AALS and the Legal Academy: Why it didn’t work for me

Jason — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 15:05:18 +0000

For the first year in two years, I am not participating in the annual AALS Faculty Recruitment Conference or “Meat Market” as it is affectionately known. This year I found a teaching position outside of AALS and am situated as an Assistant Professor at the University of Connecticut Health Center. I am a legal scholar and ethicist teaching health law and ethics in a medical school.

As I look forward to a fall without the soul-crushing meat market, I took time to reflect on why it didn’t work for me, and why I don’t think it works generally. Let me say though that in participating in the process in 2006 and 2007, I learned a lot about myself; I learned to focus my research; I got a lot of great advice; and I got a lot of practice being interviewed. I never made it to the stage of giving my job talk.

Why didn’t the AALS process work for me; why that may be a problem

Interdisciplinary work. There is no value in the faculty recruitment process for interdisciplinary work. In fact, the FAR Form makes it near impossible to emphasize the indicators of interdisciplinary work. The majority of my work is at the intersection of law and public health, and it was very difficult to sell the value of interdisciplinary approaches to recruiters. It was also difficult to even get noticed given the construction of the FAR form. As legal practice takes on a more technical dimension and requires a growing technical expertise, it suggests to me that interdisciplinary work should be a key area of focus for legal scholars. The indifference to interdisciplinary scholars suggests a gulf between the legal academy and many of the practicalities of legal practice.
Grants and Research Support. There is absolutely no recognition of potential faculty who have secured research funding. The fact that I had secured research grants and could bring those funds with me was of no relevance to law schools. I found this odd. There is a value in expanding the role of government and foundations in supporting legal research. It is difficult to secure this type of funding, and supporting researchers who can do it would be a good first step in making the practice more common.
Law Review. Recruiters like law review publications. I am not a supporter of the law review system as I find it odd to have law students making decisions about what work to publish and find that law reviews have become nearly impenetrable. The articles are too long, too dense, and archaic. Yet, if you don’t publish there, you aren’t getting a teaching position in the academy. It’s set to reward scholars who generally publish work of limited practical value. There are of course exceptions to this statement as I am painting with a very broad brush.
Ideology. The requirements of law review publications and a traditional track to the legal academy are rooted in what I see as a pervasive problem of ideology. One one side is the law and economics/neo-federalist crowd; on the other are the critical legal theorists of different types. Both seem more and more irrelevant to practical work but it feels like these ideologies drive recruitment and the academy. Some of this may be changing but much of the academy seems entrenched.

PrawfsBlawg has a post on getting a job teaching law that had a nice summary of discussions of the topic. PrawfsBlawg has also created a category on the topic. You can also find a lot of other information searching many of the law blawgs.

If you are starting or are in the midst of this process, good luck! Reach out to your fellow applicants, your professors and mentors. Get all the information you can. Even if you don’t secure a position, the process will sharpen your work and skills profoundly and can set you up for a lot of different positions and jobs that can be just as interesting as that of law professor.

Another post on the topic. Via Legal Theory Blog

New PIHP

Jason — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 19:00:29 +0000

Pelican in Her Piety (PIHP) version 1 got downloaded and archived. I have started again and kept the same name. This new version will be tailored more directly to my work and research interests. Look for posts on school food, food systems, bioethics, jurisprudence, and public health.

New USDA Report on National School Lunch Program

Jason — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 18:26:55 +0000

The USDA has released The National School Lunch Program: Background, Trends and Issues (via Marion Nestle). There’s not a lot new here if you work in the area. However, the report does provide some great material that is often difficult to find elsewhere.

The report discusses what it calls the “trilemma” of school food: the tensions between participation, nutrition, and cost and outlines, for the first time I have seen in a government report, the way that changes in policy in one area can have unintended impacts on other areas.

The report also provides an often difficult to identify history and timeline of the school lunch program as wells as a brief description of particularly complicated issues such as menu planning; USDA commodity donation programs; and eligibility determinations.

I found particularly interesting the fact that this report is one of the first I have seen that explicitly discusses policy as a factor influencing program outcomes.

Download the report.