While speaking at the dedication of a new building at Marquette University Law School, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia urged the administration to encourage professors to spend more time instructing students than publishing academic research.

"Research and writing is of course a part of the academic life and perhaps the part that makes you best known for the time being beyond the walls of your own institution," Scalia said. "But the reality is that the part of your academic career that will have the most lasting impact is the hours you spend producing an intellectual legacy in the classroom."

One reason professors are encouraged to spend time publishing academic research is to help enhance the reputation of the school, thereby increasing the school's rankings.  An increase in rankings is, in turn, thought to create greater employment opportunities for its students and alumni.

Like most law schools in the country, GW law administrators must balance faculty's time spent helping students by increasing the school's rankings and helping students through classroom instruction.

"Academic scholarship, teaching, and administrative service (on committees, etc.) are all essential responsibilities of faculty at GW Law," said Gregory Maggs, Dean for Academic Affairs Gregory.

The most current US News Law School Rankings reports that the student to faculty ratio at GW Law is 14.2 with full and part-time faculty at 280.  According to Dean Maggs, faculty only teach nine credit hours a year, two classes in the fall and one class in the winter.  This allows faculty members to have more time for their students and their writing than professors at some peer universities. In turn, this balance of experience leads to better classroom instruction.

"My writing has always enhanced my teaching because it has allowed me to study issues in more depth so that I have a better understanding of them," Dean Maggs said.

Brent Evan Newton of the Georgetown University Law Center brought this argument to the Potomac in his recently published article, "Preaching What They Don't Practice:  Why Law Faculties' Preoccupation with Impractical Scholarship and Devaluation of Practical Competencies Obstruct Reform in the Legal Academy."

"Especially at law schools in the upper echelons of the U.S. News & World Report rankings, the core of the faculties seem indifferent or even hostile to the concept of law school as a professional school with the primary mission of producing competent practitioners," Newton said.  "Attempts by law schools to compensate for the decreasing number of tenure-track professors with practical backgrounds or inclinations by allocating practical teaching to a discrete, small pool of clinicians and LRW instructors and also by outsourcing such teaching to adjunct professors have not achieved and will not achieve a healthy balance within modern law faculties.

Rather, such practical components of the faculty possess a separate-and-unequal status in the vast majority of American law schools. The gulf between the main faculty and these second- and third-class members of the legal academy in terms of practical experience and inclination is widening at the very time when it needs to be shrinking."

Newton's concern is that law schools lose their focus on hiring devoted educators in exchange for the convenience of hiring more teachers with less experience and less commitment to the classroom.  Instead, he says teaching should not become a secondary purpose for law school faculty, especially since their primary purpose is to produce "competent lawyers."

President George Washington sought to create this university to "educate future generations of civil servants and thereby forge a national identity based on 'principles friendly to republican government and to the true and genuine liberties of mankind,'" according to the GW Law website.

The primary mission of this particular school is not only creating "competent practitioners," but also creating a greater impact on society.  Perhaps GW Law students and alumni can create a more lasting and positive legal impact as the school's reputation is enhanced and their rankings climb higher.

GW Law is engaging its focus on quality teaching in order to close the "gulf" Newton warns of.  Students have taken notice.  When asked about this issue, several law students expressed they hadn't personally witnessed the conflict expressed by Scalia. In fact, many said they were glad that GW Law professors bring their real-world experience into the classroom.

"Teaching and writing are not mutually exclusive," said student, Timothy Pezzoli.  "Professors should be able to write and teach without either pursuit diminishing the quality of the other."

This may be due to a healthy balance GW Law has created for its students.  Students have high profile, well-published faculty who are actually available to them.  And anyway, who says you can't have it all?