Legal Commentary

Since beginning my law teaching career, I have had a number of research assistants, whom I have asked to perform a variety of types of projects for me. As I see it, an RA position should benefit both the prof and the student. Perhaps because these goals are at times in conflict, I have not yet hit upon an RA model that seems to work particularly well. As this is my last day here at PrawfsBlawg, I thought I'd share my thoughts on RAs and ask readers for their input.

From the prof perspective, we want our RAs to be able to perform tasks that will save us time. Leaving aside the tricky question of whether RAs should write any part of the article ---- something that I don't ask my RAs to do ---- the typical tasks seem to consist of research and proofreading. Proofreading, though it saves prof time, is probably not the substantive or interesting work that RAs are all that interested in doing. And it frankly doesn't save all that much prof time.

Research projects can be interesting for RAs, but they pose other problems. The more complicated the research project, the more likely it is that a student may perform the project poorly. If I have to go back and "check" my RA's research, then it isn't saving me time. And sometimes, in looking through the primary sources myself, I've seen information that was outside the research question posed to the RA, but that is still valuable to the project. Simpler research projects present less of a risk of RA error, but might not present much of a time saving to profs, who are likely to be able to perform simple projects more quickly than students. Simpler projects --- i.e., find me a law review article that says X for footnote 9 --- are also less likely to be interesting for students.

Finally, because students who have worked as my RA often ask me for clerkship recommendations, I think it is important to give them tasks that allow me to assess their research, writing, and critical thinking skills. But I also don't want to give the students busy work just in order to form an opinion about those skills.

Have any of you hit upon methods of employing RAs that seem valuable to both the student and the prof?