A Very Different Path to Excellence
School of Law’s Gary Lawson wins a Metcalf Award.
Faculty members nominated for a Metcalf Award for Excellence in Teaching must submit a statement about their classroom methods. Gary Lawson’s was unusual.
“I would like to say that my approach to teaching results from years of careful study of pedagogy, observation of students, and reflection on results, followed by constant refinements in techniques. But that would be wildly false,” he wrote. “I do what I do because I am what I am.”
Lawson, the School of Law’s Philip S. Beck Professor of Law, and one of this year’s recipients of a Metcalf Award for Excellence in Teaching, is autistic. Things that are easy for others are hard for him, and vice versa. He can be oblivious to his surroundings. His west-facing office high up in the Law Tower has a terrific view, but he’s never opened the shade.
Lawson always knew he was different, but he didn’t have a name for what set him apart until a dozen years ago, when one of his two children was diagnosed as autistic. “Oh, that’s what that is,” he remembers thinking. “I’ve got that—duh.” He still hasn’t bothered to get a formal diagnosis of his place on the autism spectrum, because he believes that a diagnosis wouldn’t change a thing.
Besides, none of this matters to most of his students or peers.
“He is as well known for his sharp intellect and spot-on legal analysis as he is for his unassuming personal style and quirky sense of humor,” says Maureen A. O’Rourke, dean of the School of Law. “He is a wonderful colleague, a prolific scholar, and an award-winning teacher.”
“For both courses I took with him, Professor Lawson replied to all of my emails in less than 15 minutes,” Beatriz C. Menéndez (’17) wrote in her Metcalf nomination letter, “and not only that, Professor Lawson would follow up with me in person and via email, without me asking, with more examples, if he believed they would make the concept clearer for me.”
What Lawson is not so good at is relating informally to others in social settings. “Put me at a cocktail party without my wife to hide behind, and I will literally—not figuratively—go into a corner somewhere and stand until it’s over.” For a law professor, that can be a problem, as he learned when he started teaching at Northwestern in 1988.
“It has for a century-plus been the norm that what you are supposed to do in a law school class is a back-and-forth, where the students are actively participating and you are, through clever and thoughtful questioning, drawing them out,” he says. “It became very obvious to me very early on that that wasn’t going to work. So I just started doing it my way.”
But Lawson is terrific at scholarship, and he is exceptional when it comes to making connections within vast oceans of material, at synthesizing complex ideas in an accessible fashion. He teaches the best way he can—by lecturing, a practice that he says made him an outlier, in fact—“wildly so”—at Northwestern.
“It was considered very odd,” he says. “I know, because people told me, that when I was hired here it was a big issue. ‘My gosh, he lectures in first year. Can we really have that?’ Even today I know, because I have heard them say so, there are people on this faculty who don’t consider that law teaching.
