A Place in the Academy: Law Faculty Hiring and Socioeconomic Bias

Authors

Michael J. Higdon

Document Type

Article

Abstract

(Excerpt)

Specifically, as this Article discusses, the students who attend top-tier law schools are overwhelmingly representative of the elite socioeconomic class—often times as a result of merely being born to parents who were also a member of that class.15 As such, hiring faculty members from primarily those ranks undermines a law school’s ability to achieve socioeconomic diversity on its faculty and instead helps perpetuate a class-based monopoly within the legal academy to the detriment of all involved. Given this danger, I propose that academic pedigree simply be one of many factors that a faculty takes into account when deciding who, like them, may enjoy a place in the legal academy “hot spring.”