by Nina Hart
Meet Glen O. Robinson,
Professor Emeritus at the University of Virginia School of Law. Below, he discusses his unexpected path to a
legal career that included a stint as a Commissioner for the FCC, and offers
insights on the differences between practitioners and academics.
1. What led you to
a career in law?
I drifted into it. I majored in Government at Harvard, though
mostly I studied literature and philosophy so it would be accurate to say simply
that I was a liberal arts major who read Nietzsche and a lot of Russian novels. In any case, I was not prepared for work in
the real world. However, I thought I
could probably handle law and went off to Stanford to check it out. It worked out ok.
2. What experiences with administrative or
regulatory law have you had?
My first experience was as a
junior associate with Covington & Burling in Washington, D.C., where I helped
broadcast clients deal with the Federal Communications Commission. After several years of private practice, I
embarked on an academic career at the University of Minnesota, where administrative
law was my principal subject. (With
colleagues, I published a communications law casebook in 1974, which went
through four editions before it succumbed to the lack of market demand.)
My teaching was briefly
interrupted in the mid-1970s when I was appointed to the FCC, which gave me a new
look at administrative/regulatory law from the inside. (The difference between inside and outside
perspectives did not substantially change my substantive views about most of
the issues, however; most of them were antithetical to all the work that I did
as a practitioner.) After a short tenure
at the FCC, I joined the University of Virginia faculty where I taught and
wrote on a variety of subjects. I
continued to teach the basic administrative law course for another score years. Eventually I lost interest in the basic
course and developed a course in communications regulation, which I taught
until retirement in 2008. Communications
law (more precisely the regulation of electronic communications) remains a keen
interest. In 2008, a colleague and I
published a book on Communications
Regulation; we are now finishing (forthcoming in 2014).
3. How did you become interested in studying and
teaching administrative law?
It was an accident. When I joined Covington & Burling I was
assigned to work with the communications law group. I did not have any law school preparation for
that work. I had taken a course in
administrative law, but I didn’t learn anything that proved useful to my
practice. So, more or less it was just a
case of sink or swim. I learned to
float. The interest in administrative
regulation developed more fully when I went into teaching and it became a
staple of my teaching and research for most of my career.
4. How would you characterize the dialogue
between academics and practitioners with regards to administrative law? Are
there ways to improve how professors, agencies, and advocates work together to
shape or change administrative law? Are there specific issues related to
regulation development or review that you think warrant a greater degree of
collaboration between academics and practitioners?
There isn’t all that much
dialogue as a matter of routine teaching or practice. Obviously there is
interaction in some forums where the two come together—as with ABA section
activities. But more generally, there is
not that much occasion for collaboration. Should there be more? At a very general level the easy answer is
yes. At the next level down, the answer
isn’t so easy.
Start with the question whether
practitioners can contribute to the classroom.
Everything depends on what is being taught. I am skeptical of the value of inviting practitioners
in for cameo appearances to address subjects to which their practice experience
is of marginal importance. Inviting a
guest lecture to hold forth on the Chevron doctrine is rather pointless. A practitioner who has argued countless agency
appeals has no special insights into the verbal formulas used in applying the Chevron
doctrine.
(Nor, for that matter, does the academic.) On the other hand, if the subject is whether Chevron deference should be given for the FCC’s interpretation
of a statute governing competitive access to local telephone networks, then
having an experienced practitioner in the field of communications law to explain
how network access works, what the policy implications are, etc. would be
invaluable.
On the flip side, can academics
help practitioners? Put aside using academics
as consultants or expert witnesses on some subject within the latters’ special
expertise. I have done some consulting
on specialized issues, but I never thought of it as a real collaboration of the
kind the question seems to intend. Thinking
beyond this limited form of practitioner-academic collaboration the answer to
the question depends on clarifying the purpose to be served. Many years ago a number of major law firms
adopted programs of having a scholar in residence. I participated in one of those programs with
the Washington office of a national law firm.
It was for a brief time—a week or two as I recall. The firm was vague about what they expected me
to do. I had thought there might be some
active consultation on matters of mutual interest, but that turned out not to
be the case. Apparently they conceived
of the program as a special attraction for young associates who would think it
cool to drop by my office and chat about legal matters of mutual interest. However, the associates, like the partners,
had better things to do-- chatting up a resident academic didn’t add a minute
to their billable hours. So, I gave a
couple of informal lunch talks to groups of lawyers and then did my own work;
that was it. The lesson? If there is one, it is that this kind of
collaboration will not add value unless there is a well-defined objective and a
schedule of work to be done. Merely
putting academics and practitioners together in the same space in the hope of
generating an osmotic transfer of intellectual essence is a waste of time and
money.
Specifically on the question of
administrative law reform, well, on any subject it is plainly useful to have
many minds working on the issues.
However, the question implies something more than bringing multiple
minds together; it is about bringing together people with different perspectives. So, that naturally invites the further
question whether the respective participants have distinctive perspectives or
information on the issues. I don’t think
I could answer that in the abstract without knowing what the issues are. For example, if the question at hand is
whether to have greater or less formalities for agency rulemaking proceeding I
don’t think you could assume that an academic’s perspective on the formalities
of rulemaking would be all that different from a practitioner’s.
5. What do you think is the biggest challenge
facing administrative law practitioners?
When I was a young practitioner
my greatest challenge was overcoming boredom since much of my work was
repetitious and often trivial. But I
don’t have any reason to think this is a greater problem for administrative law
practitioners than for others.
6. For law students or new attorneys considering
a career in administrative law, what do you think would be a good way of
familiarizing themselves with the field?
I have never known anyone who
practiced generic administrative law.
Law firms have specialists in, e.g., environmental law, food and drug
law, securities regulation, trade regulation, communications law, etc. I suppose you can loosely describe all these
as “administrative law,” but they do not share enough commonality to call them
a “field” for any practical purpose. If someone
asked me how to prepare for a career in administrative law I would tell them to
think about the underlying issues that they think are interesting. That will reveal at once what courses they
should take in law school. After they
have graduated the surest way to gain familiarity is to practice for a while with
an agency doing that kind of work. This
is likely to give a wider exposure to the subject than an entry-level position
in a law firm, where there is a high probability of becoming indentured to some
small corner of the field.
7. Outside of the law, what are your favorite
activities or hobbies?
Reading (but I no longer read
much law), gardening (I tend about 9 acres of undisciplined plant life) and foreign
travel (the more foreign the better).
