Draft of August 21, 1999 Inbreeding in Law School Hiring: Assessing the Performance of Faculty Hired from Within

This study compares the scholarly impact of inbred entry-level law school faculty members with the scholarly impact of non-inbred entry-level law school faculty members. The sample includes 32 law schools and approximately 700 entry-level faculty members. By our measure of performance, scholarly impact as measured by citation frequency, inbred entrylevel law school faculty members do not perform as well as non-inbred entrylevel faculty members. Law school faculty hiring is rational in at least two respects. First, one’s chance of being initially hired by an elite law school correlates positively with the strength of one’s credentials. Second, one’s chance of being laterally hired correlates positively with one’s scholarly impact. The greater one’s scholarly impact, the more likely one will have been hired by at least one school after one’s initial faculty position. Both results are consistent with using available information to filter faculty candidates. More information improves hiring and the information is used in the expected manner. A positive relation between information about candidates and hiring decisions ought to manifest itself especially strongly in hiring one’s own graduates. After all, faculties have the best possible information about their own graduates. There should be less difficulty in making comparisons with other graduates of one’s own school. Several professors are likely to be personally familiar with a candidate’s performance in class, in written assignments, as a research assistant, and in informal interactions. This information will have been gathered over a period of three years. In comparison, when hiring graduates of other law schools one usually depends on a written transcript, references of varying reliability, one day of interviews, an oral presentation, and perhaps an article or manuscript. In hiring our own, law schools truly should be getting the cream of the crop. At a minimum, they should be getting faculty members who perform as well as faculty members hired from other schools. Whatever a school’s hiring standard, the school ought to be able to apply it as well to its own graduates as to graduates of other schools. The information-based view of hiring suggests that it would be remarkable if the collective legal academy does a poorer job of hiring those with whom we are most familiar. Yet that is the case. This article compares the performance of faculty members first hired by the law schools from which they graduated with the performance of faculty members initially hired by law schools from which they did not graduate. For ease of reference, it refers to the former group as “inbred.” As measured by citations to