Law Professors, Law Schools

The Bucket List For Law School Faculty

Check these off as you accomplish them. Or arrange in the form of a bingo card and play with your friends during faculty meetings.

By Temp Dean and LawProfBlawg  
on

Thumbs up diveFaculty members have always been prone towards goals.  If one is tenure track, one seeks tenure.  If tenured, one seeks full professor.  If full professor, one seeks fame and glory (well, that happens earlier) and occasionally a deanship.  Law professors search for meaning in their lives.  They must prove that they are significant.

After that fun fades, professors might seek more to life.  Thus, we have provided a bucket list for law professors.  Check off as you accomplish.  Or arrange in the form of a bingo card and play with your friends during faculty meetings.

Scholarship

Publish in one of the 30 top 20 general law reviews.   Even if you’re not in a highly ranked school and don’t publish about cool things like due process or international aardvark law, you should at least try to do this.   Plus you may find the editorial experience qualitatively different from other publication experiences.  Or nah.

Co-author an article in a rewarding way.   Co-authoring of an article requires great foresight, planning, and teamwork.  As you quibble with your co-author about certain concepts, you and your co-author expand your thinking on a topic.

Write a book.   Not a casebook.  A book.  Something interesting.  LawProfBlawg is working on a script for his own sitcom, for example.

Put a funny footnote in your forthcoming piece, and refuse to remove it.   Some have cited the dictionary.  Others have engaged in hilarious self-citation.  Maybe cite a comedian as authoritative on a topic?  When in doubt, cite Yogi Berra.

Sponsored

Draft an amicus brief.  No, we do not mean sign onto an amicus brief.  We mean actually draft one.  Watch as it gets cited or ignored.  Then turn it into an article that has the same effect.

Write an op-ed.  This is your chance to connect with “the real world.”  That means you have to learn to write in a different style than standard legal writing.  Even better, you might get instant feedback in the form of emails and online comments containing hostility and death threats.

Walk back something from a prior work.  It’s no fun to be right all the time.  Take it from us!  Instead, think about a work in which you overstated an issue.  Revise your thinking, and then admit error.  Not huge error, just something incremental.  Whatever you do, don’t cut and paste from the prior work and change your conclusion.

Review a book without trashing it.  Sometimes academics believe their purpose in life is to point out that people are wrong.  And by people, we mean everyone but ourselves.  But what if someone wrote a book, and it wasn’t terrible?  Imagine how great you would feel writing a review of it!  Hint: It can’t be your own book.

Write a blog post on something that matters.  Participate in the moment about a matter of current debate.  Be polite and do it in under 1500 words.  It’s harder than you think.  Obviously this post doesn’t count.

Sponsored

Impact

Be interviewed for all four of the food groups for modern media: online, TV, radio, print.   For additional challenge, come across as knowledgeable even in the edited sound bite.

Serve as an expert witness.  For a good cause.  If you’re allowed to, consult outside of work.

Influence policy in your area outside the United States.  For those reading outside of the United States, your goal is the opposite.

Serve a stint in federal or state government.  You might even count this as service on your CV.  Partial credit for service to the FTC in a Democratic administration or EEOC in a Republican one.

Testify on the Hill or your state legislature.  You can contribute to a better understanding of the world.  And, in rare instances, you may even help change the law.

Get legit invitation to teach/speak/attend a conference in a location you had to look up on map.  If you had to look D.C. up on the map, head back to high school.

Be the token liberal at a GMU or Federalist Society event or token conservative at lefty law school, SALT, or ACS event.   Bonus: Have at least one person there state you sounded reasonable.

Have your work denounced on a blog.  LawProfBlawg’s doesn’t count.

Be cited by SCOTUS or a state supreme court or a federal circuit court.   This counts double if you are on the side of good and the court takes the opposite side.

Broaden Your Horizons

Take a sabbatical or research leave.  Do not use it for committee work or it doesn’t count.  Or yoga.

Try a different form of writing or teaching.  Especially if you have tenure.

Visit at another law school.  Double points if it is lower ranked.

Host a conference.  Double points if your dean won’t give you any money for it.

Give a workshop at another school.  Double points if it is attended.  Do not answer every faculty question with, “That is a good question.”

Take up a hobby that isn’t academically related.  Become a pianist, run a marathon, become an expert off-roader, take up martial arts, or become interim dean.  If you choose the latter, find a more interesting hobby.

Collegiality

Explain coherently to a job candidate why your school’s commitment to social justice is different from all the other schools with whom the candidates is interviewing.  If your school lacks any vision of social justice, wing it.

Debate with your colleagues your unique and indisputably correct view of the mission of your law school.  Some of us do this on a daily basis.

Be denounced by name at a faculty meeting by your dean.  Make it for a good reason, however.  For example, if you are on the side of right and the dean is evil.

Mentor a junior colleague (really).  I know some senior faculty may have to look at the faculty profile page to remember who their colleagues are.  Also, by mentor we mean to be helpful, not seeking to acquire ammo to destroy the person later.

Chair a committee and actually get something done.  When successful, play the “Mission: Impossible” theme song.

Be on an ABA Inspection team.  There are only so many good ideas in the world.  Try to steal one and implement at your school.  Bonus points if you jokingly wear white gloves and run your finger over surfaces.

Administer something, anything.  Just kidding on this one.

TempDean is an anonymous interim administrator and professor at a top 100 law school.  Email him at lawprofblawg@gmail.com if you must.

LawProfBlawg is an anonymous professor at a top 100 law school. You can see more of his musings here and on Twitter. Email him at lawprofblawg@gmail.com.

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