Arc of Career Program

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Session Type: AALS Arc of Career Programs

Session Capacity: 160

Location: New York Hilton Midtown

Room: Gramercy East

Floor: Second Floor

When law professors who are not on the tenure track are institutionally marginalized by non-existent or reduced contracts, lack of voting rights, and noncompetitive salaries, the Arc of the Career becomes distorted. The non-tenured, tenuously contracted or non-contracted professor spins in a whirling dervish to achieve professional success in the face of a potentially meaningless result. We work diligently to improve and update our courses, participate in national legal education associations, run conferences, give talks, write papers, blog online, counsel students, provide both public service and service within our law schools, and obtain book contracts. Nonetheless, we are confined to a status restricting us and holding us back from having the freedom to fully advance in our professional careers. For such members of the academy, there is no arc, as we are prevented from reaching the peak or, alternatively, we reach the peak only to find it is a cliff rather than the anticipated slow, gentle descent.