Harvard Law School

HappyAlumnus
Wed, 28 Sep 2016 00:37:03 +0000

Demosthenes:

Since the only source that you use for your posts is Internet “scattergrams” and similar materials, rather than first-hand or other real-world experience, it’s no surprise that you haven’t seen any evidence that HLS hires its own graduates into teaching positions.

First, look at the Harvard faculty. (Their bios are available on the Internet so you should have access to that information.) Where did a large portion of them go to law school? HLS. They are generally hired after they’ve been out of school for at least a few years, and often after they’ve taught at other law schools, but some start out at HLS.

One of my law school friends is a professor there now and he’s been at HLS ever since graduation. Like many of the people who stay at HLS as soon as they graduate, I believe that he started out teaching clinicals and non-traditional law classes but now he is a full-time, tenured professor; other classmates of mine were given offers to stay on campus and assist professors and teach classes both at HLS and Harvard College (which at the time had a strong “history of law” class for undergrads, and which one of them would have helped teach).

Other HLS alumni who stay at HLS have terminal degrees in other fields and are eligible to teach that way. There is at least one current HBS professor who was a classmate of mine and who stayed at HLS after graduation with that background. I had several classmates who helped teach classes at Harvard College during our law school days, due to prior degrees in those fields, and they were also given opportunities to stay and teach, often in some program that involved both HLS and Harvard College.

Second, do you really think that someone who gets into a school like Harvard and graduates cannot find any job whatsoever upon graduation? Perhaps some people have jobs rescinded shortly before graduation due to their firms going under, or some people may decide not to go with the job that they had lined up, but those situations are few and far between and are fixable; it’s certainly not that the person can’t get a job.

Plenty of people go to HLS with the intent of ending up in academia, and staying at HLS after graduation, even in a “school-funded” job, is one way to build that kind of career.

Of course, since that information isn’t easily compacted into an Internet “scattergram”, you wouldn’t know it.

And where did you go to law school?