Should Law Schools Require "Look-See" Visits Before Hiring Faculty Laterally?

Historically, American law schools have only hired faculty laterally (with tenure) from other institutions after the candidate has visited and taught at the hiring school for a full semester or a year; these visiting appointments are called "look-see visits," and they mean the school is interested in the candidate, and now wants to "look and see" more closely whether to add this person to the faculty.  The practice varies a bit school to school:  at some schools, the whole faculty votes on "look-see visits," at other schools, just the appointments committee extends the look-see visiting offers.  At some schools, the representation is made that, "We all love your scholarship, now we want to see what you're like in person and in the classroom," at other schools no representation is made beyond, "we're interested, no commitments." 

A young law professor at a top law school writes:

As far as I can tell, law schools very rarely make lateral hires without first inviting people for look-see visits. It seems to me that this practice systemically disadvantages women (particularly women with children). For the typical woman, the costs associated with picking up and moving to another school for a term or a year-- with no guarantee of a job offer at the end-- are far higher than the costs of such moves for the typical man. Obviously, I'm generalizing, but men are more likely than women to have spouses with "less important" careers that can be put on hold for a time. And men with young children are rarely the primary care-givers even when both spouses work. This makes a weekly commute to another law school a viable option for many men: they can leave their wife to care for the kids during the week while they commute to teach at an out-of-town school. But for women with young children, this is rarely a viable option: few women want to leave young children behind for such a length of time, and fewer still have spouses willing to take up the slack.

For most women, then, accepting a visit in another city or state requires moving the kids too (with massive disruption to their schooling, etc), and perhaps effectively becoming a single parent in a strange city for a term or year, if the male partner is unwilling or unable to leave his job behind. Either way, the costs are high. My guess is that this has two pernicious results: 1) Women law faculty probably accept (and seek out) fewer visiting offers than male faculty members, and 2) Appointments committees probably make fewer visiting offers to (otherwise qualified) women in the first place, on the grounds that there is little reason to make a visiting offer to someone who's unlikely to accept. Both 1) and 2) mean that women have less ability than men to "move up" (or even sideways) in the law school hierarchy.

Needless to say, I can't back this up with any statistical evidence, but all the anecdotal evidence I've heard supports this....

I wonder if the broad issue is one you might raise in your blog? Your blog is widely read, and generates a lot of discussion amongst law faculty nationwide. I'd be curious to know if others also consider this an issue, and whether any schools are beginning to change lateral hiring practices in response. I've heard that Boalt has stopped making lateral hires contingent on visits, but I don't know if that's true. It seems to me that ending the practice of semi-mandatory visits prior to lateral offers could be easily done with few ill effects; after all...in many other fields offers are rarely preceded by term or year-long visits. Offers are made on the basis of written work, peer evaluations, and a workshop or two. The law school visit system seems to me to have few real benefits; the claim that it takes a whole term to really get to know someone and their work strikes me as implausible. It functions mainly to establish "clubability," which is hardly unproblematic as a hiring criterion.

I led the charge (successfully) at Texas a few years ago to stop requiring a semester-long visit before making lateral offers, for all these reasons, as well as a simple reason of institutional self-interest:  there is no reason whatsoever to think that the people we'd most like to have on our faculty are in a position to uproot their lives and move to Austin for 4-9 months.  In the era of two-career couples, this is an especially absurd expectation for any school to have.  This burden clearly falls most heavily on faculty with partners or spouses, and especially those with children; it probably falls more heavily on women, for the reasons given above (does anyone know of pertinent data?).  If senior hires in most disciplines can be made without a semester-long visit, why should law schools be different?

My anecdotal evidence is that schools, including many top schools, are abandoning the look-see visit requirement.  Michigan, Penn, Chicago, Texas, and Berkeley have all made lateral offers in recent years to faculty who had not visited for a whole semester first.  All these schools (including Texas) still make use of look-see visits, some more than others.  How widespread is this trend?  Is it becoming the norm?  Should it?  Do look-see visits have a real value?  What about the burdens they place on the faculty who are expected to visit?  Do these burdens fall disproportionately on women?

Comments are open; no anonymous posts, of course.

Comments

[Keith Rowley]

I'm not certain I see the equity in allowing the author of the original post to be anonymous while requiring those posting comments to identify themselves to the world.

Having said that, this is at least the third time in the last week that I have read/heard someone overgeneralize that men don't care for or about their families. Quite frankly, I'm tired of it. I turned down offers to visit at three schools in one year because my wife, son, and I had just moved to a new city and a new law school (our third move in three years -- the first of which was to my first school and the other two were necessitated by the temporary nature of the positions I was leaving) and I did not want to further disrupt their lives. Any of the visits would have been great career moves for me, but I chose to put my wife and son first.

[jeff parness]

Is it correct to assume that all law schools are not limited by university rules or customs in these matters?

[Phil Frickey]

I write as the current chair of the faculty hiring committee at Boalt. The "young law professor" is right that Boalt does not have a flat rule requiring a lookover visit. I was hired laterally without a visit, as were several others in recent years, and we have made several other such offers that were ultimately rejected. In some circumstances, too numerous and varied to try to list but extending well beyond "clubability," however, it might be prudent to ask a candidate to visit. Moreover, our experience here is that some potential lateral candidates would like to visit before making a decision. In addition, lookover visits at Boalt are proposed by the faculty appointments committee and then given to the faculty on a notice-and-comment basis. Accordingly, a lookover visit can be authorized much more quickly and painlessly than a lateral (tenured) offer, which requires the creation of an elaborate file with outside as well as inside evaluations of scholarship, teaching evaluations, and so on, as well as two faculty meetings (the first for discussion, the second for a vote). So considerations of efficiency and timing are involved in the choice between the lookover-visit route and the outright-offer route. I agree with the young professor that a flat rule requiring lookover visits may have gendered effects, and that is one reason we don't have such a rule.

[Brian Leiter]

A word on the anonymity rule: with anonymity, it is often impossible to assess the legitimacy/credibility of the posting. That being said, I realize that younger, and especially untenured, faculty may not want to go on the "public record" as it were on this issue (much as the original correspondent did not). Since a couple of folks in this situation have already e-mailed me, I will, in this case, post some of their remarks. Since I received an e-mail from these individuals, I can vouch for their legitimacy/credibility, which is my primary reason for asking that people "sign" their posts. (The other reason is that I think people ought to own their words, but in this context, owning your words could be professionally awkward, which is why I'm relaxing my usual rule.)

[BL on behalf of an untenured faculty member]

A untenured law professor writes:

"As a new faculty member at a lower-tier school, I don't want to make a public post about look-see visits (don't want to seem too interested in the subject), so I thought I'd send this to you directly. I like the thrust of the question posed to you, but I take strong issue with the suggestion that the problem is a disproportionate impact on women. As your comment suggests, the real problem is that it affects people, men or women, who care about their kids. My wife is a lawyer, so I can’t just pick up and move for six months on an uncertain offer. More importantly, there is no way that I’d commute for six months leaving my kids at home. I’d hope that the legal profession would care as much about men spending time with their kids as women. (Of course, you can draw a parallel with other professions – didn’t Summers say that one of the reasons that women are not as successful in sciences was that they weren’t as willing as men to spend 80 hours a week in the lab? Why is it okay for men to neglect their families to get ahead?)"

[Keith DeRose]

Looks like there are two related problems, and one need not choose between them. (1) The policy works against those whose family situation prevents them from look-see-ing, whether female or male and (2) insofar as (a) statistically, the policy holds down women more than men and (b) women are problematically under-represented in the profession, the policy exacerbates the under-representation of women.

[Scott Moss]

re two prior comments:

this is at least the third time in the last week that I have read/heard someone overgeneralize that men don't care for or about their families

I take strong issue with the suggestion that the problem is a disproportionate impact on women. As your comment suggests, the real problem is that it affects people, men or women, who care about their kids. My wife is a lawyer, so I can’t just pick up and move for six months on an uncertain offer.

These two "men care too!" defenses completely miss the point. I'm sure each of you is, like myself, a wonderful husband/dad, sure to be featured on a Lifetime network movie soon. But the point here is that historically, and continuing into today's society, men are more likely than women to have stay-at-home spouses (or, similarly, spouses with mobile/secondary careers). This is common-sense knowledge of the world in which we live; it's also discussed extensively in Joan Williams's scholarship on how certain work requirements (like the "look-see" requirement, though she doesn't mention this particular one) disadvantage women in that they presume that the job candidate has a stay-at-home spouse.

We can have a discussion about the soundnes of the statistical basis for this argument -- but to reject the point because "some men have this problem too" is to reject the whole concept that some discrimination occurs when a job requirement is statistically more likely to disadvantage (and therefore screen out) women than men.

[Gordon Smith]

Good post. Good comments, especially from Phil Fickey. Although Keith Rowley and the untenured law professor commenter are undoubtedly right about the costs of visiting for men -- I say a bit about this from my own experience on my own blog -- I think that Phil must be right that "a flat rule requiring lookover visits may have gendered effects." In the end, the discimination point is not required to carry the day, as Brian offers many other reasons for moving away from compulsory visits. By the way, we do not require visits at Wisconsin.

[Keith Rowley]

In response to Scott Moss's comment, I didn't "reject" anything, nor did I "miss the point." I wasn't aiming at the point, I was aiming at the animus. I disputed an underlying assumption about men and their priorities -- one that, based on the frequency with which I have heard/read it recently, appears to be widely held. The original post spoke of "typical" women, admitted "generalizing" about men, and stated outright: "Needless to say, I can't back this up with any statistical evidence, but all the anecdotal evidence I've heard supports this." I responded to anecdotal evidence with anecdotal evidence. So did the subsequent poster. Now the original author, assuming she checks the comments, knows that there is contrary anecdotal evidence.

By the way, I doubt seriously that I will ever be the subject of a Lifetime network movie. The only guy in the movies who looks remotely like me is Ron Howard (though I have more hair), and he gave up acting long ago.

[BL on behalf of another young professor at a major law school]

Another young professor at a major law school writes:

"I think the system rewards people who can selfishly devote themselves to their career at the expense of everthing else. The 'ideal' candidate is someone who has no life, who can write around the clock, and who will leave town at the drop of a hat to go visit somewhere else for a few months. On balance, this tends to favor men: for better or worse, it's still more socially acceptable on the whole for men to be selfish and focus 100% on their career. At the same time, most schools (my own included) seem to have a slight preference for hiring women over men to counteract that dynamic. Schools pay attention to the overall gender balance on the faculty, and try to even things out by slightly favoring women in the entry-level and lateral appointments processes. That's my experience, at least. I have no idea whether it all comes out in the wash."

[Lawrence A. Cunningham]

The post and comments are interesting, but (1) my guess is that useful generalizations and meaningful data will prove elusive and (2) my impressions are that people are already aware of this and related matters.

The subject is as complex as the hundreds of schools and thousands of persons affected. Recruiting policies likely vary across schools according to innumerable factors, including: geography, size, subject area needs, institutional standing and ambitions, faculty governance traditions, professorial personalities and many others. Preferences likely vary across individuals according to innumerable factors too, including: gender, age, partner choices, parenting choices, broader family relationships, subject area interests, opportunity costs, risk-averseness, personal ambitions and many others.

My own relatively short academic career (14 years) provides examples: (1) I held a visiting appointment at a school using the look-see model (GW); (2) I requested a visiting appointment at another school offering a permanent appointment without a look-see (BC); (3) I held a visiting appointment at a school understood as a podium visit rather than a look-see visit (Vanderbilt); and (4) I declined offers of appointment to schools both requiring and not requiring a look-see visit. The different models and decisions reflected specific policy issues for the school and preferences for me.

The issue of gender sounds real as described, and participants should appreciate it; they likewise should appreciate the innumerable other factors bearing on these complex policies and preferences. My experience with the numerous schools referred to above (as well as service on and chairing appointments committees) suggests that this is the case.

--Lawrence Cunningham (Boston College)

[Anthony D'Amato]

I would like to add to the issues raised about look-see visits for lateral hires an argument that this practice is economically irrational for law faculty. Lateral hires are already such a relatively rare phenomenon among law schools that when they occur they deserve note in, among other places, the Leiter Report. Thus at present we have what might be called a sluggishness of movement at the tenure or near-tenure level in the law-teaching world.

Allow me to compare our present situation
to that obtaining in major league sports prior to the Curt Flood revolution in the free agency practice of 1970-75. In 1975 the Supreme Court, accepting Flood’s arguments (but unfortunately, not in his specific case, which had gone against him), ruled that the “reserve clause” in players’ contracts, which bound them forever to the team that first hired them, was an antitrust violation. Thus in one bold stroke, the clause that confined baseball players to a choice between
accepting their team’s salary proposal or not playing at all, opened up a third choice, namely, offering to play for any other team that would give them a significant salary increase.

The result, not just in baseball but across all professional sports, has been an enormous transfer of wealth from owners to players. The ratcheting-up of salaries resulting from a player leaving his team to join another team, lifted not only his salary but the salaries of all. Team owners were fearful of losing their best players. They responded by paying even the stay-at-homes a competitive market salary. They realized that their star players could bring in crowds of fans at the games and vastly increase television revenues. Out of fear of losing their star players, they responded with ever-increasing salaries to all the players they wanted to keep. Among the top teams (in any sport), the top players they wanted to keep were a majority, or close to a majority, of all their first-string players.

Today, when we look at a basketball game, we see the ten starting players on the court as millionaires. (What a difference from the
journeymen players of my childhood.) Many of them each year make over a million dollars. Hot baseball players are tempted by offers from other
teams of bonuses in the realm of $25 million. Many viewers of major league sports shake their heads in annoyance that the players they see on their TV screens are making such ungodly amounts of money. For me, what I see on the TV screen is the fair result that the players’ talents that make up 100% of the reason I watch the TV games, are being directly rewarded by money that would otherwise go into the pockets of the owners of the teams.

I concede that my sports analogy is not on all fours with our present financial situation in the law school world. Our contracts do not bind us forever to our schools. But from an economic viewpoint, we should look beyond the formalities of contract to the facts on the ground. I
suggest that the crucial point of comparison is that the pre-Flood situation in professional sports concerning movement of players could be
characterized as completely sluggish, and that our situation in the law market today is quite sluggish. It’s concededly not an exact comparison.

But the heart of the issue is sluggishness of movement. It is our equivalent of the lack of pre-Flood free agency in sports that accounts
for the “plateau effect” in law professors’ salaries.

Entry-level hires join the law-school world because they are provided with a salary that is roughly equivalent to that which they would
earn in practice as law-firm associates. I suggest this is an economic “iron law”," one that is not due to the benevolence of law-school
administrators, but rather to the dictates of the marketplace. If we are going to get good new teachers, we must pay them a comparatively attractive salary for joining us at the outset of their careers.

But then over time, as we all know, the newly hired professor becomes “hooked” (I’m talking only in economic terms) to the teaching job. At the same time that she becomes hooked, she is in fact distancing herself from her former peers who have been acquiring valuable experience about practical law practice in the law firms. Thus, if she were to decide to quit teaching to join a law firm, she could not (except in unusual cases) expect a better salary than she is getting in the law school.

As law school seniority accumulates, the more a given professor distances herself from what she could earn (and what she is intrinsically worth) in the practice of law. If we were to graph the
functions, her salary curve at the law school, though rising moderately, increasingly veers away from the salary curve that she would have been
receiving had she decided after law school on a career of law practice.

The net result is that after a few years of teaching, the professor is penalized for her choice in joining academia by an increasing
disparity between what she earns and what she could have earned in practice. Indeed, her salary (in most instances) tends to plateau out. As long as she stays in her own institution, she will never be more than modestly rewarded for her excellence in published contributions to the
law. In contrast, had she joined a top law firm, she would increasingly benefit from a share in its profits. The end result can be quite
startling. In my own case, my peers at Harvard Law school are today making between five and twenty times my annual salary at Northwestern. (But I also make haste to concede that the intangible benefits of teaching more than make up, in my own case, the foregone economic opportunity.)

There is one thing that could raise the level of tenured law professors’ salaries across the board. It is to take the friction out of lateral movement. For it is clear that the more often professors move from one law school to another, the more the entire salary structure will be
ratcheted up to offer a countervailing force in favor of staying home. It is the degree of movement (that which in business and gambling circles is called “action’) that benefits aggregate salaries. Joe DiMaggio in or around 1945 missed spring training for the New York Yankees because he wanted a salary of $100,000. He finally got it from the owners of the Yankees who, on his marquee value alone, were making tens of millions of dollars by his presence on the team. The press and the fans grumbled; why
did he think he should be paid so much? After the movement of players that was set in motion by the Curt Flood revolution, a player of DiMaggio’s
value would today receive 100 times what DiMaggio received.

Back to the specific issue of look-see visits. For all the reasons mentioned in the previous blogs on this subject, it is clear that
look-sees introduce sluggishness into the market for hiring laterals. The movement of a few professors every year to another school can be treated as aberrations or special cases, and other faculty may not particularly take note. Economically, we are below the critical mass. Only when sufficient lateral hires take place in the aggregate law-school context will the critical mass be achieved in which administrators will have to face up to the problem that raising the plateau may become necessary to forestall
raiding of one’s best professors.

Let’s forget “clubability” and all that nonsense. Let’s make offers to laterals strictly on their merits. Let’s encourage movement from
one school to another. We may not reach the stratospheric multiples of professional sports, but I daresay we would all be quite happy with a mere 50% salary increase. To get it, we have to abolish look-sees and all the other impediments to the movement of professors from one school to another.

[Eric Rasmusen]

The original post suggested that women, more than men, were discouraged from "upwards-lateral" moves by the custom of the look-see visit. This is plausible, and does not imply that no men are discouraged by the custom, just fewer men than women. An implication is that, other things equal (an important caveat, given affirmative action),

(a) The average quality of the women faculty at all but the top law schools would be higher than that of the men;

(b) The better the law school, the lower the proportion of female faculty.

One way to test this, to try to overcome the "other things equal" problem, would be to compare (a) and (b) for law schools and for some other university department (political science/) that is similar except for not requiring look-see visits.

[Suzanna Sherry]

Based on my experience (on both the visiting and the hiring end, as well as from friends), I have found that many schools are not as rigid about look-see visits as they appear at first. If someone to whom they make a visiting offer expresses interest in the school but an inability to visit, schools are often willing to consider alternatives, including short (1 or 2 week) courses/visits, consideration as a straight lateral, etc. It sometimes takes longer to accomplish, but can work out in the end. So the advice I would give to those who don't want to disrupt families for uncertain visits is to push back at the school and see what happens.

[Darryl Brown]

One strategy that some schools use as a compromise between semester-long look-see visits and offers without visits: short-course visits. It strikes me that one gets much of the benefit of look-see visits from 2-3 week visits: teaching can be observed, student evals gathered, lunches w/ colleagues can be had. And that's much less disruptive for parents than a semester-long visit.
Second, don't completely knock "clubability." The downsides are many and obvious, but the upside of assessing personality and social fit is that it can help preserve colleagiality in a faculty, which can be fragile thing at many places, and a quite distracting thing (and one that diminishes productivity) when it turns bad.