My views on teaching are simple. Teaching is an exhilarating and enlightening experience. Interacting with students stimulates my thinking, and the process of intellectual interchange with students, even in the context of a large lecture hall, produces some of what I hope are my best ideas. During my time at Berkeley I have been fortunate in being able to teach law students, graduate students, and undergraduates. Each of these groups brings a different intensity and a different intellectual focus to the classroom. I have also had the opportunity to work with small groups and very large lecture formats. Each setting creates its own dynamics and produces its own special needs for communication. But there is a common thread to all these environments: what I try to do is force the student to think. If one can encourage a process of looking at data or looking at society through a different prism, beautiful moments of insight can result. The focused intensity of law students can be brought to bear in peeling apart the various levels of a problem. The depth and acuity of graduate students can be inflamed by a moment of thoughtful reflection. And in the joyous arena of the undergraduate lecture hall, where I am in a room with 140 students who know almost nothing about the rather exotic topic, Chinese law and society, that I am teaching, there can be terrific moments of perspective and insight. I treasure those moments when we embark on a group exercise in which I try to make each student in the large lecture hall participate in the experience.

Teaching is a marvelous enterprise, and having the opportunity to interact with the intelligent and challenging students that one finds on a campus like this one makes things even more delightful. My teaching assignments keep me fresh and alive. Because I have an administrative component to my appointment, I don't have to teach at all, but I resist lightening my teaching load because I find that it produces much more energy than it draws down. I have yet to find anything in life that produces a longer sustained feeling of elation than an absolutely crackling good lecture in which electricity is flowing between the students and the teacher, with intuitive leaps being made on each side. To me, that's real excitement. Sometimes it strikes me as amazing that this is actually part of a job; it is too much fun. The gift of being a teacher on a campus like this one is something to relish and appreciate.

Revised: 1993