COVID-19 has affected the normal rhythms of the legal academy in ways that may be particularly disruptive for early-career faculty.
AALS invites tenure-track, clinical, and legal writing faculty to join us on Tuesday afternoons for “Faculty Focus,” a series of weekly webinars organized around issues these individuals may be facing as well as challenges affecting higher education and the profession in general.
Each 60-minute webinar will feature expert advice from law school leaders followed by shared experiences from early career law faculty. The sessions will be structured to encourage conversation and connection, with opportunities for participants to crowdsource solutions and discuss common issues across schools and teaching areas.
Up Next: How to spend your summer
The first series of topics will be organized around how newer faculty members might best allocate their time during the summer of 2020. The moment of pause and recalibration faculty usually experience after grades have been submitted—when the spring semester has been closed but planning for the fall has not yet begun—has become cluttered and confusing due to the exponential increase in demands on time and attention. Join our speakers to explore issues concerning work-life balance and the demands of scholarship, meeting the needs of all students online, and delivering high-quality online instruction using best practices from higher education.
Miss a session? Past webinars are available online.
Week 6: Effective Use of Research Assistants
When the fall term begins in a few weeks, research assistants will be standing ready to tackle their assignments, and this panel will share ideas on how you can be ready, too.
When: Tuesday, July 14 at 4 pm ET/1 pm PT
Speakers
Catherine Baylin Duryea, Assistant Professor of Law, St. John’s University School of Law
Catherine Baylin Duryea is an Assistant Professor of Law at St. John’s University and a doctoral candidate in History at Stanford University. Professor Duryea is a legal historian who researches human rights, comparative constitutional development, and administrative law. Before joining the faculty at St. John’s, she clerked for the Honorable Justice Edwin Cameron of the Constitutional Court of South Africa and was a Fulbright scholar in Morocco and Kuwait. She holds a J.D. from Stanford Law School, an M.A. in Middle East Studies from the American University in Cairo, and a B.A. from Stanford. She teaches Administrative Law and Legal History.
Joan MacLeod Heminway, Interim Director of the Institute for Professional Leadership, Rick Rose Distinguished Professor of Law, The University of Tennessee College of Law
Joan MacLeod Heminway is the Rick Rose Distinguished Professor of Law at The University of Tennessee College of Law and, effective as of August 1, the Interim Director of its Institute for Professional Leadership. A member of the American Law Institute and fellow of The University of Tennessee, Knoxville’s C. Warren Neel Center for Corporate Governance and Center for the Study of Social Justice, Professor Heminway’s twenty years of teaching and scholarship focus mostly on securities disclosure law and policy, corporate governance issues under federal and state law, and the legal aspects of corporate finance.
Emile Loza de Siles, Assistant Professor of Law, Duquesne University School of Law
Emile Loza de Siles serves as Assistant Professor of Law at Duquesne University School of Law. A legal scholar focusing on artificial intelligence, technology, and law, she was recently honored with Duquesne University’s Presidential Scholarship Award. She practiced of intellectual property and technology law and litigation practice for sixteen years, serving Cisco Systems, Hewlett Packard Company, and other Fortune 500 and innovation companies through Technology Law Group, the firm she founded. She was a Visiting Scholar with the International and Comparative Law Program of The George Washington University Law School, and she earlier clerked for the Honorable Judge Sérgio A. Gutiérrez of the Idaho Court of Appeals and the Honorable Sheila F. Anthony of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission.
Austen L. Parrish, Dean, James H. Rudy Professor of Law, Indiana University Maurer School of Law
Austen Parrish is the Dean and James H. Rudy Professor at Indiana University Bloomington’s Maurer School of Law. Dean Parrish is a member of the Association of American Law Schools’ Executive Committee and Deans Steering Committee. He previously served as a member and then chair of the AALS Membership Review Committee and as a member of the faculty/programming committee for the 2019 ABA New Deans Workshop. He is an elected member of the American Law Institute, a member of The Fellows of the American Bar Foundation, and a member of the board of AccessLex Institute. One of the leading experts on extraterritoriality, his scholarly interests focus on areas of transnational and international law.
Hosts
Darby Dickerson, AALS President and Dean, UIC John Marshall Law School
Darby Dickerson, the 2020 AALS President, has been a dean for seventeen years. She currently is Dean at the UIC John Marshall Law School and previously has served as Dean at Stetson University College of Law, Texas Tech University School of Law, and The John Marshall Law School in Chicago. Her areas of expertise include higher education law and policy and legal writing. Before entering academia, she clerked on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit and practiced commercial litigation in Dallas. She earned her B.A. and M.A. from William & Mary and her J.D. from Vanderbilt.
Vince Rougeau, AALS President-elect and Dean, Boston College Law School
Vincent D. Rougeau has been the Dean of Boston College Law School since 2011. He is President-Elect of AALS and has previously served as a member of the AALS Executive Committee and as a member of the Council of the Boston Bar Association. A vocal advocate for change in legal education, he writes and speaks extensively on legal education reform. He has led a reorganization in leadership structure at BC Law that supports a more holistic approach to academic and student services, expands the school’s national and international recruitment of a diverse student body, and enhances the school’s commitment to experiential learning and global engagement.
Moderator
Jeff Allum, AALS Director of Research
Jeff Allum is the Director of Research & Data Analytics for AALS. In addition to moderating Faculty Focus, Dr. Allum oversees AALS’s research agenda, including Before the JD and the Study of the American Law School Dean. With more than 20 years’ experience conducting higher education and workforce research, the results of his work have been reported in Bloomberg Law, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed, The National Law Journal, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Politico, to name a few. He holds an EdD in Education Policy from the George Washington University.
Upcoming Events
How to Become an Excellent Teacher While Starting Your Career in a Pandemic
When: Thursday, July 16, 2020, 4 pm EST
Join Professor Pasachoff to talk about strategies for becoming an excellent law teacher — not just in the current online environment but more generally. Professor Pasachoff will also talk about ways to balance teaching with the other obligations of academic life and the commitments of a full personal life as well.
Eloise Pasachoff, Professor of Law; Agnes N. Williams Research Professor; Associate Dean for Careers, Georgetown University Law Center
Eloise Pasachoff is Agnes N. Williams Research Professor and Associate Dean for Careers at the Georgetown University Law Center. An award-winning teacher and scholar, she is a public member of the Administrative Conference of the United States and serves on the Academic Advisory Board of the Supreme Court Fellows program.
What Every Faculty Member Should be Doing This Summer
When: Tuesday, July 21, 2020, 4 pm EST
This summer’s “to do” list may seem especially daunting: conduct research, reflect on the spring, prepare for the fall, learn new skills, and recuperate are just a few examples. Join our panelists as they offer their thoughts and suggestions on how faculty might spend the remainder of their summer.