Unlike the situation in most academic disciplines, law professors typically do not possess a true doctoral degree. The J.D. degree, the basic law degree in the United States, is the highest educational level attained by most law professors. There was a time in the past when advanced law degrees, the LL.M. and the S.J.D., would viewed as desirable prerequisites for would-be law teachers, but that day has clearly passed. The S.J.D. degree is nearly extinct, and the LL.M. has been reduced to a kind of specialization certificate that implies concentrated, but not necessarily advanced, law study.
New law professors have traditionally been hired to law school faculties on the basis of their impressive level of performance in law school. High grades and law review membership have usually been equated with potential for teaching, particularly if they are supplemented with a prestigious clerkship and some, but not too much, experience as a practicing lawyer. Professors hired solely for their practical expertise in law are relatively rare.
A recently published study by Joni Hersch and W. Kip Viscusi, two law professors at Vanderbilt University, reveals that this situation maybe slowly changing.
According to Hersch and Viscusi, at least some law schools have begun to hire individuals whose credentials also include a Ph.D. degree. Although Ph.D. degrees in law are quite common in Europe and other parts of the world, they are almost unheard in the United States, so law professors with Ph.D. degrees in the United States usually hold the degree in a field other than law.
Examining the faculties of 26 “leading” law schools, Hersch and Viscusi, discovered that 361 of 1,338 current law professors (27%) have Ph.D. degrees. Thirteen percent (13%) of faculty members have Ph.D. degrees in the social sciences other than economics; 7% have degrees in economics; and 7% have them in other fields ranging from English to chemistry. Slightly more than 18% of law professors with Ph.D. degrees (65) possess a Ph.D. degree but no law degree. However, most law professors with Ph.D. degrees (296) hold both a law degree and a Ph.D.
Northwestern University appears to have gone further than any other school in this regard, and 50% of its law faculty now hold Ph.D. degrees. Other law schools with high percentages of Ph.D. professors include Pennsylvania (43%); UC-Berkeley (42%); Yale (40%); Cornell (40%); and Stanford (39%).
The issue of hiring law professors with Ph.D. degrees goes to the core of the question of the real purpose of law school education. If law schools are primarily academic departments charged with providing students with a sophisticated analytical framework for studying the structure and function of American law, then the Ph.D. law professors, with their systematic training in scholarship and research, clearly have an edge over their non-Ph.D. counterparts who typically scramble for years trying to pick up such skills on the fly. On the other hand, if the primary purpose of law schools is to prepare lawyers for the nuts and bolts of the practice of law, the Ph.D. law professor is probably at a disadvantage, having spent years in graduate school rather in setting where one learns what it really means to practice law.
Obviously, the temptation is to say that law schools should be both, both centers of scholarship and sources of practical training. However, balancing the scholarly with the practical is a challenge. As it is, much of the legal scholarship produced by law professors is held in relatively low regard by the other branches of the academy, and the bar regularly complains that law schools are not doing an adequate job of preparing their students for the realities of law practice.
The Marquette Law School faculty currently includes four professors with Ph.D. degrees. Three earned their degrees in American universities: Professors Blinka (History); Hylton (History of American Civilization); and Papke (American Studies); while the fourth, Professor Calboli, received hers in law from a European university.
I should have noted that my colleague Lisa Mazzie is currently a PhD candidate in the Educational Policy and Leadership program at Marquette. Also, several law professors, including Professors Rofes, Madry and Boyden, received Masters’ degrees while enrolled in PhD programs.
It’s intriguing that law faculties with the largest numbers and percentages of Ph.D.’s are found at law schools that rank generally in the top 10-20 in the country. I don’t think the Ph.D.’s contribute significantly to the ranking of these schools, but I do think a significant Ph.D. presence on a law faculty enhances that law school’s standing at a given university, especially if that university takes itself to be a so-called “research university.”
Ideally, setting your curriculum and goals should precede deciding who should teach your class. “The issue of hiring law professors with Ph.D. degrees” should not “go to the core of the question of the real purpose of law school education.” Instead, law schools should decide the real goal of law school education, decide what curriculum meets those goals, and then focus on what types of professors meet those goals. These principles apply if the purpose is to educate for scholarship.
A law school could decide, however, that its purpose is scholarship, rather than education, and none of the above necessarily would apply. But then any education would simply be a by-product.
Quite right, Ellen. Quite right. A law school ought to identify its mission, decide what curricular, quasi-curricular, and other institutional strategies will maximize the prospects that such mission will be achieved, and then (and only then) self-consciously endeavor to place on its faculty — full-time and adjunct both — individuals whose values, experiences, and talents are likely to best facilitate the accomplishment of that mission. Alas, too few American law schools go about their business in the manner you suggest. The reasons for this failure are many and diverse. Moreover, a genuinely candid discussion of these reasons — in addition to proving uncomfortable in a host of respects — could highjack the conversation on this blog for a very, very long time.
Well, in the real world of legal practice I can guarantee you that opposing counsel will not care one bit if your law school professors had their PhD. While having professors with a PhD might enhance the school’s credentials, these professors will add very little, if anything, to what lawyers need for success in everyday practice. What every law student needs is a broad range of real hands-on experience, not a bunch of textbook theories from professors who lack practical experience or from a professor who has been out of the game for 10 or 20 years. Let’s get real.
In my opinion, it’s too simple to picture law school faculty hiring as a choice between those with experience as practitioners or those holding P.D.’s. Concomitantly, I don’t think law schools have to choose between either training lawyers or generating scholarship.
I’ve had the honor to teach at four law schools in my career, and I’ve been struck by the overlap at these schools between the most successful teachers and the most productive scholars. To be sure, there are exceptions. Some love to teach but don’t have a taste for scholarly work. Some love to be scholars but don’t enjoy the classroom. But still, most good teachers are also productive scholars and vice-versa.
As a result of these observations, I have over the years become fond of the scholar-teacher notion. When I consider new faculty colleagues, I tend to look for that. An active scholarly life enables one to enrich the classroom experience not only with reports from specific scholarly work, but also with enhanced skill as a critical and creative thinker. Classroom teaching, meanwhile, inevitably raises questions and produces insights that contribute to good scholarlship. Law schools are richer learning environments when these dialectical processes are manifest.
An interesting essay by Prof. Brian Tamanaha of Washington University, which argues that the movement toward JD/PhD faculty and interdisciplinary legal study is a bad idea for non-elite law schools, can be found at http://balkin.blogspot.com/2008/01/why-interdisciplinary-movement-in-legal.html
From the article professor Hylton posted which, by the way, was posted in 2008.
“Annual tuition at elite law schools will likely hit $50,000 within five years. This hefty price tag (gulp!) is still a good investment for graduates of elite law schools, who are in line for lucrative (albeit life-draining) corporate law jobs. The same cannot be said for graduates of non-elite law schools. Non-elite law schools must find ways to keep their tuition down.”
Indeed.
In the original post, I should have noted that Mark Umbreit, who is a visiting professor from the University of Minnesota and who is continuously affiliated with the law school, also has a Ph.D.
Although the data is a little old, during the 2008-2009 academic year, 158 new tenure-track law professors were hired to begin their careers the following year. Of the 158, 35 had PhDs and an additional 6 had S.J.D. degrees or the equivalent.
In other words, slightly more than one-fifth (22.2%) had PhDs, and slightly more than a quarter (25.9%) had doctoral degrees.