Digital Commons Network^™

Addressing Barriers To Cultural Sensibility Learning: Lesson From Social Cognition Theory, Andrea A. Curcio

Andrea A. Curcio

Understanding subconscious biases, their pervasiveness, and their impact on perceptions, interactions, and analyses, helps prepare lawyers to represent people from cultural and racial backgrounds different from their own, and to address both individual and institutional injustice. Two law student surveys suggest many students believe lawyers are less susceptible than clients to having, or acting upon, stereotypes or biases. The survey results also indicate that many students suffer from bias blind spot – i.e. they believe that while others cannot recognize when they are acting based upon stereotypical beliefs and biases, the students know when they are doing so. The survey …

Addressing Barriers To Cultural Sensibility Learning: Lesson From Social Cognition Theory, Andrea A. Curcio

Andrea A. Curcio

Understanding subconscious biases, their pervasiveness, and their impact on perceptions, interactions, and analyses, helps prepare lawyers to represent people from cultural and racial backgrounds different from their own, and to address both individual and institutional injustice. Two law student surveys suggest many students believe lawyers are less susceptible than clients to having, or acting upon, stereotypes or biases. The survey results also indicate that many students suffer from bias blind spot – i.e. they believe that while others cannot recognize when they are acting based upon stereotypical beliefs and biases, the students know when they are doing so. The survey …

Access To Justice For A New Century: The Way Forward, Julia H. Bass, W. A. Bogart, Frederick H. Zemans

Frederick H. Zemans

This book is a timely addition to the literature on access to justice. The book's essays address all aspects of the topic, including differing views on the meaning of access to justice; ways to improve access to legal services; litigation and its role in achieving social justice; and the roles of lawyers, citizens, and legal insitutions.

Access to Justice for a New Century is based on papers given at an international symposium presented by the Law Society of Upper Canada, sponsored by the Law Foundation of Ontario.

Killing Them Softly: Forcible Transfers Of Indigenous Children, Ruth Amir

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

The forcible transfer of indigenous children in North America and Australia are part of a global phenomenon that consisted of the kidnapping, trafficking, removal, and identity changes of children of particular groups.

Article II(e) of the United Nation Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide prohibits the forcible transfer of children of a group to another group (FTC). The FTC echoes domestic and international legal norms and policies for the protection of children since early twentieth century. Its particular applicability to specific victims within a protected group – children –conveys a unique ethical position compared to the other acts …

Transforming News: How Mediation Principles Can Depolarize Public Talk, Carol Pauli

Faculty Scholarship

News media interviews bring opposing voices into the public forum where, ideally, audience members can deliberate and reach democratic compromise. But in today’s politically polarized atmosphere, partisans increasingly accuse each other of being a threat to the country, and prospects for compromise have suffered. Journalists have been urged to take a more affirmative role, promoting problem-solving and opposing conflict. They have stopped short, citing professional norms that demand a stance of neutral detachment.

This Article turns to the principles of transformative mediation. Like journalism, it is detached from any goal of settlement. It aims instead at increasing the capacity of …

Law And The Media: An Overview And Introduction, Valerie P. Hans

Valerie P. Hans

Although occasional articles on law and the media have been published in Law and Human Behavior, this special issue is the first collection of articles on the topic to appear in the journal. By publishing some of the most recent work on issues in law and the media, we hope to draw the attention of psycholegal scholars to questions in this fertile research area that deserve theoretical and empirical study. Law and the media have become inescapably intertwined. Because a relatively small proportion of the public has direct experience with the justice system, public knowledge and views of law and …

Juries, Judges, And The Politics Of Tort Reform, David Logan

Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The End Of Law Schools, Ray W. Campbell

Ray W Campbell

What would legal education look like if it were designed from the ground up for a world in which legal services have undergone profound and irreversible change? Law schools as we know them are doomed. They continue to offer an educational model originally designed to prepare lawyers to practice in common law courts of a bygone era. That model fails to prepare lawyers for today’s highly specialized practices, and it fails to provide targeted training for the emerging legal services fields other than traditional lawyering.

This article proposes a new ideology of legal education to meet the needs of modern …

Regulating Mediators, Art Hinshaw

Art Hinshaw

Currently consumers engage mediators on a caveat emptor basis. The regulatory scheme for mediators is, at best, a disjointed patchwork of organizations that make mediation referrals which allows unscrupulous mediators to exploit consumers and hide in the system’s holes. One egregious example of abuse comes from Gary J. Karpin, a disbarred lawyer turned divorce mediator, who is believed to have used the mediation process to con hundreds of people into giving him an estimated $1 million before taking up residence in prison. His con was so successful in part because there was no natural place for his victims to turn …

Experiential Education And Our Divided Campuses: What Delivers Practice Value To Big Law Associates, Government Attorneys, And Public Interest Lawyers?, Margaret E. Reuter, Joanne Ingham

Margaret E. Reuter

How will law schools meet the challenge of expanding their education in lawyering skills as demanded from critics and now required by the ABA? This article examines the details of the experiential coursework (clinic, field placement, and skills courses) of 2,142 attorneys. It reveals that experiential courses have not been comparably pursued or valued by former law students as they headed to careers in different settings and types of law practice. Public interest lawyers took many of these types of courses, at intensive levels, and valued them highly. In marked contrast, corporate lawyers in large firms took far fewer. When …

The End Of Law Schools, Ray Worthy Campbell

Ray W Campbell

Law schools as we know them are doomed. They continue to offer an educational model originally designed to prepare lawyers to practice in common law courts of a bygone era. That model fails to prepare lawyers for today’s highly specialized practices, and it fails to provide targeted training for the emerging legal services fields other than traditional lawyering.

This article proposes a new ideology of legal education to meet the needs of modern society. Unlike other reform proposals, it looks not to tweaking the training of traditional lawyers, but to rethinking legal education in light of a changing legal services …

Why The Bar Examination Fails To Raise The Bar, Carol Goforth

Carol Goforth

Why Lawyers Fear Love: Mohandas Gandhi’S Significance To The Mindfulness In Law Movement, Nehal A. Patel

Nehal A. Patel

Although mindfulness has gained the attention of the legal community, there are only a handful of scholarly law articles on mindfulness. The literature effectively documents the Mindfulness in Law movement, but there has been minimal effort to situate the movement into the broader history of non-Western ideas in the legal academy and profession. Similarly, there has been little recent scholarship offering a critique of the American legal system through the insights of mindfulness. In this Article, I attempt to fill these gaps by situating the Mindfulness in Law movement into the history of modern education’s western-dominated world-view. With this approach, …

The Moral Lawyer And The Machiavellian Nature Of Law Practice, David Barnhizer

David Barnhizer

In Western culture the name Niccolo Machiavelli has become Machiavellianism, a pejorative signifying the willingness to do anything to achieve desired ends. American lawyers do have limits, however, and are expected to operate according to an ethical code that is at least intended to prevent the worst abuses. The effectiveness of this ethical code has often been questioned, as have the questionable efforts of the organized bar to enforce its rules, but on the surface it differentiates law practice from hand-to-hand combat and military struggles. Even though I have sometimes used the concepts of the warrior lawyer, the general and …

Bridging The Gap Between Unmet Legal Needs And An Oversupply Of Lawyers: Creating Neighborhood Law Offices - The Philadelphia Experiment, Jules Lobel, Matthew Chapman

Articles

In the United States there is, simultaneously, an abundance of unemployed lawyers and a significant unmet need for legal care among middle-class households. This unfortunate paradox is protected by ideological, cultural, and practical paradigms both inside the legal community and out. These paradigms include the legal chase for prestige, the consumer’s inability to recognize a legal need, and the growing mountain of debt new lawyers enter the profession with. This article will discuss a very successful National Lawyers Guild experiment from 1930s-era Philadelphia that addressed a similar situation, in a time with similar paradigms, by emphasizing community-connected lawyering. That is, …

Compensating The Victims Of Japan’S 3-11 Fukushima Disaster, Eric A. Feldman

All Faculty Scholarship

Japan’s March 2011 triple disaster—first a large earthquake, followed by a massive tsunami and a nuclear meltdown—caused a devastating loss of life, damaged and destroyed property, and left hundreds of thousands of people homeless, hurt, and in need. This article looks at the effort to address the financial needs of the victims of the 3/11 disaster by examining the role of public and private actors in providing compensation, describing the types of groups and individuals for whom compensation is available, and analyzing the range of institutions through which compensation has been allocated. The story is in some ways cause for …

A Primer On Higher Education In The 21st Century: The University As A Whole And Contributions Made By Law Schools, Ronald Griffin

Journal Publications

Citizens live within their unit's belief systems and superstitions. Truth is derived from family narratives, stories spun by old friends, outbursts from neighbours, barbers, religious figures, and priests. Certainty and comfort come from living in these spaces. But there is a wider world out there with characters doing things that conflict with routine. Higher education illuminates this realm. Legal education predicts what authorities will do about their antics and, while this is a laudable undertaking in the abstract, legal education should do more. It should arm the next generation with tools to cope with cultural ruptures, social confusion, dislocations, avatars, …

Fitting The Forum To The Pernicious Fuss: A Dispute System Design To Address Implicit Bias And 'Isms In The Workplace, Elayne E. Greenberg

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

This paper proposes a dispute system design to address workplace discrimination caused by implicit biases so that employees and employers involved in such disputes can secure a more responsive justice than existing legal processes are able to provide. Workplace discrimination caused by implicit bias continues to contaminate our work environment despite our focused legal efforts to combat such overt "isms" as sexism, racism, ageism, and ableism. Although overt expressions of bias have significantly decreased in recent years, expressions of implicit bias, the primary cause of workplace discrimination, persists.

This paper extends the research on implicit bias to dispute system …