Close Up
History meets the law
Samantha Barbas says her teaching style has been informed by two experiences—one positive, one not so much.
The not-so-positive one was her experience, as a Stanford Law School student, being in a class where a “professor missed the basics.”
“At times I have seen professors play only to the best, most advanced students and leave everyone else behind,” says Barbas, who joined the UB Law School this fall as an associate professor. “I’m determined to start at the most basic level and make sure every student knows the fundamentals.”
The positive experience was a lesson early in her teaching career—she taught history, mainly at Chapman University in Orange, Calif., before going to law school—from a wise mentor who had once been an actor. “He told me that absolutely above all, you have to keep the students’ attention,” Barbas recounts. “He gave me a number of different strategies, such as walking the aisles of the classroom, or bringing in props to illustrate a point. Especially now that students are using laptops and there are so many distractions, I still believe that you have to find a way to draw students in.”
Those lessons stand her in good stead at UB Law, a place she was drawn to, she says, by the interdisciplinary work of the faculty. “I was impressed with the way UB foregrounds this work,” she says. “The faculty all seem to have PhDs or advanced degrees in other disciplines.”
Barbas adds her own doctorate to the mix. A Seattle native, she did her undergraduate work in political science at Williams College, then went on to earn a PhD in history from the University of California-Berkeley.
Her scholarship as a historian has centered around the history of American film and journalism, including two books: a biography of gossip queen Louella Parsons called “The First Lady of Hollywood” (University of California Press, 2005) and “Movie Crazy: Fans, Stars and the Cult of Celebrity” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2001).
She says she decided to go to law school because “I thought it would make me a stronger thinker. I’ve always been interested in the law, and I saw it as a challenge. I thought that I might be able to speak to a broader audience and speak in a deeper way by knowing aspects of law.”
In her writing, she has combined her skills as a historian with the analytical mind of a legal scholar. In addition to writing on the history of privacy law, she has researched the development of law around the constitutional status of movies as free speech. In a 1915 decision, she notes, the U.S. Supreme Court held that movies were mere entertainment unprotected by freedom of speech. Not until the 1950s did the court reverse itself and acknowledge that the movies were indeed protected by the First Amendment.
She discusses the issue and the ongoing relationship between the First Amendment and new media in an article, “How Movies became Speech,” to be published in a forthcoming issue of the Rutgers Law Review.
“I definitely see history and law as coming together in my scholarship,” says Barbas, who served as a clerk in Honolulu for a judge of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals before coming to UB.
She has brought that synthesis to her classrooms as well. “The mark of a great scholar and writer in law,” she says, “is one who can translate complex ideas into terms that everyday people can understand and use. It’s essential for any law student to learn how to write for an audience beyond the legal community. The lawyer has a responsibility to be a public educator.”
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