Renowned Stanford Law Professor Orin Kerr: What Professors Are Really Thinking

In this episode of Status Check with Spivey, Mike has a conversation with Orin Kerr, a prominent law professor and legal academic who currently serves as a Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and a Senior Fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. In his 25+ years as a law school faculty member, Professor Kerr has written 75+ law review articles, authored casebooks, and been cited in 4,500+ academic articles and 500+ judicial decisions, including several U.S. Supreme Court opinions. He has held tenured positions at Stanford Law, GW Law, USC Law, and UC Berkeley Law, and he has been a visiting professor at UChicago Law, Penn Law, and Yale Law.In addition to his career in academia, Professor Kerr completed two clerkships, including a Supreme Court clerkship with Justice Anthony Kennedy, argued before the Supreme Court, and practiced law for a number of years, including as a trial attorney for the Department of Justice in the Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section and as a Special Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. He has a bachelor’s degree in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from Princeton University, a master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. Professor Kerr discusses how law schools try to balance preparing students to be practice-ready with teaching how to think like a lawyer (5:49), what Professor Kerr sees as the “ideal” legal training (11:27), what professors actually think when someone messes up a cold call (37:58), how and when he knew he wanted to become a law professor (1:47), the “old way” and the “new way” that law schools hire faculty (3:41), advice for prospective law students who want to become law professors (12:32), the different types of law professors (12:51), every professor’s least favorite part of the job (23:12), the built-in advantages that some students enter law school already having (32:48), Professor Kerr’s most-read law review article (33:50), and more.They also discuss a video that Professor Kerr recorded last year, “So You’re About To Start Law School: A Law Student’s Guide with Stanford Law Professor Orin Kerr.” You can watch that video for free on YouTube here.You can listen and subscribe to Status Check with Spivey on ⁠⁠Apple Podcasts⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Spotify⁠⁠, and ⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠. You can read a full transcript of this episode with timestamps here.