Law School Lateral Hiring

I was recently asked about lateral hiring at American law schools. I pointed the questioner to lists of lateral hires available both at Brian Leiter’s blog, and those made by Dan Filler at ConcurringOpinions, and TheFacultyLounge. These are very useful sources of information, but a bunch of annual lists can be hard to make sense of. So, I collated the lateral hiring info that I could find, and rendered the law lateral hiring market as a network. If you click the image below, you should be taken to an interactive version.

Unfortunately I was unable to easily get arrows working with this version of sigma.js, so the directionality here is hard to see, but if you click on nodes you can see their connections broken out by directionality. The thicker the link between schools the more laterals have moved between them. The most laterals moving from one school to another in the data are the 5 Columbia scholars hired by NYU.

The network contains data on 245 schools, with 912 directed, weighted hiring links between them. The top 10 schools by laterals hired are:

Similarly, the top 10 schools who have their faculty hired by other schools are:

Note that the data are almost certainly incomplete, and subject to a variety of errors.