Careers in Academia: Teaching and Researching Law

People assume that becoming a law professor is the natural reward for being the smartest person in your graduating class. It isn't. Some of the finest legal minds I worked with in practice would have hated the job, and some of the best scholars I know were unremarkable students who happened to be obsessed with a single, stubborn question. Academia rewards a particular temperament more than it rewards raw pedigree: the willingness to sit with a problem long after everyone else has filed their factum and gone home.

If part of you has always wanted to teach law, write about it, and argue about ideas for their own sake rather than a client's, this is the honest version of what that path looks like and how it begins.

What the job actually is

A career in legal academia is really three jobs stitched together, and the balance between them shifts depending on where you land.

The first is research and writing. You choose questions, you defend positions in print, and you build a body of scholarship that other people cite, teach, and argue with. This is the part that gets you hired and the part that keeps you employed. It is slow, solitary work, and it never truly ends.

The second is teaching. You stand in front of a room of law students, some of whom are sharper than you were at their age, and you try to make constitutional theory or the law of remedies feel alive. Good teaching is genuinely hard, and it is undervalued in the hiring process relative to how much of your week it will eat.

The third is service: sitting on committees, supervising graduate students, reviewing other people's work, and keeping the institution running. Nobody is drawn to academia for this part, but it is the connective tissue of the profession.

A colleague once told me the secret to academic life is that you trade a boss for a calendar. No partner assigns you work, but every deadline is one you set for yourself, and the honest ones are the hardest to keep.

Where it usually starts

There is no single door, but most Canadian legal academics walk through some combination of the same few rooms.

• A strong first law degree. You do not need to be the medallist, but you need a record that shows you can think and write. Faculty who taught you will eventually write the reference letters that matter most, so the relationships you build in your JD years quietly compound.
• A clerkship. A clerkship, especially at an appellate or apex court, is close to a standard credential for aspiring academics. It sharpens your writing, exposes you to how hard questions get resolved, and signals seriousness to hiring committees. If you are weighing one, our guide on whether you should do a clerkship walks through the trade-offs.
• A few years in practice. This one is optional and often skipped, but time in the profession gives your scholarship texture. It is easier to write about what the law does to people when you have watched it happen across a table.
• A graduate degree. For most tenure-track positions in Canada, an advanced degree is effectively required. More on that below, because it is the part people misunderstand most.

The graduate study question

Here is the thing nobody tells you clearly: a master's degree in law is not the finish line for an academic career. In most cases it is the on-ramp to a doctorate, and the doctorate is what does the real work of qualifying you to teach and research at a university.

An LLM can be a wonderful year. It can also be an expensive way to postpone a decision. Before you enrol, get specific about why. If the goal is academia, the more important question is often which doctoral programme you are aiming for, and whether the LLM sets it up. If the goal is deeper expertise for practice, that is a different and equally valid reason, but it changes what a good programme looks like for you.

A doctorate in law is a long commitment, frequently four to six years, built almost entirely around producing a single substantial piece of original scholarship. You will need a research question you can live with for years, a supervisor whose interests genuinely overlap with yours, and funding that lets you focus. That last point is not a detail. Underfunded doctoral students spend their best thinking hours worrying about rent.

Choose the supervisor before you choose the school. A brilliant institution with no one who cares about your topic is worse than a modest one with a mentor who will read your drafts and fight for you when it counts.

Building a scholarly identity

Hiring committees are not really asking "is this person smart." They assume that. They are asking "does this person have something to say, and will they keep saying it for the next thirty years."

That means you need a coherent research agenda, not a scattering of interesting side projects. Pick a corner of the law you can defend and develop over time. Depth beats breadth almost every time on the academic market.

A few habits that help long before you are on the market:

1. Publish early, and publish carefully. A student note or a case comment in a respectable journal shows you can carry an argument to completion. One thoughtful piece is worth more than three rushed ones.
2. Present your work. Conferences and workshops are where scholars meet each other and where your name starts to circulate. The legal academy is small, and reputation travels fast.
3. Find your readers. The point of scholarship is to be read and answered. Send your drafts to people whose work you admire. Most academics are more generous with their time than you would guess.
4. Teach whenever you can. Sessional teaching, teaching assistantships, guest lectures: take them. They build the skill and the evidence that you can do the part of the job that happens in a classroom.

The market, honestly

I will not sugar-coat this. Tenure-track positions in Canadian law faculties are scarce, and there are more qualified candidates than openings in most years. The competition is real, and it is not always fair. Excellent scholars go years on contract before landing something permanent, and some never do.

That reality should inform your plan, not end it. Keep your options genuinely open. Many people who train for academia end up in adjacent roles they love: policy work, think tanks, law reform commissions, government research, or teaching-focused positions that never lead to tenure but offer a real life in ideas. Some of the most content former colleagues I know teach part-time while practising, and treat scholarship as a vocation rather than a job title.

If you are early in your studies and testing whether this life fits, the same fundamentals that build any strong legal career apply here too. Solid grades, good references, and real relationships open doors in academia just as they do on the jobs board and everywhere else in the profession. You can browse more of our thinking on different routes through the field in the career paths collection.

A different clock

The hardest adjustment for people coming from practice is the tempo. In litigation, you win or lose and then it is over. In scholarship, an idea you publish this year might not be taken seriously until a decade from now, if ever. You are writing partly for people who have not started law school yet.

That long horizon is either the great gift of the academic life or its central frustration, depending on your wiring. If the thought of spending three years on an argument that only forty people will ever read sounds like a punishment, this is not your path, and there is no shame in that. If it sounds a little bit like heaven, you already have the temperament the job selects for. The rest is patience, good mentors, and the willingness to keep writing when nobody is watching.

Start where you are. Write one thing worth reading, show it to someone whose opinion you respect, and see how the argument holds up. That is the entire job, repeated for a career.