Law Commons^™

The End Of Law Schools, Ray Worthy Campbell

Ray W Campbell

Law schools as we know them are doomed. They continue to offer an educational model originally designed to prepare lawyers to practice in common law courts of a bygone era. That model fails to prepare lawyers for today’s highly specialized practices, and it fails to provide targeted training for the emerging legal services fields other than traditional lawyering.

This article proposes a new ideology of legal education to meet the needs of modern society. Unlike other reform proposals, it looks not to tweaking the training of traditional lawyers, but to rethinking legal education in light of a changing legal services …

Promoting Equitable Law School Admissions Through Legal Challenges To The Lsat, Al Alston

Al Alston

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 …

Fixing Students' Fixed Mindsets: Paving The Way For Meaningful Assessment, Carrie Sperling

Carrie Sperling

Soon every law school in the country will be turning its attention to the important topic of assessment. Responding to a new ABA guideline, schools will be tackling the difficult task of defining, refining, and creating more assessment opportunities for their students. The guideline’s purpose is to improve student learning through more assessment, but nothing in the ABA proposal changes the fact that many of our students fail to react adaptively to feedback. Instead, many students will become hostile, defensive, or despondent, and will therefore not further develop their competencies.

With the American Bar Association putting emphasis on formative assessment …

Reinventing The 1l Curriculum: Sequenced "Writing Across The Curriculum" Assignments As The Foundation For Producing Practice-Ready Law Graduates, Alice M. Noble-Allgire, Suzanne J. Schmitz

Alice M. Noble-Allgire

This article describes an integrative, sequenced “Writing Across the Curriculum” (WAC) program to help first-year law students master legal analysis and writing by systematically developing these skills though writing assignments in doctrinal courses, thereby enhancing the instruction that students receive in the Lawyering Skills course. The article discusses the key components of the program --- writing assignments sequenced to build skills incrementally from simple to complex; prompt and consistent feedback based upon a competency model; and transparency in setting forth the professor’s expectations, both in advance of the exercise and in the feedback --- and assesses some of the benefits …

Levinas, Law Schools And The Poor: They Stand Over Us, Marie A. Failinger

Marie A. Failinger

The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas has written about the ethics of the Face and our responsibility to the Other who is standing over us, demanding that we respond to his need and his welcome. This essay, which is written in Levinasan style, challenges the complacency of most American law schools in response to the plight of the poor. It proposes ways in which the law school curriculum, space and programs can be re-configured to bring the poor into community with legal educators and students.

Unpacking The Bar: Of Cut Scores, Competence And Crucibles, Gary S. Rosin

Gary S Rosin

Bar passage rates of first-takers vary widely among both the states and the law schools. State grading practices also vary widely, particularly as to minimum passing scores (“cut scores”) and whether they scale state exam components to the MultiState Bar Exam (“MBE”). The broad ranges of Bar passage rates and of state grading practices call into question the stewardship of the states over admission to the practice of law. This study uses generalized linear modeling, with a logit link function, to isolate the effect on the Bar passage rates of ABA-approved law schools of three factors: (i) the LSAT scores …

Correlation Versus Causality: Further Thoughts On The Law Review/Law School Liaison, Ronen Perry

Ronen Perry

This Essay is the third in a series of articles discussing the relative value of American law reviews, and a response to Professor Alfred Brophy's elaboration of my initial study of the high mathematical correlation between law review quality, as manifested in citation-based measures, and law school reputation. Given my prior interest in the relative value of American law reviews, I have used the abovementioned correlation as a means to explain some of the variance in quality among law reviews. Brophy's empirical findings overlap mine, yet the extent of his analysis, as well as his interpretation and utilization of the …

The Relative Value Of American Law Reviews: Refinement And Implementation, Ronen Perry

Ronen Perry

This Article complements a recently published paper in which I discussed the theoretical and methodological aspects of law review rankings. The purpose of this Article is twofold: refinement of the theoretical framework, and implementation. It proposes, defends, and implements a complex ranking method for general-interest student-edited law reviews, based on a judicious weighting of normalized citation frequency and normalized impact factor. It then analyzes the distribution of journals’ scores, and the diminishing marginal difference between them. Finally, it examines the correlation between law schools’ positions in the U.S. News & World Report 2006 ranking and their flagship law reviews’ positions …

The Lawyer As Legal Scholar, Michael J. Madison

Michael J. Madison

I review Eugene Volokh's recent book, Academic Legal Writing. The book is nominally directed to law students and those who teach them (and for those audiences, it is outstanding), but it also contains a number of valuable lessons for published scholars. The book is more than a writing manual, however. I argue that Professor Volokh suggests implicitly that scholarship is underappreciated as a dimension of the legal profession. A well-trained lawyer, in other words, should have experience as a scholar. The argument sheds new light on ongoing discussions about the character of law schools.