Law Professors: A Profile of the Teaching Branch of the Legal Profession

Abstract

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.

The Lure of the Law for the Formerly Convicted: Pursuing the Legal Profession as a Resistance Strategy

“…The law has a long history of excluding certain demographic groups from the profession. Although women are now well represented in the legal profession, the first woman was not barred until 1869, and sex-based prohibitions existed in other states for several additional decades (Fossum 1981). In 1844, the first Black lawyer was admitted to practice (ABA 2020), but the American Bar Association (ABA) continued to exclude this population for nearly another century, finally admitting Black members in 1943 (Abel 1989; Chambliss 2004).…”

The Path of the Law Review: How Interfield Ties Contribute to Institutional Emergence and Buffer against Change

“…12 This has coincided with a huge increase of law professors with PhDs. In 1975, the prevalence of PhDs within law faculties was so low that Fossum (1980) did not include PhD as a category of degrees in her profile of law professors. By -1989, 5 percent of all tenured and tenure-track law professors held a PhD (Borthwick and Schau 1991: 213).…”

Law School Climates: Job Satisfaction Among Tenured US Law Professors

“…But are there characteristics of law schools as particular kinds of legal work settings that bear on the questions at the heart of our study? There have been fewer studies of the work experiences of US law teachers than of the experiences of US lawyers, but there has still been some significant research over the years, tracking, for example, the way elite law schools have dominated the development of US legal education as well as the upsurge of women law professors during the 1970s and 1980s (see Fossum ; Borthwick and Schau ; Kay ; Merritt, Reskin, and Fondell ; Merritt ; for a more global perspective, see Cownie ). Even after law faculties began to achieve some integration along lines of gender and race, studies have documented stubborn problems within law schools in dynamics surrounding diversity (Chused ; Delgado and Bell ; Merritt and Reskin ; Merritt ; Barnes and Mertz ; Deo ).…”