Workshop for New Law Teachers

June 21–23, 2001
Alexandria, Virginia

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Jamin B. Raskin, Professor of Constitutional Law,
American University, Washington College of Law
Outline for AALS Luncheon Address, Friday, June 22, 2001

Theory without practice is empty; practice without theory is blind.
--John Dewey

1. Becoming A Law Professor: the Traditional Approach When I came to this conference a decade ago, I walked away with this very powerful sense: the proper way to launch your career in academia is to focus on your teaching and your scholarship, and once you have found your voice in the classroom, developed a scholarly work plan, and gotten two or three law review articles under your belt, then you can engage in some outside service activities, perhaps a pro bono case or service on a community legal board or the like. But the message was clear: don’t clutter your intellectual and pedagogical agenda with service ideas and projects until your real scholarly and teaching career is under way. Place your head before your heart. This advice troubled me, not just because it seemed to suffer from a kind of moral dyslexia in terms of the explicit professional responsibilities of lawyers and law professors, but because it reflected a fundamentally flawed conception of where ideas, scholarship, and teaching content and style actually come from.
2. The Unbearable Lightness of Being A Law Professor You are a new law professor. You have taught your first class. It was brilliant. You are exhilarated. You call your Mom. You go to your first faculty meeting. You cannot believe your good fortune. You’re not billing hours; you have no real boss. Then you remember that you must start writing, so what do you do? Perhaps there is something that has been troubling you since law school that you want to write about; perhaps a legal doctrine you came into contact with during your judicial clerkship deserves close examination and critique; perhaps you got an LLM and want to turn your master’s thesis into a law review article now. Any of these will make a good start, but what then? Or what if your mind really is a blank slate to begin with? You have a million ideas about law and justice but nothing particularly compelling or coherent to write about in your teaching subjects, which were not necessarily your first choice anyway. You wander around the library and see law review students busily working on their case notes. You pick up law reviews and read the articles. You flip through books. Maybe you’ll write about the Alien Tort Claims Act, maybe about Foucalt and prison privatization, maybe about the Americans With Disabilities Act and the Casey Martin decision, maybe about feminism, multiculturalism and the debate over female genital mutilation, maybe about the history of sovereign immunity and the 11th Amendment, maybe about the comparative treatment of hate speech in the United States, Germany, and Canada, maybe a book review of Richard Posner’s new book. How to decide how to spend the next six months of your life? How to make an imprint and a splash? You feel alternately glum and anxious or giddy and euphoric about the prospects. You experience the unbearable lightness (and sometimes heaviness) of being a law professor. What is to be done now?
3. Becoming A Law Professor: An Untraditional Approach What if we flipped the ordinary conception over? What if we began instead with the assumption that your project as a law professor, which is almost undoubtedly your life’s calling if you have gotten this far, is to serve your community or communities-and that community or communities may be defined in lots of ways: geographically, institutionally, ethnically, professionally, politically, economically, regionally, internationally, morally, educationally, and so on. This responsibility to serve is your bedrock self-definitional professional commitment and out of it will flow the ideas and insights and norms and values that shape your legal consciousness and scholarship; out of it will flow your creative self-development as a teacher in the broadest sense of the word for you will draw from your service the stature and vision that permit you to become a professor not just to your students but to society itself; and out of it will flow the professional and extracurricular engagements that will allow you to place the imprint of your mind on your social environment
   1. How to Begin: Throw Yourself into the World; Ask Dumb Questions; Be Brave About Doing and Learning Things You Don’t Fully Understand; and Find Your Own Path. The key point is to understand the tremendous gift you have been given by virtue of becoming a law professor. Your phone calls will be answered and people will treat you with a great deal of respect and deference and, in some parts of the country where there are fewer lawyers, something closer to real awe. You must use this gift energetically by throwing yourself into new situations, experimenting with new powers and contexts, and following your values and belies wherever they may lead. Through this journey-like all journeys equal parts planning, accident and improvisation-you will find your speaking and literary voice.
   2. Presentation of Examples of How Service Has Shaped and Defined My Scholarship and Teaching. I offer the following illustrations of how particular forms of service and public action have informed my scholarship and teaching.
   1. Non-Citizen Voting: The Takoma Park Redistricting Task Force, the Share the Vote Campaign, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, the AALS Scholarly Papers Competition.
   2. Democracy and Disenfranchisement in Washington: Delegate Voting in the Committee of the Whole, the D.C. statehood bill, Law of the American Political Process, the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, Alexander v. Daley, a constitutional amendment on the right to vote.
   3. Debate Gerrymandering: Perot v. Commission on Presidential Debates, Texas Law Review, Administrative Law Review, Nader v. Commission on Presidential Debates, the Appleseed Project on Electoral Reform.
   4. We the Students: The Blair High School “Gay Marriage Debate” censorship case; the Marshall-Brennan Fellowship Constitutional Literacy Project; We the Students.
4. The Inescapability of Service, Value and Choice; the Importance of the Right Start. While I have formulated a service-based philosophy of professorship as a kind of choice, in fact I want to close by arguing that it is not really a choice but an inevitability. Everything you teach, research, and write as a professor will reflect either a conscious or unconscious set of values, norms and commitments. Your work will serve meaning in the real world even if that meaning is simply an endorsement and restatement of the status quo or a validation of particular existing doctrines and systems of belief. Your realm of choice and maneuver is not in whether your work will carry normative weight and serve some institutions, systems, sectors, or ideals-it will-but in which values, communities and principles you choose to serve. “Everything depends upon the beginning.” --Latin proverb