Law Commons^™

Using Advanced Conflict Waivers To Teach Drafting, Ethics, And Professionalism, Edward R. Becker

Articles

On a substantive and ethical level, I tell my students to take on faith that if you were to do all of this and take all this into account, if you were to apply the conflict of interest and the disqualifications rules, it could make it extremely difficult or many of the firms involved in these matters to avoid being conflicted out; especially, if the parties and the kind of firms involved were not dealing with these conflicts and issues until a problem arose. The question I ask my students again at this point is what could be done. What …

Creating (And Teaching) The "Bail-To-Jail" Course, Jerold H. Israel

Articles

Yale Kamisar has explained how events that occurred about fifty years ago led to the creation of a stand-alone criminal procedure course and, a few years later, led to the division of that stand-alone course into two courses. The second of those courses came to be called, almost from the outset, the "Jail-to-Bail" course. My focus today is on why that course was created and how it was shaped. Modern Criminal Procedure, as Yale has noted, was the first coursebook designed for a stand-alone course in criminal procedure. Modern was published in 1966. A year earlier, the first version …

King V. Burwell: Where Were The Tax Professors?, Andy S. Grewal

Pepperdine Law Review

King v. Burwell drew unusually wide attention for a tax case. Members of the public, the mainstream media, health care professionals, Washington think tanks, and constitutional, administrative, and health law professors, to name a few groups, all debated the merits of the challengers’ arguments. Everyone, it seems, had something to say about the case — except tax professors. This contribution to Pepperdine Law Review’s Tax Law Symposium explores three potential reasons for the tax professoriate’s reticence. It concludes that none of those reasons withstand scrutiny, and going forward, tax professors should play a more active role in cases like this.

Harry Pratter’S Wisdom, Jonathan Pratter

Indiana Law Journal

From 1950 to 1994 Harry Pratter taught law at Indiana University- Bloomington. One of his favorite sayings (he had many of these) was Maitland’s “[T]aught law is tough law,” a phrase that a forty-four year teaching career entitles you to utter with some frequency. In response to Sartre’s notorious challenge, “Do you have anything to say?” Pratter could certainly answer yes. He took Sartre literally. Pratter preferred to speak—that is to teach, and not to write. The source of Pratter’s strong preference for speech over writing must remain a mystery. The consequence is that a good deal of what he …

The Market Myth And Pay Disparity In Legal Academia, Paula A. Monopoli

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Seventh Letter And The Socratic Method, Sherman J. Clark

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform Caveat

Law teachers use the phrase “Socratic method” loosely to refer to various methods of questioning students in class rather than merely lecturing to them. The merits of such teaching have been the subject of spirited and even bitter debate. It can be perceived as not only inefficient but also unnecessarily combative—even potentially abusive. Although it is clear that some critics are excoriating the least defensible versions of what has been called the Socratic method, I do not attempt to canvas or adjudicate that debate in this brief essay. Rather, I hope to add to the conversation by looking to a …

Drawing (Gad)Flies: Thoughts On The Uses (Or Uselessness) Of Legal Scholarship, Sherman J. Clark

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform Caveat

In this essay, I argue that law schools should continue to encourage and support wide-ranging legal scholarship, even if much of it does not seem to be of immediate use to the legal profession. I do not emphasize the relatively obvious point that scholarship is a process through which we study the law so that we can ultimately make useful contributions. Here, rather, I make two more-subtle points. First, legal academics ought to question the priorities of the legal profession, rather than merely take those priorities as given. We ought to serve as Socratic gadflies—challenging rather than merely mirroring regnant …

Peggy Radin, Mentor Extraordinaire, R. Anthony Reese

Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review

I write to celebrate Peggy Radin’s contributions to the legal academy in her role as a mentor. I know that others will speak to her significant scholarly achievements and important contributions across several fields. I want to pay tribute to the substantial time and energy that Peggy has devoted over the course of her career to mentoring students and young academics. I was extremely fortunate to have had a handful of mentors who helped me become a law professor. (I am also extremely fortunate that some of those mentors became generous senior colleagues who occasionally continue to help me navigate …

Trajectory Of A Law Professor, Meera E. Deo

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

Women of color are already severely underrepresented in legal academia; as enrollment drops and legal institutions constrict further, race and gender disparities will likely continue to grow. Yet, as many deans and associate deans, most of whom are white, step down from leadership positions during these tumultuous times in legal education, opportunities have arisen for women of color to fill those roles in record numbers. However, there are individual and structural barriers preventing access to the leadership level. Significant hurdles have long prevented women of color from entering law teaching. Thus, this Article provides evidence to support the thesis that …

Think Like A Businessperson: Using Business School Cases To Create Strategic Corporate Lawyers​., Alicia J. Davis

Articles

For the past twenty-five years, my academic and professional pursuits have straddled the line between business and law. I majored in business administration in college and then worked as an analyst in the Corporate Finance department at a bulge bracket Wall Street firm. After completing a JD/MBA, I returned to investment banking with a focus on middle-market mergers and acquisitions (M&A) and subsequently practiced law with a focus on private equity and M&A. Finally, in 2004, I found my current home as a corporate law professor. In my courses, which include Mergers & Acquisitions, Enterprise Organization, and Investor Protection, I …

Response: Situating Ourselves In History, Steven D. Smith

Pepperdine Law Review

The author presents his views on history of religious freedom incorporated in his Brandeis lecture and in the book "The Rise and Decline of American Religious Freedom." Topics discussed include hegemonic status of special protection to religious freedom for legal academics, role of ending religious freedom in providing protection to religious actors under other constitutional provisions like free speech, and impact of ending religious freedom on other freedom like freedom of association.

100+, University Of Michigan Law School

Miscellaneous Law School History & Publications

100+ facts about the University of Michigan Law School and Ann Arbor, Michigan for the 2015-2016 academic year.

Foundations: Curriculum & Faculty, University Of Michigan Law School

Miscellaneous Law School History & Publications

Michigan Law Faculty are the best of the best. As you look through these pages, you will see some of their accomplishments: They serve as senior advisers to policymakers and governments around the world, they argue important cases in courts of every level, and they produce superb research that addresses society's greatest problems.

Our faculty also take teaching very seriously. They are dedicated to using their research and experience to help create a curriculum that will challenge and transform you. Michigan Law's rich curriculum features foundational courses that evolve with the needs of the profession, a wide array of upper-level …

Reflections On Starla Williams: In Appreciation Of A Friend, Linda L. Ammons

Linda L. Ammons

No abstract provided.

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

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Legacy Of Professor Joe Sax, Fred Krupp

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

I grew up as the environmental movement did, in the 1960s and 1970s. In college at Yale, engineering professor Charlie Walker became my mentor and taught me that there are practical solutions for almost all environmental problems. This hopeful point of view inspired me to devote myself to the subject, first as an academic pursuit. As I neared graduation and was trying to decide on a path, Professor Walker handed me a book: Defending the Environment by Joseph Sax.1 That book was visionary in its description of private citizens’ ability to protect and defend the environment through the legal system. …

Making Ideas Matter: Remembering Joe Sax, Mark Van Putten

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

Joe Sax made his ideas matter. He had consequential ideas that shaped an entire field—in his case, environmental law—both in theory and in practice. His scholarship was first rate and has enduring significance in academia, as evidenced by the fact that two of his law review articles are among the 100 most frequently cited articles of all time. Others are more competent to review the importance of his scholarship; my experience in environmental advocacy is more pertinent to evaluating his impact on environmental policymaking. Here, his ideas have had a greater impact than any other legal academic. As the New …

Joseph Sax, A Human Kaleidoscope, Zygmunt Plater

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

Probably more than any other person most of us will ever have the opportunity of knowing, Joe Sax was kaleidoscopic in the way he projected his mind and lived his life as a scholar, teacher, and citizen seer. Shifting his analytical gaze from challenging context to challenging context, he repeatedly threw rich new patterns of perceptive light, thoughts broad and deep, onto a remarkable range of puzzles. Joe’s ability to think broadly and deeply influenced and reshaped the way that his students, friends, colleagues, and readers understood the intricacies, beauty, and challenges of the world around them. Others in this …

Joseph L. Sax: The Realm Of The Legal Scholar, Nina A. Mendelson

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

It is one of my great regrets that I never really got to know Professor Joseph Sax personally. I joined the faculty at the University of Michigan Law School well over a decade after Sax departed our halls for the University of California at Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law. I met him on one occasion several years ago, when he gave an engaging workshop at Michigan on governance issues around Colorado River water allocation, complete with a detailed map of the watershed. I am exceptionally fortunate, however, to occupy a chair named for him. This is not only because …

Cultivating Inclusion, Patrick S. Shin, Mitu Gulati

Michigan Law Review First Impressions

Twenty-five years ago, law schools were in the developing stages of a pitched battle for the future of legal education and academia. Faculties fought over the tenure cases of minority candidates, revealing deep divisions within legal academia on questions about the urgency of racial diversification and the merits of critical race scholarship. The students in charge of the law reviews where this scholarship was emerging engaged in their own battles, arguing over the use of affirmative action in the selection of law review editors and then, as neophyte editors, staking their own positions in the "What is legal scholarship?" debates. …

Foundations: Curriculum & Faculty, University Of Michigan Law School

Miscellaneous Law School History & Publications

Michigan Law Faculty are the best of the best. As you look through these pages, you will see some of their accomplishments: They serve as senior advisers to policymakers and governments around the world, they argue important cases in courts of every level, and they produce superb research that addresses society's greatest problems.

Our faculty also take teaching very seriously. They are dedicated to using their research and experience to help create a curriculum that will challenge and transform you. Michigan Law's rich curriculum features foundational courses that evolve with the needs of the profession, a wide array of upper-level …

Self-Interest And Sinecure: Why Law School Can’T Be “Fixed” From Within, David Barnhizer

David Barnhizer

The issue of how best to do a legal education is being approached as if it were an intellectual and pedagogical question. Of course in a conceptual sense it is. But from a political and human perspective (law faculty, deans and lawyers) it is a self-interested situation in terms of how does this affect me? The reality is that for law faculty and deans it is mainly a life style, status, economic benefit and political situation in which the various interests protected by the traditional faculty slot placeholders [as well as the non-traditional practice-oriented teachers) are being masked by self-serving …

On Legal Scholarship, Danielle K. Citron, Robin West

Shorter Faculty Works

Academic critics contend that legal scholarship is overly argumentative or too “normative,” simply stating what the law should be, as well as what the law is. It isn’t about pure scholarship’s pursuit of knowledge within the discipline of a recognized academic field. Critics from the bar and the judiciary proffer the opposite complaint: legal scholarship is too academic and not professional enough, enamored with fads, unmoored from any discipline and of little use to the practicing lawyer or sitting judge. Law schools’ legions of cost-conscious critics complain that paying high salaries to professors with low course loads drives up tuitions. …

Oh, The Treatise!, Richard A. Danner

Michigan Law Review

In his foreword to the Michigan Law Review's 2009 Survey of Books Related to the Law, my former Duke colleague Erwin Chemerinsky posed the question: "[W]hy should law professors write?" In answering, Erwin took as a starting point the well-known criticisms of legal scholarship that Judge Harry Edwards published in this journal in 1992. Judge Edwards indicted legal scholars for failing to engage the practical problems facing lawyers and judges, writing instead for the benefit of scholars in law and other disciplines rather than for their professional audiences. He characterized "practical" legal scholarship as both prescriptive (aiming to instruct attorneys, …

What Ails The Law Schools?, Paul Horwitz

Michigan Law Review

In January 2012, law professors from across the country arrived in Washington, D.C., for the annual conference of the Association of American Law Schools ("AALS"). It was an opportune moment. The legal economy was struggling. Graduates were begging for jobs and struggling with unprecedented levels of debt. The smart talk from the experts was that the legal economy was undergoing a fundamental restructuring. For these and other reasons, law schools were under fire, from both inside and outside of the academy. Judges - including the keynote speaker at the AALS conference himself! - derided legal scholarship as useless. Law school …

Vol. 63, March 27, 2013, University Of Michigan Law School

Res Gestae

• Teaching Gone Wrong • Letter from the Editor • Detroit: Mid-Size Market • Goodbye, Ma'am Prez Och! • Moran & Friedman's Guide to SCOTUS • RG Mailbag • Halberstam: Squirrel Fan • Debt WIZard • Phid Style Dinners • New LSSS Lunch Series • Mr. Wolverine Letters • Law Student Comics • Photos of Stuff that Happened this year!

Tribute To Larry Ribstein, Barry E. Adler

Michigan Law Review

A law school job talk for an entry-level candidate is an opportunity for the presenter to put his or her ideas before a faculty in the best possible light. A bit of give-and-take is part of the drill, but the candidate can usually expect the talk to stay more or less on course. My own first job talk, though, given at George Mason University more years ago than I'd like to admit, was attended by the thoroughly exceptional Larry Ribstein and so did not unfold in the usual way.

The Vexations Of Aging From The Imagination (A Lot) And Life (A Little) Of Bill Miller, James J. White

Reviews

Bill Miller has done something quite uncommon, possibly singular: he has become a prominent law professor by writing books that have nothing to do with the law. His books do not even have the remote relation to law that books by philosophers or historians can claim. Having studied medieval history before law school and achieved law school tenure by teetering on the edge of law in his work on Icelandic sagas, Miller jumped the fence completely in his books The Mystery of Courage, The Anatomy of Disgust, and Faking It. He has never returned. Presumably, this Review earned a place …

Thinking, Big And Small, Stephen B. Burbank

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Reading Kahneman's book and thinking about a tribute to Ed Cooper that has more substance than a bouquet have caused me to reflect on a phenomenon within the world of legal scholarship. I would call it a cognate phenomenon, but that would dishonor the empirical basis of Kahneman's work by suggesting a firmer basis for my reflections than the power of analogical reasoning. The phenomenon is the view that the goal of legal scholarship is or should be big ideas, particularly if they can claim the mantle of theory, rather than small ideas, particularly if they can be tarred with …

What Ed Cooper Has Taught Me About The Realities And Complexities Of Appellate Jurisdiction And Procedure, Catherine T. Struve

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

In this brief essay, I will describe some of what I have learned from Ed Cooper as a fellow participant in the rulemaking process and as a coauthor of two volumes of his Federal Practice and Procedure treatise. To describe everything that Ed has taught me would require much more than the length of this essay. So instead, I will try to offer some representative examples-or, as Ed might say, some "sketches." Because others will discuss Ed's expert guidance of the Rules Committees' consideration of key issues concerning the Civil Rules, my discussion of Ed's scholarship and reporting work will …