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Goodwin LiuAssociate Dean and Professor of Law |
Goodwin Liu, Associate Dean and Professor of Law, came to Berkeley in 2003 after having served as a law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. An expert in constitutional law, education policy, and civil rights, he is Co-Director of the Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Race, Ethnicity, and Diversity, and a frequent commentator on law and educational policy for NPR, Public Television and major newspapers. He says that “good teaching awakens in students a passion or personal concern they might not have known they had.” Students praise him not only for awakening that passion but also for his knowledge and preparation. One student noted that “Prof Liu’s masterful organization of materials—balanced perfectly between education case law and policy—and his incredibly deep and thorough knowledge of all the issues explored.” The Committee concurred with the numerous students who remarked that they consider Berkeley and Boalt fortunate to have Liu here.
Statement of Teaching Philosophy
The first goal I have as a teacher is the same as the one I have as a scholar: to model intellectual rigor and honesty. Many legal questions can be argued one way or another without clear answers. I want my students to learn that there are better and worse legal arguments, that careful reasoning is essential to the rule of law, and that their credibility as lawyers depends on their ability to see all sides of an issue with fairness and clarity. By meticulously parsing argument and counterargument, I want my students to see that the law, though often indeterminate, can have integrity that makes it worthy of respect.
Second, I believe good teaching is a process through which students come to realize that the subject they are studying matters to them. Although some might say it is useful to depersonalize legal issues in order to achieve a critical perspective, my experience suggests the opposite: students do more rigorous intellectual inquiry when they see a reason to care about the issue. In this spirit, I have sometimes abandoned lesson plans in order to take advantage of a pedagogical opportunity. On the day after last fall’s election, for example, my constitutional law students wanted to discuss the election results rather than the assigned reading. That class ended up exploring the election’s ramifications for affirmative action, same-sex marriage, and racial discrimination in voting. My students were able to see, in real time, the contemporary significance of the course material.
Finally, good teaching is personal in another sense: it is a personal interaction between me and my students. The most important qualities of this interaction are trust and mutual respect. I take seriously my students’ ideas, and I try to create a classroom environment in which they feel free to challenge each other and to challenge me. Moreover, trust and mutual respect grow out of basic things: I show up for my office hours, I come to class prepared, I respond to my students’ e-mails, and I take a personal interest in their concerns and ambitions.
The personal dimension of the teaching relationship is the most gratifying. Every semester, it catches me by surprise when, at some point, my voice cracks a little bit during a lecture I feel particularly passionate about. One time it happened as I read to my students Thurgood Marshall's oral argument to the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education, explaining the harm of racial segregation to black children. In those moments, I become aware that good teaching provokes not only my students’ passions but also my own. That is why teaching is, for me, a source of pleasure, renewal, and exhilaration.