<p>Which is better? Which has better pay, which is less stressful, which is most rewarding? Well? What are the pros and cons of each. Gee golly, it would appear that getting the summer off would be NICE, eh?</p>
<p>Well pay and stress are going to fluctuate by the type of law you practice and the quality of the law firm you're employed by.</p>
<p>Though in general, I would have to say a law professor would be a much less stressful job and quite rewarding. Pay will be commensurate with the prestige of the school, but it's not unusual to see tenured law professors making upwards of 150 grand a year.</p>
<p>Im not complexly sure but I know of a few professors who choose their path after they had burned out and/or lost the excitement of being a hotshot attorney. The best of both worlds.</p>
<p>After having this discussion with several attornies I drew the conclusion that law teaching, as a job, is less stressful. According to one attorney, I will be able to have a family and to enjoy life. Law teaching, for the most part, will not give one nearly as much money as, say, a partner at a big-name firm; however, the money comes at a price. Everything does.</p>
<p>Additionally, law professors can make additional money through consulting.</p>
<p>I should note that the comparison in salaries should only be done between professors and those working at big-name firms: to become a professor (or at least the best path to becoming one) is attending a school known for having their students earn clerkships. According to one source, and I cannot identify this person right now, Yale Law School and UChicago Law are tied for the amount of clerkships their law students earn. Other law schools that are good for clerkships are Harvard, and Stanford. The best path to becoming a law professor, then, is in attending either Harvard, Yale, Stanford, or the University of Chicago.</p>
<p>If you somehow graduate from the top of your class, you will have two salient options (among others): work for a firm or go into teaching. Given the options HYSC gives to students, it is a pretty big choice.</p>
<p>If you want to go into teaching, making oneself attractive for the market can be difficult; if students want to make progress immediately after graduating from LS, they must have already published articles in the school's law review (not to mention being a member of it) or some prestigious journal. In addition, since the teaching market is becoming more competitive, other degrees such as Ph.Ds and LL.Ms are conducive to making one marketable.</p>
<p>Teaching is difficult as well. Those who fare well in the market do so because they love teaching; they are willing to make certain sacrifices in order to teach. One sacrifice is that students may have to take up posts at less prestigious law schools and work their way up, with the hope of gaining a tenured position at the big schools. Expecting schools like Harvard, Yale, and Stanford to offer you a TT post after graduating straight from law school is simply unrealistic... unless you are Alan Dershowitz or something;)</p>
<p>Don't forget the whole "publish or perish" institutional pressure for law professors ...</p>
<p>Sallyawp, that is absolutely correct, and I would say that it is equally imperative for almost any position in academia: if one wants a good teaching position (or a teaching position, period), one needs to publish. Professors at top universities are researchers, first and foremost, and then teachers.</p>
<p>I agree with what has been said. Being a prof is less stressful and will allow for a better lifestyle. The money is not the same as corporate law. However, when comparing incomes, don't forget the difference of hours chained to a desk. Consider your personality and what you love to do. Also, if you can get on tenure track at a top school, there is a much greater potential for income. I'll go as far as saying that being a prof at a top LS is probably way harder than securing employment in corporate law -- and the benefits are roughly the same at that level.</p>
<p>As far as publishing, you can always hire 1Ls and 2Ls to do your grunt work.</p>
<p>No one is going to pay you to have a relaxing lifestyle. Many well-paying jobs are paying you to be stressed and available to the office, even on vacation.</p>
<p>Most successful practitioners make more money, and work longer hours, than law professors.</p>
<p>Which is better? One man's meat is another man's poison. I have a cousin who's a tenured law professor (and currently dean of the school); I would no more wish to trade places with him, professionally, than he would wish to trade places with me, I suspect. </p>
<p>Frankly, the prospect of spending the rest of my professional life teaching the same handful of classes over and over again to a new group of twenty-something, and writing scholarly articles on the side, sounds more than a little like purgatory to me.</p>
<p>
[quote]
the prospect of spending the rest of my professional life teaching the same handful of classes over and over again to a new group of twenty-something, and writing scholarly articles on the side, sounds more than a little like purgatory to me.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>It really depends on the nature of the position, in my opinion. A lot of professors are not "teachers," they are researchers. As such, conduct their work with the purpose of advancing. There is no repetitive teaching or writing of scholarly articles just because you are required to do so unless you want to conduct your scholarly career that way if that is the case, one should not expect tenure anytime soon.</p>
<p>Being a professor is a goal-oriented job, and the research is substantive. In addition, professors need not teach the same class every year. In fact, professors can offer different courses, depending on what research they are conducting and their expertise.</p>
<p>In law school, professors tend to teach the same classes every year - at least at my law school. Some will offer different, highly specialized, courses; however, they rotate through a few of them. A law school needs to offer a specific set of courses on a regular basis, unless they want their students to revolt. The first-year curriculum is set; they need professors to teach those courses. Add to that a lot of recommended upper-level courses that students take because they will be on the bar exam - corporations, individual tax, corporate tax, family law, secured transactions, bankruptcy, admin law, professional responsibility, evidence, accounting, employment law, specific Con Law courses, antitrust - and, face it, most professors have to teach the same courses every year. Yes, you can design your own seminars, but most of what is taught at law school - even the elite, academic, liberal-arts influenced law schools - is set in stone.</p>
<p>my dad is a law professor at a well regarded university (not hys, although he has taught at other schools in the top 10) and it definately is a less stressful, although less monetarily rewarded, job than being a partner in a large firm. He is able to set his own hours and to take the summer off. He has taught the same 3 or 4 courses for the last 20some years, although the content changes somewhat from year to year with different court decisions and such. However, where you get the more variable and interesting work is through consulting. </p>
<p>It is, however, almost impossible to get a job teaching at a top law school. My dad helps interview candidates, and ridiculously well qualified (harvard law school with bunches of publications, top of class, with a clerkship witha well known judge) applicants are getting turned down for jobs. From what i've heard, its also hard to work your way up, as law schools rarely, if ever, hire their adjuncts into tenure track positions. And law schools don't usually go down to lower tiers for new hires.</p>
<p>The key is to make one's mark in a less highly regarded institution, then make the (both lateral and vertical) leap to a more elite school. The professors who taught my parents law at SUNY are now ensconced at the Ivies.</p>
<p>Defense attorneys make the big bucks, because crooks will pay anything to stay out of jail. Patent and intellectual property attorneys probably do well. Orchestrating an IPO for a hot company will get be rewarding as well.</p>
<p>Most of my friends and former classmates who have begun careers in academia knew that they wanted to be professors from the outset. While in law school, they focused tremendous efforts on being published in the law review (and other publications) and on doing the most prestigious clerkships available to them. Many actually did district court clerkships for one or two years out of law school followed by appellate court and/or supreme court clerkships (some got appellate court clerkships right out of law school). From there, most of them headed straight into academia. </p>
<p>A separate group of my friends, former classmates and colleagues went to work at law firms across the U.S., Canada and Europe, and some, including me, teach as adjunct professors at law schools. Adjunct professors are utilized by many law schools not considered to be top schools as a staple of their teaching, while many of the top schools rely on adjuncts for classes on more specific subject areas where day-to-day industry experience may be more important than academic research (for example. while in law school, I took a class in venture capital financing taught by an adjunct who taught us the theories and regulatory structure relating to the industry while literally walking us through a transaction and having the class negotiating real agreements - an invaluable experience and one that gave me great confidence when I began working). </p>
<p>I'm sure that there are former practitioners across the country who now teach law in one setting or another. Unfortunately, I do not have experience with this avenue so I cannot comment here.</p>
<p>It has been my observation that the vast majority of law school professors at top law schools followed the first route to academia described above. That said, I'm certain that there are plenty of other ways to get into academia, either after law school/clerkships or after working at law firms/government agencies/public interest. There are also opportunities out there for law firm lawyers (and lawyers from other settings as well) to teach a class here or there (though the demands on your limited free time are immense to do so). Perhaps you don't always have to make a choice.</p>
<p>wow, sally! Is there anything you don't do? ;)</p>
<p>What do you teach, if you don't minde me asking?</p>
<p>Cheers.</p>
<p>All I do is work, teach my adjunct class a few months out of each year, go running and do my best to be good to my family and friends (oh, and tend to my garden a bit during the summer). There is not much time for anything else. </p>
<p>I would rather not say where I teach as an adjunct, but I will say that the class is related to corporate law.</p>
<p>Sally, you mention the publish or perish rule for professors, but don't they gain tenure after a few years? I'm kind of confused</p>
<p>The "publish or perish" axiom means "if you don't publish, don't expect to get tenure."</p>
<p>oh ok.. understood</p>
<p>Even when you get tenure, things aren't always perfect. The Cornel West issue at Harvard, as I recall, was one of those times; Summers came down hard on a tenured prof who had not produced any academic literature in the past several years. There is still pressure that can be applied - probably anything from assigning the professor to less desirable classes to cutting funding or lab space.</p>