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(excerpt from Fall 2005 Research in Brief)

Behind every great law school is a great faculty. But among the top schools, how does one manage to distinguish its stellar faculty from another?

When Northwestern Law's Strategic Planning Committee, in cooperation with Dean David E. Van Zandt, the faculty, students, and staff, drafted a comprehensive plan seven years ago for the Law School 's future, one of the five key investments they identified was the development and retention of a diverse and internationally-renowned faculty—one that would set Northwestern apart from the competition.

"Strategically, our obvious goal is to have the best faculty we can," Van Zandt says, "and I don't think we can do that by copying every other top law school's approach."

While schools have traditionally preferred hiring faculty who hold law degrees from prestigious universities and whose research analyzes doctrinal trends, Northwestern has adopted a new approach to hiring with an emphasis on faculty with strong methodological training and who engage in empirical research. The idea is to develop a "discipline-based faculty."

"The research faculty of the future law school will be composed largely of academics with a strong disciplinary training in one of the social sciences who are also well-trained lawyers with a strong grasp for the functioning of law and legal institutions," Van Zandt writes in "Discipline-Based Faculty" (Journal of Legal Education, September 2003).

Whereas traditional scholarship is more focused on arm-chair theoretical and normative internal evaluations of the importance of legal decisions, discipline-based scholarship draws on the methodological and theoretical tools of other disciplines to advance the understandings of law and legal institutions whether those understandings are normative or positive. Based on that research, legal scholars can contribute to the formation of public policy with respect to the law in a more informed manner.

The comparative advantage of interdisciplinary scholars over gifted practitioners, according to Van Zandt, is not in the area of traditional doctrinal analysis, but in their ability to apply strong disciplinary tools to investigations of law and legal institutions.

"More and more, faculty to be effective in contributing research have to go out and see the world and be empirical," he says. "They have to have a strong methodological foundation that they can bring to bear on legal problems, whether it's economics or psychology or some political science training to help them." The law school should be the place where well-trained academics of all types choose to work because they can collaborate with others who are both interested in questions about law and legal institutions and who fully understand the mechanics and operation of those institutions.

Northwestern Law has been at the forefront of the trend in hiring interdisciplinary and empirical scholars who, in most cases, not only have a JD degree but also a PhD.

In addition, the law faculties of the past were composed of intelligent generalists who believed that they could effectively analyze all areas of law, which was much simpler in the past. Today, however, law is composed of a large number of highly specialized areas, and Van Zandt believes it will be more difficult for faculty to be generalists. This also means that Northwestern must be more strategic about the research areas in which it invests.

"In one sense, we're trying to predict where academic research is going," Van Zandt says. "We want to be ahead of the curve or leading that edge, but we cannot try to have 'one of everything.'"

Each year, the Law School faculty appointments committees identify research areas the school would like to build on or that look promising within four general areas: (i) public law, (ii) litigation and criminal processes, (iii) property law, torts, environmental law, trusts and estates, and (iv) business and commercial law.

Recent faculty hires have exemplified the Law School 's focus on interdisciplinary scholarship. [see below]

"The academic study of law has for the last couple of decades relied more and more heavily on intersections with other disciplines," says Janice Nadler, professor of law and chair of the entry-level appointments committee. "In order for the research of our faculty to stay current, it's really to our advantage to have faculty who have training or strong interests in disciplines outside of law in addition to law."

The influx of interdisciplinary-focused faculty members has also prompted joint collaborations with some of the Law School 's more traditional, doctrinal scholars.

For example, Professors Max Schanzenbach and Robert Sitkoff joined forces to coauthor a breakthrough study using empirical data to analyze jurisdictional competition for trust funds.

Professor James Lindgren, a leading scholar in the growing movement of new legal empiricists with a background in sociology, recently teamed with Professor Steven Calabresi, a constitutional law expert, on a widely publicized proposal to set limits on Supreme Court justices' terms.

"Ideally what happens is that these two groups influence and learn from each other and both works improve," says Stephen Presser, Raoul Berger Professor of Legal History and a former chair of the appointments committee. "We're reaching a good point in which the traditionalists can talk to the interdisciplinary scholars, and no one has to feel defensive about it."

Though some academics still question the new strategy, they cannot deny the growing popularity of interdisciplinary hiring among law schools.

"If you want to look for more market validation, many of our hires have been poached by higher ranked schools," says Max Schanzenbach, a member of the entry-level appointments committee. "In fact last year we faced more competition [in entry-level hiring] because many of the people we went after, NYU, Stanford, etc. also went after."

As a result, the Law School 's hiring strategy has become in part a retention strategy as other schools have grown increasingly interested in seeking interdisciplinary scholars.

Northwestern Law faculty agree, however, that the Law School still has an edge on the competition having been a leader in promoting discipline-based scholarship.

"Candidates whom we recruit understand that we already have an established environment of interdisciplinary and empirical research," Nadler says, "so they know that if they were to come here they would have a lot of support, a lot of people to talk to, workshops of interest to them, people to collaborate with potentially. Thus, the most attractive candidates often see Northwestern as a place where their research and their approach to teaching will really flourish, where they will be well supported."

As added incentive, new Northwestern hires have flexible teaching loads and access to outside research funding during their first few years at the Law School.

"[The dean] was instrumental in securing grants from the Searle fund," Presser says. "As a result, for the first three years someone is a faculty member here, they get a lot of relief from teaching to find their sea legs with regard to scholarship, because that takes time. You need to form a scholarly agenda. No one used to even think about that stuff. Because we offer Searle grants, release time, and sabbaticals, people are better able to do that."

As the Law School continues to strategize ways to stay ahead of the competition and find balance between traditional and interdisciplinary scholarship, it is always with the ultimate goal in mind (as proposed in the Strategic Plan): to be the best place to foster brilliant and influential scholarship and to use the insights gained from that scholarship to prepare lawyers for a challenging, complex, and changing environment.

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