Digital Commons Network^™

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 …

Bullshit And The Tribal Client, Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

No abstract provided.

The Folly Of Expecting Evil: Reconsidering The Bar's Character And Fitness Requirement, Leslie Levin

Leslie C. Levin

The bar’s character and fitness inquiry seeks to protect the public. As part of this inquiry, bar applicants are required to produce detailed information about their past histories. The rationale for this inquiry is that this information can be used to identify who will subsequently become a problematic lawyer. Bar applicants bear the burden of providing their “good” character even though there is little evidence that past conduct predicts who will become a problematic lawyer. This article looks at psychological and other research that attempt to identify factors that might predict future misconduct in the work place. It also reports …

Show, Don't Tell: Legal Writing For The Real World (Chapter Outline), Adam Lamparello, Megan E. Boyd

Adam Lamparello

Show, Don’t Tell is designed to help all members of the legal profession learn to effectively draft the most common litigation documents. Far too many books offer tips and advice about good writing, but don’t actually show the reader specific examples of good writing or show the reader why examples offered are effective. The authors have read many books on legal writing, but once we learned the basics of legal writing, we didn’t learn anything in those books to make us better writers. Why? We were exposed to the best theories, but never given practical, how-to tips to turn book …

Planning For Law As A Career And An Enterprise, R. Lisle Baker

R. Lisle Baker

If you are a law student concerned and unsure about what happens after graduation, and still trying to sort your preferred professional role, this article is designed to help you do homework on both yourself and the legal profession so that you can enhance your opportunity to find the right professional role. The premise of the article is that a career in law is something for which you can and should prepare, just as you prepare for oral argument in court by writing a well-researched and thorough legal brief. The article is based on a course offered by the author …

Atticus Finch Looks At Fifty, Michael L. Boyer

Michael L. Boyer

At the 50th anniversary of To Kill A Mockingbird (the book and film), this piece explores the textual evidence related to Atticus Finch as a public interest lawyer as concerned with class and economic equality as racial justice. This interpretive strand has received less attention yet remains one of the most useful for post financial collapse legal professionals.

Rethinking Regulation And Innovation In The U.S. Legal Services Market, Ray W. Campbell

Ray W Campbell

For decades, academics have argued that the US system for regulating the practice of law inhibits innovation. Despite that academic consensus, we live in an age of unparalleled innovation in the way legal services are provided to clients in the United States. What gives? How can we live in a regulatory environment that prevents innovation, and have such an abundance of it? Where is this innovation coming from, and from whence might more innovation come? The answers are neither simple nor obvious. Understanding this changing landscape requires a close look both at how innovations take root and at the US …

Rethinking Regulation And Innovation In The U.S. Legal Services Market, Ray W. Campbell

Ray W Campbell

For decades, academics have argued that the US system for regulating the practice of law inhibits innovation. Despite that academic consensus, we live in an age of unparalleled innovation in the way legal services are provided to clients in the United States. What gives? How can we live in a regulatory environment that prevents innovation, and have such an abundance of it? Where is this innovation coming from, and from whence might more innovation come? The answers are neither simple nor obvious. Understanding this changing landscape requires a close look both at how innovations take root and at the US …

The Revolution In Family Law Dispute Resolution, John Lande

John Lande

In the past fifty years, the revolution in American family law led to a revolution in family law dispute resolution. Virtually every aspect of divorce law has been transformed since the Mad Men era, including grounds for divorce, characterization of marital property, child custody presumptions, and alimony and child support rules. Marriage is not assumed to be a lifelong commitment. Fault generally is not legally relevant. Gender equality is a fundamental principle. In this period, family courts struggled with an increased volume of cases and ambiguous rules. They found that the tools of litigation were poorly suited to handle most …

The Ugly Ducking Comes Of Age: The Promise Of Full-Time Field Placements, Robert A. Parker, Sue Schechter

Robert A. Parker

This article locates field placement offerings within a landscape of legal education that is being transformed by incisive critiques, new regulations, advances in technology, and harsh economic conditions. Drawing upon our combined experience of over 15 years working with students enrolled in full-time field placements and with faculties who define the parameters of field placement programs, we offer a description of the advantages of these programs, innovative options for implementation, and some traps for the unwary. The heart of our article is a discussion of the results of our comprehensive survey of all 200 ABA approved law schools. The information …

Fixing Students' Fixed Mindsets: Paving The Way For Meaningful Assessment, Carrie Sperling

Carrie Sperling

Soon every law school in the country will be turning its attention to the important topic of assessment. Responding to a new ABA guideline, schools will be tackling the difficult task of defining, refining, and creating more assessment opportunities for their students. The guideline’s purpose is to improve student learning through more assessment, but nothing in the ABA proposal changes the fact that many of our students fail to react adaptively to feedback. Instead, many students will become hostile, defensive, or despondent, and will therefore not further develop their competencies.

With the American Bar Association putting emphasis on formative assessment …

Race And Place In Post-Reconstruction America: How The Cleveland Bar Became Segregated, 1870-1930, Robert N. Strassfeld

Robert N. Strassfeld

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Cleveland bar could fairly be described as racially integrated. The openness of the bar and the response of African American lawyers shaped the day-to-day professional lives of those lawyers. This openness manifested itself in a number of interracial law practices, in a client base for black lawyers that was predominantly white, in the court appointment practices of white judges, and in the general openness of the institutions of the Cleveland legal community to black participation. The bar was also geographically integrated. African American lawyers opened their offices in the same downtown office …

Lawyers Suing Law Firms: The Limits On Attorney Employment Discrimination Claims And The Prospects For Creating Happy Lawyers, Nancy Levit

Nancy Levit

It is more than a mild irony that anti-discrimination law fails lawyers in particular. This article addresses doctrinal and pragmatic limits on employment discrimination lawsuits by lawyers against their law firms. It considers the failures of the Title VII template to remedy the sorts of discrimination and dissatisfactions lawyers face in the practice of law, and concludes that many of the things that make lawyers unhappy are simply not reachable through employment discrimination lawsuits. The latter portion of the article turns to the recently emerging science of happiness literature. It suggests that the interests of lawyers and their firms may …

A First Amendment Theory For Protecting Attorney Speech, Margaret C. Tarkington

Margaret C Tarkington

In June 2010, the United States Supreme Court held that Congress could constitutionally prohibit attorneys from providing legal assistance and advice regarding lawful nonviolent conduct to groups that the Secretary of State has designated as Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs). The plaintiffs wished to assist two FTOs invoke international human rights law, petition the United Nations and United States Congress, and peacefully resolve their disputes. The Supreme Court held that the statute clearly prohibited plaintiffs’ proposed activities, but did not violate the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment because the attorneys could still engage in “independent advocacy” of any message …

The Death Of Big Law, Larry E. Ribstein

Larry E. Ribstein

Large law firms face unprecedented stress. Many have dissolved, gone bankrupt or significantly downsized in recent years. This paper provides an economic analysis of the forces driving the downsizing of Big Law. It shows that this downsizing reflects a basically precarious business model rather than just a shrinking economy. Because large law firms do not own durable, firm-specific property, a set of strict conditions must exist to bind the firm together. Several pressures have pushed the unraveling of these conditions, including increased global competition and the rise of in-house counsel. The large law firm’s business model therefore requires fundamental restructuring. …

Remodeling The Temple, Phase I: Assessing The Foundations Of Neo-Classical Professionalism In Law And Business, Robert E. Atkinson

Robert E. Atkinson Jr.

Abstract

Both the management of private enterprise and the practice of corporate law must be radically remodeled if they are properly to serve their correlate values: prosperity and justice. In that remodeling, the cornerstone of professional status would be appreciation of the deepest values of our common culture, gained through liberal education in the humanities and social sciences. Lawyers and managers need this appreciation because, under the best available institutional arrangements, they together must actively shape our public world, both in the law and in the market, for the common welfare.

The professional’s requisite cultural appreciation has two essential components, …

Beyond Cardboard Clients In Legal Ethics, Katherine R. Kruse

Katherine R Kruse

Historically, legal ethics has been preoccupied with the moral conflicts that arise when the pursuit of a client’s interests requires a lawyer to harm innocent third parties, undermine the truth-seeking norms of the legal system, or both. But is over-zealous loyalty to clients really the biggest problem in legal professionalism? This Article argues that it is not. Rather, the obsession in legal ethics with the problems of zealous partisanship dates back to the preference of early legal ethicists—many of whom were philosophers—to focus on conflicts between professional role morality and ordinary morality. To generate these conflicts, legal ethicists had to …

Judgment, Identity, And Independence, Cassandra Burke Robertson

Cassandra Burke Robertson

Whenever a new corporate or governmental scandal erupts, onlookers ask “Where were the lawyers?” Why would attorneys not have advised their clients of the risks posed by conduct that, from an outsider’s perspective, appears indefensible? When numerous red flags have gone unheeded, people often conclude that the lawyers’ failure to sound the alarm must be caused by greed, incompetence, or both. A few scholars have suggested that unconscious cognitive bias may better explain such lapses in judgment, but they have not explained why particular situations are more likely than others to encourage such bias. This article seeks to fill that …

The St. Thomas Effect: Law School Mission And The Formation Of Professional Identity, Jennifer Wright

Jennifer Wright

The legal profession has long been criticized for declining standards of professionalism. Recent studies have pointed to the crucial role of legal education in forming the professional identity of lawyers. Law schools must take seriously their duty to intentionally and thoughtfully shape their students’ sense of what it means to be a lawyer and of how their professional identities will align and coexist with their other personal and ethical commitments. In this article, I examine a case study of one law school, the University of St. Thomas School of Law, whose self-proclaimed raison d’etre is to produce a “different kind …

The Law Firm Caste System, Tiffani N. Darden

Tiffani N. Darden

Diversity eludes the most prestigious legal employers—the federal judiciary, academia, and elite law firms—despite enlightened scholarship diagnosing the quandaries of workplace equity in professional settings. While recruitment efforts stream attorneys of color into the lower ranks of corporate law firms, management and the profession still grapple with retention challenges. How can the legal profession, including law firms, resolve this problem? In addressing this question, I examine the uncharted intersection between two bodies of legal scholarship: workplace equity theory and the institutional analyses of law firm diversity. The primary data collection method for this study consists of personal interviews with diversity …

The Future Of Women In The Legal Profession: Recognizing The Challenges Ahead By Reviewing Current Trends, Maria P. Lopez

Maria Pabon Lopez

In 2004, the Indiana Supreme Court Race and Gender Commission undertook a large survey of lawyers’ perceptions about women in the legal profession in order to assess which areas of gender bias have improved and which areas could stand improvement. This article takes the data from this survey and interprets its significance for women in the profession and for the justice system overall. The article compares the findings from the 2004 study of Indiana lawyers to the findings of a similar earlier Indiana study (conducted in 1990) and draws conclusions regarding the overall occurrence of gender bias in Indiana along …

Building A Better Lawyer Discipline System: The Queensland Experience, Leslie Levin

Leslie C. Levin

In many jurisdictions, lawyer-run discipline systems are inefficient, overly lenient and insufficiently responsive to consumer's concerns. Queensland's Legal Profession Act 2004 (Qld) breaks away from that model by moving lawyer discipline out of lawyers' professional associations and into an independent agency. It articulates a decidedly consumer-oriented approach to lawyer discipline and gives Queensland's new Legal Services Commissioner the power to investigate and prosecute all discipline complaints. This article looks at Queensland's recent reforms, and considers how well the new system is meeting its twin goals of consumer protection and traditional lawyer discipline. Using interviews and other data, the article identifies …

Lawyers In Cyberspace: The Impact Of Legal Listservs On The Professioal Development And Ethical Decisionmaking Of Lawyers, Leslie Levin

Leslie C. Levin

This article explores the impact of trial lawyers' associations on the professional identities of its members, their professional development, their understanding of practice norms, and their ethical decision making. It does so by looking at the New York State Trial Lawyers Association (NYSTLA), and more specifically, the conversations that occur on its listserv. When these conversations are viewed in the context of the history and current operations of NYSTLA, it is possible to see how such listservs powerfully promote shared professional values and views within NYSTLA=s membership. The listserv extends the advice networks of trial lawyers far beyond the small …

Revisiting A Classic: Duncan Kennedy's Legal Education And The Reproduction Of Hierarchy The Ghost In The Law School: How Duncan Kennedy Caught The Hierarchy Zeitgeist But Missed The Point, Steve Sheppard

Steve Sheppard

In his manifesto, Duncan Kennedy aptly identified hierarchies within legal scholarship and the legal profession, but his conclusion--hierarchies in law are wrong and must be resisted--is misplaced. Kennedy’s Legal Education and the Reproduction of Hierarchy: A Polemic Against the System, claims law schools breed a hierarchical system, where rank plays an important part in how law schools relate to each other; how faculty members relate to each other and to students; and how students relate to other students. This system trains students to accept and prepare for their place within the hierarchy of the legal profession. According to Kennedy, such …