2012-09-30

The Benefits of Senior, Junior, and Adjunct Law Faculty

There was an interesting post on the Law Librarian Blog this week concerning the benefits of senior, junior, and adjunct faculty in the classroom. The post can be linked to here. This is a subject that interests me greatly, and readers will remember that I recently wrote a law review article (in the BYU Education and Law Journal) about junior faculty teaching. You can link to my full article here, and to my previous blog posts on the article here and here. The latter post includes an exchange with UCLA law professor Stephen Bainbridge.

The long and short of it is that this Law Librarian Blog post reviews some of the current scholarship on law faculty teaching by senior, junior, and adjunct professors and provides some interesting commentary on this scholarship. Most interesting, perhaps, is the blog's observation that there seems to be little academic literature on the benefits of senior faculty teaching. Personally, I think this is because the common wisdom in the legal academy is that senior faculty are better teachers all around, so why write about it? I disagree with this view, however--and if you are interested in seeing why, look at my BYU article.

"Must Sue TV"

Today's post is about the blog That's What She Said, on which blogger and attorney Julie Elgar discusses legal/HR issues raised by episodes of the US TV show The Office. Specifically, Elgar assigns a litigation value to various actions that occur on the show. I blogged about her blog briefly in a previous post.

Tonight (9/27/07) was the season premiere, which means that tomorrow morning (Friday) Elgar will post a blog entry about the episode. It's very interesting to see the show dissected for legal liability purposes. And the truth is that there are a lot of idiot bosses out there, so it's not a hypothetical exercise. One boss I know ordered his employees not to conjugate in the hallways. Seriously. In the same office, an internal office memo from the boss explained that security was being improved at the front door by installing a "security intercom buzzard." Again, no joke. Dilbert bosses are alive and well. So the idea of treating the scenarios on The Office as if they were real is a legitimate exercise. And fun, which is the most important thing.

I have added That's What She Said to my blogroll for those who are interested in checking it out on a regular basis.

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