This webinar is for law school career development professionals, current students, and graduates who may have an interest in law teaching.
How to Become a Law Teacher is designed to provide useful information about the faculty hiring process within the legal academy. Only a small segment of law schools are able to provide dedicated career counselors for students who seek careers in legal academia. This information will help career counselors at member schools, as well as prospective law teachers themselves, as we work to attract a wider, more diverse group of qualified candidates to the legal academy.
The panelists are a group of recently hired law faculty, experienced hiring chairs, and current deans. This webinar will also provide an overview of resources that AALS offers to assist and support candidates throughout the hiring process and while they are members of the legal academy.
Panelists will discuss:
- Concrete actions that law students can take while in law school to make them more competitive candidates when applying for law teaching jobs.
- Different pathways for entering legal academia.
- Nuts and bolts of the hiring process including the typical hiring cycle, what to expect at different phases of the hiring process, and tips for an effective job talk.
How to Become a Law Teacher
Tuesday, April 4, 2023
4:00 – 5:30 EDT | 1:00 – 2:30 PDT
Panelists
Tiffany Atkins
Tiffany D. Atkins is an Associate Professor of Law at Elon University School of Law, where she teaches first-year legal writing, upper-level writing courses, as well as doctrinal subjects. As a scholar, Professor Atkins writes about race and human rights.
Prior to joining the permanent faculty at Elon Law, Professor Atkins completed at two-year Legal Method and Communication Fellowship at Elon in 2018 and was a Visiting Assistant Professor at Wake Forest Law School in 2019. Before that, Professor Atkins was a staff attorney with Legal Aid of North Carolina, where she litigated family law, public housing law, unemployment, and educational justice cases.
Professor Atkins received her law degree from Elon University School of Law and her Bachelor of Arts from The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Professor Atkins was also the 2011 recipient of the prestigious David Gergen Award for Leadership and Professionalism.
Zamir Ben-Dan
Zamir Ben-Dan joined the Temple Law faculty as an assistant professor in the Fall of 2022. His research interests and emerging scholarship lie in the intersections of criminal law, race and the law, and American history. He earned his associate degree from Rockland Community College, his bachelor’s degree from Baruch College, and his law degree from CUNY School of Law.
He taught as an adjunct in CUNY Law’s first-year lawyering program for full-time students in the 2020-2021 academic year. He then served as the interim director of the program the following academic year.
Prior to that, Zamir joined the Legal Aid Society in New York City as a staff attorney in the Bronx Criminal Trial Practice. In 2017, he was a founding member of the Black Attorneys of Legal Aid caucus, an amalgamation of over 100 Black Legal Aid lawyers that advocates for racial justice both within and without the Legal Aid Society.
Andrew Michaels
Professor Andrew Michaels joined the University of Houston Law Center in 2018 as an assistant professor. He teaches in the areas of intellectual property and statutory regulation. His scholarship has focused on the areas of patent law and jurisprudence.
Prior to joining the Law Center, Professor Michaels was a Visiting Associate Professor and the Frank H. Marks Intellectual Property Fellow at the George Washington University Law School. Professor Michaels received his J.D. from the New York University School of Law and subsequently clerked for Judge Pauline Newman at the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit before practicing as a patent litigator for a number of years.
Beth Zilberman
Professor Zilberman is an assistant professor and directs the Immigration Clinic at Willamette University College of Law. She directed the Immigration Clinic at the University of Arkansas from 2018-2021 and was a visitor at the University of Washington School of Law from 2021-2022. She also previously served as a fellow in the Michigan State University College of Law’s Immigration Law Clinic and the Boston College Immigration Clinic.
She is a graduate of Boston College Law School, where she was a Public Service Scholar and received the Aviam Soifer Award for Public Service Achievement and Leadership. After graduation, she was an Equal Justice Works fellow with Kids in Need of Defense (KIND) in Boston. Her scholarship explores the intersection of immigration and administrative law, specifically the divide between administrative design theorization and immigration agencies’ implementation of their regulatory charges.
Steve Clowney
Professor Stephen Clowney joined the faculty at University of Arkansas School of Law in 2014. Before moving to Arkansas, he held the Frost Brown & Todd endowed professorship at the University of Kentucky. At the U of A, Professor Clowney teaches Property, Land Use, Trusts & Estates, and a seminar on Race & the Law.
Prior to entering academia, Professor Clowney served as a Law Clerk in the Chambers of the Hon. Ruggero J. Aldisert, in Santa Barbara, California. He has also worked as a legal consultant in Hawaii, a college admissions officer, and a gravedigger.
His main areas of research include zoning regulations, the history of cities, handwritten wills, and the presence of violence in informal property systems. He has chaired the appointments committee numerous times and is currently serving on the AALS Recruitment and Retention Committee.
Adam Feibleman
Professor Feibleman is the Sumter Davis Marks Professor of Law at Tulane University School of Law. His scholarship and research focus on bankruptcy law, regulation of financial institutions, legal issues related to sovereign debt, and international monetary law.
He joined the Tulane faculty in 2009 and has chaired the appointments committee several times. Prior to joining Tulane’s faculty, he was a faculty member at the University of North Carolina School of Law and the University of Cincinnati School of Law and taught as a Bigelow Fellow at the University of Chicago.
Cassandra L. Hill
Cassandra Hill became dean of the Northern Illinois University College of Law on July 1, 2020. Prior to joining NIU Law, Dean Hill served as an administrator and faculty member at Thurgood Marshall School of Law at Texas Southern University. Most recently she served as the associate dean for academic affairs. She also was appointed by the then-university president to serve on a three-member leadership team with the law school’s acting dean. In addition, she held positions as associate dean for research and faculty development and director of legal writing.
Dean Hill’s scholarship focuses on pedagogy, learning theory, and assessment in legal education. She is chair of the American Bar Association (ABA) Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar Conferences and Programming Committee and has experience as a site-team evaluator with the ABA. Dean Hill is the first elected African-American member on the Board of Directors for the Legal Writing Institute (LWI) and she was a former Managing Editor of the LWI Monograph Series. Dean Hill received her J.D. from Howard University School of Law and graduated with a B.A. in Mathematics and Spanish from the University of Virginia.
Christiana Ochoa
Dean Ochoa was appointed dean of Indiana University Maurer School of Law in November 2022. She is the school’s first-ever Latine dean and one of just eight Latine women ever to serve as the dean of a U.S. law school. She has served as associate vice provost for faculty and academic affairs for the IU Bloomington campus, as founding academic director of the IU Mexico Gateway, and as a founding director of IU’s Center for Documentary Research and Practice. Her research delves into the ways economic activity impacts human and ecological well-being through the lens of international and comparative law with a focus on business and human rights, law and development, international finance, and foreign direct investment. Dean Ochoa received her juris doctorate degree from Harvard Law School and her undergraduate degree from the University of Michigan.
