Stuart Buck explores the relationship between teaching and scholarship:
You occasionally come across the argument that academia rewards scholarship too much, to the possible detriment of students. That is, academia fails to reward good teaching to the extent that it rewards brilliant scholarship. The response is usually something like this: Scholarship and teaching are not at odds with each other. Instead, if professors are deeply involved in producing the most current scholarship, they will be all the better at teaching their students. . . .
I suspect that the more important relationship between teaching and scholarship is the other way around. That is, what's really going on is that the act of preparing for and teaching a class improves a professor's ability to produce thoughtful scholarship.
To a certain extent, I agree with Buck. (Larry Solum responds to Buck here.) Producing a high-quality article on causation requirements in mass toxic exposure cases will tend to enhance noticeably only my teaching of that particular topic in the Torts course, but teaching the entire Torts course will give me the necessary background to understand mass toxic exposure cases in light of the function and purposes of Tort law in general.
However, for those of us engaged in the scholarly exploration of Catholic legal theory, the dynamic may be different. Most of us don't even teach a course on Catholic social thought (much less Catholic legal theory), so there would seem to be a complete disconnect between our scholarship and teaching on this front. But the Catholic legal theory project, as I understand it, is devoted to articulating a just vision of modern society in light of the authentic nature of the human person. This impacts every course in the law school curriculum. So while I do not devote a particular class session of Torts to the topic of subsidiarity, my work on subsidiarity informs my understanding of a just society, which will come across in my teaching of Torts. (E.g., charitable immunity, parental liability, principles of agency, etc.) And it's a two-way street: if my work on subsidiarity is based only on papal encyclicals, it will lack the breadth and depth made possible by integrating my knowledge of the legal order acquired through teaching a foundational course like Torts.
So given our focus on the ultimate questions of existence (and law), perhaps the Catholic legal theorists can embody an ideal symbiosis between teaching and scholarship?
Rob
Yale law prof Stephen Carter opines on student free speech rights and government efforts to "draw fine distinctions between who can bear offense and who cannot."
Rob
Tuesday, July 11, 2006
Minnesota law prof Dale Carpenter offers interesting commentary on last week's ruling by the New York Court of Appeals on same-sex marriage. In its rational basis review, the court ruled that "the Legislature could rationally decide that, for the welfare of children, it is more important to promote stability, and to avoid instability, in opposite-sex than in same-sex relationships.” Carpenter explains:
Children need permanence and stability in their lives. Yet the heterosexual relationships that produce them, said the court, “are all too often casual or temporary.” Homosexual couples do not become parents by “accident or impulse”; they must plan ahead and obtain children through adoption, artificial insemination, or some other “technological marvels.” Unstable relationships among heterosexuals therefore “present a greater danger that children will be born into or grow up in unstable homes than is the case with same-sex couples.”
Note the irony of this argument. For decades, homosexual life has been medicalized and pathologized by doctors, sexologists, psychiatrists, and politicians. Only 33 years ago, homosexual orientation was still officially a “disorder.” Gays, especially gay men, were denounced as hopelessly promiscuous, unstable, histrionic, and self-absorbed. Above all, this medico-political consensus held, homosexuals were dangerous to children and should be kept away from them. From the outset of the gay-marriage movement, a vocal opposition argued that the supposedly innate instability of homosexual relationships disqualified them from marriage.
Now, in the most important judicial decision yet rejecting a claim for gay marriage, we are told that gay couples may be kept from marriage not because they are unstable, but because heterosexual couples are unstable.
Rob
