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Thanks to friend of the BLPB Christina Sautter for sending along the following hiring announcement:

LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY, PAUL M. HEBERT LAW CENTER seeks to hire a tenure-track faculty member in commercial law, including, but not limited to, bankruptcy. Applicants should have a J.D. from an ABA-accredited law school, superior academic credentials and publications or promise of productivity in legal scholarship, as well as a commitment to outstanding teaching.  

We additionally seek to hire a full-time faculty member with security of position to direct the Immigration Law Clinic as part of LSU Law’s Experiential Education Program. The Immigration Law Clinic is a fully in-house, one-semester, 5 credit clinic in which students represent non-citizens in their defensive proceedings before the Executive Office of Immigration Review (EOIR) and affirmative applications with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) Applicants must have a J.D. from an ABA-accredited law school, superior academic credentials, substantial experience in Immigration practice and be admitted and in good standing in a U.S. jurisdiction. Prior clinical teaching experience and fluency in Spanish is preferred. We may consider applications from persons who specialize in other areas as additional needs arise. 

We also seek to hire a full-time Assistant Professor of…

Those of us who study banking law and regulation know it’s an absolutely exciting area! That’s particularly true at the moment. Not only are we watching the path of Lacewell v. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), a case about the OCC’s power to grant federal fintech charters to nondepository institutions, currently in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, but we’ve also been treated to dueling banking law prof amicus curiae briefs (additional amicus briefs were also filed). In this week’s post, I’ll highlight the brief led by Lev Menand, Saule Omarova, Morgan Ricks, Joe Sommer, and Art Wilmarth, and signed by thirty-three banking law scholars (here).

The professors begin by stating their interest: “ensuring that banking agencies stay within their statutory mandates and work in the public interest.” They term the OCC’s proposal to charter nondepository fintech firms “a dangerous power grab premised on the novel claim that banking is just another word for lending.” In a nutshell, the scholars argue that “the OCC does not have the power to charter entities that are not in the deposit – that is, money creation – business.” It’s actually illegal – as the brief notes – for…

Greetings from SEALS (virtually). I’ve just finished sitting in on the last of several excellent panels on online teaching. Below are tips from the panelists, some of my own lessons learned, and key takeaways from the excellent book Small Teaching Online.  For more of the foundations of online teaching see Part I,   Part II,  Part III, and Part IV.

  • Have a class zero- you and students can record an introduction of themselves, pets, hobbies, skills, talents etc. Make sure you’re smiling and conveying your excitement in the video about the class.
  • You can also have a class zero where you spend 5 minutes on Zoom with each student before the first day of class talking to them about any questions they have about the class, their tech etc. 
  • Let students know that this online format is not just a pandemic issue. Virtual offices are increasingly common in practice.
  • Think about how to motivate students- what counts as a grade? Should you raise the class participation component and if so, how will you measure it? Will watching videos before class and participating in discussion boards count?
  • Stand when recording your video lectures or teaching synchronously. Students

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This coming week, the Association of American Law Schools will host its seventh week of special summer webinars geared to providing assistance to under-supported law faculty in our current unusual circumstances.  The series, dubbed “Faculty Focus,” is described in the following way on the program website (which also includes information about upcoming programs):

COVID-19 has affected the normal rhythms of the legal academy in ways that may be particularly disruptive for early-career faculty.

AALS invites tenure-track, clinical, and legal writing faculty to join us on Tuesday afternoons for “Faculty Focus,” a series of weekly webinars organized around issues these individuals may be facing as well as challenges affecting higher education and the profession in general.

Each 60-minute webinar will feature expert advice from law school leaders followed by shared experiences from early career law faculty. The sessions will be structured to encourage conversation and connection, with opportunities for participants to crowdsource solutions and discuss common issues across schools and teaching areas.

Although I am not in the target audience, I have enjoyed several of these programs.  Here is a list of the programs held to date:

Week 1: Work-Life Balance and the Demands of Scholarship
Tuesday, June 9, 2020

Week…

In a past post (here), I mentioned stumbling (thankfully!!) into teaching in the area of Negotiation and Dispute Resolution while a PhD student focused on financial regulation.  For so many reasons, the opportunity to pursue doctoral studies in the Ethics & Legal Studies Program at the Wharton Business School was truly a great blessing!  So, I’m delighted to share with BLPB readers that applications for the Program’s incoming class of 2021 are now being accepted.  If you – or someone you know – might be interested in learning more, an quick overview is provided below and an informational flyer here: Download Ethics&LegalStudiesDoctoralProgram

The Ethics & Legal Studies Doctoral Program at Wharton focuses on the study of ethics and law in business. It is designed to prepare graduates for tenure-track careers in university teaching and research at leading business schools, and law schools.

Our curriculum crosses many disciplinary boundaries. Students take a core set of courses in the area of ethics and law in business, along with courses in an additional disciplinary concentration such as law, management, philosophy/ethical theory, finance, marketing, or accounting. Students can take courses in other Penn departments and can pursue joint degrees. Additionally, our program…

Helpful article here (on SSRN) by Nina Kohn. (H/T to Jessica Erickson on Twitter).

As law school classes move online, it is imperative that law faculty understand not only how to teach online, but how to teach well online. This article therefore is designed to help law faculty do their best teaching online. It walks faculty through key choices they must make when designing online courses, and concrete ways that they can prepare themselves and their students to succeed. The article explains why live online teaching should be the default option for most faculty, but also shows how faculty can enhance student learning by incorporating asynchronous lessons into their online classes. It then shows how faculty can set up their virtual teaching space and employ diverse teaching techniques to foster an engaging and rigorous online learning environment. The article concludes by discussing how the move to online education in response to COVID-19 could improve the overall quality of law school teaching.

Greetings from Miami, Florida, COVID19 hotspot. Yesterday, 33% of those tested had a positive result. Although my university still plans to have some residential instruction as of the time of this writing, most of us are preparing to go fully online at some point. In Part I,   Part II, and Part III, I provided perspectives from experts in learning. I’m still gathering that information.

This week, however, I spoke to the real experts — students. Yesterday, I had the opportunity to hear from students studying business and human rights from all over the world courtesy of the Teaching Business and Human Rights Forum. I’ve also been talking to research assistants and other current and former students. Here’s a summary of their conclusions:

  • We know that Spring was hard for everyone and that everyone is still learning how to teach online. Do not be worried about making mistakes. 
  • Don’t assume that we are all digital natives. Some of us are older students or not used to the technology that you have decided to use. Make sure that the interface is intuitive and use tech in fun and interesting ways. (One professor used Jeopardy online and students

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Last week, I wrote the first in a series of posts with tips for teaching online. I expect many more law schools to join Harvard and now UC Berkeley by doing all Fall classes online. I’m already teaching online this summer and will teach online in the fall. Our students deserve the best, so I’m spending my summer on webinars from my home institution and others learning best practices in course design.

Here are some tips that I learned this week from our distance learning experts. First, I need to adopt backward design. I have to  identify the learning objectives for my courses, then decide how I will assess whether or not students successfully met the learning objective. Effective learning objectives are active, measurable, and focus on different levels of learning (e.g., remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, creating). Some people find Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives helpful.

Once I figure out my learning objectives, I will work backwards to determine what kinds of activities the students will work on either online or face to face (which for me will be Zoom). For more on this topic, see this guide to backward design from Vanderbilt University Center for …

If you’re like me, you’re wondering how you can improve your teaching after last Spring’s foray into online learning. I wasn’t nearly as traumatized as many of my colleagues because I had already taught Transactional Drafting online asynchronously for several semesters. This summer, I’m teaching two courses — Transactional Drafting asynchronously and a hybrid course on Regulatory Compliance, Corporate Governance, and Sustainability. I’m making a list of tips based on my experience and will post about that in the future. In the meantime, I’ve started to think about how I can improve next semester when I will be teaching all of my courses online. Since I know that so many students had a mediocre to poor experience with emergency online teaching, I’ve spent a lot of time on webinars learning how to do better. This will be the first in a series of posts on what I’m learning on course design, learning styles, and best practices. But let’s start with the basic questions to ask yourself as you’re preparing for next semester.

First, think about whether you want to teach synchronously or not. If you’re looking for maximum flexibility for both you and the students, then asynchronous teaching makes sense.

I am teaching Business Associations this summer, and I am excited to get back in the classroom. Well, I was. Instead, I am teaching in virtual class room via Zoom.  I am still glad to be interacting with students in a teaching capacity, but I sure miss the classroom setting. I am glad, though, to have this experience so I am closer to what this has been like for our students and faculty.  I still have the benefit of my colleagues experiences, students who have been in the online learning environment, and a little time to plan, so it’s better for me than it was for everyone in March. Still, there is quite a learning curve on all of this. 

Over the past several years, I have asked students to create a fictional limited liability company (LLC) for our first class.  It does a number of things. To begin, it connects them with a whole host of decisions businesses must make in choosing their entity form.  It also introduces them to the use of forms and how that works.  I always give them an old version of the form. This year, I used 2017 Articles of Organization for a West…