Professor Mary Beth Beazley’s Scholarship Focuses on Experiential Learning and Digital Reading

Mary Beth Beazley’s scholarship has two focuses: equality in legal education, and the impact of digital documents on reading and writing.  She is currently working on an article about voting rights on law faculties, gathering the data by surveying skills faculty and others. Traditionally, the voting rights of full-time skills faculty have been limited, and her goal is to discover the ways in which those limits are and are not changing. 

“In this century, many or most of the changes in the ABA requirements for law schools have encouraged more experiential learning,” Professor Beazley says. “However, at a lot of law schools, the people that teach these courses don’t have the same status as those that teach the casebook courses. In particular, they may not be able to vote on hiring decisions. At law schools where that continues to be true, the schools may be less likely to hire faculty members who are focused on promoting the teaching of skills.” 

Professor Beazley hopes that the survey will show a positive trend toward allowing skills faculty to vote on hiring. She believes that the hiring of pro-skills faculty is particularly important, given both ABA curricular requirements and the coming of the so-called NextGen Bar Exam, which will significantly broaden the testing of skills. She anticipates finalizing this article in the next six months.