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.