Toby’s blog

I noticed that Brian Leiter has had some interesting things to say on the movement of faculty to Harvard (and from other schools).  Take a look at his blog and particularly at two of his recent posts (here and here).

While we have long had a student-faculty ratio like that at some of the small, elite liberal arts colleges (like Bowdoin or Middlebury) we have made a concerted effort in recent years to try to further drive down that ratio by hiring some outstanding scholars.  Many of them have come here from other law schools.  We expect the trend to continue and believe that this is one of the things that makes Harvard Law School the most exciting place in the world to pursue a legal education.  Harvard has the most intellectually interesting and diverse faculty in the nation and it is great to see outsiders take notice, particularly those who, like Professor Leiter, watch these trends carefully.

Another day, another summer adventure! Before coming to HLS, 2L Michael Zabelin was a member of Americorps*VISTA, taught English in Ecuador, and was an intern at the Center for American Progress. In the fall he will begin working as a member of the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau.

“I found my summer internship with the Legal Assistance Foundation by taking advantage of the individual advising from the OPIA (Bernard Koteen Office of Public Interest Advising). In my meeting, Director Alexa Shabecoff suggested several options in the handful of geographic areas I was interested in spending the summer. Not only did Alexa provide names of organizations but also the names of HLS alumi and current students who had worked at these various places. After speaking with an alum who is currently working at LAF and a current student who had spent a summer there, I realized that LAF was going to be a great fit for me.’

“When preparing for my phone interview, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that the LAF supervisory attorney in charge of hiring interns was an HLS grad. This connection allowed us to have an easy start to the interview. He was especially impressed with my involvement with the Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review of which he was an active member in his law school days.’

“Before coming to law school, I had done both a semester long internship and a year of Americorps*VISTA in the field of low-income housing. This experience led me toward the Home Ownership Preservation Project at LAF. We are a very busy project this summer as the bulk of our work is in mitigating the effects of foreclosure. From advising people of their rights when they are first foreclosed upon to bringing suit against fraudulent parties who cheated clients while claiming to be rescuing them from foreclosure, I am part of a team that is doing real work to make a difference for people who are being effected by this very real headline-grabbing problem. I leave work feeling good most days knowing that I was able to have at least a small part in making the system a little more fair for the people who have been left behind or treated unfairly in the past.’

“Aside from the interesting substance of the work that I am doing, I am also learning a great deal about the day-to-day life of a public interest lawyer. Everything from filing documents at the Daley Center Courthouse to scouring depositions for something useful to our case has become part of my lawyerly repertoire because of this summer. I’ve even caught myself applying things from first year Legal Research and Writing and Civil Procedure that, at the time I learned them, I was certain I never would actually need to know.’

“I look forward to bringing the skills I have gained this summer back to Cambridge in the fall. I am sure they will be helpful as I begin my first year as a member of the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau.’

“One can’t be a lawyer without thinking in some measure historically, because lawyers think about how doctrine changes over time, and how legal institutions change over time,” explains Professor Kenneth Mack. “I find it very natural to think historically when I’m teaching property.”

When Mack teaches property law to 1Ls, he takes them on a hundred-year journey through American suburban residential development. Suburbanites “…want a certain type of house, want a certain type of community. Lots of doctrines that govern that type of thing were changed in the early 20th century precisely to accomodate that development.”

He also has a uniquely historical view of constitutional law, public interest law and civil rights. Every year or two, Mack teaches a survey class from 1865 to the present. He guides students in the study of how modern concepts of U.S. citizenship—”and I use the term ‘citizenship’ very broadly”—came into being, tracing the idea from the end of the civil war to the present.

In an article in the Yale Law Journal [PDF], Mack addresses the power of law to re-order American race relations, challenging today’s take on the past civil rights effort. “There’s a particular narrative that undergirds lots of debates about civil rights law, and much of that narrative is incorrect.”

“There’s a standard story that you find in lots of works about public interest lawyering, civil rights lawyering and civil rights history right now: That the lawyers in the 1940s and 50s tried to transform society by getting decrees from the court, hoping it would revolutionize American race relations…Appended to that narrative is this: Most people think that the public interest lawyers of the 60s and 70s tried to model themselves off this earlier group of lawyers.

“I try to take that story apart. There was a quite vigorous debate among the civil rights bar about …precisely this question. What could you get out of the Supreme Court? Out of law? There was debate that was quite sophisticated in our terms. We could learn a lot from examining the contours of that debate. What was not there was the uncriticized idea that we could just get a Supreme Court decision, and implement it, and revolutionize American law and society.”

When I ask him for advice on becoming a legal academic, he says, “There are lots of different routes to law.” His combination of Ph.D. and law degree is helpful, he says, but the main thing to do, if you’re interested in academia, is to write. Law school has become an even better place to do that, says Mack, since he was a student here 16 years ago.

Podcast: Kenneth Mack (13:10)