Seventy-one percent of law professors earned degrees from top law schools, according to the Association of American Law Schools.
The legal professoriate is becoming more racially, ethnically and gender diverse, but new data shows that first-generation college graduates remain underrepresented among law faculty ranks.
Just 22 percent of law faculty are first-generation college graduates whose parents have less than a bachelor’s degree. Meanwhile, 56 percent of law faculty have either a parent with an advanced degree or a law degree, according to a report the Association of American Law Schools published earlier this month in conjunction with NORC, a research group at the University of Chicago.
“It’s not surprising, but it’s good to have some data on this,” said Katie Kempner, associate director of research for AALS. “As people become aware of these [data points], we’re hoping that law school career services will find this helpful as they have students who may be interested in going into law teaching. They can say, ‘Here’s what you’re looking at in terms of the [job] market,’ and they can prepare their students to be the optimal candidates while they’re going into this.”
The report examined the career pathways, responsibilities and job satisfaction of law school faculty; it’s the culmination of two surveys AALS conducted in the fall of 2023—one institutional-level survey of 117 law deans and another individual-level survey of 1,892 law faculty members across 194 institutions.
The first report of its kind, the study follows a previous report AALS produced in 2022, the American Law School Dean Study, which found that the percentage of female law deans increased from 18 percent in 2005 to 41 percent in 2020. Over that same time period, the percentage of deans of color and of Hispanic origin increased from 13 percent to 31 percent.
“The prior AALS study on law deans is an important piece in understanding our profession. Our hope is that this report will prove equally useful and interesting to law school faculty and allow us to more fully map the most popular paths to a career in law teaching,” Melanie D. Wilson, president of AALS and dean of Washington and Lee University’s School of Law, said in a news release. “The legal academy is changing, and the findings in this study reveal those important trends.”
Indeed, Hispanic faculty and faculty of color who started their legal teaching careers within the past five years make up 37 percent of faculty who started teaching in the last five years. By comparison, just 21 percent of law faculty who have taught for more than 30 years identify as Hispanic or a race other than white.
And women—who comprised fewer than 10 percent of lawyers in 1980—now make up the majority of law school faculty. But unlike Hispanic and other nonwhite faculty members, who are most likely to be in tenure-track positions, fewer than half (42 percent) are tenure-track classroom faculty or deans.
However, female law professors do make up the majority (54 percent) of faculty who have earned tenure since 2010. When asked about the value of tenure, faculty members who were eligible for tenure and those from underrepresented groups were most likely to rank it more highly.
While the report noted that law schools hired an increasing number of faculty during the 2022–23 academic year, breaking into the world of legal teaching—a career some 74 percent of survey respondents described as satisfying—is still highly competitive.
Seventy-one percent of professors earned degrees from top law schools, but getting a prestigious law degree is increasingly not enough to land a teaching job. According to the report, 57 percent of faculty who got law degrees between 2010 and 2023 also have a master’s or doctoral degree.
Although the report demonstrates that the legal faculty is more diverse than ever, it’s not yet clear if—or to what extent—the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 decision to ban race-based affirmative action in college admissions could dry up that pipeline.
For now, affirmative action is “a huge topic of conversation in law school admissions and hiring,” said Kempner of AALS. “You have to get your J.D. before you can become a law professor. We’re monitoring these changes … It’s still to be seen what the implications of [affirmative action] will be for faculty hiring.”
But a paper published by the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law earlier this year offers some predictors. While the racial makeup of law students across the nation has become increasingly diverse since 1980 (law students who matriculated in 2023 were the most diverse class on record), that diversity declined by 20 percent in the states that had enacted affirmative action bans over the past 28 years. Black and Hispanic students saw the steepest drops.
And of course, before a student can apply to law school, they typically have to get a bachelor’s degree first. A database Inside Higher Ed compiled this fall showed that the racial diversity of undergraduates declined over all when it comes to Black and Hispanic enrollment in the first freshman class enrolled since the Supreme Court decision.
Experts and institutions caution that it’s still too early to draw definitive conclusions from the data.