Law Commons^™

On The Effective Communication Of The Results Of Empirical Studies, Part Ii, Lee Epstein

Vanderbilt Law Review

While law professors are increasingly making use of data in their scholarship and while the data work housed in their studies is (generally) of a high quality, they have been less effective at communicating the products of their labor. A strong devotion to tabular, rather than graphical, displays, and claims about "statistical significance" rather than substantive importance, are just two areas requiring improvement.

Here, as in Part I, we attempt to adapt a burgeoning literature in the social and statistical sciences to the unique interests of legal scholars. Our proposals are many in number, but none is particularly difficult to …

The Geologic Strata Of The Law School Curriculum, Robert W. Gordon

Vanderbilt Law Review

The modest aim of this piece is to supply some historical background to the other contributions to this Symposium. The modern American law school curriculum is the product of a few but critical choices of design, some of them over a century old. In this Article, I seek to (1) outline how the basic structure and content of the modern American law school curriculum came into being and what were the main competitors that curriculum displaced; (2) describe some of the ways in which the curriculum's basic structure and content have changed since its inception; and (3) point to some …

Psychological Theories Of Educational Engagement: A Multi-Method Approach To Studying Individual Engagement And Institutional Change, Bonita London, Geraldine Downey, Shauna Mace

Vanderbilt Law Review

As teachers, administrators, scholars, and practitioners, one critical issue we face in the academic world is how to foster the academic success and psychological well-being of future generations of teachers, scholars, and practitioners. In some cases, even the most well-prepared and academically motivated students enter law school with the drive and ability to succeed, but along the way, may encounter difficulties that interfere with their potential success in law school and beyond. What are the barriers to engagement, academic success and psychological well-being that impede some students? How might we understand the process of engagement and investment in legal education, …

What's Wrong With Langdell's Method, And What To Do About It, Edward Rubin

Vanderbilt Law Review

Here we are, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, using a model of legal education that was developed in the latter part of the nineteenth. Since that time, the nature of legal practice has changed, the concept of law has changed, the nature of academic inquiry has changed, and the theory of education has changed. Professional training programs in other fields have been redesigned many times to reflect current practice, theory, and pedagogy, but we legal educators are still doing the same basic thing we were doing one hundred and thirty years ago. Many law professors are conscientious and …

Can Law Survive Legal Education?, Ernest J. Weinrib

Vanderbilt Law Review

Legal education exists at the confluence of three activities: the practice of law, the enterprise of understanding that practice, and the study of law's possible understandings within the context of a university. The first of these, the practice of law, consists of the activities consciously governed by law, including, for example, lawyers giving legal advice, citizens contemplating the legality of prospective actions, legislators creating law within the limits of their jurisdiction, and judges determining the rights and duties of litigants. It thus comprehends the entire field of legal institutions, legal doctrine, and legal interaction. The second activity, the enterprise of …

A Lawyer's Lament: Law Schools And The "Profession" Of Law, Wayne S. Hyatt

Vanderbilt Law Review

Back in the mid-eighties, I offered a first year, second semester "un-elective" called American Legal Theory and American Legal Education. It scrunched together two history courses I had taught irregularly before. I liked the way the two topics fit together and still do, but with so many recalcitrant law students enrolled in it, the course was an unmitigated disaster. As is always the case with such attempts at offering perspective, amidst the shambles I had acquired at least a few devoted students. At the end of the last class one of them came up to the front to ask a …

Inside The Law School Classroom: Toward A New Legal Realist Pedagogy, Elizabeth Mertz

Vanderbilt Law Review

In recent years, the legal academy has been experiencing a strong renewed interest in empirical legal research. Referred to by various analysts as a "new legal realism" or as "empirical legal studies," this restored focus on the social sciences in many ways echoes an earlier era of legal realism in American law, with some important differences.' . . .

This Article combines these two themes: empirical research on law and careful examination of legal education. It reports on an empirical study of legal education, which I have been conducting under the auspices of the American Bar Foundation (a research institute …

2007 Symposium On The Future Of Legal Education, Nicholas S. Zeppos

Vanderbilt Law Review

Like the proverbial elephant, law school appears different when perceived from different perspectives. During my twenty years as a law professor, I saw law school as a professional training program, a legal research institute, and a wonderful group of academic colleagues. The articles in this Symposium on the Future of Legal Education, based on a conference held at Vanderbilt in spring of 2006, generally view law school from a similar perspective. Now that I'm a Provost, my perspective is different. This raises some new issues, but it also underscores the basic theme of the Symposium. Law schools, like business schools, …

A Damn Hard Thing To Do, John H. Schlegel

Vanderbilt Law Review

Back in the mid-eighties, I offered a first year, second semester "un-elective" called American Legal Theory and American Legal Education. It scrunched together two history courses I had taught irregularly before. I liked the way the two topics fit together and still do, but with so many recalcitrant law students enrolled in it, the course was an unmitigated disaster. As is always the case with such attempts at offering perspective, amidst the shambles I had acquired at least a few devoted students. At the end of the last class one of them came up to the front to ask a …

A Case For Another Case Method, Todd D. Rakoff, Martha Minow

Vanderbilt Law Review

American legal education is pretty good. Generally speaking, it is rigorous, and generally speaking, students learn a lot. After three years in law school, students usually leave not only with knowledge of specific legal materials, but also with the sharp analytic skills and ability to work in existing legal institutions that people expect from lawyers. But our society is full of new problems demanding new solutions. Less so than in the past-less than in the 1930s and less than in the 1960s-are lawyers inventing those solutions. Much of the action is moving to graduates trained in other disciplines and professions, …

Taking Law And _______ Really Seriously: Before, During And After "The Law", Carrie Menkel-Meadow

Vanderbilt Law Review

Any consideration of what legal education should consist of must begin with the question of what "law," as a field of study, is. Whether a study of "the law" is science, philosophy, political science, or a field unto itself, or is more like a social science study of the norms and behaviors that human beings create and enforce for their self- governance, what the field is should have something to do with how it is studied.

So, one can ask, what is the object of study when one studies "the law"? Court decisions and interpretations (doctrine) and statutes and regulations …

Making Lawyers (And Gangsters) In Japan, Mark D. West

Vanderbilt Law Review

How insulting to have juxtaposed "lawyers" and "gangsters" in the title, to hint that lawyers are not engaged in a supremely noble profession, to insinuate a commonality between counselors-at-law and godfathers. There will be no explicit comparisons here, for this is an Essay about Japanese legal education, not La Cosa Nostra. Instead I offer a description of how Japan trains its lawyers and what lawyers in Japan do. I'll also talk a bit about how gangsters in Japan are trained, and what they do. Perhaps a serendipitous connection will present itself.

I begin by briefly discussing the old system of …