Law Commons^™

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 …

Experiential Education As Critical Pedagogy: Enhancing The Law School Experience, Spearit, Stephanie Ledesma

Articles

This article examines the shift to greater experiential education in law school through the lens of critical pedagogy. At its base, critical pedagogy is about devising more equitable methods of teaching, helping students develop consciousness of freedom, and helping them connect knowledge to power. The insights of critical pedagogy are valuable for a fuller understanding of experiential education and its potential to affect students in profound ways, particularly as a means of empowerment. Although this is an understudied area of pedagogical scholarship, power relations are at the heart of legal education. Critical pedagogy offers a frame for considering how experiential …

Visions Of The Future Of (Legal) Education, Michael J. Madison

Articles

One law professor takes a stab at imagining an ideal law school of the future and describing how to get there. The Essay spells out a specific possible vision, taking into account changes to the demand for legal services and changes to the economics and composition of the legal profession. That thought experiment leads to a series of observations about values and vision in legal education in general and about what it might take to move any vision forward.

Knowledge Curation, Michael J. Madison

Articles

This Article addresses conservation, preservation, and stewardship of knowledge, and laws and institutions in the cultural environment that support those things. Legal and policy questions concerning creativity and innovation usually focus on producing new knowledge and offering access to it. Equivalent attention rarely is paid to questions of old knowledge. To what extent should the law, and particularly intellectual property law, focus on the durability of information and knowledge? To what extent does the law do so already, and to what effect? This article begins to explore those questions. Along the way, the article takes up distinctions among different types …

Beyond Creativity: Copyright As Knowledge Law, Michael J. Madison

Articles

The Supreme Court’s copyright jurisprudence of the last 100 years has embraced the creativity trope. Spurred in part by themes associated with the story of “romantic authorship” in the 19th and 20th centuries, copyright critiques likewise ask, “Who is creative?” “How should creativity be protected (or not) and encouraged (or not)?” and “ Why protect creativity?” Policy debates and scholarship in recent years have focused on the concept of creativity in framing copyright disputes, transactions, and institutions, reinforcing the notion that these are the central copyright questions. I suggest that this focus on the creativity trope is unhelpful. I argue …

Exporting Legal Education: Lessons Learned From Efforts In Transition Countries, Ronald A. Brand

Articles

A convergence of inward and outward-looking processes in US law schools creates both risk and potential reward in the development of legal education. As law faculties engage in the current process of changing the traditional law school curriculum, they should carefully coordinate a desire for internal goals with an understanding of external impact, realizing that this process is likely to affect not just US law schools, but legal education across the globe. Changes in the curriculum at US law schools should be responsive, not only to concerns about the legal marketplace in the United States, but also to the impact …

What Helps Law Professors Develop As Teachers? -- An Empirical Study, Gerald F. Hess, Sophie M. Sparrow

Law Faculty Scholarship

The overall goal of this article is to provide concrete suggestions for how law schools can improve teaching and enrich law student learning. In doing so, it reviews and analyzes the data collected from two national surveys about the kinds of faculty development activities that are most effective in improving law professors’ teaching. One survey was designed to quantify how many law teachers engaged in twenty-two types of teaching development activities over the previous five years and to assess the effectiveness of each of those activities. The other survey focused on the effectiveness of a national conference on teaching and …

Writing To Learn Law And Writing In Law: An Intellectual Property Illustration, Michael J. Madison

Articles

This essay, prepared as part of a Symposium on teaching intellectual property law, describes a method of combining substantive law teaching with a species of what is commonly called "skills" training. The method involves assessing students not via traditional final exams but instead via research memos patterned after assignments that junior lawyers might encounter in actual legal practice. The essay grounds the method in the theoretical disposition known generally as "writing to learn." It argues that students are likely to learn intellectual property law effectively if they learn to practice as intellectual property lawyers, and specifically to write as intellectual …

Assessing Technology Skills In An Undergraduate Business Course, Kimberly Hollister, Nicole B. Koppel

Department of Information Management and Business Analytics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

This article focuses on how an undergraduate program of an Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB), an accredited business school, incorporates assessment on the use of information technology in a computer business course. To meet the new AACSB standards regarding assessment and adequately determine "if and what students are learning?" This article presents the technology learning goals, the associated learning objectives and the specific technology-related behaviors and actions that are assessed. In addition, specific examples of student assignments are presented as well as how these assignments are designed and assessed in relation to the learning objectives for the …

"In A Case, On The Screen, Do They Remember What They've Seen?" Critical Electronic Reading In The Law Classroom, Debra Moss Curtis

Faculty Scholarship

In 2005, we produced a well-received article and presentation entitled, "'In a Case, In a Book, They Will Not Take a Second Look!' Critical Reading in the Legal Writing Classroom." The article examined the educational foundations of critical reading, as well as, critical reading techniques. The purpose was to establish that law students need instruction in critical reading. In the article, we offered creative solutions that had been successfully used in our legal writing classes. In the two years since, we have found it necessary to reconsider the problem of critical reading in the law school classroom, in light of …

Everything I Wanted To Know About Teaching Law School I Learned From Being A Kindergarten Teacher: Ethics In The Law School Classroom, Debra Moss Curtis

Faculty Scholarship

This article discusses the ethics of teaching law school. It was not until the 1920s and 1930s that full-time law teachers, rather than part-time practitioners or judges, held the main responsibility for teaching at many law schools. When this shift began to occur, the field of "law professor" was born, and there arose the need for rules in all areas governing law professors, including ethics. Today, most law professors in the United States are members of both the legal and teaching professions and therefore must comply with the ethical rules of each profession. However they may be professionally licensed, law …

Teach The Children Well: Incorporating Cultural Literacy Into The Law School Learning Experience, Debra Moss Curtis

Faculty Scholarship

This article is an examination of what and how we teach in law school. Much attention has been given to the concept of the Socratic Method and whether teaching in this manner "hides the ball" from students. Rather than focusing on whether the ball is hidden, my work shall focus on whether students know what the ball is in the first place.

"In A Case, In A Book, They Will Not Take A Second Look!" Critical Reading In The Legal Writing Classroom, Debra Curtis, Judith Karp

Faculty Scholarship

This article is based on a presentation that was first assembled for the Southeastern Regional Legal Writing Conference in September 2003. The theme of that conference was "The Basics and Beyond: Building Solid Skills on Flawed Foundations." As legal writing professions with nine years of teaching experience between us, we immediately honed in on "reading" as a core lawyering skill--though it is the one that seemed most flawed in the first-year legal writing class. We determined that case analysis, statute analysis, synthesis, and application were not possible unless students critically read the material with which they were working. Many students …

You've Got Rhythm: Curriculum Planning And Teaching Rhythm At Work In The Legal Writing Classroom, Debra Curtis

Faculty Scholarship

With increased frequency, attention is being given to the methods and style of teaching the law, and to the educational knowledge of law teachers necessary for their development. While teachers in many other areas of higher education are required to take credit hours in education courses, that requirement or focus on pedagogy itself has not yet fully spilled over to legal education professionals. In addition, although law professions, have been encouraged to think and learn about the law, they generally have long since accepted the Socratic method as a primary method of teaching. Recently information about students' learning styles, and …

Toward A Rule Of Law Society In Iraq: Introducing Clinical Legal Education Into Iraqi Law Schools, Haider Ala Hamoudi

Articles

This Article details my experience introducing clinical legal education into three Iraqi law schools. I highlight some of the cultural, legal and logistical obstacles that existed, and the means my colleagues and I used to circumvent them. By and large we considered our project at least modestly successful and certainly garnered the interest of many faculty and nearly all students who participated. Nevertheless, the extent of our success depended largely on the cooperation of the faculty and administration at the law schools with which we worked, and we were able to achieve the most at those institutions where cooperation was …

The Role Of Foreign Languages In Educating Lawyers For Transnational Challenges, Vivian Grosswald Curran

Articles

In a world in which every other country seems intent on teaching English to their youth, and in which the United States educational system does not place a high priority on teaching foreign languages, the American law student, dean and professor may doubt if foreign language knowledge is anything more than marginally helpful to law graduates. Similarly, educators at the primary school level may not be likely to assess foreign language education as warranting a greater allocation of scarce public resources.

The usefulness of foreign languages to the United States lawyer gradually has been gaining increased recognition in the profession, …

How To Incorporate External Activities Into Courses For Your Students’ Benefit, Marissa Moran

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Clinical Legal Education: Energy And Transformation, David J. Herring

Articles

The clinical movement has had a dramatic impact on the nation's law schools. Administrators and faculty members cannot successfully ignore it or wish it away. Instead, they must address it and seek ways to harness its energy. My perspective on this subject stems from my entry into academia as a clinician. I was a faculty member in the University of Michigan's Child Advocacy Law Clinic for three years before joining the faculty at the University of Pittsburgh in 1990 with the charge to create and implement an in-house clinic program. Over the past ten years, I have assisted in the …

Education For Self-Reliance, Responsibility And Hope, John Strassburger

Publications

This is the first in a series of occasional papers about the challenges confronting students and what Ursinus is doing to help them enter adult life.