Event Information

Pre-registration is now closed. If your form with payment has not arrived at AALS by May 26, 2011, it will be necessary for you to register onsite. There is an additional charge of $25 to register onsite.

-View Workshop on Beginning Legal Writing Teachers Workbooklet-

-View Workshop for New Law School Teachers Workbooklet-

-View Workshop for Pretenured People of Color Law School Teachers Workbooklet.pdf-

2011 Workshop for New Law School Teachers, Workshop for Pretenured People of Color Law School Teachers, Workshop for Beginning Legal Writing Law School Teachers
Date: June 20 — July 1, 2011
Location: The Renaissance Mayflower Hotel

-Click here to view 2011 New Law Teachers Workshops Brochure-

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Workshop for New Law School Teachers

Why Attend?

At the 29th annual Workshop, new law teachers will share their excitement, experiences and concerns with each other and with a roster of senior and junior faculty chosen for their track record of success and their diversity of scholarly and teaching approaches. These professors will pass along invaluable advice about teaching and testing techniques and tips for developing, placing and promoting one's scholarship.   Speakers will also address how to manage the demands of institutional service, as well as the expectations of students and colleagues, along with special challenges that arise when confronting controversial topics.

Who Should Attend?
The Workshop will benefit newly appointed faculty members, including teachers with up to two years of teaching experience, and those with appointments as visiting assistant professors.

Workshop for Pretenured People of Color Law School Teachers
Supported in part by a grant from the Law School Admission Council
Why Attend? 
From their first day of teaching until tenure, minority law teachers face special challenges in the legal academy. At this workshop, diverse panels of experienced and successful law professors will focus on these issues as they arise in the context of scholarship, teaching, service and the tenure process.  The workshop dovetails with the AALS Workshop for New Law School Teachers by providing sustained emphasis on the distinctive situations of pretenured minority law school teachers.

Who Should Attend?
The Workshop will be of interest to newly appointed minority law teachers as well as junior professors who are navigating the tenure process and looking for guidance and support.

Workshop for Beginning Legal Writing Teachers

Why Attend?  The Workshop is designed to offer new law faculty an introduction to the teaching of legal writing, research, and analysis. The workshop will address the basic tasks of the teacher of legal writing: classroom teaching, designing problems, conducting effective individual conferences, incorporating the teaching of legal research, and critiquing students’ written work. Additionally, the workshop will address new teachers' scholarly development and institutional status issues.

 

Who Should Attend?  The Workshop will be of interest to new legal writing teachers and to all new teachers whose responsibilities include some teaching of legal writing.  The program will be particularly valuable for full-time professors and adjunct professors who will be teaching legal research and writing for the first time and Directors of legal writing programs, if those individuals have taught full-time for four or fewer years.

 

 

Workshop on Women Rethinking Equality

Why Attend?
Women seeking equality in America today face an uneven prospect. Women are represented in record numbers in all branches of government, yet also struggle in unprecedented numbers below the poverty line, and they remain notably absent from many corporate boardrooms. Two more women have been appointed to the Supreme Court, including the first Latina justice; yet the popular debate and confirmation hearings were marred by race and gender stereotypes and by homophobia.

 

Advocates of same-sex marriage and new reproductive technologies have challenged the traditional family, yet they have been met by efforts to re-naturalize marriage, childbirth, and the place of women in the private sphere. These same contradictions mark women’s role in legal education. Women comprise a majority of students in many law schools, yet women are not equally represented in the professoriat. A recent AALS Report revealed a “tenure gap” affecting all women, which was particularly wide and increasing among women of color. The predominance of women in lower-paid, lower-status positions without job security in the legal academy mirrors their relative absence from top positions in law firms, law schools, and other highly paid legal positions. As we address the unfinished business of equality, women confront complex challenges. Some impediments stem from a public perception that the central problems of women’s equality were solved a generation ago. Other obstacles – which women are often reluctant to confront – arise from the heterogeneity of the group itself.

 

We are heterogeneous first in the ways we experience our lives as women: women share commonalities based on sex, while also differing along lines of race, ethnicity, class, immigration status, religion, sexual orientation, and disability. In the cities and rural areas of this country, as in the halls of law schools, these stark variations can give women widely different experiences of gender and sharply different stakes in its continued political amelioration. Women also vary in our conceptualizations of the challenges we face. Some continue to emphasize “sex discrimination” as the social and institutional dynamic that produces the inequality of women. Other theorists and activists have focused on the pressures to conform to bifurcated gender norms: expectations of cross-sex sexual desires or the fulfillment of these desires within marital, nuclear, reproductive families. Finally we are heterogeneous in our personal and professional aspirations: Many women may not analyze sex or gender in these explicitly politicized ways, or may not use more formalized constructs to discuss them. These women may want to focus efforts not on analyzing gendered dynamics in a theoretical way, but on developing practical strategies for confronting them in daily lives or individual workplaces. This variation is hardly surprising in a group that includes more than half of the human race. Yet if women fail to understand and negotiate this heterogeneity in a self-aware, reflective way, we may end up chasing an elusive unity, or diffusing our efforts with unnecessary friction.

 

The 2011 Workshop on Women Rethinking Equality will address these challenges, in the broader society and in the specific context of legal education. In analyzing the remaining barriers, we will think specifically about how to understand and to bridge the heterogeneity our group reflects – by glimpsing our shared stake in struggles of particular subgroups, and by focusing on the immediate institutional environment that we all share. We will also ask how we might use many kinds of connections among women – networking, mentoring, sharing of information – to secure greater opportunity, and transform the institutional settings in which we live and work.

 

“Women Rethinking Equality” will appeal to a full range of teachers and scholars in all subject areas. It will challenge us to think about the  meaning, contours and status of equality for women: in legal, social, and institutional settings – and in the specific context of legal education. In the law school setting, discussions will focus on women’s scholarship, teaching concerns and professional development. We have particularly sought to reach out to a wider and more varied group of women faculty, through calls for presentations on substantive legal questions implicating gender, and for works-in-progress by junior and other scholars seeking commentary and discussion. The substance and format of the program, in general, will offer opportunities for networking and small-group discussion. We welcome participation by all AALS members, and particularly all women, whether or not their scholarship includes a gender focus.

 

Testimonials from previous Workshop attendees:

“I have been teaching for three years and I can’t believe I missed all this valuable information all this time! What a great conference and the information was very useful!”

“Very concrete tips: depth, breadth and substance. We now know what to do, what to ask about and what to think about.”

“I especially appreciated the networking opportunity, the motivational key note address, and the helpful workshops on teaching.”

“It was inspiring being around so many law profs of color who were generous with their time, talent, war stories, words of encouragement and energy. Wed evening and Thursday couldn't have been any more perfect. “

“All speakers were informingly engaging and offered excellent advice.  Very valuable conference!”

“This workshop has provided me with a wealth of knowledge.  I am so grateful for the opportunity to attend such a workshop!”

“Enjoyed it thoroughly – very important for minority issues to be addressed by AALS; made me feel valued into in  legal academia.”

“I am extremely glad I had the opportunity to attend this conference.  It has been a great experience and tremendous learning opportunity.