Education Commons^™

Writing To Learn Law And Writing In Law: An Intellectual Property Illustration, Michael J. Madison

Articles

This essay, prepared as part of a Symposium on teaching intellectual property law, describes a method of combining substantive law teaching with a species of what is commonly called "skills" training. The method involves assessing students not via traditional final exams but instead via research memos patterned after assignments that junior lawyers might encounter in actual legal practice. The essay grounds the method in the theoretical disposition known generally as "writing to learn." It argues that students are likely to learn intellectual property law effectively if they learn to practice as intellectual property lawyers, and specifically to write as intellectual …

Toward A Rule Of Law Society In Iraq: Introducing Clinical Legal Education Into Iraqi Law Schools, Haider Ala Hamoudi

Articles

This Article details my experience introducing clinical legal education into three Iraqi law schools. I highlight some of the cultural, legal and logistical obstacles that existed, and the means my colleagues and I used to circumvent them. By and large we considered our project at least modestly successful and certainly garnered the interest of many faculty and nearly all students who participated. Nevertheless, the extent of our success depended largely on the cooperation of the faculty and administration at the law schools with which we worked, and we were able to achieve the most at those institutions where cooperation was …

The Role Of Foreign Languages In Educating Lawyers For Transnational Challenges, Vivian Grosswald Curran

Articles

In a world in which every other country seems intent on teaching English to their youth, and in which the United States educational system does not place a high priority on teaching foreign languages, the American law student, dean and professor may doubt if foreign language knowledge is anything more than marginally helpful to law graduates. Similarly, educators at the primary school level may not be likely to assess foreign language education as warranting a greater allocation of scarce public resources.

The usefulness of foreign languages to the United States lawyer gradually has been gaining increased recognition in the profession, …

Sharing Systems, Sharing Language: Designing And Working In A Virtual Department, Claire Mcavinia, Jane Hughes

Articles

Less widely taught languages present special problems. Often students may be ab initio learners who must progress very rapidly from beginner to highly competent. Appropriate learning materials are scarce. Small student numbers restrict the range of learner tasks. To address these problems, and drawing on research methods from both CALL and Computer Science domains, we investigated the use of a virtual learning environment (WebCT) as a tool for collaborative language teaching and learning. A web-based virtual department was created, bringing students and tutors from different institutions together to practise the target language (students) and share the development of quality resources …

Key Skills By Design: Adapting A Central Web Resource To The Departmental Context, Claire Mcavinia

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Web-­based delivery of support materials for students has proved to be a popular way of helping small teams to implement key skills policies within universities. The development of ‘key’ or ‘transferable’ skills is now encouraged throughout education, but resources (both in terms of staffing and budget) tend to be limited. It is difficult for key skills teams to see learners face to face, and not feasible to print or distribute large amounts of paper­-based material. Web-­based delivery presents a means of overcoming these problems but it can result in generic study skills material simply being published online without due consideration …

Clinical Legal Education: Energy And Transformation, David J. Herring

Articles

The clinical movement has had a dramatic impact on the nation's law schools. Administrators and faculty members cannot successfully ignore it or wish it away. Instead, they must address it and seek ways to harness its energy. My perspective on this subject stems from my entry into academia as a clinician. I was a faculty member in the University of Michigan's Child Advocacy Law Clinic for three years before joining the faculty at the University of Pittsburgh in 1990 with the charge to create and implement an in-house clinic program. Over the past ten years, I have assisted in the …