Law Commons^™

Tribute To Professor Jonathan L. Entin, Sharona Hoffman

Faculty Publications

Tribute to Professor Jonathan Entin.

How To Think (Like A Lawyer) About Rape, Kimberly Kessler Ferzan, Peter K. Westen

All Faculty Scholarship

From the American Law Institute to college campuses, there is a renewed interest in the law of rape. Law school faculty, however, may be reluctant to teach this deeply debated topic. This article begins from the premise that controversial and contested questions can be best resolved when participants understand the conceptual architecture that surrounds and delineates the normative questions. This allows participants to talk to one another instead of past each other. Accordingly, in this article, we begin by diffusing two non-debates: the apparent conflict created when we use “consent” to mean two different things and the question of whether …

Envisioning 100% Access To Justice In Colorado, Daniel M. Taubman, Melissa Hart

Publications

No abstract provided.

Is Legal Scholarship Worth Its Cost?, Paul Campos

Publications

No abstract provided.

From The Technical To The Personal: Teaching And Learning Health Insurance Regulation And Reform, Allison K. Hoffman, Whitney A. Brown, Lindsay Cutler

All Faculty Scholarship

In the Fall of 2016, I taught Health Law and Policy for the fourth consecutive semester. Over time, one thing has become increasingly clear: the aspect of this course that I work with most closely as a scholar—the regulation of health care financing and insurance, including the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA)—is also the material that I find the most challenging to teach. Every time I reflect on teaching this material, and hear from students about how they learn this material, the thing that stands out is how critical it is that my students understand the profound impact …

Can Practicing Mindfulness Improve Lawyer Decision-Making, Ethics, And Leadership?, Peter H. Huang

Publications

Jon Kabat-Zinn, the founder of mindfulness-based stress reduction, defines mindfulness as paying attention in a curious, deliberate, kind, and non-judgmental way to life as it unfolds each moment. Psychologist Ellen Langer defines mindfulness as a flexible state of mind actively engaging in the present, noticing new things, and being sensitive to context. Langer differentiates mindfulness from mindlessness, which she defines as acting based upon past behavior instead of the present and being stuck in a fixed, solitary perspective, oblivious to alternative multiple viewpoints. Something called mindfulness is currently very fashionable and has been so for some time now in American …

Cultural Brokers In The Changing Landscape Of Legal Education: Associate Deans For Experiential Education, Binny Miller

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.

An Empirical Study Of The Copyright Practices Of American Law Journals, Brian L. Frye, Franklin L. Runge, Christopher J. Ryan Jr.

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

This article presents an empirical study of the copyright practices of American law journals in relation to copyright ownership and fair use, based on a 24-question survey. It concludes that many American law journals have adopted copyright policies that are inconsistent with the expectations of legal scholars and the scope of copyright protection. Specifically, many law journals have adopted copyright policies that effectively preclude open-access publishing, and unnecessarily limit the fair use of copyrighted works. In addition, it appears that some law journals may not understand their own copyright policies. This article proposes the creation of a Code of Copyright …

A Reply To The National Conference Of Bar Examiners: More Talk, No Answers, So Keep On Shopping, Suzanne Darrow-Kleinhaus

Scholarly Works

In Let the Games Begin: Jurisdiction-Shopping for the Shopaholics (Good Luck With That) Mark Albanese defends the National Conference of Bar Examiners’ grading practices as essential to assuring reliability given the variability in grading between UBE jurisdictions. In addressing the claim that it is possible to achieve different outcomes on the same test by the same candidate if taken in different UBE jurisdictions, he describes how NCBE monitors jurisdiction variation to ensure grading consistency. Those of us concerned, however, with the possibility that the jurisdiction in which a candidate takes the Uniform Bar Examination (UBE) may make the difference between …

When Torts Met Civil Procedure: A Curricular Coupling, Laura G. Dooley, Brigham A. Fordham, Ann E. Woodley

Scholarly Works

Law students must become adept at understanding how various bodies of law interact-supporting, balancing, and even conflicting with each other. This article describes an attempt to achieve these goals by merging two canonical first-year courses, civil procedure and torts, into an integrated class titled ‘Introduction to Civil Litigation’. Our most pressing motivation was concern that students who study civil procedure and torts in isolation develop a skewed, unrealistic view of how law works in the real world. By combining these courses, we hoped to teach students early in their careers to approach problems more like practicing lawyers, who must deal …

Discovering A Predictor Of Reading Comprehension Difficulties, Ann L. Nowak

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Risks And Rewards Of Externships: Exploring Goals And Methods, Leah Wortham, Linda F. Smith, Jeff Giddings

Scholarly Articles

This article grew from a presentation relating externship clinical programs to the theme of the July 2016 International Journal of Clinical Legal Education and Association of Canadian Legal Education conference: The Risks and Rewards of Clinical Legal Education Programmes. Externships or field placement programs involve students placed away from the law school and supervised by a person who is not employed by the law school. Externships offer many potential rewards for students as well as other stakeholders, including especially community institutions. But there are also risks—risks that the externship will be expected to accomplish too much with too few resources …

The Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program: The Need For Better Employment Eligibility Regulations, Gregory S. Crespi

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

People will start seeking tax-exempt debt forgiveness under the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (“PSLF”) program in October of 2017 after satisfying the requirements of 10 years of post-October 1, 2007 employment in a “public service job.” I estimate that eventually 200,000 people a year or more will obtain debt forgiveness under this program, at a total cost to the Treasury of $12 billion/year or more. Estimates are that up to one-quarter of all employment will qualify as a public service job.

For such a large and costly program the precise eligibility criteria are crucial. The statutory definition of a public …

Will The Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program Ever Forgive Any Loans?, Gregory S. Crespi

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

There is a sharp tension between the expectations that hundreds of thousands to millions of persons have regarding their right to eventually have their student loan debts forgiven under the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, starting this fall, and the legitimate public concerns regarding the large future costs and regressive incidence of the PSLF program’s benefits. The Trump Administration has recently proposed prospectively abolishing the PSLF program for future Direct Loans. Whether or not this proposal is adopted, given the large costs of the program (which I estimate will eventually rise to $12 billion/year or more as an estimated 200,000 …

A Challenge To Bleached Out Professional Identity: How Jewish Was Justice Louis Brandeis?, Russell G. Pearce, Adam B. Winer, Emily Jenab

Faculty Scholarship

As an exemplar, Justice Louis D. Brandeis challenges the currently dominant conception that requires lawyers to, in Sanford Levinson's term, "bleach out" their personal identity from their professional identity. Under the dominant neutral partisan vision of the lawyer, clients will only receive the equal representation necessary to provide equal justice if lawyers exclude all personal and group identifications from their role. Brandeis, in contrast, asserted that his Jewish identity constructed his understanding of himself as a jurist. His distinguished career thereby provides a counter-narrative to bleaching-out that can serve as a model for all lawyers, whatever their personal and group …

The Case For A Uniform Cut Score, Joan W. Howarth

Scholarly Works

To our detriment, attorneys have become accustomed to state-by-state disparities in the cut score for our national, multiple choice licensing test, the Multistate Bar Exam (MBE). MBE cut scores range from 129 in Wisconsin to 145 in Delaware. The states with the most licensed attorneys, New York and California, use MBE cut scores of 133 and 144, respectively, which land on different sides of the national MBE score bell curve bulge. No one pretends that these disparities are justified because practicing law as a new lawyer is more difficult in California than in New York. The MBE cut score is …

The Problem With Aba Standard 405(C), Kathryn M. Stanchi

Scholarly Works

This essay takes the position that clinicians and legal writing faculty deserve better than "not too bad." Standard 405(c) needs to be called out for what it is: an institutionalized bar to professional advancement divorced from any reasonable measure of merit.

Increasing Diversity By A New Master's Degree In Legal Principles, Joni Hersch

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Students who leave their JD program before graduation leave empty handed, without an additional degree or other credential indicating that their law school studies had any professional, educational, or marketable value. The absence of such a credential combines with the substantial risks and costs associated with law school education to discourage risk averse students from applying. The adverse impacts of these risks may be especially great for lower income students who have fewer financial resources to draw on and less information about their fit with legal education and the legal profession. I propose that law schools award a master’s degree …

Teaching Public Policy Drafting In Law School: One Professor's Approach, Lisa A. Rich

Faculty Scholarship

This article provides an overview of the Drafting for Public Policy course offered at the Texas A&M University School of Law. The article addresses the theoretical and pedagogical underpinnings of the course, including how such a course easily encompasses the teaching of cultural context and awareness, as well as professional identity, and encourages students to engage deeply in the policymaking process. It also explores the continued relevance of the work of Harold D. Lasswell, as well as that of Myres McDougal and Anthony Kronman. These works, from 1943 and 1993 respectively, resonate now because they called on law schools to …

Time For A Change: 20 Years After The "Working Group" Principles, Barbara Cox

Faculty Scholarship

This article discusses three aspects of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) Section on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity’s history. First, it reviews the section’s activities at the 1992 AALS Annual Meeting. Second, it discusses how the AALS implemented its Bylaw and Executive Committee Regulations that prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation (and now gender identity after a recent revision). Finally, it encourages the AALS to discontinue use of some of the guidelines adopted in the early 1990s to guide its interactions with religiously affiliated law schools when conflicts arise concerning allegations of sexual orientation or gender …

Whoosh - Declining Law School Applications And Entering Credentials: Responding With Pivot Pedagogy, Laura M. Padilla

Faculty Scholarship

The number of law school applications and entering law students and the credentials of those students, declined all at once. This trend has continued for many years, however, given the cyclical nature of law school applications, it will likely reverse eventually and credentials will improve, but not overnight. The first part of the article briefly discusses the decline in law school applicants and applications, including the confluence of perfect storm factors that resulted in more of the crash landing we experienced than a gradual drop. It also details the corresponding drop in entering credentials which accompanied that decline. The article …

The Practice - And Rule - Of Law, Stephen Ellmann

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Tribute To Sam Davis: A Georgia Perspective, Ronald L. Carlson

Scholarly Works

Sam Davis had a twenty-seven year history at Georgia, commencing in 1970. After a distinguished record as a student at the University of Mississippi School of Law, he joined the Georgia law faculty. Sam moved through the academic ranks, ultimately becoming Allen Post Professor of Law. Along the way he served, at various times, as Assistant Dean, as Associate Dean, and he was for a time the University's Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs. In 1997 he took over as Dean at the University of Mississippi School of Law. This article comments on his life and professional career, with some …

Human Rights From The Ground Up: Building The First Law School Legal Aid Clinic In Haiti, Kate Bloch, Roxanne Edmond-Dimanche

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Jerry L. Mashaw And The Public Law Curriculum, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

Jerry L. Mashaw’s magisterial account of the first one hundred years of Administrative law sharply distinguishes between internal and external administrative law – between those contributions to the regularity and legality of agency behavior that emerge from its own institutions and practices, and the constraints imposed by external actors – legislative, executive, and judicial. The “systems of internal control and audit” he found common to nineteenth-century governance are subordinated, if not suppressed in today’s thinking about administrative law.

In our world of multiple transsubstantive statutes and ubiquitous judicial review, we tend to think of our administrative constitution as a set …

Bridging The Gap: A Joint Negotiation Project Crossing Legal Disciplines, K. E. Powell, Lauren Bartlett

All Faculty Scholarship

This article discusses the creation and implementation of a cross-discipline negotiation simulation project designed by two law professors at Ohio Northern University Claude W. Pettit College of Law. The project bridged the gap between podium classes and clinical experience, exposing two separate groups of students to new subject areas. Professors Lauren E. Bartlett and Karen Powell brought together two distinct law classes, one doctrinal tax class and one pretrial litigation skills class, to exercise legal skills, and learn substantive and procedural law from their classmates, while acting as an attorney or a client in a simulated negotiation.

Teaching And Practicing Community Development Poverty Law: Lawyers And Clients As Trusted Neighborhood Problem Solvers, Susan Bennett, Alicia Alvarez, Louise Howells, Hannah Lieberman

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.

Paying It Forward To Build The Perfect Lawyer, David Spratt

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.

Triumphs Of Commission, Eric L. Talley

Faculty Scholarship

Willis L.M. Reese Prize commencement address to the Columbia Law School class of 2017.

Race Liberalism And The Deradicalization Of Racial Reform, Kimberlé W. Crenshaw

Faculty Scholarship

Recent works by neoconservatives and by Critical legal scholars have suggested that civil rights reforms have been an unsuccessful means of achieving racial equality in America. In this Article, Professor Crenshaw considers these critiques and analyzes the continuing role of racism in the subordination of Black Americans. The neoconservative emphasis on formal colorblindness, she argues, fails to recognize the indeterminacy of civil rights laws and the force of lingering racial disparities. The Critical scholars, who emphasize the legitimating role of legal ideology and legal rights rhetoric, are substantially correct, according to Professor Crenshaw, but they fail to appreciate the choices …