Law Teaching Career
A candidate for a law-teaching position needs to have top grades, an editorial position with a law review or law journal, a federal clerkship, work experience and the ability to articulate the direction of his future legal scholarship. In other words, if you want to have a career as a law teacher, you must first become a lawyer. Before you become a lawyer, you must be an excellent law student.
Other People Are Reading
-
Education
-
A law-school applicant must have a four-year undergraduate degree. Any major course of study would qualify a person for law school admission. Once a person has been admitted to law school, he must work hard to earn good grades. Most law schools rank their students according to grade point average. If you want a shot at having a career as a law teacher, you should aim at being in the top 5 to 10 percent in your law school class.
Grade Point Average
-
Ranking high among law school peers will open many doors for a student. One of the doors opened will be the door to the law school's law review. Only the students with the highest GPAs after their first year of law school will be invited to be on the law review. On the law review, the student will spend a lot of time writing and reviewing legal scholarship. In this position, the student will improve his writing, and the ability to compose great legal scholarship will serve a student well when applying for federal judicial clerkships.
-
Federal Clerkship
-
Another one of the doors opened will be the path to a federal judicial clerkship. Federal judges employ only the best law students, fresh out of law school. A federal law clerk will advise the judge on legal matters, do the judge's legal research and write drafts of judicial opinions bearing the judge's name. The law student's grades will ensure the judge that the student has the competence in these areas to work for him.
Employment
-
Once the judicial clerkship's term of one to two years is up, the person should practice law. Usually, people who have graduated in the top percentile of their class, served on law review and held federal judicial clerkships obtain jobs in corporate law. Corporate attorneys start out making six-figure salaries, in exchange for the amount of work and long hours they have to put into their jobs. As a result of the amount of time and energy put into corporate law careers, many corporate attorneys leave their jobs after just a few years to go into teacher law.
Writing
-
One of the most important accomplishments a person needs to have before having a career in law teaching is to have been published in a respectable law journal or law review. Half of the job as a law teacher will be actual teaching; the other half of the job will be churning out legal scholarship, and an essential step to getting a foot in the door at a law school is having had legal articles published.
-
References
- Photo Credit livre ouvert image by razorconcept from Fotolia.com
