Faculty/Staff Profile

Chelsea Baldwin joined the faculty at Washburn University School of Law in 2022, where she teaches courses in the general curriculum including Law in Context and Multistate Legal Analysis. She also provides workshops, one-on-one coaching, and small group support to students through the school's Academic Enrichment and Bar Readiness program where she has served as director since June 2023.

Prior to joining Washburn, Professor Baldwin taught courses in legal writing and legal analysis, bar exam preparation, business entities and information privacy at several other ABA-accredited law schools throughout the country. Her career has been dedicated to helping students transition into the rigors of law school and then again into the rigors of bar exam preparation. In addition to generalized support for first year students and bar examinees, Professor Baldwin has supported, coached, and advocated on behalf of students with disabilities as they navigate the process of acquiring documentation, seeking accommodations, and making strategic choices about how to compensate once accommodations have been granted or denied.

Professor Baldwin has presented to national legal education audiences on topics such as stereotype threat in legal education, technology and project management in legal education, teaching skills in legal education, and supporting the mental and emotional health of students during legal education. Her scholarship is currently focused on finding scalable ways to mitigate some harmful emotional effects of the intense cognitive restructuring that legal education produces in many individuals. Her piece, “Bad Therapy: Conceptualizing the Teaching of “Thinking Like a Lawyer” as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy” is forthcoming in volume 55 of St. Mary’s Law Journal.

Professor Baldwin’s Recommended Reading on Racial Justice:

• I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
  While this book is an extraordinary piece of writing that deserves to be read for that reason alone, I particularly recommend this book to people who are just beginning the journey of dismantling their own whiteness and white privilege. It is a personal essay about an experience of growing up Black and impoverished in America. Seeing different formative experiences from our own helps move one from focusing on the "I" in justice to the "us."
• Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do by Claude Steele
  I recommend this book for anyone who is working as a teacher, or a coach, or is a social psychology geek. It's a lay presentation of the author's research into the phenomena of stereotype threat with some concrete recommendations for how one can allay the effects of the phenomenon on one's students and mentees.