Law Commons^™

American Lawyers And International Competence, Charlotte Ku, Christopher J. Borgen

Charlotte Ku

Just over ten years ago, Germans tore down a wall that divided their country and the whole of Europe. Stepping through the hole in the Berlin Wall, they took the first steps towards the reunification of West and East Germany and the end of the Cold War. Today another wall is being torn down—that between purely domestic law and international law. Companies are engaged in international trade at ever increasing rates. Environmental degradation has proved to be a global problem that cannot be solved with uncoordinated local measures. Individuals worldwide are pressing their governments for the recognition of a common …

The Power Of Imagination: Diversity And The Education Of Lawyers And Judges, Barry Sullivan

Barry Sullivan

No abstract provided.

Who Wants To Be A Muggle? The Diminished Legitimacy Of Law As Magic, Mark Edwin Burge

Mark Edwin Burge

In the Harry Potter world, the magical population lives among the non-magical Muggle population, but we Muggles are largely unaware of them. This secrecy is by elaborate design and is necessitated by centuries-old hostility to wizards by the non-magical majority. The reasons behind this hostility, when combined with the similarities between Harry Potter-stylemagic and American law, make Rowling’s novels into a cautionary tale for the legal profession that it not treat law as a magic unknowable to non-lawyers. Comprehensibility — as a self-contained, normative value in the enactment interpretation, and practice of law — is given short-shrift by the legal …

Dickinson Law's Contexts & Competencies Course: A "One-Pager" For Nalp, Laurel S. Terry

Laurel S. Terry

Assessing Academic Law Libraries' Performance And Implementing Change: The Reorganization Of A Law Library, Linda Kawaguchi

Linda Kawaguchi

Transforming Justice, Lawyers And The Practice Of Law, Marjorie A. Silver

Marjorie A. Silver

This is the Preface and Introduction to Transforming Justice, Lawyers and the Practice of Law, an anthology of writings by participants in the Project for Integrating Spirituality, Law and Politics (PISLAP) and others actively engaged in transforming law, legal education and social justice. It showcases the abundant ways in which lawyers, judges, law professors and others are employing more communitarian, peaceful and healing ways to resolve conflicts, plan legal relationships and achieve justice. It is written for lawyers, law professors, law students and others who share similar goals and are eager to learn new ways to practice law and create …

Law School Based Incubators And Access To Justice – Perspectives From Deans, Patricia E. Salkin, Ellen Suni, Niels Schaumann, Mary Lu Bilek

Patricia E. Salkin

At the end of February 2015, law professors, law deans, incubator staff and attorneys, and self-selected others gathered at California Western School of Law for the Second Annual Conference on Law School Incubators and Residency Programs. The incubators that are the subject of this article tend to focus on transition to law practice and access to justice, and some are also working to incorporate technology for the practice of law as a means of enhancing access to justice. As more law schools decide to host, sponsor or offer an incubator, and following our panel discussion at the February 2015 incubator …

From Rome To The Restatement: S.P. Scott, Fred Blume, Clyde Pharr, And Roman Law In Early Twentieth Century America, Timothy G. Kearley

Timothy G. Kearley

The Integrated Law School Curriculum, Adam Lamparello

Adam Lamparello

In January 2014, the American Bar Association’s Task Force on the Future of Legal Education stated that “[a]n evolution is taking place in legal practice and legal education needs to evolve with it.” To this end, the Task Force recommended that the law school curriculum “needs to shift still further toward developing the competencies and professionalism required of people who will deliver services to clients.” In fact, the Task Force emphasized that “[a] graduate’s having some set of competencies in the delivery of law and related services, and not just some body of knowledge, is an essential outcome …

Learning From And About The Numbers, Carole Silver, Louis Rocconi

Carole Silver

In this article, we enter the debate about the value of legal education, taking aim at the issue of the ways in which law schools prepare students for practice. But rather than focusing on skills training, our concern is with the approach of law schools to preparing students to understanding the context of the legal issues they will encounter, and specifically on their preparation for working with numbers, whether with regard to business, finance or information presented in statistical form generally.

Our contribution to this debate is to emphasize the importance of data in analyzing the value of law school, …

A Tale Of Three “Professions”: Search Engine Optimization, Lawyering & Law Teaching, Ray Campbell

Ray W Campbell

The question has been posed: is legal practice today a profession? This leads, naturally enough, to another question: should society treat it as one? Using the concept of ‘profession’ in different ways, some argue that one thing modern legal practice needs is a good dose of 'professionalism;' others argue that, whatever once might have been true, treating law practice as a ‘profession’ is a rum game best abandoned.

These questions matter. Law enjoys special regulatory privileges and market protections that make little sense if law has become just another form of business – a specialized form of consulting, perhaps. At …

Legal Education In North Carolina: A Report For Potential Students, Lawmakers, And The Public, William D. Henderson, Andrew P. Morriss

Andrew P. Morriss

No abstract provided.

Legal Education In North Carolina: A Report For Potential Students, Lawmakers, And The Public, William D. Henderson, Andrew P. Morriss

Andrew P. Morriss

No abstract provided.

What Firms Want: Investigating Globalization's Influence On The Market For Lawyers In Korea, Carole Silver, Jae-Hyup Lee, Jeeyoon Park

Carole Silver

This article addresses one of the central debates regarding globalization: how best to approach liberalizing markets in order to balance the interests of local and non-local actors and institutions. It takes the legal services market as its focus and draws on the South Korean experience as a case study. Korea recently liberalized its regulatory approach to legal services by changing both its method of producing lawyers (including initiating a graduate level law school system and drastically increasing the proportion of bar exam passers) and allowing foreign competition to directly enter its market through foreign law firms and foreign-licensed lawyers working …

Exporting The Legal Incubator: A Conversation With Fred Rooney, Fred Rooney, Justin Steele

Fred Rooney

A legal conversion between Justin Steele, Executive Articles Editor of the UMass Law Review and Fred Rooney, Director of the International Justice Center for Post-Graduate Development at Touro Law Center.

The Contemplative Lawyer: On The Potential Contributions Of Mindfulness Meditation To Law Students, Lawyers, And Their Clients, Leonard L. Riskin

Leonard L Riskin

This Article proposes that introducing mindfulness meditation into the legal profession may improve practitioners' well-being and performance and weaken the dominance of adversarial mind-sets. By enabling some lawyers to make more room for - and act from - broader and deeper perspectives, mindfulness can help lawyers provide more appropriate service (especially through better listening and negotiation) and gain more personal satisfaction from their work. Part I of this article describes a number of problems associated with law school and law practice. Part II sets forth a variety of ways in which lawyers, law schools, and professional organizations have tried to …

The Elephant In The Admissions Office: The Influence Of U.S. News & World Report On The Rise Of Transfer Students In Law Schools And A Modest Proposal For Reform, Bruce Price, Sara Star

Bruce M Price

Students who perform well after the first year of law school are increasingly transferring to schools ranked higher by U.S. News to maximize their chances of getting a law firm job immediately following graduation. This phenomena raises two fundamental and understudied issues: how students make the decision to seek to transfer to a higher-ranked and higher-tier law school, and why such law schools are willing to admit transfer students into their second-year class who they were not willing to admit initially. The first issue we explore through interviews with students who transferred as well as those who could have transferred …

Globalization And The Monopoly Of Aba-Approved Law Schools: Missed Opportunities Or Dodged Bullets?, Carole Silver

Carole Silver

As the market for lawyers and for law itself has responded to global forces, legal education also is becoming accustomed to working within a global context. U.S. law schools routinely look beyond the country’s borders to attract new students and opportunities. As with law firms and business generally, it no longer is sufficient to be domestic only; in order to gain prestige and to effectively compete in the U.S. market, schools must have a credible claim to being globally connected, if not global themselves. But despite the reorientation of law schools toward globalization, the regulatory regime in which U.S. law …

Crowdsourced Coursebooks, Stephen E. Henderson, Joseph T. Thai

Stephen E Henderson

Given increasing criticism and dropping admissions, American legal education is likely to change, hopefully reversing the unsustainable trend of increasing expense without increasing value. Much debate focuses on restructuring the curriculum to make it more “practical” and skills-infused; here we instead propose a rethinking of the basic unit of law teaching, the casebook. Casebook authors and publishers are cautiously venturing into electronic editions, but they fail to harness the power of social learning to make textbooks dramatically smarter as well as cheaper. Working with a technology startup, we are developing an online platform that reinvents both authorship and learning. The …

The First Thing We Do, Jorge R. Roig

Jorge R Roig

Cat, Cause, And Kant, Richard Peltz-Steele

Richard J. Peltz-Steele

These are precarious times in which to launch a new law school and a new law review. Yet here we are. The University of Massachusetts is now in its first year of operation with provisional ABA accreditation. This text is a foreword to the first general-interest issue of the University of Massachusetts Law Review. Now marks an appropriate time to take stock of what these institutions mean to accomplish in our unsettled legal world.

Time For A Top-Tier Law School In Arkansas, Richard J. Peltz-Steele

Richard J. Peltz-Steele

A simple change in state law could improve the quality of legal education in Arkansas and the quality of legal services available to our consumers - and save significant amounts of taxpayers' money. With an Afterword on academic freedom. Also available from Advance Arkansas Institute website.

The Future Of The American Law School Or, How The “Crits” Led Brian Tamanaha Astray And His Failing Law Schools Fails, Stephen Diamond

Stephen F. Diamond

Debate over the impact of the economic crisis on the future of the American law school has reached an exceptional level of intensity. Brian Tamanaha’s short book, Failing Law Schools, serves as the manifesto for those who believe the law school must undergo radical restructuring and cost cutting. While there is room for disagreement with almost all aspects of the reform argument no critic of Tamanaha has attempted to place his critique in the context of his pre-existing scholarly work on the rule of law. This review essay argues that only an appreciation for the dual nature of the modern …

In-House Live-Client Clinical Programs: Some Ethical Issues, James E. Moliterno

James E. Moliterno

No abstract provided.

The Social Responsibility Of Corporate Law Professors, Lyman P.Q. Johnson

Lyman P. Q. Johnson

Most statements of corporate social responsibility focus on the responsibilities of corporate decision makers or their advisors Professor Johnson argues that corporate law professors-the persons who educate the students who will become lawyers counseling corporate decision makers-also have a social responsibility. He believes that professors should find various ways to raise the subject of corporate social responsibility in the basic corporations course, and he advocates rejecting a classroom approach that addresses only shareholder-manager relations After describing several possible ways to do this, Professor Johnson spotlights fiduciary laws as a fruitful area to enrich student understandings of director duties in a …

One Small Step For Legal Writing, One Giant Leap For Legal Education: Making The Case For More Writing Opportunities In The "Practice-Ready" Law School Curriculum, Sherri Keene

Sherri Keene

Legal writing is more than an isolated practical skill or a law school course; it is a valuable tool for broadening and deepening one’s knowledge and understanding of the law. If experienced legal professionals, both professors and practitioners alike, take a hard look back at their careers, many will no doubt remember how their work on significant legal writing projects advanced their own knowledge of the law and enhanced their professional competence. Legal writing practice helps the writer to gain expertise in a number of ways: first, the act of writing itself promotes learning; second, close work on legal writing …

The "Reason Giving" Lawyer: An Ethical, Practical, And Pedagogical Perspective, Donald J. Kochan

Donald J. Kochan

Whether as a matter of duty or utility, lawyers give reasons for their actions all the time. In the various venues in which legal skills must be employed, reason giving is required in some, expected in others, desired in many, and useful in most. This Essay underscores the pervasiveness of reason giving in the practice of law and the consequent necessity of lawyers developing a skill at giving reasons. This Essay examines reason giving as an innate human characteristic related directly to our need for answers and our constant yearning to understand the answer to the question “why.” It briefly …

Law And Leadership: Integrating Leadership Studies Into The Law School Curriculum, Paula A. Monopoli, Susan Mccarty

Paula A Monopoli

Leadership includes the ability to persuade others to embrace one’s ideas and to act upon them. Teaching law students the art of persuasion through advocacy is at the heart of legal education. But historically law schools have not included leadership studies in the curriculum. This book is one of the first to examine whether and how to integrate the theory and practice of leadership studies into legal education and the legal profession. Interdisciplinary in its scope, with contributions from legal educators and practitioners, the book defines leadership in the context of the legal profession and explores its challenges in legal …

Thinking Like Thinkers: Is The Art And Discipline Of An "Attitude Of Suspended Conclusion" Lost On Lawyers?, Donald J. Kochan

Donald J. Kochan

In his 1910 book, How We Think, John Dewey proclaimed that “the most important factor in the training of good mental habits consists in acquainting the attitude of suspended conclusion. . .” This Article explores that insight and describes its meaning and significance in the enterprise of thinking generally and its importance in law school education specifically. It posits that the law would be best served if lawyers think like thinkers and adopt an attitude of suspended conclusion in their problem solving affairs. Only when conclusion is suspended is there space for the exploration of the subject at hand. The …

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 …