I just listened to the episode of Orin Kerr’s podcast, the Legal Academy, where he interviews Emma Kaufman. In the episode, Orin starts by asks a series of questions about the value of academic fellowships for aspiring law professors. Many of the questions were great conversation starters; but there was also a line of questions that gives the wrong impression about what makes academic fellowships valuable.
Orin specifically asked what’s the substance that people learn during their time as a fellow. That is, is there a “cannon” that is helpful to learn before going on the market that you’re exposed to in a fellowship? Are there a set of ideas, arguments, or articles that people will expect you know before you’re qualified to be a full-fledged member of the academy? If so, what are they? And how can people on the outside-looking-in learn them without the fellowship?
Learning the canon is something that may make you a star student, but it’s not what makes you a star on the job market. No one succeeds on the job market because they know the details of what important legal thinkers wrote. You don’t have to know about what Ronald Coase or Ronald Dworkin thought about anything to be successful on the market. This is because schools typically don’t hire academics because they have mastered the ideas of the past.
Doing a fellowship thus isn’t about getting exposed to a canon. It’s about getting to the research frontier. The stars on the academic job market are the people that have been able to identify the most important, currently active people are in their field; learned the questions they are researching, the arguments they are having, and the methods they are using; and figured out how to do something that moves the ball forward. Those important, active people in the field—who have the highly specialized knowledge to understand where the research frontier is currently located—then vouch to the gatekeepers in the academy that there is someone new that they’re learning from that’s available on the market.
Want to be a star originalist on the market? The way you get hired at a great law school is having Will Baude, Steve Sachs, and _________ (this will have to be a list of two because I don’t want to accidentally out any originalists that aren’t out and proud) say that your research changed or challenged their thinking in some way.
This is part of why it’s so difficult to really succeed on the job market without doing a fellowship. If you’re in practice or clerking, it’s tough to learn where exactly the frontier in a current field lies, and it’s even tougher to get the people who are currently at that frontier to be willing to vouch to hiring committees that you’re pushing its boundaries.
Instead, you need people to point you to the best current work being done. You then need to take the time to understand it. And then you need to find a way to say something new or better. For all but the most impressive job market stars, it takes time in the academy to pull that off.
_____
As a final note, Emma’s advice, especially on what makes a good job talk paper, is fantastic. I argued in an earlier post that aspiring academics should get to know young professors because they give the best advice; Emma’s interview is the perfect embodiment of that point. Her advice on finding topics that bring people in, even if that requires saying something more normative than you’d prefer, is spot on. That said, I’m pretty biased. Before this blog, Will and my joint venture was running the Bigelow program—Emma was the first person we hired.