Boosting the life cycle of the law teacher: from rookie to academic rock star

Scott Taylor (University of St Thomas, USA) conducted a workshop in which participants explored their past, present and future academic careers to help aspiring and new law teachers learn the secrets of success in the legal academy.

Participants responded to questions about their own careers in law teaching and assessed the factors that have enhanced or detracted from their academic careers. To get things rolling we identified the top three rock stars in the UK legal academy and discussed the factors that contributed to their success.

The list served as a backdrop to stimulate our interest in ourselves – a source of comparison to our own past, present and future careers in the legal academy. We then turned inward and looked at our own successes and disappointments:

• the postgraduate education that qualified us for that first law teaching job – what did we do right? what should we have done differently?
• how did we get that first teaching job? was that job a good place to start?
• how have we progressed since that first job? are we stuck in a rut or are we happy where we are?

Along the way we paused to consider successes based on internal, self defined criteria, with a focus on personal satisfaction. We then considered external measures of success and compared these with our personal measures. After some reflection, we speculated how we would advise aspiring and new law teachers to find success in the legal academy.

In terms of future research, Scott plans to continue doing surveys of legal academics to help us define excellence as we see it in others. We can then look at the life cycle of these successful legal academics and identify factors, if any, that have led to their success. These factors, in turn, may help us decide what is professionally important in promoting success or, perhaps, learning that success has its negative side.

About Scott

---

Scott Taylor, on leave from the University of St Thomas, is serving as a visiting professor of teaching excellence at the Phoenix School of Law for the academic year 2009-10. This has engendered an interest in helping aspiring and new law teachers find success as legal academics.
Scott has been teaching law since 1982 and thinks that those with experience need to extend a helping hand to those who are new to the profession.

Last Modified: 9 July 2010