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The Role Of Religiously Affiliated Law Schools In The Renewal Of American Democracy, Bruce Ledewitz Dec 2015

The Role Of Religiously Affiliated Law Schools In The Renewal Of American Democracy, Bruce Ledewitz

Bruce Ledewitz

American Democracy has broken down.  This crisis was on dramatic display in the 2016 Presidential Campaign.  Americans are resentful, distrustful and pessimistic.  We find it easy to blame “the other side” for the deadlock, mendacity and irresponsibility in American public life.  By virtue of their public role, American law schools have an obligation to address the breakdown in order to understand and try to ameliorate it.  That task is currently unfulfilled by law schools individually and collectively, which are distracted by marketing and pedagogy.  Religious law schools, which retain the traits of normative discourse, mission, Truth and tragic limit to …

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Drawing (Gad)Flies: Thoughts On The Uses (Or Uselessness) Of Legal Scholarship, Sherman J. Clark Oct 2015

Drawing (Gad)Flies: Thoughts On The Uses (Or Uselessness) Of Legal Scholarship, Sherman J. Clark

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform Caveat

In this essay, I argue that law schools should continue to encourage and support wide-ranging legal scholarship, even if much of it does not seem to be of immediate use to the legal profession. I do not emphasize the relatively obvious point that scholarship is a process through which we study the law so that we can ultimately make useful contributions. Here, rather, I make two more-subtle points. First, legal academics ought to question the priorities of the legal profession, rather than merely take those priorities as given. We ought to serve as Socratic gadflies—challenging rather than merely mirroring regnant …

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Paid Family Leave In American Law Schools: Findings And Open Questions, Laura T. Kessler Mar 2006

Paid Family Leave In American Law Schools: Findings And Open Questions, Laura T. Kessler

ExpressO

There exists a substantial literature on the status of women in the legal profession, including studies on women students’ experiences in law schools, gender bias on law school faculties, and family leave policies and practices among legal employers. However, no recent study examines the family leave policies and practices in American law schools. This study seeks to fill that gap. Its findings are threefold. First, almost three quarters of law schools provide wage replacement during a family leave that is more generous than required by federal law. Second, there is a positive relationship between teaching at top-tier and private law …

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Legal Reasoning, Phoebe C. Ellsworth Jan 2005

Legal Reasoning, Phoebe C. Ellsworth

Book Chapters

For more than a century, lawyers have written about legal reasoning, and the flow of books and articles describing, analyzing, and reformulating the topic continues unabated. The volume and persistence of this "unrelenting discussion" (Simon, 1998, p. 4) suggests that there is no solid consensus about what legal reasoning is. Legal scholars have a tenacious intuition - or at least a strong hope - that legal reasoning is distinctive, that it is not the same as logic, or scientific reasoning, or ordinary decision making, and there have been dozens of attempts to describe what it is that sets it apart …

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