Law Commons^™

The Future Of Legal Education Reform, James E. Moliterno

James E. Moliterno

The article discusses the criticism raised against legal education including high cost, disconnection between law schools and profession, and lack of employment opportunities. It examines the role of the bar examinations and reflects that the model in place is dysfunctional. It suggests that modern law school should teach students not only legal analysis but also business aspect of law practice such as project management and creative resolutions of disputes.

The Accidental Crit Iii: The Unbearable Lightness Of Being ... Pedro?, Pedro A. Malavet

Pedro A. Malavet

The Hastie Fellowship Program At Forty: Still Creating Minority Law Professors, Thomas W. Mitchell

Thomas W. Mitchell

This article provides a history of and information about the structure of the William H. Hastie Fellowship Program at the University of Wisconsin Law School. This article is part of a series of articles published by the Wisconsin Law Review commemorating Professor James E. Jones Jr., emeritus professor of law at the University of Wisconsin Law School and the founder of the Hastie Fellowship Program. Forty years after this pioneering program was established, the Hastie Fellowship Program continues to represent the preeminent pipeline program that has enabled more than 30 minority lawyers to become tenure-track law professors at law schools …

Legal Education In Crisis, And Why Law Libraries Are Doomed, James G. Milles

James G. Milles

The dual crises facing legal education - the economic crisis affecting both the job market and the pool of law school applicants, and the crisis of confidence in the ability of law schools and the ABA accreditation process to meet the needs of lawyers or society at large - have undermined the case for not only the autonomy, but the very existence, of law school libraries as we have known them. Legal education in the United States is about to undergo a long-term contraction, and law libraries will be among the first to go. A few law schools may abandon …

Elucidating The Elephant: Interdisciplinary Law School Classes, Kim Diana Connolly

Kim Diana Connolly

This Essay explores the use of interdisciplinary law school classes as a fundamental way to connect law students with future colleagues who are receiving different professional training, as well as with concepts related to but outside of traditional doctrinal law. While these classes offer rich learning opportunities, their design and implementation present a host of different issues. Part I of this Essay briefly explores the history and range of interdisciplinary class opportunities, looking both outside and within the law school context. Part II provides an overview of the benefits and barriers to successful interdisciplinary law school courses. Part III offers …

Foreword: Making Makeup Matter, Devon Carbado, Catherine Fisk, Mitu Gulati

Catherine Fisk

More than a decade ago, Katharine Bartlett, currently Dean of Duke Law School, authored a foundational article on discrimination based on appearance choices.1 The article made a big splash, provocatively raising the question of whether discrimination claims based on dress and appearance standards are cognizable under Title VII, the federal law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of, among other aspects of identity, race and sex. [...] to a large extent, their reasoning centered on two ideas: (1) that employers have broad latitude to define the professional boundaries of their workplaces and that grooming standards are a reasonable way for …

Catholic Law School, John T. Noonan Jr.

John Noonan

No abstract provided.

Growing Inequality And Racial Economic Gaps, Thomas W. Mitchell

Thomas W. Mitchell

Over the past several decades, economic inequality has grown dramatically in the United States while inter-generational economic mobility has declined, which has challenged the very notion of the "American Dream." In fact, the United States is more economically unequal than most other industrialized countries. Further, there are dramatic and growing racial economic gaps in this country. Despite the Occupy Wall Street Movement, and the various spinoffs it has catalyzed, there has not been any sustained, widespread social movement to address economic inequality in the United States over the course of the past several decades. Furthermore, it is unlikely that a …

The Phd Rises In American Law Schools, 1960-2011: What Does It Mean For Legal Education?, Justin Mccrary, Joy Milligan, James C. Phillips

James C Phillips

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

Bruce Ledewitz

Counting Outsiders: A Critical Exploration Of Outsider Course Enrollment In Canadian Legal Education, Natasha Bakht, Kim Brooks, Gillian Calder, Jennifer Koshan, Sonia Lawrence, Carissima Mathen, Debra Parkes

Sonia Lawrence

In response to anecdotal concerns that student enrollment in "outsider" courses, and in particular feminist courses, is on the decline in Canadian law schools, the authors explore patterns of course enrollment at seven Canadian law schools. Articulating a definition of "outsider" that describes those who are members of groups historically lacking power in society, or traditionally outside the realms of fashioning, teaching, and adjudicating the law, the authors document the results of quantitative and qualitative surveys conducted at their respective schools to argue that outsider pedagogy remains a critical component of legal education. The article situates the numerical survey results …

Towards A Pedagogy Of Diversity In Legal Education, Faisal Bhabha

Faisal Bhabha

There is resounding consensus that diversity in legal education is a priority. Yet, North American law schools continue to be criticized for failing to reflect the diversity of the society that they are training lawyers to serve. This article is a project of conceptual reorientation against a backdrop of critical scholarship and empirical evidence. Parts I and II examine the past twenty years of diversity promotion in legal education, concluding that, while several advances have been made, especially in increasing numerical representation of diverse groups in law schools, the promise of meaningful diversity remains unfulfilled. Part III suggests that reforms …

A Tale Of Three “Professions”: Search Engine Optimization, Lawyering & Law Teaching, Ray Campbell

Ray W Campbell

The question has been posed: is legal practice today a profession? This leads, naturally enough, to another question: should society treat it as one? Using the concept of ‘profession’ in different ways, some argue that one thing modern legal practice needs is a good dose of 'professionalism;' others argue that, whatever once might have been true, treating law practice as a ‘profession’ is a rum game best abandoned.

These questions matter. Law enjoys special regulatory privileges and market protections that make little sense if law has become just another form of business – a specialized form of consulting, perhaps. At …

Late Night Thoughts On Blogging While Reading Duncan Kennedy's Legal Education And The Reproduction Of Hierarchy In An Arkansas Motel Room, Franklin G. Snyder

Franklin G. Snyder

It has been more than twenty years since Duncan Kennedy published his seminal 'Legal Education and the Reproduction of Hierarchy'. In it he called for a radical assault on the hierarchies embedded in American law schools. But that assault failed. Over the past two decades, the hierarchies of legal education have, if anything, become even more fixed, insular, and status-driven, even while the elites of the practicing bar have changed dramatically and become more open to outsiders. It is vastly easier for the graduate of a fourth-tier law school to become a partner at an elite law firm than it …

Crisis And Trigger Warnings: Reflections On Legal Education And The Social Value Of The Law, Kim D. Chanbonpin

Kim D. Chanbonpin

In the same moment that law schools are embracing neoliberal strategies in response to the economic crisis caused by declining admissions, students in the classroom have begun to agitate for advance content notices (or “trigger warnings”) to alert them to any potentially trauma-inducing course materials. For faculty who have already adopted a defensive posture in response to threats to eliminate tenure, this demand feels like an additional assault on academic freedom; one that reflects a distressing student-as-consumer mentality. From this vantage point, students are too easily cast as another group of adversaries when, in actuality, students are straw targets who …

Using A Cultural Lens In The Law School Classroom To Stimulate Self-Assessment, 48 Gonz. L. Rev. 365 (2013), Julie M. Spanbauer

Julie M. Spanbauer

The American Bar Association is exerting pressure on United States law schools to improve teaching effectiveness by shifting the evaluation of student learning away from input measures to focus upon output-based assessments. Yet, many legal educators appear to be resistant to and fearful of change, in part, perhaps, due to their comfort with teaching methods such as the Socratic or case-dialogue approach, which demands little accountability for teaching effectiveness and provides more time for the pursuit of the traditional goals of scholarly productivity. This method of teaching as currently utilized in law schools is also innately professor-centric performance art. The …

Scholarly Incentives, Scholarship, Article Selection Bias, And Investment Strategies For Today's Law Schools, Dan Subotnik, Laura Ross

Dan Subotnik

No abstract provided.

Apps, Artificial Intelligence, And Androids: Beyond Schumpeter’S “Creative Destruction” To “Destructive Destruction” David Barnhizer, David Barnhizer

David Barnhizer

The analysis offered here is not a Neo-Luddite rage against “the machine”. As with the oft-stated reproach about paranoia, there sometimes really are situations in which people are “out to get you”. In our current situation the threat is not from people but from the convergence of a set of technological innovations that are and will increasingly have an enormous impact on the nature of work, economic and social inequality and the existence of the middle classes that are so vital to the durability of Western democracy. The fact is that developed nations’ economies such as found in Western Europe …

Faculty Ethics In Law School: Shirking, Capture, And "The Matrix", Jeffrey L. Harrison

Jeffrey L Harrison

The primary focus of this essay is the ethical dimension of the decisions faculty governance requires law professors to make. This essay is devoted to the proposition that conditions are ideal for most law schools to be governed for the benefit of the faculty at the expense of the welfare of students and others (stakeholders) who expect to be served by the law school. This section also suggests that faculty shirking, if it occurs, stems primarily from a lack of respect for those whom the law school serves. Section II addresses the second step. Having described shirking and capture in …

Widener Adds Support For A State-Sponsored Law School, Erin Daly

Erin Daly

No abstract provided.

Claiming A Space In The Law School Curriculum: A Casebook On Sex-Based Discrimination, Herma Hill Kay

Herma Hill Kay

The article presents information on a law school casebook on sex-based discrimination in Columbia. It provides information that it has raised the legal issues of a law school related to traditional curriculum on women and the law that affects women law students. It informs that it focused on sex discrimination in employment to law students and graduates with using own prepared material regarding law school. It reveals that sexual interaction within the family, women and crime, and women and employment issues has been discussed in the seventh edition of the law school casebook.

The Aging Of The American Law Professoriate, David Barnhizer

David Barnhizer

A recent (rather tasteless) article argued: “Professors approaching 70 … have an ethical obligation to step back and think seriously about quitting. If they do remain on the job, they should at least openly acknowledge they’re doing it mostly for themselves.” In “The Forever Professors: Academics Who Don’t Retire Are Greedy, Selfish, and Bad For Students”, the insensitive author added: “the number of professors 65 and older more than doubled between 2000 and 2011.” The author’s most intellectually savage comments were that: “faculty who delay retirement harm students, who in most cases would benefit from being taught by someone younger …

Gender And The Crisis In Legal Education: Remaking The Academy In Our Image, Paula A. Monopoli

Paula A Monopoli

American legal education is in the grip of what some have called an “existential crisis.” The New York Times proclaims the death of the current system of legal education. This is attributed, in part, to the incentivizing of faculty to produce increasingly abstract scholarship and the costs this imposes on pedagogy and the mentoring of students. At the same time, despite women graduating from law schools in significant numbers since the 1980s, they continue to lag behind in the most prestigious positions in academia—tenured, full professorships: From academic year 1998-99 to academic year 2007-08, the percentage of women full professors …

The Law And The Little Big Horn: What Beginning Law Students Can Learn From General Custer, Samuel W. Calhoun

Samuel W. Calhoun

Not available.

"Practice Ready" Law Graduates, David Barnhizer

David Barnhizer

Whatever view one holds on the idea of “practice ready” law graduates in the abstract it seems clear that it does not and could not mean that a new graduate can be fully capable of providing high quality services across the board to clients unfortunate enough to be using the services of the neophyte lawyer. If that were the case I can hear a client’s conversation with the brand new lawyer in a complex corporate merger with numerous parties, millions of dollars at stake, estate and tax issues, patent rights and differing valuations for the deal. “How many of these …

Remedies Reveals The Seamless Web.Pdf, Candace Kovacic-Fleischer

Candace Kovacic-Fleischer

A Christian Law School: Images And Vision, Lynn R. Buzzard

Lynn R. Buzzard

No abstract provided.

Religiously Affiliated Law Schools: Macro-Dynamics In Contemporary Culture, Lynn R. Buzzard

Lynn R. Buzzard

No abstract provided.

Do Law Schools Mistreat Women Faculty? Or, Who’S Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?, Dan Subotnik

Dan Subotnik

No abstract provided.

Law Student Laptop Use In Class For Non-Class Purposes: Temptation V. Incentives, Jeff Sovern

Jeff Sovern

LAW STUDENT LAPTOP USE DURING CLASS FOR NON-CLASS PURPOSES: TEMPTATION v. INCENTIVES Jeff Sovern St. John’s University School of Law This article reports on how law students use laptops, based on observations of 1072 laptop users (though there was considerable overlap among those users from one class to another) during 60 sessions of six law school courses. Some findings: • More than half the upper-year students seen using laptops employed them for non-class purposes more than half the time, raising serious questions about how much they learned from class. By contrast, first-semester Civil Procedure students used laptops for non-class purposes …