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Anyone want to become a law professor? Anyone?

The largest annual entry-level law school hiring event kicks off Friday in Washington, but the scene at the host hotel will likely be more subdued than the frenzied atmosphere from a decade earlier. The number of candidates vying to become doctrinal legal academics is about half what it was 10 years ago, a phenomenon observers attribute to an overall drop-off in law school hiring as well as an increase in the credentials schools seek in new professors.

At the same time, more law schools are hiring new faculty this year, according to the Association of American Law Schools, meaning it's something of a buyer's market for would-be profs. In fact, 111 law schools have advertised open positions this cycle, the highest number in at least four years. Last year, 90 schools posted available jobs in advance of the hiring conference.

The bulk of hiring for entry-level, tenure-track positions occurs at the AALS' Faculty Recruitment Conference, which takes place each October. Aspiring law professors submit a form on the association's Faculty Appointments Register (FAR) in hopes of being invited for 30-minute interviews with hiring committees at the conference. Candidates that pass that first hurdle are then invited to campus to deliver what is known as a job talk.

Just 334 people submitted FAR forms in the first distribution this year, down from 662 in 2010, according to data compiled by Sarah Lawsky, a professor at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law who tracks the law school hiring market at PrawfsBlawg. (There are two more FAR distributions annually, but the first is by far the largest and most closely watched. In total, 411 candidates have applied for positions so far, according to the AALS. That's a 50% decrease from nine years ago.)

"I don't think it's that nobody wants to be a law professor anymore," Lawsky said in an interview Thursday. "I think that people are accurately assessing what qualifications they need to have. My guess is that the marginal people who aren't applying now wouldn't have gotten jobs. Way more people apply than get jobs."

Those marginal candidates likely have a better sense that they don't have the qualifications to get hired, thus aren't bothering to throw their hat into the ring, she said.

Lawsky's data highlights the increasing importance of fellowships and doctorates in landing a law teaching job, credentials that weren't required back in 2006 when she was on the faculty market. Among the 82 new tenure-track professors hired in 2019, 78% had a fellowship on their resume and 66% had an advanced degree in addition to a law degree.

The AALS hiring conference has been much more empty in recent years, Lawsky added, in part because many campuses curtailed professor hiring amid the sustained downturn in enrollment that began in 2011. Schools hired 155 new professors that year, a number that sunk to a low of 62 in 2017. Lawsky's analysis of professor hiring shows that top-tier schools have largely maintained their faculty hiring numbers, while lower-tier schools pulled back dramatically. That makes sense considering that lower-tier schools experienced the biggest enrollment declines and that at least five have shut down altogether.

Meanwhile, the AALS this year launched a new website dedicated to helping aspiring law professors navigate the hiring process.

"The goal of the site is to make the process of obtaining a teaching job as transparent as possible, and to provide useful information to potential candidates," said association spokesman James Greif. "The website explains the faculty recruitment process, provides resources, and includes multimedia interviews with recently hired professors and directors of law school programs for aspiring faculty."

Despite the decline in available tenure-track positions in recent years, the corresponding falloff in job candidates means that the odds of landing a professor gig are roughly in line with what they were before the enrollment crisis. In 2011, 23% of candidates were hired. That fell to 12% in 2014, but ticked up to 24% in 2019, Lawsky's data show. She predicts that the percentage of successful candidates will be about the same during this hiring cycle. The number of law schools hiring at least one new tenure-track professor rose to 60 in 2019, up from a low of 42 in 2017.

"My sense is that we're in a new normal," Lawsky said. "My guess is that it's going to look a lot like last year."