Any lawyers going back to get English PhD?

[Arco]

I'm thinking about making that transition, and would love to get any insight into that process - how common/rare is it? is it an advantage? will undergrad or law school GPA still matter? To give you some background, I'm an associate at a prestigious law firm, clerked for a year with a federal judge before that, top of my class in law school, abysmal undergrad GPA in English, high LSAT score so I predict a high GRE score, don't have a writing sample yet but plan to write on theoretical intersections between law and literature. Will the low undergrad GPA hurt? Is there any interest by theorists in legal studies? I'd love to hear any thoughts you guys have. Also, I apologize if this has been asked before - new to this forum, trying to get as much information on the process from outside academia.

[Romanista]

I'm basically the opposite of you. I attended law school (at a TTTT) and got attritioned (is that a verb?) after the first year. I emailed a couple departments about how they approach a bad GPA in a different subject and they said that they don't really focus on it. I had a good undergraduate GPA in English and I got a couple of funded MA offers for my first application cycle. 

I think that in your case the fact that you can bridge your legal experience with literature would perhaps overshadow the low undergraduate GPA. I didn't attempt to argue that my legal studies prepared me for graduate school. I treated going to law school as a mistake so for that reason I don't think adcomms dwelled on it. Not like I would know what adcomms think though. 

Edited September 29, 2015 by Romanista

[ProfLorax]

My take is this: experience (work or scholarly or otherwise) outside of English can maybe help an already strong application. I have a colleague in the department who was a nurse before entering our program, and she looks at disability and illness in film. So people definitely make the jump, but they typically need a pretty strong foundation to begin with. 

I actually think the abysmal English GPA could be a problem. Adcomms, I suspect, are less interested in how you did in constitutional law and more interested in how you performed in English classes. Even with your interesting legal background, adcomms are going to ask the same questions of you as they will ask for all the candidates: do the applicant's grades, statement of purpose, writing sample, and GRE scores demonstrate that the applicant would succeed in our program? An MA program could help balance out those bad grades. You could show that you can do the work of a literary scholar at the graduate level and write a writing sample.

I'm super curious: why are you thinking of leaving your (presumably well paid) post at a law firm for grad school in the humanities?  

[Arco]

My take is this: experience (work or scholarly or otherwise) outside of English can maybe help an already strong application. I have a colleague in the department who was a nurse before entering our program, and she looks at disability and illness in film. So people definitely make the jump, but they typically need a pretty strong foundation to begin with. 

I actually think the abysmal English GPA could be a problem. Adcomms, I suspect, are less interested in how you did in constitutional law and more interested in how you performed in English classes. Even with your interesting legal background, adcomms are going to ask the same questions of you as they will ask for all the candidates: do the applicant's grades, statement of purpose, writing sample, and GRE scores demonstrate that the applicant would succeed in our program? An MA program could help balance out those bad grades. You could show that you can do the work of a literary scholar at the graduate level and write a writing sample.

I'm super curious: why are you thinking of leaving your (presumably well paid) post at a law firm for grad school in the humanities?  

Thanks for the reply.

Re: GPA - that was my fear but it's crazy if they care more about undergrad grades - law school grades mean so much more since it's graded on a curve. Also, I'm not sure if English folks realize this but law school isn't that different from literary scholarship - research, writing, analysis. Of course, there are differences, but the skills are somewhat convertible. In law school, you read cases, talk about cases, talk about the theories underlying those cases (e.g. legal formalism vs legal realism), apply the law to new facts, interpret ambiguous statutes, talk about theories of legal interpretation (e.g. textualism vs intentionalism), and so on. Take a class on domestic violence law, you'll read the same feminists and queer theorists - you'll look at how gender norms inform rape laws, etc. Labor law, you read Marx. In seminars, you write 25 page papers using the same theoretical frameworks you use in a literary context. So there's got to be a way to highlight that kind of thing... maybe in a statement of purpose?

Re: doing an MA - I'm hesitant about that because it seems like wasted time, and I don't need it to prepare a writing sample. It's a big commitment leaving a partner-track position for grad school, so I'm probably only going to do this if I get into a relatively decent PhD program.

Re: leaving a well paid job for grad school - money's overrated and academia's underrated. Just ask the same question in reverse: why don't you leave grad school to work in big law? You have infinitely more control over your life as an academic than as a lawyer - you decide what you work on, when you work on it, how you work on it, etc. Law, you're at the mercy of partners... and if you make partner, you're at the mercy of clients. Disagree with your client's position? Too bad. And that's not to say that being a lawyer sucks; the law is great - it's intellectually challenging in all the same ways academic life is, and it's probably the last career where you can actually practice rhetoric/sophistry and make an absurd amount of money too. But it comes at huge costs to your independence.  So it's largely a matter of taking control over my life - self-determination or whatever you want to call it. In terms of the money, I'm personally not one for material wealth - I don't drive, prefer renting to owning, and don't have expensive tastes. For me, the best thing about having money is that you don't ever worry about money. But if you can manage not to worry about money while making less, working less, and working a better job, I'd rather do that everytime.

[phdthoughts]

Thanks for the reply.

Re: GPA - that was my fear but it's crazy if they care more about undergrad grades - law school grades mean so much more since it's graded on a curve. Also, I'm not sure if English folks realize this but law school isn't that different from literary scholarship - research, writing, analysis. Of course, there are differences, but the skills are somewhat convertible. In law school, you read cases, talk about cases, talk about the theories underlying those cases (e.g. legal formalism vs legal realism), apply the law to new facts, interpret ambiguous statutes, talk about theories of legal interpretation (e.g. textualism vs intentionalism), and so on. Take a class on domestic violence law, you'll read the same feminists and queer theorists - you'll look at how gender norms inform rape laws, etc. Labor law, you read Marx. In seminars, you write 25 page papers using the same theoretical frameworks you use in a literary context. So there's got to be a way to highlight that kind of thing... maybe in a statement of purpose?

Re: doing an MA - I'm hesitant about that because it seems like wasted time, and I don't need it to prepare a writing sample. It's a big commitment leaving a partner-track position for grad school, so I'm probably only going to do this if I get into a relatively decent PhD program.

Re: leaving a well paid job for grad school - money's overrated and academia's underrated. Just ask the same question in reverse: why don't you leave grad school to work in big law? You have infinitely more control over your life as an academic than as a lawyer - you decide what you work on, when you work on it, how you work on it, etc. Law, you're at the mercy of partners... and if you make partner, you're at the mercy of clients. Disagree with your client's position? Too bad. And that's not to say that being a lawyer sucks; the law is great - it's intellectually challenging in all the same ways academic life is, and it's probably the last career where you can actually practice rhetoric/sophistry and make an absurd amount of money too. But it comes at huge costs to your independence.  So it's largely a matter of taking control over my life - self-determination or whatever you want to call it. In terms of the money, I'm personally not one for material wealth - I don't drive, prefer renting to owning, and don't have expensive tastes. For me, the best thing about having money is that you don't ever worry about money. But if you can manage not to worry about money while making less, working less, and working a better job, I'd rather do that everytime.

I have to say that what you are saying resonates with me. As I get further along in my career here, I just keep thinking "what am I doing, and do I really want to be doing this for the next 30 years?" I'm honestly not sure. It's a terrifying prospect going back to grad school, the money the least of it. Like you, I don't feel I need tons of "stuff" to be happy. Just enough to not worry about money. So, I see a crossroads ahead. I can either grind it out for the next 10 years or so, hoping it gets better, moving up, sure, more money, hopefully...or, take a real leap of faith.

[ExponentialDecay]

I refrained from commenting yesterday, and boy am I glad that I did.

 Also, I'm not sure if English folks realize this but law school isn't that different from literary scholarship

This here is why every humanities job search in the country gets 33% of its applications from retired lawyers who decided they want to "give back to the community" and "teach a class on something or other I've been pursuing as a hobby on the weekends for the past 3 years". Yes, law school is different from literary scholarship. I've never set foot in a law school, and I can already tell you that you didn't spend the last 3 years building encyclopedic knowledge of a distant corner of some literary canon, maturing your ideas through planning, completing, and revising lengthy projects intimately connected to the matter of your scholarship, developing a relationship with major and minor literary theorists, and trying the daily bread of the trade, such as conferences, teaching, department politics, and which invited talks have the best doughnuts. Of course the skills you learned in law school are transferable - most skills are. Of course you're going to have an easier time transitioning into literature than into physics. But the same reason law school doesn't qualify you for any kind of work but law is the reason it doesn't qualify you for grad school in literature - because the really important ingredient to forming a sophisticated argument, besides being able to form an argument, is having something to form an argument about, and that comes from experience, which is a word for a lot of time spent working through a specific subject matter, which is the piece that many unsuccessful applicants don't have. Being a good writer or whatever is kind of the necessary but not sufficient piece; likewise, being a good mathematician is the best predictor for success in a math or economics program, but good mathematicians don't always make good physicists and economists because math is neither physics nor economics. Math is math, and law school is law school (I will have no Magritte jokes, please).

 

 

You have infinitely more control over your life as an academic than as a lawyer - you decide what you work on, when you work on it, how you work on it, etc.

 

Oh boy. Tell you what, I don't know how much control over their lives lawyers have, but I do know that all academics but the likes of Hawking and Chomsky have very little control over their lives, and they are moreover not paid shit for it. An academic in the humanities usually can't choose where they will live, because they have to accept whatever position of employment is offered to them, even if it's in Bumfuck, New Jersey, they have little leeway in deciding when to work on things simply because they have to be working all the time, and the what and how are often limited by grant funding, department politics, and getting fucked in the ass by the administration for any attempt at non-compliance with the party line. You remember that guy who tweeted something untoward about Israel this time last year and immediately got fired (which, in academia, is the same as having your forehead branded with DO NOT HIRE, EVER - other offenses with similar punishment include going to a non-fancy school and adjuncting to pay your bills)? That could be you. When academics finally get control of their lives is when they are tenured, have made a name for themselves in a profession, and can show up on campus  maybe1 day a week to teach a graduate class and do nice things like give invited talks and write op-eds for the NYT, which happens when they're like 50 (in law, I think this is called "making partner").

Don't go into academia expecting to have a good work-life balance. Don't go into academia expecting to live the "life of the mind", chill out on the quad green, and make conversation with attractive undergrads and get paid for it. Professional scholarship is signing up for Investment Banking hours for months at a time, for the next 20 years of your life (if you're lucky - if you're not, you're thrown out and have to start your life over at 35, married, with two kids). 

 

Sigh. Sometimes I am annoyed at the VM thread, but other times I see posts like this and I understand the importance of VM's work.

[greenmt]

All of this is true.  Admissions committees won't necessarily be impressed by your previous accomplishments in another field, any more than a law school admissions committee would be impressed that you wrote a dissertation on representations of the law in Emily Dickinson's writing - the subject of a recent book.  Similar skills, different field, each with its own norms and frameworks of understanding and secret handshakes.  Another way of saying that is: we read differently given different contexts.  

That said, I took a class, toward my MA, with a former attorney who went back to school, got a PhD and then a tenure-track teaching job.  She taught 17th C British poetry, and her insights into the always-shifting legal landscape were eye-opening.  I am in favor of second-career PhDs, and not just because I am one.  I think it broadens the field and introduces new ways of thinking.  Also, it takes hard work to build a career in (X), and those work habits / skills *do* apply to the work of scholarship.  

Adcomms won't want to know that you find lawyering boring, or really want to self-direct your work life.  You might want to talk with some academics, if you know any.  As ExponentialDecay points out, tenure is not all that different than making partner, in the sense that there are established criteria but the process is subjective and personal.  As an associate lawyer is, to an extent, dependent on the goodwill of partners and clients, an untenured professor is dependent on the goodwill of tenured peers and students.  My guess is that, in the end, lawyers have with more options to self-direct, in part because there are more places for them to land, but the money is part of it, too.  I have lawyers in the family, and most, not all, are tied to their firms in the way academics are tied to their institutions. Others, who work in corporate law, have more time on their hands.  All make more money than I ever will, and those who are retired are truly free to pursue their interests, and do. 

Anyway, admissions committees want to know what goals you have in mind, so they can assess whether they have the faculty and the resources to help you get there, and whether you have something they see as valuable in terms of *their* field.  ProfLorax's colleague provides a good example here: draw a connection between what you've been doing and what you would like to study.  Like a nurse who, through her prior professional work, developed an interest in representations of disability, you might have interests - specific interests, e.g., legal culture in Middle English literature, or law and lawyers in the fiction of the American antebellum south - that make use of your legal knowledge but that will contribute something new to understanding literature.  

GPA: I failed out of my first undergrad college, and my second didn't use grades at all.  It's a part of the overall application package.  High grades elsewhere, and a high GPA score, won't necessarily mean automatic acceptance, but they won't hurt, particularly if you can show that you've remained engaged with English Lit and can show a clear path between what you've done and what you want to do.

... a colleague in the department who was a nurse before entering our program, and she looks at disability and illness in film.

[Metaellipses]

To answer your initial post: there are a lot of theorists interested in legal studies. Peter Goodrich has published recently on Renaissance legal emblems.  At Princeton, Bradin Cormack works with literature and the law in the 16th century. My advisor is working on early modern literature and the legal concept of the "corporation." There was a conference at Columbia a little over a year ago about mercantilism and law in pre-18th century Europe. There's also a lot of work being done right now on re-framing conversations about sovereignty and legal personhood to include non-human animals (Lorraine Daston and Lynn Festa are producing this kind of work). This is just what I know of within my own period (early modern/Renaissance studies), but I'm sure you could find plenty of examples in whatever historical period you choose to look at. And speaking of historical periods: if you're planning on applying to a standard English literature program, you'll need to place yourself in a historical framework of some kind. Most departments have period quotas, i.e. they admit a certain number of people from each historical period, from early medieval to contemporary.

But to echo what other people have said: being an academic is hard work. You don't have control over where you work or when you work, as you are connected to an institutional apparatus. You are also working in a field with a depressed job market and poor professional prospects (yes, even if you're planning to apply for non-academic jobs). In addition, you are often asked to work for impossibly long hours. For example, this is the semester before my qualifying exams, and I'm currently teaching two sections of a poetry class, taking two classes, and reading 50-60 books on the side to prepare for the exams. This has added up to ~ 10-12 hour days...every single day of the week. Next semester will be significantly better, but you do have to learn to work through exhaustion for months on end. This is in a program with good support, placement, and seven years of funding, which is by no means typical - even among other top 20 programs.

If you have adjusted well to the rigor of the legal profession, you might fit in just fine here and really enjoy working in an English department.  I don't regret being in graduate school for an English PhD, not for a moment. I just think that you might need to do some research about program structure, expectations, and job market predictions before you commit to switching careers. There are a lot of resources on this site for that.

Edited September 29, 2015 by Metaellipses

[rhetoricus aesalon]

So, just out of curiosity, do you have a list of programs that you'd want to apply to? I had a colleague in my program come from law, but he was getting an MFA. I'd say in my experience it is not common, though not unheard of. 

Something you might consider is taking graduate-level classes as a non-degree-seeking student for a semester or two at a college near you to test out if this is the kind of transition you really want to make; it might also help with some of the stress of feeling like you're not doing anything right now. I did this before going back to grad school, the credits transferred into my program, and it also helped me build relationships with faculty who eventually wrote letters of recommendation for me when I did apply for a degree granting program.

I could be totally reading into your situation here too much, but it's my feeling that you're rushing this and need guidance from an adviser, not a discussion board. As you've already gotten from others, it doesn't seem like you really know what you want or what you're signing up for, and whether that's true or not -- it isn't something you want to have come across in a statement of purpose.

[Arco]

Thanks for all the replies.

I appreciate the warnings but I understand what grad school and academia entails. It's something I researched extensively before law school (I actually found this forum while I was in undergrad), so this isn't deterring me. Yes, you don't get to choose where you live. And, yes, you have to treat it like a profession. But law isn't much different. There's a monopoly on legal practice, so that if you want to move to a different state you need to take the bar exam for that state, which means studying for 2 months. And the professionalism aspect is, at least arguably, more intense and pronounced in the law. You need to market yourself to partners to even get work. If you make partner, you need to find clients. That means going to conferences, going to bar association events, going to networking events, and so on. 

The big difference is that in the law you research topics you don't want to research, you make arguments you don't want to make, and you have clients you don't like. I'd rather do 70+ hours of self-directed research on a topic that interests me than 70+ hours of research for a partner/client I disagree with, on a topic I care nothing about. That's the difference. I also think there's a misunderstanding about what working in big law is like - there's a required number of hours you need to bill every year, and that means you're working something like 70 hours a week, with maybe 2 weeks for vacation. Some folks work longer hours that than so that they can get bonuses. There's just no way academics consistently work that many hours. And even you're working 70+ hours a week, you set that schedule. As for grad school, of course it's a lot of work; law school is no different. As for the quantity of reading, law isn't any different. That's my point about legal work not being that different from literary work. Of course there's differences, but the point is that I'm fully capable of doing lots of reading, working long hours, being a professional, marketing myself, and so on.

[Arco]

So, just out of curiosity, do you have a list of programs that you'd want to apply to? I had a colleague in my program come from law, but he was getting an MFA. I'd say in my experience it is not common, though not unheard of. 

Something you might consider is taking graduate-level classes as a non-degree-seeking student for a semester or two at a college near you to test out if this is the kind of transition you really want to make; it might also help with some of the stress of feeling like you're not doing anything right now. I did this before going back to grad school, the credits transferred into my program, and it also helped me build relationships with faculty who eventually wrote letters of recommendation for me when I did apply for a degree granting program.

I could be totally reading into your situation here too much, but it's my feeling that you're rushing this and need guidance from an adviser, not a discussion board. As you've already gotten from others, it doesn't seem like you really know what you want or what you're signing up for, and whether that's true or not -- it isn't something you want to have come across in a statement of purpose.

I don't have a list of programs yet. I haven't worked out details - I still need to write a sample - but I'm not applying until next year so there's lots of time to work out details. I was actually planning on getting in touch with a few of my professors from undergrad who wrote law school recommendation, so I'll be doing that first. I like your idea of taking graduate-level classes. I dunno if I'll have time for that but I'll definitely look into it.

[Arco]

To answer your initial post: there are a lot of theorists interested in legal studies. Peter Goodrich has published recently on Renaissance legal emblems.  At Princeton, Bradin Cormack works with literature and the law in the 16th century. My advisor is working on early modern literature and the legal concept of the "corporation." There was a conference at Columbia a little over a year ago about mercantilism and law in pre-18th century Europe. There's also a lot of work being done right now on re-framing conversations about sovereignty and legal personhood to include non-human animals (Lorraine Daston and Lynn Festa are producing this kind of work). This is just what I know of within my own period (early modern/Renaissance studies), but I'm sure you could find plenty of examples in whatever historical period you choose to look at. And speaking of historical periods: if you're planning on applying to a standard English literature program, you'll need to place yourself in a historical framework of some kind. Most departments have period quotas, i.e. they admit a certain number of people from each historical period, from early medieval to contemporary.

This is very helpful. In terms of a historical period, I'm thinking on writing my sample on a short story from Junot Diaz, so I'm looking at contemporary literature. But I'm also interested primarily in theory - that's what originally got me interested in English, I spent a lot of time reading Foucault and Deleuze in undergrad, and applying them to literature. Though I also want to avoid an "application of theoretical framework" model, so I'm not entirely certain yet how I'm gonna frame my application. It'll probably be either 20th century and 21st century literature or theory. I'm definitely gonna look into the folks you're talking about. And also, I love the idea of talking about the concept of "corporation," as there's some really interesting legal work being done on that topic. 

[EmmaJava]

I'm no lawyer but I've got some lawyer friends and from what I know of my lawyer friends, they don't need to be told about hard work, lol. Arco, I'm a sympathizer, and I've been rooting for you to get good information in this thread, so I'm glad you got some. And when it comes to "transferable" or "convertible" skills, that's also a bit overblown, since, as you rightly pointed out, you read the same stuff and do the same things with it. I get it. I'd go so far as to say that transferability is selling it short, to be honest. Your idea of controlling what you do with an identical skill set is not lost on me, even if the idea of "controlling your life" might seem to rub some the wrong way. Hey, it's a sensitive crowd.

That said, I did wince just slightly when you mentioned working 70 hours a week as a lawyer thing but not an academic thing (or that those academics who do work those hours set their own schedules), and I was afraid you might get slaughtered for that. Glad it hasn't happened yet but, as a sympathizer, let me caution you that it could. That doesn't justify all the martyrdom you see here but just be aware that a 70 hour work week is nothing. And that's not really an academic thing or a lawyer thing but all kinds of things, across all sectors. Anyone pursuing a passion and succeeding at the highest levels of his or her respective game is going to be pulling some crazy hours, but hopefully they're not counting them. People working 40 hours or less? I honestly do not know these people. Do you? Are they succeeding at the highest levels of their game? Are they passionate? Are they controlling their lives?  I honestly wouldn't know but I have a guess.  And I'm including working parents and what have you...

...but, as I know that lawyers don't need to be told about hard work, I'll leave it there and hope that more helpful information along the lines of what you solicited keeps rolling in. Good luck, I mean it.

[Good JuJu]

Just chiming in here:

It seems to me that you've already decided that you want to pursue a PhD. Your responses to others are more arguing that you're right than considering what they're saying. You're definitely a lawyer.

I'm a lawyer, too. I went to a top law school. I have ten years of post-law school experience. I stopped working as an attorney 3 1/2 years ago. I stopped working in law altogether one year ago. I spent the last year broke, living with my parents, writing fiction, and applying to MFA programs. I've never been happier.

But I'm not convinced that this would work you. First, you haven't said how long you've been practicing. It matters. Age and experience matter, too. If you're 26, BigLaw is your first real job, it's your first or second year and you're burned out, that doesn't mean that you need to change careers altogether. Second, your undergrad grades tell me that you weren't that into English when you were a college student. If you weren't passionate or excited enough about it then, you probably won't be into it now.

For me, I always wanted to be a writer. I never really wanted to be a lawyer. I went to law school because I didn't want to be a starving artist. My undergrad grades in English were stellar. My law school grades were terrible. Grades are not an indicator of my abilities, but they are absolutely an indicator of my interest in the subject matter I was studying.

But what concerns me most about the original and subsequent posts is that the focus is not on wanting a career in academia. It's not even about not wanting a career in law. It's about wanting a break from BigLaw, specifically. You don't have to pursue a PhD to take a break. 

You have a lot of options. First, save up your BigLaw money. From there, you can either take a break from law altogether or you can pursue another type of law practice. I know people who've gone from BigLaw to legal academia, public interest, criminal trial practice, or consulting work. There may be some other type of law practice that works for you. I knew a guy who did BigLaw, took a break, worked at a public defender office for two years, and then went back to Big Law. Not all lawyers work 70 hours per week.

I think that the advice about an MA program was actually good advice. Why is it wasted time? What are you in a hurry to do that you can't spend a year or two in an MA program? You'll get a taste for what grad study of English is like and you can decide if you really want to commit to it. You'll get a decent writing sample out of it, too. Humanities programs get thousands of applications from recovering lawyers. They will look at your grades and know that you have buyer's remorse. An MA program will definitely balance out your bad undergrad grades.

Legal writing is very different from academic writing. You don't realize how different it is because you haven't done any academic writing lately, which I am assuming since you don't already have a writing sample. The reading is different, too. It's a very different type of reading and a lot more of it. There is a learning curve to transition back. Sitting down and writing a sample for your applications will be more difficult than you think it is. With your grades and no MA, the writing sample will make a huge difference in the quality and number of programs you get into.

I'm not trying to convince you not to apply. But whoever said, "This here is why every humanities job search in the country gets 33% of its applications from retired lawyers" is absolutely right. Society gives lawyers and doctors a boost that people in other professions don't get. People think we're smart or accomplished because we have the lawyer or doctor title. They think we must be smart because law and medical school are "hard". The bar exam is "hard". And when you go to a really good school with international recognition, people are basically bowing down and saying, "We're not worthy!"

And then we, as lawyers, start to buy into it. We start thinking that we can do any job or study any topic in the humanities because nothing is more difficult than practicing law. That is simply not true. I had to learn this lesson the hard way. You will, too. 

Good luck. For what it's worth, I hope you figure it out. There are too many unhappy lawyers in the world. But if I were you, I'd go for the slow transition.

Also, University of Virginia has an MA concentration in Law and Literature.

 

[bhr]

For what it's worth, I can name about a half dozen PhD students or junior faculty in Rhet/Comp who were lawyers. The ones I know study legal rhetoric, public discourse, and the like. That may be a field you can consider, as you narrow down the work you want to do at the next level. (FWIW, R/C also tends to take a more open approach to students with non-traditional academic paths.

[lyonessrampant]

A bit late, but as my partner is a lawyer, most of my close friends are lawyers, and I strongly considered going that path (debate in high school and college tends to fuel law school lol) and I'm an advanced Ph.D. candidate, I have some experience with both fields.  I'll avoid duplicating (as much as possible) what other people have said.  On the question of whether a law degree and legal practice can be an advantage: my program has hired twice for TT lines: one time for two 18/19 lines and this year for one (maybe two) 20/21 Am lit lines.  Both searches culminated in campus interviews of 8-10 people per search, and in both searches at least one (and up to two or three) people had the JD/Ph.D. combo, so while this is solely anecdotal evidence, I think it can be an advantage if your research requires unique legal skills that only someone fully trained in law can bring.  I have a colleague who does law and literature in the EM period.  I know many law and literature scholars who work in that period, but while a modern legal training is helpful for this particular subfield, it is hardly required.  Particularly if you're working on English or continental law, you're not exactly learning about that in law school so a dedicated Ph.D. researcher who spends her time reading through legal cases and codes can develop an expertise absent a legal degree.  Since you're interested in contemporary (20/21 c.) American lit, you can absolutely set up your research in such a way that your legal expertise makes you uniquely suited to accomplish a specific research project.  If you can frame your project with this in mind, you have a case for why your law school grades and legal experience trump undergrad grades, and more important than the grades issue is the feasibility of research question.

On the MA question (or rather rejection): I, too, think an MA might be a good path in that it sounds like you haven't figured out a research project that draws on your legal experience in a lively, new reading of literature.  An MA would give you space to figure that project out, develop a strong writing sample (can't overstate how critically important that is . . . and it will, or should, look very different from what you wrote for law school), and get good grades for an English program that can overshadow your undergraduate performance.

Whatever you decide to do, best wishes to you.

[Guest]

First of all, to Exponential Decay--let me just say "bumfuck New Jersey"? Holy crap, most of us would sell our corneas to work in New Jersey! It's on the east coast! It's NEAR STUFF! Even the bumfuck parts! Compare that to Pocatello, Idaho, or something.

Anyway, that just made me laugh. 

To the OP: the only practical piece of advice I can give you is that your writing sample needs to be outstanding. Like, truly outstanding. Because there are already a literal shit ton of people who law and literature. Law and literature is well-trod ground and has been for a very long time. And Foucault went out of style in the 90s. If you're going to make this law/literature thing fly, you are going to have to come up with an idea that is truly groundbreaking. And, as others have said, that will probably require putting in the time at an MA program, even if it is "busy work" in some ways. 

I actually know a lot of historians who do legal history, and--unfair or not--the perception among historians are that lawyers can't do legal history. They're the last people you go to when you have a question about legal history. Literary scholars might not hold this perspective, but I do know that adcomms care fuck-all about what you did outside the university. Like, I ran a nonprofit before going back to grad school, and it made no difference to my application whatsoever. Adcomms care only about your proposed project and how well you do at articulating the stakes. They want to see something fresh and original. They don't care if you're an amazing lawyer. I know that stinks and is unfair, but that's the reality of graduate admissions. 

[ExponentialDecay]

@my_muse Yeah, I regretted putting that down after the fact. I even almost put Bumfuck, CT, but then realized that that would be one of the Havens. I think most professionals, lawyers included, would shudder at the prospect of CT or NJ. Just shows how different the academic world is.

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They don't care if you're an amazing lawyer. I know that stinks and is unfair, but that's the reality of graduate admissions. 

Why is this unfair? I don't care if my lawyer is a good husband and father or if he won the gold in biathlon in the '86 Olympics or how well he did in his undergrad major. I care that he gives accurate legal advice and doesn't broadcast my shit to third parties, aka that he is good at his job. Why should grad school be any different?

Edited January 6, 2016 by ExponentialDecay

[Guest]

I don't mean that we should be evaluating candidates according to how nice or interesting/virtuous they are as people--only that I think that admissions committees are, IMO, very narrowly focused on what makes a good candidate--and usually what makes a good candidates means a candidate who followed a very traditional path. Personally, I think that working outside of academia (and being successful at it) is an incredible asset that should be valued in grad admissions, and that being a successful professional certainly speaks to someone's drive, ambition, and networking skills. But too often these candidates get penalized because their writing samples are outdated, or they've been out of school for too long, or their letters of recommendation are vague and stale. So committees pass over them--and the diversity they bring to the table--and go for the person who's a safer bet--who's a 22-year-old BA holder with a writing sample that deploys the latest buzz words in the field.

I feel like I've seen the field get a lot narrower in the last few years that I've been in grad school. I used to see older people in PhD programs; now it seems like everyone is right out of college. And it remains to be seen whether or not they will be better scholars. Sometimes the person with the rough and non-traditional background ends up applying themselves harder whereas the young person who went to grad school straight out of undergrad burns out and realizes this just isn't for them. Full disclosure: I was that rough-around-the-edges nontraditional candidate that no school but one would take a chance on. My friend was the cookie-cutter "stellar applicant" with a cutting-edge writing sample, and programs lined up to recruit her. She went to the top program, and I didn't. But I actually ended up finishing in time, with publications and all else, and my friend totally floundered and, six years in, hasn't gotten past her prospectus, and has never even presented a paper at a conference. (In six years!) No one would have been able to tell that things would turn out that way by looking at our respective applications, but I feel that the evidence for my dedication was perhaps reflected in the way I approached my professional life. 

I don't know if "fair" is the word I should have used. Maybe "shortsighted" and "risk-averse." If I were on an admissions committee, I might actually be interested in lawyer OP. But other things would definitely have to be there as well (a solid undergrad background, for instance, and a command of language and history). But I'm not on an admissions committee, so. 

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Why is this unfair? I don't care if my lawyer is a good husband and father or if he won the gold in biathlon in the '86 Olympics or how well he did in his undergrad major. I care that he gives accurate legal advice and doesn't broadcast my shit to third parties, aka that he is good at his job. Why should grad school be any different? 

Edited January 7, 2016 by my_muse