International law teaching combines the worst aspects of sex and the weather. Everyone thinks they are an expert; they complain about problems but do nothing to improve the situation

Gamble, John

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TEACHING OR GET OFF THE LECTERN:IMPEDIMENTS TO IMPROVING INTERNATIONALLAW TEACHINGJohn Gamble*I. REWARD SYSTEM IN U.S. COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES ........ 383II. OUR MAJOR PROFESSIONAL ASSOCIATIONS Do NOTTAKE TEACHING SERIOUSLY ................................ 384International law teaching combines the worst aspects of sex and theweather. Everyone thinks they are an expert; they complain about problems butdo nothing to improve the situation. This is an exaggeration, but, in spite ofprotestations to the contrary, the teaching of international law does not seem tobe a major interest of professional associations devoted to international law or,for that matter, to most professors who teach the subject.In some ways, the last fifteen years have seen a marked increase indiscussions about the teaching of international law. The American Society ofInternational Law (ASIL) has an interest group on teaching.' The InternationalLaw Association (ILA) has established a committee on the Teaching ofInternational Law.2 ASIL President, Anne-Marie Slaughter, established a* Distinguished Professor of Political Science and International Law, The Behrend College, ThePennsylvania State University, Erie, PA 16563 U.S.A.I. The Interest Group has existed for more than a decade. This is the official description of itsrole:The Teaching International Law Interest Group provides a forum for those involvedin or interested in teaching international law to discuss approaches, methods, and newtechniques taking place both in the United States and abroad. The Group operatesunder the premise that effective teaching leads to increased public awareness and agreater understanding of international law. Although innovative new practices areoften highlighted, standard approaches are also examined in order to keep them freshand effective.The Group has recently addressed topic areas such as curriculum and pedagogies inboth doctrinal and non-doctrinal courses, requiring international law courses, infusioncurriculum, and international law certificate programs within the JD program. TheGroup addresses these topics through discussions and workshops, as well as throughco-sponsorship of international conferences.See The American Society of International Law, available at http://www.asil.org/teachingillindex.html (lastvisited Feb. 7, 2007).2. The Committee has approximately thirty members and alternates and has participated activelyin all ISL Bi-Annual Meetings since 2000. 1 serve as rapporteur for the committee. See International LawILSA Journal of International & Comparative Law"teaching initiative" that held two workshops: Workshop One, held onSaturday, April 3, 2004 in Washington, D.C.-sponsored by ASIL, TeachingInitiative; ILA Committee on the Teaching of International Law, Institute forInternational Law & Politics, Georgetown University; Workshop Two,Monday, August 23, 2004, Faculty of Law of the University of Potsdam,Germany-sponsored by ILA Committee on the Teaching of International Law;ASIL, Teaching Initiative; Faculty of Law, University of Potsdam.Both were successful, drew good attendance, and discussed a wide rangeof issues important to teachers from the content of examinations, informationage teaching techniques, to the place of international law in the curriculum.Given successes like these workshops, it is tempting to declare that thecondition of international law teaching is good. I do not accept this positiveassessment. Rather, I believe there are institutional, systemic barriers tosignificant improvement in international law teaching. Unless these can beovercome, we might miss a once-in-a-generation opportunity.Until fifteen years ago, my experience with international law teaching wasfairly typical. International law always had been my principal research interestand occupied perhaps a quarter of my teaching. I developed certain impressionsabout international law teaching from teaching courses once or twice per year.In no way was my knowledge of international law teaching systematic,developed as it was from my own experiences and from occasional discussionswith colleagues.Things changed for me in 1989, when the Ford Foundation seemed eagerto fund a survey of international law teaching via a grant to the ASIL. I was theonly person active in ASIL with interests in international law and surveyresearch, so I got the job of organizing, developing, and administering thesurvey that resulted in Teaching InternationalLaw in the 1990s.3 The first stepin the survey was drafting a questionnaire that would be sent to thousands ofprofessors, academic administrators, and even some students to assess theirexperiences with international law teaching. Two points about this experienceillustrate both the success of the survey and why the project could not bereplicated today. Soon after the project began, I convened a group-mostlyfrom the project advisory committee-that met for two and a half hours afteran ASIL annual meeting to discuss the details of drafts of the questionnaires.Those attending included: Goler Butcher, Charlotte Ku, Anne-Marie Slaughter,Lori Damrosch, Igor Lukashuk, Edwin Smith, Abram Chayes, Michael Molitor,Association, available at http://www.ila-hq.org/htmlVlayoutcommittee.htm (last visited Jan. 22, 2007).3. JOHN GAMBLE, TEACHING INTERNATIONAL LAW IN THE 1990S (1992) [hereinafterINTERNATIONAL LAW].[Vol. 13:2GambleLouis Sohn, Richard Edwards, Yasuaki Onuma, Tullio Treves, Louis Henkin,Alain Pellet, Daniel Turp, Keith Highet, Bruno Simma, Stephen Zamora.4We agreed on different questionnaires for each of the several con-stituencies, and sent out 1,500 questionnaires with a return rate of more thanfifty percent.5 In 2006, I do not think it would be possible to get this manyleading scholars of international law to meet to discuss a questionnaire dealingwith teaching. And, in the Internet age-when we are bombarded with e-mailquestionnaires-neither would it be feasible to get such a high return rate.Carrying out this survey broadened and deepened my interest in theteaching of international law. I moved beyond the anecdotal and, somewhatoxymoronically, made teaching one of my research interests.6The survey found high levels of interest among faculty and students; bothconstituencies like teaching and studying the subject. Administrators inpolitical science admit to a prejudice against international law because it is toonormative and not amenable to the quantitative methods so prevalent in politicalscience.7 Law school professors think international law should be taught betterand to more students but, generally, oppose requiring any international law.8"Only 23% of respondents would require the course."9Fast forward to 2006, let's start with the good news. The confluence ofthree broad factors provides an excellent opportunity.The Internet has matured so that teachers and students can communicateeasily, comfortably, and inexpensively-almost irrespective of physical loca-tion. This makes it possible to draw students from many locations into the samecourse-not to mention the almost infinite range of audio visual enhancementsnow readily available for classroom teachers. However, my impression aftertalking with dozens of colleagues is that new modes of teaching are possible butoften not sustainable because of the huge amount of time and effort needed.The real test of the Internet will be feasibility.4. Id.5. Id. at 141-87.6. In addition to the aforementioned book, I have published: JOHN KING GAMBLE & CHRISTOPHERC. JOYNER, TEACHING INTERNATIONAL LAW: APPROACHES AND PERSPECTIVES, (1997); John Gamble andNatalie Shields, International Legal Scholarship: A Perspective on Teaching and Publishing, 39 J. oFLEGAL EDUCATION., 39-46 (1989); John Gamble, Teaching ofInternational Law: Innovative Techniques,in CONTEMPORARY INTERNATIONAL LAW ISSUES: OPPORTUNITIES AT A TIME OF MOMENTOUS CHANGE367-70 (1994); John Gamble, An Introductory Course: Clear/er Solutions: The Case for a Bare-bonesCourse in International Law (BBCiIL), in 4 INTERNATIONAL LAW FORUM DU DROIT INTERNATIONAL 208-14(2002).7. Survey, supra note 3, at 132-33.8. Id. at 22.9. Id. However, younger faculty seemed much more positively disposed towards a requirement.2007]ILSA Journal of International & Comparative Law [Vol. 13:2On October 6, 2006, Harvard Law School announced a new internationallaw requirement.'" While this is not as sweeping a development as initiallyinferred, it may change the thinking about U.S. international legal education.Harvard Dean Elena Kagan said, "This marks a major step forward in ourefforts to develop a law school curriculum for the twenty-first century.""However, a single survey course is not required; instead, "each student will takeone of three specially crafted courses introducing global legal systems andconcerns-Public International Law, International Economic Law, and Com-parative Law."'" The result may be a sea of change in the quality and quantityof international law taught in the 190 law schools in the U.S. At least in theshort run, this should mean heightened interest in international law teaching.During the last fifty years, political science has been a difficult environ-ment for international law. Most departments did not even teach the subject.Research in international law tended to be discounted. That situation haschanged slowly, but drastically. International law is taught in moredepartments, and research is more active than ever. The International TreatyResearch and Analysis Group (ITRAG) held a workshop October 12-14, 2006at the University of Iowa. The meeting, organized by Professor Sara Mitchell,was attended by almost thirty people. ' This would have been inconceivable a10. Harvard Law School, available at http://www.law.harvard.edu/news/2006/10/06_curriculum.php (last visited Jan. 22, 2007).11. Id.12. Harvard provided this description of the new requirement:From the beginning of law school, students should learn to locate what they arelearning about public and private law in the United States within the context of alarger universe-global networks of economic regulation and private ordering, publicsystems created through multilateral relations among states, and different and widelyvarying legal cultures and systems. Accordingly, the Law School will develop threefoundation courses, each of which represents a door into the global sphere thatstudents will use as context for U.S. law. A course on public international law willintroduce students to the sources, institutions and procedures emerging over timethrough the bilateral and multilateral arrangements among states as well as theparticipation of nongovernmental actors. A course on international economic law willintroduce students to the network of economic regulation and private orderingaffecting commercial transactions, trade, banking and other systems for facilitatingand regulating economic relations around the globe. A third course, on comparativelaw, will introduce students to one or more legal systems outside our own, to theborrowing and transmission of legal ideas across borders and to a variety ofapproaches to substantive and procedural law that are rooted in distinct cultures andtraditions. Students will be allowed to elect any one of these courses in the first year.Id.13. Shambaugh Conference, Department of Political Science, University of Iowa, Oct. 12-14,2006,Building Synergies: Institutions and Cooperation in World Politics, available at http://www.saramitchell.org/shambaugh06.html (last visited Jan. 22, 2007).Gambledecade ago. There is some excellent international law research-most quitequantitative-being carried. The hope is that this research will lead to moreand better teaching within political science."Given the present climate, I conclude the possibility exists for unprece-dented synergy, innovation, and improvement in the teaching of internationallaw. However, I fear the deck is stacked against major changes. Two factorsconspire against the kind of change that is needed.I. REWARD SYSTEM IN U.S. COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIESRewards for faculty are stacked overwhelmingly in favor of research, notteaching. I have hundreds of friends and acquaintances with various kinds ofhonorific titles connected to their faculty appointments. Only one of them,Professor J. Martin Rochester, has the word "teaching" or "teacher" in his title;his title is "Distinguished Teaching Professor."' 5 The difficulty is compoundedby the fact that research accomplishments are much easier to measure than isteaching effectiveness. If a faculty member has published a number of articlesin significant journals, research proficiency is a fairly safe assumption.Teaching is much harder to evaluate and measure. Most institutions in the U.S.and Canada now use some kind of course evaluation questionnaire (CEQ) bywhich students assess the quality of the instruction they have received. At theirbest, CEQs may provide increased accountability, but they are not a panacea.CEQs are useful principally as a measure of student satisfaction. They arean imprecise, broad-brush measure of a phenomenon that is difficult to assessin the first place. There are other ways to judge teaching. If these are usedjudiciously along with CEQs, we will come closer to making a fair assessmentof the quality of this art called teaching. We must remember that CEQs are asundial, not a stopwatch, and higher education has many cloudy days.' 6I suspect the following dynamic occurs fairly often. Most rewards facultyreceives accrue because of research accomplishments. Teaching is difficult toassess, save for simplistic, inadequate CEQs. The most rational behavior formost of the faculty is to teach well enough to get reasonable CEQ scores.Innovation in teaching is discouraged because, in the short run, most changetends to lower CEQ scores. This creates the scenario where facultyconcentrates on research, seeking the path of least resistance and relatively highCEQ scores for their teaching. As these faculty members receive tenure and14. Id. For a list of papers and text of many, see Professor Mitchell's website, available athttp://www.saramitchell.org/index.html (last visited Jan. 22, 2007).15. University of Missouri at St. Louis, see Dept. of Political Science, available athttp://www.umsl.edu/-polisci/faculty/profiles.html (last visited Jan. 22, 2007).16. John Gamble, The Sundial/Stopwatch Dilemma, 12 NEW EDUCATION 59 (1990) (on file withauthor).2007]ILSA Journal of International & Comparative Lawbecome more senior, they have the opportunity to adjust their teaching dutiesaway from large introductory courses towards advanced, smaller, much morespecialized seminars that often are far closer to their research interests. This isnot the climate where preeminent international law faculty will lobby the deanfor support in trying to devise the best, most creative survey course ininternational law.II. OUR MAJOR PROFESSIONAL ASSOCIATIONSDo NOT TAKE TEACHING SERIOUSLYThis may be biting the hand that feeds me. Both the ILA and ASIL haveshown token interest in teaching with, respectively, a Committee on teachingand an Interest Group. But neither has prospered. The ILA Committee hastrouble getting branches to appoint members. Reports of the Committee are nottaken seriously and, because they do not fit the usual ILA mold, often do not getpublished. Teaching is fundamentally different from other ILA foci, e.g., "theregime of the continental shelf beyond 200 nautical miles from the baselinesfrom which the breadth of the territorial sea is measured,"' 7 and has not foundits niche. The ASIL Interest Group has conducted some activities, but overallhas not been particularly active. Teaching usually is deemed not sexy enoughfor the ASIL Annual Meeting. The last plenary session on teaching at an ASILAnnual Meeting was in 1991."8 This was possible only because of theinsistence of one of the program co-chairs (me). 400 people attended, includingYale Professor Myres McDougal. Professor McDougal-eighty-five years oldat the time-sat in the front row, appeared to be sleeping, but asked the first andbest question. I had hoped for a resurgence of interest at ASIL, but it has beenvery difficult. Executive directors generally are supportive of teaching; mostASIL presidents have not made it a high priority.The opportunity exists for a major resurgence in interest in internationallaw teaching. I think this argument can be made, although, so far, it does notseem to have held sway. In my opinion, two of the major problems facingprofessional associations like the ASIL and the ILA are appealing to both majormembership constituencies, professors, and practitioners, and dealing withspecialization and, ultimately fragmentation, e.g., will an American Society ofInternational Economic Law develop because economic law experts feel theyare getting short changed by ASIL?17. See List of Committees, available at http://www.ila-hq.org/html/DISPLAYCOMM_DETAILS.ASP?ID=33&COMM=Outer+Continental+Shelf&type=IC (last visited Jan. 22, 2007).18. Proceedings of the Eighty-Fifth Annual Meeting of the American Society of International Law,Roundtable on the Teaching of International Law, American Society of International Law, April 17-20, 1991,85 AM. SOC'y INT'L L. PROC. 102.[Vol. 13:2GambleA creative, ambitious rededication to international law teaching couldaddress both of these problems. In dozens of conversations with ASIL and ILAmembers, I have been struck by the fact that all members have a commoninterest in international law teaching as students, professors-or moreimmediately-as the vehicle by which new and talented people are drawn tointernational law. Further, efforts to develop a good, efficient, effective surveycourse in international law should have broad appeal. More focus on teachingmight also ameliorate the rift among sub-specialties. Improved teachingtechniques and strategies should be of interest to all subspecialties. Sub-fields,e.g., human rights law, law of the sea, and trade law, cannot be taughtefficiently if students lack a basic grounding in international law. How canprofessors teach about the World Trade Organization (WTO) dispute settlementprocedures if students have no prior knowledge of dispute settlement modesused in international law?Where do we begin? First, we should seek practical, focused approachesthat yield tangible results. With all due respect to my friend, the late JudgeManfred Lachs, an expansive approach to teaching such as that advocated inJudge Lachs' book is not the way to generate sustained interest. 19 I suggest thata university join forces with a professional association to create an institute forthe improvement of international law teaching (triple ILT). This must be aneutral forum, not favoring any particular approach or orthodoxy.2" It wouldhave to accommodate the fact that we teachers want to be assisted, not coerced,and often are suspicious of those offering to help us to teach better. Initially,I envision a website, organized by important topics. Faculty could visit to getadvice, strategies, or anecdotes for teaching a particular subject. Subsequently,they could contribute to the site-making the endeavor interactive, almostorganic. In the overall scheme of things, this task is not difficult. Theproblem-not surprisingly-is finding people with the determination, time,energy, and influence to make it happen. Of course, a sizeable grant wouldhelp, as would explicit expressions of support from officials of ASIL and theILA.19. See MANFRED LACHS, THE TEACHER AND INTERNATIONAL LAW (1982). I think Judge Lachswould agree with my assessment. In many long conversations, he explained to me that his book was anattempt to express his view of teachers integrating their efforts in research and teaching.20. For example, if such a website were dominated by opposition to the war in Iraq, it would makeit harder to sustain and develop the site for use in the long-term.2007]

Teaching Or Get Off The Lectern: Impediments To Improving International Law Teaching

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Teaching Or Get Off The Lectern: Impediments To Improving International Law Teaching

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