I hate to raise this again given the response last time I raised a similar comment on blogging and legal scholarship, but if indeed there is a correlation between blogging and SSRN downloads, might that not also translate to a correlation between blogging and citation count for the relevant professor? Others have argued that because blog posts are not counted in citation rankings, they do not likely affect citation counts, but I have suspected there is at least an indirect correlation ie bloggers are able to promote their ideas more readily to a wider audience which leads to wider reading (and likely also citation) of their scholarly papers?

Ralph, it's interesting that you raise this because I had similar thoughts when asked to do a 'goal setting' exercise for my beginning kindergartner. (And I could do a whole blog post on why we want 5 year olds to set academic goals!!!) But it did get me to thinking about what we are doing with entering law students, and even students in their second and third years, in terms of identifying their most pressing needs and helping them achieve their goals. (I assume that potty training as a goal should be taken care of before a student commences law school.)

That makes a lot of sense and it does seem a good way to encourage more introverted students to add their thoughts more freely than they might in a more open discussion.

Interesting that Melbourne had the opposite experience to us - although I can only speak for my own classes. I haven't done a broader survey here. Emily makes some good points. We tried to emulate the time period as well as possible by having most students fill in the online evaluations in class on the day we would have used for the paper evaluations, but by the time I ask them to do it in class a lot have already done it online or said they planned to do it later - so that may skew the results as you suggest.

Welcome, Ralph! Looking forward to your posts.

Yes, that's a great suggestion CBR. I read that when it first came out (late last year?) and am looking forward to the sequel.

I know this is showing my ignorance, but I thought "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" was a short story. Was it a full novel? Was "Minority Report" better than the book? I haven't read that one either.

Have to agree with you there, TS. FWIW, I have heard more success stories in recent years of people just contacting schools directly themselves and getting interviews and appointments, without doing the whole 'play it coy' game.

Thanks, Jessica. Those are great suggestions. I should also note that of the people I know who have put their names in the FAR book as laterals, most if not all of them have told their schools that they are doing it. It is definitely not something your school should find out for the first time when their appointments committee peruses the book. The cases I know of are people who want to, say, relocate to or from a particular geographical region, or who are perhaps having issues with their current schools that are generally known within the school eg concerns about tenure potentially etc.

Thanks, Paul. That is an excellent article and I should have thought of mentioning it. And Emily that's a good question too ie how to lateral from outside the U.S. I don't think there's any one great way to do it and my experiences are woefully out of date. That said, I did what a number of foreign law profs do, and ultimately decided to put my name in the AALS register and come over here as an entry level candidate. It's the easiest way to get U.S. law schools to consider your candidacy because it's very low cost/low risk for them to just meet you at the meat market and decide if they want to pursue things further with you. The more difficult thing is to figure out how to get credit for work done overseas or if indeed any credit is possible. I started as a pure entry level and did the whole tenure track at CWRU despite having been a fully tenured mid-level faculty member in Britain. This had both upsides and downsides. The downside is that the tenure track can be pretty stressful and it's kinda mystifying for those of us with no experiences in U.S. law schools at all. The upside is that if you do all or at least some of the tenure track in a U.S. law school you really get a sense of how it works and it proves quite helpful later on if you sit on P&T committees or appointments committees because you really understand what is expected of tenure track folks within your institution. I get the feeling (again purely anecdotally) that U.S law schools are perhaps more willing than they were to look at overseas candidates. Once you have one foreign lawyer on your faculty and potentially on your appointments committee, that person can often give some guidance as to how to read and interpret the credentials of other foreign lawyers - at least that was a role I sometimes played on appointments committees at CWRU. And with more international exchange going on, there's probably more U.S. trained profs who are now better at reading and evaluating the credentials of foreign lawyers. I'm at more of a loss to know how to lateral with tenure from another country. I know a small handful of folks who have done it, but they have generally had previous long term connections with the schools they ended up at e.g. through visits, conferences etc. And they still have to have written something that 'counts' for U.S. tenure purposes. Unfortunately, many schools in the U.S. are pretty limited/restricted about what they count in terms of overseas work. I'd be interested in others' experiences because mine are pretty limited and out of date. And thanks again for asking the question, Emily. I wish I had better answers for you.

Anon - I think the claim was that women are over-represented in admin work, not that they're better than men at it. But I agree the wording in the post looks ambiguous. There are lots of statistics out there re women and minorities being over-represented on committees in particular, the idea being that the committee is not 'representative' of the faculty if there aren't women or minorities on the committee, but of course there are less in the profession overall so the burden falls disproportionately on them. Certainly, the ABA and AALS have done a lot of work on this and there are statistics available - I think you could get a fair amount of detail from the AALS committees on women and minorities. They do regular studies on these issues, and present regularly at annual meetings on these issues. I also agree that sometimes it's difficult for white male candidates when law school appointments committees are being pressured to focus on diversity, and it's a very difficult balance to strike ie to find the best candidates, and ensure fairness to all applicants. It is illegal to discriminate in either direction, but different hiring committees face different pressures from the university, and the accreditation bodies from year to year. I don't think that white males will be grossly underrepresented in legal academia in the future. I've seen no evidence that the problem is as stark as you suggest and I've had a lot of experience on appointments committees over the years. My own school has hired more white males than women and minorities in recent years, and I'm sure we're not alone.

In what way is it sexist, anon? As there are less women in academia than men statistically, women do tend to be over-represented on committees etc which takes up more of their time and generally isn't weighted as highly in promotion and tenure decisions. (This is the same for minorities.) So if women spend more time doing things that are less valued and have less time to spend on things that are more valued, why is it a sexist claim? It might be a sexist claim if you interpreted it as asserting that women were better teachers or administrators than men - I haven't seen any evidence that such a claim would be true - but I don't think that's what's being said here. I think the claim is that women spend more time than men on things that are less heavily weighted in salary and promotion decisions. And this isn't a novel claim at all. This point has been made before with respect to both women and minorities.