IN
A NEW SEMINAR for students interested in pursuing law
teaching, Gideon Parchomovsky, assistant professor of law, is preparing
students for a job market that places significant value on legal writing
and publishing and on an interdisciplinary background.
In “Legal
Scholarship,” up to eight second and third-year students work with
Parchomovsky to publish a note and an article, developed from the students’
own ideas. The students then present their papers for comment to Penn
Law professors with relevant legal specialties. “It enables the
students to draw on wonderful resources,” says Parchomovsky. “Unlike
other students who write papers for a seminar, they produce much more
expansive and better polished papers with superior quality.”
A record
of scholarly production has become increasingly important in recent years,
says Penn Law professor Stephen J. Morse. “One of the things that
was often said about old-style law schools -- say 40 years ago -- is they
were filled with people who were brilliant but who had few genuinely scholarly
ideas,” he says. “They were very good at examining a line
of cases and rationalizing them, but they had few theoretical, interdisciplinary,
or interesting policy ideas about how the law should be.”
Today, says
Parchomovsky, these ideas are more important than ever for aspiring law
professors. Law, he says, is no longer “an insular field. . . .
Now much of the analysis is driven by policy, and law is more of a policy
instrument than it used to be in the past. Students with academic aspirations
ought to be aware of this change. There’s no other way for them
to be successful. They have to understand what the expectation is out
there.” |
