Law Schools

Why You Didn't Get A Job: A Tenure-Track Candidate Rejection Form

We wish you the best of luck on your candidacy, which will likely end at a higher-ranked school than ours.

By LawProfBlawg and Temp Dean  
on

Dear Applicant for a tenure-track law professor position at the LawProfBlawg School of Law,

We here at the LawProfBlawg School of Law believe in openness and transparency.  While most schools don’t bother to tell you why you are not being hired, we believe that it is important for you to understand why your candidacy was killed, and how.

Challenge raised:

_____.  Your scholarship pushed the envelope of doctrine, and you were not from Harvard, Yale, or Stanford.  If you had graduated from one of those schools, you would have received the benefit of the doubt.

_____.  Your scholarship raised an issue without solution, and you were not from Harvard, Yale, or Stanford.  If you had graduated from one of those schools, you would have received the benefit of the doubt.

_____.  Your scholarship was in a field in which several of our faculty research and they did the legal equivalent of a drive-by on your scholarship.

_____.   Your job talk sucked, as dictated by the mood of the faculty during the job talk.

Sponsored

______.  You failed to call on a very sensitive colleague who had raised his hand patiently.  He then spent the next three days finding everything wrong with anything in the footnotes of your article.

______.  Someone unexcited about your candidacy interpreted your stellar references as not stellar enough.

_______.  A faculty candidate who is considered to be our version of the village idiot strongly endorsed you.

________.  LawProfBlawg endorsed you.

________.  A faculty member with too much time on their hands did a thorough review of all your articles and convinced the faculty that the one typo they found was your fault and signaled sloppy scholarship.

Sponsored

________.   You were considered “not collegial.” (Footnote: See Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964).

________.   You wanted to teach a course that has been the monopoly of one professor since 1964.  He and his friends who have been on the faculty since before you were born took you down.

________.  “Curricular fit.”  In other words, the associate dean of academic affairs didn’t like you.

________.   You assumed we read your article before your job talk.  Sadly, we didn’t.  That meant we didn’t know what the hell you were talking about.  Our bad.  Your loss.

_______.   You confided in someone on our faculty who you thought would be an ally and they inserted a knife so deep that your candidacy couldn’t recover.

_______.   We were unable to actually vote on the merits of your candidacy since the faculty spent the full two hours of the meeting debating eligibility for voting and procedural issues.

_______.  Several members of the faculty believed that you failed to sufficiently agree with a faculty member’s prior scholarship during the question period.

_______.  The students who met with you were overly enthusiastic about your candidacy.

_______.  While we told you we desperately needed someone to teach the classes you teach, we decided to hire the superstar in an obscure area of law who will write and publish well and teach three students a year.

_______.  The faculty member who presented you to the faculty did not wax rhapsodic, while other presenters could burn in hell for the lies they told about their candidates.

We wish you the best of luck on your candidacy, which will likely end at a higher-ranked school than ours.

Sincerely,

LawProfBlawg and TempDean

TempDean is an anonymous interim administrator and professor at a top 100 law school.  Email him c/o 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.  He is way funnier on social media, he claims.  Please follow him on Twitter (@lawprofblawg) or Facebook. Email him at lawprofblawg@gmail.com.

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