Although Peter Salib, ’16, loved philosophy, even planning to do his PhD in philosophy, he was turned off after meeting a few people deep into that trajectory. He wasn’t sure that he quite fit in. The career prospects sounded shaky too—even for top students. 

Law felt familiar and seemed to fit. What was law if not applied metaphysics, carving the world into tangible objects and non-tangible objects? And as in philosophy, Salib loved how seriously professors at the Law School took the subjects, digging deeply into ideas. “That environment was extremely influential on me,” he said.

After graduating, Salib clerked for Judge Frank Easterbrook, formerly a lecturer at the Law School, then worked at Sidley Austin. The big firm job wouldn’t be for him forever, he knew, and he thought back to a lunch he had with Professor Jonathan Masur, who told Salib that he would make a good law professor. When Salib again reached out to Masur, he suggested applying for fellowships.

Soon, Salib became a Climenko Fellow at Harvard Law School, where he got to write about fascinating legal questions and teach motivated students. He immediately loved the job and saw this as a great career path, one with good career prospects.

Now Salib is on the faculty of the University of Houston Law Center, and is an associated faculty in public affairs and a law and policy advisor at the Center for AI Safety. He teaches civil procedure and First Amendment law. He also researches the intersection of law and artificial intelligence.

In one recent paper, Salib wrote about the constitutional limits on regulating large language model AI systems. For example, there is litigation now claiming ChatGPT goaded a young man into suicide, with the company saying that this is free speech. Salib’s view is that this is not protected speech, because it’s not the speech of anyone who has First Amendment rights.

After his initial struggles finding his path, Salib relishes his job as a law professor and believes that more people should tell young lawyers that they, too, can be a legal academics. 

“More grads have this as an option than they think,” he said. “If they’re reading this and they want to know more about how to do it, I’m always happy to talk.”

Salib's Advice to Aspiring Academics:

"Love your field of research enough to write 25,000 words on it. Those wanting to become legal scholars must love the work so much they’d do it if no one was watching. Sometimes, as legal academics, you do influence the world, including the work of judges and policymakers. But that’s not the modal outcome."

This story is part of a series about Law School alumni in academia. View the full series here.