Reflections on Doing an LRW Fellowship

This blog has many readers who are on the meat market.  One path to law teaching careers is through an LRW teaching fellowship—Stanford’s program, the Climenko, the Bigelow, etc.  This is the path I took, and if you are on the cusp of a law teaching career, but not quite ready, you might consider it.

It has been done before, but I thought I would offer some pros and cons of such programs.

Cons

•    It can be very difficult to produce scholarship while teaching lrw.  It is likely your first time teaching, and teaching LRW in particular is time-intensive as it requires you to constantly read your students’ work and give meaningful oral and written feedback;
•    Depending on the school, LRW instructors may not get much love from the doctrinal faculty, and your status may be low;
•    You may not have the opportunity to develop mentorship relationships with the faculty at the school;
•    Students may resent you for the amount of work you give them and any negative feedback that you might have to give them;
•    The pay isn’t great;
•    Teaching LRW is probably not what you really want to do.

Pros

•    If you work really hard, you may well be able to produce scholarship (I and all of my colleagues in Stanford’s program were able to do so);
•    Attending faculty workshops, symposia, and job talks will help you understand what makes for a good job talk;
•    You learn a lot about teaching;
•   If you are persistent and your timing is good, you may find some generous faculty members who will advise you, discuss your scholarship, and mentor you (as I did);
•    If you are lucky (as I was), you will have amazing and generous colleagues;
•   Teaching LRW can be incredibly rewarding, as it allows you to forge relationships with students, help them, and learn from them;
•    It can plug you into the law teaching network in a variety of ways (conferences, symposia, old-fashioned networking, etc);
•   It helps you on the tenure-track market because it demonstrates your seriousness about your aspirations, allows you to talk seriously about teaching, gives you time to find your voice and agenda as a scholar, and helps you adopt the persona of a law professor.

For me, despite the occasional complaining, the fellowship at Stanford was more than worth it.  On a purely functional account, it set me up very well for the teaching market.  On every metric, I did far better my second time on the market than I did the first (before the fellowship). 

Wholly apart from that, though, it was just a wonderful experience. I learned a lot about myself, mostly enjoyed the work, enjoyed working with students, and had great colleagues.  Not bad, as far as jobs go.

As I have indicated, I’m not convinced that the fellowship model is the best for LRW teaching, but that’s got very little to do with whether applying for such a position is the best idea for you.