CLIENT: NORC at the University of Chicago
SCOPE: Research Report Design
As higher and legal education continues to evolve, having a comprehensive understanding of law school faculty perspectives has become increasingly important. Commissioned by the Association of American Law Schools, the American Law School Faculty Study provides a snapshot of law teaching today and is the first of its kind to detail faculty career pathways and work experiences as well as recent hiring trends in legal education.
Primarily drawing on two surveys, one at the school-level and another at the individual-level, this study details the analysis of responses from 117 current or acting deans and 1,892 faculty members across 194 AALS member and fee-paid law schools.
The study was designed to investigate several research questions:
• Who are law school faculty today?
• What are the main career pathways to teaching law?
• What are the current hiring practices of law schools?
• What are the expectations of law faculty for earning tenure?
• What are the job responsibilities of law faculty and how much time do they allocate to each?
• How satisfied are law school faculty with their jobs?
In presenting novel findings about the current legal education landscape, the report offers key insights on law school faculty demographic profiles, professional experiences, and institutional characteristics, such as selectivity and governance.
This 104-page report is available in both print and digital formats. It is text and Infographic-heavy, with full-color photographs throughout. There are also endnotes with works cited and two appendices that contain both of the formatted questionnaires that the respondents filled out at the onset of the study.
This report is a product that AALS sells on its website so I am therefore limited to presenting only what they have released as their public-facing documentation.
