Episode 25: Lyrissa Lidsky
Dean of the University of Missouri School of Law
00:55:46
Subscribe and listen on…
Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | Google Podcasts | Amazon Music | PocketCasts | iHeartRadio | Player.FM Podcasts
Watch Full Interview
Show Notes
Host M.C. Sungaila sits down with Lyrissa Lidsky, Dean of the University of Missouri School of Law. Lyrissa discusses her passion for teaching and her career journey from a small town in Texas to leading a major law school. Listen as she shares the challenges and rewards her academic career has brought her -- and how surviving breast cancer while serving as Dean impacted her, her family, and her academic community.
This episode is powered by Clearbrief, Trellis, BriefCatch, and CSBA .
Lyrissa Lidsky
Lyrissa Lidsky is Dean of the University of Missouri School of Law and Judge C.A. Leedy Professor of Law, and the focus of her research and teaching is the intersection of Tort Law and the First Amendment, with an emphasis on free speech issues in social media. Missouri Lawyers Media named Lidsky its 2020 Woman of the Year based on her scholarship, passion for law, mentorship of students, and engagement of constituencies supporting the school of law.
Before becoming dean, Lidsky served in a variety of leadership roles at the University of Florida. There she was associate dean for graduate and international programs and associate dean for faculty development. She also held the Stephen C. O’Connell Chair in Law and received a number of teaching awards during her 23-year tenure at UF, including student-selected awards such as Teacher of the Year (twice) and Faculty Graduation Speaker (three times), as well as Teacher of the Year, which was selected by a faculty committee.
A prominent Media Law scholar, she is co-reporter on the Restatement of Defamation and Privacy, co-author of a leading Media Law casebook, a First Amendment casebook, and a reference book on press freedom and has published dozens of articles, culminating in her recent article in California Law Review titled Considering the Context of Online Threats. Her work on anonymous speech has been cited by a number of state supreme courts and the highest courts of Canada and Hong Kong.
Before becoming a law professor, Lidsky served as a clerk for the Honorable Joseph T. Sneed of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco, Calif. Lidsky received her law degree from the University of Texas School of Law with high honors. She was initiated into Order of the Coif in recognition of her scholastic achievement and served as articles editor of the Texas Law Review. Before law school, she was a Fulbright Scholar at Cambridge University in England, studying medieval legal history and early development of the Common Law. She received her bachelor’s degree, summa cum laude, in English and political science from Texas A&M University.
Transcript
I am pleased to welcome our first academic guest and a distinguished one at that, the Dean of the University of Missouri, Lyrissa Lidsky. Welcome.
Thank you for having me.
We go pretty far back in terms of clerking on the Ninth Circuit together. I have been so pleased to see where you have gone and what influence you have had in First Amendment Law and Defamation Law. I am also pleased to see the care that you have brought to your role as dean in law school as well, and training and raising the next generation of lawyers. You mentioned how many of your students have blossomed. You are able to see that, and it is rewarding to see them in positions of influence within the legal profession. It is always good to see them grow.
It truly is the greatest joy of my career to see my students finding what they were meant to do in their lives. I had this proud moment where the ABA Journal comes. I look on the cover and it is an issue about the newest breed of prosecutors. There is a student from my first class ever, Melissa Williamson Nelson, over in Jacksonville. She is the elected state attorney in Jacksonville. I remember her on her first day of Law school, and there is no joy like that.
I feel in some ways that is how the judges that we worked for must feel. At a certain point, there is the whole law clerk family. Seeing everyone reach their potential and exceed at times is gratifying to have been part of that in the beginning.
It is. I was in a room simultaneously with my mentor from the University of Texas who got me into Law teaching and is a media lawyer. I was on her dissertation committee when she got her PhD in Journalism. I said to the audience, "There are three generations of Media lawyers here. I do not know if you all appreciate what a joy this is to have three generations of Media lawyers." It was pretty fantastic.
Each plays a role for the other in providing opportunities and education for them to be where they are. It is not happenstance, but there are three generations of Media lawyers. It is rare to come out of the clerkship and into teaching almost immediately. People tend to come to that over time. Although some of the clerks for one of the judges I worked for, Judge Dorothy Nelson, go into teaching. They are interested in it before they come to the clerkship because she was an eminent academic and dean. You knew you wanted to go into Law teaching early. What made you consider going into law at all, or becoming a lawyer to begin with?
I am from nowhere. I am basically from an oil field town in West Texas, which is 100 miles from a town of 100,000. It is 100 miles from Midland, Texas, so it is remote. My parents were teachers there and I had both of my parents as teachers multiple times because it is that small of a school. For whatever reason, I decided that I wanted the town to have a debate team. I do not know if it was a television program or a book, or I do not remember what the inspiration was. My mother had to be the coach in order to start the debate team. I recruited my best friend. They sent us to a camp. We were between eighth grade and freshman year at the University of Texas to learn how to do debate.
That was it. That meant I had to be a lawyer. I always loved the public speaking part. In Future Farmers of America Agriculture, there are all these public speaking contests. I did all of those. I loved the debate. I thought, "What can you do with that?" I did not know a lawyer. There were no lawyers in my town at all. There was only one doctor. My best friend was the doctor's daughter and she was my debate partner. That was it. I was hooked after that.
I did not know I wanted to be an academic until after I went to college and was captivated by my teachers. I loved what they did. I loved how they opened my eyes to new ideas and worlds. I was lucky enough. I got a scholarship between undergrad at Texas A&M University and Law School to do a Fulbright at Cambridge University in England. What I was going to study was the Origins of Medieval History, Anglo-Saxon Legal History, pretty obscure.
I thought about becoming a medievalist because I loved it so much, but I was already on the track to go to law school. The dean of the University of Texas had met and recruited me. There were full scholarships to Law school. I knew my passion was academia. It was research and teaching. It is my whole family business. Both my parents are teachers. My brother, my sister, and my nephews are teachers. It is what we do. We teach people.
Besides the debate experience and the experience in college with your teachers, you have had some early experience with your family and with your parents.
I had the strangest experience with my son when he was in preschool. He was about 4 years old, maybe 5. From the earliest age, he loves what he loves. When he loves something, he wants everybody to know about it. He loved sharks and History. His teachers at school called him "The Little Professor," because he wanted to convert everybody to love of sharks and love of History. It brought back this memory that I did not even know was there. I was the same way at his age. I would read about something and be captivated by it. I wanted to convert everybody to love it the same way I did. I still feel that way.
That is part of the joy of what you are doing. You have a passion for what it is that you are teaching and the teaching process. How did you end up focusing on your interest in Media Law then? Was that with a particular teacher in law school or before that?
It was. I was an English major. I have always been interested by authorship, what authors do, and how they get into the business of writing. That has always been a fascinating thing for me. A lot of people come into Media Law from a Journalism background, but I did not come from that angle. I love journalism. Freedom of the press is important. I came from a love of words printed on paper. My professor was the most motivational person in the world. At every turn in my career path, he has been there for me. We become co-authors on various books and he changed my life.
I do not think many people can say that they have one professor that was pivotal both in terms of opening up your mind to something, but also the subject area being the area that you end up focusing on in so many different ways.
Somebody opens your mind to the joy of their subject and it is almost like a religious conversion. You come to love it. Oftentimes, you are so influenced. Their intellectual influence is so powerful. From the beginning of your career, you are in lockstep with that. The day you break away from that, and you have ideas that diverge from that, it can be scary at first. It is like, "I do not think David would agree with me on this. I must be wrong." You develop the courage to say, "I am all right."
You have your own opinions, views, and theories about the law. You can't have that without the foundations first. In terms of writing or any art, you can only break the rules once you know the rules well. You can go out and do different things. I think about Picasso in that way and his art. He could do traditional. Every once in a while, he would go back to a traditional drawing to show he could. He chose to do something else because he knew those fundamentals, and how to work with them in new ways and new creativity. It sounds like the same thing academically.
I love writing, too. That is a common thing. Among a lot of lawyers is the love of the writing process. As an English major, I always thought in my part of heart I might be a novelist one day. Maybe I still will. Who knows?
It is the greatest joy of one’s career to see people finding what they were meant to do in their lives.
There are a lot of us who have that thought. In fact, that was one of the first things I wanted to do. I wanted to be a poet when I was quite young, then I realized that probably would be tough existence. I should think about something else. Being an appellate lawyer, that is essentially what I do, but to persuade.
I write for a living also but largely to inform, sometimes to persuade.
I do not know that people think of it that way. Different kinds of laws are different in that regard. Many trial lawyers are like, "I do not like the writing part, but I love the speaking part. I love working with juries, witnesses, and things like that." I do not enjoy that as much. I like the writing part. There are so many different things you can do with legal training. The jobs are so different depending on what exactly you are doing. The academics and appellate are both generally a lot more writing and sharing your ideas through writing.
The thing I love about mine is you get the best of all the possible worlds because you do have the speaking and the performance in class. You have the writing and the introverted contemplation, but you have the extroverted mentoring. I have the best of all possible jobs. As a dean, I get to go and learn from people from every corner of the legal profession. That has been fascinating. I have learned so much by the people I encounter.
I want to talk about the difference. People think, "Being a dean, how is that compared to being a Law professor?" You are still teaching as well, but what does that involve? Obviously, there are leadership and administrative responsibilities. There are also fundraising responsibilities for the school. You wear many hats. Can you describe what you do as dean in addition to teaching?
I never thought I would be a dean because I love being a professor so much. One day, a student came to me and said, "You like to make a difference for students. Do not you think you could maybe make more difference as a dean than even you make as a professor?" I thought, "Yes." I had done some administrative work as an associate dean, and that was fun. I got the joy of working on teams. I never did that as a professor. Professors do not normally work on teams much. Working on a good team towards a common goal and feeling like the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
I thought that is pretty great. I was intimidated because I was worried about the fundraising, which is crucial to a successful Law school, private or public. The philanthropy of donors supporting their schools is utterly crucial because even in state institutions, states do not fund the way they used to. The state's funding has plummeted. We are utterly dependent on the generosity of our donors.
I could not sell girl scout cookies when I was a kid. I was too sheepish to ask people for money for the girl scout cookies. I thought, "How could I possibly be a fundraiser?" It is fun. I love it. It is a kick. Here is the reason. First off, you do not go in asking for money. You go in getting to know people. I love people. I like learning about them and what they do. That is fun.
They do not take your meeting unless they want to help you in some way. You want to help students so you are not selling something for yourself. You are doing it for students. It is finding the Venn diagram where your needs and their interest meet. There is a metric if you are succeeding or not. In a lot of academic jobs, you do not have a great metric to know if you are doing what you are supposed to be doing.
You are like, "I published X number of articles or books this year. My students seem to be comprehending what I am teaching them." Other than that, there are not a lot of objective metrics.
It is all fuzzy. There is an objective metric. Do you get the money or do not get the money and how much? I have doubled the annual aggregate fundraising at my institution. We have got a higher percentage of people giving. It is because we get out there, I have an image on a team. I have a fun team and we go out. We like people. It is a huge kick. I have met so many fascinating people as a result.
That is a good attitude to have. It is the same situation with developing business as a law firm partner or working on nonprofit boards. You are donating, but you are also getting additional funding for the charity. It is your attitude towards what you are doing. I am interested first in learning about people and what their interests are. You said an important thing. They would not be in the room if they were not willing to help me in some way and figure out what that is.
Sometimes, the challenge is to ask. If you ask for something too specific, then sometimes, you shoot too low than what somebody is interested in doing. You do not want to throw someone off. We did not have that in mind but then you do not want to ask too low. You are like, "There could have been something much more innovative that we could have done. I asked for something maybe a little more pedestrian.” That is an art.
That is part of why you do not ask too soon. I have learned a lot about it. I have the greatest teacher. My chief fundraiser and I have a lot of fun together. He has been a good teacher. You want to get the ask at the right place. That is listening to them and finding out what motivates them, what they are thinking of, and shaping it in those realms. It is also being creative in problem-solving.
Maybe there is something neither of you ever thought of that could be transformative. It is a weird business. Whether it is business development or it is in a sense transactional, you are most successful, the more authentic it is. When I go out, these are real relationships. I care about the people deeply. I do not think I would be able to do it if it felt like I am using people. It is transactional.
It is important that people can have an attachment to an institution, but an institution is not a person. Having that personal relationship can be the bridge between someone deciding, "I would like to support that." They would like also to support you. You have passion for what you are doing and what is happening at the school.
The other thing I have learned in the job is that a good lawyering skill across the board is being a better storyteller. What mostly motivates people is students' stories. The thing I raise money for the most easily is our veterans' clinic. They are incredible stories about people going from being homeless to having homes and being able to adopt grandchildren, and having college benefits. That is all done through the work of our students. There are stories about how the students' lives are transformed in the process. I have grown a lot as a lawyer through the process of being the representative for those stories.
That is a good point. When you are thinking about how to present the more individual discrete stories, people relate to those more. They want to relate to a person. An institution's a little too much. A specific success story or something that the clinic has done is going to be more approachable even than saying, "We have helped how many hundreds of people." It makes them much more tangible. Think of it as storytelling. That is what we do as lawyers in so many different ways.
People are motivated by giving scholarships. A person who was a scholarship student could not have made it without scholarships all the way through. I am passionate about telling how each individual student's life is changed by not coming out with debt. They can take a public service job. They can do what they are meant to do. The other thing is you have to get on the ground and know the students and all the stories to tell the stories.
It is different when you know that as opposed to when somebody gave you some talking points and said, this and this. You are going to be way more authentic in presenting it because you have seen the impact directly.
It is one piece of being a dean. It turns out I am scared of that piece the most. It is the most fun in a lot of ways. The other part of the job is taking care of people. I am responsible for everybody in the building. If you are responsible for a lot of people, people are going through some hard times. We have been through some hard stuff. It is bringing people together to know that you have a shared purpose, shared mission, and thinking about the human element. We have had students go through tragic things. We have had staff. We have had faculty go through tragic things, being there as an institution as much as you can be to help people through those things.
You have much more loyalty when you do that to help people as human beings, to recognize them like that, and to support them and the challenges that they might have to the extent you can. It is always nice to know that an institution relates to you as a person and as a human being, and supports you in tough times.
The whole country has been through tough times in the last few years. It has been interesting being a leader through the pandemic and trying to help people get through that and get yourself through it. It is hard to be a leader.
It is hard enough. Some of the toughest parts of leadership remained and the fun parts went away during COVID. Everybody has their own personal response to the situation during the pandemic. You have so many layers of things going on at once that is not what you would have anticipated having to deal with. I can't imagine, especially with having to move so quickly with the students to remote learning and all of this stuff. Everything is changing for everyone all at the same time. There are added stresses on everyone, including you, and whole unprecedented ways of doing things.
The other thing is, depending on where you live, your experience of the pandemic was entirely different. I am a dean in a red state and we stopped wearing mask a good amount of time back. My sister lives in Maryland. It is an entirely different experience than it has been here in Missouri and there in California.
Finishing through spring, most of the law schools out here are still remote. Maybe some are on campus, but finishing up remotely. It is a different circumstance.
Watching the suffering of the students through the anxiety, social isolation, technology discrepancies between the students, and the loneliness, it has been helpful to me that my oldest son is the age of most of our law students now. Simultaneously seeing it from the lens of a parent and as a leader responsible for students' well-being has been helpful to me.
You can have more empathy and understanding. People are not going to want to share some of the details of their challenges, but when you see them, you can anticipate some of their needs even if they do not voice them. You have to be able to have empathy in some way in seeing those circumstances. You can say, "My students might be experiencing this, too."
I do not think we have seen all the fallout from the mental health components of the pandemic yet. Hopefully, we can all be compassionate. The legal profession is working on some of these issues now. They are not fast enough in my opinion, but we are also working on them in Law schools, probably not fast enough also.
The lingering impact is true, especially on younger people. You see the studies and it is a little bit scary. It makes you want to think pretty quickly about what can he do to get these people back up and engaged.
There are the suicide rates and the drug overdose rates. Unfortunately, we have lost a child in my family. He is my nephew. I will never know the full story, but I do suspect the pandemic had a dramatic role. I do not know for sure.
In terms of those who have medical issues, people were not going for preventive care during that timeframe. You went when you had to for something immediate. There is an impact of that, too, right?
I am a breast cancer survivor. I was diagnosed in 2019 and had treatment the year before the pandemic started. It was so hard and stressful to go through. I can't imagine what people go undergoing chemo and radiation during the pandemic went through, the fear that if you got COVID that you might die. I was immunocompromised for a year. It was terrible going through it without the pandemic.
You have been open about that journey, the ups and downs, and the support that you have had from your law school community. On Twitter, you would comment on it as well. How did you decide to be open about that and share that? Did you think there was some value to that to others as well as to yourself?
Partly, it is my temperament. It is what I am like. I did think there was value because I found my breast cancer through a self-exam. I thought if I tell people, maybe somebody out there is going to do a self-exam that was not thinking at it. Maybe they'll go get their mammogram. Maybe their life will be saved, too. This is something positive. I can use my public position to maybe foster. I was bald. If you do not think your hair is part of your identity, you are fooling yourself. I never thought I was that vain or anything, but your hair is part of your identity.
It’s fun to be working on a good team towards a common goal and feeling like the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
People respond to you. People have this fear of cancer. There is this stigma about cancer. We still have this automatic death sentence type image of cancer. I remember my grandparents used to spell it around the children. They could not say the word out loud. I would like to dispel some of that because a lot of us are going to go through it. Everybody has a story about cancer in their family. We need to open up and tell those and make it better for all of us going through. It is part and parcel of who I am. I taught through it, and that saved my life. It was my form of denial. I thought, "As long as I can keep teaching my class, I am going to live.”
You got to use what you got to keep going in that situation and other ones. People are different in that way, but I am the same in that. When there are other challenges going on, it is almost like the law practice and the work you know that you are good at and that you enjoy. For that moment, I am able to focus on that and not think about and not be the cancer patient. Despite all the other stuff and entropy that is going on in the other parts of my life, this core is still there. It is almost a centering place to go to.
For three hours a week, while I was teaching First Amendment Law, I did not have cancer. You can feel terrible walking in, but somehow you bring it every time. For that hour, you do not have cancer.
People are different, but I am of the same persuasion. I am like, "Let's do this." You are going back to what you love, and what you are good at.
That is affirming for all of us.
People see that. There is an educational part to having people be a little more open themselves about it and see that it is possible to carry on also for yourself. You do so many different things. I do know of your work in your Amicus and in litigation. You share your knowledge in First Amendment Law with the courts, so that they have a good framework of some new ideas and new areas. You also have an important role as a reporter on the AOI restatement as well. Can you talk about how those things relate to the teaching or some adjunct to what you do as a professor?
Some of my work is pretty theoretical and not as practical, but I have always wanted a practical bent. One of the greatest joys is when my work gets cited by courts. I might have made a difference in helping somebody understand something new, novel, or technical in a way that they might not otherwise. Being appointed to the restatement of defamation and privacy is one of the highlights of my career. I get to work with one of my scholarly heroes, the Dean Emeritus of Yale, Robert Post.
Not only that, I get to follow in the footsteps of one of my true scholarly heroes, the great William Prosser, who was the Leader of the Last Restatement of Torts. When I started teaching in 1995, I used to sleep with Prosser's Hornbook by my bedside. I would wake up at 3:00 in the morning and say, "What if the students ask me this?" I would turn to my Prosser Hornbook and try to memorize whatever Prosser said on that subject in Torts. To be following in Prosser's footsteps is a real joy.
We have a team of research assistants. You get to learn about what is going on in all 50 states on every little aspect of defamation, and then try to do the best account of what the law is for the guidance of lawyers, judges, and students. My ideal audience is some judge's law clerk that does not know much about defamation and needs a little help. That is who I am thinking of when I am writing.
That is another pragmatic approach to what you are doing with the restatement. There is clearly high level of academic knowledge as well. Who is using this? Who is this for? That might get lost with some law professors. This is a much more academic approach that is not like, "Who is going to pick this up first and use it as a compass as a way to orient themselves?" Practicing lawyers do. Judges and law clerks do.
There is always that continual debate of, "Where is the line between the restatement, restating the law as it is, and pushing the law forward?" There are unclear areas of the law, but you have to take some view on those if you are doing the restatement and recognize that difference and maybe provide some view of where it might go and make sense to go. There are others that say, "You can't push too far in that." There is always that tension and a challenge with being a reporter for a restatement because there is always that debate.
I always used to be the person that said, "It is the job of the restatement to restate." I find now that I am a reporter, in defamation line, in particular, there are aspects that people have been complaining about. I have an esteem blue-ribbon panel in England at the beginning of the 19th Century who said, "The distinction between libel and slander has never made any sense. It is a holdover from when defamation started in the ecclesiastical courts and it was a sin. It should be abolished."
Yet because of the pull of precedent, that is never happening even after we underwent the internet revolution. There is the question that it does not match the majority rule even though a lot of people express dissatisfaction with it. They are like, "We have got hundreds of years of precedent. What do we do? Can the restatement abolish the distinction between libel and slander and have a unified board of defamation?" We will see. We are going to try.
It is not as black and white as people think in that regard. As you peel the onion back, you find a lot more things like that. I feel the same way even in advocating in an appellate case where sometimes, later courts will reiterate things that an earlier court said. When you go back and look at it over time, let's start from the beginning and go all the way down. How did this law develop?
You see that decision was deciding X or it was based on particular facts. Since then, courts have created their own aura around that decision which it never was. We need to start from that, recognize that, and go, "What everybody is saying about that decision is not what that decision says. We need to maybe take a different look at it."
That is exactly right except, in this case, you are peeling back the onion to one turn in the 17th Century. Everybody is called the wrong turn in the 17th Century that may not have even been what the court meant.
Everything is built on that over time and it makes it hard to say, "We are not going to make that distinction anymore because everything hinges on that distinction."
It has been an education for me. You have been in the business a long time and you think you know things but one thing I love about law is there is always more to learn. There is always growth as a lawyer, as a speaker, and as a scholar that you can have in this field.
You should always try to do that. If you are not growing or you are not challenged, that is a sign to go get challenged. You are like, "This is too easy. I need to do something else." It caused me to grow in different ways.
That has an effect on how you counsel people coming into the profession, too. I have developed a lot of humility that when somebody comes to me for advice about what they should do, I do not answer. I help them ask questions so they can discover for themselves what they should do.
That is a hard thing to do. It is important because sometimes when you hear yourself say things, that is when you have an epiphany and realize things. The big firms come on campus. There are things that are easy to do or to fall into, but then there are a bunch of other things you can do with a law degree, including teaching. It is not emphasized in the same way.
You are not channeled in those ways. Law schools do a better job than they did when we were in school in showing students more of a breadth of practice. Even so, I do think we say there is big law and then there are government jobs and this whole field in between that we do not give enough emphasis. One thing I have learned as an administrator is about in-house council roles that are fascinating. I did not know anything about them for the first 30 years I was a lawyer, but now I do. They are interesting jobs.
They have evolved over time, too, in terms of what is involved in those roles.
The statistics show there is a lot of growth of that, too. You are right. The role of the in-house council has changed.
In many cases, much more of an equivalent member of the C-Suite at the CLO level still in some cases treated a little bit differently, but much more involved in the strategic business decision-making with the lens of the law. It is an interesting, more pragmatic application of legal practice and then leading teams of outside council. Inside council and then everybody else internally. It is different even from law firms. Even within law firms, it is rare where you are managing so many in the law firm. It is your practice group or a smaller group of people.
There is a lot of autonomy in a different way than there is in an in-house department or in a company. It is interesting. That is why I have interviewed general counsel and chief legal officers as well because it is an interesting route. In a long route internally, people often zigzag between different companies and have different levels of associate general counsel, deputy, and then to become general counsel than in the C-Suite is a whole other category of work. I wanted to ask one question in terms of your students. What do you tell them about teaching? If they are interested in maybe considering going into law teaching at some point, what advice do you give to them? We both loved our clerkships. Do you recommend that for teaching or for even any practice?
We do a lot of recommending of clerkships, particularly if the person wants to go into academia. If they want to do any law, the exposure you get to all kinds of lawyering, all kinds of matters, and the mentoring are so incredibly valuable. We do a lot of counseling students into clerkships. If the person wants to go into academia, I talk about the importance of publishing early and often, how you do that, and how it is not rocket science.
I have one of my mentees that I took to conferences with me. I made her a co-author on pieces, took her to conferences, and got her networked because I did not understand. Nobody told me that being networked in the scholarly community was important. How was I to know? That is an advantage that people have if they go to say Yale because the whole place is set up to make you an academic. If you go to other schools, it is not like that. Unless you happen to get the right mentor with the right advice, you do not know any of this.
This is twenty years' worth of knowledge. I can now tell somebody that I learned everything the hard way but they do not have to. It is much more common for somebody to do a visiting professorship aimed at preparing you for academia. Lots of different places have those. They are called VAP, Visiting Assistant Professor. The idea is you go and teach there for two years. They mentor you and then you go on the market from that position into a tenure track legal academic position.
I had seen those. I did not know what those were.
That is what they are. They are an apprenticeship for becoming a law professor. We had one here. I am proud of our VAP. I ended up on the tenure track at Buffalo and doing great work. It makes you feel good. You have contributed to somebody's career. Nobody told me it was important to go give papers at conferences. I was like, "They can read my paper," but they won't. When you tell it, they will know it is out there and when they need it, they will go seek it out and then they will cite you.
I have the same perspective for newer lawyers and in practice. People need to get to know you. It is variations of that. Different ways of establishing thought leadership or at least having an interest outside of your particular real because you need other people to know you. Whether it is co-authoring shorter articles or speaking on things a little bit later, going to conferences and meetings where you can see people, all of that is part of the process that should start early because it takes a while for it to take hold.
Did you have somebody that walked you through some of that? In the early days, I did not. I figured it out the hard way.
You and I are intellectually curious so we like to do that. It is like, "I have thought about this. Let's publish this article." You naturally go that way. I did not know anything about that. Having learned the hard way, I want to make sure that people recognize that earlier so they do not have to do it.
I have known you since you first entered the legal profession. One thing I always admired about you even early is you were community-minded and involved in community organizations even right out of law school.
That is another thing that I say to people, too. You want to meet different people, other lawyers, non-lawyers, whatever. It is having an interest in serving in some way that you are passionate about, not that you think you should, but that you want to do.
In law, there's always more to learn.
One of the secrets to professional happiness is it is so easy to have all your friends be in your workplace, but you are going to be happier if you have friends that are not work friends. You can have both, but you need some friends who do not care about your title and any of that stuff. They just like you for you.
It is also different parts of you that are not all tied to that one location. You learn so many different skills from doing that. You have to stretch yourself in different ways. You can also see the value in the way of thinking that you learn in law school. You get broken down and reformed analytically during law school and you realize we look at problems differently. We break them down. We analyze challenges differently.
Even when you are on a board with many business people or whatever, you realize we do look at things differently. We think about them differently, break them down into their component parts, attack each one of those, and figure out how to address a problem. You realize you bring that thinking process to the board and you are like, "I am bringing something helpful to this."
In academia, it is the same way. I constantly am surrounded by people from every discipline. A lot of times in the room, they do look to you and they are expecting the lawyer analytical perspective on the problem. That is something valuable that you can always bring to the table after you have been through law school.
It gives you some sense of, "My training is valuable in different ways."
You have to also know when to set that aside and not pull out your lawyer part.
They are like, "You are being too much like the lawyer." You need to be that on the down-low on that a little bit sometimes. I wanted to conclude with a few lightning-round questions if you are open to it. Which talent would you most like to have, but don’t?
I would like to be able to dance.
What is the trait you most deplore in yourself and then what is the trait you most deplore in others?
I have learned to accept it. I do not know if I deplore it. I am not the world's most organized person. I wish I were better. One of the things I have learned in life is all of your weaknesses are also the source of your greatest strengths and vice versa. Anything that is your strength is also your weakness. My lack of organization makes me open to new experiences and open to new people. I love novelty. I deplore getting in my head and being insecure still at this age. I try not to do that.
It happens.
It does. We are all human.
That is being human and having some sense of humility.
I will tell you what I deplore in other people. As a flawed human, oftentimes, I am pretty forgiving of lots of different things. I do not forgive if people are not good to students. I do not like that. If people are being abusive towards students, I am not down with that. I do not like people abusing positions of authority because we are so lucky. It is a miracle I am here, but I feel fortunate every day. If you are taking that gift that you have been given and then abusing it, I deplore that.
When you say being good to students, what does that look like to you?
One is trying to stay in touch with the emotional aspects of going to law school. I do not believe in demeaning students. Sometimes, it comes from people forgetting how hard it is, and what we are asking them to do because we have been doing it for so long. We forget that it is hard. I am more forgiving if it comes out of that, but belittling, demeaning, or not having time for the mentoring that we, as professors, have been entrusted to do for students.
Your position is much more than coming to class, delivering lectures, going off, being accessible to the students, and helping them individually achieve what they are capable of achieving.
In these jobs, you can transform somebody's life and you can do it for the better or for the worse. The people that are not cognizant of the power they have and are potentially changing lives for the worst bother me a lot.
You had a positive transformative experience. That is an inspiring thing to have in yourself because you know what that felt like and what a difference it made to your life. Being able to be that, even in a small way for others, is a way of paying that back.
I can't pay back all that I have been given, so I have to pay it forward. It is the only way.
I am going to ask who are your favorite writers. I also wonder if there are favorite professors or other academics that you enjoy their work.
I love Jane Austen. I always joke to all my classes that you can't be a lawyer unless you read Jane Austen because the understanding of human nature and human dynamics and developing in understanding people is so profound from reading Jane Austin. I often reread Jane Austin probably once every other year. I make it through the whole cycle every two years or so. I love lots of other writers. I was an English major, so I love medieval literature. I love it all. I will read anything. I will read a trashy vampire novel and all of the classics. You name it, I will read it.
Do you still read all of those regularly despite having to do a bunch of other academic readings?
I can't sleep without reading. I read every night. I will not sleep unless I read for at least an hour every day and do not work reading. The harder my work reading is during the day, the more likely I am to read a trashy vampire novel. In terms of judicial writing, I am a huge fan of Learned Hand and Prosser. Prosser had a way of turning a phrase. I can still quote pieces of Prosser's treated. The reason it had enduring value is because he knew how to turn a memorable phrase.
Richard Posner is a memorable judicial writer, but I can't stand some of his writing because it is so disrespectful to the litigants. He is there using their life problem as an intellectual exercise to say something he wants to say and I can't stand it. It drives me crazy. A judge should always be sensitive to the fact that this is somebody's life. It could have been a catastrophic event in their life and making light of it for intellectual purposes seems wrong to me.
I love reading my co-reporter on the restatement, Robert Post. His writing partly inspired me to go into academia because it combined law and other subjects. David Anderson has a totally different style, but I could spot it anywhere. He came out of journalism. He is clear and powerful in his sentences. I can spot certain academic style and try to emulate some of them myself.
On the Supreme Court, I enjoy Justice Kagan's writing and Justice Gorsuch's writing as well. They both have distinct styles, but there is clarity to Justice Kagan's writing. I am thinking of that because an opinion she wrote on a Holocaust art recovery case that I had worked on several years ago came out. I thought how crisp her writing was while also acknowledging the parties to the case.
We are dealing with this one, discreet simple, legal issue on a choice of law. We understand that the overall litigation has been going on for decades. It is truly vexing and still does not have an answer. We can't solve everyone's problems in this one certain petition and then clearly stating what the rule is for the future.
I have met Kagan personally in academic settings before she became Justice Kagan. It strikes me that she has one of the qualities that I find best in good academics. A good academic convinces other people they are the smartest person in the room, not them, but the audience. My role as a teacher is not to convince you I am the smartest person in the room. My role as a teacher is to convince you that you are the smartest person in the room. I see that in Kagan. That is a product of her teaching style.
That is an interesting way of thinking about it because you do feel, "I got that." Even if it is complex when you are reading the opinion, you are like, "I am on it. I am capturing this complex concept." It is because of how she has laid it out.
That is what I strive for in my writing as well. You can write things in a way that people are like, "She must be smart. She used certain words. She clearly has read all this philosophy." The point is to take something complex and make it where any educated reader can feel they understand it. That is the essence of great legal writing. That is what Kagan does.
That is the commonality with Justice Gorsuch, too. He comes from the perspective of, "I want people who are not lawyers to understand what we are saying and to break it down, it might be a little folksier than justice Kagan would do, but it is the same concept. They are both trying to achieve the same thing. Some judges have mentioned that the public is not going to read the entire decision that we are writing, especially at the Supreme Court level.
Only parts of it are going to get snippets out and put in news articles or things like that. We need to both write in a way that we know in that summary section, that we are going to get clear on what it is that we are saying. That is where the journalists are going to take from and put into their article. That may be the only thing that the language of the opinion that non-lawyers see.
It is hard to write for an audience that is fast and that complex in its needs and abilities. When I think about what the justices have to do, it is a hard job.
To get it to that point, there were a lot of drafts. As an appellate brief writer, sometimes we get that too. People go, "We could do that." Other lawyers are like, "We could write that brief which seems so clear. It should turn out this way." That was twenty brief drafts ago that we started.
That is the mark that you have succeeded. People think that they could do that because it is so clear that anyone can understand it.
You can transform somebody's life, and you can do it for the better or for the worse. Those who are not cognizant of that power are potentially changing lives for the worse.
They are like, "We could do that." I am like, "I want to see you try that. Let's see if it works out that way when you do it."
That is the same thing. Being a good teacher, you make it seem obvious.
You are leading people to that obvious point and it takes some thinking ahead for sure. You have to know it so well that you are able to boil it down to that.
To put in just the right amount, but not too much.
People can extrapolate for themselves, but also you have to know where it is going in order to give the key ones that people need to move to the next.
That is why I love what we do.
The law is awesome. As appellate layers and as academics, there is that pure love of the law itself that is common.
You care that it makes sense. You care to get it right.
You have compassion for those who are involved, especially when you are advocating and on the bench, too. Who is your hero in real life?
One of my heroes is the first woman Supreme Court of Missouri, Ann Covington because she is so incredible. What she had to overcome to get to that position was so incredible. She is yet the most modest person. Talk about a writer's writer, she cares about every sentence. We talk about writing. We talk about books. She has been so good to me since I became a dean here.
She helped advise me through difficult things that I would not have gotten through without having somebody who has been there. She can protect my confidence when I needed an ear to listen. She is one. I got lots of heroes. David Anderson, my mentor, has helped me at every stage of my career. Who knew that when I walked into law school that this man who taught me on my first day of Torts, we would be this close many years later?
That is amazing and unusual. It is good for you to recognize how sometimes people will come in to help at different points in your career or might be pivotal at one point. To have that over time, there is a special richness to that.
There is another professor that has been there at almost every turn. We do not have the subject matter of bonding, although I teach Professional Responsibility and he does, too. John Dzienkowski at the University of Texas has been so good to me at every turn. I can't pay them back, but I have students for that I have been there at every step in their careers.
You learned how to be from them, how to be helpful, and how to be there for people. That is an important lesson. For what in life do you feel most grateful?
So much. It is people. One of the things I have learned going through cancer is that there is nothing more important than relationships with the people that love and care about you. You can't invest enough in those. At the end of the day, that is what matters. Cancer changed me for the better. I am a workaholic. I am not exceptional in that in terms of your interviewees. It showed me that at the end of the day, being close with those who love you, there is nothing more important. Being there when they need you, there is nothing more important. I am grateful every day to get to do what I love. I have been so lucky. It was so unlikely that I would be here.
It is so challenging. I do not know if people realize how hard it is or how few positions there are in law teaching. You have to be able to move at various all around the country for different positions. You have to have a family who is willing to go along with that. There are still so few deans who happen to be women in law school.
My husband has made serious career sacrifices to support my career. He does not get much credit for that. He does not get the accolades. If he had not done that, I could not have done the things I have done. Some people have this real ideology behind it. That is not his orientation. He has done it. He loves his family. He has made sacrifices for the good of our family.
He wants to see you thrive and be happy and he sees what does that.
There is a generational shift where it was more common for the woman to be the primary breadwinner. It is more common in people younger than I am but we are on the cusp of that. It is hard. There is still a stigma in some circles with regard to, "Your wife makes more than you."
Given the choice of anyone in the world, who would you invite to a dinner party?
I would love to invite Jane Austen. Some of the jurists in the past would be fascinating. Oliver Wendell Holmes as a First Amendment thinker and skeptic. I like that. He has opinions that are troubling like Buck v. Bell. The man fought in the Civil War. I would love to talk to him. I would love to talk to Louis Brandeis. Talk about a fascinating figure. I would love to have the two of them at the same time. They ended up dissenting in all these pivotal cases that became the foundation for Modern First Amendment Law, yet they are not the same at all in their outlook or orientation. I would love to get them together and see how they bonded over that.
That is why I say sometimes it is the combination of people that would make interesting discussion and even their own discussions with each other about that.
Maybe throw in the Harvard academic, Zechariah Chafee, who had some influence on both of them. That could be a majorly nerdy First Amendment dinner party.
You are the first person to have that. "I would like to have the different judges discuss their decisions." That is why you are an academic, Lyrissa.
I have studied its intellectual history of it. I would to see if the intellectual historians are right about how those ideas developed.
People have their theories, but how did this happen? If we created some story about this, that did not exist. Who knows? My last question is what is your motto if you have one?
I have a lot of little mantras that get me through it. I would not say they are mottos. I used to have writer's blog when I started in academia. I say to myself, "Words on paper." Even my mentee has a little bit of this for her graduation gift. I got her a little thing to hang on her office wall that says, "Words on paper." I have other versions of it like, "The only way over it is through it." I am a big believer in developing these little mantras for yourself to get you through hard times because they work for me.
The words on paper, that is an interesting thing. People deal with that differently. I took some creative writing classes. Often it is either procrastination or not getting the words on the page, the same problem that most people in the class had. I could not follow that approach. You have to know yourself about what works, too. I am like, "Until it is fully formed somewhere in the back of my brain, I cannot write it."
I have to wait like go for a walk or do something until it comes out before the deadline always. I could not do the writing to get somewhere because it would end up a word salad. When it was ready, it would come out, organized at least like an outline thing. I knew how I wanted to put the parts together. Part of that is knowing yourself in what works for you and getting you through the hard stuff.
I have another little mantra, "Deadlines are your friend." My professor said once, "Every piece of writing is a compromise with time." That helps me not be a perfectionist. It is never going to be perfect.
That is a great phrase. I am going to use that for my own writing because there is that part, "Once it is out, you want to keep messing with it.” You are like, "It is within the timeframe."
I have a million of them that I trot out for various occasions. Develop little mantras for yourself to keep yourself going and so positive self-talk. I used to be a negative self-talk person. Get rid of it. It does not help.
There is enough of that going on externally. Internally, you need to support yourself.
Get friends who support you, too, because that is the way you get through hard times. It is having friends who talk you up and lift you up during the hard times.
Thank you so much for participating in the show. I have so enjoyed catching up with you and getting your insights on all of this. Having seen you from the beginning and mature into the amazing woman, but also a unique combination of someone who is both a highly regarded academic and thought leader in your area, but also devoted to students and to their experiences. It is the perfect combination and to see you have grown into that role is nice to see.
Thank you so much.
Lyrissa Lidsky, thank you so much for joining the show.
It is so much fun.