Law Commons^™

Legal Deserts: A Multi-State Perspective On Rural Access To Justice, Lisa R. Pruitt , Amanda L. Kool, Lauren Sudeall Lucas, Michele Statz, Danielle M. Conway, Hannah Haksgaard

Lisa R Pruitt

The Path To Lawyer Well-Being: Practical Recommendations For Positive Change (The Report Of The National Task Force On Lawyer Well-Being), Part Ii, Recommendations For Law Schools, David Jaffe

David Jaffe

Gandhi’S Prophecy: Corporate Violence And A Mindful Law For Bhopal, Nehal A. Patel

Nehal A. Patel

AbstractOver thirty years have passed since the Bhopal chemical disaster began,and in that time scholars of corporate social responsibility (CSR) havediscussed and debated several frameworks for improving corporate responseto social and environmental problems. However, CSR discourse rarelydelves into the fundamental architecture of legal thought that oftenbuttresses corporate dominance in the global economy. Moreover, CSRdiscourse does little to challenge the ontological and epistemologicalassumptions that form the foundation for modern economics and the role ofcorporations in the world.I explore methods of transforming CSR by employing the thought ofMohandas Gandhi. I pay particular attention to Gandhi’s critique ofindustrialization and principle of swadeshi (self-sufficiency) …

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, …

The Moral Lawyer And The Machiavellian Nature Of Law Practice, David Barnhizer

David Barnhizer

In Western culture the name Niccolo Machiavelli has become Machiavellianism, a pejorative signifying the willingness to do anything to achieve desired ends. American lawyers do have limits, however, and are expected to operate according to an ethical code that is at least intended to prevent the worst abuses. The effectiveness of this ethical code has often been questioned, as have the questionable efforts of the organized bar to enforce its rules, but on the surface it differentiates law practice from hand-to-hand combat and military struggles. Even though I have sometimes used the concepts of the warrior lawyer, the general and …

Promoting Inclusion Through Exclusion: Higher Education's Assault On The First Amendment, Adam Lamparello

Adam Lamparello

To obtain a meaningful educational experience and achieve the benefits of a diverse student body, students should confront beliefs they find abhorrent and discuss topics that bring discomfort. As it stands now, universities are transforming classrooms and campuses into sanctuaries for the over-sensitive and shelters for the easily-offended. In so doing, higher education is embracing a new, and bizarre, form of homogeneity that subtly coerces faculty members and students into restricting, not expressing, their views, and creating a climate that favors less, not more, expressive conduct. This approach undermines First Amendment values and further divorces higher education from the real …

Building A More Critical Lens Into The Five Habits Of Cross-Cultural Lawyering, Kiran Sidhu

Kiran Sidhu

No abstract provided.

Law Schools And Learning Outcomes: Developing A Coherent, Cohesive, And Comprehensive Law School Curriculum, Anthony S. Niedwiecki

Anthony S. Niedwiecki

No abstract provided.

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 …

The Death Of Academic Support: Creating A Truly Integrated, Experiential, And Assessment Driven Academic Success And Bar Preparation Program, Adam Lamparello, Laura Dannebohm

Adam Lamparello

For too long, academic support programs have been viewed as the unwanted stepchild of legal education. These programs have existed in the dark shadows of legal education, reserved for students deemed “at risk” for satisfactorily completing law school or successfully passing the bar examination, and focused on keeping students above the dreaded academic dismissal threshold. The time has arrived for the remedial – and stereotypical – character of academic support to meet its demise, and to be reborn as a program that helps all students to become better lawyers, not just better law students.

In this article, we propose a …

International Trade V. Intellectual Property Lawyers: Globalization And The Brazilian Legal Profession, Vitor M. Dias

Vitor M. Dias

No abstract provided.

Meeting The Experiential Challenge: A Fee-Generating Law Clinic (With Harold J. Krent), Gary S. Laser

Gary S. Laser

No abstract provided.

The High Price Of Poverty: A Study Of How The Majority Of Current Court System Procedures For Collecting Court Costs And Fees, As Well As Fines, Have Failed To Adhere To Established Precedent And The Constitutional Guarantees They Advocate., Trevor J. Calligan

Trevor J Calligan

No abstract provided.

Toward A Writing-Centered Legal Education, Adam Lamparello

Adam Lamparello

The future of legal education should bridge the divide between learning and practicing the law. This requires three things. First, tuition should bear some reasonable relationship to graduates’ employment outcomes. Perhaps Harvard is justified in charging $50,000 in tuition, but a fourth-tier law school is not. Second, no school should resist infusing more practical skills training into the curriculum. This does not mean that law schools should focus on adding clinics and externships to the curriculum. The focus should be on developing critical thinkers and persuasive writers that can solve real-world legal problems. Third, law schools should be transparent about …

, The Law School Of The Future: How The Synergies Of Convergence Will Transform The Very Notion Of “Law Schools” During The 21st Century From “Places” To “Platforms”, Jeffrey A. Van Detta

Jeffrey A. Van Detta

This article discusses the disruptive change in American (and trans-national) legal education that the convergence of technology and economics is bringing to legal education. It posits, and then defends, the following assertion about "law schools of the future":

“Law schools will no longer be ‘places’ in the sense of a single faculty located on a physical campus. In the future, law schools will consist of an array of technologies and instructional techniques brought to bear, in convergence, on particular educational needs and problems.”

This paper elaborates on that prediction, discussing the ways in which technology will positively impact legal education, …

The End Of Law Schools, Ray W. Campbell

Ray W Campbell

What would legal education look like if it were designed from the ground up for a world in which legal services have undergone profound and irreversible change? 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 …

Experiential Education And Our Divided Campuses: What Delivers Practice Value To Big Law Associates, Government Attorneys, And Public Interest Lawyers?, Margaret E. Reuter, Joanne Ingham

Margaret E. Reuter

How will law schools meet the challenge of expanding their education in lawyering skills as demanded from critics and now required by the ABA? This article examines the details of the experiential coursework (clinic, field placement, and skills courses) of 2,142 attorneys. It reveals that experiential courses have not been comparably pursued or valued by former law students as they headed to careers in different settings and types of law practice. Public interest lawyers took many of these types of courses, at intensive levels, and valued them highly. In marked contrast, corporate lawyers in large firms took far fewer. When …

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 …

Why The Bar Examination Fails To Raise The Bar, Carol Goforth

Carol Goforth

A Government Of Laws Not Of Precedents 1776-1876: The Google Challenge To Common Law Myth, James Maxeiner

James R Maxeiner

Conventional wisdom holds that the United States is a common law country of precedents where, until the 20th century (the “Age of Statutes”), statutes had little role. Digitization by Google and others of previously hard to find legal works of the 19th century challenges this common law myth. At the Centennial in 1876 Americans celebrated that “The great fact in the progress of American jurisprudence … is its tendency towards organic statute law and towards the systematizing of law; in other words, towards written constitutions and codification.” This article tests the claim of the Centennial Writers of 1876 and finds …

Perspectives On International Students' Interest In U.S. Legal Education: Shifting Incentives And Influence, Carole Silver

Carole Silver

This article seeks to situate the shift to international students in U.S. law school SJD programs within the larger context of globalization and higher education, and was published as a comment on Gail Hupper’s article on “Educational Ambivalence: The Rise of a Foreign-Student Doctorate in Law.” Broadening the framework of analysis allows consideration of the competing factions and opportunities that explain the developing international market for legal education. In addition, this wider lens also offers insight into the incentives shaping new investments in legal (and higher) education, including Yale Law School’s new PhD in law.

On The Battlefield Of Merit: Harvard Law School, The First Century, Daniel Coquillette, Bruce Kimball

Daniel R. Coquillette

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 …

Spirals And Schemas: How Integrated Law School Courses Create Higher-Order Thinkers And Problem Solvers, Jennifer Spreng

Jennifer E Spreng

As legal educators continue to shift focus to preparing students for practice, they should put integrated first-year courses and curricula into the top tier of potential reform vehicles. Integration refers to the extent to which a course or curriculum blurs disciplinary boundaries as well as boundaries between doctrine and authentic learning activities. Integrated courses promote active, deep learning that facilitate orderly knowledge construction and reveal more connections between vital legal concepts. The authenticity of integrated courses improves students’ retention and transfer of knowledge. Such accessible, interconnected knowledge in such a vital learning environment is like intellectual rocket fuel to law …

Suppose The Class Began The Day The Case Walked In The Door . . ., Jennifer Spreng

Jennifer E Spreng

Problem-solving is the manifestation of a lawyer’s expertise. Unfortunately, the first year of law school is too highly compartmentalized and often semi-rote-learning experience that does not disturb what are many students’ passive undergraduate school learning strategies. Once taught the same way in law school, students are unlikely to develop the more intellectually sophisticated, relational learning strategies to make the cross-topical and cross-disciplinary connections of which problem-solving expertise is made.

This article argues that horizontally and vertically integrated first-year courses with spiral designs that prioritize honing students’ analytical and problem-solving capacities can break this cycle and prepare students with more self-directed …

Lawyer, Form Thyself: Professional Identity Formation Strategies In Legal Education, Professional Responsibility, And Experiential Courses, Susan S. Daicoff

Susan Daicoff

Professional identity formation as a learning objective in law school may appear to be nontraditional and perhaps even innovative. While perhaps not a new concept, it is not typically an explicit goal of legal education. Empirical data finds that law school has demonstrable effects upon law students’ professional development; it also finds that certain nontraditional skills and competencies (or “soft skills”) make lawyers most effective. This article argues for explicit planning for and inclusion of professional identity development, including training in these nontraditional skills, in legal education. Professional identity encompasses one’s values, preferences, passions, intrinsic satisfactions, emotional intelligence, as well …

Experiential Legal Writing: The New Approach To Practicing Like A Lawyer, Adam Lamparello, Charles E. Maclean

Adam Lamparello

Law students engage in various types of “experiential” learning activities while in school, such as clinics and externships, but they graduate without the experience necessary to practice law. This is traceable to a glaring deficiency at most law schools: a writing program that is comprehensive, properly sequenced, and integrated across and throughout the law school curriculum.

First, most graduates have never drafted the documents they will encounter in law practice. Additionally, they have not drafted and re-drafted such documents while also participating in real-world simulations as they would in actual practice. Instead, students graduate having drafted an appellate brief, a …

Enigma: A Variation On The Theme Of Legal Writing's Place In Contemporary Legal Education, Ian Gallacher

Ian Gallacher

No abstract provided.

Whose Article Is It Anyway? Student Editors And The Law Review Process, Josephine R. Potuto

Josephine R Potuto

Law professors publish in law reviews, not peer-reviewed journals. They are edited by law students. The editing process can be both irritating and exasperating. From experiences lived and those shared by colleagues across the country, I provide concrete examples of where law student editors go wrong, and also explain why.