We've noted this before, but we shall say it again: if you ever have the opportunity to teach in a law school -- either as a full-time legal scholar or part-time as an expert adjunct practitioner -- do it if you are at all able. You might think you know a lot about a particular subject, but there's nothing like spending time at the lectern in a law classroom in front of sharp and eager lawyers-in-training to sharpen your thoughts, and get you to truly understand a subject. And it can be oh-so-rewarding as you see law students develop into colleagues at the Bar.
(And everyone insisting on calling you "professor" can evoke a smile.)
But if there's a downside to the law school experience from the teacher's side of the lectern, it's grading. Especially at a law school like William and Mary that has a pretty strict mandatory curve that forces ranked grading. In upper-division courses that we handle like Eminent Domain and Property Rights Law, and Land Use -- where we're dealing with some very high-level stuff and the quality of the students is uniformly high -- that makes for some hard choices at this time of year. Despite these challenges, we've wrapped up grading for the Fall 2023 semester for both courses, and have submitted the official scores.
Although I cannot share with you the students' final papers in these classes, I don't think they would mind if I give you a sampling of the topics and titles, just so you can see how the next generation of lawyers is thinking about property, property rights, takings, land use, and environmental law (inter alia).
And this year, the grading curve was especially difficult. If I could grade the submissions objectively, I would not have had a problem with awarding each a top score. It seems that every year, the quality of submissions become better -- more sophisticated, more thought-out -- making distinguishing among them very (very!) difficult.
For confirmation, check out this random sample of paper titles:
- Health, Safety, and Welfare for Whom? A Comparative Historical and Legal
Analysis of the Impact of Eminent Domain on Pittsburgh’s Chinatown- MIMBY (Maybe In My Backyard)?: Affordable Housing and the California Coastal Commission
- Essay on Locke, Bataille, and the Use of Philsophy in Legal Advocacy
- Unveiling Ancient Principles: Eminent Domain in Talmudic Law
- Reclaim, Reuse, Remodel: How Office Conversions and Adaptive Reuse Can Create Affordable Housing
- Kern County Planning Commission Campaign Speech: Regulating CAFOs Through Land Use
- Eminent Domain in Star Wars: Government Takings of Droids
- Euclidian Zoning: A Deep Dive into the Most Influential United States Zoning Case
- You Wild Colorado: HOA Reform and Lessons to Be Learned from the Centennial State
- The Takings Dilemma: Property Rights and Public Interests in Urban Planning
- The Price of Creating the Shenandoah National Park: A Closer Look at the Government’s Use of Eminent Domain to Clear the Park’s Boundaries
- "Give It Back To The Indians": A Look at What and How the Federal Government Took (or Didn’t Take) Property During the Course of the Manhattan Project
- A Place for Everything and Everything in its Place … Except Airbnb: The Short-Term Rental Problem and Euclidean Zoning Battles Across Jurisdictions
- Ready, Set, Build: Why You Might Be Seeing an Influx of New Construction Projects and What They Mean
- Pandora’s Box of Rights: Avatar, Eminent Domain, and the Battle for Interstellar Real Estate
- Envisioning a New Lahaina: Rebuilding after the Maui Wildfire
- "Good" vs. "Bad": Regulating Morality through Land Use Restrictions
- Ninth Inning Stretch: Does Returning Dodger Stadium Constitute Just Compensation
And this is merely a small sampling, and the only reason I haven't posted all of the titles is that there are over 50 papers, and the list would be too long.
I don't know about you, but I feel pretty good about this, and believe it bodes well for our profession and especially for the Property Bar.
I will be encouraging several of them to consider beefing up their papers and submitting them for publication, so you may be seeing the substance of some of these papers down the road.
