Law Professors, Law Schools

The Law Professor Search for Meaning

Streamlining tenure decisions by cutting to the quick.

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iStock_000018352777_LargeIn my mind, I imagine in a decade or so that faculty members going up for tenure will have to fill out a form like this. Or worse, it will just be dictated what standard should apply. There are so many to choose from. Let’s explore.

Promotion and Tenure Faculty Scholarly Impact Form For FY 2025

Name: _______________________

Years in rank: __________________

Number of Scholarly publications:  _________

No, we mean longer than 3 pages:[1] ________

Note: This form is the result of a 3-year (and 3 chair) committee to reform our faculty scholarship guidelines for promotion and tenure. We believe we have adopted an approach that is both rigorous and flexible.[2] It is rigorous in demanding scholarship from untenured faculty, yet flexible enough to allow us to fire untenured faculty on the whimsical fancy of anyone the candidate for promotion has annoyed while at this fine institution.

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Candidate: Please check the box for which scholarship impact method will serve as the basis of your review:

_____. “Peer” Review. We will send out your articles to people you probably know.If you have not annoyed them, they will send back a nice review of your work. We will use this review by people you know in your discipline to promote you. On the other hand, if you have annoyed someone on our faculty, we will be completely free to ignore those reviews and accept the personal judgments of anyone who read the piece on the faculty who is gunning for your demise.

_____. SSRN downloads.[3] It is vitally important that you have placed all of our articles on SSRN before you place them in prominent law journals. If you have done this well, and all of your friends are downloading your article, then you should select this criterion. You do not need to worry if those downloads do not translate into law review citations, as that would be unfair. On the other hand, don’t worry about the potential biases of this method.

_____. H-Index.[4] Just kidding. We’re legal academics.

_____. Law review citations. This is really a good way to measure your scholarly impact if you are a big dog in a large field.[5] If you write in water law, it’s probably a no go. However, if you have a large group of friends, you can cite each other’s work and engage in the most massive Ponzi scheme ever. Or maybe it’s better to call it a scholarship “bubble.”

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_____. Ranking of the law review. If you’ve published a lot in top-tier law reviews, highlight that fact![6] Your articles are “well placed,” and suggest something about the level of your scholarship compared to others. Sure, some naysayers will claim that students pick the articles and it isn’t a good measure of quality, but they are just jealous. Judge Posner still writes for law reviews, all the while criticizing them.[7] Embrace the positive aspects of the rankings. Bonus points if you write an article criticizing law reviews and then leverage it up to a top-10 law review.

_____. Other. You could come up with your own model.[8] Or you could do interdisciplinary work. Regardless, check this box and we will expedite your no vote.

______. Peer-reviewed journals. Don’t even think about it.[9] Sure, you may have been published in the New England Journal of Medicine or the American Economic Review, but that isn’t your primary field. We’ll take a look, but you better check another box.

______. Engaged “scholarship.”[10] Have you prepared Congressional testimony? Have you written amicus briefs before the Supreme Court? Have you been cited in the Congressional Record? We thank you for your service. This isn’t scholarship. Plus, some law firm probably paid you for it.

______. Casebooks.[11] This isn’t the 1980s. True, in many areas this is the way to get well known, but it isn’t scholarship. Why did you even write the thing? We’ll put this in the teaching box.


[1] Brian Leiter, Measuring the Academic Distinction of Law Faculties, 29 J. Legal Stud. 451, 461 (2000)(“The length of articles surely deserves some weight in assessing productivity. Accordingly, schools accumulated points only for articles and review essays of at least six pages in length as follows: for contributions of 6-20 pages, a school accrued 1 point; for contributions of 21-50 pages a school accrued 2 points; for contributions longer than 50 pages, a school accrued 3 points.”). I have repeatedly asked not to be called Shirley.
[2] Larry Catá Backer, Defining, Measuring, and Judging Scholarly Productivity: Working Toward a Rigorous and Flexible Approach, 52 J. Legal Educ. 317, 324 (2002).
 [3] Bernard S. Black and Paul L. Caron, Ranking Law Schools: Using SSRN to Measure Scholarly Performance, 81 Ind. L.J. 83 (2006).
 [4] George Hirsch, An Index to Quantify an Individual’s Scientific Research Output (Sept. 29, 2005), available at http://arxiv.org/PS_ cuche/physics/pdf/0S08/0S08025v5.pdf (“A scientist has index h if h of his/her Np papers have at least h citations each, and the other (Np–h) papers have no more than h citations each.”)
[5] Especially a male dog. See Nancy Leong, Why Are The Most Cited Legal Academics White Men?, available at http://www.nancyleong.com/race-2/why-are-the-most-cited-legal-academics-white-men/.
[6] Alfred L. Brophy, The Emerging Importance of Law Review Rankings for Law School Rankings, 2003-2007, 78 U. Colo. L. Rev. 35, 35-36 (2007).
 [7] See a long list of Judge Posner’s law review publications, available at http://www.law.uchicago.edu/node/79/publications.
[8] Robert Steinbuch, On the Leiter Side: Developing a Universal Assessment Tool for Measuring Scholarly Output by Law Professors and Ranking Law Schools, 45 Loy. L.A. L. Rev. 87, 119-22 (2011).
 [9] Some have thought about it. Christian C. Day, The Case for Professionally-Edited Law Reviews, 33 Ohio N.U. L. Rev. 563, 563-66 (2007).
 [10] Of course, we don’t mean it exactly in the Catherine McKinnon sense. See Catherine A. McKinnon, Engaged Scholarship as Method and Vocation, 22 Yale J.L. & Feminism 193 (2010) (“To be engaged in the sense I mean–conscious of location and clear about position, open to the world of the known both going in and coming out, grounded in substance–centers on having and affirming direct involvement with the reality of the subject matter.”)
 [11] Myron Moskovitz, On Writing A Casebook, 23 Seattle U. L. Rev. 1019, 1021 (2000)(“Will writing a casebook bolster your reputation as a scholar? Maybe, but probably not. Many professors consider casebook-writing a rather low form of scholarship, if scholarship at all. Indeed, some tenure committees give little or no credit for casebooks.”)

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