Academic job market in law

I know there are always some readers thinking about law school, but also hoping to continue in academia, so you may find this data of interest concerning the 2015-16 law teaching job market.   Applications to law schools have declined by about 30% since 2010, as the recession took its toll on legal employment.  Prior to this crash, 160 or more rookie tenure-track law faculty were hired each year; that dropped to about 65 in 2013-14, and held steady in 2014-15. This year we saw a slight uptick:  there were about 80 new tenure-track hires nationwide.  The law teaching market is different, of course, in that those seeking law teaching jobs generally have clear non-academic options (hence three of our candidates this year turned down good tenure-track job offers for personal reasons; all will return to lucrative legal practice opportunities, and try the academic market again in the future).   With law school enrollments having stabilized, I expect there to be a slow but steady increase in the hiring of rookie faculty, though I very much doubt we will get back to the pre-crash numbers in the foreseeable future, but the new normal will probably be about 100 new positions filled each year.  As the linked data suggest, hiring for law teaching positions is extremely pedigree-sensitive, much more so than in academic philosophy even.