Law Commons^™

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 …

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 …

Keepers Of The Flame: Prosser And Keeton On The Law Of Torts, Craig Joyce

Vanderbilt Law Review

Rarely in the history of American legal education has one author's name been so clearly identified with his subject as the name of William L. Prosser is with the law of torts. Even today, fourteen years after his death in 1972, "Prosser on Torts" remains in the minds of students, teachers, the bench, and the bar alike a single thought, its parts indistinguishable one from the other. Indeed, the passage of time has done nothing to diminish the influence of the man on the subject. His articles remain landmarks in the development both of the literature of torts and of …

Professional Competence And Social Responsibility: Fulfilling The Vanderbilt Vision, Sandra D. O'Connor

Vanderbilt Law Review

In our laudable attempt to train law students to "think like lawyers" by teaching them legal method, we must not lose sight of the fact that questions of professional responsibility cannot properly be resolved with the same legal framework of analysis. Rather,we must see that as professionals with almost exclusive access to our system of justice, we have moral responsibilities totally outside the scope of the legal rules, and not amenable to analysis in terms of legal method. It is time to return to consideration of the moral and spiritual foundations of our legal system. It is time to train …

The Evaluation Of A Clinical Legal Education Program: A Proposal, Junius L. Allison

Vanderbilt Law Review

Even though the Code of Professional Responsibility sets only general standards for competency, the competence of individual lawyers is now an area of active inquiry by the courts. Likewise, Legal Services are subject to regular evaluations. While these evaluations have had poor track records, the fault lies with their administration rather than their concept. If the practice of law is subject to scrutiny, it follows that schools for training the lawyers, and certainly parts of their curricula, such as clinical programs, can be evaluated." Legal education on its most basic level is preparation for a profession, the 'public profession of …

John W. Wade: An Appreciation, Reber Boult

Vanderbilt Law Review

Without going back to the year of his advent as Dean when the placement of law graduates was largely a catch-as-catch-can proposition, but starting with the academic year 1965-66, there were approximatly 35 law firms, government agencies, or other entities that sent representatives to the Law School to interview candidates and to make offers for legal opportunities. During the 1971-72 academic year, there were over 100 such interviewers, a number of whom represented some of the most prestigious law firms in the United States. This record of achievement speaks eloquently of the end work product of the Vanderbilt School of …

Law Reform And Law For The Layman: A Challenge To Legal Education, Walter Barnett

Vanderbilt Law Review

Most of the current debate over academic neutrality has centered on whether the university as an institution--the faculty and students as a corporate body--should take formal positions on political issues, such as the war in Vietnam. This article will address the related, but perhaps more mundane, question whether law professors should take a more active role in providing legal services to government and to the public when this activity might provoke attacks on academic freedom. Traditionally, law professors who have sought to serve society in ways other than educating lawyers have engaged in the following five extramural activities:' (1) The …

Book Reviews, Elliot E. Cheatham, Robert N. Covington

Vanderbilt Law Review

SOURCES OF LAW By Helen Silving Buffalo: William S. Hein & Co., Inc., 1968. Pp. viii, 404. $20.00.

reviewer: Elliot E. Cheatham

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LAW OF PARTNERSHIP By Judson A. Crane & Alan R. Bromberg St.Paul: West Publishing Co., 1968. Pp. xviii, 615. $12.00.

reviewer: Robert N. Covington

The Published Works Of Elliott E. Cheatham, Law Review Staff

Vanderbilt Law Review

The Published Works of Elliott E. Cheatham

conflict of laws, legal education, professional standards

BOOKS CASES AND MATERIALS ON CONFLICT OF LAWS Chicago, 1936(with others); 2d edition, 1941; 3d edition, Brooklyn, 1951; 4th edition, 1957; Supplement, 1961; 5th edition, 1964.

CASES AND OTHER MATERIALS ON THE LEGAL PROFESSION. Chicago, 1938; 2d edition, Brooklyn, 1955.

COURS GENERAL SUR PROBLEMES ET METHODES EN MATIERE DECONFLIT DE LOIS. Paris, 1960. A LAWYER WHEN NEEDED. New York, 1963.

ARTICLES

What Can Law Schools Do to Raise the Standards of the Legal Profession? Symposium on Co-operative Efforts to Raise the Standards of the Legal Profession), …

Elliott Evans Cheatham, Willis L.M. Reese

Vanderbilt Law Review

Cheatham has made a marked imprint through his teaching and his writing on five areas of the law: international law, property, legal education, the legal profession, and conflict of laws. Of these, the legal profession is probably the field where his influence has been most deeply felt. Indeed, it is largely because of his ground-breaking casebook that the subject figures so prominently today in law school curriculums. Likewise, his Carpentier Lectures of a few years ago on "A Lawyer When Needed" provided the entering wedge into a subject that is of great contemporary significance. What Cheatham has done in the …

Elliott E. Cheatham - Gentleman, Richard R. Powell

Vanderbilt Law Review

It was suggested to the writer that he write about Elliott E. Cheatham as a colleague in the field of legal education. This is but one aspect of his special preeminence, but any aspect of this man finds its ultimate foundation in his underlying and pervasive qualities as a gentleman. Kindly in the face of student stupidity, gentle in persuading his obstinate colleagues, loving in his more personal relations, the man embodies the best that can be connoted by the phrase "Southern gentleman."

Legal Education And The Demands For Stability And Change Through Law, John W. Wade

Vanderbilt Law Review

Our theme for this dedication program is "Stability and Change Through Law." The general plan has been to give consideration, first, to the demands made upon law and legal institutions to meet the basic social needs for security and order and to reach out toward the fuller realization of national ideals, while adapting to the stresses brought on by science, technology, and changing political, economic,and social patterns; and second, to the responses of law and legal institutions to these demands. The treatments of the law's response considered not only what has been done in the past and what is being …

Edmund M. Morgan, Austin W. Scott, John W. Wade

Vanderbilt Law Review

Everyone who knows him well speaks of him as Eddie Morgan--or simply as Eddie. This includes his colleagues, whether they are at the same school or another one; his students, though this is privately, of course, when they are talking about him among themselves; and his former students. Especially his former students. No matter whether they have been out of school for many years or just a few years, they ask about him in the same way. The face and the voice disclose an admiration for him and a touch of awe, and yet at the same time a different …

Books Received, Law Review Staff

Vanderbilt Law Review

CONDUCT OF JUDGES and LAWYERS

By Orie L. Phillips and Philbrick McCoy

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CRIMINAL JUSTICE.

By Orvill C. Snyder

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FREEDOM OF THE PRESS IN ENGLAND 1476-1776

By Frederick Seaton Siebert

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FREEDOM THROUGH LAW

By Robert L. Hale

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HISTORY OF AMERICAN BAR ASSOCIATION

By Edson R. Sunderland

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HISTORY OF A LAWSUIT

By Abraham Caruthers

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HOLMES-LASKI LETTERS

by Mark DeWolfe Howe

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LEGAL EDUCATION IN THE U. S.

By Albert J. Harno

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LIFE INSURANCE AND ESTATE TAX PLANNING

By William J. Bowe

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NACCA LAW JOURNAL

By the National Association of Claimants' Compensation Attorneys

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PSYCHIATRY …

Legal Realists, Legal Fundamentalists, Lawyer Schools, And Policy Science--Or How Not To Teach Law, Fred Rodell

Vanderbilt Law Review

Increasingly over the past years, there has cropped up in the law reviews a special kind of leading article. It does not deal with anything courts are doing or legislatures are doing or lawyers are doing; it does not even deal with what courts or legislatures or administrators or lawyers ought to be doing; instead, it deals with a subject of apparently endless and obviously narcissistic fascination to the law teachers who write the articles. It deals with the teaching of law. More precisely, these articles are concerned with how the law teachers who write the articles think other law …