Now that my series interviewing VAP and fellowship directors has ended, I wanted to reflect on the broader lessons that I learned from these interviews. Your takeaways may differ, so I hope you chime in in the comments if you think there are different or additional takeaways that prospective candidates and/or hiring committees should have. But I’ve been on the hiring side for a long time and there were still a number of things that surprised me when I dug into the VAP/fellowship world.
**Before I dig into these reflections, a quick note that Howard Wasserman was nice enough to create a category for VAP and fellowships to the left, so you can now find all of these interviews and posts
Comments
Having gone through a fellowship interview, and having read this series exhaustively, I think it would be interesting to continue in the future with a few follow-ups. Namely:
1. What interview questions do fellowships generally ask? What do they expect fellows to communicate during interviews? I found this information readily available for AALS interviews, but much less so for fellowships. Furthermore since there is no fellowship for fellowships, there is no program to coach you for this sort of thing either! Knowing the interview procedure was helpful, but knowing how to succeed would be more useful still.
2. A number of the interviewees were able to get away with saying they wanted “the best” candidates without elaborating very much on that. We hear that they probably want you to have published before, but since many rejected candidates will have reached this threshold, more information on how they define “best” or “excellence” would be useful.
3. Given the success rate, many candidates will find they need to apply to these fellowships year after year. Is there any chance fellowship programs will be interested in candidates who have published maybe slightly more the following year? Or should they take a rejection as an indication they are probably not going to be seen as a fit for that program? At which stage (first round, second round) is a rejection more indicative of this? Would these programs be inclined to reconsider an applicant whose scholarly focus changes by the time another application is made, or will this be seen as inauthentically opportunistic?
Posted by: anon3 | Dec 20, 2019 8:09:28 PM
Hi VAP or Write – My view might be slightly different than Matthew’s. I worry a little when I hear lawyers say they don’t need to do a VAP because they’ve managed to write while in practice. Writing one or more articles is, of course, essential before going on the market, but it isn’t enough. The articles also have to be really good. I don’t mean to imply that your articles aren’t good – after all, I have no idea who you are or what you’ve written. But I do think it is incredibly hard to write really good articles in practice. Maybe I shouldn’t bring this up because you state as a given that any article you write in practice will be the same quality as any article you write in a fellowship. That might be right, but it seems unlikely to me. In my experience, some attorneys have time to write while practicing, but it’s tough to write with the level of depth and polish that hiring committees expect, especially given the competition out for each open slot.
VAPs and fellowships really do serve a purpose here. They allow you to devote more time to your papers, which means that you can develop your arguments more and think through the broader implications. You also get far more opportunities to have people in your field read your articles and offer feedback, which again makes the papers better. Legal scholarship, like anything else, is subject to a whole set of norms that are hard to appreciate from outside the academy. This may be controversial, but in my experience, the papers of VAPs and fellows are almost always better than papers written by lawyers in practice. More than anything else, that’s why they get hired. It’s not just a matter of credentialing, as much as people like to categorize it as such.
Also, I assume you care about more than just getting a law faculty position at some law school somewhere. Presumably, you also want to have options so you can end up at an intellectually stimulating environment in a geographic area that works for your family. Perhaps you can get a job without doing a VAP or fellowship (it’s possible, although I’d need to know more about your curricular area, your papers, etc.), but I think you’ll have more options if you do a fellowship first.
None of this is meant to ignore the costs/risks of doing a fellowship. They are very real and the reason that I did this series in the first place. As a profession, I think we need to think more about the costs. Ultimately, though, only you can decide whether the costs outweigh the benefits. But I know your dilemma is a somewhat common one, so I thought I’d chime in my own thoughts. And if you want to reach out to me over email, I’m happy to discuss your personal situation in more detail.
Posted by: Jessica Erickson | Dec 15, 2019 7:06:26 AM
VAP or Write | Dec 11, 2019 2:39:09 PM
IMO, you should stay just where you are. Maybe start going to law professor conferences to present your work, but if you have the time to write in practice, I’d stay put.
Posted by: Matthew Bruckner | Dec 14, 2019 4:51:13 PM
Writing to say thanks Jessica, to you and others who take the time to do the research and interviewing on the legal job market. It’s very helpful to those of us aspiring to teach (I’m a later career teaching candidate, with a few publications, adjunct teaching, and experiential teaching background).
Posted by: Charlie Martel | Dec 12, 2019 5:10:56 PM
The additional value of the fellowships beyond writing time is probably people from the program invested in calling hiring committees on your behalf. Sometimes it seems like you’re invisible in this process without that.
Posted by: anon3 | Dec 11, 2019 3:56:34 PM
My biggest question is whether the VAP or fellowship has independent value beyond the time to write, mentoring, and conferences. I’m doing these things while in practice. I’m trying to decide whether to stay at my firm, where I have been able to fit in time to write an article every two years or so and my last one placed pretty well, or go to a fellowship. Is it worth jumping ship from a good wage and no ticking clock to a wage that cannot support my family (for the particular fellowship that I think I might get, the pay is $50k) and a ticking clock at the end of the fellowship? I feel strongly that my next paper will be done at the same time and likely be written the same whether I stay at the firm or go to a fellowship.
Posted by: VAP or Write | Dec 11, 2019 2:39:09 PM
Jessica, thanks again both for this very useful set of interviews and for your reflections here. It’s very useful context for those contemplating careers in legal academia.
Posted by: Orin Kerr | Dec 11, 2019 12:00:08 AM
Thanks for this clarification. I very much agree that it can be tough/impossible for people in non-law PhD programs to write law review articles during their PhD programs. My sense though is that discipline-specific papers, assuming they have something to do with law, will help you get in the door at VAP/fellowship programs, where you will then have the time/mentoring to write law review articles. In other words, if you need, say, 3 papers or a monograph-length dissertation to get a VAP, you can write those in the PhD program, even if they aren’t geared to law reviews. Then you can write the law review articles you’ll likely need for the entry-level job market in the VAP program. That’s a long path, but it seems like a somewhat common one these days.
That said, I could be wrong with VAP selection committees more hostile to non-law review articles than I think!
Posted by: Jessica Erickson | Dec 10, 2019 10:06:27 PM
This is a welcome set of comments overall, but I must add one caveat to the following statement:
“it’s not surprising that candidates are doing a Ph.D. program to write an initial set of papers”
It is emphatically not true that you will necessarily have more time in a PhD program to write law review papers, unless you neglect your other duties. In many social science PhDs you will be encouraged to write papers, but in your discipline. In humanities and borderline social science disciplines, like history, you may be discouraged from writing papers at all in order to focus on a dissertation that will be a future book. It is also not necessarily shrewd for job market purposes to spend all your time on law review papers even neglecting these factors, since the other option for PhDs will be a disciplinary job market in which law review papers are worthless.
I know there are all kinds of exceptions to these comments, ways in which you can publish in borderline law/disciplinary journals, etc., but they don’t erase the fact that this tension exists and is potentially excluding people from consideration for fellowships whose PhDs are less friendly toward publishing extensively in an alien discipline.
Posted by: anon1 | Dec 10, 2019 9:54:29 PM
I’m certainly not pretending that JD institution is irrelevant. That said, on the hiring side, it feels pretty irrelevant when it comes to voting offers, at least in my experience. To the extent that it correlates with law faculty job offers (and I have no doubt it does), it’s unclear whether that’s because (i) hiring schools care a lot about it, (ii) VAPs/fellowships care a lot about it, or (iii) people from top schools happen to have other qualifications (better papers, etc.) that make them better candidates. On the second possibility (VAPs/fellowships care a lot about it), I think these programs are incredibly risk averse. Given the deep applicant pool, they can afford to go for candidates who already have a few papers and a top JD (and other stuff to boot). Moreover, to the extent that they are choosing between candidates with imperfect scholarship — because few people new to the academy have great papers, even given the deep pool — I have to imagine that VAPs and fellowships rely quite a bit on JD institution and related factors to predict who among those with imperfect papers will turn out to be good scholars.
All of which is to say that, while I think hiring schools are relying less on JD institution as a proxy these days, it’s already baked into our decisions if we’re hiring people with good papers and these good papers are a result of the mentoring that come through VAPs/fellowships.
Of course, I could be wrong and hiring schools rely on candidate’s JD institution much more than I think. Given the number of papers that most top candidates have though, that just feels like an irrational strategy. Maybe most schools are too lazy to read the papers, but certainly past scholarship is a better proxy for future scholarship than where someone went to law school. And there is no shortage of candidates with lots of good papers.
Posted by: Jessica Erickson | Dec 10, 2019 9:49:34 PM
“On the hiring side, we look at what you’ve written, not where you went to law school, and I think many academics pat themselves on the back for using this criteria. I worry though that we’re ignoring the impact of the VAP/fellowship programs on our decision making. Sure, maybe whether you went to Harvard/Yale/Stanford doesn’t matter much to hiring committees anymore, but I think these credentials do matter when it comes to getting a fellowship”
Good for you. But you are in the minority. If you look at how the market shakes out, JD institution is by far the best predictor of job prospects. It may also be a great predictor of landing a fellowship. But that is just reinforcing the point. And if you are correct that it matters a lot for fellowships, then it doesn’t quite square with the point about writing. The reality is that top VAPs/Fellows are getting better jobs than those without. It’s still true that schools need to sort through mountains of candidates, and they do this using the JD institution. Let’s not pretend the academy is past this. It is not.
Posted by: anon | Dec 10, 2019 9:19:11 PM