How can you best preserve the option of pursuing an academic career? What courses and jobs should students be thinking about? 

 

More on Peter Menell and Andrea Roth. 

 

SPEAKERS

Wayne Stacy, Peter Menell, Andrea Roth

 

Wayne Stacy 0:00 Welcome, everyone to the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology's Careers in Tech podcast. I'm your host, Wayne Stacy, the Executive Director for BCLT. Today, we're going to be able to talk about academic careers, and what you need to do to at least prepare for getting to an academic career at some point. We have two of the leading professors in the country with us today and two of the BCLT faculty co-directors, Andrea Roth, and Peter Menell. Thank you both for joining us.

Andrea Roth 0:31 Thanks for having us.

Wayne Stacy 0:32 First thing I wanted to talk to you about is really the full scope of your work. When people hear "professor" they think "teacher", and there's so much more to what you do then get up in the morning and teach a class. I know that's an important piece of what you do. But there's a whole lot more. So can you let people know kind of the full scope of your work?

Peter Menell 0:51 My career, I think is mostly about public policy that entails doing research, working with legislative and administrative agencies, and trying to prepare students who are going to go out in the world and work and hopefully promote better public policies. That was my goal. I never went to law school to be a lawyer, I was doing a multidisciplinary academic preparation. It's only after I became a professor that I got involved in consulting and expert work. And that exposed me a lot more to what lawyers do. I did clerk, which gave me a very good bird's eye view. But my real focus is trying to improve public policy.

Andrea Roth 1:37 And I would say my focus is, you know, I was a public defender for many years before going into academia. I'm not a practicing attorney with clients anymore. But I'm hoping to improve outcomes in the criminal system, especially as technology changes it every day. And so to answer your question directly, what do I do all day. And it's not just teaching, but it's consulting with lawyers on the ground and learning what's going on on the ground in real courtrooms. It's doing research, including historical research on how technological advances have been dealt with in the past by the legal system and learning from the lessons of the past. It's service, I serve on a legal task group of the National Institute of Standards and Technologies, organization of scientific area committees. So I actually work with scientists on the ground, to think of legal issues that are going to come up and how labs should be doing forensic work on the front end. Then everything in between. Service for the University Press inquiries, mentoring students who are interested in this work. It turns out to be a lot more than just prepping for class.

Wayne Stacy 2:50 The reason I was excited to have the two of you is because your careers to the academic or your past the academic world are very different. You know, Peter was dedicated to that path from day one. And Andrea, you went through a career and then came to the academic world. And both of them have been very, very successful. So I guess I would start that discussion for people that are thinking they might want to be a professor, or move into the academic world, is one path better than the other?

Peter Menell 3:21 I will say that, although I would have answered the question, what do you want to be doing 30 years later, when I was in law school to say that I would be sitting here at a university doing the kind o