Labor / Employment, Law Professors, Law Schools, Quote of the Day

Law Professor Compares His Own Scholarship To Whale Poop

Who says law professors are delusional? This one is brutally honest.

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[W]ith self-biting candor, I must acknowledge an undeniably deeper flaw in my scholarship. My goal was to capture the minds, if not hearts, of real world decision-makers in my field…. This proved, alas, to be the deepest debacle of my life as a professor. My labor law articles sank like whale excrement in the seas of jurisprudence, and the most I’ve ever mustered is a solitary citation by a state court judge.

— Professor John W. Teeter Jr. of St. Mary’s University School of Law, in a law review article entitled Perils and Pontifications: Reflections on the Failures and Joys of a Law Teacher (via TaxProf Blog).

(Read on for more commentary from the brutally honest Professor Teeter….)

Who says law professors are delusional? Professor Teeter seems clear-eyed and remarkably honest in his self-assessment. Many law professors I know believe their own scholarship to be brilliant, but Teeter is not one of them:

[M]y initial articles were parochial, pedantic, and pedestrian…. A wise dean once advised new teachers to “write about what you know,” and what I knew best was how to read cases thoroughly, identify legal conflicts, and make a pitch as to how those struggles should be resolved. In almost paint-by-numbers steps, I would exhaustively discuss every relevant and significant case on each side of the doctrinal divide and attempt to build a simple legal overpass rooted in common sense and a homespun feeling of fairness. This approach, I learned, is far more likely to impress partners, their clients, and judges than professors and law review editors.

Parochial, pedantic, pedestrian… and practical? No thanks, Professor Teeter. Please write instead about “the influence of Immanuel Kant on evidentiary approaches in 18th-century Bulgaria.”

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More self-deprecation from the good professor:

By some accounts, I’m a failure. A wasted draft pick, an aging mediocrity, just another professor in the pits. My labor law articles have failed by any conceivable measure to influence law, society, or intellectual thought. I’m a nobody’s nobody in legal and academic circles, and, to recycle a favorite quote from Robert Penn Warren, I teach at a school that is “long on Jesus and short on funds.”

Wow, Professor Teeter — don’t be so hard on yourself. Or on St. Mary’s, which is #140 in the latest U.S. News rankings. If you’re looking for a law school that is truly “long on Jesus and short on funds,” focus on the “rank not published” law schools, several of them religious.

Let’s close on a cheerier note. Even if Teeter hasn’t been the world’s most influential legal scholar, he has excelled at, and enjoyed, classroom teaching:

Next to fatherhood and my faith, teaching is what matters most to me, and yet it has been filled with failures as well as undeniable fulfillment and joy…. I love what I do. I sense that it’s my calling, and I’m humbled and grateful to be a teacher. Despite my very real failures and limitations, my career brings me tremendous satisfaction, especially when I focus on the crops brought to harvest rather than the opportunities blown.

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So look on the bright side, Professor Teeter. Even if some of your scholarship has sunk like whale excrement, your classroom teaching has been as valuable as ambergris.

Perils and Pontifications: Reflections on the Failures and Joys of a Law Teacher [Southern Illinois University Law Journal]
Life and Career Advice From a ‘Minor League’ Law Professor [TaxProf Blog]

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