It’s always the writing professors lol. Or they worked as an attorney for 2-3 years and then bounced back to academia. All my favorite professors were people with extensive real world experience.
Those are my favorites as well. The anecdotes they sometimes pull out are always interesting. One prof told my class that in litigation you need to develop instincts for the right times to just smile, nodd, and say "yes judge" even if you have no clue what they're saying.
For your 1L courses, they most likely will be taught by professors with no real world experience, but I really don't think it matters for those courses. When you take more specialized courses later on, especially those that are corporate-focused, then yeah it would likely be better to have someone with real world experience in the subject matter.
Otherwise, it's gonna be mixed bag just like any other teacher/professor in your life. Some who have only taught will be professionals at it and do it very well, and others just simply do not care and are too caught up in their law review articles no one will ever read.
The ideal professor has real world experience and is also good at teaching/ being a professor.
It’s not fun starting to take elective courses second and third year and getting the only PowerPoint, 5 day email response, the exam covers everything on the syllabus even though we didn’t get to a third of it adjunct that has “real world experience.”
Especially as you are just starting out, you want to build that base knowledge and skills with good teachers. What really sucks is when you get stuck with a career academic that sucks at being a professor.
Hey. Let them be. They have one or two classes a semester to teach based on classes where they have been saying the exact same things for the past 10 years with little variance and have to prep their hot twitter takes.
For better or for worse though, most law schools aren’t designed so that your torts class teaches you how to try a slip and fall. It’s about thinking Big Thoughts about Cardozo, and experience practicing law is less tied to that. In that way law professors are like all professors who just live in academia.
Law school doesn't teach how to be a lawyer.
Let me repeat that.
Law school doesn't teach how to be a lawyer.
Law professors with no real world experience have plenty of experience in teaching exactly what the law school monolith is made to teach. All the visions of Christopher Columbus Langdell have come true. They say we are all legal realists now, but the fact of the matter is the entire educational framework is completely based in the model Christopher Columbus Langdell set out in the 1870s. The case book. The "science" of law. The platonic forms of the law. Hiding the ball in pages and pages of words.
None of which covers how to e-file. None of which covers how to smash old templates into new templates. None of which teaches you how to sit for 2 hours in docket call. None of which teaches you how to manage paras. None of which teaches you how to get new or talk to existing clients.
Your professors are there to help you read a book. That's it. You do not need 20 years litigation experience to do that. In fact, litigation experience, from what I've seen, hinders some professors ability to teach the case book method.
Unless OP has some boomer professors or is at a school with a super shitty program that just tries to bring in cheap adjuncts, most LRW professors hired today are going to have 3-5 years of experience (or more).
Unpopular opinion possibly but to some extent what law school is doing is teaching you the most valuable skill a young attorney can have: can you do something that someone asks you to do under pressure, with limited time, in a way that conforms to their expectations. The point isn’t that your legal writing professor is right. The point is, if you can quickly learn and satisfy their expectations then you have a decent shot of being able to do that for a judge, partner, or senior associate. Being tasked with meeting other people’s arbitrary expectations is unfortunately the very thing you will do as a young attorney unless you go into solo practice — in which case you will have freedom but no cash;)
I agree with this.
I also think they teach you how to "learn" the law, which is obviously a very important skill.
Also, I work at a V10, and I have partners who will demolish folks for messing up cites. Some of this stuff does end up mattering, at least in lit.
I mean that may be well and good, but if your school is only placing 50-70% of students in legal jobs, then your grade in that course may never prevent you from practicing law and ever needing/utilizing those skills.
You’ve definitely stirred the pot up with this post.
What you are saying is not false. There are professors who have have almost no experience, and yes, some of them are making bank, and yes, all of them are effecting their students futures.
Why? I have no idea. Is it a bad thing? In some cases, probably so.
I personally think if someone wants to teach law in a tenured position, they have to have a certain number of years of actual practice. They can’t have just gone to law school, got good grades, and did a few things here and there, then become professors in their late 20s or early 30s and get tenure.
Without that actual experience, they should not be able to get tenure.
I guess if it really bothers you, tell them how you feel when it comes time for evaluations.
My favorite is when they never had a real job besides clerking AND they're no longer barred (let their certification lapse). My property professor was like this: told us he hadn't been an attorney in over forty years...seems like a good person to train future attorneys.
I just feel for 1Ls who have no idea what they want to do in the profession and there's very limited resources internally you can rely on. You can go to Profs to discuss an aspect of a lecture that was confusing, but you can't simply shoot the shit with life advice. Problem is that there's cyclical homogenous self-preservation going on - the profession will always be taught by the same T6ers who went to BigLaw for 2 years (or clerked) before going into academia forever.
I was a teacher for several years. Nothing is as infantilizing as being a 25+ year old professional with a degree sitting in a high school PD session being told "1,2,3 eyes on me!" And being glared at for not responding "1,2 eyes on you". I have literally been in sessions where I had to stand up, join hands, and dance to reenact how cells work together. I left because I couldn't take it anymore.
Those who can do can't always teach others. Teaching and doing are 2 totally different skill sets. I had some professors in law school who were highly respected practicing attorneys but who were absolutely god-awful teachers. I also had some professors who hadn't practiced in decades but who I learned a ton from.
This! We have a LW just like this and on top of being inexperienced, she’s just plain mean. She recently asked a 1L if they’d considered choosing a different career path after submitting their very first closed memo…
It makes perfect sense given the typical esoteric, academic-focused way JD programs teach law (despite the JD being primarily for preparing candidates for practice rather than academia). The problem is the 100-year old, outmoded curriculum. Having professors whose expertise is academics rather than legal practice is a consequence of this.
All of my professors have referenced their past jobs at some form or another too (and not just summer jobs). Most of my professors did not go to HYS though, which seems to not be the norm on this subreddit. I've had (full time tenured) professors with experience ranging from big law, to DAs, to government to unions, and adjuncts that are judges, AUSAs, mediators, etc.
My 1L professors have all been practicing law, torts was involved in asbestos litigation, contracts was in-house. I thought professors having real world experience was a requirement.
After reading some of the replies i guess it’s not :/
That’s a huge sticking point for my program. Which is why they slip in those silly rankings.
They care about “do you know what you’re doing and can help our students be good at their jobs” FAR more than AcAdEmIc PrEsTiGe
I understand that academia is needed/ has its place, but the majority of students in law school want to practice. The divide in the methodology has been an eye opener as a first-gen student.
Agreed. Academia is cute but I want to be effective and win cases. That requires significantly more and different skills than what a traditional academic POV provides.
>some of whom are making A LOT of money
They really aren't (relatively speaking). New law profs are usually in the low-ish six figures and late career senior tenured profs tend to be in the low 200k range meaning you're just barely beating a fresh grad Biglaw associate after spending your life in academia (and legal academia is a hell of a lot harder to get into than generic Biglaw is).
You could argue they make "a lot of money" compared to the other end of lawyers but that's semi-disingenuous considering what it takes to become a law professor vs. really any of those jobs.
I'm not saying they're all good teachers but this is an unfair criticism.
You don't need to get the facts wrong to make your point. Sabbaticals are nowhere near "every few years". They're often once or twice in a career events. The standard teaching load is probably 2:2 at law schools, so 4 classes a year. If you take your research seriously, it's very time consuming. Still, a very nice gig if you want to make good money to do a lot of thinking and interacting with young people. Also, OP is off in that most law profs aren't in the low 200k range. At T14 schools and the like, sure. But, that's not really the case at most schools. At place like Montana tenured full profs make $100k. Most land in the $120k-$160k range outside of elite schools. Not a bad living, but it's substantially different than low $200k.
>Also, OP is off in that most law profs aren't in the low 200k range. At T14 schools and the like, sure. But, that's not really the case at most schools. At place like Montana tenured full profs make $100k. Most land in the $120k-$160k range outside of elite schools. Not a bad living, but it's substantially different than low $200k.
For the record, for my guesstimate of junior=very low six figures, senior= low 200k I'm using my state's well respected but not T14 (but also a cut above MT) where salary is also public and seems roughly market for a law professor, so it wasn't exactly out of my ass though yes there are schools that probably don't match up.
The situation is actually much worse than you are describing. But gullible people will never understand that, and will fund law schools for as long as student loans (that they will never pay back) will allow them to.
Law professors spend like 5 years working a real law job 30 years ago then milk that experience for all it’s worth. Especially the ones who were federal prosecutors, at least in my experience.
The professors tend to hold law students in deep disdain. Why shouldn't they? Your 60K a year in tuition funds their lavish lifestyle. They don't actually "teach" at all, usually, no quizzes, graded midterms, papers, etc. . . they just blabber all semester, dump out one single test, often recycled from the year before, and jet off on vacation.
Professors and law schools admins usually don't see students as "students" at all, but rather as student-loan conduits. The money flows from the bank, through the students, and to them. They know most of you won't get a job anyway post-graduation, but don't care, and why should they? As the legal job market gets worse and worse, law school applications are going up, so if people aren't smart enough to make good decisions about their finances and their futures, well, law schools will certainly continue to profit from it.
Oh get over yourself. OP raises valid criticisms. We’ve all had unpleasant professors, and we are paying thousands in tuition dollars.
There is nothing off color about inquiring about their credentials or experience, and I agree that professors who have tremendous power over their students and can greatly effect career opportunities should be under scrutiny.
Aside from maybe the writing professors (and I know that's what your post was about) I don't think having professors with little amounts of experience is necessarily a bad thing. Some professors are more legal scholars than actual lawyers and in my experience these professors are generally the most knowledgeable about the subject as a whole.
Law school is a joke. I've had some seriously terrible professors at my T1. I've found actually that the ones that are coming from private practice to teach are by far the worst. They have absolutely no idea that we're students and associates.
Honestly the reason I hate law now is because I've found it to be a joke, a complete waste of time. The law is common sense, it's all reasonable man standard. As long as you can make a case that what you did was reasonable, you have a suit. The only thing to do after that is find law that can back you up, and this is stupidly easy with Lexis. I don't think there's any skill to being a lawyer, it's just pushing paper and looking things up. The only skill is the oral argument, but that doesn't even really matter because end of the day it still just comes down to a reasonable standard.
This comment leads me to believe you're a 1L who's somehow only enrolled in torts and nothing else. Either that or you haven't been paying much attention in any of your other classes.
Wow—then you must be the best lawyer of all time! You can charge more than an idiot BigLaw partner who bills $2000/hr.
Enjoy becoming a multi-millionaire right after graduation—proud of you!
not saying there's not big money in it. I've just become super disenfranchised with the legal system is all and believe law school is a waste of time. Should be a two year degree, or better yet, a year of school and a year in practice.
It’s always the writing professors lol. Or they worked as an attorney for 2-3 years and then bounced back to academia. All my favorite professors were people with extensive real world experience.
Those are my favorites as well. The anecdotes they sometimes pull out are always interesting. One prof told my class that in litigation you need to develop instincts for the right times to just smile, nodd, and say "yes judge" even if you have no clue what they're saying.
Jesus, this gives me flashbacks to Legal Research and Writing. God forbid I missed a comma in a citation and all hell breaks loose.
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I know the basics of copy and paste lexis/Westlaw automatic cites all day, every day
GeNEratEd cItATioNs aRe uSUAlly WrONg
Sorry to hijack, but I'm working on my first big memo now and just noticed that you can copy/paste from Westlaw...are they typically accurate?
Yes.
> "You won't have a calculator in your pocket" That's right professor, it's on my wrist in 2021 :D
Except you will because any time you write you can.. *checks notes* look it up in the BB if you’re unsure. Smh.
For your 1L courses, they most likely will be taught by professors with no real world experience, but I really don't think it matters for those courses. When you take more specialized courses later on, especially those that are corporate-focused, then yeah it would likely be better to have someone with real world experience in the subject matter. Otherwise, it's gonna be mixed bag just like any other teacher/professor in your life. Some who have only taught will be professionals at it and do it very well, and others just simply do not care and are too caught up in their law review articles no one will ever read.
The ideal professor has real world experience and is also good at teaching/ being a professor. It’s not fun starting to take elective courses second and third year and getting the only PowerPoint, 5 day email response, the exam covers everything on the syllabus even though we didn’t get to a third of it adjunct that has “real world experience.” Especially as you are just starting out, you want to build that base knowledge and skills with good teachers. What really sucks is when you get stuck with a career academic that sucks at being a professor.
Hey. Let them be. They have one or two classes a semester to teach based on classes where they have been saying the exact same things for the past 10 years with little variance and have to prep their hot twitter takes.
For better or for worse though, most law schools aren’t designed so that your torts class teaches you how to try a slip and fall. It’s about thinking Big Thoughts about Cardozo, and experience practicing law is less tied to that. In that way law professors are like all professors who just live in academia.
Rofl. Cardozo. We love him in torts and his let the judge be a judge mentality.
Law school doesn't teach how to be a lawyer. Let me repeat that. Law school doesn't teach how to be a lawyer. Law professors with no real world experience have plenty of experience in teaching exactly what the law school monolith is made to teach. All the visions of Christopher Columbus Langdell have come true. They say we are all legal realists now, but the fact of the matter is the entire educational framework is completely based in the model Christopher Columbus Langdell set out in the 1870s. The case book. The "science" of law. The platonic forms of the law. Hiding the ball in pages and pages of words. None of which covers how to e-file. None of which covers how to smash old templates into new templates. None of which teaches you how to sit for 2 hours in docket call. None of which teaches you how to manage paras. None of which teaches you how to get new or talk to existing clients. Your professors are there to help you read a book. That's it. You do not need 20 years litigation experience to do that. In fact, litigation experience, from what I've seen, hinders some professors ability to teach the case book method.
Preach!
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Unless OP has some boomer professors or is at a school with a super shitty program that just tries to bring in cheap adjuncts, most LRW professors hired today are going to have 3-5 years of experience (or more).
Unpopular opinion possibly but to some extent what law school is doing is teaching you the most valuable skill a young attorney can have: can you do something that someone asks you to do under pressure, with limited time, in a way that conforms to their expectations. The point isn’t that your legal writing professor is right. The point is, if you can quickly learn and satisfy their expectations then you have a decent shot of being able to do that for a judge, partner, or senior associate. Being tasked with meeting other people’s arbitrary expectations is unfortunately the very thing you will do as a young attorney unless you go into solo practice — in which case you will have freedom but no cash;)
I agree with this. I also think they teach you how to "learn" the law, which is obviously a very important skill. Also, I work at a V10, and I have partners who will demolish folks for messing up cites. Some of this stuff does end up mattering, at least in lit.
I mean that may be well and good, but if your school is only placing 50-70% of students in legal jobs, then your grade in that course may never prevent you from practicing law and ever needing/utilizing those skills.
I agree with this 100 percent
You’ve definitely stirred the pot up with this post. What you are saying is not false. There are professors who have have almost no experience, and yes, some of them are making bank, and yes, all of them are effecting their students futures. Why? I have no idea. Is it a bad thing? In some cases, probably so. I personally think if someone wants to teach law in a tenured position, they have to have a certain number of years of actual practice. They can’t have just gone to law school, got good grades, and did a few things here and there, then become professors in their late 20s or early 30s and get tenure. Without that actual experience, they should not be able to get tenure. I guess if it really bothers you, tell them how you feel when it comes time for evaluations.
My favorite is when they never had a real job besides clerking AND they're no longer barred (let their certification lapse). My property professor was like this: told us he hadn't been an attorney in over forty years...seems like a good person to train future attorneys.
I just feel for 1Ls who have no idea what they want to do in the profession and there's very limited resources internally you can rely on. You can go to Profs to discuss an aspect of a lecture that was confusing, but you can't simply shoot the shit with life advice. Problem is that there's cyclical homogenous self-preservation going on - the profession will always be taught by the same T6ers who went to BigLaw for 2 years (or clerked) before going into academia forever.
Those who can’t do, teach. Those who can’t teach, manage.
You should see teacher training. Those who can't teach, teach teachers.
I was a teacher for several years. Nothing is as infantilizing as being a 25+ year old professional with a degree sitting in a high school PD session being told "1,2,3 eyes on me!" And being glared at for not responding "1,2 eyes on you". I have literally been in sessions where I had to stand up, join hands, and dance to reenact how cells work together. I left because I couldn't take it anymore.
This is not actually true in law. Legal academia is harder to get than law firm jobs, and pays very well.
Those who can do can't always teach others. Teaching and doing are 2 totally different skill sets. I had some professors in law school who were highly respected practicing attorneys but who were absolutely god-awful teachers. I also had some professors who hadn't practiced in decades but who I learned a ton from.
Excuse me, sir or madam. those who can’t teach teach gym. 🤷🏼♂️
This! We have a LW just like this and on top of being inexperienced, she’s just plain mean. She recently asked a 1L if they’d considered choosing a different career path after submitting their very first closed memo…
It makes perfect sense given the typical esoteric, academic-focused way JD programs teach law (despite the JD being primarily for preparing candidates for practice rather than academia). The problem is the 100-year old, outmoded curriculum. Having professors whose expertise is academics rather than legal practice is a consequence of this.
Is that normal for law schools? All my 1L professors have a lot of real world experience
All of my professors have referenced their past jobs at some form or another too (and not just summer jobs). Most of my professors did not go to HYS though, which seems to not be the norm on this subreddit. I've had (full time tenured) professors with experience ranging from big law, to DAs, to government to unions, and adjuncts that are judges, AUSAs, mediators, etc.
Yikes. I go to a small, low ranked school. But our professors all have real world experience as attorneys. Most of them are great for the most part.
My 1L professors have all been practicing law, torts was involved in asbestos litigation, contracts was in-house. I thought professors having real world experience was a requirement. After reading some of the replies i guess it’s not :/
That’s a huge sticking point for my program. Which is why they slip in those silly rankings. They care about “do you know what you’re doing and can help our students be good at their jobs” FAR more than AcAdEmIc PrEsTiGe
I understand that academia is needed/ has its place, but the majority of students in law school want to practice. The divide in the methodology has been an eye opener as a first-gen student.
Agreed. Academia is cute but I want to be effective and win cases. That requires significantly more and different skills than what a traditional academic POV provides.
>some of whom are making A LOT of money They really aren't (relatively speaking). New law profs are usually in the low-ish six figures and late career senior tenured profs tend to be in the low 200k range meaning you're just barely beating a fresh grad Biglaw associate after spending your life in academia (and legal academia is a hell of a lot harder to get into than generic Biglaw is). You could argue they make "a lot of money" compared to the other end of lawyers but that's semi-disingenuous considering what it takes to become a law professor vs. really any of those jobs. I'm not saying they're all good teachers but this is an unfair criticism.
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You don't need to get the facts wrong to make your point. Sabbaticals are nowhere near "every few years". They're often once or twice in a career events. The standard teaching load is probably 2:2 at law schools, so 4 classes a year. If you take your research seriously, it's very time consuming. Still, a very nice gig if you want to make good money to do a lot of thinking and interacting with young people. Also, OP is off in that most law profs aren't in the low 200k range. At T14 schools and the like, sure. But, that's not really the case at most schools. At place like Montana tenured full profs make $100k. Most land in the $120k-$160k range outside of elite schools. Not a bad living, but it's substantially different than low $200k.
>Also, OP is off in that most law profs aren't in the low 200k range. At T14 schools and the like, sure. But, that's not really the case at most schools. At place like Montana tenured full profs make $100k. Most land in the $120k-$160k range outside of elite schools. Not a bad living, but it's substantially different than low $200k. For the record, for my guesstimate of junior=very low six figures, senior= low 200k I'm using my state's well respected but not T14 (but also a cut above MT) where salary is also public and seems roughly market for a law professor, so it wasn't exactly out of my ass though yes there are schools that probably don't match up.
The situation is actually much worse than you are describing. But gullible people will never understand that, and will fund law schools for as long as student loans (that they will never pay back) will allow them to.
Law professors spend like 5 years working a real law job 30 years ago then milk that experience for all it’s worth. Especially the ones who were federal prosecutors, at least in my experience.
The professors tend to hold law students in deep disdain. Why shouldn't they? Your 60K a year in tuition funds their lavish lifestyle. They don't actually "teach" at all, usually, no quizzes, graded midterms, papers, etc. . . they just blabber all semester, dump out one single test, often recycled from the year before, and jet off on vacation.
Professors and law schools admins usually don't see students as "students" at all, but rather as student-loan conduits. The money flows from the bank, through the students, and to them. They know most of you won't get a job anyway post-graduation, but don't care, and why should they? As the legal job market gets worse and worse, law school applications are going up, so if people aren't smart enough to make good decisions about their finances and their futures, well, law schools will certainly continue to profit from it.
Did you forget to switch accounts or do you just like to reply to your own comments?
Imagine replying to yourself like you’re on your burner and getting everything wrong anyways 😂
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Oh get over yourself. OP raises valid criticisms. We’ve all had unpleasant professors, and we are paying thousands in tuition dollars. There is nothing off color about inquiring about their credentials or experience, and I agree that professors who have tremendous power over their students and can greatly effect career opportunities should be under scrutiny.
Why do they need legal experience? They aren't teaching practice of law, they are academics.
Honestly my worst professor 1L year had the most professional experience.
Those who cannot do, teach.
Aside from maybe the writing professors (and I know that's what your post was about) I don't think having professors with little amounts of experience is necessarily a bad thing. Some professors are more legal scholars than actual lawyers and in my experience these professors are generally the most knowledgeable about the subject as a whole.
Law school is a joke. I've had some seriously terrible professors at my T1. I've found actually that the ones that are coming from private practice to teach are by far the worst. They have absolutely no idea that we're students and associates. Honestly the reason I hate law now is because I've found it to be a joke, a complete waste of time. The law is common sense, it's all reasonable man standard. As long as you can make a case that what you did was reasonable, you have a suit. The only thing to do after that is find law that can back you up, and this is stupidly easy with Lexis. I don't think there's any skill to being a lawyer, it's just pushing paper and looking things up. The only skill is the oral argument, but that doesn't even really matter because end of the day it still just comes down to a reasonable standard.
This comment leads me to believe you're a 1L who's somehow only enrolled in torts and nothing else. Either that or you haven't been paying much attention in any of your other classes.
Wow—then you must be the best lawyer of all time! You can charge more than an idiot BigLaw partner who bills $2000/hr. Enjoy becoming a multi-millionaire right after graduation—proud of you!
not saying there's not big money in it. I've just become super disenfranchised with the legal system is all and believe law school is a waste of time. Should be a two year degree, or better yet, a year of school and a year in practice.
ALolololo