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Wiecek Named 1997 Scholar/Teacher of the Year
Expert in 18th- and 19th-century American legal history is the University Scholar/Teacher of the Year
An eminent scholar of American legal history is recipient of the 1997 University Scholar/Teacher of the Year Award. William M. Wiecek, professor of law and history, and holder of the Chester A. Congdon Chair in Public Law and Legislation in Syracuse University's College of Law, is this year's faculty honoree. The award, sponsored by the Division of Higher Education and Ministry of the United Methodist Church, was announced by Chancellor Kenneth A. Shaw Sept. 24 during his annual address to the faculty. The award carries a $2,000 cash prize.
Wiecek joined the College of Law from the University of Missouri-Columbia in 1985. Although he has taught just about every aspect of the law-from civil procedure to Roman law-his field of specialty is early American legal history, encompassing the 18th and 19th centuries. Dean Daan Braveman calls Wiecek "one of the leading scholars of American legal history in the country today." Wiecek is currently immersed in a project he began three years ago: preparing a volume covering the period from 1941 to 1953 for the multi-volume "Holmes Devise History of the U.S. Supreme Court" series of books. Being selected to write a volume for the series is an enormous honor, Braveman says, and one which Wiecek is certainly due.
Wiecek's volume covers the chief justiceships of Harlan Fisk Stone (1941-46) and Fred Vinson (1946-53). Wiecek has completed five chapters and anticipates finishing the project "sometime in the next millennium." As he began writing the second chapter--an introduction to the state of the law at the time Stone became chief justice--Wiecek found that "the chapter began taking on a life of its own." As he addressed more and more questions that were not fully explained in existing legal literature, Wiecek started expanding the chapter. In the space of about a year, the chapter grew to the size of a book. It's Wiecek's eighth. Titled "The Lost World of Classical Legal Thought: Law and Ideology in America, 1886-1937," it is due from Oxford University Press in May 1998.
"In addition to his national scholarly reputation, Bill is truly a great teacher," Braveman says. "He is wonderful in the classroom. He is a caring teacher who spends a lot of time with the students. And it shows in his teaching evaluations, which are always outstanding." Wiecek has been an innovator in the College of Law in the classroom use of "electronic casebooks"-traditional legal casebooks stored on CD-ROM. A few years ago, he began downloading information from a CD-ROM into a laptop computer and then used the laptop and a connected projector for classroom instruction. "In the field of law, we have been using computers for research for 20 years," Wiecek says. "It seemed to me that the time was right to expand that opportunity to the classroom." The electronic casebooks are valuable, Wiecek says, because they can be easily customized: With an electronic case book, the user can easily highlight sections of text, add notes, link one idea to another, or jump from the casebook into other software programs like word processing or legal databases.
About three years ago, the major publishers of legal texts began producing electronic casebooks. Wiecek uses their products as well as a CD-ROM he constructed based on materials he had compiled for his legal history courses. With improvements to the College of Law's electronic infrastructure and construction of a high-tech addition to the school, the use of electronic casebooks will be even easier, Wiecek says. The improvements include a localized computer network, on which the electronic casebooks could be loaded and retrieved, and multimedia teaching stations similar to those in Eggers Hall. Wiecek is intimately familiar with the construction of the addition, Winifred MacNaughton Hall, through his position as co-chair of the College of Law's Building Committee. He is also chair of the Promotion and Tenure, and Curriculum committees.
"I am grateful to everyone who had a role in giving me this award," Wiecek says. "I am flattered and deeply honored by it."
This article reprinted with permission from the Syracuse Record Vol. 28, No. 7. Kevin Morrow, Editor
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