Law Commons^™

Hot Topics Under The First Amendment, George Bach

Faculty Teaching Resources

No abstract provided.

Guidelines For The Self Evaluation Of Legal Education Clinics And Clinical Programs, J.P. "Sandy" Ogilvy

Scholarly Articles

This volume is an effort to present a comprehensive set of guidelines for the self-evaluation of legal clinics and programs. The last time that guidelines were developed for legal clinics was in 1980 when a joint AALS and ABA Committee on Guidelines for Clinical Legal Education published its Guidelines for Clinical Legal Education. The present guidelines trace their lineage to the efforts of a group of clinicians working under the auspices of the CLEA-AALS Section on Clinical Legal Education Joint Task Force on Clinical Standards, which was formed in 1995 and was active for several years. These guidelines also draw …

Narrowing The Gap Between Rights And Resources: Finding A Role For Law Students In Court-Annexed Resource Centers, Faith Mullen

Scholarly Articles

This article relates the experience of law students from The Catholic University of America providing assistance in the Small Claims Resource Center during the past eight years. During this time, the District of Columbia Bar Pro Bono Program has played a pivotal role in the development and the ongoing success of court-annexed resource centers in the District of Columbia. They have recruited law firms and legal services providers (including law school clinics) to staff the resource centers, sought changes in the rules of professional responsibility, and developed intake forms and model pleadings. Their steady oversight, provided by knowledgeable and resourceful …

The U.S. Supreme Court Fellows Program; The Opportunity Of A Lifetime, S. I. Strong

Faculty Publications

One reason why the Supreme Court Fellowship is one of the best-kept secrets in Washington, D.C., is its size. Unlike the White House Fellows program, which invites 12 people to join its ranks each year, and the Congressional Fellows program, which has over 30 participants annually, the Supreme Court accepts only four extremely talented individuals into its Fellows program each year. Every fall, these fortunate few begin a 12-month journey that offers them an unparalleled opportunity to observe and participate in the work of the federal judiciary at the highest levels.

Review Essay: Bilingual Legal Education In The United States: An Idea Whose Time Has Come, S. I. Strong

Faculty Publications

The long-standing and close connection among law, language and the state has traditionally led law schools to provide legal education in a single language. Indeed, bilingual legal education could in some cases be viewed as potentially contrary to state interests, given that "[t]he main instrument of nation-building is the imposition of a common state language. Indeed, bilingual legal education could in some cases be viewed as potentially contrary to state interests, given that "[t]he main instrument of nation-building is the imposition of a common state language."' However, the historical model of monolingual legal education may be in jeopardy. For example, …

The Future Of Legal Education: Three Visions And A Prediction, Harry W. Arthurs

Articles & Book Chapters

In this article, the author examines three visions of the future of law schools. The first vision is that they should focus on producing "practice ready lawyers" to meet the immediate needs of today's legal profession. The second is that law schools should focus on training "tomorrow's lawyers, "graduates who are able to adapt to a rapidly-changing world. The third insists that law schools are knowledge communities whose many functions include, but are not limited to, providing students with a large and liberal understanding of law that will prepare them for a variety of legal and non-legal careers and for …

Student, Esquire?: The Practice Of Law In The Collaborative Classroom, Nantiya Ruan

Scholarly Works

Law faculty and non-profit lawyers are working together in a variety of partnerships to offer students exposure to "real life" clients in the first year of law school, as well as in advanced courses in substantive areas. Teachers engaged in this client-centered advocacy through experiential frameworks have broken out of their isolated silos in the law school (e.g., legal writing, clinical, externship, and doctrinal) and begun to work together. To help students develop a sense of professional identity, cultivate professional values, and tap into key intrinsic motivations for lawyering, such as serving the public good, collaborative classrooms have an important …

Teaching Legal History Through Legal Skills., Howard Bromberg

Book Chapters

I revolve my legal history courses around one methodology: teaching legal history by means of legal skills. I draw on my experience teaching legal practice and clinical skills courses to assign briefs and oral arguments as a means for law students to immerse themselves in historical topics. Without distracting from other approaches, I framed this innovation as teaching legal history not to budding historians but to budding lawyers.

The Improbable Birth And Conceivable Death Of The Securities Arbitration Clinic, Jill I. Gross

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

This Article explores the birth, life, and possible death of securities arbitration clinics (SACs) in the United States. Part II of this Article describes the history of the securities arbitration clinic in the United States. Part III describes how a SAC operates and how SAC students help investors. Part IV reviews the pedagogical advantages and disadvantages of a SAC, and addresses the reluctance of many law schools to embrace this type of clinic. Part V concludes by predicting whether these clinics have a future in light of the modern challenges to clinical legal education.

The Professor And The Judge: Introducing First Year Students To The Law In Context, Michael B. Mushlin, Lisa Margaret Smith

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

For the past five years the authors, one a law professor, and the other a federal judge, have joined forces to teach introductory civil procedure to first semester first year students. Our approach is contrary to the traditional theory of legal instruction which holds that students learn first by a rigid diet of Socratic teaching of the fundamentals of legal analysis without any exposure to the real world or even a simulation of it. The central idea behind our experiment is that at the beginning of law school it is essential to provide a contextual introduction to the work of …

Accessing Law: An Empirical Study Exploring The Influence Of Legal Research Medium, Katrina Fischer Kuh

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

The legal profession is presently engaged in an uncontrolled experiment. Attorneys now locate and access legal authorities primarily through electronic means. Although this shift to an electronic research medium radically changes how attorneys discover and encounter law, little empirical work investigates impacts from the shift to an electronic medium.

This Article presents the results of one of the most robust empirical studies conducted to date comparing research processes using print and electronic sources. While the study presented in this Article was modest in scope, the extent and type of the differences that it reveals are notable. Some of the observed …

Breaking Glass: Identity, Community And Epistemology In Theory, Law And Education, Francisco Valdes

Articles

No abstract provided.

Experience The Future Of Legal Education, Lorne Sossin

Articles & Book Chapters

This article examines the shift towards experiential legal education and its implications. While others have focused on experiential education as a means of training better lawyers, the author advances the argument for experiential education because it is rooted in substantive problem-solving, access to justice, engagement with communities, and greater opportunities for reflective and critical thinking about law and justice. Drawing on examples from Osgoode Hall Law School, which adopted an experiential curricular requirement in 2012, the article explores the ways in which experiential education may change law school and law students. The article also canvasses the implications of the experiential …

Mindful Ethics - A Pedagogical And Practical Approach To Teaching Legal Ethics, Developing Professional Identity, And Encouraging Civility, Jan L. Jacobowitz, Scott L. Rogers

Articles

Aristotle spoke of virtue and ethics as a combination of practical wisdom and habituation-an individual must learn from the application of critical reasoning skills to experience. Perhaps one of the earliest proclamations of the value of experiential learning, the Aristotelian view, reappears throughout history and is captured once again by the Carnegie Foundation's Report on Legal Education, which includes a call for instruction that provides practical skills and ethical grounding to complement the teaching of legal analysis. The Carnegie Report continues to play a role in the ongoing discussion of the need to reform legal education; a debate that is …

Cultivating Professional Identity & Creating Community: A Tale Of Two Innovations, Jan L. Jacobowitz

Articles

No abstract provided.

Testing, Discrimination, And Opportunity: A Reply To Professor Harvey Gilmore, Dan Subotnik

Scholarly Works

This article was written as part of an ongoing dialog about the author’s previous article, "Does Testing = Race Discrimination?: Ricci, The Bar Exam, the LSAT, and the Challenge to Learning," which defended the Supreme Court’s decision in Ricci v. DeStefano, as well as defending testing more generally against charges of irrelevance, racial obtuseness, and most seriously, race discrimination.

This article specifically responds to an article written by Professor Harvey Gilmore which focuses mostly on the SAT and the LSAT.

Toward A Critical Corporate Law Pedagogy And Scholarship, André Ddouglas Pond Cummings, Steven A. Ramirez, Cheryl L. Wade

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

In recent years, the publicly held corporation has assumed a central position in both the economic and political spheres of American life. Economically, the public corporation has long acted as the key institution within American capitalism. Politically, the public corporation now can use its economic might to sway electoral outcomes as never before. Indeed, individuals who control public firms wield more economic power and political power today than ever before. These truths profoundly shape American society. The power, control, and role of the public corporation under law and regulation, therefore, hold more importance than ever before.

Even though corporate …

Twenty Years After The Education Apocalypse: The Ongoing Fall Out From The 1994 Omnibus Crime Bill, Spearit, Mary Gould

Articles

This essay is an introduction to the 2013 National Conference on Higher Education in Prison, organized by the Saint Louis University Prison Program. It is a primer on the current state of higher education in prison, which provides a social-legal framework for the conference and the symposium essays that follow. Beginning with the recent history of the exponential growth of incarceration in the past four decades, it charts the unprecedented reliance on incarceration that, at present, distinguishes the country as a world-class punisher. It was in the middle of this shift that the 1994 Omnibus Crime Bill was born, which …

Experiential Education As Critical Pedagogy: Enhancing The Law School Experience, Spearit, Stephanie Ledesma

Articles

This article examines the shift to greater experiential education in law school through the lens of critical pedagogy. At its base, critical pedagogy is about devising more equitable methods of teaching, helping students develop consciousness of freedom, and helping them connect knowledge to power. The insights of critical pedagogy are valuable for a fuller understanding of experiential education and its potential to affect students in profound ways, particularly as a means of empowerment. Although this is an understudied area of pedagogical scholarship, power relations are at the heart of legal education. Critical pedagogy offers a frame for considering how experiential …

The American Legal Profession In The Twenty-First Century, Stephen M. Sheppard

Faculty Articles

Lawyers in the United States work in public service, private counseling, and dispute resolution, but many also work outside of traditional legal practice. The million-member American bar, second largest in the world, grows more diverse by gender, and ethnicity and older on average. All members of this learned profession must qualify by education or examination and by proof of good character and fitness before taking an oath to serve as an attorney. Thence, there are few limitations on the form of legal practice, though many law firms require an associateship before an attorney becomes an owner of the firm. Economic …

The Sincerest Form Of Flattery: Examples And Model-Based Learning In The Law School Classroom, Terrill Pollman

Scholarly Works

Responding to a changing landscape of law practice, law schools are searching for ways to structure the classroom experience and broader curriculum to promote more efficient and better learning outcomes. Although imitation, modeling, and the use of examples have become pre-eminent features of modern legal education, these pedagogies have remained largely unexamined. This article shows the power of teaching with examples in both the traditional and legal writing classroom, as well as how skillfully to limit the use of such pedagogy for maximum effect. Specifically, this article applies the findings of cognitive load research and composition theory to show that …

Honors Convocation, University Of Michigan Law School

Commencement and Honors Materials

Program for the May 9, 2014 University of Michigan Law School Honors Convocation.

Analyzing Carnegie’S Reach: The Contingent Nature Of Innovation, Stephen Daniels, Martin J. Katz, William Sullivan

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

Our interest is curricular innovation, with a focus on the recommendations of the 2007 Carnegie report – Educating Lawyers. Recognizing that meaningful reform requires an institutional commitment, our interest also includes initiatives in the areas of faculty development and faculty incentive structure that would support curricular innovation. Additionally, we are curious as to what might explain change and whether certain school characteristics will do so or whether external factors that challenge legal education offer an explanation. To explore these issues we surveyed law schools (a 60.5% response rate). The results show that while there is much activity in the area …

Preparing Law Students To Become Litigators In The New Legal Landscape, Paul Radvany

Faculty Scholarship

The legal world has undergone rapid change over the past few years and law schools and law students are in the midst of adjusting to this new legal landscape. Employers increasingly want to hire students who are ready to practice. As a law student, I participated in an externship, simulation classes, and an in-house, live-client litigation clinic; as a professor, I have taught all three types of classes. 1 My experience, first as a law student, then as a litigator, and now as a professor, has taught me the importance and educational value of experiential learning in helping law students …

Balancing Between Two Worlds: A Dakota Woman’S Reflections On Being A Law Professor, Angelique Eaglewoman

Faculty Scholarship

There were many paths I considered as a young woman and none of them included becoming a law professor. My journey to my present life as a Dakota woman law professor is about balancing between the worlds I travel back and forth in. There is my tribal world, where I feel replenished and part of an on-going community experience stretching back to time immemorial. I feel that I am part of an unfolding history of endurance, strong Native women, and a participant in sustaining our traditional Native ways. On the other hand, there is the non-Indian world, where I often …

Adapting To Change In The Legal Profession, Janet Levit, Valerie K. Couch, Joseph Harroz Jr.

Articles, Chapters in Books and Other Contributions to Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Pragmatic Liberalism: The Outlook Of The Dead, Justin Desautels-Stein

Publications

At the turn of the twentieth century, the legal profession was rocked in a storm of reform. Among the sparks of change was the view that "law in the books" had drifted too far from the "law in action." This popular slogan reflected the broader postwar suspicion that the legal profession needed to be more realistic, more effective, and more in touch with the social needs of the time. A hundred years later, we face a similarly urgent demand for change. Across the blogs and journals stretches a thread of anxieties about the lack of fit between legal education and …

Internships As Invisible Labor, Melissa Hart

Publications

No abstract provided.

The Story Behind A Letter In Support Of Professor Derrick Bell, Cheryl Nelson Butler, Sherrilyn Ifill, Suzette Malveaux, Margaret E. Montoya, Natsu Taylor Saito, Nareissa L. Smith, Tanya Washington

Publications

Professor Derrick A. Bell, Jr. had a long and proud history of disturbing authority. He is widely noted as one of the founders of Critical Race Theory. His scholarship on race was not only a direct challenge to the traditionally conservative legal academy, but also to the more liberal bastions within the academy, such as the Critical Legal Studies movement. His writings about the role of race in American law have made him one of the most prominent legal scholars of a generation.

However, Professor Bell did not merely write about racial injustices. He was willing to take risks to …

Tax Recognition, Barry Cushman

Journal Articles

This article was prepared for the St. Louis University Law Journal’s “Teaching Trusts & Estates” issue. Many law students take a course in Trusts & Estates, but comparatively few enroll in a class devoted to the federal wealth transfer taxes. For most law students, the Trusts & Estates course provides the only opportunity for exposure to some of the basic features of the estate tax, the gift tax, the generation-skipping transfer tax, and some related features of the income tax. The coverage demands of the typical Trusts & Estates course do not allow for intensive discussion of these issues, but …