Working With Faculty

Professors at Virginia have a reputation for being available, for working with students on legal scholarship or having lunch to discuss the latest concept they taught in class.

• Internships
• Independent Research
• Partnering With Students
• Professional Development
• Take a Professor to Lunch Program

Internships

In addition to interacting with professors in and outside the classroom, many students work for faculty during the school year or their first-year summer, collecting and fact-checking research or completing other legal work. (More)

Alex Krueger-Wyman '13 worked as a research assistant to Professor Saikrishna Prakash, focusing primarily on editing his forthcoming book on presidential powers. 

Alex Krueger-Wyman

"Not only did I learn more about a fascinating area of the law, but I had the opportunity to do so by working privately with one of the foremost luminaries in the field," Krueger-Wyman said. "More importantly, however, working as a research assistant to Professor Prakash was a terrific personal experience. Professor Prakash has become a wonderful mentor and friend to me, and he went above and beyond in helping me secure my federal clerkship. I have no doubt we will remain in touch."

Krueger-Wyman also assisted Professor A. E. Dick Howard with a law review article and helped prepare him to moderate the Fourth Circuit Judicial Conference. "Not only did I learn a great deal about Supreme Court jurisprudence, I actually visited the Supreme Court twice with Professor Howard to hear oral argument and personally meet Justice [Samuel] Alito and Justice [Anthony] Kennedy."

Independent Research

Students can design their own research paper for credit, allowing them to work closely with a faculty mentor who supervises their work. Story | More on Independent Research

Partnering With Students

Students form partnerships with professors for a variety of reasons, ranging from pro bono projects to co-authoring publications. Several students teamed up with Professor Anne Coughlin in 2011 to advise on a lawsuit aimed at changing the U.S. policy against women serving in combat roles, and opening the draft to women. The group was calling itself the Molly Pitcher Project, after the folk tale — based on real accounts — of a woman in the Revolutionary War who took her husband's place in firing a cannon on British forces.

On Jan. 24, 2013, then-Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta announced that he was lifting the longstanding direct ground combat exclusion rule for female service members and eliminating all unnecessary gender-based barriers to service.

"So much work had already been done on the issue, so many women had been in combat [and] died in combat. The lawsuit was maybe the straw that broke the camel's back," said third-year law student Helen O'Beirne, one of the members of the Molly Pitcher Project. (More)

Professional Development