Faculty Spotlight
Morgan Cloud
Charles Howard Candler Professor of Law
Morgan Cloud is the Charles Howard Candler Professor at Emory University’s School of Law, and part of the first group of Distinguished Teaching Scholars at Emory University. Professor Cloud specializes in constitutional criminal procedure, criminal law, white collar crime, and pretrial litigation, particularly the complex issues of substantive and procedural law and professional ethics arising in this setting. He is the author of numerous books and articles and has taught and lectured extensively at other universities and before professional groups in the U.S. and Europe. Before joining the Emory faculty in 1983, Professor Cloud practiced as a trial lawyer and litigator in Florida and California. He earned his BA at Grinnell College, his MA at the University of Iowa, and his JD from Cornell University in 1972.
Q and A with Morgan Cloud
The following is a condensed version of an interview with Professor Cloud from November 11, 2009:
What about joining the faculty at Emory appealed to you?
I found the Emory faculty to be so much more dynamic and interesting than faculties I talked to at other places. In some of those interviews I’d be sitting in a room full of faculty members and deans, and I felt like I could see the cobwebs growing from the walls to them. I thought it was deadly boring and worried that it would not be possible to study and teach about law as a dynamic social institution in those settings. Emory was completely different. Emory was dynamic. It was developing a great litigation training program at the time, and we also had this group of new scholars who were exciting and dynamic.
How would describe your teaching style?
I’m learning a little bit every year and getting better at accomplishing things that are useful for the students, but I struggle with that and have for years. When I started law teaching, my only models were the teachers who impressed me in law school. I found myself consciously emulating their behavior. They were really good teachers, but it wasn’t me. Over time, that has fallen away as I’ve tried to find things I’m comfortable doing in ways I hope will work for the students. I hope to just keep changing, hopefully for the better.
When I became a parent, one of the things that quickly became obvious to me was that not everybody learns the way I do. I think a lot of people who go into teaching harbor this assumption, perhaps unconsciously, that the way they understand and learn is how other people learn. The complexity of the learning process had never occurred to me – the different ways that people learn, store, and retrieve information was just something I had not considered before. Once I started learning about that, I began to study, think about, and experiment with ways to try to reach as many students as possible. I knew, for instance, that some people were visual learners, some audio learners, but I’d never thought about that as something to deal with as a teacher. The more I learned and thought and watched, I realized that probably nobody learned the way I did.
Is there some philosophy that guides your teaching?
This is going to sound really corny, and I apologize for being so prosaic. The phrase is “it’s not about me.” I’ve been slow to come to that. I’ve been so concerned about presenting material in a certain way over my career, that it’s really been only in recent years that I’ve really pursued that understanding of what it means to be a law teacher. As a teacher in a professional school, one obligation is to help the students learn, in a sophisticated way, as much as they can about the subject matter of the course. At the recent swearing in ceremony for Emory graduates who had just passed the bar exam, one of my students thanked me because she didn’t have to study criminal procedure at all for the exam. She had it wired from having studied for my class. I feel really good that students are leaving these classes prepared to be lawyers. But teaching the substance of the law is only one of our obligations. Lawyers need to have common sense, strong ethics, and a commitment to something other than just self-interest. This is more than can be taught in a class, but I try to keep those issues alive in our discussions.
How has your approach to teaching changed over the last five or ten years?
I’ve tried to incorporate different class structures and communication devices, in part to address this multiple intelligences issue. Also, about ten years ago we shifted from fifty-minute classes to ninety-minute classes. At about forty minutes people start getting bored. That’s not a big deal if you’re teaching a fifty-minute class, but if you’re teaching for ninety minutes, it becomes a big deal. I’ve tried to break each class into different segments, so classes usually include both lectures and Q&A elements; and increasingly I am using technological devices to keep students involved, sometimes entertained, or just to a wake them up.
Recently in my constitutional criminal procedure class, I showed a short video of cocaine leaves being turned into cocaine hydrochloride somewhere in the mountains of Peru as part of our discussion of drug law enforcement at the nation’s borders. In another class I played an audio clip of a woman who called the police to report that she was driving drunk. It’s fantastically funny, but it’s also perfectly appropriate for an analysis of Miranda rights. Both clips were available because of the internet and our classroom technology.
I’m a big enthusiast about the ways twenty-first century technology allows us to introduce these kinds of materials into classroom.
What advice would you give to a law professor just embarking on a teaching career?
It’s tough, because the tradition in legal scholarship has been that a good law review article would require the amount of time and effort, and almost length, of a book in another area of scholarship. That meant that a very small number of articles could be a tremendous scholarly accomplishment. Now, in the sciences and social sciences, somebody who’s been teaching eight years could have 100 publications. That’s a powerful model to resist, because it’s so easy to evaluate the productivity quantitatively, and to be honest, several of those short articles might represent no more work than a single lengthy law review article. The pressure on law professors to produce quantity is dramatically more than it was ten or fifteen years ago. Quantity can be the enemy of quality, but people have to be realistic about what they have to do to secure their job and get tenure. Over time, nobody can crank out a high volume of work and maintain quality in any field. Young people starting out are in a bind. They can’t now say I’ll write two or three really good pieces in six years and get tenure, because they might not. That might not be enough today, although it could have been in the past.
How would you want your students to remember you or describe you?
I hope they remember me as somebody who took his work seriously, took them seriously, gave them their money’s worth. They’re paying a lot of money for what we’re supposed to be delivering. As I get older I seem to be more concerned that they’ll remember me as one of the professors who was concerned about them, their educations, and their careers on a personal level.
What accomplishments since you joined the faculty are you most proud of?
I’m proud of some of the scholarship I’ve done on the Bill of Rights and drug law policy, and professional responsibility. Some of this work was pretty groundbreaking and innovative stuff that has held up over time. My articles from 1985 still get cited along with my articles from 2007. I’m proud of some of the innovations I’ve been part of in teaching. When I first came here I helped create a whole body of what we call simulation courses in which we try to compress about two years of legal practice into a one-semester course. These courses combine practice skills and ethics with mastery of a variety of subjects and areas of the law, and the Emory model has been copied all over the country at some other very good law schools. I think it’s moved us more in the direction of not just teaching legal theory, but of trying to develop a teaching and learning model that replicates the complexity of the intellectual, interpersonal, and ethical issues lawyers face in practice.
What changes are needed in legal education?
The educational model dominant in this country for more than a century posits that we can train people in law school to learn to analyze the law cerebrally then go out and learn how to be a lawyer in practice will not survive. Legal education everywhere is going to have to become more like medical schools and graduate programs in clinical psychology and music performance, where you get theory and practice combined. Law schools are going to have to start graduating people who are more capable of representing clients the day they walk out the door.
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