Breaking Into Legal Academia
A Practical Guide for Aspiring Law Professors from Non-Traditional Backgrounds
Let me start with something I wish someone had told me earlier in my career.
There’s no “right” way to become a law professor.
My own journey illustrates this fact. I started with a BS in mechanical engineering from MIT, earned an MSE in environmental engineering from Johns Hopkins, worked in engineering and consulting, and then went to Harvard Law School. After law school, I practiced as a project finance attorney at a large international firm, then moved to a small nonprofit focused on fair housing issues.
From there, I completed a clinical teaching fellowship at George Washington University Law School, spent four years as an Assistant Professor of Law at UDC Law while co-directing a community development law clinic, and now I’m a tenured Associate Professor of Law at the University of South Carolina Joseph F. Rice School of Law.
But here’s what matters most about that winding path.
I didn’t come from an academic family. My father never went to college, and my mother was a nurse. Growing up, I didn’t see a future in academia. In fact, I didn’t even consider it as a career option.
That circuitous route—from engineering through big law, nonprofit work, and finally into tenure-track academia—taught me that what matters isn’t the perfection of your path, but how you weave your experiences into a coherent scholarly voice and teaching philosophy.
The Market Reality (And Why It’s Not as Scary as You Think)
Let’s be honest. The academic job market for law professors is competitive.
The field is seeing more candidates with advanced degrees beyond their JD, including PhDs in history, economics, political science, sociology, and other disciplines. Many applicants now come to the market with multiple publications already in print.
But here’s what you should understand.
This market rewards preparation, authenticity, and persistence. The competition is real, but so are the opportunities. The key is not to chase what you think committees want to hear, but to develop a genuine scholarly voice that grows from your unique experiences and interests. Schools can sense authenticity, and they value candidates who bring fresh perspectives and deep commitment to their work.
The market is also increasingly recognizing that the best teachers and scholars often come from diverse backgrounds and experiences. Your path into law—whether through practice, other disciplines, or community-based work—can be a tremendous asset if you frame it thoughtfully.
Many institutions—particularly those with strong commitments to social justice or public interest work—are actively seeking candidates with interdisciplinary backgrounds. They want scholars who can connect doctrinal knowledge to broader frameworks like political economy, race and the law, or environmental justice. This trend actually favors candidates whose work bridges multiple disciplines or challenges traditional boundaries.
Understanding the AALS Process
The Association of American Law Schools (AALS) coordinates the primary recruitment process for entry-level law professors through the Faculty Appointments Register (FAR)—an online database that has evolved significantly since COVID.
Here’s how it works.
The FAR standardizes information about your education, teaching and employment experience, publications, bar passage, scholarly focus, and other relevant qualifications into an easily-searchable database. Think of it as the central marketplace where law schools go shopping for candidates.
Applications are accepted on a rolling basis from June through September, but AALS releases candidate information to schools in two batches. For 2025, the first deadline is August 4th (distributed to schools on August 14th), and the second is September 4th (distributed on September 11th). This system ensures that applications submitted after the initial deadline don’t get lost in the shuffle.
Schools pay an access fee to search the database and can set up their recruitment teams starting in mid-June. The process has become flexible post-COVID, with many institutions conducting virtual screening interviews before inviting applicants to campus for a formal job talk.
Understanding the Different Types of Academic Positions
American law schools vary widely, as do their hiring practices and terminology. Generally speaking, there are three main categories of teaching positions:
Tenure-track faculty are hired primarily to teach doctrinal courses (like Contracts, Torts, Constitutional Law) and are eligible for tenure.
Clinical faculty are hired primarily to teach in live-client clinics, providing students with real-world legal experience while serving actual clients. At most law schools, clinical faculty are now eligible for tenure and may also teach doctrinal courses.
Legal research and writing faculty are hired primarily to teach legal research and writing skills, the foundational tools every lawyer needs. Like clinical faculty, legal writing faculty at many institutions are now eligible for tenure and may teach additional courses.
These distinctions matter for your application strategy, but don’t get too hung up on rigid categories. The lines are blurring as law schools recognize that all faculty contribute meaningfully to legal education.
Your background might position you well for any of these tracks, and the “best” path depends on your interests, strengths, and career goals rather than some hierarchy of prestige.
Essential Application Materials
Whether you’re applying through the AALS Faculty Appointments Services or directly to schools, you’ll need to prepare several key documents. These materials are your opportunity to tell your story and demonstrate your readiness for academic life.
Curriculum Vitae (CV): This should be comprehensive but strategic, organizing your experiences to highlight your academic preparation. Don’t hide your practice experience. Frame it as valuable preparation for scholarship and teaching.
Research Agenda: This document should be ambitious but achievable, specific enough to show you’ve thought deeply about methodology and contribution, but flexible enough to evolve. Avoid jargon and make sure someone outside your specific area can understand why your work matters.
List of Publications: Having at least one strong publication is increasingly important. It shows you can take a project from idea to print and demonstrates follow-through. If you don’t have a published work yet, a strong piece under submission or forthcoming can still be competitive, especially if it is coupled with a compelling research agenda.
Job Talk Paper: This will showcase your best thinking during campus visits. Choose a paper that represents your scholarly voice and agenda, not necessarily your most recent or complex project. This paper should allow you to demonstrate your ability to engage with faculty questions and provide a sense of your intellectual presence.
The Interview Process: It’s About Mutual Fit
Once you secure a screening interview—whether through the AALS process or through direct contact with law schools—the process becomes about mutual evaluation. Screening interviews, conducted either on campus or via video conference, serve one primary purpose: determining whether you and the law school are a good fit for each other.
This is crucial to understand because it shifts the dynamic from one-way evaluation to genuine conversation. You’re not just trying to impress them. You’re also assessing whether their institution aligns with your values, scholarly interests, and career goals. Be genuinely curious about the school, its students, and its mission. Ask thoughtful questions about scholarly support, teaching expectations, and institutional culture.
Don’t try to be what you think each school wants.
Be consistently yourself while showing how you’d contribute to their specific community. Schools can tell when candidates are saying what they think committee members want to hear versus speaking from genuine interest and conviction.
Remember that a “no” from one school doesn’t reflect your worth as a scholar or teacher. Rather, it often reflects institutional needs, timing, or fit factors that are beyond your control.
What You Actually Need to Be Competitive
First, and foremost, you need a JD from an accredited law school.
While elite law schools still provide advantages in terms of networks and perceived prestige, they’re not the only path. What matters more is what you do during and after law school, including your grades, law review experience, judicial clerkships, and scholarship.
Increasingly, candidates also come with advanced degrees, including PhDs in related fields that provide deep methodological training and signal serious scholarly commitment.
But a PhD isn’t required.
Some of the most innovative legal scholars only have JDs. What matters is demonstrating intellectual depth and the ability to contribute meaningfully to legal scholarship.
There’s also a persistent myth that BigLaw experience is the gold standard for academic hiring. While large firm experience is still treated as a strong credential—it signals strong writing skills, certain kinds of rigor, and institutional familiarity—it’s no longer the only pathway.
More hiring committees are recognizing the depth and richness of other practice experiences, especially those that demonstrate direct engagement with communities, public institutions, or social movements. My own work in nonprofit fair housing advocacy and clinical supervision gave me insights into how law operates in people’s lives. These insights became central to my scholarly identity.
The key for candidates with public interest or policy work backgrounds is translating that experience into a scholarly frame. If you can show how your practice raised pressing legal questions—about power, structure, inequality, or governance—you can position that experience as an asset, not as a detour.
Embrace Your Non-Linear Journey
If your path to legal academia has been winding—through other careers, different disciplines, various types of practice—don’t apologize for it. Don’t treat it as something to explain away. Instead, show how each experience contributed to your scholarly perspective and teaching philosophy.
The key is to move from apology to narrative. There’s no such thing as “too winding” if you can own it with clarity and conviction. In fact, a non-linear path often reflects real-world insight, resilience, and intellectual depth.
My engineering background taught me to think systematically about problems and solutions. My big law experience showed me how private law actually operates at scale. My nonprofit work revealed how legal structures can perpetuate or challenge inequality. My clinical teaching demonstrated how legal education can serve community needs. None of these were detours. Rather, they were all essential to developing my scholarly voice.
Rather than minimizing or overexplaining your diverse background, highlight the through-lines.
What connects your journey across disciplines?
What questions have followed you from one domain to another?
If you can identify that coherence—not in your CV, but in your intellectual curiosity—you invite others to see your path as expansive rather than scattered.
Developing Your Authentic Research Agenda
Your research agenda should grow organically from your genuine intellectual curiosities and experiences, not from what you think is trending in legal scholarship.
My own focus on law, political economy, and legal history emerged from the friction between my practice experiences and deeper questions about how law structures opportunity and inequality.
Working in engineering and nonprofit settings exposed me to structural questions that planted seeds for thinking in terms of political economy. As I pursued scholarship, I began seeing these not just as policy issues, but as part of longer legal and historical struggles.
In other words, my scholarly agenda didn’t come fully formed. It evolved through the intersection of practice and theory, between day-to-day client realities and deeper historical legal patterns I discovered through my research.
So, don’t chase trends.
Chase the questions that haunt you. Let those guide your reading, writing, and long-term scholarly commitments. Committees can distinguish between authentic intellectual curiosity and opportunistic trend-following.
The Importance of Authentic Voice
Hiring committees can sense when candidates are performing a version of what they think academia wants versus speaking from genuine conviction.
Your authentic voice—shaped by your personal experiences and interests—is far more compelling than a perfectly polished performance of academic conventionality.
So much of academic hiring is about fit, but fit doesn’t mean conformity. It means knowing who you are, what you bring, and how your journey uniquely positions you to contribute to legal scholarship. When candidates embrace their path, they often speak with more authority, more imagination, and more authenticity.
That’s magnetic.
This doesn’t mean being unprofessional or unprepared. It means grounding your scholarship and teaching philosophy in who you actually are and what you actually care about, rather than what you think sounds impressive.
As a Black male from a working-class background, academia can sometimes feel lonely. You may find yourself as the only person in faculty meetings or conferences who shares your background or perspective. But that’s exactly why your voice matters so much. Legal academia benefits tremendously from diverse perspectives and experiences.
Your background—whether it’s first-generation college, military service, community organizing, artistic practice, scientific training, or any other path—brings insights that purely traditional academic backgrounds cannot provide.
The key is learning to articulate how your experiences inform your scholarship and teaching, not just mentioning them as biographical details.
Building Sustainable Academic Life
Once you do get hired, remember that the goal isn’t just to survive the academic job market and find a job. It’s to build a sustainable and fulfilling career. Academic life offers tremendous flexibility.
But it also means work can expand to fill all available time if you let it.
The freedom of academic schedules can be both blessing and curse. You have autonomy over your time, but you also have to create your own structure and accountability. It’s easy to get caught up in the metrics of academic success and lose sight of why you wanted to do this work in the first place.
Remember that your work has real-world implications.
Whether you’re writing about contract doctrine, constitutional theory, or criminal justice reform, your scholarship contributes to how law develops and how lawyers think about their practice.
That’s both a privilege and a responsibility.
Academic life can be isolating, especially if you’re the only person at your institution working in your area or sharing your background. Actively build community through scholarly organizations, writing groups, and collaborative projects. The AALS offers several programs specifically designed to support scholars from underrepresented backgrounds. I’ve found these incredibly helpful throughout my career.
Your Voice Matters
Legal academia needs the perspectives, experiences, and insights that each of you brings. The path isn’t easy, and the market is competitive, but there’s room for authentic voices and innovative thinking.
Don’t try to fit someone else’s model of what a law professor should be.
Instead, figure out what unique contribution you can make to legal education and scholarship, and pursue that with rigor, authenticity, and persistence.
Your diverse backgrounds, practice experiences, and scholarly interests aren’t obstacles to overcome. They’re assets that can make legal academia richer. The question isn’t whether you’re qualified, but whether you’re committed to the hard and rewarding work of developing those qualifications and finding your scholarly voice.
Whether you were a first-generation college student, are coming from practice, or bring perspectives that haven’t traditionally been centered in legal academia, remember that these experiences are precisely what the field needs.
Your unique combination of background, training, and insights can contribute something that no one else can.
Good luck!
Becoming Full,
This essay is a condensed version of a webinar I recently delivered for Justia on “Becoming a Law Professor: What Aspiring Academics Need to Know.”
I’d love to hear from readers in the comments below:
What aspects of the academic job market would you like to explore further?
What challenges are you facing in your own journey toward legal academia?
What questions do you have about developing your scholarly voice or navigating the application process?
Let’s continue this conversation and I will try to answer all of your questions!
P.S. As always, thank you for reading this week’s issue of The Tenure Track. If you found this article helpful, share it with a friend. If it moved you, consider supporting with a paid subscription or buying me a coffee. Together, let’s continue to build a supportive and creative academic community.
Your support helps me create content that serves fellow scholars on the path.
The emphasis on coherence over perfection is powerful. In my experience, whether someone is moving into academia, in-house, or pursuing partnership, the through-line of their story matters more than the linearity of their path. When people can articulate how their experiences shaped their perspective and judgment, it changes how others evaluate them.