Jeremy Elkins–Teaching Statement 2000-01
Lecturer, Legal Studies

It is an honor to have been nominated for an Excellence in Teaching Award.

I have thought a great deal about teaching since I began in the Legal Studies Program in 1989. When I was hired, Legal Studies had almost no courses of its own (nor its own major) and relied on cross-listed courses from other departments. As the only person hired directly through Legal Studies (which is still the case), my assignment was to create a set of courses that would fill in some of the gaps in the curriculum and that would help integrate the existing cross-listed courses into a coherent program. This task has been daunting, particularly because as the program has developed and matured, as it developed is own major, and as enrollments have increased severalfold, the needs of the program have changed. Whenever I thought that I had settled on, and refined, a set of courses that worked, the changing character of the program required that I respond with a new set of courses. In consequence, I have developed 17 completely different and original courses. These courses have ranged from small seminars to lecture courses of 300 students. So it is perhaps no surprise that I have spent a lot of time thinking about teaching.

One of the attractions for me of legal studies as a field is its possibilities for interdisciplinary studies. I have long believed that academic disciplines have more to teach each other than they sometimes allow, and the study of legal questions is a natural place in which questions of philosophy and political theory intersect with questions of public policy and with instututional analyses. All of my courses are set at the intersection of these concerns, although they approach the study of legal issues from very different perspectives. Indeed, my courses now cover at least five separate subfields in legal studies: theory and jurisprudence, public law, legal process, legal history and law and society.

I am very proud to have played a central role in the development of the legal studies curriculum over the past decade. Students in legal studies now have an opportunity to participate in a broad-based, interdisciplinary study of law that ranks, I believe, with the best programs in the country. In my courses alone, students can move from an intensive study of the nature of legal rights and interests in the modern administrative state ("Administrative Jurisprudence") to an exploration of the problem of what it means to live under a written constitution ("Problems in Constitutional Law"), to an examiniation of the history and concept of popular sovereignty ("Sovereignty and Law") to an investigation, through the use of primary sources, of the important constitutional debates between American colonists and the metropolis in the years preceding the American Revolution ("Topics in American Legal History: The Development of American Constitutionalism") to a critical examiniation of the role of American courts in articulating the nature of, and remedies for, discrimination ("Courts and Social Policy") to an inquiry into the role of various "sacrificial practices" in the construction of individual and collective identity ("Sacrifice, Identity and Law") and so on. While my courses vary greatly in their approach and emphasis, each combines broad theoretical concerns with specific political-legal problems and institutional concerns. For example, while courses such as "Sovereignty and Law" and "Sacrifice, Identity and Law" are quite theoretical in their approach, they combine texts of political and legal theory and philosophy with texts drawn from anthropology, political science, literature, Freud, sociology, history, film and judicial decisions. Ont he other hand, while courses such as "Introduction to Legal Process," "Problems in Consitutional Law" and "Administrative Jurisprudence" rely more heavily on readings from judicial cases, the study of legal doctrine in those courses is situated within broader theoretical and historical concerns, and the texts of those courses include readings drawn from history, jurisprudence and political science.

Most disciplines have a standard canon, and often a standard story that is told about, or through, that canon. There are, of course, compelling reasons for teaching certain classic texts. But too often, I believe, undergraduate education ends up being a matter of passing along what is essentially a professional tradition, as though we were primarily training students to be professional academics. Another attraction for me of legal studies is that, because it is a relatively young field, one rarely is put in the position of having to decide whether to teach the "canon"; and this is because, by and large, there is not as yet a canon--and I very much hope that there never will be. At the same time, this increases the challenge of creating new courses. Each course that I develop begins from the ground up. Each course is either an original topic (e.g. "sacrifice, identity and law") or an attempt to re-think a particular topic or subject in the study of law. I try to approach each new course from outside the professional discipline--which is, of course, the position from which most undergraduates will approach the material--and to ask what it is about the material that would matter to someone who was not already committed to it. In doing this, I am forced to justify the course to an (imaginary) student who might rightfully ask why she should spend 10 weeks working as hard as I typically ask students to work; why, that is, she should care. The courses that result tend to be "stories" of sorts that begin with large problems or questions and that then consider the texts of the course as attempts to address (and, in some cases, to better articulate) those larger concerns. Every course is thus a kind of book in which each section (or "chapter") of the course, though it may raise distinct questions and engage distinct problems related to the overall topic of the course, builds on the previous sections and moves the class forward in thinking through the larger project of the course. Because each course is original in conception and in approach, I rarely use published anthologies, and instead rely--wholly or partially--on readers that I construct.

This way of constructing courses places a high demand on students, who are asked both to work through particular texts (that are often complex in their own right) and to situate those texts within a broader conceptual context. But by being able to move back and forth between the larger set of questions of the course and the details of particular texts, I am able to help students see, as they struggle with challenging material, why their efforts matter. And I have found that, as students themselves learn to move between, and to integrate, the broader concerns of the course and the particular issues raised by a text or an argument or a legal doctine, they learn how to read in a more sophisticated and critical way.

Inevitably, the courses that I develop raise questions that engage my own thinking at the deepest level. the courses thus become a kind of joint project (in which the students and I are both participants) of thinking through and towards certain questions. And though my courses are now mostly larger lecture courses, I try to lecture in a way that invites students to engage in the project of the course as their own, and I make sure to provide opportunities--in class, in section, in office hours, and importantly in the papers that I assign--for students to make the enterprise their own. In class, I try to allow students to see for themselves the next step in the progress of the joint enterprise of the class: by providing opportunities for questions and directed class discussion and often by posing the questions through a limited form of Socratic dialogue. When I use teaching assistants, I work closely with them to develop particular projects and exercises for section that will allow students constantly to re-engage with the broader enterprise of the course. Ultimately what I am most proud of in my courses is the sense of ownership that students tend to feel in the course, and I tend to judge my courses in part by how well students come to regard the course as theirs and not merely mine.

I believe that all great teaching is transformative. It is not merely a matter of adding information to existing patterns of thought, but of changing the categories and patterns of thought themselves. Teaching is extraordinarily difficult precisely because it requires moving a mind from here to there, leading another to a mountain-top which she did not even know existed. The greatest challenge of a teacher, I believe, is to be able to ask a great deal of one's students, to challenge them, to bring them up that mountain, while keeping them excited about the journey, even at its most difficult. As a teacher who asks much from his students, I have been gratified by how eager students are, by and large, to take the journey once they see why it matters; and gratified by the fact that those students have seen fit to nominate me for a teaching award.