Legal Writing Faculty Fellowship
The Belmont University College of Law invites applications for its Legal Writing Faculty Fellowship to begin Fall 2024.
This fellowship is a two-year program designed for individuals who wish to pursue a career teaching law with a particular disciplinary focus on legal writing. Fellows are paid a base salary of $70,000/year with the opportunity to earn an additional, small stipend for certain service. Training in the fellowship program will focus on each aspect of an academic career, including teaching, research, and service through the lens of the legal writing specialty.
Teaching. Fellows will teach a 1:1 load each year, teaching the same section of legal writing students in both the fall (objective writing) and spring (persuasive writing) semesters. Section sizes at Belmont Law are capped at 20 legal writing students. Fellows will join Belmont’s legal writing faculty and benefit from its team-teaching model and joint curriculum while still retaining academic freedom to structure and shape their individual classes. Fellows will have the opportunity to gain teaching experience both in a small practicum course and in a large lecture setting by teaching one of the group class sessions offered in the 1L legal writing curriculum. Belmont University’s Teaching Center provides formative reviews of pedagogical progress and other professional development opportunities including one-on-one reviews, webinars, workshops, reading groups, and applied teaching and learning groups. Fellows will receive ongoing, direct mentorship from the Director of Legal Writing, including an orientation to legal academia in general and the field of legal writing in particular. Fellows will have the opportunity to shadow various legal writing faculty and courses, including Belmont’s upper-level, Advanced Legal Writing course. Fellows will have the opportunity to help craft curricular materials such as an in-class exercise, work product examples, and/or full problem files. Fellows will become conversant in curricular issues related to a legal writing program, including curricular integrations with Academic Success Programs, Experiential Learning Programs, and Bar Prep Programs in modern legal academia. Fellows will be included on curricular planning meetings of the legal writing team.
Research. Faculty fellows will be supported in the production of quality scholarship. Fellows have access to 30 hours of research assistant support each week, as well as some University travel funds. It is expected that fellows will be able to produce one published piece of scholarship and develop at least one work-in-progress before entering the academic job market at the end of the second fellowship year. Fellows will receive direct mentorship from Belmont Law’s Assistant Dean for Research and Scholarship, including assistance in the production of a scholarship plan and in the article submission process. Fellows will receive mentorship from the Director of Legal Writing regarding how to situate new work among existing strands of scholarship in the legal writing discipline. Fellows will also have access to support from Belmont University’s Teaching Center related to the scholarship of teaching and learning. Fellows will benefit from inclusion in a cross-disciplinary cohort of other University Fellows. Fellows will have the opportunity to attend and potentially present at professional academic conferences in the legal writing discipline along with Belmont’s legal writing faculty, including the Legal Writing Institute’s Biennial conference (LWI) and/or the Association of Legal Writing Directors conference (ALWD).
Service. Fellows will have the opportunity to do certain, light service work on select committees at the law school to gain experience in institutional operations. Fellows will also have the opportunity to supervise one or more student notes produced by students on the Belmont Law Review and the Belmont Law Journal to gain experience supervising an upper-level rigorous writing requirement. Additionally, fellows will be able to serve as the faculty supervisor for one or more students in legal externships to gain experience in how students are connecting their classroom legal writing skills to applied writing projects in the field. Fellows will be mentored by the Director of Field Placements and will be able to shadow some of the experiential learning classes at Belmont Law to gain an understanding of the connection between the first-year, legal writing practicum and upper-level practicum experiences in professional settings.
Career Placement. By the end of the Legal Writing Faculty Fellowship at Belmont Law, fellows will be well-prepared to enter the legal academic job market and will be stand-out candidates for positions in the legal writing discipline. Belmont Law will help Fellows apply for and interview for faculty positions at other universities. Fellows will be mentored in this process by the Faculty Recruiting Committee. Fellows are hired on a contract basis and are not tenure eligible at Belmont University. More information on the University Fellows Program can be found here: https://www.belmont.edu/academics/faculty-fellows/index.html. Belmont Law does not hire fellows to fill law faculty vacancies.
About Us. Belmont Law boasts a legal writing faculty comprised of a tenured Legal Writing Director and four additional, full-time, tenure-track professors of law. Additionally, Belmont’s Director of Academic Success and its Bar Refresher Faculty have regularly taught in the legal writing program, ensuring that legal writing skills are integrated throughout the curricular experience for Belmont Law students. You can access Belmont Law’s public comment supporting the ABA’s proposed standard revision relating to legal writing faculty here: https://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/administrative/legal_education_and_admissions_to_the_bar/council_reports_and_resolutions/comments/2023/comments-received-standards-304-405.pdf
Belmont University is a private, ecumenical Christian university focusing on academic excellence and is located in the heart of Nashville, one of the fastest growing and most culturally rich cities in the country. It is the second largest private university in Tennessee approximating 9,000 students. The median LSAT/GPA for the 124 students who entered Belmont’s law school in August 2022 were 160 and 3.70 (75th percentile: 162 and 3.88; 25th percentile: 156 and 3.47). Belmont’s ultimate bar passage rate for 2018 and 2019 was 100%, one of only a few law schools in the country to have achieved a perfect pass rate in those years.
Apply Now. The Belmont College of Law encourages applications from people whose background, life experiences, and scholarly approaches would contribute to the diversity of our faculty, curriculum, and programs. Belmont is an EOE/AA employer. Belmont College of Law reserves the right to exercise a preference for those candidates who support the goals and missions of the University.
Applicants must possess a J.D. or equivalent degree from an accredited U.S. law school and must demonstrate strong scholarly potential and a commitment to excellence in teaching. If interested, please submit a letter of interest and curriculum vitae to the Chair of the Faculty Recruitment Committee, Professor Kristi W. Arth, using the recruitment committee’s email address - lawfaculty.recruitment@belmont.edu. If you have questions about the position or Belmont University, please contact Professor Arth at kristi.arth@belmont.edu.