Clinical Law Review Writers’ Workshop a Success!
Flights across the U.S. were snarled on Friday due to a fire affecting O’Hare, but system-wide flight cancellations and delays could not keep nearly 100 clinical faculty members from descending on NYU School of Law yesterday for a scholarship boot camp experience, but with kinder, gentler drill sergeants. The annual event aims to support clinical faculty at all levels in their scholarship endeavors.
As every clinical professor knows, publishing regularly is especially challenging in light of the significant supervision and practice-related responsibilities inherent in our positions. The Clinical Law Review Workshop was created to help support clinical faculty in overcoming those challenges in order to become and remain high quality scholars. The workshop is organized around small, thematically-focused groups. This year there were fifteen groups ranging in topics from business law to juvenile justice to tax law. All participants apply to participate in the late spring and commit to complete a draft of their articles by September 1, when they exchange drafts with their group members. They read one another’s drafts closely and then spend most of the day together offering constructive critiques, asking provoking questions, and sharing thoughtful suggestions to help take each paper to the next level. Every group is moderated by a more senior clinical faculty member with significant publishing experience.
At the end of the day, all of the participants come together for a gloves-off session providing tips on how to keep writing and place the papers that will soon be finished. Kate Kruse of Hamline presented the results of a study by Robert Boice on scholarly productivity that showed that professors who wrote every single day produced four times as much scholarship as a control group who wrote in blocks of time (64 pages versus 17 pages). Those who wrote daily AND were accountable to another person for reporting their writing time were over nine times as productive as those who wrote in blocks of time (157 pages versus 17 pages). Michele Gilman of Baltimore reviewed the submission cycle, submission strategies, and provided links to resources such as Writing for and Publishing in Law Reviews found here and a law review template to format one’s article before submission. She even explained the influential power and significance of the asterisk footnote and why one might consider denoting on one’s CV or professional biography when one is writing for a symposium issue.
This is my ninth year as a professor and the second time I have participated in the Clinical Law Review Workshop—first as a junior professor and now as a mid-level professor. Both times I received feedback that fundamentally changed the scope and framing of my research and learned submission and publication tips and strategies that I believe have and will continue to make a difference in my scholarship. I will be back.
There are few professional experiences that are as positive and invigorating as a day immersed in our national and international clinical community—participants came from Croatia, Brazil, Poland, Arizona, Wyoming, D.C., Texas, Florida, Massachusetts, and many more. As Mary Helen McNeal of Syracuse University observed on the clinic listserv today, ours is an especially “supportive and caring community.” The Clinical Writer’s Workshop, under the leadership of Randy Hertz of NYU, is an annual reminder that these values and attitudes are not limited to how we treat our students and clients, nor is it limited to our teaching and supervision–it is how we treat one other and our scholarship.
If you have not yet participated in the Clinical Writer’s Workshop or have not done so recently, I strongly encourage you to keep an eye out for the application information next spring. Keep in mind that, historically, the event has been free thanks to the generosity of NYU School of Law and there have even been a limited number of scholarships available to help offset travel costs, which helps to ensure that the workshop is affordable and inclusive.
In the meanwhile, keep writing every day, remember to create accountability for your writing time with a friend or colleague, and know that there is a large and caring community here to support you, not just with your teaching and supervision, but with your scholarship as well.