Law Commons^™

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.

The Lawyer's Toolbox: Teaching Students About Risk Allocation, Dana Malkus, Scott Stevenson, Eric J. Gouvin, Usha Rodrigues

All Faculty Scholarship

This Article is the transcript of a panel presented at Emory’s Third Biennial Conference on Transactional Education. The panel focuses on techniques for teaching risk allocation as part of transactional skills classes. The panelists describe their approaches to teaching risk allocation, from syllabus design to final evaluations. How can a professor help students to understand the basic concepts of risk, the role risk plays in business and legal decisions, and how they can help clients manage risk. The techniques for teaching risk allocation include hypotheticals, visual aids, and hands-on assignments. The panelists each take their students down a different path …

Time: An Empirical Analysis Of Law Student Time Management Deficiencies, Christine P. Bartholomew

Journal Articles

This Article begins the much needed research on law students’ time famine. Time management complaints begin early in students’ legal education and generally go unresolved. As a result, practicing attorneys identify time famine as a leading cause of job dissatisfaction. To better arm graduating students, law schools must treat time as an essential component of practice-readiness. Unfortunately, most law schools ignore their students’ time management concerns, despite growing calls for greater “skills” training in legal education.

To date, legal scholarship has overlooked psychological research on time management. Yet, this research is an essential starting point to effective instruction. Rather than …

Cooperation In Legal Education And Legal Reform, Ronald A. Brand

Articles

This contribution to the symposium Special Report on Kosovo After the ICJ Opinion focuses on legal education and its role in the legal reform necessary to any state that is transitioning to a new system of government. It does so by considering first the importance of legal education as a U.S. export to transition countries. This necessarily requires a reciprocal consideration of the importance to U.S. law schools of considering the external, international effect of implementing changes in the traditional structure of U.S. legal education, and about how teaching methods both distinguish differing legal systems and require cross-system consideration of …

Special Report: Kosovo After The Icj Opinion, Introduction, Ronald A. Brand

Articles

On October 22-25, 2012, judges, government officials, and scholars from Kosovo and the United States gathered at the University of Pittsburgh for a conference on “Kosovo after the ICJ Opinion.” The conference was organized by the Center for International Legal Education (CILE) at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, and the University of Prishtina Faculty of Law. It was co-sponsored by the Ministry of Justice, Kosovo; the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Kosovo; the Forum for Civic Initiatives, Kosovo; the American Society of International Law (ASIL); and the Center for Russian and Eastern European Studies at the University of Pittsburgh …

Teaching Law And Digital Age Legal Practice With An Ai And Law Seminar: Justice, Lawyering And Legal Education In The Digital Age, Kevin D. Ashley

Articles

A seminar on Artificial Intelligence ("Al") and Law can teach law students lessons about legal reasoning and legal practice in the digital age. Al and Law is a subfield of Al/computer science research that focuses on designing computer programs—computational models—that perform legal reasoning. These computational models are used in building tools to assist in legal practice and pedagogy and in studying legal reasoning in order to contribute to cognitive science and jurisprudence. Today, subject to a number of qualifications, computer programs can reason with legal rules, apply legal precedents, and even argue like a legal advocate.

This article provides a …

Universal Citation In Sixty Seconds, Anne Burnett

Presentations

A large format infographic describing the system for citation which permits reference to legal or law-related information in any medium without requiring reference to proprietary products. Includes a timeline of the Universal Citation Guide from 1993 to 2012, citation elements, a list of states and territories that adopted the practice and an interactive QR code for accessing AALL's page on this citation format. The poster also encouraged viewers to advocate for adopting Universal citation with judges, attorneys and legislators.

Agenda: A Life Of Contributions For All Time: Symposium In Honor Of David H. Getches, University Of Colorado Boulder. School Of Law, University Of Colorado Law Review

A Life of Contributions for All Time: Symposium in Honor of David H. Getches (April 26-27)

On April 26-27, 2012, Colorado Law honored David H. Getches with a symposium to celebrate his life and legacy of trailblazing scholarship. “A Life of Contributions for All Time” featured a keynote address by Distinguished Professor Charles Wilkinson entitled, “Hero for the People, Hero for the Land and Water: Reflections on the Enduring Contributions of David Getches.” Top scholars in the fields of natural resources, water, and American Indian law reflected on Dean Getches’ contributions and their own insights into these fields, including Professor John Leshy, John Echohawk, Professor Carole Goldberg, Professor Joe Sax, Professor Rebecca Tsosie, Justice Greg Hobbs, …

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 …

Equipping The Garage Guys In Law, Gillian K. Hadfield

Gillian K Hadfield

The twin structural changes of the last few decades—globalization and the emergence of a web-based platform for economic activity--have transformed the economic demand for law. The market for law, however, has struggled to keep up with these changes, showing few signs of the kind of innovation that we see in many other sectors of the new economy. Even our most sophisticated and innovative corporations report difficulty in finding lawyers with the kinds of risk-attuned and creative problem-solving skills that they need (Hadfield 2011). Some large corporate clients have gone so far as to refuse to hire new law firm associates, …

The Effect Of Legal Theories On Judicial Decisions, Anthony D'Amato

Faculty Working Papers

I draw a distinction in the beginning of this essay between judicial decision-making and a judge's decision-making. To persuade a judge, we should try to discover what her theories are. Across a range of theories, I offered well-known case examples typically cited as examples of each theory. Then I showed that the exact same theory used to justify or explain those case results could be used to justify or explain the opposite result in each of those cases.

Teaching With Emotion: Enriching The Educational Experience Of First-Year Law Students, Grant H. Morris

Grant H Morris

Through the case method and Socratic dialogue, first year law students are taught to develop critical legal analytic skills–to “think like a lawyer.” Those skills, however, are primarily, if not entirely, intellectual. This article discusses the need to address emotional issues in educating law students. Unlike other articles, my article does not merely urge professors to raise such issues in their classes and discuss them analytically. Rather, I want students to actually experience emotion in the classroom setting as they discuss various fact situations and the legal principles involved in the resolution of disputes involving those facts. Law students need …

Who Gets To Be The Expert?: Legal Research Skills Certification In Legal Education, Richard Leiter

Marvin and Virginia Schmid Law Library

This article considers the question of whether there is a need for law schools to offer certification for specialization in legal research skills and discusses various approaches to legal research skills cer­tification. The author argues that it is unnecessary to offer legal research certification as it is presupposed that a basic legal educa­tion should include instruction in how to find and read the law. Anything less is a failed legal education.

Exactly how special are legal research skills? Are they special enough to warrant certification? As a matter of fact, the act of legal researching is so intimately connected with …

Law School And The Making Of The Student Into A Lawyer: Transformation Of First Year Law Students In The National University Of Singapore, Seow Hon Tan

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

This paper examines the impact of legal education and law school on the student's moral development and conception of professional identity, through an empirical study of first year law students of the Class of 2010 at the National University of Singapore. The project aims to increase consciousness of how law school remakes students and develops the moral and professional identity of future lawyers, and to facilitate a dialogue that reshapes legal education to achieve its aims. Given that legal education in Singapore is similar to that in other law schools in common law jurisdictions, the analysis is, with allowances for …

What's In A Name? A Gen Xer And Gen Yer Explore What It Means To Be Members Of Their Generations In The Workplace, Lauren M. Collins, Elizabeth A. Yates

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

In the NextGen Librarian's Survival Guide by Rachel Singer Gordon, the author cites several reasons this time is different than times before in librarianship. Those that are most relevant to law librarianship include:

• Flattening workplace hierarchies and participative management increase the input of newer librarians in workplace decision making

• New technologies require changing skills that affect attitudes toward the integration of those technologies into our daily work

• Outside pressures, such as the prevalence of the Internet, impose a need for librarians to continually prove our relevance and improve relations with younger patrons

• The much talked about …

Happy Law Students, Happy Lawyers, Nancy Levit, Douglas Linder

Nancy Levit

This article draws on research into the science of happiness and asks a series of interrelated questions: Whether law schools can make law students happier? Whether making happier law students will translate into making them happier lawyers, and the accompanying question of whether making law students happier would create better lawyers? After covering the limitations of genetic determinants of happiness and happiness set-points, the article addresses those qualities that happiness research indicates are paramount in creating satisfaction: control, connections, creative challenge (or flow), and comparisons (preferably downward). Those qualities are then applied to legal education, while addressing the larger philosophical …

The Legal Employment Market: Determinants Of Elite Firm Placement, And How Law Schools Stack Up, Anthony M. Ciolli

ExpressO

Data collected on 15,293 law firm associates from 1295 employers who graduated from law school between 2001 and 2003 were used to develop a “total quality score” for every ABA-accredited law school, both nationally and for nine geographic regions. Quantitative methods were then used to identify factors that help explain the variation in a law school’s national career placement success at elite law firms. The findings revealed that while a law school’s academic reputation is the single biggest predictor of placement, several other factors were also highly significant. Differences in grading system, class rank disclosure policies, and the number of …

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, …

Leaky Boundaries And The Decline Of The Autonomous Law School Library, James G. Milles

Journal Articles

Academic law librarians have long insisted on the value of autonomy from the university library system, usually basing their arguments on strict adherence to ABA standards. However, law librarians have failed to construct an explicit and consistent definition of autonomy. Lacking such a definition, they have tended to rely on an outmoded Langdellian view of the law as a closed system. This view has long been discredited, as approaches such as law and economics and sociolegal research have become mainstream, and courts increasingly resort to nonlegal sources of information. Blind attachment to autonomy as a goal rather than a means …

Queering Legal Education: A Project Of Theoretical Discovery, Kim Brooks, Debra Parkes

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

The article has two parts. Part II discusses the materials we reviewed to inform the development of a queer legal pedagogy. In particular, it examines the categories of queer legal scholarship and highlights the contributions of other outsider scholars to legal education debates. Early in our research, we found limited material on queer legal pedagogy, and we discovered nothing that posited a theoretical approach. We did, however, find rich resources written by other outsiders to law from which some design principles for queer legal pedagogy might be drawn. We should note at the outset that our goal in this Part …

Designing Electronic Casebooks That Talk Back: The Cato Program, Kevin D. Ashley

Articles

Electronic casebooks offer important benefits of flexibility in control of presentation, connectivity, and interactivity. These additional degrees of freedom, however, also threaten to overwhelm students. If casebook authors and instructors are to achieve their pedagogical goals, they will need new methods for guiding students. This paper presents three such methods developed in an intelligent tutoring environment for engaging students in legal role-playing, making abstract concepts explicit and manipulable, and supporting pedagogical dialogues. This environment is built around a program known as CATO, which employs artificial intelligence techniques to teach first-year law students how to make basic legal arguments with cases. …

Becoming Gentlemen: Women's Experiences At One Ivy League Law School, Lani Guinier, Michelle Fine, Jane Balin, Ann Bartow, Deborah Lee Stachel

Publications and Research

In this Article we describe preliminary research by and about women law students at the University of Pennsylvania Law School—a typical, if elite, law school stratified deeply along gender lines. Our database draws from students enrolled at the Law School between 1987 and 1992, and includes academic performance data from 981 students, self-reported survey data from 366 students, written narratives from 104 students, and group-level interview data of approximately eighty female and male students.' From these data we conclude that the law school experience of women in the aggregate differs markedly from that of their male peers.

Moving Into Management From The Outside, Lynn Wishart

Library Staff Articles

When accepting a promotion from outside the organization, the new manager must understand what is being given up and left behind, and must also realize clearly what expectations the new library holds. In the new position, the outside manager must articulate goals and find common ground with supervisors and subordinates. The take-charge period should be used for judicious decision making and intense learning.

Preparing Global Professionals, Alfred C. Aman

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Reflections Of An Octogenarian On Criminal Law And Criminology, Jerome Hall

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Reflections On Education In International Law In Africa, Henry J. Richardson Iii

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Address By Secretary Of Labor W. Willard Wirtz, W. Willard Wirtz

San Diego Law Review

The address was delivered by Mr. Wirtz at the annual meeting of the Association of American Law Schools held in Los Angeles on December 29, 1963. Because they were addressed to the particular group assembled and depended for their meaning upon circumstances existing at the time, certain introductory comments have been deleted.

Foreword: University Of Ghana Law Journal, William Burnett Harvey

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Legal Education And Public Administration, Ralph F. Fuchs

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.