PROFESSORS-WHAT ARE THEY LIKE?

When a student asks this question what that student is really asking is whether law school professors are approachable if that student is having difficulty understanding something. There is no one simple answer to this question except to say law school professors are just like any other group of individuals; some are very approachable and some are not.

A better way to understand law school professors is by understanding what they are hired to do and what is required of them. There are basically three types of law school professors. Those three types are doctrinal professors, clinicians, and the skills professors.

Doctrinal professors are the professors that teach a majority of the required courses and electives such as torts, contracts, administrative law, estates, tax, etc. The class sizes for the doctrinal courses can range from just a few students to over 100 students. As you can imagine, the bigger the class the more difficult it is for a doctrinal professor to give a student the individual attention a student sometimes needs. Furthermore, the major reason doctrinal professors are hired is for their scholarship ability, and not for their ability to build students' skills so some of them are not very effective at helping struggling students grasp what a student is having difficulty understanding.

The clinicians supervise the law school clinics in which students get the opportunity to represent real clients in real cases. In clinics there are usually no more than twenty students being supervised by one professor, and often there are fewer students than twenty. Clinicians are usually very good at working with individual students because a big part of their job is to teach and coach students how to handle the cases the students are assigned to.

The skills professors are made of two basic sub-groups: (1) research and writing professors, and (2) academic success professors. Both these types of professors are hired specifically to help students develop the skills that are essential for legal success, and these professors are often very good with individual students.

The research and writing professors are the law librarians and legal writing professors. These professors usually work with no more than 40 students in a semester in classes of no more than twenty students at a time. Furthermore, the legal writing professors are often expected to hold individual conferences with students regarding the students' writing assignments.

As for academic success professors, their main responsibility is to help students become the most effective and efficient law students possible. Thus, academic success professors are often very good at helping an individual student understand his or her learning style so that the student knows how to best approach his or her legal studies.

Other related articles on this website include First Year-The Common Complaint and Learning in Law School .

Good luck in law school!

Michael Santana
michael.santana@lawboost.com