Faculty/Student Presentation Day 2012

Thursday, April 12, 2012

For the full program for Faculty/Student Presentation Day 2012, click here.

Welcome to New York Law School’s fifth Faculty Presentation Day – and its first Faculty/Student Presentation Day!

Faculty Presentation Day is something of an institution at New York Law School – a day set aside in the school’s calendar, with all classes cancelled, to be the occasion for faculty and students to engage not with each other not over the latest class reading assignments but in the very process of creative and scholarly work. We’ve held these symposia in 2002, 2004, 2006 and 2008 – with issues of the New York Law School Law Review resulting from each one.

Meanwhile the school has been changing. We have built, and we’ll be holding all of today’s sessions in, a beautiful new building – at the time of our last Presentation Day this building was only under construction. We have also paid a great deal of attention to the reshaping of the school’s curriculum, with a growing recognition of the importance of combining preparation for practice and experiential learning with the study of legal doctrine and scholarly insights into the law. (In fact, we used what would have been Faculty Presentation Day in 2010 for a faculty retreat to help us think through issues like these.)

Today’s Faculty/Student Presentation reflects the work we have done and are doing. It is, like its predecessors, a scholarly event, and you will have the chance to encounter a range of the scholarly insights of our faculty in the sessions today. Scholarship infuses teaching, but today you’ll see that many of the faculty’s presentations are in fact precisely about pedagogy. All of these sessions, moreover, lead up to a second symposium this same day, beginning after the third set of Faculty/Student Presentation Day panels: a celebration of the scholarship of New York Law School’s distinguished professor and former dean, James Simon.

At the same time, however, today’s Faculty/Student Presentation Day is a student event. In fact Faculty Presentation Day was often a day for presentations by students as well as faculty. But this year’s new name, Faculty/Student Presentation Day, reflects a new emphasis on the work of New York Law School’s students. This work ranges from Law Review student writing to films. It covers topics from human trafficking to legal expert systems. And the presentations themselves range from individually-authored work to group presentations by students who have been studying the law by taking part in collaborative projects, in our project-based learning classes and elsewhere.

We hope you will join us for this Day’s events. Come to the panels, but not just to hear your teachers and fellow students speak – as much as we expect you’ll enjoy that. Come ready to engage with them, to make comments and ask questions, so that this Day becomes a stepping stone for all of us to greater insights, new understanding, and many Presentations in the future!

Carol Buckler
Interim Dean

Stephen Ellmann
Director, Office of Clinical and Experiential Learning