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John Osborn's Enduring Words On Law & Learning, Walter Effross

Popular Media

When I started my first year at Harvard Law School, 17 years after Osborn did, I wasn’t looking for enlightenment. But I expected to be — and was — intimidated by Socratic taskmasters who, like the movie version of Osborn’s Professor Kingsfield (a role for which John Houseman won an Academy Award and a Golden Globe Award in 1973), were ready with “always another question, another question to follow your answer.”

Building A Culture Of Scholarship With New Clinical Teachers By Writing About Social Justice Lawyering, Susan Bennett, Binny Miller, Michelle Assad, Maria Dooner, Mariam Hinds, Jessica Millward, Citlalli Ochoa, Charles Ross, Anne Schaufele, Caroline Wick

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

This Article is a collection of essays about teaching social justice lawyering, as seen through the eyes of eight practitioners-in-residence in the clinical program at American University’s Washington College of Law (“WCL”). They include: Michelle Assad, Maria Dooner, Mariam Hinds, Jessica Millward, Citlalli Ochoa, Charles Ross, Anne Schaufele, and Caroline Wick. They teach in seven clinics, including the Civil Advocacy Clinic, the Criminal Justice Clinic, the Community Economic and Equity Development Clinic, the Disability Rights Law Clinic, the Immigrant Justice Clinic, the International Human Rights Law Clinic, and the Janet R. Spragens Federal Income Tax Clinic. We use the terms …

Fifty Years Of Clinical Legal Education At American University Washington College Of Law: The Evolution Of A Movement In Theory, Practice, And People, Robert D. Dinerstein, Elliott S. Milstein, Ann C. Shalleck

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

Clinical legal education has evolved substantially in the fifty years since Elliott Milstein initiated the clinical model at American University Washington College of Law (“WCL”) that, notwithstanding numerous changes in program and personnel since that time, remains essentially in effect today. In this Article, we explore the theoretical, pedagogical, structural, programmatic, and personnel developments that have occurred during this period. We link these developments to broader developments within the national and international clinical legal education spheres. WCL’s Clinical Program, and its clinical faculty, have been leaders in shaping these developments, but, in the best clinical tradition, we have not done …

Trauma-Informed (As A Matter Of) Course, Natalie Netzel

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

Law students are impacted by trauma and law professors are in a position to help by adopting a trauma-informed approach as a matter of universal precaution. The 2021 Survey of Law Student Well-Being (“SLSWB”) revealed that over twenty percent of responding law students meet criteria that indicate they should be evaluated for post-traumatic stress disorder (“PTSD”). The study also revealed that almost fifty percent of responding students reported an important motivation for attending law school was experiencing a trauma or injustice. Put differently, law schools are full of law students who have experienced trauma, many of whom are actively struggling …

Unsettling Human Rights Clinical Pedagogy And Practice In Settler Colonial Contexts, Jocelyn Getgen Kestenbaum, Caroline Bishop Laporte

American University Journal of Gender, Social Policy & the Law

In settler colonial contexts, law and educational institutions operate as structures of oppression, extraction, erasure, disempowerment, and continuing violence against colonized peoples. Consequently, clinical legal advocacy often can reinforce coloniality—the logic that perpetuates structural violence against individuals and groups resisting colonization and struggling for survival as peoples. Critical legal theory, including Third World Approaches to International Law (“TWAIL”), has long exposed colonial laws and practices that entrench discriminatory, racialized power structures and prevent transformative international human rights advocacy. Understanding and responding to these critiques can assist in decolonizing international human rights clinical law teaching and practice but is insufficient in …

Teaching Case Theory, Binny Miller

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

As the key means of framing a case, case theory is the central problem that lawyers confront in constructing a case, and many of the decisions made during the life of a case are decisions that rest on case theory. Building on the author's earlier scholarship on case theory, this essay articulates a concept of case theory called "storyline," and sets out a framework for teaching this concept. The framework for this process has three basic stages - imagining case theory, evaluating (and constructing) case theory, and choosing case theory. The material for this process is stories, which are the …

Reflections On Law Student Mental Health By A Dean Of Students After 25 Years, David Jaffe

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Your faculty need to be educated about how to refer students, how to speak with students who pop into their office. Your Dean, writ-large nationally, Deans need to have the willingness, and again, the bravado, the willingness to go to the faculty and say, "You need to be part of this movement." Whatever that may mean. I would love to see every faculty member taking 30 seconds at the beginning of every class for students to breathe. Thirty seconds of breathing. If you've never done it, do it at home today, deep breaths, and see what it feels like. I …

"It's Okay To Not Be Okay": The 2021 Survey Of Law Student Well-Being, David Jaffe, Katherine M. Bender, Jerome Organ

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

The Survey of Law Student Well-Being, implemented in Spring 2014 [hereinafter "2014 SLSWB"], was the first multi-law school study in over twenty years to assess alcohol and drug use among law students, and it was the first multi-law school study ever to address prescription drug use, mental health, and help-seeking attitudes. The article summarizing the results of the 2014 SLSWB has been downloaded over 12,000 times.

With a desire to learn what has changed since 2014 given the increased emphasis on law student and lawyer well-being among law schools and legal professionals, the authors sought and received grant funding from …

Legal Education's Curricular Tipping Point Toward Inclusive Socratic Teaching, Jamie Abrams

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Two seismic curricular disruptions create a tipping point for legal education to reform and transform. COVID-19 abruptly disrupted the delivery of legal education. It aligned with a tectonic racial justice reckoning, as more professors and institutions reconsidered their content and classroom cultures, allying with faculty of color who had long confronted these issues actively. The frenzy of these dual disruptions starkly contrasts with the steady drumbeat of critical legal scholars advocating for decades to reduce hierarchies and inequalities in legal education pedagogy.

This context presents a tipping point supporting two pedagogical reforms that leverage this unique moment. First, it is …

Feminism’S Transformation Of Legal Education And Unfinished Agenda, Jamie Abrams

Contributions to Books

Feminism has had a broad influence in legal education. Feminist critiques have challenged the substance of legal rules, the methods of law teaching, and the culture of legal education. Following decades of advocacy, feminist pedagogical reforms have generated new fields, new courses, new laws, new leaders, and new feminist spaces. There are many reasons to celebrate the accomplishments of our feminist pioneers and champions. Yet, COVID-19 has also exposed all the vulnerabilities and tenuousness of feminist gains too. Critical work remains for faculty, administrators, and students to carry the work forward with a vigilant purpose and determination.

From The Editors, Ezra Rosser, Robert Dinerstein

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Although this issue arrives on desks roughly two years after the start of the coronavirus pandemic, it offers a degree of continuity with our usual fare concerning scholarship about legal education. Our next double-length issue will explore in depth matters of teaching modality, technology, and change connected with the ongoing pandemic. This issue offers fresh perspectives on matters of long-standing concern-line drawing, pro bono requirements, pedagogy, law student instruction of high school students, and bar exams. We found the articles, as well as the three book reviews that fill out this issue, to be engaging and insightful and we hope …

Experiential Learning And Assessment In The Era Of Donald Trump, Jamie Abrams

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Law teaching is turning a critical corner with the implementation of new ABA accreditation standards requiring greater skills development, experiential learning, and student assessment. Years of debate and discourse preceded the adoption of these ABA Standards, followed by a surge in programming, conferencing, and list-serv activity to prepare to implement these standards effectively. Missing from the dialogue about effective implementation of standards has been thoughtful consideration of how implementing these requirements will intersect with the challenges, realities, opportunities, and complexities of political divisiveness and polarization so prevalent in society and university campuses today.

Law schools are notably implementing these pedagogical …

A Synergistic Pedagogical Approach To First-Year Teaching, Jamie Abrams

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

The First “Colonial Frontier” Legal Writing Conference, held at Duquesne University School of Law, focused on Engendering Hope in the Legal Writing Classroom: Pedagogy, Curriculum, and Attitude. This conference built on the foundational work of Allison Martin and Kevin Rand in which these scholars call for educators to engender hope in law students to prepare them for practice. Martin and Rand conclude that hope is a predictor of students’ academic performance and psychological health during the first semester of law school and recommend that law professors “maintain and creat[e] hope in law students” by embracing five core principles. Martin and …

Telling Stories About Cases And Clients: The Ethics Of Narrative, Binny Miller

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

In recent years, narrative has achieved great prominence in legal scholarship and in much other academic work, although the concept is not new. The legal realists always have emphasized the importance of stories; as long ago as 1941, Karl Llewellyn published case studies of the Cheyenne and their dispute settlement practices. In step with the popularity of narrative in legal scholarship, stories about the individuals behind the legal doctrine are increasingly common. While the terms "narrative" and "story" are sometimes used interchangeably, they are not quite the same thing.