

A few notes on this blogpost: the next section (The Draw of Law) will give a little non-quantitative background to motivate this post, which the pure-numbers crowd may wish to skip. From there, I’ll proceed with an overview of the yearly hiring trends and the number of hires who chose each path in the JD/PhD crowd (Crunching the Numbers: Hiring Trends), then examine the origin JD or PhD program and final hiring school of candidates (Where Did You Come From, Where Did You Go?), and finally turn to how fellowships mediated the hiring process of each group (Fields and Fellows).

If you read in your day job and cannot handle anything more than ingredient labels outside of work, head over to the conclusion (Tell Me How to Live My Life). Hopefully, readers will emerge with a better sense of the law school market, its various paths, and even where they may fit within that map. ...

As Dr. Lawsky remarks in her posts on the subject, this dataset is limited to hires. We don’t know who else was in the pool who didn’t make it into these cells or took an alternative route through law practice, industry, or government. We don’t have exact CVs directly in the data, so cannot verify if there was no first fellowship or if no first fellowship was recorded unless we want to read over a thousand CVs. Even with these potential limitations, I do feel I was able to pull out a bit of information that can’t be found in Dr. Lawsky’s awesome blogposts on the subject.

First, PhD holders mostly resemble just-JD candidates in their career trajectories. They’re more likely to have no fellowships and no clerkships, but also more likely to have two fellowships and no or some clerkships. They mostly seem to opt out of the middle of the pack with one fellowship compared to just-JDs. Most people in both groups have one fellowship and a clerkship, and we reach the majority of the sample when we add the people with one fellowship and no clerk experience. Candidates with or without a PhD should expect a fellowship, then, though most likely just one.

Yale, Harvard, NYU, and Stanford are the top picks for future-professor JD students with a PhD, but Columbia, Berkeley, and Georgetown are the top hiring schools. PhDs tend to be in adjoining subjects and the top JD schools are also the schools where people (though only a small group of the same people) stay for their PhD.

If you wish to remain at the school you studied, go to Yale or Harvard for your JD and Harvard or Berkeley for your PhD. For fellowships, there are many more schools where a PhD seems to lead to a first fellowship in that same institution or another top school. For from-fellowship hiring, the first fellowship is a nice way to stay in place if your dream is Harvard or Columbia. Second fellowship is a less reliable road, with most fellows gaining positions at lower-ranked schools and less than a handful taking spots at their second fellowship school.

(Hat Tip: Sarah Lawsky.)

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