Educational Background and Stratification in the Legal Academy: Invasion of the Body Snatchers… or More of the Same?

*Abstract*: Since the 1960s, law schools have seen an influx of faculty with graduate training and research presences in fields outside the law – primarily in the social sciences, statistics, and the humanities, but also in biology and medicine – which has brought “interdisciplinarity” into law schools, in the form of scholarship under the banners of “law and [ ]” or “critical [ ] studies.” As their names suggest, these lines of inquiry either seek to extend traditional legal scholarship with complementary insights from external disciplines or else seek to question (if not overturn) traditional legal scholarship based on such insights. The rise of interdisciplinarity has been discussed in depth, with some scholars arguing that the rise of interdisciplinarity has strengthened the legal academy by broadening legal curricula and legal scholarship beyond traditional disciplinary law, while others aver that the rise of interdisciplinarity has reduced the autonomy of law in the university by introducing “alien” ideologies and practices. To trace this phenomenon, we use data-science methods to gather and analyze “big data” on the educational backgrounds of all faculty who held tenured and tenure-track positions in all accredited law schools in the United States in the 2011-12 academic year. Our analysis reveals a persistent increase in law-school faculty with PhDs, but most of those are faculty with both PhDs and JDs. This suggests that law schools have not been invaded by PhD-toting “pod people” importing alien values and practices from the arts and sciences Rather than reducing the autonomy of the law, the influx of PhD-trained faculty is more likely to be promoting an intellectual culture and academic practices that are a hybrid of the traditional legal academy and the arts and sciences, which involves taking only selected external elements and adapting them to fit traditional law-school culture and practices, rather than adopting them wholesale to replace traditional law-school culture and practices. Such hybridization would yield more of (almost) the same culture and practices. Our analysis also reveals that although PhD-trained faculty are concentrated in the most prestigious law schools, the influx of PhD-trained faculty has trickled down the ranks to many less prestigious schools. This suggests that PhD credentials have become an important axis of competition in the law school market, in which prospective law professors increasingly accumulate advanced degrees to compete for law-school positions, and law schools increasingly hire candidates with multiple advanced degrees to compete in prestige and media rankings. Finally, our analysis shows that male law professors are far more likely than their female counterparts to hold PhDs, but male professors are also far more likely than their female counterparts to be employed by top-tier law schools when they do not hold PhDs. The gender gap in the stratification of law faculty across the law-school prestige hierarchy indicates that even though the training of legal academics has changed, patterns of inequality in achievement have persisted.