Hundreds of would-be law professors arrived last weekend at the Marriott Wardman Park in Washington, dressed in conservative suits and clutching résumés and copies of the academic articles they had painstakingly researched. They were expected to mill around nervously in the cavernous hotel lobby as they awaited their 25-minute interviews with law school hiring committees, which was the centerpiece of the Association of American Law Schools Faculty Recruitment Conferencethe “law school meat market” to those in the know.
The conference happens every October, but it was unlikely to prove business as usual this time around. Legal educators predicted that entry-level faculty gigs would be especially hard to come by, given the dramatically reduced entering class sizes at many schools and uncertainty about the future.
