Today we are joined by Professor Tenielle Fordyce-Ruff, a professor of Legal writing at ASU's Sandra Day O'Conor College of Law as she shares her passion for Legal education with us. She shares not only her passion for Legal education, but also offers advice and paths to mentorship for those who want to enter the field.
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Today we are joined by Professor Tenielle Fordyce-Ruff, a professor of Legal writing at ASU's Sandra Day O'Conor College of Law as she shares her passion for Legal education with us. She shares not only her passion for Legal education, but also offers advice and paths to mentorship for those who want to enter the field.
Contact Chance/ Support the Show
Contact Professsor Fordyce-Ruff
Welcome strive seek fame podcast. I'm your host Chatswood. This episode marks our latest 10 Question style episode. These are episodes based around a simple concept, allowing people to talk about the things they're passionate about. That can be a job, hobby cars, or anything in between. Because to me, there aren't many things as interesting as learning what people get excited about. Today, we're truly fortunate to have Professor Tenille Fordyce rough, a professor of legal writing, and she's going to share with us her passion for legal education. Now let's get started. We'd like to welcome Professor to Neal Fordyce rough to the program. Thanks for being here to Neil. You're very welcome. Thanks for having me. So let's get started here. Tell us a little bit about yourself. So I am technically associate clinical professor of law at the Sandra Day O'Connor college of law at Arizona State University. For those that aren't in legal academia. I'm a law professor who teaches on the skill side rather than the doctrine side. More specifically, I specialize in teaching legal research and writing. So that's what I do. I actually have been friends with your host for several years now. And I enjoy lots of things. I enjoy the outdoors. I enjoy dogs, rescuing dogs, and I enjoy teaching. All right, thank you. How long have you been in legal education? So I just finished my 12th year of teaching. But I actually started in legal, legal education, sort of when I was two L or in my second year of law school because I worked as a teaching assistant in a legal research and writing program. So if you can't that I guess it's 14 years. And beyond the legal education piece, I'm assuming you have other legal experiences that that as well. You would be correct. So I finished law school in 2004. I then was a law clerk that is when a person who has a Juris Doctorate a JD. And in my case, I take it and pass the bar, work sort of as a staff attorney for a judge, but they're temporary positions. In my case, I ended up clerking for now the retired Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Idaho. I was with him for three years. I then actually taught at the University of Oregon, School of Law for two years, moved back to Idaho practice for a few years and then went back into legal education. So I've bounced around a bit. But I've clerked, I've practiced and I've taught so I've had quite an interesting now 18 years. So what first led you to this career. So I could talk a little bit about what led me to a locker and then a little bit about what led me into legal education. My undergraduate degree is actually in international studies, specifically, the former USSR and that area. And that was a really interesting degree to get. And when I came out of my undergrad in 99, kind of useless. And so I knew I needed to go on and do more. And what I really loved about school, and kind of why I had gone into international studies, which you had to really research everything to understand complex ideas and ideas that were foreign to you, right foreign cultures. And then I had wanted to go into something where I'd be able to help people. And when I stepped back and looked at what I really enjoyed and how I could take those skills and apply them outside of International Studies, law was an obvious choice because you research and write to advocate for people. So I decided to go to law school because it was a skill set that I was good at and that I was interested in doing forever. Turns out that I discovered in my first year of law school that I have an aptitude for legal research and writing probably not shocking since that was what sort of led me there in the first instance. And I was offered a position as a teaching assistant. So I took that and it was wonderful. I love Almost instantly working with the students, I loved seeing behind the curtain and understanding why professors did things the way they did things. Because frequently as a student, you're very confused as to what's happening a certain way, and particularly in your first year of law school where it's like trying to drink from a fire hose. So I just really, really enjoyed that. And then the director of the legal research and writing program, I went to the University of Oregon, called me in, I think it was 2006. She was writing a series or editing a series of textbooks that were state specific, when I was the only person she knew in Idaho, and she said, Would you like to write this textbook for my series. So she and I co wrote a textbook, I'm actually starting in now to the fourth edition of that. And as we were working together, it turns out that she had a two year position at the University of Oregon. For a variety of professional and personal reasons, it was wonderful for me to take, I figured I can do this for two years. And if it's not great, I can go back to practice, I still have my bar license, we kept our home in Idaho. So it was, you know, would be an easy move to come back. And I kind of never looked back. I loved it and knew it was what I wanted to do. You mentioned while you're talking about that the idea of early on seeing behind the curtain for the professor's Can you give us an example of what that might look like? Sure, so there are an actually chance, you know, this is an educator. Every day when you're putting together your lessons or your assignments, you're faced with a series of both pedagogical decisions as to sort of how best to present. But then particularly for law, there's a lot of outside forces, I teach legal research and writing, which is very practice based course. It's the skills that like if you watch Law and Order that standing up in court and talking, I teach that so I need to look at both, you know, the pedagogical side, how can I best present this lesson? But then how can I ensure that the students are best prepared for the real world out there? And because law students haven't yet practice law, and many of them are what I call Keita JD students, they've gone from kindergarten to law school without a break. So they've never had a full time professional job. Many of them have great part time jobs or great externships. But they've never sort of really been involved in a profession before. And so they don't always understand why I'm putting something together because they don't understand pedagogy and they don't understand intimately the profession that they're entering. And so it's just interesting for me to see how those two blend because it's not, you know, it's not purely math where I need your arithmetic, I need you to understand that two plus two is four. Right? It's, I need you to understand that there is this macro organizational structure that everyone uses because it's based on the classic syllogism, but we present it in a very formalized way, so that it's easy to read and judges can quickly make decisions. That's not intuitive to a first year law student. Thank you. All right. Next up. What about legal education feed your creative energy. There's actually two pieces that are equally important. One is working with students and one is working with amazing colleagues. It's pretty rewarding to start the first day of class and look out at a roomful of brilliant people, many of whom are actually way smarter than I will ever be. And get to help mold them into the profession that they've chosen in a profession that I believe is tremendously important to our society, to help them understand how their interests and skills can help every single person that they ever come in contact with. It's just incredibly rewarding. And then, you know, they're they're pretty scared on that first day of law school. It's pretty intimidating. By the end of the year, we're almost friends and mentoring them I know about their pets. I know about their families, I know about their interests. And so I've taken sort Have students in the abstract who are, you know, interested generally in the same thing, and really helped them and gotten to know these freely interesting people. And now after 12 years of doing this, I have a tremendous network of, you know, friends and colleagues and students. And then one of the wonderful things about legal academia, but specifically the legal research and writing portion of it, is we're in incredibly close knit community nationally. Charlie, my husband always laughs because I'm like, I am talking to my friend and, and there'll be people that I've never met in person that I've only had zoom meetings with, because they're in Kentucky, or Vermont, or wherever they live. But we all share similar goals and values and interests. And really, there's only about, I want to say, between five and 600 people in the nation that do what I do. So you kind of have to be close if you're going to work together to improve the profession. And so I get to work individually with students and help them improve personally. And then I get to work with a great group of legal educators that want to improve the lives legal education system. And that's pretty amazing. I get to do that every day. That's sounds fascinating. You know, I can understand a little bit of this from the close knit community piece, both in education. People often forget that. Educators tend to know or know people who know other educators. So you go about anywhere in the valley, and you can trip over people that you know, and to a lesser extent for across the country. This doing podcasts has created some of that for me, because I'm online talking to people in England, or in Chicago, or all over the country. I've never met him. But we're pretty good friends after they've helped, we've helped each other out through figuring out how to make podcasting work. So that's, that makes it a lot of fun. In any profession, you're always seeking to get better. How do you go about improving your craft, I do a number of things to try to improve. First, the legal academia, there's a subsection of us that write a lot about improving teaching and improving pedagogy. So I've written articles in that field. And I read articles in that field, legal research, and writing also has a very active listservs. And, you know, if I'm really stumbling, and there isn't, you know, someone in the office next door that can quickly answer my question, I can throw out a question to ellipse listserv, and get expert advice and start conversations that help. So there's a reading component, there's a talking to people component. And then what might not seem obvious to everyone is I pay attention to my students. And so I used to direct a legal research and writing program, I no longer do that. But when I would hire new teachers to come in, I would explain to them that looking at your students papers is the worst mirror you're ever going to look at. Because it's going to point out all of where you stumbled in your classroom, and where you can improve. So after every class, I sit down for a few minutes, and I make notes. On the lesson notes I took into class like this worked. This didn't improve this, I got these questions. So that when I hit that lesson again in a year, I know sort of what worked well, what didn't and I can really focus my energy on improving those particular points in class. You know, likewise, if I so in legal research and writing, you tend to take fictionalized problems that a client would bring in, and you can, for instance, if I teach a Covenant Not to Compete, which is a contract term, every state has law on covenants not to compete, so I can take the sort of same basic facts and I can teach it in Arizona or I can say, Okay, now we're in Idaho, or, Hey, we're in Nebraska. But I can look at where students stumbled the last time I taught that and improve See the problem or improve my teaching or know what to look for when I'm picking the cases that they're going to use as the basis of the problem? So, I mean, I guess the short answer is there's a lot of self reflection, and I spend a lot of time figuring out what I'm not good at, or what I could be better at. And then finding the answer that helps me improve there. Thank you. This brings to mind for me, as an educator, there always seems to be shifts, continuous shifts in best practice, in legal education, how fast are those shifts occurring? Not fast enough. So the law as a whole is a very conservative body. And I don't mean politically conservative, it does not want to change because we recognize as attorneys, that even small changes in the law can have huge ripple effects that we don't necessarily understand. And I know, given the current political climate, that might be a little bit difficult to understand. But traditionally, the law is always sort of set, I don't know, seven to 10 years kind of behind shifts in society. And it's actually like legislators who pull us forward with new statutes to do with societal changes, and then the attorneys and courts pick up from theirs. And that has come into legal education. We're overseen by the American Bar Association, that's our accrediting body, in addition to regional, and then state accreditors. And because we're overseen by judges and attorneys, nothing shifts very quickly when they want to shift a standard. It can take years it goes through committees, there's notice and comment periods. So the last major shift in specifically legal research and writing and experiential education happened in 2017. I think it took six or seven years to get that new standard in. And then something that probably makes more sense to an educator is, we're still trying to figure out like how to teach our students legal technology, which has been around for 15 years, and there are still law schools that don't have robust courses or programs on for instance, the technology, you're going to need to be in court to deal with keeping client confidential. Client matters confidential. And so we do a really, really great job at helping students understand how the law works, and how the legal system works. But we don't do a great job at understanding how to take the theoretical knowledge and apply it. We're getting better at it. But I don't think we're getting better at it quickly enough. So by that, I'm assuming you mean, like everything from keeping records safe in a time where anybody with a thumb drive could take you to take everything or just come in through the network, or how to deal with presenting cases over things like zoom, is that what you're referring to? I mean, some of that, but then there's specific legal technology and the practice of law is shifting sort of the business of law and the way the law is being practiced. It's no longer huge firms with sort of, they bring in newly minted attorneys who've just passed the bar and mentor them for several years, everyone sort of needs to hit the ground running. Law is becoming much more of a delivery service in some ways, then, sort of, you know, you get an attorney when you're 20, and you keep them for your whole life, it's a lot more situational. And for those of us that are older and went into academia before some of these shifts happen, we just aren't set up well, to sort of understand how the practice is changing. And so we could do a better job listening to our graduates, both recent and those who've been out much longer, and then shifting our curriculums to help our students understand where I think, though, doing a better job of understanding those shifts that are happening and sort of teaching more metacognitive skills so that our students are at least prepared to be self aware and teach themselves so We're dealing with it in some ways, but we could certainly do a better job. Okay, that makes sense to me then. Next up, who do you idolize or enjoy in the field, and who are you some of your mentors. Mentors, in some ways is easier and in some ways is harder. course there's the professor who first let me be a teaching assistant and then helped me write a book and then brought me into a program to teach. And now we're actually dear friends, we text each other, she stayed in my home. Her name is Suzanne RO, she's the director of the legal research and writing program at the University of Oregon School of Law. And I would not be where I am, if I had never set foot in her office. I owe her so much for my career. Beyond that, there are some sort of titans in the legal research and writing field. There's Mary Beth Beasley, she's now at UNLV, she spent a number of years at The Ohio State University, she has worked tremendously hard to improve pedagogy and to improve some status issues. One of the things I haven't mentioned is legal academia is can be really siloed. And for a number of years, those of us who taught on the skill side, like in clinics, or in legal research, and writing, were sort of fourth class citizens. And now I'd say in most institutions were first or second class citizens. There's Linda Edwards, who is no longer teaching, she actually is an Idaho attorney, and she was State Bar counsel for the state of Idaho. She then went into legal academia, she's written a number of textbooks. I randomly was sitting next to her at an ice cream social at a conference once. And we realized we knew some of the same attorneys in Idaho. And she just became a dear friend and dear mentor. And for a number of years. When I had a particularly bad day, I could close my office door and call Melinda and she knew the answer. And if she didn't, she knew who I could talk to. There's Terry Pullman who just retired. And then I have a lot of sort of colleagues that aren't, you know, 10 or 15 years ahead of me and careers, but we kind of came in around the same time, and we're working together to sort of bridge these titans retiring, or getting very close to retirement, and then the new people who are coming into the field. They're too numerous to mention, in all honesty, but they're the people who feed me when I get low and who I hope I help prop up and then of course, idolize, there's always the judges or the legal educators who, you know, everyone knows the name of there's, you know, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who did so much for women. There's Sandra Day O'Connor, who, you know, couldn't find a job coming out of law school as an attorney. And now I work at the law school named after her. So there are a number of, you know, big female Titans, semi or, and cryptology Jackson, who, you know, are very much still leaders in their fields and doing so much for young people who want to enter the field. But honestly, day to day, the people that do the most for me, are sometimes the people in my building that I can just knock on the door or have a cup of coffee with and we help get each other through what can be some really difficult times and you know, chance from the last two years, any kind of education in a pandemic or on Zoom or mast is incredibly difficult. And I certainly didn't experience some of the difficulties that you've gone through being in public education. But there were some pretty tough days and we needed each other. Very good. Knowing that we are in the middle of our respective careers. So there's a long ways to go. So you don't want to put a cap on things. What do you think your greatest accomplishment is so far in your field? And what are you most proud of in this area? Oh, yeah, I am in the middle of My career greatest accomplishment. I think, when Suzanne Rowe who started the series of textbooks decided to step down as the editor she asked me to take over. So I'm now the series editor for Carolina academic presses state legal research series. For those in the field, you'll know what I'm talking about. For those not in the field, about 32 or so states have a state specific legal textbook that they use, and I edit that series. And when I took it over from Suzanne, we were sort of cresting a hill in a very big change in the way legal research is done. So I've been able to take what was a really solid foundation, and shift it and push it in different ways so that the individual states books are more unique to the state. They've definitely shifted. So they're teach the way legal research is done now better because when I took it over, we we're shifting from book dominated to online platforms dominated. And there's been this huge expansion in free and low cost online platforms. So I feel like I'm helping make that different and better while still, of course, standing on the shoulders of giants in the field. What am I most proud of? I think the days that I'm most proud of her when I get the thank you notes from students. So it's not one thing. In particular, it's when a student or a former student actually takes the time to tell me about how they're a better attorney because of something I said or did. And I helped improve that person, but perhaps more importantly, they got a better outcome for their clients. So I'd like to think that, you know, in 20 years that will and I'm done with my career, I look back and realized I sort of created a web that helped many more people than I was ever able to sit in a classroom with. Yes, those those moments that are long time coming, sometimes it may be years before you hear, but that payoff is so powerful. It really is. There's nothing that I keep a file I know a lot of us do, because students and particularly law students can be pushy, right? We're training them to be advocates, so we're training them to be pushy, not shocking, and resistant. And so actually keep a file of the Thank You, You made my life better. You taught me so well, that are really, really meaningful. Thank you. If someone wants to get into this field of legal education, space, and maybe even more specifically, legal research and writing, what steps would you suggest? That's actually a really tough question. As I mentioned there, I mean, statistically, very few of us who do this and legal academia is actually kind of a hard field to get into. That being said, there are some things you could do. You can write articles, even bar journal articles, preferably law review articles, any hiring committee is going to look at can you publish in law reviews in bar journals? Do you have something to add to the conversation because just like all academia, you teach, and you research and you write, and so they'll want to see their writing piece. You can also practice teaching, you could take an adjunct role at a law school near you and teach a class and really learn how to put content and pedagogy together and deal with students. there if you're interested in legal research and writing I would say join the legal writing Institute. That is LW AI online, if you're looking for it out there. It has it lists all the jobs that are open in the nation, that would be full time jobs, some of them are just visiting positions. That's actually what I did for the first two years. And so it's an opportunity to go and work at a school for a year or two. To the less than your service loads, so you're not doing the administration of the school you're not serving, say on the curriculum committee and trying to improve the curriculum for that law school, you're just teaching and researching and writing. And that can give you a really good feel for is this something I actually want to do? I love it. I hope I've made it sound like the best job in the world, because I think it is. But it is not for everyone. And I. In some ways, I think it might be really nice to just take a visitor's position and really figure out, yeah, this is for me, or oh, this is really, really not for me. And honestly, if you're interested, you can find me and I will talk to you. I've mentored a lot of people into adjunct teaching, or helped them move from adjunct ting into an actual full time career. And I'm more than thrilled to help anyone do that. So, if you couldn't do this for a living, what would you choose to do? I'd win the lottery and run a foundation. No, know I, I hope it's obvious to your listeners that this really is kind of my dream job. If I couldn't do it, I think I would still try to find a way to meld my love of helping people and education, whether that was some sort of public interest practice, and, you know, working with college students or high school students or something like that. But if I couldn't have this job, I think I'd have to create a job that still fed me the same way this one does. And I'm not sure why it exists because I haven't gone looking for it. That's a great place to be in some ways. But it's also good to note that you've thought about the pieces and parts that keep you satisfied about it. All right, question number 10. We're wrapping things up. What else would you like our audience to know? I'm not sure there's much legal education is wonderful. If you're interested in that. Like I said, please reach out and find me. I'm on Twitter at my handle is at Fordyce rough. I'm at ASU so you can get on a lot a lot@asu.edu and find me on the faculty list there and I'd be happy to answer any questions you have. I will also put the contact info the Twitter handle in our show notes. I'd like to thank Professor Neil Fordyce rough coming on with us today. And thank you for sharing your passion for legal education with us. I found it fascinating. So, listeners, what are you passionate about? Is it something you'd like to share with our listeners? Reach out? The contact information is below in the show notes. Well, friends, that's it for this week's episode of strife seek fine. Thanks for listening. If you'd like to support the podcast, please share it with a friend. Or alternatively leave a review on your favorite podcasting app. If you'd like to support the podcast financially, I do have buy me a coffee link is below in the show notes. Every time of it will go to show improvements. Until next time, keep seeking your own brilliant future