Submitted by Lou Virelli
The Aspiring Law Teachers Workshop is a recurring annual program at SEALS designed to provide people who are preparing to go on the teaching market information and skills that will be useful to their job search. On Saturday afternoon, a group of experienced and aspiring faculty members met to discuss a series of issues relevant to new and emerging scholars.
The group covered a wide variety of topics. The meeting began with a vibrant discussion of how to develop new scholarship ideas. Recurring themes included finding topics that are current, that inspire you intellectually and emotionally, and that may be commonly featured in relevant blogs or legal news sources. The conversation shifted to development of those new ideas, in particular how to determine whether an idea merits treatment in a full-length article or some other forum. Comments included ways to structure a law review article, the appropriate length for an article versus an essay, and when to convert a longer piece into two separate publications.
After fleshing out where ideas are likely to come from and how they can be developed into law review articles, the group looked more closely at the writing process. It addressed strategies for how to start and find time to pursue specific writing projects and then expanded into a discussion about ways to stay productive both as a junior scholar and throughout the arc of a career. In that vein, the group also took up the costs and benefits for junior scholars of certain types of writing projects, such as co-authored pieces, interdisciplinary projects, and books.
The last category of topics involved the role of scholarship and a scholarly agenda in the hiring process and the value of professional conferences for new scholars. The group considered the importance of, and approach to, writing a formal research agenda, both for entry-level applicants as well as junior laterals. It went on talk about how attending conferences can benefit a new scholar’s current and future work product, before closing with a question-and-answer session that revisited many of the topics previously discussed.