There\u2019s an adage in law that claims that the students who earned As in law school become law professors, the students who earned Bs become partners, and the students who earned Cs become judges.\u00a0 I can\u2019t verify that the adage is correct, but there is some truth to the first part.\u00a0 Typically law professors had excellent law school grades.\u00a0 But that\u2019s not all.\u00a0 They often members of their school\u2019s law review, and most have held at least one \u2013 sometimes two \u2013 judicial clerkships.\u00a0 A good number also spent a couple of years in practice.<\/p>\n
As my colleague Gordon Hylton recently noted<\/a>, such qualifications are considered indicators of the person\u2019s potential to teach law.\u00a0 The irony here is that few law professors have any background in education or pedagogy and even fewer have any experience teaching.\u00a0And while law schools often support a new professor as she develops her classroom skills (through formal or informal mentoring or paying for the professor to attend conferences), law schools don\u2019t offer any formal training in teaching law.\u00a0 Generally, a law professor\u2019s only real teaching qualification is that she once was a law student.<\/p>\n While teaching law is clearly an important part of being a law professor, the coin of the realm is scholarship.\u00a0 Law professors, like other academics, must produce scholarship, and preferably scholarship more substantive than that about teaching or pedagogy.\u00a0 It\u2019s said that producing scholarship can make one a better teacher, and surely the more a person knows about an area of law, the better she understands it and the more likely she is to be able to convey that knowledge to her students.\u00a0 But to the extent that a professor must take time to research and then to write scholarship, she loses time to devote to learning more about teaching.<\/p>\n Striking a balance between scholarship and teaching for any individual law professor parallels a larger attempt to strike a balance between law school envisioned as an academic \u201cthink tank\u201d and law school envisioned as a place that trains lawyers.\u00a0 In 2007, the Carnegie Foundation released its report on law schools, called Educating Lawyers:\u00a0 Preparation for the Practice of Law.<\/em>\u00a0 The authors of that report concluded that law school does a good job imparting legal doctrine, but they chided law schools for failing to adequately prepare students for the actual practice of law. Brief overviews of that report can be found here<\/a>\u00a0and here<\/a>.\u00a0 To that end, it may be that law schools will begin to place more emphasis on teaching and on clinical and skills program, a development that would benefit women in the legal academy.<\/p>\n The number of women on law faculties has improved in recent years, but does not reach half, particularly at the associate professor and full professor level. A large number of women are found on the often lower-paying, lower prestige clinical and legal writing faculty, many of whom are not eligible for tenure.
\nAccording to recent statistics from the Association of American Law Schools<\/a>, nearly two-thirds of lecturers and instructors, which are non-tenure track positions, are women.<\/p>\n