Terence Centner

2014 D.W. Brooks Award for Excellence in Teaching

Department: Agricultural and Applied Economics

Terence Centner teaches four law courses for the University of Georgia College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences and serves as the pre-law advisor for students interested in law school. He helped to develop a minor in agricultural and environmental law for AG*IDEA, "a national consortium of universities offering programs and courses in agricultural disciplines," providing distance learning and coursework, to students. He teaches in this national program.

For his lecture courses, Centner employs the Socratic method to develop the whole student. He structures his courses so that students prepare for class, answer questions written in his course text and learn how to analyze legal issues. He also injects ethics in to the classroom through questions about current events and group exercises.

Centner has lectured at 17 foreign universities, taught as a Fulbright Senior Scholar at the University of Mannheim in Germany and has been named to the Fulbright-Scotland Visiting Professorship at the University of Aberdeen, where he will teach in the spring of 2015.

As part of his research program, Centner works with undergraduate students on timely policy issues. In fact, seven students have co-written papers in refereed journals and one has co-authored a book chapter. Centner is the author of three books –"Empty Pastures," "Blame Culture" and "Environmental Law" – and served as president of the American Agricultural Law Association.

Additional Resources

• News release:
  2014 D.W. Brooks Awards recognizes faculty, staff and students
• Photos:
  DW BROOKS 2014 on Flickr