Mere Brilliance

In aid of enjoying, and perhaps benefiting from, this hiatus between spasms of interviewing and recruiting new persons for our respective law faculties, I would recommend an article by Professor James Gordley of Boalt Hall: "Mere Brilliance: The Recruitment of Law Professors in the United States," 41 The American Journal of Comparative Law 367 (1993).  Gordley is among those who have convinced me that our way of deciding whom to hire is hard to rationalize.  Often the results of the process are brilliant, but the method seems hard to defend.  I'll leave the article to speak for itself, hoping to entice readers with this (indicative) excerpt (375-76):  "The interviewer is not likely to be impressed by the candidate's scholarly interests because usually the candidate does not yet know what they are.  Any impression formed of the candidate's personality is likely to be discounted.  The great dean of a great American law school was once introduced to an audience as a man so brilliant he didn't need a personality, and appointments committees recognize it is often so with great individuals.  Where I work, we not only would appoint someone with the temper of Beethoven, the tact of Savanarola, the warmth of Captain Kidd, and the table manners of Genghis Khan, but I have seen it happen, although we lost the candidate to another school that made a better offer."