LWI Professional Status Committee


In March 2015, the LWI Board of Directors formed the LWI Professional Status Committee. 

The LWI Professional Status Committee serves two functions:

  • to act as a resource for members who are facing specific employment or professional development issues

  • to gather information about status issues and challenges facing the LWI membership

If you are facing a specific employment or professional development issue and would like to contact us, please feel free to reach out to any of the following committee members:

David Austin (Cal Western)

Mary Bowman, co-chair (Seattle)

Olympia Duhart (Nova)

Lucy Jewel (Tennessee)

Kristen Tiscione, co-chair (Georgetown)

Melissa Weresh (Drake)

Cliff Zimmerman (Northwestern)

The committee members bring together a range of backgrounds and experiences (in teaching, scholarship, administrative roles, and organizational leadership), and they represent diverse schools and programs that provide a spectrum of status categories along with the associated terms and conditions of employment. The committee members expect to draw on the collective experience and knowledge of the legal writing community as well as its generosity.

We are also in the process of gathering information that relates to maintaining and improving the status of legal writing faculty.

Current Resources

ALWD/Legal Writing Inst., Report of the Annual Legal Writing Survey (2014).

American Bar Association, Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar, Law School Faculty and Staff by Ethnicity and Gender (2013).

Center for the Study of Applied Legal Education, The 2013-14 Survey of Applied Legal Education (2014).

Deborah Maranville, Ruth Anne Robbins & Kristen K. Tiscione, Faculty Status and Effectiveness, in Building on Best Practices & Carnegie's Educating Lawyers: Legal Education in a Changing World (Maranville, Sedillo Lopez, Bliss, & Kaas, eds., forthcoming 2015).

Rebecca Scharf, Compiled List of Legal Writing Faculty Who Have Served in a Dean's Position in Law School (August 2015).

Kristen K. Tiscione & Lucille A. Jewel, Employment Discrimination in Legal Education: Selected Readings Relating to Women, Minorities, and Legal Writing (2015).

LWI Policy Statement on Full Citizenship for Law Faculty (Adopted March 2015):

The LWI Board has adopted a policy statement on principles of equality for law faculty that will guide its future planning and decisions. This statement explicitly signals our commitment to the policy of full citizenship for all law professors, and it is designed to communicate that commitment to our members as well as others in the legal academy and the legal profession. The policy statement also has been adopted by the ALWD Board of Directors and the SALT Board of Directors: 

The Legal Writing Institute is committed 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 method. All full-time law faculty should have the opportunity to achieve full citizenship at their institutions, including academic freedom, security of position, and governance rights.  Those rights are necessary to ensure that law students and the legal profession benefit from the myriad perspectives and expertise that all faculty bring to the mission of legal education.

LWI Policy Statement on Best Practices for 405(c) Faculty (Adopted July 2015)

Many legal writing professors have earned the form of security of position defined as being reasonably similar to tenure under ABA Accreditation Standard 405(c). Believing that concrete and specific information about satisfying this standard would be immediately useful to law professors and law schools, the Boards of Directors of the Legal Writing Institute and the Association of Legal Writing Directors have adopted the Best Practices for 405(c) Faculty Policy Statement.