VOLUME 85

Porcher Taylor

In 1992, law professor-to-be David W. Case attended the annual AALS Faculty Recruitment Conference (FRC), as an aspiring law professor, along with several hundred other law professor candidates. To his surprise, Case found himself unprepared to answer specific questions regarding his long term research and scholarship agenda. Case’s self-described “debacle” at the FRC is in similar failure vein to law professor-to-be Jeffrey M. Lipshaw’s 2005 and 2006 FRC screening interviews, because, as Associate Professor of Law Lipshaw noted in a law review article in 2008, he did not realize something crucial until hindsight set in: “Everything in that thirty minute interview, assuming it goes well, is about whether you show the predictors of being a productive scholar.” Recognizing the critical need for law school recruitment teams to better assess in advance the scholarship agendas of entry-level candidates registered with the AALS Faculty Appointments Register (FAR) and of candidates who receive on-campus interviews, this Article innovatively explores how a modest change to the FAR form might facilitate and transform the recruitment of scholarship-hungry tenure-track faculty.

Full article (.pdf) available here.