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Some Reflections On The Lateral Hiring Market

Josh Blackman | 10.28.2026 11:39 PM

Every year, professors move from lower-ranked institutions to higher-ranked institutions. But for the lateral market to sustain itself, schools have to continue to play the game: recruit laterals, hoping they improve the school's standing before they move onto greener pastures.

One way to measure this market is to analyze the track record of a new school that built its faculty from scratch. Over the past quarter century, the American Bar Association has granted provisional accreditation to about 20 law schools. Only three of those institutions have cracked the top 100 U.S. News rankings. Last year, FIU was at #77 and Drexel was at #82. U.C. Irvine, founded in 2007, is the outlier. The new state school has hovered between #20 and #40 over the past decade. A lot of the credit should go to Founding Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. But even after Chemerinsky departed for Berkeley in 2017, the rankings have stayed fairly consistent.

Starting from a blank slate, Irvine was able to build a faculty from the ground up, using both entry-level hires as well as laterals. I thought it might be worthwhile to analyze lateral hires and departures from Irvine over the past two decades. Here, I owe a debt to Brian Leiter and Dan Filler, who have charted these moves since 2006. Many of the posts on the Faculty Lounge, Concurring Opinions, and Leiter Reports can now be found on the Internet Archive.

I include the raw results below the jump. Here, I will offer some broader observations about the lateral hiring market. I don't think these patterns are limited to Irvine, but that institution is a useful measuring stick because it started so recently. All of my counts here are tentative. Please let me know if there are any errors.

By my count, between 2008 and 2026, at Irvine there were a total of about 40 lateral hires (including two deans).

Between 2008 and 2026, sixteen of these forty lateral hires later departed. Here, I will note the year they were hired and the year they departed.

In most of these moves, the professor transferred to a higher-ranked school. The average duration of a lateral hire who departed was about six years.

I exclude in this count two professors (L. Song Richardson and Mario Barnes) who departed for administrative positions, but then returned to Irvine. I also exclude Katie Porter who left teaching to serve in the House, but then returned to the faculty. Those aren't exactly laterals in the traditional sense of........

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