Falling Leaves and Rising Stress Levels?

The leaves are changing, the nights are cool, and there’s a nip in the air in the early mornings.  That means it’s October, which means for most law students that school has been in session for nearly two months (for most students).  It’s around this time that the 1Ls perhaps notice an increase in workload.  Now there’s not just reading and briefing for class – which may be clipping along more quickly now – but probably assignments due in their writing classes.  All along, in the background, 1Ls are hearing people talk about “getting those outlines started.”  Second years have hustled through the on-campus interview process, which seems more selective than ever, and some are working their way through call-backs.  Others are frustrated that they aren’t getting any call-backs.  And likely most 3Ls are themselves working on getting jobs, knowing with that as each day passes, they are one step closer to graduation and one step closer to having to pay back those loans.

Perhaps here is where the stress starts to kick in.

Not all stress is bad; stress often gives us the kick in the pants we need to get things done, and we can return to “normal.” But for law students, the stress can seem to be ongoing, weighing them down for weeks or maybe months.  Is there any way for law students to avoid this stress?

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R.I.P. Derrick Bell, Pioneer of Critical Race Theory

 

On Wednesday of this week, the world lost several visionaries. Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, a prominent civil rights activist, and Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, Inc. both died.  But there was a third visionary whose light went out on Wednesday:  Derrick Bell.

Bell was a visiting professor of law at New York University School of Law when he died. He is considered a pioneer of critical race theory, which theory examines issues of race, racism, and power in law and legal institutions.  But while he had spent most of his life as an academic, his roots – and his defining experiences – were in civil rights.

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The Making of a Law Professor

There’s an adage in law that claims that the students who earned As in law school become law professors, the students who earned Bs become partners, and the students who earned Cs become judges.  I can’t verify that the adage is correct, but there is some truth to the first part.  Typically law professors had excellent law school grades.  But that’s not all.  They often members of their school’s law review, and most have held at least one – sometimes two – judicial clerkships.  A good number also spent a couple of years in practice.

As my colleague Gordon Hylton recently noted, such qualifications are considered indicators of the person’s potential to teach law.  The irony here is that few law professors have any background in education or pedagogy and even fewer have any experience teaching. And while law schools often support a new professor as she develops her classroom skills (through formal or informal mentoring or paying for the professor to attend conferences), law schools don’t offer any formal training in teaching law.  Generally, a law professor’s only real teaching qualification is that she once was a law student.

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