Law Commons^™

International Legal Education And Specialist Certification Committee, Mara A. Smith

The Year in Review

No abstract provided.

Law’S Contributions To The Mindfulness Revolution, Elizabeth F. Emens

Utah Law Review

These are phenomenally challenging times. Mindfulness is a tool that can help lawyers support themselves, each other, their clients, and their collaborators in the hard work needed to build community and take action. For these and other reasons, mindfulness has made major inroads into law and legal institutions. Law firms, law schools, and courthouses offer training in mindfulness meditation to support the cognitive clarity and emotional self-regulation necessary for the demanding work of analyzing problems, resolving conflicts, overcoming bias, and doing justice. A growing literature, from empirical social science to legal scholarship, catalogs these and other benefits of mindfulness for …

Board Members, University Of The District Of Columbia Law Review

University of the District of Columbia Law Review

No abstract provided.

Integrating A Racial Capitalism Framework Into First-Year Contracts: A Pathway To Anti-Capitalist Lawyering, Chaumtoli Huq

Journal of Civil Rights and Economic Development

(Excerpt)

Nationwide protests against police brutality in the summer of 2020, coupled with the high rates of COVID-19 deaths among Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC), has brought to the foreground the role of the legal system in upholding structural racism and economic inequality. This renewed focus spotlighted our legal education: what are law schools doing as the institutions that educate future lawyers to be anti-racist, so they can, in turn, create a legal profession that is anti-racist? Being anti-racist is making conscious choices to fight racism in all its forms: individual, interpersonal, institutional, and structural. Being anti-racist also …

The Science Of Legal Synthesis, Jennifer M. Cooper

St. John's Law Review

(Excerpt)

This Article applies scientific research to improve and systematize legal synthesis, a vital element of reasoning that spans legal analysis, legal education, and law practice. Despite its critical role in legal analysis, synthesis is poorly understood, hard to perform, and even harder to describe. Synthesis embodies a hidden curriculum that legal educators expect students to learn “by osmosis.” This lack of transparency frustrates both professor and student, rendering the skill difficult to teach, assess, and master.

This Article provides reliable methodologies to better understand how legal synthesis really works and how to actually perform it. Part I provides a …

The Foundational Skill Of Reflection In The Formation Of A Professional Identity, Neil W. Hamilton

St. Mary's Journal on Legal Malpractice & Ethics

There is a growing scholarly literature on the professional development and formation of law students into the core values, guiding principles, and well-being practices considered foundational to successful legal practice.* This growing scholarly literature can guide effective curriculum development to foster student growth toward later stages of development on these learning outcomes. This Article focuses on the skill of reflection as one of the most effective curricular strategies to foster each student’s growth toward later stages of these learning outcomes. This same curricular strategy will also be effective in engaging practicing lawyers to grow toward these same goals. Part II …

Book Review Of The Way Forward For Legal Education, Stephen Daniels

Journal of Legal Education

No abstract provided.

Actively Achieving Greater Racial Equity In Law School Classrooms, Catherine Bramble, Rory Bahadur

Cleveland State Law Review

2020 illustrated the ongoing pervasiveness of implicit and explicit racism in our society. Less well-acknowledged and recognized is the extent to which Socratic pedagogy also reflects those pervasive racist realities while simultaneously resulting in inferior learning based on a teaching method invented 150+ years ago. Despite this racist and outdated reality, the legal academy has been reluctant to alter the traditional method of teaching. Tangible, empirical evidence obtained from data-driven cognitive learning science research demonstrates that active learning not only improves learning outcomes for all students, but also mitigates the structural effects of racism in the classroom thereby increasing racial …

Law Firm Dynamics: Don’T Hate The Player, Hate The Game, Tom Kimbrough

SMU Law Review Forum

This paper concerns the business of law, a subject ignored by legal academia and sugarcoated by the organized bar. If law professors express little or no interest in this subject, their students most certainly do. Indeed, I have found that students are desperately hungry for information on the day-to-day realities of working in a law firm. Students are especially keen to learn about possible paths for career advancement within firms, across them, or across the organizations served by the firms.

Paths for career advancement do exist, but they are not easy to find or pursue. Law firms are hardly going …

Masthead & Table Of Contents

Dalhousie Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Online Legal Help-Seeking For Victims Of Intimate Partner Violence During The Covid-19 Pandemic, Christina S. Walker

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

Legal, court, and criminal justice professionals regularly navigate court procedures and processes through online portals. They know where to locate applicable court rules, such as a specific section on a court website or a departmental contact. However, these tasks can be extremely daunting for laypersons seeking court assistance, especially for victims of violence who have limited time away from the abuser. To determine how state judicial branches make information available about protective order procedures and general information to a layperson, especially to victims of intimate partner violence, this study assessed court websites of five states where intimate partner violence (IPV) …

The Fate Of Comment 8: Analyzing A Lawyer's Ethical Obligation Of Technological Competence, Lisa Z. Rosenof

University of Cincinnati Law Review

No abstract provided.

Prospects For Legal Analytics: Some Approaches To Extracting More Meaning From Legal Texts, Kevin D. Ashley

University of Cincinnati Law Review

No abstract provided.

How To Protect Special Education During Covid-19: From The Courts To The Capitol, Sarah Coleman

University of Miami Race & Social Justice Law Review

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced students around the country out of brick-and-mortar schools and into virtual classrooms. While the switch to remote learning has helped keep students and teachers safe from contracting the virus, students with disabilities have largely been deprived of a meaningful education and in person services mandated under federal law. This essay will explain how students have been denied a free appropriate public education (FAPE) under the Individuals with Disabilities Act (IDEA), how litigation has been unsuccessful in creating systemic change for these students, and how public policy by U.S. legislators can offer a solution.

Learning Beyond The Classroom: The Case For Establishing An Undergraduate Pre-Law Clinic, Teresa Rivera Bean

University of Baltimore Law Forum

No abstract provided.

From Governance To The Classroom: Rethinking Large-Scale School Reform To Improve Educational Opportunity And Equity, Benjamin M. Superfine Phd, Mark Paige Phd

Cleveland State Law Review

For decades, governmental institutions have focused on improving and equalizing the educational opportunities for students. Courts, legislatures, and chief executive officers at federal and state levels have spearheaded a range of large-scale educational reform efforts, including desegregation, school finance reform, educational improvement for students with disabilities, charter schools, and standards-based accountability systems. However, many assessments of these efforts reflect limited or mixed success. This Article takes a bird’s-eye view examination of not simply why a single type of educational reform has failed to reach its goals in a particular area, but instead at why such efforts have failed to reach …

Arkansas Law Review's 75th Anniversary Remarks, Steve Caple, Erron Smith

Arkansas Law Review

It is an exciting time for the Arkansas Law Review, the School of Law, and the University of Arkansas. The journal is celebrating its 75th anniversary, the law school is approaching its 100th year of existence, and the university recently celebrated its 150th birthday.

Examining The Bar Exam: An Empirical Analysis Of Racial Bias In The Uniform Bar Examination, Scott Devito, Kelsey Hample, Erin Lain

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

The legal profession is among the least diverse in the United States. Given continuing issues of systemic racism, the central position that the justice system occupies in society, and the vital role that lawyers play in that system, it is incumbent upon legal professionals to identify and remedy the causes of this lack of diversity. This Article seeks to understand how the bar examination—the final hurdle to entering the profession— contributes to this dearth of diversity. Using publicly available data, we analyze whether the ethnic makeup of a law school’s entering class correlates to the school’s first-time bar passage rates …

Trek To Triumph, Briaunna Buckner

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

I was screaming in the stairwell of my home, holding a dead baby. The air was so thick that I could barely breathe. Tears were racing down my face as her twin sister, Zola, was screeching at the top of her lungs. “WHY LORD, don't take my baby!” Every emotion, every word, and every second after that moment felt black. All the sweet memories from just eight days of being able to hold her, kiss her, and love her fell in a black pit along with the dreams I had for my life. As I looked down at my sweet …

The Limits Of Law And Ai, Ryan Mccarl

University of Cincinnati Law Review

For thirty years, scholars in the field of law and artificial intelligence (AI) have explored the extent to which lawyers and judges can be assisted by computers. This Article describes the medium-term outlook for AI technologies and explains the obstacles to making legal work computable. I argue that while AI-based software is likely to improve legal research and support human decision making, it is unlikely to replace traditional legal work or otherwise transform the practice of law.

International Legal Education And Specialist Certification, Marissa Moran, Diane Penneys Edelman, Richard Petz-Steele

The Year in Review

No abstract provided.

Book Review Of The Expelled Law Student—A Case Law Survey, Robert Rains

Journal of Legal Education

No abstract provided.

Designing A Fulfilling Life In The Law, Bridgette Carr, Vivek Sankaran, Taylor J. Wilson

Journal of Legal Education

No abstract provided.

Book Review Of The Law Student’S Guide To Doing Well And Being Well, Lawrence Krieger

Journal of Legal Education

No abstract provided.

Reexamining Relative Bar Performance As A Function Of Non-Linearity, Heteroscedasticity, And A New Independent Variable, Rory Bahadur, Kevin Ruth, Katie Tolliver Jones

New Mexico Law Review

One might believe that a law school's graduates doing better on the bar exam than their matriculating credentials predicted must be primarily attributable to the teaching ability and performance of the institution's faculty. Some scholarship makes such a claim. However, it is empirically untrue. Prestidigitation rather than legal pedagogy yields such superficial results. Law schools manipulating their matriculant pools via academic attrition and transfer is the sleight-of- hand that improves their graduates' bar performance rates. This article reveals the math behind the magic.

This article demonstrates that effective pedagogy may not be the only driver of a law school's students …

The Powerpoint Channel, Lynn M. Lopucki

University of Massachusetts Law Review

This Article is the first to present a comprehensive theory and style for using PowerPoint to teach law. The theory is that presentation software adds a channel of communication that enables the use of images in combination with words. Studies have shown that combination to substantially enhance learning. The style is based on an extensive literature regarding the use of PowerPoint in teaching law and other higher education subjects as well as the author’s experimentation with PowerPoint over two decades. The Article states fourteen principles for slide or slide sequence design, provides the arguments from the literature for and against …

How To Train Your Supervisor, Kris Franklin, Paula J. Manning

Pace Law Review

No abstract provided.

Nonlawyers In The Legal Profession: Lessons From The Sunsetting Of Washington's Lllt Program, Lacy Ashworth

Arkansas Law Review

Today, the number of attorneys in the world fails to serve the number of people in need of legal assistance. Approximately sixty percent of law firm partners are baby boomers, meaning those in their mid fifties to early seventies, and twenty-five percent of all lawyers are sixty-five or older. These individuals will predictably retire. Meanwhile, law school costs more than ever. The average law student graduates $160,000 in debt only to enter into the legal profession with an average starting salary of $56,900 in the public sector and $91,200 in the private sector. It is no surprise law schools have …

Not White Enough, Not Black Enough: Reimagining Affirmative Action Jurisprudence In Law School Admissions Through A Filipino-American Paradigm, Joseph D. G. Castro

Pepperdine Law Review

Writing the majority opinion upholding the use of racial preferences in law school admissions in 2003, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor anticipated that racial preferences would no longer be necessary in twenty-five years. On the contrary, 2021 has seen the astronomic rise of critical race theory, the popularity of race-driven “diversity” initiatives in higher education, and the continued surge of identity politics in the mainstream. So much has been written on affirmative action—what else could this Comment add to the conversation? Analyzing the Court’s application of strict scrutiny through a Filipino- American paradigm, this Comment ultimately concludes that affirmative action in …

Reflective Journal: Curricular Deficits, Pedagogical Challenges And Constructing Community In A Non- Traditional Law School Class, Rita A. Sethi

Roger Williams University Law Review

No abstract provided.