After the initial shock of years of layoffs in law firms, and after years of law students in a panic over the dwindling job pool, one of the groups that has long had some of the best job security in the legal profession is now the target of layoffs: law professors. After several years of low enrollment and angry students with no summer or permanent jobs, law schools are buckling under the pressure and laying off their faculty. Some law schools are, like law firms did with associates, letting their junior, untenured faculty go. What’s even more groundbreaking is that some law schools have been discussing the removal of tenured faculty, and now a debate about the future of tenure has emerged.
The American Bar Association is reconsidering whether the promise of tenure to most faculty members should be a factor in a law school’s accreditation. The ABA has proposed two alternatives to tenure as an accreditation requirement. One would require schools to show that they have an alternate form of job security in place for full time faculty, including clinical professors and legal writing instructors. The other alternative would require no job security, but would otherwise ask schools to show that they have policies in place to maintain competent faculty members and preserve academic freedom.
