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.
I recently had the opportunity to re-read the personal statement I submitted with my Marquette Law School application, now almost three years ago, for one of my current classes. While many things had changed—for example I am now far less idealistic, definitely less “bright-eyed and bushy-tailed,” and no longer have a passion for criminal law—the opening and closing statements still ring true and effectively capture the development as a person and future lawyer I have experienced during my law school career at Marquette. As the new class of future Marquette attorneys has only recently began this journey at Eckstein Hall, I wanted to write a blog post to them explaining what I think the most influential and important aspects of my almost-complete legal education have been.