ProfessorBainbridge.com

Question of the day

Do law profs Kevin Jon Heller and Paul Horwitz really think that the mainstream media does not exhibit a consistent left-liberal bias? To quote Vizzini, Inconceivable!

Should a law faculty applicant list religious affliations on his/her cv?

Bridget Crawford offers up a list of the worst things a law school faculty applicant can list on his/her cv:

• Pre-collegiate employment or volunteer activity
• Pre-collegiate anything, really
• Lists of blog postings
• Religious affiliation or membership.

Which prompts Paul Horwitz to opine that:

The argument for not including any trace of one's religious involvements strikes me as more of a prudential or pragmatic argument: why bother including something, whether it involves your politics or your religion, that might hurt your job chances?  I'm not sure I faced this issue, because I didn't really have prominent involvements of either kind, so the question of whether to put them on my CV didn't come up.  But I say, to hell with the prudential argument.  If you think these activities are worth listing, list them.  Period.  And certainly there is nothing more objectionable about listing relevant activities that signal one's religious affiliation than listing relevant activities that signal one's political allegiances. 

Given how relentlessly secular the modern American legal academy has become, it's not terribly surprising that Jim Lindgren's studies found that people of faith are highly underrepresented on law school faculties. So my advice is that applicants ought to at least consider the prudential approach. Whether you adopt it depends, I suppose, on which of the following two biblical principles you think is more important:

"Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that are in the house."

versus

“Behold, I am sending you like sheep in the midst of wolves; so be shrewd as serpents and simple as doves."

I've done fine opting for the former approach, but I can certainly understand why somebody might want to opt for a more prudential approach to their first cv.