Law Commons^™

Externships As A Vehicle For Teaching Access To Justice, Spring Miller

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

As a relatively new externship instructor, I spend a lot of time thinking about externships – what they mean for our students, what they add to the clinical curriculum and law school curriculum more broadly, and how best to conceptualize and make the most of these courses that constitute one of the most prevalent forms of experiential legal education.

Thanks to the work of experienced externship instructors and scholars, there are now a number of resources and articles exploring externships’ promise in promoting student learning with regard to lawyering skills and professional development. I have relied on many of these …

Comparing United States And New Zealand Legal Education: Are U.S. Law Schools Too Good?, Gregory S. Crespi

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

This Article offers a thoughtful comparison of the legal educational systems of the United States and New Zealand. The author highlights the significant differences between these two legal educational systems by contrasting their admissions policies, clinical programs, "law-and-economics" electives, and staffing of required courses. Based on this analysis, the author concludes that although U.S. law schools are clearly "better," such superiority may have been achieved at too high of a cost, in terms of both the substantial resources now devoted to legal education which could otherwise be applied to alternative uses and the problematic effects of the stratified legal educational …