This article seeks to contribute to a growing debate within legal studies about the relationship between women, men and the ‘private life’ of the law school. Via an exploration of the economic, political and cultural shifts presently transforming understandings of what academic life entails, the article seeks to unpack the contours of the material and emotional economy in which (legal) academic labour now takes place. As a particular kind of knowledge worker within an increasingly corporatised university environment, a shift in the dominant gender configurations of higher education (marked notably, I suggest, by the rise of ‘entrepreneurial masculinities’) has itself resulted in a complex shift in the landscape of doctrinal and socio-legal legal scholarship, in the hierarchy of law schools more generally and in understandings of what a ‘successful’ legal academic career entails. Conclusions address the possible implications of these developments for legal academics seeking to re-negotiate a growing tension between ‘work/life’ commitments at a time of rapid change and uncertainty within academic life. Importantly, these are changes which, I argue, have a gendered dimension and are themselves playing out in some unpredictable and at times – for both women and men – frequently contradictory ways.
The Law School, the Market and the New Knowledge Economy