Law Commons^™

True North: Navigating For The Transfer Of Learning In Legal Education, Tonya Kowalski

Seattle University Law Review

As lifelong learners, we all know the feelings of discomfort and bewilderment that can come from being asked to apply existing skills in a completely new situation. As legal educators, we have also experienced the frustration that comes from watching our students struggle to identify and transfer skills from one learning environment to another. For example, a first-semester law student who learns to analogize case law to a fact pattern in a legal writing problem typically will not see the deeper applications for those skills in a law school essay exam several weeks later. Similarly, when law students learn how …

The Educational Pipeline To Law School—Too Broken And Too Narrow To Provide Diversity, Sarah E. Redfield

The University of New Hampshire Law Review

[Excerpt] “The legal profession remains markedly out of sync with the changing demographics of the country, where the population is projected to be over 50 percent minority by 2050. Against this trend, law school enrollment hovers around 20 percent minority, including over 7 percent Asian students. Enrollment of some minority groups shows a decline rather than improvement. These numbers will remain static or continue to decline if the profession does not pay far more serious attention to the current leaks and gaps along the educational pipeline, far before students seek admission at the law school gates.”

Is Our Students Learning?: Using Assessments To Measure And Improve Law School Learning, Rogelio Lasso

Rogelio A. Lasso

Is Our Students Learning?: Using Assessments to Measure and Improve Law School Learning

Using Assessments to Improve Student Performance

Rogelio A. Lasso

The primary role of a law school is to make sure students learn skills to become competent lawyers. Learning is a loop in which the teacher facilitates learning, students perform tasks to show what they have learned, the teacher assesses and provides feedback on students’ performance, and students use the feedback to improve their learning skills for the next learning task. Teacher assessment feedback is critical to student learning. Prompt and frequent feedback allows students to take control …

Teaching With Emotion: Enriching The Educational Experience Of First-Year Law Students, Grant H. Morris

Grant H Morris

Through the case method and Socratic dialogue, first year law students are taught to develop critical legal analytic skills–to “think like a lawyer.” Those skills, however, are primarily, if not entirely, intellectual. This article discusses the need to address emotional issues in educating law students. Unlike other articles, my article does not merely urge professors to raise such issues in their classes and discuss them analytically. Rather, I want students to actually experience emotion in the classroom setting as they discuss various fact situations and the legal principles involved in the resolution of disputes involving those facts. Law students need …

One L Revisited: Tales From The Back Bench, Robert R.M. Verchick

Robert R.M. Verchick

My move to Harvard Law was an exciting, but sometimes frustrating transition. The law school community was large and anonymous, the famous Bauhaus dormitories (designed by Walter Gropius) part Habitrail and part shoebox factory, the eyes of campus administrators a baleful gray. I had come with a bachelor's degree in English (English!) from a west coast univer-sity that called itself “the Farm,” a campus known for fragrant eucalyptus and a pride of lion-colored hills. Harvard Law was certainly no “Farm,” and to my eye it was no “Hundred-Acre Wood” either. Whimsy? Forget it. . . .

Exporting Legal Education: Lessons Learned From Efforts In Transition Countries, Ronald A. Brand

Articles

A convergence of inward and outward-looking processes in US law schools creates both risk and potential reward in the development of legal education. As law faculties engage in the current process of changing the traditional law school curriculum, they should carefully coordinate a desire for internal goals with an understanding of external impact, realizing that this process is likely to affect not just US law schools, but legal education across the globe. Changes in the curriculum at US law schools should be responsive, not only to concerns about the legal marketplace in the United States, but also to the impact …