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 …

50 Years Of Excellence: A History Of The St. Mary's Law Journal, Barbara Hanson Nellermoe

St. Mary's Law Journal

Founded in 1969, the St. Mary’s Law Journal has climbed the road to excellence. Originally built on the foundation of being a “practitioner’s journal,” the St. Mary’s Law Journal continues to produce quality scholarship that is nationally recognized and frequently used by members of the bench and bar. From its grassroots origins to the world-class law review it is today, the St. Mary’s Law Journal continues to maintain its prestigious position in the realm of law reviews by ranking in the top five percent most-cited law reviews in federal and state courts nationwide.

In celebration of the St. Mary’s Law …

An Invitation Regarding Law And Legal Education, And Imagining The Future, Michael J. Madison

Articles

This Essay consists of an invitation to participate in conversations about the future of legal education in ways that integrate rather than distinguish several threads of concern and revision that have emerged over the last decade. Conversations about the future of legal education necessarily include conversations about the future of law practice, legal services, and law itself. Some of those start with the somewhat stale questions: What are US law professors doing, what should they be doing, and why? Those questions are still relevant and important, but they are no longer the only relevant questions, and they are not the …

Roll Over Langdell, Tell Llewellyn The News: A Brief History Of American Legal Education, Stephen R. Alton

Stephen Alton

The origin of this essay is a presentation the author made at the Office of the Attorney General of the State of Texas on December 10, 2008. This essay is derived from the author's presentation, which originally was entitled "A Brief and Highly Selective History of American Legal Education and Jurisprudence. " In this essay, the author provides an overview of the history and development of legal education in America, emphasizing the establishment and evolution of the case method of instruction in American law schools and focusing on the influence of American jurisprudence on the development of legal education in …

The End Of Law Schools, Ray Worthy Campbell

Ray W Campbell

Law schools as we know them are doomed. They continue to offer an educational model originally designed to prepare lawyers to practice in common law courts of a bygone era. That model fails to prepare lawyers for today’s highly specialized practices, and it fails to provide targeted training for the emerging legal services fields other than traditional lawyering.

This article proposes a new ideology of legal education to meet the needs of modern society. Unlike other reform proposals, it looks not to tweaking the training of traditional lawyers, but to rethinking legal education in light of a changing legal services …

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 …

Two Decades Of Therapeutic Jurisprudence, David B. Wexler

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Judicial Assistants Or Junior Judges: The Hiring, Utilization, And Influence Of Law Clerks, Chad Oldfather, Todd C. Peppers

Scholarly Articles

Law clerks have been part of the American judicial system since 1882, when Supreme Court Justice Horace Gray hired a young Harvard Law School graduate named Thomas Russell to serve as his assistant. Justice Gray paid for his law clerks out of his own pocket until Congress authorized funds for the hiring of “stenographic clerks” in 1886. The Gray law clerks, however, were not mere stenographers. Justice Gray assigned them a host of legal and non-legal job duties. His clerks discussed the record and debated the attendant legal issues with Justice Gray prior to oral argument, conducted legal research, and …

Teaching Legal History Through Legal Skills., Howard Bromberg

Book Chapters

I revolve my legal history courses around one methodology: teaching legal history by means of legal skills. I draw on my experience teaching legal practice and clinical skills courses to assign briefs and oral arguments as a means for law students to immerse themselves in historical topics. Without distracting from other approaches, I framed this innovation as teaching legal history not to budding historians but to budding lawyers.

Financial Retrenchment And Institutional Entrenchment: Will Legal Education Respond, Explode, Or Just Wait It Out?, Ian Weinstein

Faculty Scholarship

Both markets and ideas have turned against the American legal profession. Legal hiring has contracted, and law school enrollments are decreasing. The business models of big law and legal education are under pressure, current levels of student indebtedness seem unsustainable, and a hero has yet to emerge from our fragmented regulatory structures. In the realm of ideas, the information revolution has sparked deep critiques of structured knowledge and expertise, opening the roles of the law and the university in society to reexamination. We are less enamored of the scholar-lawyer and gaze with longing at technocrats. I hope that clinical law …

"Thinking" In A Deweyan Perspective: The Law School Exam As A Case Study For Thinking In Lawyering, Donald J. Kochan

Donald J. Kochan

As creatures of thought, we are thinking all the time, but that does not necessarily mean that we are thinking well. Answering the law school exam, like solving any problem, requires that the student exercise thinking in an effective and productive manner. This Article provides some guidance in that pursuit. Using John Dewey’s suspended conclusion concept for effective thinking as an organizing theme, this Article presents one basic set of lessons for thinking through issues that arise regarding the approach to a law school exam. This means that the lessons contained here help exercise thought while taking the exam — …

Why Not A Justice School? On The Role Of Justice In Legal Education And The Construction Of A Pedagogy Of Justice, Peter L. Davis

Peter L. Davis

Why are law schools not named schools of justice, or, at least, schools of law and justice? Of course, virtually every law school will reply that this is nit-picking; all claim to be devoted to the study of justice. But our concern is not so easily dismissed. The names of institutions carry great significance; they deliver a political, social, or economic message. . . This Article contends that not only do law schools virtually ignore justice – a concept that is supposed to be the goal of all legal systems – they go so far as to denigrate it and …

Justice Hugo Black And His Law Clerks: Match-Making And Match Point, Todd C. Peppers

Scholarly Articles

Like other Justices on the Supreme Court, Justice Black hired law clerks to assist with the work of the Court. Each year, his law clerks would assist in reviewing cert. petitions, doing legal research, and editing opinion drafts. These job duties, however, were only one dimension of the Black clerkship. As the Justice himself once remarked to a law-clerk applicant, “I don’t pick my law clerks for what they can do for me, I pick my law clerks for what I can do for them.”

Roll Over Langdell, Tell Llewellyn The News: A Brief History Of American Legal Education, Stephen R. Alton

Faculty Scholarship

The origin of this essay is a presentation the author made at the Office of the Attorney General of the State of Texas on December 10, 2008. This essay is derived from the author's presentation, which originally was entitled "A Brief and Highly Selective History of American Legal Education and Jurisprudence. " In this essay, the author provides an overview of the history and development of legal education in America, emphasizing the establishment and evolution of the case method of instruction in American law schools and focusing on the influence of American jurisprudence on the development of legal education in …

Kamisar, Yale, Jerold H. Israel

Other Publications

Kamisar, Yale (1929- ). Law professor. Born in the Bronx, N.Y., to an immigrant, working-class family of modest means and limited educational background, Kamisar received academic scholarships that enabled him to attend New York University (B.A., 1950) and, after enlisting in the army during the Korean War and winning a Purple Heart, Columbia Law School (LLB., 1954).

Isaiah And His Young Disciples: Justice Brandeis And His Law Clerks, Todd C. Peppers

Scholarly Articles

It cannot be said that Louis Dembitz Brandeis has suffered from a lack of scholarly attention. Brandeis is considered to be one of the most influential Justices in the history of the U.S. Supreme Court, and scores of books and law-review articles have been written about Brandeis the lawyer, the political insider, the Zionist, and the Justice. A case can be made, however, that history has not fully recognized the important and lasting contribution that Brandeis made to the development of the institutional rules and norms surrounding the Supreme Court law clerk, an oversight that this essay seeks to rectify.

Cravath By The Sea: Recruitment In The Large Halifax Law Firm, 1900-1955, Jeffrey Haylock

Dalhousie Law Journal

The traditional view is that regularized, meritocratic hiring in Canadian law firms had to wait until the 1960s, with the rise in importance of Ontario university law schools. There was, however, more regional variation than this view allows. After an overview of the rise of large firms in the U.S. and Canada, and of the modern hiring strategies (the "Cravath system") that developed in New York in the early twentieth century, the author considers whether Halifax firms were employing these strategies between 1900 and 1955. Nepotistic hiring continued unabated; however, the three large firms of the period recruited young students …

Teach Justice, Steve Sheppard

Steve Sheppard

Law schools must improve their preparation of students to practice law ethically. Current law school curricula focus on preparing students to analyze legal issues but not ethical issues. A curriculum that encourages students to distance themselves from their ethical instincts is dangerous. A value-neutral approach to the law eventually leads to distortions of the law. Lawyers will be left without a proper way to sense the purpose behind the law, and they will instead focus solely on what the law requires or allows. While law schools could choose from limitless lists of moral values to include in their curricula, this …

Fighting For The City In Context: William Nelson And The Legal History Of New York, William P. Lapiana

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Charles Reich’S Journey From The Yale Law Journal To The New York Times Bestseller List: The Personal History Of The Greening Of America, Rodger D. Citron

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

Why Not A Justice School? On The Role Of Justice In Legal Education And The Construction Of A Pedagogy Of Justice, Peter L. Davis

Scholarly Works

Why are law schools not named schools of justice, or, at least, schools of law and justice? Of course, virtually every law school will reply that this is nit-picking; all claim to be devoted to the study of justice. But our concern is not so easily dismissed. The names of institutions carry great significance; they deliver a political, social, or economic message. . . This Article contends that not only do law schools virtually ignore justice – a concept that is supposed to be the goal of all legal systems – they go so far as to denigrate it and …

Revisiting A Classic: Duncan Kennedy's Legal Education And The Reproduction Of Hierarchy The Ghost In The Law School: How Duncan Kennedy Caught The Hierarchy Zeitgeist But Missed The Point, Steve Sheppard

Steve Sheppard

In his manifesto, Duncan Kennedy aptly identified hierarchies within legal scholarship and the legal profession, but his conclusion--hierarchies in law are wrong and must be resisted--is misplaced. Kennedy’s Legal Education and the Reproduction of Hierarchy: A Polemic Against the System, claims law schools breed a hierarchical system, where rank plays an important part in how law schools relate to each other; how faculty members relate to each other and to students; and how students relate to other students. This system trains students to accept and prepare for their place within the hierarchy of the legal profession. According to Kennedy, such …

From Petticoats To Briefs: History Of Women At The University Of Missouri-Kansas City School Of Law, Robert C. Downs, Brooke Grant, Elizabeth Sterling

Faculty Works

The story of women in American society has largely been defined and recorded by men and the institutions that men have dominated for most of the past two hundred-odd years. Women have been denied access to education, employment, political power and other benefits of social intercourse by exclusion, intimidation, ridicule and patronization. The experience of women in law school is one part of that experience. Law school is an arduous undertaking whether one is male or female. Gaining admission to modern law schools requires talent and demonstrated academic performance in a competitive environment. But in the nineteenth century, the foremost …

Taking Back The Law School Classroom: Using Technology To Foster Active Student Learning , Rafael Gely, Paul L. Caron

Faculty Publications

Law schools (and indeed all of higher education) have witnessed an explosive growth in the use of technology in the classroom. Many law teachers now deploy a wide array of technological bells and whistles, including PowerPoint slides, Web-based course platforms, in-class Internet access, and the like. Students, in turn, increasingly come to class armed with laptop computers to harvest the fruits of the classroom experience. Yet in recent years there has been something of a backlash, with various law teachers arguing that this technology is interfering with, rather than improving, pedagogy in the classroom. According to the critics, the technology …

Continuing Classroom Conversation Beyond The Four Whys, Jeffrey W. Stempel, Bailey Kuklin

Scholarly Works

LAW school classes regularly prove Santayana's aphorism. Although nearly every law teacher desires to keep discussion focused and forward-moving, there are more than a few moments of thundering silence experienced in the classroom. Most of us adjust to this inevitability by positing some pedagogical virtue to still air and contenting ourselves with the knowledge that conversation-stopping “whys?” are usually delivered by us as teachers rather than the students. Perhaps we are underappreciative of the value discomfitting silence has, but we generally prefer that the conversation continue, that we miss the opportunity to feel simultaneously smug and uncomfortable, and that students …

“Some Kind Of Lawyer”: Two Journeys From Classroom To Courtroom And Beyond, Terry Birdwhistell

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

In January 1996 a panel of the American Bar Association released a report concluding that "discrimination continues to permeate the structures, practices and attitudes of the legal profession." It has been a long journey in women's efforts to obtain equity in both law schools and in the legal profession generally. This article is composed of two interviews with University of Kentucky College of Law graduates: Norma Boster Adams (’52) and Annette McGee Cunningham (’80). Twenty-eight years separated Norma Adams and Annette Cunningham at the College of Law. They faced different obstacles and chose varied paths to success. While each can …

Virtues And Vices In Practical Legal Education: Address Given On The Occasion Of The 1985 Commencement Of The Dickinson School Of Law, Charles A. Morrison Q.C.

Penn State International Law Review

This Article is the Commencement Address given to the Class of 1985 at Dickinson Law School.

A Comment On Style: The Elevator As Metaphor, James Brook

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.