Law Commons^™

The Futures Of Law, Lawyers, And Law Schools: A Dialogue, Sameer M. Ashar, Benjamin H. Barton, Michael J. Madison, Rachel F. Moran

Articles

On April 19 and 20, 2023, Professors Bernard Hibbitts and Richard Weisberg convened a conference at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law titled “Disarmed, Distracted, Disconnected, and Distressed: Modern Legal Education and the Unmaking of American Lawyers.” Four speakers concluded the event with a spirited conversation about themes expressed during the proceedings. Distilling a lively two days, they asked: what are the most critical challenges now facing US legal education and, by extension, lawyers and the communities they serve? Their agreements and disagreements were striking, so much so that Professors Hibbitts and Weisberg invited those four to extend their …

Caring For The Souls Of Our Students: The Evolution Of A Community Economic Development Clinic During Turbulent Times, Gowri J. Krishna, Kelly Pfeifer, Dana Thompson

Articles

Community Economic Development (CED) clinicians regularly address issues surrounding economic, racial, and social justice, as those are the core principles motivating their work to promote vibrant, diverse, and sustainable communities. When COVID-19 arrived, and heightened attention to police brutality and racial injustice ensued, CED clinicians focused not only on how to begin to address these issues in their clinics, but on how to discuss these issues more deeply and effectively with their students. This essay highlights the ways in which the pandemic school year influenced significant rethinking of one CED clinic’s operations: first, the pandemic sharpened the clinic’s mission to …

How I Finally Overcame My Apprehension About Peer Review, Beth H. Wilensky

Articles

I’ll admit it: I was afraid to try peer review in my Legal Practice class. I’ve been teaching legal analysis, writing, and research for 17 years. I know all of the benefits of peer review. I’ve read plenty of scholarship about why and how to do it well. I have space in my syllabus to incorporate it into my teaching. But I’ve been reluctant. I worried that students would be averse to sharing their work with a classmate. I worried that the exercise would embarrass students who felt self-conscious about their writing. And I worried that the truly excellent writers …

Transferability: Helping Students And Attorneys Apply What They Already Know To New Situations (Part 2), Edward R. Becker

Articles

Part 1 of this column (January 2019) described several ways that professors and supervisors can help young attorneys transfer their knowledge of legal skills and legal practice to new situations. The pedagogical techniques discussed in Part 1 look forward, helping novice lawyers make connections between what they learn today and how to put those lessons into play tomorrow. This month’s column changes direction. Successful knowledge transfer also looks to the past. When young lawyers and law students are introduced to what might first appear to be brand-new legal skills, their ability to quickly make sense of that new information is …

Rick's Taxonomy, Mary Crossley

Articles

This Essay uses the influential educational work Bloom’s Taxonomy as a jumping-off point for exploring how Rick Matasar’s scholarship relating to leadership in and the goals of legal education provides a guide for identifying, prioritizing and pursuing the core values and objectives of the legal education enterprise in a time of profound change. This Essay briefly describes Bloom’s Taxonomy and its status in the educational literature. Then it highlights two ways that Matasar’s leadership scholarship displays kinship to Bloom’s Taxonomy. His approach to describing a problem, analyzing its nature, and synthesizing and evaluating possible responses to the problem is …

Foreword Snx 2014: Challenges To Justice Education: South-North Perspectives, Sheila I. Velez Martinez

Articles

“Towards an Education for Justice: South North Perspectives” was the theme of the XI LatCrit South North Exchange on Theory, Culture and Law, convened at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia in 2014. Scholars, students and activists from more than 10 countries encompassing the Global South and Global North engaged in a critical and animated exchange on the changing space of legal studies and how this change can be stirred towards acknowledging the need to integrate a concern for justice as part of legal education. The premise of the Conference was that the dominant model of legal education, …

Preparing For Service: A Template For 21st Century Legal Education, Michael J. Madison

Articles

Legal educators today grapple with the changing dynamics of legal employment markets; the evolution of technologies and business models driving changes to the legal profession; and the economics of operating – and attending – a law school. Accrediting organizations and practitioners pressure law schools to prepare new lawyers both to be ready to practice and to be ready for an ever-fluid career path. From the standpoint of law schools in general and any one law school in particular, constraints and limitations surround us. Adaptation through innovation is the order of the day.

How, when, and in what direction should innovation …

The Technology Of Law, Bernard J. Hibbitts

Articles

This paper argues that contemporary fascination with the law of technology (IP, cyberlaw, etc.) has led us to overlook the fundamental impact of the "technology of law," and offers suggestions for creating "neterate" lawyers more comfortable with and cognizant of technology itself. The author describes how the legal news service JURIST implements many of these suggestions and provides a unique learning experience for its law student staffers.

Another Voice For The 'Dialogue': Federal Courts As A Litigation Course, Arthur D. Hellman

Articles

The traditional course in "Federal Courts" - built on the model established by the great Hart and Wechsler casebook - focuses on issues of federalism, separation of powers, and institutional competence. That focus provides a powerful intellectual model for organizing the materials that make up the field of study, and it is hard to imagine anyone teaching a Federal Courts course today without drawing heavily on that model. But the traditional model is deficient in one important respect. Most of the students who take a Federal Courts course do so because they think it will help them to practice law …