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Full-Text Articles in Law
Will Legal Education Change Post-2020?, Heather K. Gerken
Will Legal Education Change Post-2020?, Heather K. Gerken
Michigan Law Review
The famed book review issue of the Michigan Law Review feels like a reminder of better days. As this issue goes to print, a shocking 554,103 people have died of COVID-19 in the United States alone, the country seems to have begun a long-overdue national reckoning on race, climate change and economic inequality continue to ravage the country, and our Capitol was stormed by insurrectionists with the encouragement of the president of the United States. In the usual year, a scholar would happily pick up this volume and delight in its contents. This year, one marvels at the scholars who …
Affirmative Inaction: A Quantitative Analysis Of Progress Toward “Critical Mass” In U.S. Legal Education, Loren M. Lee
Affirmative Inaction: A Quantitative Analysis Of Progress Toward “Critical Mass” In U.S. Legal Education, Loren M. Lee
Michigan Law Review
Since 1978, the Supreme Court has recognized diversity as a compelling government interest to uphold the use of affirmative action in higher education. Yet the constitutionality of the practice has been challenged many times. In Grutter v. Bollinger, for example, the Court denied its use in perpetuity and suggested a twenty-five-year time limit for its application in law school admissions. Almost two decades have passed, so where do we stand? This Note’s quantitative analysis of the matriculation of and degrees awarded to Black and Latinx students at twenty-nine accredited law schools across the United States illuminates a stark lack of …
#Fortheculture: Generation Z And The Future Of Legal Education, Tiffany D. Atkins
#Fortheculture: Generation Z And The Future Of Legal Education, Tiffany D. Atkins
Michigan Journal of Race and Law
Generation Z, with a birth year between 1995 and 2010, is the most diverse generational cohort in U.S. history and is the largest segment of our population. Gen Zers hold progressive views on social issues and expect diversity and minority representation where they live, work, and learn. American law schools, however, are not known for their diversity, or for being inclusive environments representative of the world around us. This culture of exclusion has led to an unequal legal profession and academy, where less than 10 percent of the population is non-white. As Gen Zers bring their demands for inclusion, and …
Incorporating Social Justice Into The 1l Legal Writing Course: A Tool For Empowering Students Of Color And Of Historically Marginalized Groups And Improving Learning, Sha-Shana Crichton
Incorporating Social Justice Into The 1l Legal Writing Course: A Tool For Empowering Students Of Color And Of Historically Marginalized Groups And Improving Learning, Sha-Shana Crichton
Michigan Journal of Race and Law
The media reports of police shootings of unarmed Black men and women; unprovoked attacks on innocent Jews, Muslims, religious minority groups, and LGBTQ persons; and current pervasive, divisive, and misogynistic rhetoric all cause fear and anxiety in impacted communities and frustrate other concerned citizens. Law students, and especially law students of color and of historically marginalized groups, are often directly or indirectly impacted by these reports and discrimination in all its iterations. As a result, they are stressed because they are fearful and anxious. Research shows that stress impairs learning and cognition. Research also shows that beneficial changes are made …
How Cosmopolitan Are International Law Professors?, Ryan Scoville, Milan Markovic
How Cosmopolitan Are International Law Professors?, Ryan Scoville, Milan Markovic
Michigan Journal of International Law
This Article offers an empirical answer to a question of interest among scholars of comparative international law: why do American views about international law appear at times to differ from those of other countries? We contend that part of the answer lies in legal education. Conducting a survey of the educational and professional backgrounds of nearly 150 legal academics, we reveal evidence that professors of international law in the United States often lack significant foreign legal experience, particularly outside of the West. Sociological research suggests that this tendency leads professors to teach international law from predominantly nationalistic and Western perspectives, …
Drawing (Gad)Flies: Thoughts On The Uses (Or Uselessness) Of Legal Scholarship, Sherman J. Clark
Drawing (Gad)Flies: Thoughts On The Uses (Or Uselessness) Of Legal Scholarship, Sherman J. Clark
University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform Caveat
In this essay, I argue that law schools should continue to encourage and support wide-ranging legal scholarship, even if much of it does not seem to be of immediate use to the legal profession. I do not emphasize the relatively obvious point that scholarship is a process through which we study the law so that we can ultimately make useful contributions. Here, rather, I make two more-subtle points. First, legal academics ought to question the priorities of the legal profession, rather than merely take those priorities as given. We ought to serve as Socratic gadflies—challenging rather than merely mirroring regnant …
Peggy Radin, Mentor Extraordinaire, R. Anthony Reese
Peggy Radin, Mentor Extraordinaire, R. Anthony Reese
Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review
I write to celebrate Peggy Radin’s contributions to the legal academy in her role as a mentor. I know that others will speak to her significant scholarly achievements and important contributions across several fields. I want to pay tribute to the substantial time and energy that Peggy has devoted over the course of her career to mentoring students and young academics. I was extremely fortunate to have had a handful of mentors who helped me become a law professor. (I am also extremely fortunate that some of those mentors became generous senior colleagues who occasionally continue to help me navigate …
Trajectory Of A Law Professor, Meera E. Deo
Trajectory Of A Law Professor, Meera E. Deo
Michigan Journal of Race and Law
Women of color are already severely underrepresented in legal academia; as enrollment drops and legal institutions constrict further, race and gender disparities will likely continue to grow. Yet, as many deans and associate deans, most of whom are white, step down from leadership positions during these tumultuous times in legal education, opportunities have arisen for women of color to fill those roles in record numbers. However, there are individual and structural barriers preventing access to the leadership level. Significant hurdles have long prevented women of color from entering law teaching. Thus, this Article provides evidence to support the thesis that …
Letting Go Of Old Ideas, William D. Henderson
Letting Go Of Old Ideas, William D. Henderson
Michigan Law Review
Two recently published books make the claim that the legal profession has changed (Steven Harper’s The Lawyer Bubble: A Profession in Crisis) or is changing (Richard Susskind’s Tomorrow’s Lawyers: An Introduction to Your Future). The books are interesting because they discuss the types of changes that are broad, sweeping, and dramatic. In suitable lawyer fashion, both books are unfailingly analytical. They both also argue that the old order is collapsing. The Lawyer Bubble is backward looking and laments the legacy we have squandered, while Tomorrow’s Lawyers is future oriented and offers fairly specific prescriptive advice, particularly to those lawyers entering …
What Ails The Law Schools?, Paul Horwitz
What Ails The Law Schools?, Paul Horwitz
Michigan Law Review
In January 2012, law professors from across the country arrived in Washington, D.C., for the annual conference of the Association of American Law Schools ("AALS"). It was an opportune moment. The legal economy was struggling. Graduates were begging for jobs and struggling with unprecedented levels of debt. The smart talk from the experts was that the legal economy was undergoing a fundamental restructuring. For these and other reasons, law schools were under fire, from both inside and outside of the academy. Judges - including the keynote speaker at the AALS conference himself! - derided legal scholarship as useless. Law school …
The Crisis In Legal Education: Dabbling In Disaster Planning, Kyle P. Mcentee, Patrick J. Lynch, Derek M. Tokaz
The Crisis In Legal Education: Dabbling In Disaster Planning, Kyle P. Mcentee, Patrick J. Lynch, Derek M. Tokaz
University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform
The legal education crisis has already struck for many recent law school graduates, signaling potential disaster for law schools already struggling with their own economic challenges. Law schools have high fixed costs caused by competition between schools, the unchecked expansion of federal loan programs, a widely exploited information asymmetry about graduate employment outcomes, and a lack of financial discipline masquerading as innovation. As a result, tuition is up, jobs are down, and skepticism of the value of a J.D. has never been higher. If these trends do not reverse course, droves of students will continue to graduate with debt that …
The Crisis Of The American Law School, Paul Campos
The Crisis Of The American Law School, Paul Campos
University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform
The economist Herbert Stein once remarked that if something cannot go on forever, it will stop. Over the past four decades, the cost of legal education in America has seemed to belie this aphorism: it has gone up relentlessly. Private law school tuition increased by a factor of four in real, inflation-adjusted terms between 1971 and 2011, while resident tuition at public law schools has nearly quadrupled in real terms over just the past two decades. Meanwhile, for more than thirty years, the percentage of the American economy devoted to legal services has been shrinking. In 1978 the legal sector …
Becoming A Legal Scholar, Samuel W. Buell
Becoming A Legal Scholar, Samuel W. Buell
Michigan Law Review
What does it take to become a law professor? With the publication of Brannon Denning, Marcia McCormick, and Jeffrey Lipshaw's Becoming a Law Professor: A Candidate's Guide, we can now say-as academics do that there is a literature on this question. Previously, much of the advice on this topic consisted of postings to blogs and other websites, which comprise probably the most detailed set of writings law professors have created in that medium. The arrival of a monograph pulls this body of advice together, organizes it, adds substantially to it, and supplies a handy tool for the kit of any …
The Promise Of Grutter: Diverse Interactions At The University Of Michigan Law School, Meera E. Deo
The Promise Of Grutter: Diverse Interactions At The University Of Michigan Law School, Meera E. Deo
Michigan Journal of Race and Law
In Grutter v. Bollinger, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld affirmative action at the University of Michigan Law School on the grounds of educational diversity. Yet the Court's assumption that admitting diverse students into law school would result in improved race relations, livelier classroom conversations, and better professional outcomes for students has never been empirically tested. This Article relies on survey and focus group data collected at the University of Michigan Lav School campus itself in March 2010 to examine not only whether, but how diversity affects learning. The data indicate both that there are sufficient numbers of students of color …
Teaching Whren To White Kids, M. K.B. Darmer
Teaching Whren To White Kids, M. K.B. Darmer
Michigan Journal of Race and Law
This Article addresses issues at the intersection of United States v. Whren and Grutter v. Bollinger at a time when the reality of racial profiling was recently illustrated by the high-profile arrest of a prominent Harvard professor. Given the highly racialized nature of criminal procedure, there is a surprising dearth of writing about the unique problems of teaching issues such as racial profiling in racially homogeneous classrooms. Because African American and other minority students often experience the criminal justice system in radically different ways than do Whites, the lack of minority voices poses a significant barrier to effectively teaching criminal …
Against Practice, Anthony V. Alfieri
Against Practice, Anthony V. Alfieri
Michigan Law Review
This Review examines the theory/practice dichotomy in legal education through the prism of the Carnegie Foundation's Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law. Descriptively, it argues that the Foundation's investigation of law school curricular deficiencies in the areas of clinical-lawyer skills, professionalism, and public service overlooks the relevance of critical pedagogies in teaching students how to deal with difference-based identity and how to build cross-cultural community in diverse, multicultural practice settings differentiated by mutable and immutable characteristics such as class, gender, and race. Prescriptively, it argues that the Foundation's remedial call for the curricular integration of clinical lawyer …
Without Color Of Law: The Losing Race Against Colorblindness In Michigan, Khaled Ali Beydoun
Without Color Of Law: The Losing Race Against Colorblindness In Michigan, Khaled Ali Beydoun
Michigan Journal of Race and Law
This Essay examines affirmative action, while discussing its fall in California, Washington State, and ultimately Michigan.
Negative Action Versus Affirmative Action: Asian Pacific Americans Are Still Caught In The Crossfire, William C. Kidder
Negative Action Versus Affirmative Action: Asian Pacific Americans Are Still Caught In The Crossfire, William C. Kidder
Michigan Journal of Race and Law
The author concludes that Espenshade and Chung's inattention to the distinction between negative action and affirmative action effectively marginalizes APAs and contributes to a skewed and divisive public discourse about affirmative action, one in which APAs are falsely portrayed as conspicuous adversaries of diversity in higher education. The author will also argue that there is ample reason to be concerned about the harmful effects of divisive and empirically unsupported claims about APAs influencing the public debate over affirmative action, particularly in Michigan, where an anti-affirmative action initiative nearly identical to California's Proposition 209 will appear on the November 2006 ballot. …
Cambridge Law School For Women: The Evolution And Legacy Of The Nation's First Graduate Law School Exclusively For Women, Nina A. Kohn
Cambridge Law School For Women: The Evolution And Legacy Of The Nation's First Graduate Law School Exclusively For Women, Nina A. Kohn
Michigan Journal of Gender & Law
Although several scholars have briefly discussed CLSW in conjunction with work on other subjects, this Article presents the first comprehensive history of the school. The Article begins in Section Two by exploring how and why CLSW came into being in 1915 after two young Radcliffe suffragists led an unsuccessful campaign for admission to Harvard Law School. Section Three examines the design, pedagogical foundations, and day-to-day workings of the school during its first two years. Sections Four and Five explore the historical events that led to CLSW's closure in 1917. These sections also document and discuss the school's subsequent, and previously …
Dealing With Hate In The Feminist Classroom: Re-Thinking The Balance, Kathryn M. Stanchi
Dealing With Hate In The Feminist Classroom: Re-Thinking The Balance, Kathryn M. Stanchi
Michigan Journal of Gender & Law
The goals of this essay are two-fold. First, by describing the experience the author had in Law and Feminism, the essay will show how hateful and harassing speech in a seminar devoted to issues of gender, race and sexuality can rob students of important educational experiences. The story of the author’s class is meant to remind legal educators and administrators of the concrete harm, both personal and educational, of hate speech. Too often the hate speech debate focuses on the theoretical and the abstract; participants forget that the principles at stake have demonstrable consequences for real people. Second, while this …
The Sacred Way Of Tibetan Crt Kung Fu: Can Race Crits Teach The Shadow's Mystical Insight And Help Law Students "Know" White Structural Oppression In The Heart Of The First-Year Curriculum? A Critical Rejoinder To Dorothy A. Brown, Reginald Leamon Robinson
The Sacred Way Of Tibetan Crt Kung Fu: Can Race Crits Teach The Shadow's Mystical Insight And Help Law Students "Know" White Structural Oppression In The Heart Of The First-Year Curriculum? A Critical Rejoinder To Dorothy A. Brown, Reginald Leamon Robinson
Michigan Journal of Race and Law
Part I of this Article uses a quasi-parable, in which Dorothy Brown is a Tibetan Master who teaches law students CRT Kung Fu, the monastic fighting skills by which they will acquire the Shadow's mystical insight to "know" the heart of the first-year curriculum. Part II challenges the organizing principles and content on which Brown's Critical Race Theory purports to critically interrogate traditional legal doctrine, applying a New Age Philosophical critique as well as agency theory to crack dealing in Spanish Harlem. I use this case study to argue that crack dealers deliberately and purposefully choose extra-legal economic opportunities, even …
Prologue: Brief Of Amici Curiae On Behalf Of A Committee Of Concerned Black Graduates Of Aba Accredited Law Schools: Vicky L. Beasley, Devon W. Carbado, Tasha L. Cooper, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Luke Charles Harris, Shavar Jeffries, Sidney Majalya, Wanda R. Stansbury, Jory Steele, Et Al., In Support Of Respondents, Luke Charles Harris
Michigan Journal of Race and Law
The brief of Amici Curiae on Behalf of a Committee of Concerned Black Graduates of ABA Accredited Law Schools in Grutter v. Bollinger was written so as to intervene and to assist in the refraining of the public debate surrounding minority admissions programs in institutions of higher education.
Brief Of Amici Curiae On Behalf Of A Committee Of Concerned Black Graduates Of Aba Accredited Law Schools: Vicky L. Beasley, Devon W. Carbado, Tasha L. Cooper, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Luke Charles Harris, Shavar Jeffries, Sidney Majalya, Wanda R. Stansbury, Jory Steele, Et Al., In Support Of Respondents, Mary Mack Adu Esq.
Michigan Journal of Race and Law
In the Supreme Court of the United States. Barbara Grutter V. Lee Bollinger
Breaking Into The Academy: The 2002-2004 Michigan Journal Of Race & Law Guide For Aspiring Law Professors, Gabriel J. Chin, Denise C. Morgan
Breaking Into The Academy: The 2002-2004 Michigan Journal Of Race & Law Guide For Aspiring Law Professors, Gabriel J. Chin, Denise C. Morgan
Michigan Journal of Race and Law
Guidance for individuals interested in becoming law professors.
"I Will Not Sit Idly By While My Future Is Determined:" The Response Of The University Of Michigan Black Law Students' Alliance To Grutter V. Bollinger, Et Al., The Black Law Students' Alliance
"I Will Not Sit Idly By While My Future Is Determined:" The Response Of The University Of Michigan Black Law Students' Alliance To Grutter V. Bollinger, Et Al., The Black Law Students' Alliance
Michigan Journal of Gender & Law
Back in 1998, the Michigan Journal of Gender & Law expressed support for the University of Michigan Law School's defense of its affirmative action policy, which is at controversy in Grutter v. Bollinger. Today, as in 1998, "[W]e certainly do not believe the Law School admissions policy truly addresses the inequalities within our law school and the legal profession generally. Legal education is unfortunately not a bastion of diversity." Women and students of color struggle to be heard and seen, and to achieve equal representation in both the study and practice of law. "Without active efforts, we cannot create …
The Logician Versus The Linguist- An Empirical Tale Of Functional Discrimination In The Legal Academy, Andrea Kayne Kaufman
The Logician Versus The Linguist- An Empirical Tale Of Functional Discrimination In The Legal Academy, Andrea Kayne Kaufman
Michigan Journal of Gender & Law
This paper, focusing exclusively on gender, asks whether male and female law students express different preferences for logic-based learning models. A wide variety of educational theories and other theories have been used to conceptualize different learning preferences among law students but until now, none has focused on logical intelligence compared with the other intelligences. Using Harvard educational psychologist Howard Gardner's theory of Multiple Intelligences, this paper describes an empirical study establishing that male and female law students express differences in preferring logical intelligence over the other intelligences. This paper introduces the concept of "functional discrimination," addressing the ways in which …
Silence And Silencing: Their Centripetal And Centrifugal Forces In Legal Communication, Pedagogy And Discourse, Margaret E. Montoya
Silence And Silencing: Their Centripetal And Centrifugal Forces In Legal Communication, Pedagogy And Discourse, Margaret E. Montoya
University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform
Language and voice have been subjects of great interest to scholars working in the areas of Critical Race Theory and Latina/o Critical Legal Theory. Silence, a counterpart of voice, has not, however, been well theorized. This Article is an invitation to attend to silence and silencing. The first part of the Article argues that one's use of silence is an aspect of communication that, like accents, is related to one's culture and may correlate with one's racial identity. The second part of the Article posits that silence can be a force that disrupts the dominant discourse within the law school …
Some Observations On Teaching From The "Pioneer" Generation, James E. Jones Jr.
Some Observations On Teaching From The "Pioneer" Generation, James E. Jones Jr.
Michigan Journal of Race and Law
A paper from the perspective of the "pioneer" generation.
The Compelling Need For Diversity In Higher Education, Michigan Journal Of Race & Law
The Compelling Need For Diversity In Higher Education, Michigan Journal Of Race & Law
Michigan Journal of Race and Law
The University of Michigan has brought together a team of leading scholars to serve as its experts in these cases to establish the basis for the University's argument that there is a compelling need for diversity in higher education. Their research is evidence that the use of race in higher education admissions is not only constitutional, but of vital importance to education and to our society.
Expert Report Of Thomas J. Sugrue, Thomas J. Sugrue
Expert Report Of Thomas J. Sugrue, Thomas J. Sugrue
Michigan Journal of Race and Law
At the end of the twentieth century, the United States is a remarkably diverse society. It grows more diverse by the day, transformed by an enormous influx of immigrants from Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia. In an increasingly global economy, Americans are coming into contact with others of different cultures to an extent seen only in times of world war. Yet amidst this diversity remains great division. When the young black academic W.E.B. DuBois looked out onto America in 1903, he memorably proclaimed that "the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line." Over …