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Article About Switching Legal Careers: Texas Emerging Scholars Program Is A Bridge From Prosecutor To Professor And The Increasingly Competitive World Of Legal Academia. And About Switching Legal Careers, Scholars Program, School Of Law, Law School, Law Professors, Judicial Clerks, Faculty Job Openings, Law School Outline, Law School Exam.
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SKILL SHARPENER 1.800.973.1177
PAGE 1
Samuel Buell is the first Visiting Assistant
Professor and Fellow in the Emerging Schol-
ars Program. While his professional résumé
is impressive, he, like most practicing attor-
neys, did not have any scholarly publications
to his name when he decided he wanted to
change careers and enter academia.
Law professors used to prepare for the
academic careers by being former top law
students and excellent judicial clerks. Now,
like professors in other disciplines, law pro-
fessors need a body of written scholarship
to back them up in the pursuit of a tenure-
track teaching job. Texas’ ESP has fellows
take a half load of teaching courses for each
semester. Fellows devote the rest of their
energies the first year towards developing a
body of published work. For the second year,
fellows work on teaching, publishing, and job
hunting.
After 10 years as a federal prosecutor, Buell
had “reached the peak of what I wanted to
do.” An alumnus of New York University Law
School, Buell started off as a prosecutor in
the U.S. Attorney’s office in Brooklyn, NY.
Then, he worked as a prosecutor in the U.S.
Attorney’s office in Boston for four years and
rounded out his work spending two years in
Washington, DC, on the Enron task force at
the Department of Justice.
Buell had always been interested in teach-
ing; but considering he has been out of law
school for 10 years and has a family, it “was
not feasible” to take a year off to do research
and writing, and he could not take the time
to do it while practicing. So he looked for
temporary positions in academia, knowing
it would be “invaluable” to take that time to
develop his skills.
The ESP allows him to teach, attend col-
loquia, work on his research and writing, and
also to get feedback on his ideas from other
faculty members. It is “ideal” to be able to do
research and teach, which he enjoys a great
deal. Buell taught federal criminal law this
semester and will teach criminal law in the
fall next year. Being able to teach courses on
law, and not on legal writing and research
methods, was “really attractive to me,” says
Buell. The Texas program “is a real preview
of being a professor at a law school.”
There are other fellowship programs and
visiting assistant professorships out there.
Some do involve teaching, but most of those
are classes on legal writing and research.
Some fellowships only come with research
components and no teaching work at all.
There are relatively few temporary law
school jobs out there, and the positions are
difficult to get. Still, there are more law
schools offering temporary positions, includ-
ing the Bigelow Program at the University of
Chicago.
Since Buell is on a half schedule for teach-
ing, he has time to develop his legal scholar-
ship. He currently has a manuscript for a law
review article on entity criminal liability, and
he is researching his next piece on individual
responsibility in white-collar crime. In addi-
tion to having time to do research, Buell says
another draw to the ESP is that “the Univer-
sity of Texas law faculty is outstanding; it’s
one of the top law faculties in the country.”
Scholarly writing uses different muscles than
legal writing. The former is expounding on a
theory; the latter, setting out an argument.
Scholarship is more abstract and broader
than argumentation, says Buell, which draws
on a confined set of materials, most on the
relevant law on a particular issue. Academic
legal scholarship draws on law, but also on
historical economic, philosophical, and even
psychological analysis of an issue. In this
arena, the writer decides what is relevant
to the inquiry, which is very challenging, ac-
cording to Buell.
The transition from law practice to law
teaching is a little smoother. Buell is able
to draw on his practical experience in the
courtroom and bring it to the classroom,
describing to students real examples of legal
practice, such as examples of prosecutorial
discretion. The relevance of his work experi-
ence to teaching is “all very immediate.”
There are other connections between Buell’s
law practice and his academic career. As a
prosecutor, his job was to find the truth and,
on a more basic level, to achieve “the right
result.” Academics and professors also seek
truth, he says, and have a socially useful pur-
pose. As for leaving behind his prosecutor’s
career, “I was ready for a new challenge.”
Buell adds, “Career change can be a wonder-
fully revitalizing thing.”
Switching legal careers: Texas’ Emerging Scholars Program is a bridge from prosecutor to professor [by Erica Winter]
The University of Texas at Austin School of Law’s Emerging Scholars Program (ESP) bridges the gap between law school, or law practice, and the increas-
ingly competitive world of legal academia. The two-year program allows fellows to get teaching experience while having access to tenured law faculty exper-
tise in order to develop bodies of scholarly work.