Sunday, August 10, 2008

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.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Great feedback on this question, I wish my forum questions got more input.

http://www.walterstrustinfo.com/

Anonymous said...

for what it's worth, i found "junior" and adjunct professors to be much more entertaining than the more senior professors, which made the subject matter of the course much more interesting and captivating. comparatively speaking, junior professors do have the absolute advantage in this regard.