Equity partners earn more, sometimes stunningly more, than law professors, but the latter are freer to chart the flow of their own careers and schedules, sometimes astonishingly more so. Though some law firms offer sabbaticals, they provide nothing remotely comparable to the steady flow of study leaves and visits to other schools with which law faculties water and renew themselves. The benefits of leaves and visits are clear, but their profusion in the law school world is striking by any other standards that come to mind, including the habits of arts and sciences faculties, to say nothing of law partnerships. Law schools, more than law firms, are still able these days to retain their sense of community. Huge law firms spread around the world cannot know themselves as they did when most of their people were in one office and sufficiently few in number actually to call one another by name.
Law faculties can still truly know one another.
This is their great good fortune. Let me end with a sixth, and final, anti-shock factor that has eased my passage into the academy. My last year in law school, the constitutional war powers of the President and Congress wrapped me in their mysteries. I experienced the delights and demands of serious scholarship. Time to write about the war powers during most of these years had to be fit in the occasional interstices of a hectic practice.