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Women Law Professors

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Donna Fossum
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Abstract

Until recently, women were rarely found on the faculties of the nation's law schools. The few who were tended to teach at their alma maters and specialized in only a few subject areas. This article reports the extent to which women have become part of the tenure track faculties of the nation's law schools. The author finds that women have made considerable progress toward becoming tenure track law teachers. She finds, however, that women law professors continue to be academically inbred in disproportionate numbers and overrepresented in some subject areas.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Bar Foundation Research Journal , Volume 5 , Issue 4 , Fall 1980 , pp. 903 - 914
Copyright
Copyright © American Bar Foundation, 1980 

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References

1 Data came from the Association of American Law School, Directory of Teachers in Member Schools 1950–51 (St. Paul: West Publishing Co., 1950).Google Scholar

2 David Margolick & Jon Gelberg, 3,987 Partners; 85 Are Women, Nat'l L.J., Aug. 4, 1980, at 59, col. 2.Google Scholar

3 See Blaustein, Albert P. & Porter, Charles O., The American Lawyer: A Summary of the Survey of the Legal Profession (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954); James J. White, Women in Law, 65 Mich. L. Rev. 1051 (1967); Cynthia Fuchs Epstein, Women and Professional Careers: The Case of the Woman Lawyer (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1968).Google Scholar

4 It should not be inferred from the concomitant overrepresentation of women among the nation's law school librarians and their underrepresentation among the nation's tenure track law teachers in the 1950s and 1960s, that women librarians were necessarily “faculty quality” persons relegated to the library. It appears that the qualifications necessary to become law school librarians have, in general, been different from those required to become members of the tenure track teaching faculties, a fact which presumably explains why law school librarians as a group have never had the same status as teaching faculty. The fact remains, however, that prior to the late 1960s running a law school library was a permissible activity for women lawyers while teaching in a law school was apparently not.Google Scholar

5 Data on the percentage of women in the legal profession came from U.S., Department of Labor, Changes in Women's Occupations, 1940–50, Women's Bureau Bulletin No. 253, at 57 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1954).Google Scholar

6 Data came from the Directory of Teachers, supra note 1, which included only those law schools that were members of the American Association of Law Schools. During the 1950s and 1960s, there were a number of women on law school faculties in full-time, nonlibrarian, non-tenure-track teaching positions, many of whom were married to tenure track teachers at the same institutions. As a result of the antinepotism rules in effect at most institutions during this time, only one spouse was permitted to hold a tenure track position at an institution, which meant that in most cases the husband held the tenure track position and the wife held the non-tenure-track position.Google Scholar

7 Data on the percentage of women in the legal profession came from Census of Population: 1960, vol. 1, at 528–33 table 202 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1962). Data on the number of law professors came from the Directory of Law Teachers in American Bar Association Approved Law Schools 1960 (St. Paul: West Publishing Co., 1960), which included only those law schools that were approved by the ABA.Google Scholar

8 Exec. Order No. 11,375 (reprinted in [1967] U.S. Code Cong. & Ad. News 3519) amended Exec. Order No. 11,246 (reprinted in (1965) U.S. Code Cong. & Ad. News 4416).Google Scholar

9 Davidson, Kenneth M., Ruth B. Ginsburg, & Herma H. Kay, Text, Cases and Materials on Sex-based Discrimination 870 (St. Paul: West Publishing Co., 1971).Google Scholar

10 Data came from the Directory of Law Teachers: American Bar Association Approved Law Schools 1967 (St. Paul: West Publishing Co., 1967), which included only those law schools that were approved by the ABA.Google Scholar

11 Marwell, Gerald, Rachel Rosenfeld, & Seymour Spilerman, Geographic Constraints on Women's Careers in Academia, 205 Science 1225, 1230 (1979).Google Scholar

12 Id. Google Scholar

13 Id. Google Scholar

14 It is possible that geographic mobility patterns may have changed over time. When the possible effects of time were controlled, however, the differences in geographic mobility (or immobility) between men and women were found to be the same as when time factors were ignored.Google Scholar

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17 See Reece McGee, The Function of Institutional Inbreeding, 65 Am. J. Soc. 483 (1960); Lowell L. Hargens & Grant M. Farr, An Examination of Recent Hypotheses about Institutional Inbreeding, 78 Am. J. Soc. 1381 (1973); Peter M. Blau, The Organization of Academic Work (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1973).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

18 Hargens & Farr, supra note 17, at 1393. see also Hagstrom, Warren O., Inputs, Outputs, and the Prestige of University Science Departments, 44 Soc. Educ. 375 (1971); August B. Hollingshead, Ingroup Membership and Academic Selection, 3 Am. Soc. Rev. 826 (1938); Walter C. Eells & Austin C. Cleveland, The Effects of Inbreeding, 6 J. Higher Educ. 323 (1935); John H. McNeely, Faculty inbreeding in Land-Grant Colleges and Universities (Washington, D.C.: Office of Education, 1932); Floyd Reeves et al., The University Faculty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1933); Michael H. Miller, Academic Inbreeding in Nursing, 25 Nursing Outlook 172 (1977).Google Scholar

19 See Hargens & Farr, supra note 17, at 1395.Google Scholar

20 Id. at 1400.Google Scholar

21 Id. at 1397.Google Scholar

22 See McGee, supra note 17; Miller, supra note 18, at 173.Google Scholar

23 In some studies of academic inbreeding a distinction has been made between “true” inbreds, or those who accept positions at their alma maters immediately upon graduation, and “silver-corded” inbreds, or those who accept positions at their alma maters after having taught elsewhere. No such distinction was made in this study, however, as a result of the unusual nature of the field of law school teaching. Very few lawyers (only about 6 percent) who enter tenure track teaching do so immediately upon receiving their J.D. degrees. The overwhelming majority either clerk for judges and/or practice law before entering tenure track teaching. Consequently, most law teachers might be considered “silver-corded” inbreds for almost all had been employed elsewhere before accepting positions at their alma maters. This prior employment, however, was in a line of work other than tenure track teaching, so perhaps they were not really “silver-corded” inbreds after all. If the prior nonacademic employment of most law teachers were ignored, then only those who had held tenure track positions at another law school before accepting a similar position at their aha mater could be considered “silver-corded” inbreds and all the others would be “true” inbreds. Interinstitutional mobility in tenure track law teaching is remarkably low, however. Indeed, less than 10 percent of the law teachers who were considered academically inbred in this study had taught at more than one law school. Because of the difficulty of distinguishing between “true” and “silver-corded” inbreds among the nation's law teachers, it was decided that in this study that any law teacher who was teaching in 1975–76 at the same law school from which they had received their J.D. degree would be considered academically inbred.Google Scholar

24 This might have been a consequence of the fact that, in many law schools, the promotion from associate to full professor has essentially been automatic as compared to that from assistant to associate professor. That is, in virtually all law schools the normal progression is from assistant to associate to full professor with the most critical promotion decision occuring between the ranks of assistant to associate professor. In these schools, the promotion from associate to full professor is frequently a relatively automatic decision. In a handful of law schools either the rank of assistant or associate professor does not exist. In these schools the critical promotion decision occurs either between assistant and full professor (e.g., Harvard) or associate and full professor (e.g., Kansas). For purposes of analysis in this study, the promotion from assistant to full professor was treated as if it were from assistant to associate professor.Google Scholar

25 See note 3.Google Scholar

26 Edward O. Laumann & John P. Heinz, Specialization and Prestige in the Legal Profession: The Structure of Deference, 1977 A.B.F. Res. J. 155.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

27 The 28 substantive areas of law teaching were derived from the Association of American Law Schools' list of 92 courses that has been used for a number of years to prepare the Directory of Law Teachers. The 92 courses were collapsed into 28 using the classificatory schemes of the substantive areas of law developed by Donald W. Jackson & E. Gordon Gee, Bread and Butter?: Electives in American Legal Education (New York: Council on Legal Education for Professional Responsibility, 1975); Edward O. Laumann & John P. Heinz, Specialization and Prestige in the Legal Profession: The Structure of Deference, 1977 A.B.F. Res. J. 155; Ronald M. Pipkin, A Paper on Law School Curricula from the Law Student Activity Patterns Project (Draft 1977).Google Scholar

28 The areas of advanced civil procedure, antitrust, evidence, legal history/jurisprudence, torts, and urban/zoning law were disproportionately dominated by the more experienced teachers, and men were disproportionately represented among the more experienced law teachers. This fact contributed to but did not entirely account for the differences noted between men and women in these areas. In all other areas, the differences between men and women were unaffected by the length of time a person had been in tenure track law teaching. That is, the differences between men and women were similar among those who had been teaching only a short time and among those who had been teaching a long time.Google Scholar

29 Data came from the Directory of Law Teachers for 1967 through 1979, which included only those law schools that were approved by the ABA.Google Scholar