Clinical Law Professor

Clinical law professors run law school clinics where students represent real clients under faculty supervision—the educational equivalent of a teaching hospital. You're managing active casework while also supervising students, teaching legal skills, and often handling the administrative complexity of running a functioning legal practice within an academic institution.

The dual obligation to clients and to students creates genuine tension. Clients need competent representation; students need learning opportunities that sometimes involve supervised mistakes. Calibrating when to step in and when to let a student navigate is a constant judgment call that experienced clinical faculty develop over years.

People who tend to thrive have deep commitment to experiential legal education and genuine satisfaction in developing new lawyers. If you're a practicing attorney who finds mentorship as rewarding as litigation or counseling, and if you care about the specific populations your clinic serves—immigrants, prisoners, small businesses, environmental justice communities—clinical teaching tends to be an unusually rich integration of practice and education. The academic service component (committees, scholarship expectations) varies by institution.