Noel Semple has had a long and meaningful legal career, without ever directly representing clients. Unlike most of his law school classmates, Noel went to law school with the goal of having an academic career. The child of a lawyer father and historian mother, this path felt and still feels like an homage to his parents. While other students were preparing for law firm interviews, Noel was taking as many paper classes as possible and trying to publish everything that he wrote.
As an Associate Professor at the University of Windsor Faculty of Law, Noel is doing what he set out to do, but getting there took some trial and error.
Although Noel is known for his work in access to justice, his initial graduate work focused on family law. He was interested in the best interests of the child as a sociological concept in the lives of people who work on family law cases including lawyers, judges and social workers. Noel did his LLM and PhD at Osgoode Hall in this context and started applying for jobs while completing his LLM. There was nothing wrong with the quality of Noel’s work, but after a dozen applications, he had zero interviews. Noel realized this was because law schools hire full-time professors based on trends, and he had been focusing on an area that had gone out of trend. Although family law was a hot topic in the 80s and 90s, by the time Noel was in the job market, tenure track professors were no longer being hired to teach it.
Noel re-evaluated and switched gears. He completed a post-doc and redirected his research into access to justice, which was an emerging topic of the moment.
The more he learned, the more he realized the opportunity for transformation in the practice of law. He wrote a book called “Legal Services Regulation At the Crossroads: Justitia’s Legions”, which focused on whether legal services regulation helped or hurt the access to justice crisis in Canada. With this book and others under his belt, Noel got offered a job at Windsor Law. Noel’s takeaway from this experience and advice to others is simple: you have to fish where the fish are. Luckily for him, the fishing spot he found was one he really liked.
Windsor Law is known as Canada’s access to justice law school. Noel teaches classes like Civil Procedure and Legal Ethics, but he also is involved in some programs unique to Windsor Law. He teaches a seminar on access to justice and directs the Windsor Legal Practice Simulation, which was created by Julie Macfarlane. During the simulation, the entire 1L class is given a realistic legal problem that unfolds over the course of a week. Noel is also Interim Director of the National Self-Represented Litigants Project (NSRLP) Advisory Board, a project founded by Julie Macfarlane as well. NSRLP researches issues that affect self-represented litigants and provides resources based on the actual needs of self-reps, amongst other things.
Much of Noel’s research and writing now is about the practice of law and access to justice in the context of small firm practice. He has spent years studying the lives of particular lawyers who work with individual clients and he is interested in how small firms balance the need to run a business with the desire to promote access to justice.
In addition to his longtime love of research and writing, Noel has also been interested in politics since undergrad. He spent time in student politics, where he enjoyed talking to people and learning their stories and how policies directly affected them. Noel is involved in politics at a much higher level now, as the Ontario Liberal Party’s candidate in Etobicoke Centre. Regardless of partisan alignment, Noel encourages everyone to get involved in the democratic process. As an introvert, politics is in some ways not a natural fit for him, but Noel loves getting to understand people’s stories and seeing how public policy is made. For anyone interested in making the world a better place, experiencing how the “democratic sausage is made” is essential.
Having never worked as a lawyer, Noel cannot be sure of how much more or less he would have earned practicing law. Tenured law professors are paid well, but there are not a lot of those positions available. There is no shortage of lawyers who are interested in taking on classes as sessional instructors, and not many people are in the sessional business for the money. With so much of the law school curriculum being covered by sessionals, tenured jobs can be very competitive. If you are interested in becoming a tenured law prof, Noel recommends being open to teaching at any school, following hiring trends and tailoring your research to stay in line with them. He also recommends finding mentors who are leading the way in the areas of law that you are interested in or that fit the hiring trends. Being a professor is extremely rewarding and although the jobs are not easy to come by, they’re worth the work to get.
Noel’s favourite thing about teaching is the chance he gets to make subjects like civil procedure exciting and interesting for his students. He likes the challenge of taking a mandatory course that can be dense and technical, and passing on his enthusiasm and interest for the subject matter to his students.
With his research work, Noel revels in the freedom to decide what interests him and what he thinks the world needs to know more about. He loves throwing himself into the literature and the lived experiences of the people he’s learning about. If you want to be a legal academic, having that foresight from the beginning of your law school career helps. But if you want to be involved in law in a way that focuses on the future, there is room to get involved in politics or research at any point in your career.