Legal Education

SALT Names 2018 Great Teacher and Human Rights Honorees

At its upcoming Annual Awards Celebration to be held on January 5, 2018, in San Diego, SALT will honor two champions of justice, diversity and teaching excellence. Professor Jeffrey Selbin of Berkeley Law will receive the 2018 SALT Great Teacher Award. Professor Robert S. Chang and the Fred T. Korematsu Center for Law and Equality will receive the 2018 M. Shanara Gilbert Human Rights Award (details below). We are revamping the SALT Annual Dinner to increase interaction and fun! The 2018 SALT Annual Awards Celebration will feature presentations by the Great Teacher and M. Shanara Gilbert Human Rights awardees along with a gala reception providing an opportunity to interact with awardees, greet long-time and new SALT friends, usher in new Co-Presidents Matthew... Continue »

SALT issues Statement Opposing Threatened Limitation on UNC’s Center for Civil Rights Participation in Litigation

August 14, 2017 STATEMENT OF THE SOCIETY OF AMERICAN LAW TEACHERS ON THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA (UNC) CENTER FOR CIVIL RIGHTS The Society of American Law Teachers, founded more than 40 years ago, is a national organization with members at law schools throughout the United States. SALT is committed to diversity, justice, and academic excellence. Consistent with these values, SALT strongly supports legal education that offers experiential learning opportunities for students, allows curricular decisions free from political influence, and vigorously protects faculty members’ academic freedom. Like teachers, scholars, students, and community-based organizations around the country, SALT condemns recent efforts by university governing bodies, state legislatures, and corporate interests to influence curricular offerings at colleges and universities and to restrict the ability of law schools to provide students with meaningful… Continue »

Call for Nominations — 2018 Great Teacher Award

Pictured, 2017 Award Winner Frank Askin SALT holds an annual awards event to celebrate the SALT’s community, values, and honorees to coincide with the January AALS meeting. Mark your calendars: This year’s SALT awards celebration will be on Friday, January 5, 2018, at a location TBA in San Diego.  A highlight of this celebration is the presentation of SALTʹs Great Teacher Award. SALT invites you to submit a nomination for this award. Award criteria and past awardees are set out below.  Current members of the SALT Board of Governors are not eligible for nomination. You must be a current member of SALT to make a nomination. You can click here to join or renew.  To check the status of your membership,... Continue »

Call for Nominations — Junior Faculty Teaching Award

Pictured, 2016 Award winner Vinay Harpalani The Society of American Law Teachers seeks nominations for the Junior Faculty Teaching Award.  Mark your calendars: This year the award will be given at SALT’s Annual Awards Celebration on Friday, January 5, 2018, at a location TBA in San Diego.  The award recognizes an outstanding recent entrant (seven years or fewer) into legal education who demonstrates a commitment to justice, equality and academic excellence through his or her teaching. This award is designed to honor all faculty, including clinical, legal research and writing, librarian and doctrinal teachers. Eligibility and Selection Criteria To be considered for the Junior Faculty Teaching Award, applicants must be: • Full-time faculty members with no more than seven years of teaching in the law... Continue »

Farewell to SALT Founder and Civil Rights Giant Norman Dorsen

In memoriam: Norman Dorsen (1930-2017) Founder of SALT, NYU School of Law Legend, Former General Counsel and President of the Board of the ACLU, Civil Liberties Giant, Social Justice Visionary, and Friend   The Founding of SALT by Norman Dorsen, Michael Rooke-Ley, and Joyce Saltalamacchia   2008 SALT Tribute to Norman Dorsen Thirty-five years ago, Norman Dorsen created the Society of American Law Teachers, dedicated to justice, equality, excellence and academic freedom. He appreciated that law teachers could act and speak more boldly than law schools. He also understood that an organization should include, not just professors, but the many professionals who make significant contributions to legal education without the title of professor. Plus the acronym—SALT—is cool! In creating... Continue »

LWI & ALWD Full Citizenship Project for All Law Faculty

LWI and ALWD have chosen this day to launch a new campaign, the “Full Citizenship Project for All Law Faculty,” because of the professional status challenges that continue to plague skills-based and academic support law faculty, who are predominantly women.  They are inviting individual signatures endorsing the Full Citizenship Statement, which the SALT Board voted to endorse in March 2015. SALT has long supported efforts to strengthen the role of the very faculty–including legal writing, clinical and academic support faculty–most able to lead law school efforts to further experiential education. The signature campaign begins today and will end on Equal Pay Day (April 4).   Please consider adding your name here and sharing this message with your contacts.   The LWI and ALWD press release... Continue »

Call for Action–Contact ABA Delegates to Oppose Bar Passage Standard Revision

SALT asks that you immediately contact your state’s ABA Delegates and other ABA delegates you may know to urge rejection of a proposal that will come before the ABA House of Delegates as Resolution 110B on Monday, February 6 (sample email below).  If you are in the Miami area, we also encourage you to attend the House of Delegates Session and speak against Resolution 110B. The proposal would revise ABA Standard 316, the bar passage accreditation standard, to impose a single nationwide standard on all law schools.  Specifically, the proposed standard would require that 75% of all members of a law school graduating class who sit for a bar exam must pass within two years of graduation.  The proposal is simplistic in failing to take into account dramatic variations in passing scores… Continue »

SALT Endorses LWI Best Practices for Security of Position for 405(c) Faculty

SALT has repeatedly expressed its commitment to a policy of full citizenship for all law faculty. No justification exists for subordinating one group of law faculty to another based on the nature of the course, the subject matter, or the teaching matter. To the contrary, all full-time law faculty should have the opportunity to achieve academic freedom, security of position and governance rights. Making artificial distinctions between doctrinal, clinical and legal writing faculty undermines the legal education mission; removing faculty hierarchies is important to ensuring adequate curricular attention to doctrine, skills, and values. Moreover, security of position is a commitment of a law school to allow a critical range of inquiry and experimentation to full-time faculty who have dedicated... Continue »

SALT Names 2017 Great Teacher, Human Rights, and Lifetime Achievement Honorees

At its upcoming Annual Dinner to be held on January 6, 2017, in San Francisco, SALT will honor three champions of justice, diversity and teaching excellence.  The Great Teacher Award recognizes Professor Frank Askin of Rutgers Law School, a SALT founding member, for his longstanding, tireless defense of civil liberties and his work mentoring and training a new generation of civil rights lawyers.  The M. Shanara Gilbert Human Rights Award recognizes Zahra Billoo, Executive Director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations San Francisco Bay Area, for her courageous work to promote justice and mutual understanding through community organizing and civil rights advocacy.   A special Lifetime Achievement Award recognizes Charles Ogletree, Harvard Law School Professor and Executive Director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race... Continue »

SALT Announces Nominees to Board of Governors Copy

  SALT is proud to announce the following Nominees to the Board of Governors.  The Nominees will be presented as a slate at the Annual Members’ Meeting to be held at 6:15 p.m. on Friday, September 30, 2016, at The John Marshall Law School in Chicago, Illinois, in conjunction with the 2016 SALT Teaching Conference. Elected Board members start their three-year terms on January 1, 2017.  SALT members are encouraged to attend the meeting in person or to vote by proxy by submitting an online proxy form. You must be a member in good standing of SALT at the time of the meeting or at the time you submit a proxy.  If you are unsure of your membership status, please... Continue »