Law Commons^™

Mitchell Hamline School Of Law Summer 2020 Covid-19 Legal Response Clinic, Natalie Netzel, Ana Pottratz Acosta, Joanna Woolman, Kate Kruse, Jon Geffen

Faculty Scholarship

This essay is a reflection on lawyering in a time of crisis. It details the Mitchell Hamline School of Law Clinical Faculty’s response to the community needs resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic by creating the COVID-19 Legal Response Clinic. It also recounts the impact of the murder of George Floyd and the long overdue national reckoning with systemic racism, sparked in our city. Additionally, against this backdrop, it examines the trauma-informed approach taken in clinical work and the classroom to help students process their own trauma and apply this approach in their work with clients.

Amid these concurrent crises in …

Client Problem-Solving: Where Adr And Lawyering Skills Meet, Katherine R. Kruse, Bobbi Mcadoo, Sharon Press

Faculty Scholarship

Influenced by critiques of legal education, law schools are scrambling to offer more and better opportunities for experiential education. To fulfill the new demands for experiential education, one obvious place to turn is clinic pedagogy, which has developed methodologies for teaching students in the real-practice settings of in-house clinics and externships. As the interest in experiential education broadens, a wider spectrum of teaching methodologies comes under the experiential tent, creating opportunities to tap new sources of guidance for reshaping legal education.

This article turns the spotlight on one of these other, less obvious resources within legal education: the alternative dispute …

The Status Of Clinical Faculty In The Legal Academy: Report Of The Task Force On The Status Of Clinicians And The Legal Academy, Kate Kruse, Bryan L. Adamson, Brad Colbert, Kathy Hessler

Faculty Scholarship

In the midst of ongoing debates within the legal academy and the American Bar Association on the need for "practice-ready" law school graduates through enhanced attention to law clinics and externships and on the status of faculty teaching in those courses, this report identifies and evaluates the most appropriate modes for clinical faculty appointments. Drawing on data collected through a survey of clinical program directors and faculty, the report analyzes the five most identifiable clinical faculty models: unitary tenure track; clinical tenure track; long-term contract; short-term contract; and clinical fellowships. It determines that, despite great strides in the growth of …

Getting Real About Legal Realism, New Legal Realism And Clinical Legal Education, Kate Kruse

Faculty Scholarship

Jerome Frank’s call for a “clinical lawyer-school” is cited so frequently in clinical scholarship that it borders on the canonical. Like many calls for reform in legal education, Frank’s plea for clinical lawyer-schools was based on a critique of the appellate case method of legal instruction. However, unlike most critiques, the legal realist critique was embedded within a jurisprudential challenge to the meaning of law itself, arising from American Legal Realism. Running through legal realist jurisprudence was a distinction between the “law in books” and the “law in action,” with the idea that law is not found primarily in statutes …

In Re Gault And The Promise Of Systemic Reform, Kate Kruse

Faculty Scholarship

The right to counsel for juveniles in delinquency cases that the Supreme Court declared in In re Gault can be seen as an effort at systemic reform - a purposeful alteration of the structure, procedure, or resources of a law-administering system that aims to better align the system's operation with the principles or ideals on which it is based. Although the Court articulated the benefits of counsel in terms of individual representation, juvenile defenders are increasingly called upon to expand their role to include broader forms of advocacy aimed at reforming juvenile justice system practice and procedure. The predominant stakeholder …

From The Clinic To The Classroom: Or What I Would Have Learned If I Had Been Paying More Attention To My Students And Their Clients, Peter B. Knapp

Faculty Scholarship

This past year, two experiences related to clinical teaching—one a moment of personal epiphany and the other, a conversation with a colleague—have caused the author to spend more time thinking about what he should be learning in the clinic and applying in the classroom.

Clinical Teaching At William Mitchell College Of Law: Values, Pedagogy, And Perspective, Eric S. Janus

Faculty Scholarship

A retrospective celebrating thirty years of clinical education at William Mitchell College of Law. These courses are nurtured by the key principles that have shaped clinical education at William Mitchell. They embrace the profession of law, but insist on a critical stance. They recognize that values define the practice of law, and that only through intentional choice of pedagogy and perspective can values education be effective and respectful of the autonomy of our students as they work to define the sort of lawyers they wish to become.

In Support Of A Unitary Tenure System For Law Faculty: An Essay, Nina W. Tarr

William Mitchell Law Review

[L]aw faculties are made up of diverse groups of people who contribute to the academic mission in a variety of ways. Given this, there is no reason to isolate one subset--those who teach in the clinic--and treat them differently when it comes to influence, power, autonomy, access to resources, security, or remuneration. In short, to give them a different “status” has become a historical anachronism.

The Law School Clinic As A Model Ethical Law Office, Peter A. Joy

William Mitchell Law Review

In this essay, I contend that all clinical teachers should explicitly acknowledge that they are legal ethics and professional responsibility teachers and role models of the “good lawyer” in everything they do. I argue that every in-house clinical teacher should strive to make her clinic a model ethical law office.