Law Commons^™

Leveraging Technology To Promote Access To Justice, Amy Emerson

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Anthrogogy: Towards Inclusive Law School Learning, Rebecca C. Flanagan

Faculty Publications

At the time it was introduced, andragogy did offer benefits over “chalk and talk;” where most law students passively took notes while one student at a time actively engaged with their professor in a Socratic dialogue. While andragogy has sustained several modifications and revisions over the last fifty years, it does not reflect the life stage or life experiences that blur the boundaries of childhood and adulthood for over half the current student body in most law schools. Andragogy, designed as a teaching methodology for traditional adults seeking continuing education or to gain credentials for upward mobility in their current …

Law As Instrumentality, Jeremiah A. Ho

Faculty Publications

Our conceptions of law affect how we objectify the law and ultimately how we study it. Despite a century’s worth of theoretical progress in American law—from legal realism to critical legal studies movements and postmodernism—the formalist conception of “law as science,” as promulgated by Christopher Langdell at Harvard Law School in the late-nineteenth century, still influences methodologies in American legal education. Subsequent movements of legal thought, however, have revealed that the law is neither scientific nor “objective” in the way the Langdellian formalists once envisioned. After all, the Langdellian scientific objectivity of law itself reflected the dominant class, gender, power, …

Emerging Adults: A New Understanding Of Millennial Law Students, Rebecca C. Flanagan

Faculty Publications

The challenges facing emerging adults in law school can be some of the vexing for Academic Success professionals if these students are assumed to have the adult life experiences of prior generations of law students. However, their challenges can be some of the simplest to solve when Academic Success professionals are aware of trends in law school admissions and undergraduate education. Academic Success professionals have the tools to work with doctrinal or substantive professors to provide context to the difficulties students are experiencing with understanding class discussions.

Your Mission, Should You Choose To Accept It: Taking Law School Mission Statements Seriously, Irene Scharf, Vanessa Merton

Faculty Publications

A law school can best achieve excellence and have the most effective academic program when it possesses a clear mission, a plan to achieve that mission, and the capacity and willingness to measure its success or failure. Absent a defined mission and the identification of attendant student and institutional outcomes, a law school lacks focus and its curriculum becomes a collection of discrete activities without coherence.

Do Med Schools Do It Better?: Improving Law School Admissions By Adopting A Medical School Admissions Model, Rebecca C. Flanagan

Faculty Publications

The differences between legal education and medical education start before students enter their post- graduate professions programs: the differences in the preparation begin during a period of undergraduate years. This article briefly compares pre-law and pre-medical undergraduate preparations, and discusses how the differences in preparation shape preparedness in professional school. Taking cues from the successes in pre-med preparation, this article provides recommendations for improving the law school admissions model by adopting more rigorous pre-law preparation standards. The recommendations in this articles are necessary prerequisite for law schools looking to produce the “practice ready” graduates that the public demands.

Teaching Access, Or Freedom Of Information Law, Richard J. Peltz-Steele

Faculty Publications

Based on the author's experience developing and administering the course and materials, this article provides an introduction and resources to teach a graduate journalism or professional law school course on access to government, commonly called "freedom of information law", which may be constructed as a capstone course in law school. The appendices provide supporting material and references.

Clinical Legal Education & Access To Justice: Conflicts, Interests, & Evolution, Margaret B. Drew, Andrew P. Morriss

Faculty Publications

The explosive growth in the number of law school clinics over the last 50 years began with an individual client focus as a core component. This contributed to reducing unmet legal needs in substantive areas such as landlord-tenant, family, consumer and other areas. These service clinics accomplished the dual purpose of training students in the day-to-day challenges of practice while reducing the number of unrepresented poor. In recent years, however, the trend has been to broaden the law school clinical experience beyond individual representation and preparation for law firm practice. So-called “impact” clinics typically address systemic change without significant individual …

The Cplr At Fifty: A View From Academia, Vincent C. Alexander

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

First and foremost, teaching students in an advanced civil procedure course that concentrates on the CPLR helps them prepare for civil litigation in all of the state courts of New York. As we all know, New York has numerous civil courts of original subject matter jurisdiction--a distressing feature for students and litigants alike. What is sometimes overlooked, however, is that the CPLR governs the procedure in all of those courts unless some specific statute says otherwise. Even for students who intend to practice law in other states, an in-depth study of the CPLR will enhance their ability to cope …

The Excitement Of Interdictory Ideas: A Response To Professor Anders Walker, Marc O. Degirolami

Faculty Publications

The very first time that I taught criminal law, I would occasionally tell my six-year-old son, Thomas, about selected cases and situations that I had come across. Thomas enjoyed these discussions—more than I would have guessed: he was captivated by the horror of Dudley & Stephens, he was uncomfortably intrigued by shaming punishments, he was appropriately outraged at all manner of outcomes that seemed to him too harsh or too lenient. But most of all, he wanted to test his own burgeoning intuitions about right and wrong, good and evil, the permitted and the forbidden, against my "criminal law stories." …

Benefits Of Integrated Programs Over Non-Integrated Programs, Rebecca Flanagan

Faculty Publications

I do see hybrid teaching as the ASP model of the future. It is not a method that will be adopted by all schools, and it will certainly take time, and analysis, to refine the model to fit the student and school culture. Success is always a work in progress, but can only be achieved once you step from your comfort zone and try a new method.

The Case For "Thinking Like A Filmaker": Using Lars Von Trier's Dogville As A Model For Writing A Statement Of Facts, Elyse Pepper

Faculty Publications

Part I of this Article introduces movies as a persuasive medium. Part II examines the value of movies as teaching tools in the law school context. Part III breaks down the movie Dogville and demonstrates how it might be used to create two Statements of Facts in a fictionalized criminal case. Part IV recaps the lessons learned from using a film as a model for fact writing.

Albany In The Life Trajectory Of Robert H. Jackson, John Q. Barrett

Faculty Publications

We recall Supreme Court Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor Robert Houghwout Jackson (1892-1954) for many reasons, but certainly a leading one is the striking contrast between his humble origins and his exalted destinations. Jackson's life began literally in the deep woods, on a family farm in the gorgeous rural isolation of Spring Creek Township in northwestern Pennsylvania's Warren County. He spent his boyhood and obtained his basic public school education in Frewsburg, a small town in southwestern New York State. While still a teenager, Jackson spent one additional year as a high school student in nearby Jamestown, New York, but he …

Introduction: A Good Idea, Mark L. Movsesian

Faculty Publications

With this volume, the editors of the Hofstra Law Review introduce a new section: "Ideas." "Ideas" will serve as the vehicle for short pieces—from three to ten pages in length and having a minimal number of footnotes—on topics of interest to scholars and practitioners. There will be no subject-matter restrictions and no requirement that the pieces relate to one another. "Ideas" will not be a symposium, but a collection of brief observations on important legal questions. The editors hope to attract submissions from the academy and from prominent members of the bench and bar as well.

The inauguration of this …

Teacher, Student, Ticket: John Frank, Leon Higginbotham, And One Afternoon At The Supreme Court--Not A Trifling Thing, John Q. Barrett

Faculty Publications

A path to greatness often begins with a special teacher, and this is such a story. In the fall of 1949, John P. Frank was a new associate professor at the Yale Law School. This story also involves a young student. In autumn 1949, A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr., was a first year law student at Yale. Higginbotham, a 21-year-old black man from Trenton, New Jersey, had attended Purdue University and, after transferring, graduated from Antioch College in 1949. Leon Higginbotham was one of three black students who entered Yale Law School in fall 1949. Higginbotham met John Frank when he …

American Lawyers And International Competence, Charlotte Ku, Christopher J. Borgen

Faculty Publications

Just over ten years ago, Germans tore down a wall that divided their country and the whole of Europe. Stepping through the hole in the Berlin Wall, they took the first steps towards the reunification of West and East Germany and the end of the Cold War. Today another wall is being torn down—that between purely domestic law and international law. Companies are engaged in international trade at ever increasing rates. Environmental degradation has proved to be a global problem that cannot be solved with uncoordinated local measures. Individuals worldwide are pressing their governments for the recognition of a common …