How do lawyers become law professors?
By building a file and entering the market that hires for it: this guide walks the blocks — the JD, a clerkship, published scholarship, fellowships or visiting appointments — and the market itself, where entry-level tenure-track hiring runs, per AALS, mostly through its Faculty Appointment Services.
Below is the route: the credentials, the AALS process, the clinical and legal writing tracks, and what our research could and could not confirm about odds and timing.
Typical credentials: JD, clerkship, publications, VAP or fellowship
Law teaching candidacies are files, and a typical file is built from four blocks: the degree, the clerkship, the publications, and the fellowship or visiting appointment.
Our research did not capture how hiring committees weigh them, so read them as the usual ingredients rather than a checklist.
The JD comes first.
It is the degree the attorney career path runs on, and it is where this file starts.
What you produce along the way — seminar papers, a journal note, a research assistantship — becomes the earliest pages of the file.
The clerkship is the block with a calendar of its own.
Federal clerkship hiring for current students runs on the judiciary's Federal Law Clerk Hiring Plan, whose dates cover students with two full years of grades — and whose dates do not apply to law graduates, whom judges may hire on their own schedule.
On a teaching file a clerkship reads as what it is: a stretch of legal research and writing done to a judge's standard.
Our guide to clerkships covers how the selection process works.
Publications are the block you can start on your own.
An article in a law journal gives the market something to read, cite and argue with, and the writing can begin without waiting on anyone — though placement still depends on a journal's editors accepting the piece.
The lead time is whatever the writing needs: work that holds up takes as long as it takes.
Fellowships and visiting assistant professor (VAP) appointments round out the file.
They are law-school appointments, and what each one actually includes — writing time, teaching load, research support — is set by the school.
Read each posting for what it includes rather than for a template.
The AALS faculty recruitment process
Entry-level hiring for the tenure-track market has a center, and the center is the Association of American Law Schools (AALS).
Its own description of Faculty Appointment Services is that it is "the hub through which most entry-level hiring for tenure-track faculty positions at law schools is conducted."
For a candidate, the concentration is the practical news.
Entry-level in this market means entry into teaching — but our research did not capture how schools weigh years in practice against the rest of the file, so we will not guess at that.
What the hub structure does mean is that this market is concentrated rather than scattered.
We also could not confirm how a candidate's materials move through the hub, so confirm those mechanics with AALS — and make the file you bring genuinely strong, able to hold up against a skeptical read.
Our research gap: the FAR's current dates and fees
Clinical, legal writing and adjunct tracks
The tenure-track doctrinal seat is the job people picture, but AALS describes three broad categories of law teaching jobs: tenure-track (doctrinal), clinical, and legal research and writing.
Clinical faculty teach in a law school's clinic — the live-client side of the building, where students work real matters under faculty supervision.
Legal research and writing faculty teach the courses where students learn to write like lawyers.
AALS notes that some clinical and writing jobs do not require scholarship, which is a real distinction if you would rather teach than produce articles.
Adjunct teaching sits beside those categories rather than inside them: a practicing lawyer teaches a course while keeping the practice.
Which courses a school needs, and on what terms, is each school's own call — so start from the school's own postings.
For an attorney curious about teaching, it is the smallest reversible experiment.
And if the question underneath is whether the work is worth the market: AALS cites a fall 2024 study finding 74% of law faculty satisfied or very satisfied with their current positions.
How long it takes and the odds
The honest part first: our research did not surface verified selection rates or a verified timeline for entry-level law teaching, and we will not invent either.
What can be described is the typical shape of the route, and that shape is sequential.
The JD comes first, a clerkship or fellowship follows it, and publications accrete over however long it takes to write something a law journal accepts.
Each block is slow because each one is a yes somebody has to give — a judge, a journal's editors — and those yeses run on calendars of their own.
The odds are a different kind of number, and nobody should quote you one without a source.
What can be said is what the market is organized around — entry-level tenure-track hiring conducted mostly through AALS Faculty Appointment Services, three categories of teaching jobs, and a clinical and legal writing track where some jobs do not require scholarship.
Those are the levers a candidacy turns on: the file, the category, and the cycle timing you confirm with AALS itself.
Two things are worth doing while you decide.
Write toward one publishable piece rather than toward a count of publications.
And bank teaching evidence where it already exists in your week — trainings you run, sessions you lead, juniors you supervise — so the file holds more than a transcript when you are ready.
Where to find attorney jobs
Teaching is one exit among many from practice.
If you are weighing the academic route against staying in the market, start from what is open right now: browse attorney jobs on LawFirmHires, then step back through the attorney careers hub to see the rest of the map before you commit a season to a fellowship application.