Day One:
The three of us, me and my fellow Princeterns, arrived in Professor Fleming’s office at 9 am, and had a chance to hear the full account of how he came to be a Law Professor, from college to the present day. We shared our various academic interests with him, and Professor Fleming in turn set up a variety of appointments with other BU Law professors whose work overlapped with our interests. At 10 am, one of his students came in to talk about an upcoming paper on Constitutional theory, as well as to update Professor Fleming on the duties she had completed as his research assistant for his upcoming book. This meeting touched upon three of Professor Fleming’s roles at BU Law — a professor of Constitutional Law (a first year class) and Constitutional Theory (an upper level seminar), an author of esteemed academic literature (his most recent book is about to go to press, and was co-authored by his wife Linda McClain, who is also a professor at BU), and the faculty advisor for the BU Law Review. After this meeting, we got the chance to meet two professors specializing in Health Law and International Law. Finally, at 2 pm we headed to Professor Fleming’s two hour lecture on Constitutional Law.
Day Two:
Dr. Fleming and his Princeterns
We started the day with another meeting between Professor Fleming and oneof his students/research assistants. After this, we sat in on his meeting with the Dean of BU Law, getting the chance to see how a law school works from the administration side, such as conversations about how to give funding to professors for research, the topic for the next big colloquium Professor Fleming is organizing, maintaining a balance between a theoretical and a practical law education, and selecting new professors for tenure. We ate lunch at a faculty paper workshop where a visiting professor presented his paper on the applicability of foreign laws in the U.S., and afterwards took questions and feedback from his colleagues. We ended the day by sitting in on Professor Fleming’s second class — his upper level Constitutional Theory seminar. Thank you Professor Fleming for being such a dedicated host and giving us a fascinating two day opportunity to glimpse the life of a law professor! I really was able to put myself in the shoes of a law student and get exposure to a variety of topics within the academic branch of law.
