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Abstract

This is both an exciting and daunting time to begin a career in the legal academy. As one who started teaching law in the fall of 1990, I still view the profession very much through a beginner's critical eyes. I trust that this confession comes as no surprise, since my more seasoned colleagues have informed me that they felt like greenhorns well into their first half-dozen or so years of teaching, and more than a few have confided that they experience the neophyte's exhilaration and dread whenever they teach a course for the first time. Accordingly, beginners of all ages and levels of experience might find wisdom as well as solace in Rilke's admonition; learning to live (if not always love) "the questions themselves" is certainly the best way that I have found to temper the apprentice's angst with a necessary measure of enjoyment while riding the steep and occasionally heady professorial learning curve. But even aside from the conventional "beginner's syndrome," the novice law teacher of today has special cause for intellectual vertigo in embarking upon a profession which is itself undergoing a period of intensive scrutiny and dissection from both without and within. In numerous contexts, the "center" no longer holds when we scrutinize previously sacrosanct jurisprudential norms and pedagogical assumptions.

Publication Title

Clinical Law Review

Volume

1

Issue

1

First Page

135

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