Law Commons^™

An Empirical Analysis Of Clinical Legal Education At Middle Age, Robert R. Kuehn

Scholarship@WashULaw

This article provides the first comprehensive empirical analysis of clinical legal education’s development and growth over the past fifty years. By analyzing dozens of surveys and reports on aspects of clinical legal education, including unique data developed by the authors, and comparing the results over time, this article presents a factual picture of clinical legal education’s progression from early adulthood to today’s middle age.

This article seeks to inform the present and help legal educators shape the future role of law clinic and field placement courses in the preparation of law students for the practice of law. It provides an …

Organized For Service: The Hicks Classification System And The Evolution Of Law School Curriculum, John L. Moreland

Articles by Maurer Faculty

This article traces the origins and development of the Hicks Classification System, an in-house organizational scheme used by the Yale Law Library from the late 1930s to the 1990s. It explores the relationship between the Hicks Classification System and the changing pedagogical methods of the law school curriculum during the early part of the 20th century. It provides a brief biographical sketch of Frederick C. Hicks, creator of the scheme, the need for a legal classification system, a detailed analysis of Hicks’s scheme, its finding aids, and a discussion of the inherent cultural biases in the system.

Antiracist Lawyering In Practice Begins With The Practice Of Teaching And Learning Antiracism In Law School, Danielle M. Conway

Faculty Scholarly Works

I was honored by the invitation to deliver the 2021 Lee E. Teitelbaum keynote address. Dean Teitelbaum was a gentleman and a titan for justice. I am confident the antiracism work ongoing at the S.J. Quinney College of Law would have deeply resonated with him, especially knowing the challenges we are currently facing within and outside of legal education, the legal academy, and the legal profession. I am fortified in this work by Dean Elizabeth Kronk Warner’s commitment to antiracism and associated diversity, equity, and inclusion work. Finally, I applaud the students who serve on the Utah Law Review for …

Loving It To Pieces: Eu Law In Us Legal Academia, Revisited, Daniela Caruso

Faculty Scholarship

The Editors of the Special Issue have kindly invited me to update earlier reflections on the state of EU law in US legal academia. For a variety of reasons, it is important to me not to mislead the reader with the false promise of some kind of summa. What follows is my own perception of a complicated landscape, which I shall sketch lightly here in the hop of prompting other scholars of EU Law to report on their own US experience.

Inclusivity In Admissions And Retention Of Diverse Students: Leadership Determines Dei Success, Danielle M. Conway, Bekah Saidman-Krauss, Rebecca Schreiber

Faculty Scholarly Works

Penn State Dickinson Law has been leading with an Antiracist admissions philosophy and corresponding plans for implementation before the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. Arguably, this approach to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)was not identified explicitly as a vision priority for the law school until July 2019, when Dickinson Law welcomed Danielle M. Conway as the first Black Dean and first woman Dean in the law school’s 186-year history. Dean Conway outlined four vision priorities to accomplish within her first five years at Dickinson Law. Vision priority number two calls upon the law school’s administrators to move the needle substantially on …

On Being First, On Being Only, On Being Seen, On Charting A Way Forward, Veronica Root Martinez

Journal Articles

This Essay reflects upon my professional experiences as a Black woman both at Notre Dame and beyond. It argues that it is important for students to have demographically diverse professors within their educational environments. It calls for the Notre Dame Law School community to continue to create a diverse, equitable, and inclusive culture.

Teaching Information Privacy Law, Joseph A. Tomain

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Teaching information privacy law is exciting and challenging because of the fast pace of technological and legal development and because "information privacy law" sprawls across a vast array of disparate areas of substantive law that do not automatically connect. This Essay provides one approach to teaching this fascinating, doctrinally diverse, and rapidly moving area of law. Through the framework of ten key course themes, this pedagogical approach seeks to help students find a common thread that connects these various areas of law into a cohesive whole. This framework provides a way to think about not only privacy law, but also …

How Covid-19 Rekindled The Spirit Of Teaching, Nayha Acharya

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

The abrupt end to our classes in the middle of March 2020 due to the Covid-19 situation reignited in me the real sense of what it means to be a teacher. It brought me out of the superficial notion, where being a law professor just means being someone who has students who will listen to me talk about the law, and into the deeper sense - that being a teacher involves a very special human relationship. This transition arose in me, I believe, because the Covid-19 situation forced me to slow down and sit still for a while, and that …

The 2019-20 Survey Of Applied Legal Education, Robert R. Kuehn, Margaret Reuter, David A. Santacroce

Scholarship@WashULaw

This report presents the results of the 2019-20 Center for the Study of Applied Legal Education (CSALE) Survey of Applied Legal Education. The survey was composed of two parts – a Master Survey directed to ABA accredited U.S. law schools and a Sub-Survey distributed to each person teaching in a law clinic or field placement course. Ninety-five percent of law schools and over 1,300 clinical teachers participated in the survey. The results provide valuable insight into clinical programs and law clinic and field placement courses in areas such as design, capacity, administration, funding, and pedagogy, and into the role and …

Train Wrecks: 3m National Teaching Fellows Explore Creating Learning And Generative Responses From Colossal Failures, William B. Strean, Patrick T. Maher, Kim Brooks

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

We all fail. We also like to look good and avoid looking bad. So, even though we know that taking risks and trying new approaches are important for enhancing our teaching and students’ learning (Strean, 2017), we rarely talk about our failures. Our claim in this paper is that our insecurities create a substantial barrier to improving and enriching our teaching practices. If we do not find time to take big risks, and then to explore and critically reflect on failures that result sometimes from those risks, we lose out on the chance to become better teachers; more fundamentally, we …

Exploring Diversity With A "Culture Box" In First-Year Legal Writing, Ann N. Sinsheimer

Articles

Studying law is in many ways like studying another culture. Students often feel as though they are learning a new language with unfamiliar vocabulary and different styles of communication. Throughout their legal education, students are also exposed to a profession comprised of unique traditions and expectations. As a result, learning law takes time and energy. It can be both engaging and frustrating and may even challenge some of students’ values and belief systems. To ease her students’ transition to law school, the author starts her course each year with a “culture box” exercise, which encourages students to examine who they …

A Study Of The Relationship Between Law School Coursework And Bar Exam Outcomes, Robert R. Kuehn

Scholarship@WashULaw

The recent decline in bar exam passage rates has triggered speculation that the decline is being driven by law students taking more experiential courses and fewer bar-subject courses. These concerns arose in the absence of any empirical study linking certain coursework to bar exam failure.

This article addresses speculation about the relationship between law school coursework and bar exam outcomes. It reports the results of a large-scale study of the courses of over 3800 graduates from two law schools and the relationship between their experiential and bar-subject coursework and bar exam outcomes over a ten-year period. At both schools, the …

Afterword - Agape And Reframing, James Boyd White

Other Publications

In a provocative essay, philosopher Jeffrie Murphy asks: 'what would law be like if we organized it around the value of Christian love, and if we thought about and criticized law in terms of that value?'. This book brings together leading scholars from a variety of disciplines to address that question. Scholars have given surprisingly little attention to assessing how the central Christian ethical category of love - agape - might impact the way we understand law. This book aims to fill that gap by investigating the relationship between agape and law in Scripture, theology, and jurisprudence, as well as …

Not For Free: Exploring The Collateral Costs Of Diversity In Legal Education, Spearit

Articles

This essay examines some of the institutional costs of achieving a more diverse law student body. In recent decades, there has been growing support for diversity initiatives in education, and the legal academy is no exception. Yet for most law schools, diversity remains an elusive goal, some of which is the result of problems with anticipating the needs of diverse students and being able to deliver. These are some of the unseen or hidden costs associated with achieving greater diversity. Both law schools and the legal profession remain relatively stratified by race, which is an ongoing legacy of legal education’s …

International Legal Education And Specialist Certification [Year In Review], Marissa Moran, Diane Edelman, Richard J. Peltz-Steele

Publications and Research

The American Bar Association (ABA) promulgates rules and regulations that apply to all United States law schools with ABA-accreditation and approval. Those rules apply specifically to schools offering programs leading to a J.D. degree. In August 2016, the ABA Council approved certain changes to the ABA Standards and Rules of Procedure for Approval of Law Schools, which became effective on August 9, 2016. The changes affected not only J.D. programs, but also study abroad programs offered by ABA member schools.

Virginia Bar Exam, July 2016, Section 2

Virginia Bar Exam Archive

No abstract provided.

Virginia Bar Exam, July 2016, Section 1

Virginia Bar Exam Archive

No abstract provided.

Clinical And Experiential Learning Programs In Canadian Law Schools, Gemma Smyth, Samantha Hale, Neil Gold

Law Publications

Information for this chart is from law school and clinic websites as well as from follow-up interviews with Deans or Deans’ Designates of 13 of the 16 common law schools in Canada. Programs were deemed “Experiential” if the majority of the activities and/or assessment in a class is taught or practiced experientially. Only credit-bearing programs are included here.

Virginia Bar Exam, February 2016, Section 1

Virginia Bar Exam Archive

No abstract provided.

Virginia Bar Exam, February 2016, Section 2

Virginia Bar Exam Archive

No abstract provided.

Lawyers At Work: A Study Of The Reading, Writing, And Communication Practices Of Legal Professionals, Ann N. Sinsheimer, David J. Herring

Articles

This paper reports the results of a three-year ethnographic study of attorneys in the workplace. The authors applied ethnographic methods to identify how junior associates in law firm settings engaged in reading and writing tasks in their daily practice. The authors were able to identify the types of texts junior associates encountered in the workplace and to isolate the strategies these attorneys used to read and compose texts.

The findings suggest that lawyering is fundamentally about reading. The attorneys observed for this study read constantly, encountering a large variety of texts and engaging in many styles of reading, including close …

Dean's Desk: New Wintersession Offers Learning, Networking Opportunities, Austen L. Parrish

Austen Parrish (2014-2022)

No abstract provided.

Where Tradition Meets Innovation: Providing A Practice-Oriented Curriculum, Andrea Lyon

Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Virginia Bar Exam, July 2015, Section 2

Virginia Bar Exam Archive

No abstract provided.

Virginia Bar Exam, July 2015, Section 1

Virginia Bar Exam Archive

No abstract provided.

Virginia Bar Exam, February 2015, Section 1

Virginia Bar Exam Archive

No abstract provided.

Virginia Bar Exam, February 2015, Section 2

Virginia Bar Exam Archive

No abstract provided.

Redefining Attention (And Revamping The Legal Profession?) For The Digital Generation, Lauren A. Newell

Law Faculty Scholarship

With computers, text messages, Facebook, cell phones, smartphones, tablets, iPods, and other information and communication technologies (“ICTs”) constantly competing for our attention, we live in an age of perpetual distraction. Educators have long speculated that constant exposure to ICTs is eroding our ability to stay focused, and recent research supports these speculations. This raises particularly troubling implications for the practice of law, in which being able to pay sustained attention to the task at hand is crucial.

Research also indicates that the brains of today’s young people, the “Digital Generation,” may function differently than the brains of their elders because …

Law School Deans And The “New Normal.", Peter C. Alexander

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Making Law School A Place For People Who Know What They Want To Do

Austen Parrish (2014-2022)

No abstract provided.