The Faculty Lounge

Truly Useful Law School Courses

As a faculty advisor, one of my jobs is to approve the courses my first-years plan to take next fall. Law students are fairly conservative and risk-averse in their choices, so usually I see the standard set of courses:  Evidence, Bus. Org., Crim Pro, Admin, and the like.  But the fabulous E. Noakes of McSweeney's has provided a list of *truly* useful courses that law schools should offer:

Classes My Top-Tier Law School Should Have Offered As Warnings About The Profession

Cutting and Pasting Legal Lingo

Explaining Business Associations to the People Who Are Running Them

4 A.M. Word Processing and the Law

Ethics of Conspicuous Consumption

Forwarding E-mails: Theory and Practice: Seminar

Arbitrary-Deadline Negotiation Strategies

Crying Quietly: Clinic

Jeans-Friday Advocacy Workshop

Cutting and Pasting II: Plural to Singular

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I'd like to add a few of my own:

Document Production:  Theory and Practice

Windowless Document Warehouses--Practicum

and for the public-interest minded:

Finance and the Law:  When Salary Doesn't Even Cover Loan Repayment

Cross-posted at Prawfsblawg.

Part Time Work in the Legal Academy

Over at Crooked Timber, they're talking about academics who choose (often for family reasons) to work part time.   Lots of reasons why one might want that.  A lot has to do with having more time to spend with families.  Sometimes, also, graduate students will work part time (to put bread on the table and self-fund their research).   And they're talking about the pros and cons of this, particularly its implications for research.  As Ingrid Robeyns says:

But my biggest doubt whether part-time work is such a splendid idea for academics who are doing research has to do with the nature of research: whether one works on a full-time contract or a part-time contract, the literature that one has to follow to keep up to date with one’s area of research remains the same. There are ‘fixed costs’ (in terms of time and effort) for each line of research that one pursues. The consequence is that a part-timer spends as much time (in absolute number of hours) on keeping up to date with the literature, implying that she has fewer hours left for actually developing new research.

I suspect that use of part time academics, like increasing use of adjuncts and non-tenure track faculty, is another strategy of cost-cutting and benefit reduction that we're seeing throughout the economy.  The academy's being transformed (for good and bad) just as the rest of our economy.   As schools, understandably, look for ways to cut costs, use of part-time faculty is going to be yet another popular response.  This is a topic on which I hope to spend a lot of time talking this summer.

Alfred Brophy

The Morality of Doing Research Using Proslavery Treatises

This is a problem you don't face everyday.  I'm in the midst of a short paper on the University of Mississippi's trial of its Chancellor (incidentally F.A.P. Barnard, the namesake of Columbia University's Barnard College) for taking testimony of a slave against a student.   Really fascinating stuff, because we usually think about trials as about truth, but there was great concern about taking the testimony of enslaved people against whites. 

There's a lot that needs to be said about this topic.  Right now, though, I'm interested in knowing about the key cases from southern courts.  So I have the question: should I use T.R.R. Cobb's treatise on slave law?  Cobb was a pretty important person in the old South: he edited the Georgia Code, taught for a while at the University of Georgia, and published a comprehensive treatise on slave law.  (He occupies a key place in my current book project, University, Court, and Slave.)  Now, I've used the treatise a bunch as evidence of thought at the time.  But now I have a different purpose in mind: to use it as a source of cases.  There is something that I find more than a little disturbing about "communicating" with General Cobb (he died fighting at Fredericksburg) in this way.  For this is not just reading his work to understand his mind, but reading his work to learn about what the law actually was.

I guess that's how the progress of knowledge works, though--we use the literature of those before us.

Alfred Brophy

Are Law Professors Giving Senator Obama a Bad Name?

This morning I've been listening to Fox's interview with Senator Obama.  Dig this from Chris Wallace (transcript here):

WALLACE:  But some observers, and some liberal observers say is that part of your problem is you come off as a former law professor who talks about transforming politics when the lunch bucket crowd really wants to know what you’re going to do for them.  Bob Herbert, columnist for the “New York Times”, [who] happens to be a black man, says that Hillary Clinton seems tougher than you do.

How about that!  Makes me want to look into some more on public attitudes towards law professors.  And, perhaps even more importantly, do we spend a lot of time talking about transformative politics?  Not the law professors I know--though every once in a while, at the end of a book, some of us talk about the future (and even think it's one in which race plays a smaller role than it does today).

Alfred Brophy

Exams

Alas, it's that time of the year where many of us are either writing or grading exams.  Here at Willamette our semester ends mid-April, so I am hard at work grading my way through a stack of crim pro exams. 

I'm always curious what others do to make this task less onerous.  One of my colleagues suggests beer, but I will probably save that for after tenure.  Listening to music helps a bit;  Verdi's Requiem always seems to set the appropriate mood. Perhaps it's the echoes of my students in the "salve me, fons pietatis" (save me, thou font of mercy)?

I also tend to put my friends in the fact-pattern, which never fails to amuse me.  Puerile, perhaps, but reading about Miranda for the 80th time is just that much more bearable when the "defendant" discussed is a friend or family member.

But for true amusement, my hat goes off to Stephen Bainbridge, who has posted these hilarious exam-taking instructions:

Is An Online JSD Next? Serious Law Bibliographies For People With Time

Patrick O'Donnell, over at Ratio Juris, is putting up some substantial bibliographies in a variety of areas of law.  I can't  speak for their comprehensiveness - and indeed, he is taking on so much real estate that they necessarily reflect signficant choices on his part - but they sure would give an aspiring scholar (with time) something to gnaw on.  There are four up so far (and the links are listed below) but many others are due to follow.  I wonder whether the University of Phoenix will want to sign him up to run an online JSD (or will it be SJD)  program?

Criminal law bibliography

International law, human rights and comparative law bibliography

American Indian law bibliography

Bioethics, environment and ecology bibliography

Reforming Legal Education: Debating The Future Of Law Schools

For those of you who missed some or all of the great conversation around the question "What Kind of Institution Do We Want A Law School To Be?", here is a summary of links to the Madisonian mobblog on the topic.  Deven Desai deserves particular kudos for his efforts organizing this discussion.

Mobblog: What Kind of Institution Do We Want A Law School To Be? (Deven Desai)

A Law School for the 21st Century (Erwin Chemerinsky)

Law Schools and Law Firms (Mike Madison)

“Doing What We Do Best” or “Why Law Professors Should Feel Less Guilt” (Nate Oman)

A Mini University? (Al Brophy)

What Kind of Institution Do We Want a Law School to Be? (Nancy Rapoport)

Two Cheers for Indentured Servitude (Nate Oman)

Litigation, Money, And The Demise Of Tenure

First, Robert Weissberg, a political science prof at Illinois, suggested that tenure litigation would kill tenure (at least for that most endangered species, the white male.)   Then Walter Olsen, at Overlawyered, agreed at least as to the core idea: litigation threatens tenure.  And now Paul Secunda, over at Workplace Prof, is hosting a chat about whether this is all garbage.  (Scott Moss and Dana Nguyen, for example, think so.)

My view?  I'm with Scott and Dana: this argument is 99% specious.  It is true that there is a move away from tenure in the academy, and I suppose that litigation might be a tiny part of this.  But there are many other factors - not least of which is money.     Non tenured slots don't necessarily pay less, but in practice they tend to be cheaper. 

The push for increased scholarly production means that institutions are increasingly bifurcating the academic job into tenured research and untenured teaching.  Non-tenured, lower pay positions allow schools to offer richer, more diverse curricula.  The lower pay positions also allow schools to bolster student/faculty ratios, an important factor in both college and graduate school US News rankings.  And in law, schools are seeking ways to increase experiential offerings (with their famously low student-faculty ratios) at a comparatively lower price point. 

None of this is good news for entry level teaching candidates.  And perhaps the idea of "price points" is an anathema to our conception of non-profit education.  But in this case, at least, I don't think it's fair to blame the lawyers. 

Single Sex Law Schools?

An insightful (and concerned) colleague of mine has noted the paucity of female participants in this mobblog - and for her it reflects, more generally, the ways in which women’s voices are underrepresented in the law school community.  So let me throw up a surely controversial idea for discussion.  Is there a place for a single sex, women’s law school?   Might it have secondary effects on student participation, faculty-student interaction, and development of both analytical skills and community commitments?  Could it eventually lead to  increased numbers of women in leadership positions within both law and the legal academy?  Or perhaps…a more gender diverse legal blogitariat?

The folks from Smith College certainly would think so:

In a recent study by Indiana University’s Center for Postsecondary Research, far more students at women’s colleges reported having regular interaction with faculty members than those at coed institutions. They also reported with greater frequency that their colleges helped them learn more about themselves, hone their quantitative analysis skills and develop a desire to help their communities.

Cross listed at madisonian.net.

What The Hell Is A Law School Anyway? A Madisonian Mobblog

Come one, come all.  There's a mobblog going on over at Madisonian.net.  Zillions of law profs, including  current and former deans Erwin Chemerinsky, Jim Chen, Nancy Rapoport,  and Rodney Smolla, and professors  Ann Bartow, Jack Chin, Brett Frischmann, Christine Hurt, Rick Garnett, Greg Lastowka, Orly Lobel, Mike Madison, Nate Oman, Frank Pasquale, Larry Solum, and Fred Yen will weigh in on this pressing question: what kind of institution do we want a law school to be?  Al and I are also there and we'll be cross-posting.

A Mini University?

I'm participating in Michael Madison and Devan Desai's mobblog over at Madisonian.net, where they're having a conversation on “What kind of institution do we want a law school to be?”  Some pretty interesting stuff already, from Erwin Chemerinsky, among many others, much on what law schools should be teaching.  I take a different approach in my first entry, which is cross-posted below....

The institution I’d like is, well, perhaps pretty close to the ones we already have–something like a mini university, or maybe it’s better analogized to a liberal arts college. Either way, it’s an institution that has people with expertise across a wide spectrum–from hard-core law subjects (obviously) to economics, philosophy, sociology/anthropology, literature, history, and business (accounting) and some other areas like quantitative methods. A law school faculty of thirty people can cover a whole lot of intellectual terrain. And one of the great treats of being a part of a law school community is the opportunity to learn from very smart people who’re expert in neighboring fields, or maybe even fields that are a few miles down the road from my patch.

A virtue of teaching in law schools is that you have the opportunity to interact on a daily basis with people of differing expertise and talents. Although I do not write in criminal law or jurisprudence or economics, I am constantly exposed to the insights from colleagues who do. This must be what it’s like to be on the faculty of a liberal arts college, where there are relatively few (if any) people in your area of expertise but you learn from smart people in other disciplines. It also requires us as faculty to stay current in more areas than you’d typically expect of faculty in a university department. My friends who teach in history departments typically teach something like American history from Revolution through Civil War and some allied courses (like, oh, the old South, Jacksonian America, and the coming of the Civil War). Yet, law faculty will typically teach in several distinct areas. There’s something exciting about keeping up with the latest in equity and civil procedure, as well as trusts and estates, even though it is time consuming. You have the chance to show your students the ways that what we study is connected. Law school education has become what college was in the 1950s and 1960s (and what it still is at elite colleges and universities and maybe the honors programs at a lot of other schools)–a great general education in writing and reasoning.

And so as the students get all the benefits of introductions to the latest in theory and practice, we as faculty get the pleasure of seeing that from our colleagues. I think that makes us better rounded. And while it’s a favorite past-time of law faculty to decry how bad legal scholarship is, it also has a lot of virtues. Often it’s engaged with contemporary problems and often it draws upon many disciplines comes from the fact that it’s produced in law schools rather than arts and sciences departments. Some of my favorite legal academic literature, like Robert Cover’s Justice Accused: Antislavery and the Judicial Process and Morton Horwitz’ Transformation of American Law, 1780-1860, integrate law with other disciplines–history and philosophy in Cover’s case and history and economics in Horwitz’ case. I’m not sure that literature could be produced in a traditional history department–and I think history departments are a lot more open to innovation than a lot of departments. Basically, law schools foster broad and engaged work.

I guess this was driven home to me a few years back when I read the NYU Law School magazine and I thought, wow, this place has a huge and extraordinary faculty, “It’s a mini university!” And in hindsight, I think, maybe not even mini, maybe just university.

Now, how might we encourage more of this?  That’s a subject for another day!

Alfred Brophy