Teaching Law: Justice, Politics, and the Demands of Professionalism

by Robin West

Teaching Law reimagines law-school teaching and scholarship by going beyond crises now besetting the legal academy and examining deeper and longer-lasting challenges. The book argues that the legal academy has long neglected the needs to focus teaching and scholarship on the ideals of justice that law fitfully serves, the political origins of law, and the development of a respectful but critical relationship with the legal profession. This book suggests reforms to improve the quality of legal education and responds to concerns that law schools eschew the study of justice, rendering students amoralist; that law schools slight the political sources of law, particularly in legislative action; and that law schools have ignored the profession entirely. These areas of neglect have impoverished legal teaching and scholarship as the academy is refashioned in response to current financial exigencies, and addressing them is long overdue.

Genres: Law

252 pages, Paperback

First published November 30, 2013

About the author

Robin West (born 1954) is the Frederick J. Haas Professor of Law and Philosophy and Associate Dean (Research and Academic Programs) at the Georgetown University Law Center. West's research is primarily concerned with feminist legal theory, constitutional law and theory, philosophy of law, and the law and literature movement.

West holds a B.A. and a J.D. (1979) from the University of Maryland and a masters in judicial studies from Stanford. West came to Georgetown after teaching at the University of Maryland Law School from 1986 to 1991, and at the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law from 1982 to 1985.

West is best known for her work in the ethics of care and feminist legal theory.