Each year, academics move from institutions with modest reputations to those with higher standing. Yet for the lateral market to survive, universities must keep playing the game: recruit skilled movers, hoping they bolster the school’s prestige before they transition to even more attractive opportunities elsewhere.
A useful gauge of this market is to study the history of a brand-new law school that built its faculty from scratch. Over the last twenty-five years, the American Bar Association has granted provisional accreditation to roughly twenty law schools. Only three of those have managed to crack the top 100 of the U.S. News rankings. Last year, FIU sat at #77 and Drexel at #82. UC Irvine, founded in 2007, stands out as an exception. The new public institution has hovered in the #20–#40 range for much of the last decade. Much of the credit goes to Founding Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. Even after Chemerinsky moved on to Berkeley in 2017, the rankings have remained comparatively stable.
Starting with a clean slate, Irvine assembled a faculty through a combination of entry-level hires and lateral moves. I thought it would be instructive to examine the pattern of its lateral hires and departures across the past twenty years. I owe a debt to Brian Leiter and Dan Filler, who have tracked these movements since 2006. Numerous posts on the Faculty Lounge, Concurring Opinions, and Leiter Reports are now archived in the Internet Archive.
I present the raw data below the jump. What follows are some broader takeaways about the market for lateral hires. I don’t claim these patterns are unique to Irvine, but that institution serves as a useful benchmark precisely because its timeline is so recent. All the figures I cite are provisional. If you spot any mistakes, please let me know.
From 2008 through 2026, Irvine witnessed roughly 40 lateral hires (including two deans).
Over the same span, sixteen of those forty movers eventually left. Below I list the year they joined and the year they departed.
- Erwin Chemerinsky (Hired in 2008, moved to Berkeley in 2017)
- Catherine Fisk (Hired in 2008, moved to Berkeley in 2017)
- Jennifer Chacon (Hired in 2009, moved to UCLA in 2018)
- Christopher Tomlins (Hired in 2009, moved to Berkeley in 2018)
- Olufunmilayo Arewa (Hired in 2009, moved to Temple University in 2014)
- Rick Hasen (Hired in 2011, moved to UCLA in 2022)
- Douglas NeJaime (Hired in 2013, moved to UCLA in 2015)
- Michele B. Goodwin (Hired in 2014, moved to Georgetown in 2023)
- Gregory Shaffer (Hired in 2014, moved to Georgetown in 2023)
- Sarah Lawsky (Hired in 2010, moved to Northwestern in 2016)
- Alexandra Natapoff (Hired in 2017, moved to Harvard in 2020)
- David S. Law (Hired in 2019, moved to Virginia in 2020)
- Rachel Moran (Hired in 2019, moved to Texas A&M in 2023)
- Aziza Ahmed (Hired in 2021, moved to Boston University in 2022)
- Jamelia Morgan (Hired in 2021, moved to Northwestern in 2022)
- Courtney Cahill (Hired in 2022, moved to USC in 2026)
In most instances, the mover shifted to a school with a higher ranking. On average, a lateral hire who left Irvine stayed for about six years.
I exclude two faculty members (L. Song Richardson and Mario Barnes) who left Irvine for administrative roles and subsequently returned, as well as Katie Porter, who left to serve in the House and later returned to the faculty. Those moves don’t fit the conventional notion of a lateral transition.
At least four of the lateral hires seem to have taken emeritus status: Bryant Garth, Kaaryn Gustafson, Robert Solomon, and Grace Tonner. As far as I can tell, sixteen recruited laterals continue to teach full-time at Irvine: Christopher Leslie, Tony Reese, Mario Barnes, Katherine Porter, Sameer Ashar, Kenneth W. Simons, Victor Fleischer, Ji Li, Austen Parrish (dean), Veena Dubal, Kevin Haeberle, Ari Waldman, Robert S. Chang, Andrew Gold, Trevor G. Reed, and Charles Tyler.
If the numbers are correct, out of forty lateral hires, twenty-four stayed on, while sixteen departed. The turnover rate for hired laterals sits around 40%. Put differently, the retention rate is about 60%, though that figure is imperfect because some professors took emeritus or retired status and were no longer actively on the move.
Moreover, my tally shows four externally recruited faculty who lateraled out of Irvine: Alejandro Camacho (to UCLA), Seth Davis (to Berkeley), Jonathan Glater (to Berkeley), and Leah Litman (to Michigan). If you include these departures, Irvine’s retention rate declines further.
Ideally, a law school would hire far more through the lateral route than it loses through departures. Institutions that recruit scholars ought to be able to keep them. In practice, the reality is messier. Professors who lateral to one school are often recruited elsewhere. In fact, one could view it as a positive that a university recruits and develops scholars who later move on. More realistically, the number of lateral hires should roughly balance the number of lateral departures to keep faculty at parity: for every insider who leaves, another should be brought in. At Irvine, the flow of hires and departures is fairly close to parity. I’m not sure how Irvine’s retention compares with other schools; that’s something I might examine in the future.
Still, even with these caveats, maintaining a law school’s reputation hinges on balancing lateral inflows and outflows. If departures outpace replacements, a school’s standing could erode. The public might then question why a significant portion of its faculty is moving away. A common response is that new talent can be attracted through entry-level recruiting. Yet the entry-level market can be volatile, and junior scholars can take many years to mature; and once those junior scholars become prominent, they become attractive targets for higher-ranked institutions. Keeping home-grown talent is difficult unless the school increases compensation or the professor has a personal reason to stay.
Another consideration is cost. Lateral moves frequently involve substantial financial incentives to persuade a professor to relocate their family. Retention bonuses are common, but once those terms expire, a move to a higher-paying institution becomes more likely. And this phenomenon recurs with disheartening regularity.
I welcome comments, feedback, and corrections.
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