Who’s Teaching Labor/Employment Law ?

Rick Bales has now posted a great article, “A Data-Driven Snapshot of Labor and Employment Law Professors,” on SSRN.  It is scheduled to appear in the St. Louis University Law Journal later this year.  I gave it a quick read this morning, and many of the data-driven findings parallel recent developments among ADR faculty.

His Conclusion is posted below, but it’s really worth a few minutes to give the full article a read.  As a bonus for numbers junkies, it includes a bunch of graphs and charts.

My only criticism of Rick’s work is that he manages to be funny in this work.   I find this threatening, as I have been trying to use humor to mask substantive flaws in my arguments for year.  Rick manages to be funny AND accurate, and I hope that he cuts that nonsense out in the future.

MM

Conclusion

The data we collected confirmed some things that we expected, but also provided several surprises. We were not surprised to find that the teaching of Labor Law is declining or that the teaching of Employment Law is rising, because those trends mirror current law practice. We were somewhat surprised at the extent to which men still dominate the teaching of Labor Law, but pleased to find that women have mostly narrowed the gap in Employment Law. We were struck by how much “younger” (in terms of teaching experience) Employment Law faculty members are than Labor Law faculty members. We were not particularly surprised to find that Labor Law faculty members are more likely than their Employment Law counterparts to teach Contracts and ADR, or that Employment Law faculty members are more likely than their Labor Law counterparts to teach Civil Procedure. We were dumbstruck, however, by the sex segregation of the other courses taught by both Labor and Employment Law faculty members. For example, Employment Law faculty members who also teach Family Law or Property are overwhelmingly likely to be women, and Employment Law faculty members who also teach Constitutional Law, Civil Procedure, or Contracts are overwhelmingly likely to be men.  Finally, we found it interesting that both Labor and Employment Law faculty members are more prevalent in top-tier law schools than in bottom-tier law schools, that such faculty members are more prevalent in the Great Lakes, Northeast, and Midsouth regions than in other regions of the country, and that law schools in large metropolitan areas are much more likely than rural law schools to have a large number of Labor/Employment faculty members.

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