Law Commons^™

Culture Clash: Teaching Cultural Defenses In The Criminal Law Classroom, Susan S. Kuo

Faculty Publications

In the law school classroom, the Socratic method of legal analysis removes a dispute at issue in a given case from its sociocultural context and takes the cultural backgrounds of the parties into account only when they serve the legal argument. The language of the law commands law students to siphon off the emotional and cultural content because of the enduring belief that the law is neutral and impartial. Accordingly, cultural conflicts are deemed irrelevant to legal analysis because laws are unbiased and culture-blind. This detached outlook has been termed perpectivelessness to denote a neutral, odorless, colorless non-perspective.

This essay …

Reflection-In-Action: Lessons Learned From New Clinicians, Justine A. Dunlap, Peter A. Joy

Faculty Publications

Clinical legal education focuses on reflective learning, yet data collected from newer clinical faculty reveal that few schools offer training to assist new clinicians in understanding and incorporating reflective learning techniques as they make the transition from law practice to clinical law teaching. To the extent that training is offered to newer faculty, it may range from ad hoc guidance and informal mentoring to more deliberate programs, which may include periodic meetings devoted primarily to discussing clinical methodology, teaching techniques, and other issues important to newer clinical faculty. Although informal and unstructured approaches to training new clinical faculty may well …

Damages: Using A Case Study To Teach Law, Dispute Resolution, And Lawyering , Melody Richardson Daily, Chris Guthrie, Leonard L. Riskin

Faculty Publications

Seven law school faculty members and one practicing attorney recently developed and taught a wholly new kind of law course based on an already published case study, Damages: One Family's Legal Struggles in the World of Medicine, by Barry Werth, an investigative reporter who spent several years researching to write the book. Damages, an in-depth account of a medical malpractice case, presents the perspectives of the injured family, the defendant physician, the lawyers, and the three mediators. In this Symposium Introduction, the authors provide a summary of Werth's book, explain why they decided to create a course based on his …