The Business Law Professorship
A professor of business law is held to the general academic obligations of teaching, conducting research, and performing service in the faculty and the community. These "general obligations of faculty" are discussed in the Faculty Handbook of the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto (scroll to 1.4.3). I provide some detail below.
TEACHING
Teaching responsibilities include a three-course load (three half-credit/one full-course per year) in normal times. For tenured faculty, according to the Faculty Handbook, section 51.4(b), these teaching responsibilities are to be "broadly interpreted, in view of the time available after research and scholarship activities and collegial and professional responsibilities of all kinds." For non-tenured faculty (by which I mean tenure-track faculty), the teaching load may be reduced to 2 or 2.5 full courses per year depending upon experience.
These teaching obligations may be supplemented by teaching outside of the regular academic year, the Professional Development Program, as well as additional undergraduate classes. For a senior tenure-track faculty member, having completed a degree in a relevant graduate program, they also have an opportunity to teach graduate students at the master’s and doctoral levels.
Normally, faculty are not expected to supervise 20 first-year students in a class if they teach property law. Some professors would never have undergraduates in their classrooms. For a business law professor, however, first year undergraduate classes are often the largest classes in the Faculty of Law. Professors often teach those courses despite the teaching pressures on them. Those first-year classes have small sections that are taught by the professor or co-taught for one-third of the class size or to smaller groups by sessional or CLT employees. As a result, a business law professor will often teach 200 students in one section and another 100 students in a small section (or two) that is taught by a sessional or CLT employee. Those 300 students are then divided into 28 tutorial groups (a maximum of 10-12) that are each led by upper-year law students. Each tutorial group may meet twice a week for 45 minutes , with tutorial materials assigned in advance by the professor who lectures.
RESEARCH
For most business law professors, they are actively engaged in research and publishing. Their own works may be supported by a research assistant funded by a charitable foundation, a university grant, or through internal funding in the Faculty of Law. Some professors have access to a significant research budget.
And there are various internal and external bodies that offer various types of grants, including SSHRC, to provide modest support for significant research projects. Grants from the Canada Council for the Arts or the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council have been available in the past for research at $7,000 or $15,000 or more. There are also opportunities for funding for law research, such as the Faculty’s Centre for Innovation in Business Law.
SERVICE
Most business law professors are actively engaged in service for the Faculty, the Faculty of Arts & Science at the University of Toronto, the Faculty of Law, University of Toronto, and the Courts or other public policy organization.
Our business law professors (like all Faculty members) chair or serve on various internal committees including curriculum committees, scholarships, awards, and various ad-hoc committees.
Faculty are also involved in research institutes.
Outside of the University, the more limited service commitments are to various bar associations, Institute of Law Clerks of Ontario, or to non-profit or public organizations.
A business law professor may devote considerable time to the Senate of the University, the Law Society of Ontario, or to the Court by serving on various committees or as a puisne judge. Service to legal and bar journals also takes a significant amount of time (but can be a lot of fun).
The service commitments of law professors are considerable.
Keep in mind that all of this academic service is on a voluntary basis. Professors are actively engaged in service to their Faculty and University, as well as to their profession. Their service is a low-cost and sometimes no-cost way to provide significant benefits to their Faculty and University.
Requirements for Business Law Professors
Most business law professors have earned their law degrees, and many have advanced law degrees in fields related to business law. They are likely to have focused their professional experience on practicing a specialty in business law, such as commercial litigation, intellectual property, or federal taxation. From their own experience, they shape their classrooms and scholarship to instill in their students a broad understanding of the principles of business law combined with some depth of practical knowledge in particular areas.
Regardless of their practice specialties or research interests, most professors possess a breadth of understanding about the profession that students learn in the classroom. Some professors are former leaders in their practice areas. Others have devoted their professional lives to public service. All have spent years developing expertise in their fields while they have taught classes and written both professionally and academically.
Prospects for Business Law Professors
The market for business law professors is strong relative to the legal job market as a whole, and has remained so for quite some time. Law school hiring trends support this conclusion as well. In 2011, for example, the rate of lawyers hired by law schools nationwide was 8.9%. In 2012, the rate was 9.2%, and in 2013, the rate increased to 11.3%, indicating that 1 out of 9 law school deans hired an employed lawyer to teach advanced subjects. Although these figures are nationally based, we have found similar trends in hiring trends at law schools in the southeast and at other schools with business law-related programs.
Business law professors can be employed at various levels of education. The vast majority of business law professors teach in law schools. There are also schools that are not ABA-accredited law schools where business law professors may teach such as the following:
Business law professors teach a wide variety of courses including business associations, contracts, commercial law, intellectual property, bankruptcy and related courses. Some business law professors are also asked to teach other subjects to meet business school requirements or the law school requirement of faculty diversity.
With this information in mind it becomes clear that the outlook for business law professors is favorable and on the upswing, particularly in light of the growing demand for business law school courses such as intellectual property, contracts and commercial law.
Schools Hiring Business Law Professors
The following are just a few of the more well-known universities and colleges which hire business law professors to teach at various levels:
Yeshiva University, Cardozo School of Law
Cardozo boasts a comprehensive law program of more than 80 courses and a diverse group of 44 faculty members. Their curriculum has been featured in Academic Analysis of Law Teaching in US Law Schools (1999) and provides students with general, focused or interdisciplinary skill sets.
University of California, Berkeley, School of Law
Berkeley Law offers a uniquely diverse set of courses, with a specific emphasis on international law and international legal institutions. Berkeley boasts a 6:1 student-to-faculty ratio for its 900-person student body.
Widener University, Delaware Law School
Widener’s faculty is known for its accessibility and for providing a high standard of knowledge and experience. Widener also offers research opportunities in environmental law, coastal law, and international law.
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey – Camden, School of Law
Rutger’s 11:1 student-to-faculty ratio is smaller than most law schools in the area and encourages close relationships with professors. They offer many unique and interdisciplinary law courses in areas such as business law and technology.
New York University – Stern School of Business
Stern has been ranked the top business school in New York for master’s students and fourth overall in the nation for undergraduate programs. Their JD-MBA Program offers an interdisciplinary business and legal education emphasized by New York City’s global business center.
Boston University – School of Law
BU is notable for its access to the greater Boston area. It offers a number of joint degree programs, including a JD-MBA program. Students can also specialize through courses offered in its International Graduate Program, with concentrations in civil and commercial law.
How to Become a Business Law Professor
One way to improve the chances of being considered for a tenure-track position is to teach as an adjunct. Some schools allow adjuncts to teach a course more than once, thereby creating the opportunity to receive a letter of recommendation for an assistant professor position at that school. This is essential. If you teach only once as an adjunct and receive a stellar letter, a school may view the letter as biased.
Ideally, you should teach at some of the top schools in the country. If you attend a top-ranked school (like Harvard, Yale, or Chicago), those schools will be familiar with your work product. If, however, you do not attend a top school, or are an institutionally relatively unknown scholar, it is important to have a national affiliate to make certain your work is well known. An adjunct position at a non-elite school will not accomplish this, while an adjunct position at a top school like Yale would. As Yale is not likely to allow an adjunct from another school to have anything other than a one-semester period as an adjunct, this would require the strategy of the adjunct teaching as many courses as possible in a one-semester period , or adjuncting at schools of varying prestige while still a student. Neither alternative is ideal. Furthermore, many top schools will not consider your application without a traditional pedigree. It will be difficult to get an adjunct position in the first place without an offer to do a fellowship or clerkship, unless you currently teach at an elite school or are a high-ranking judge.
While teaching, it is also vital to increase your scholarship, ideally by broadening the nature of that scholarship. This includes expanding the topics on which you write. Doing so will greatly enhance a career-long reputation, and will enable you to regularly submit articles to publications you otherwise could not.
Finally, to improve the chances of being secured an offer, one must spend as much time as possible getting to know faculty members and the hiring committee. Schmoozing is key, and if one can convince a faculty member to write a recommendation letter, or even better, be an advocate on the hiring committee, that is ideal. It will go better for a candidate to have a faculty member advocate his candidacy than to rely on scholarship alone.
Remuneration and Milestones
In terms of salary, business law professors generally earn competitive compensation for their expertise and teaching abilities. When starting out, they can expect to earn anywhere from $60,000 to $90,000 per year, though this figure is subject to change depending on factors like geographic location, years of experience and the type of college or university with which a business law professor is employed. For example, business law professors at institutions in larger metropolitan areas may earn more than those in rural locations, who may enjoy a lower cost of living.
Career advancement for business law professors may hold different meanings at colleges, universities, and community colleges. Business law professors are often hired as associate professors or assistant professors and can earn as much as $120,000 to $150,000 annually at top tier institutions.
The road to the top tier has been well charted in previous decades, and the path to becoming a full professor, which often includes broader responsibilities and much higher salaries, is generally well-established by hiring institutions. Assistant professors who followed this rut took several years to ascend to the ranks of full professors. Changes in university structure, mission, and economic pressures have made determined movers and shakers able to shortcut the bumps and ruts expected in the older professional structure.
Equally important is an increased willingness by community colleges to hire people knowledgeable about business law. These positions have the potential for significant advancement as well. These positions also pay less, and seats are harder to find. But the relative newness of these positions should provide both opportunity and challenge to the collegial environment. The professors appointed will receive ample opportunity to make their mark and provide much-needed insight into the world of business law.
The Influence of Technology on Business Law Teaching
Technology has become an integral component of law school education, including in the business law area. Law students now receive their reading assignments and supplementary materials via online platforms. They engage with each other and the professors through social media forums that serve as discussion boards for each class. The law school curriculum is now available in digital format. Technology has enabled law professors to prepare to offer their courses in a fully online mode, either synchronously or asynchronously.
These advancements have sparked innovation in pedagogical approaches to the subject matter, including game-based platforms and a range of digital tools to increase interactivity between the student and the material. For example, a recent edition of Business Associations: Cases and Problems, fifth edition, uses an online casebook platform to create a dynamic version of the book, where students may view caselaw excerpts, videos , and pre- or post-case questions directly in the digital text. The use of technology in this way has been embraced by asynchronous distance learning graduate curricula at both the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Florida Levin College of Law.
Technological innovations in the classroom extend beyond the use of platforms designed directly for interactions in the classroom. Electronic legal research is now the norm, and its use is implemented in classes where research skills are part of the overall learning objectives. Online resources such as LexisNexis and Westlaw allow for maximum efficiency in tracking changes in the law and capture citations, which can be built into a legal database from which the student can derive their own rationale and information on a specific issue or an entire area of the law. Audiovisual resources such as podcasts bring changes to updates and revisions in the field practically into the classroom.