An Academic Career in Law
For a lawyer, embracing an academic career is not self-evident. In fact, when describing a typical law professor most researchers would portray him as a practitioner and part-time lecturer rather than as a full-time academic. This picture reveals the importance of practitioners and of the practitioner’s perspective in the legal profession’s self-understanding as well as in legal thinking. The vocational tradition with the view that 'law' is more of a profession more than a scientific discipline, continues to structure legal scholarship and legal academia. In various ways, law is practice-oriented.
Arguably, the orientation of legal discourse towards the needs of the practitioner explains many features of legal academia. First, practitioners are well represented in academia. Judges and professional lawyers are often offered lectureship positions in law schools. Many of them do not even hold a doctorate (like French and British appointees to the European Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights), but are routinely invited to conferences and seminars. Far from raising the suspicion of bias and lack of neutrality, an experience as a practitioner is generally seen as an asset.
Second, law schools and law departments are expected to produce able practitioners rather than scientists. Students are trained as future practitioners and teaching often emphasises the acquisition of rhetorical skills (hence the value of experience as a practitioner).
Third, law has remained largely provincial and very few legal scholars achieve secure tenured positions outside the country in which they received their PhD. This, again, stems from the orientation of the academic discourse towards the needs of practitioners.
In daily practice, legal counsels have to provide expertise as to how courts and judges will react to the behaviour of their client. Trial lawyers want judges to decide in favour of their client. Because the values and cognitive processes of an audience are context-dependent and culture-dependent, what is rhetorically effective in one country may not work in another. As a result, each country has developed its own, self-centred, legal scholarship and its academic institutions recruit, quasi-exclusively, people who produce and have been trained in that same nation-centric scholarship.
From a more economic point of view, however, there is usually an important difference between full-time academic and practicing lawyers. Practitioners, and especially partners in big international law firms, earn, on average, a lot more than their colleagues in academia. So embracing a career as a full-time academic lawyer will not be, in most instances, a matter of enhancing one’s financial welfare.
Requirements to obtain an academic job vary from one country to another, although there appear to be some general requirements which hold true cross-country. First, in order to be hired in a junior lecturer’s position an applicant must posses a law degree of at least a bachelor level. In most cases an applicant is expected to be a holder of a doctorate degree of at least LL.M/Ph.D level.
Second, in most European countries it is expected that an applicant has at least one degree from the country of employment. This expectation is due to the fact that in law most subjects are oriented to national law.
In general, European universities do not require applicants to be members of a Law Society/Bar. However for some practice-oriented disciplines, such as clinical education, they may require such membership. As a rule applicants must be able to show a solid record of publications in leading national/international refereed journals in order to be employed in a university position.
As a general rule, research and teaching go hand in hand. There is no distinction between research and teaching positions. By the same token, there is no distinction between a research and a teaching career.
With that said, it should be pointed out that not all universities in the world place equal emphasis on teaching and research. It is fair to say that, for example, American law schools place more emphasis on research on the first two tiers than those on the lower ranking. In other words, the law schools in the former category pay no less attention to research than to teaching; other law schools take teaching as the primary mission of their faculty. Thus, working with research-oriented law schools would presumably involve a somewhat lesser teaching load. In contrast, law schools of lower caliber would put more stress on pedagogical skills.
Taken as a whole, there is no distinguishing teaching from research in legal academia, although different institutions have different mix of these two academic components. If you want to do research, you will have to teach and if you want to teach you will have to do research.
The main chances of obtaining a postdoctoral fellowship and funding are in the USA and Europe. In Europe differences can be observed depending on the country. As regards postdoctoral level, the chances of attaining a fellowship and the process to attain it vary according to the state system. Within Europe different systems can be distinguished: the UK model and the Continental one. While there are countries with a long tradition in this field, e.g. the UK, there are others like Spain, where both postdoctoral fellowships and funding options have been increasing only in recent years. Principally, funding options are provided by institutions (private and public universities, government agencies, EU institutions) and networks of institutions.
Unfortunately, (so far) law has not become a major issue for postdoc programmes. While there are many programmes for political scientists and economists, there are hardly any postdoc programmes targeted specifically at lawyers. Law is still a rather conservative discipline and hence skeptical of such innovative ideas as postdoc fellowships. For instance, many senior professors (particularly from non-English speaking countries) still do not know what a ‘fellow’ is. Moreover, it seems as if experience in legal practice is still considered more important than postdoc experience. As in any other discipline, establishing contacts with potential postdoc mentors at conferences is essential. A close fit between your research proposal and your potential mentor’s reaserch interests is very important. As so often in legal science, a postdoc-mentor is a synallagmatic relationship, too!
In the following we provide you with links to some funding opportunities for lawyers. We hope you will find them helpful:
There are no comprehensive statistics of law scholars’ salaries but one may justifiably suppose that they are more or less on the same level as those of other scholars working in social sciences and in general lower than those of scholars working in natural sciences.
Clearly, one of the advantages of working in legal scholarship is the opportunity of earning some additional money in legal practice. Indeed, many law scholars seize on this opportunity, which is often – and not without reason – criticized as having a negative impact on the quality of their academic work.
There are several professional organizations of lawyers throughout the world, some dedicated to practitioners and others to academics. Each field of law has its own professional organization. It is sometimes difficult to make the difference between professional and academic organizations since most organizations have an annual academic conference.
First of all each country has it own Bar Association. There is in addition the International Bar Association which gathers legal practitioners, bar associations and law societies in the world. Among professional organizations, several are located in Europe. There is the Union des Avocats Européens/European Lawyers Union . Eurojuris International is a leading network of law firms in Europe covering 610 different cities/locations in 16 countries. It gives legal advice and local legal representation throughout Europe.
There are also most specific organizations such as the European Women Lawyers Association – EWLA , the American Bar Association for the rule of law in Europe and Eurasia ABA-CEELI and the European Young Bar Association . All of these are professional in the sense that they are primarily addressed to practitioners.
Some organizations have an academic purpose: the European Association of Law and Economics is an example. The European Maritime Law Organization is another. The European Jurists’ Forum meets every year and the International Commission for Jurists works on human rights. There is another form of organization: Avocats sans Frontières is a non governmental organization run by a small groups of lawyers seeking justice across borders.
There are additional organizations around the world such as the American Bar Association, the International Law Association and the American Society of International Law. For more information on these and other associations click here and here .
Please contact us if you can provide relevant information
Special thanks to:
MWP, Academic Practice Group, Law, 2007-08