A new article–Eric Martinez & Kevin Tobia, What Do Law Professors Believe About Law and the Legal Academy?, 112 Geo. L.J. 111 (2023)–looks at, among other things, what law professors feel are central areas of study and what areas law professors feel should be central areas of study. Among all areas, Poverty Law had the third most people who believed it should be more central than it was currently. Why does this matter? As Martinez and Tobia explain, “law professors by and large rated areas such as Native
American law and poverty law—as well as areas such as natural resources, regulated industries, legislation, energy law, and consumer law—as signifcantly less central to the legal academy than they should be plausibly provides weight in favor of the view that these areas should be more central moving forward.”
Personally, I am somewhat doubtful that Poverty Law will scroll up high enough in the priority lists of appointments committees for schools to actively recruit and hire for Poverty Law. And my impression, only anecdotal and too personal I know but based on the fact that while schools often ask me to write tenure letters I am almost never asked to identify who would be a good “poverty law hire”, is that schools haven’t really been in the hire for poverty law mode. They will hire people who do poverty law but as a secondary matter to other interests or in connection with work done in a more major field like Property, Civil Procedure, or even CRT. I don’t see this changing but perhaps I am wrong. In the last few years there have been a number of schools who have prioritized hiring people who specialize in Indian law, and with a somewhat limited number of Native academics that has meant a fair number of lateral offers. Hopefully Martinez and Tobia’s article is onto something, capturing a mood among faculty that Poverty Law should be elevated, and we might start to see a lateral market develop in the Poverty Law space just as it has been appearing in the Indian law space the last few years. Certainly, and again this is anecdotal, the student interest in Poverty law seems to have been consistently high ever since Black Lives Matter helped students see better the importance of race and, relatedly, structural inequality.
Poverty Law 