Welcome back to Ahead of the Curve. I'm Karen Sloan, legal education editor at Law.com, and I'll be your host for this weekly look at innovation and notable developments in legal education.

This week, I'm noting the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg's unique place in the legal academy. Then I've got the rundown on a long-awaited book about the first women law professors by the late UC Berkeley law professor Herma Hill Kay, who died in 2017. The project, which had been championed by Kay's longtime friend Ginsburg, is being finished by Santa Clara law professor Patricia Cain, who last week gave a preview on the book. Next up, the faculty at Texas A&M University School of Law is keeping it fresh with their rendition of the School House Rock song Preamble about…wait for it…the Constitution. Who says you can't have some fun in law school?

Please share your thoughts and feedback with me at [email protected] or on Twitter: @KarenSloanNLJ

RBG and The Legal Academy

I sent a draft of this column to my editor Friday afternoon, just an hour or so before news broke that Ruth Bader Ginsburg had died. Thus, her appearance in the following item on a soon-to-be-completed book about the first women law professors was a coincidence. While accidental, I think it's a fitting tribute to the influence the Notorious RBG had on women in the legal academy, because Ginsburg of course was a law professor before she become a Supreme Court justice and a feminist icon. She was hired to teach at Rutgers Law School in 1963, after famously being denied jobs at law firms because she was a woman. And she returned to her Columbia Law School alma mater in 1972 to teach. (Yes, Ginsburg did her first two years at Harvard Law School, but it was Columbia that conferred her J.D. after she transferred for her 3L year. Her husband, Marty, had landed a law firm job so the couple moved to New York.)