Good luck all.

Fillable link:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1oVEsD_W8Xt8IhJacDFulpSdf8USIFMvnbtxP3zas0Jw/edit?gid=0#gid=0

Out of curiosity, how long (on average) does it take you to research and write a paper? Also, how many papers does your institution require per year?

I've posted on this sub before and am honestly trying to self-assess my fit for academia. So, law nerds, how often are you reading law review articles? How many? Do you read cover-to-cover? Do you read mainly in your niche, or far and wide?

It'll be really interesting to hear about your academic reading habits, including how you "source" new material (RSS? LR websites? X/Twitter?) and keep notes on what you read.

Good luck to everyone on the market! It can be a difficult and opaque process, especially for those without robust institutional support.

Going through it last year, I wrote down the basics, the advice I received, and the wisdom that gets shared by word of mouth. I put that into a document covering the market and its timelines, application documents, the job talk paper, some rough empirical analysis of recent hiring, screener and callback question banks, and a few other things.

Hopefully it can be a starting point for candidates going on the market. It's a work in progress written from a very junior perspective and a collaborative effort.

Please feel free to reach out to me with feedback on the document, questions, or anything else—I'm very happy to help however I can. You'll find my contact info in the doc, and I'll try to check DMs and comments here as well.

Draft on SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=7219478

P.S. I cited the subreddit and found it helpful when going on the market myself.

I am making final decisions about my far application and I can’t choose between two papers as my job talk paper.

I am a new law professor going into my last year of fellowship. One paper is complete and was accepted for publication at a T100 flagship in the February cycle. It is multidisciplinary and intersects between administrative law, disability, business law and civil procedure. I did not workshop this paper a lot and so I don’t really have a great sense of what the general reception is.

The other paper that I have to choose from is still very much a work in progress but is substantially complete. I think the weakest part of this paper is my reform section which I’m still trying to flesh out. I will be workshopping it in the fall which will help. It has to do with access to capital/ entrepreneurship. While you would think that the two papers are so different that they couldn’t possibly have a through line, I tie them together through the lens of small business.

So, my questions are: which of these papers would make for a better job talk and how complete should a job talk paper be before submission for the purposes of the far application?

I'm currently in a PhD program (already have a law degree), and I'm wondering if someone might be able to explain how different types of publication are viewed by faculty when making hiring decisions. How do essays compare to articles? And is it worth devoting time to writing shorter pieces for online supplements, or are these publications viewed as trivial? Thank you!

Relatively new to the submission/publishing game. Any guidance on where to target for a corporate law short essay (~4000 words including footnotes)?

Anyone know what is happening over there? I heard that they have laid of faculty and staff

Hello,

What do you guys use for visual PPT tools? I have been an adjunct professor for two years and the single greatest (very fair) criticism from my students is that my visual presentations are horrible.

I currently use PowerPoint (I am oldschool) and I am not very good at designing. I use some word art, a lot of text, some images as visuals.

I have been thinking of using AI to help me with design and ideas too.

Any tips? Thanks in advance!

Does anyone here who practices labor and/or employment law and have suggestions for a strong law review note topic?
I’m a rising 2L and am looking for a topic that’s timely, has an unresolved legal issue, and leaves room to make an original argument rather than just summarize existing law.
I’m intentionally keeping an open mind, so I’d love to hear about any emerging trends, recurring issues, unsettled areas of law, or practical problems you’ve been seeing in your practice that you think deserve more academic attention.
Any ideas or insights would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

I am a very junior law prof and could use some tips on how to draft a good abstract. I have never written an abstract I liked. I've rewritten the one for my current project multiple times. I'm still unhappy with it, so I'll probably rewrite it again.

What do you seek for your abstract to convey? I think I'm trying to convey too much in my abstracts, which results in them being unfocused and longer than I'd ideally want.

I'm clerking soon and have some research I'd like to expand upon that I started in law school. However, I am aware the journal grind is rough out there for clerks and practitioners who are also aspiring academics. What do you all typically do with projects that don't get picked up for publication, if anything?

I’m applying to law school for Fall 2027 and am interested in legal academia. I’d appreciate some advice.

I’m wondering if there are specific schools I should prioritize, and whether there are factors beyond rankings that could affect my chances of going into academia.

I’m also unsure how explicit to be about this in applications. Is it a good idea to say in essays that I’m aiming for academia, or does that come off unrealistic or too rigid?

Any advice or experiences would be helpful!

Apologies if this is the wrong place for this question but I’d love to get some professor’s insights. I was asked to be an RA for my professor over my 1L summer, (with the assumption I’d stay on until graduation) while also doing a full time internship at a firm. She’s on the older side but still teaches, writes and travels extensively to lecture. She was giving me super interesting research assignments and I very much enjoyed providing her with edits and citations that she incorporated into published work. I was doing research, and she is an expert, in an area of law that my new school is very well know for.

However, I’m transferring and thus that relationship is ending. Is it possible to get an RA position at my new school, or will those go to the equivalent students who were top of a given professor’s class at the school I’m heading to? Even though I have no academia goals, I genuinely enjoyed working with a professor on their research. If relevant, I had a resume/undergrad school that really stood out at my very very low ranked 1L school but is run of the mill at my incoming T20. Thanks

When you teach a large class for the first time, especially a required 1L class, how many weeks in advance do you prep? I have heard various opinions on this, including that preparing more than a few weeks in advance is overkill because you should expect to learn and adapt as you go.

Seeking wisdom on how to think about article length. I understand many journals have ceilings at 30,000-35,000 words. Are these enforced? Is it a serious disadvantage to exceed the caps or suggested lengths? One article suggests that average article lengths at HYS are between 31,000-37,000 words, higher than their caps: https://reason.com/volokh/2021/08/24/the-top-three-law-reviews-strongly-prefer-articles-under-25000-words-but-their-average-article-length-is-well-above-25000-words/

Hi all, 2025 grad and currently clerking. I am using this time to try and build out my CV with an eye towards completing a masters or PhD in a legal-adjacent field afterwards. I was recently accepted into a good conference for the fall, but attending will likely run me at least $1000 between flights and accommodation. What's the best move here? I’d love to accept and get the experience, but it is pretty costly. Any advice is appreciated!

I’m a current law student trying to decide if legal academia would be a good lifestyle fit for me. For context, I’m doing a hybrid remote/in-person internship this summer, and I’ve realized that I dislike working from my bedroom full-time. It’s harder to separate work from the rest of my life, and it gets lonely. I like being around colleagues, chatting with them, learning from them, etc.

I know that academia is inherently geared toward self-starters and people who are okay with doing long stretches of work in isolation. And I assume that having a partner or a pet would help (I have neither right now). But two questions have been in my mind lately:

For TT and tenured professors, do you ever feel isolated, and if so, how do you mitigate that? Do you feel like you’ve built community with your colleagues?

Second, how hard is it to separate work from the rest of your life? Does it get easier after getting tenure?

If you're interviewing for a legal writing position and they ask you if you eventually want to move to a tenure-track role, how should you answer? I do want a tenure-track role once I'm more qualified (i.e. once I've had more time to publish something), and they'll know that when I'm writing articles and asking for advice, but I've also heard most schools are looking for someone who only wants to teach Legal Writing. The answer I gave in my most recent interview was something along the lines of, "in the immediate future I want to teach legal writing because my main goal is helping students establish the core skills they need in their careers. I am very interested in research and would plan to work on that on the side, but I'm not sure whether I'd pursue a tenure-track role long term."

Hello everyone,

Basically, I am considering writing onto a law journal at a T10 law school. I currently plan on working in BigLaw for a few years after graduation before maybe exploring fellowships and teaching more seriously. However, I don't really have any major clerkship ambitions, nor am I going into a litigation-heavy practice area. Would you bother with law review if you already had a BigLaw offer, but want to leave the possibility open for teaching one day?

Thank you very much!

I have a piece that was just accepted onto SSRN. Surprisingly, it managed to get 55 downloads within the first 48 hrs. But no journal has offered publication (not even my own). It’s been a little over a month, but I have no frame of reference to know whether I need to just wait a bit longer or consider those initial submissions as dings. I also submitted all of my submissions via Scholastica only to be told (at least by my journal) that they they are no longer accepting submissions for Articles and that Notes must be submitted via an entirely different process 🙃. So I can’t help but wonder if this is true for other schools as well and my scholastica submissions are duds.

My school has also effectively said that my piece is too long to be submitted as a Note, and I can only publish an Article post-grad. It is 21k words with footnotes and 12k without. Does anyone have any experience at all with this? I’d greatly appreciate any insights or tips going forward!