5 Lessons from 5 years in the Legal Academy (with Credit where it is Due)

About 5 years ago, while a fellow, I accepted the generous offer of Dan M. et al. to blog on Prawsblawg. I thought I'd take the opportunity to reflect on a few lessons I have learned that might be useful to others starting out, and to give credit to those who taught them to me:

1. Office location matters: Especially in a big school where all the faculty are not together, where you locate your office matters. I largely lucked out by choosing a location which was near at least one other person who taught Civ Pro, whose office I could pop into when I didn’t understand something the first time through (which was often!) and who was extremely patient and generous with their time.  By contrast, I am a bit far in location from the other two faculty members who are closest to me in terms of subject matter of writing, but we make appointments and otherwise look for opportunities to catch up.  Think about what you need and want because there may only be a limited number of people with whom you can have a “water cooler talk” type of relationship.
2. The optimal level of tenure anxiety is what you should aim for, neither the maximal nor the minimal. I worry about not getting tenure. I think this is just a fact of life in my home institution, and is true of all the juniors to some extent. What I did not immediately recognize is that this is a good thing…to a point… I would not push myself nearly as hard or be as entrepreneurial if I did not feel the need to distinguish myself in my field in order to maintain my job. What I constantly have to do, though, is aim for the optimal anxiety over tenure. I don’t lie awake at night paralyzed with fear or ever feel plagued with self-doubt, but a little anxiety can be very healthy.
3. Not everything you communicate has to be communicated verbally to your students. There are many things that your students need to learn, for which in-class time (be it lecture or socratic) is a total waste because it is just not suited for that format. Martha Minow gave me the advice, that sometimes the best way to communicate material is in writing. Thus I have inserted into my “reader” for Civ Pro several “cheat sheets” that walk students through particular subjects (like service of process) I want them to know but do not want to lecture on in class. It has gone very well thus far.
4. Monitor your food intake. At least at Harvard, there is very often food provided at various meetings and times of the day. It is easy to get fat. At the same time, I have come to realize that I need some caffeine and sugar flowing into my system while teaching. Through trial and error I have discovered the odd combination o Coke Zero and Swedish Fish make an excellent in-class snack. The fish are small enough that I can chew them while my students are answering a question I just asked.
5. Learning names matters to students. In my 1L contracts class, Christine Jolls (who taught me) memorized all 140 of our names by day one of the class. This stuck with me all these years, so I undertook to do the same the first year I taught Civ Pro (luckily class sizes had shrunk to 80 by then, which makes Jolls’ feat even more remarkable). I combine it with a trick I picked up from Peter Hutt to get them to submit one page information sheets on themselves and then call them for particular cases or hypos based on things they had done (e.g., “Mr. X, you were a beat cop in NYC, how would you evaluate the chase in Scott v. Harris? Would the court’s holding change the way you approached your job?”) I had thought this would be a good parlor trick of sorts, that it would make the students believe I was watching out for them and also that I took teaching seriously (both of which I do!) What I never anticipated was how much of a difference it made to them. They routinely tell me in person and on evaluations that it made them feel as though someone in the law school really knew and cared about them. So even though it is a pain every year to do it, I have kept doing it and recommend it to anyone.