Law School Hires Two Tenure-Track Faculty

As part of its goal to grow and diversify its faculty over the next decade, the Harvard Law School (HLS) will bring two new tenure-track faculty members this spring.

The appointment of Ryan Goodman and Guhan Subramanian ’92 as assistant professors, effective in June, will increase the size of the faculty to 82 tenure-track individuals and help in the school’s efforts to grow by 15 faculty members over the next decade.

HLS Dean Robert C. Clark said the two new hires will be particularly valuable to the faculty in their respective academic areas—human rights and negotiation and business law.

“Each of them fills a need that’s very hard to fill in a top-quality way,” he said.

A strong pool of applicants and a limited number of positions in the market allowed Harvard to have its pick of new professors, according to HLS Professor of Law William J. Stuntz, chair of the Law School’s appointments committee.

“We have the option of taking the two best people on the [law scholars] market,” he said. “These are extraordinarily credentialed individuals.”

Goodman will come from the University of Chicago Law School, where he has focused on human rights law—one of HLS’ under-staffed fields, according to Clark.

Currently, Clark said, the program on human rights law at HLS has only one senior-level professor.

But Goodman said that despite its size, the strength of the human rights law program at Harvard helped attract him to the new position.

“Harvard’s accomplishments in the field are top of the line,” he said.

Subramanian currently serves as an assistant professor of business administration at Harvard Business School (HBS), where he teaches classes on negotiation and business law.

He said he is “thrilled” with the chance to cross the river and join the HLS faculty.

“I’ve joked with friends that it’s like an invitation to join the Chicago Bulls of law school faculties, and you don’t pass up an opportunity to join the Bulls,” he wrote in an e-mail. “[HLS] is probably the best place in the world to do the kind of research in negotiations and corporate law that I want to do.”

Subramanian’s ties to Harvard run much deeper than his current teaching appointment.

While he was an undergraduate, Subramanian headed the Undergraduate Council and went on to graduate from a joint HLS and HBS program in 1998.

Clark said he thought Subramanian would be a particularly valuable addition to HLS’s negotiation program.

“You look around the universe of law schools, [and] plenty of people are doing [work on negotiation], but few would be qualified for an appointment at HLS,” he said.

Looking to the Future

Despite their excitement about the two new appointments, both Clark and Stuntz emphasized the need for continued and increased growth in the HLS faculty.

“If anything, I think this is a year that we’ve underhired,” Stuntz said.

A 1999 McKinsey & Co. study of the school criticized HLS for its lack of student-faculty interaction and identified a number of student complaints, such as a lack of feedback on their work.

Clark and other faculty developed a sweeping strategic plan to reshape teaching at the school, including the plan to grow the faculty and shrink class sizes.

In order to grow by the planned 15 people over the next decade, Stuntz said, HLS will have to hire 30 to 40 new faculty members—amounting to three or four hires each year—over the same time period to overcome normal rates of attrition.

Citing budget constraints and the upcoming HLS capital campaign, Clark said hiring attempts this year were more reserved.

“We weren’t eager to make more than a modest number of appointments [this year],” he said.

However, Clark said he also saw the need to grow the faculty carefully and thoughtfully—with an eye towards hiring faculty with varying backgrounds and specialties.

“We’re trying to build a diversified portfolio,” he said. “The critical thing is do it right.”