All content tagged with: Legal Education

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  • Who is Black Enough For You? An Analysis of Northwestern University Law School’s Struggle Over Minority Faculty Hiring

    This Article considers the factors that should be used in hiring a person of color to a faculty position and raises the following questions: Apart from potential teaching ability and scholarly productivity, should faculty appointments committees look to other criteria for candidates of color? Provided that we can still consider the race and ethnicity of prospective candidates of color at private institutions, should faculty appointments committees be concerned about how closely identified a candidate is to an essentialized conception, for instance, of Black persons? Should a faculty hiring committee focus its efforts to hire African Americans on a Black person who has ancestral roots in the American South, whose family has endured Jim Crow racism, who is very dark-skinned, whose family background is impoverished, and who grew up in an all-Black segregated environment? Stated conversely, should a faculty appointments committee hire a Black person who does not meet any of these essentialized characteristics? In confronting these issues, this Article calls. into question conceptions of race within mainstream U.S. society and among African Americans and other communities of color

  • The Social Construction of Identity in Criminal Cases: Cinema Verité and the Pedagogy of Vincent Chin

    This article will discuss the use of the film, Who Killed Vincent Chin?, as a method: (1) to analyze the relationship of social constructions of identity, particularly race, on the rules and discretionary application of criminal jurisprudence; (2) to provide an interactive pedagogical tool for law teachers, especially criminal law teachers, to examine the social contexts of criminal jurisprudence from multiple perspectives; and (3) to examine the ability of criminal law doctrine to address issues of race.

  • Breaking into the Acadamy: The 1996-97 Michigan Journal of Race & Law Guide for Aspiring Law Professors

    I was not very far into my law school experience when I realized that my professors had the best job in town-it took me quite a bit longer to discover that I, too, could get in on the deal. Do not misunderstand me-being a law professor is not easy. In fact, when done correctly, the job requires a tremendous amount of intellectual energy, emotional commitment, long hours, and hard work. However, if you enjoy writing, research, public speaking, and developing mentoring relationships, being a law professor could be the career for you. This Article, and the listings of helpful organizations and citations to other articles about law teaching that follow, are intended to help guide the law professor wannabe through the process of applying for a tenuretrack faculty position at a law school.