Schlegel on Teaching Law in a Bureaucratic Age @UBSchoolofLaw

John Henry Schlegel, University of Buffalo School of Law, is publishing To Dress for Dinner: Teaching Law in a Bureaucratic Age in volume 66 of the Buffalo Law Review (2018). Here is the abstract.

A significant change in economic or social life is likely to change the meaning of higher, including graduate, education for students. The changes that followed the Great Inflation of the 1970s and the Great Recession that began in 2008 surely did. Teachers experience such changes as a gradual alteration of the interests and expectations found in the river of students passing through their classrooms. Eventually, a gradual shift in these interests and expectations can no longer be understood as a difference in degree, but as a difference in kind. For an honorable teacher, the experience of such a difference in kind poses the question of what should be done when ingrained teacher expectations seriously diverge from the reality that is the lives of students. I explore this question by contrasting my understanding of what it is to be a teacher with the understanding of a figment of my imagination, an Aristotelian teacher, a comparison made with the aid of two good stories: A novel, The Leopard, by Giuseppe Lampedusa, and a movie, Wild River.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.