Faculty Publications

"This book is the latest development in YLDs efforts. The ten essays included here range from overviews of the need for pro bono disaster legal assistance and the roles of the organized bar and civil legal services providers in meeting it to informative, nut-and-bolts guides to specific issues in disaster legal aid-such as navigating flood insurance claims, dealing with post-disaster housing and tax issues, and understanding the specific needs of vulnerable populations. This volume is a valuable resource for the entire disaster response community-and the latest of many contributions from a leader of that community, the ABA Young Lawyers Division"--

Every academic year, new law school faculty enter legal academia. Many of these new teachers are practitioners with varying levels of legal practice experience. While the transition from practice to teaching is particular to each person, for clinical professors there are some specific challenges that transform our professional identity. Clinical professors wear many hats: teacher, lawyer, mentor, and scholar. Navigating those many hats and adjusting to various goals of teaching emerging attorneys is only a couple of challenges. Other challenges include changing the focus of our professional identity from career-centered, in its many facets, to student centered.

A core component of clinical legal education is the reflective process. A reflective lawyer is one who thoughtfully digests information and thinks about how an experience affects his or her professional growth. A reflective teacher does the same. This article shares some of my reflections on becoming a clinician and what I learned through experiences about becoming a more effective teacher.