Law Commons^™

Creating Lightbulb Moments: Developing Higher-Order Thinking In Family Law Classrooms Through Court Observations, Sonia Gipson Rankin

Faculty Scholarship

This article fills a critical gap in the family law literature by arguing that teaching doctrinal family law in conjunction with the application of established learning theory and pedagogy yields a deeper engagement with the subject matter and leads to more practice-ready lawyers. ABA Standards 301, 303, and 304 do not clearly articulate the distinction between experiential education and experiential learning; doctrinal law classrooms are often bereft of experiential learning activities. By incorporating active learning and inclusive pedagogy in the doctrinal classroom and following recommendations from the MacCrate Report and Family Law Education Reform Project, students will be better prepared …

Cocurricular Learning In Management Education: Lessons From Legal Education’S Use Of Student-Edited Journals, Matthew I. Hall, Matt Theeke

Scholarly Works

In this essay, we draw on insights from U.S. legal education’s century-long experiment using student-edited journals as a cocurricular learning tool, to develop the argument that management education should consider introducing a new category of student-edited, practitioner-oriented journals. Student-edited journals are potentially well-suited for management education because they encourage students to learn professionally relevant skills and to develop a greater understanding of research and its role in professional education. Enlisting students to help edit practitioner journals could also benefit business professionals by increasing the availability of practitioner-oriented research. In doing so, management education can use this cocurricular learning activity to …

Moving Toward A Competency Based Model For Fostering Law Students’ Relational Skills, Susan L. Brooks, Marjorie A. Silver, Sarah Fishel, Kellie Wiltsie

Scholarly Works

Legal education has long been criticized for failing to provide adequate professional training to prepare graduates for legal practice realities. Many sources have lamented the lack of sufficient attention to the range of competencies necessary for law graduates to be effective practitioners and develop a positive professional identity, including those that are intra-personal, such as self-awareness, critical self-reflection, and self-directedness; those that are interpersonal, such as deep and reflective listening, empathy, compassion, cross-cultural communication, and dialogue; and those that engage with the social/systemic dimension of lawyering, such as appreciating the role of multiple identities, implicit bias, privilege and power, and …

How Serving Jobless Workers During The Pandemic’S Economic Recession Grounded Students: A Reflection From Michigan’S Workers’ Rights Clinic, Rachael Kohl, Nancy Vettorello

Articles

The COVID-19 pandemic drastically changed the delivery of legal education. Many courses switched to remote instruction, and that change was particularly complicated for clinical courses. For Michigan's Workers' Right Clinic (WRC), however, the pandemic brought more than a change in course delivery - it brought a huge influx of new cases and community need with rapidly and continually changing laws. This article describes how the WRC navigated and thrived, despite the rapid changes brought about by the pandemic, and how the clinic provided an opportunity for students to engage in more complex work that benefited students both academically and mentally. …

Looking Back: A Case Study Of Career Interest And Experiential Learning In Law School, David I.C. Thomson, Stephen Daniels

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

This article is divided into four parts. First, some general observations on what led us to think about our research differently-the importance of career relevance with attention to students interested in a business-related career. Second, an overview of our ongoing study of students and experiential learning at Denver Law-a study designed to follow an incoming class as it goes from first year to last and into the practice of law. Third, through the lens of career interest, an analysis of 1L Denver Law students' preferred style of learning and their views on experiential learning. Fourth, a corresponding analysis of Denver …

Assessing The Experiential (R)Evolution, Allison Korn, Laila L. Hlass

Faculty Scholarship

For more than a century, law schools have resisted substantial reforms relating to experiential education. Yet, in 2014, the ABA mandated a six-credit experiential course graduation requirement for law schools, alongside a packet of experiential curriculum amendments. Proponents of experiential education had hoped for a fifteen-credit mandate, aligning law schools with other professional schools that require one-quarter to one-third skills training. Still, six credits is significant, potentially marking a striking shift in the direction of legal education. To date, no one—including the ABA—has broadly evaluated the post-mandate legal education experiential landscape. It is particularly urgent to consider recent shifts in …

Are You Experienced? - Simple Timesheets For Experiential Learning Courses, Eleanor C. Lanier, Leslie Grove

Presentations

ABA Standards require students to complete six credit hours of experiential learning. Hours must be tracked, and field placements in particular require students to keep logs of their activities to document compliance. Various web-based solutions are used, including “high-end suites like CORE ELMS, the Symplicity experiential learning module, and the basic and free Dropbox and Google Suite” as well as Canvas, and a time-tracking program called Tick. Here at the University of Georgia School of Law, we decided to add simple timesheet functionality to our Drupal-based student portal, allowing students to securely log their hours and activities, and faculty to …

From The Courtroom To The Classroom: How A Litigator Became A Transactional Drafting Professor, Amy Bauer

Publications

No abstract provided.

Flying Without Wings, Eleanor Lanier

Scholarly Works

Because of Georgia’s unique court structure and political challenges, state advocates were unable to secure funding for a spot in the WINGS nest. But there is good news. The bonds we forged over our many years of advocacy on guardianship issues, and our effort to pull together the (unsuccessful) WINGS application, helped a few of our ideas take flight. This article highlights one highly successful and easily replicable effort that can be undertaken for a local court, in a region or at the state level, depending on resources and interest.

Lawclinics@50: 50 Years Of Clinical Legal Education At Georgia Law, Alex Scherr

Scholarly Works

Director of the Veterans Legal Clinic Alex Scherr penned this blog post announcing the LawClinics@50 celebration plans as well as the collaboration with the Georgia Law Review Online platform and sharing the first in a series of articles related to the fiftieth anniversary of legal clinical education at the School of Law.

50 Years Of Clinical And Experiential Learning At Georgia Law, Eleanor Lanier

Scholarly Works

This note serves as an introduction of the partnership between the Georgia Law Review Online Platform and the School of Law's Clinical Programs and Experiential Learning faculty to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of clinical legal education at the University of Georgia's law school. It provides a brief history of the program beginnings in 1967 and discusses the program expansions to present which reached a total of 18 different options when the note was published.

If You Build It, They Will Come: What Students Say About Experiential Learning, David I.C. Thomson, Stephen Daniels

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

Our purpose here is to explore one of the “natural experiments” cited by the Task Force: the Experiential Advantage (EA) program at the University of Denver’s Sturm College of Law (Denver Law). EA was developed as a part of a greater general focus on experiential learning and is built upon the three “Carnegie Apprenticeships” – “the intellectual or cognitive,” “the forms of expert practice,” and “identity and purpose.” It was implemented at Denver Law starting with students entering in August 2013. To explore this natural experiment, we took a particular route and did so for what we see as good …

Innovation And Tradition: A Survey Of Intellectual Property And Technology Legal Clinics, Cynthia L. Dahl, Victoria F. Phillips

All Faculty Scholarship

For artists, nonprofits, community organizations and small-business clients of limited means, securing intellectual property rights and getting counseling involving patent, copyright and trademark law are critical to their success and growth. These clients need expert IP and technology legal assistance, but very often cannot afford services in the legal marketplace. In addition, legal services and state bar pro bono programs have generally been ill-equipped to assist in these more specialized areas. An expanding community of IP and Technology clinics has emerged across the country to meet these needs. But while law review articles have described and examined other sectors of …

The Experiential Course Book I Have Been Waiting For, Martin J. Katz

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

There is an exciting movement toward practical legal education in U.S. law schools. There are many good reasons for this movement, including demand from students and potential students, as well as demand from the employers and clients that will hire those students. Additionally, a plethora of compelling studies strongly suggest that adults learn best through practical, contextual, experiential education.

Yet, many professors in U.S. law schools continue to teach using more traditional methods. There are a number of reasons for this. Perhaps the most widespread reason why professors hesitate to engage in experiential, or problem-based, teaching is the amount of …

A Missing Link For Producing Practice-Ready Law Graduates And For Narrowing The Expectations-Reality Gap: 1l Judicial Internships, Inti Martinez-Aleman

Student Scholarship

Mitchell Hamline School of Law (MHSL) is in a privileged position to help redefine legal education in the United States. Its two predecessor schools, William Mitchell College of Law and Hamline University School of Law, were regarded as practice-focused and devoted to public service. As it goes through its first year since the law schools combined, MHSL’s new Dean and President, Mark C. Gordon, is positioned to carve out a bright future for the school’s next 100 years. If the model MHSL implements proves to be groundbreaking—as the Langdellian model was for American legal education starting in Harvard Law School …

The Humanities In The Law School Curriculum: Courtship And Consummation, Linda H. Edwards

Scholarly Works

Today the humanities occupy a small corner of the law school curriculum. Might they instead become a more vibrant partner in legal education? Might law and humanities scholarship escape the pages of law reviews and teach us something important about how to read and understand the law?

Despite the long theoretical dominance of legal realism in scholarly circles, much of legal education as we know it has remained mired in Langdell's formalist vision of the law—a vision of a narrow, abstract, impersonal system bereft of human meaning and value. But we can do better. We can approach law, and teach …

Assignments With Intrinsic Lessons On Professionalism (Or, Teaching Students To Act Like Adults Without Sounding Like A Parent), Beth H. Wilensky

Articles

There is little question that law schools ought to teach their students professionalism – indeed, they are required to do so to maintain accreditation. And there is little question that the required legal writing and research course is one of the places it ought to be taught. But teaching students to adopt the norms of professional behavior — both in law school and after graduation — is a challenge to law faculties, and particularly to the experiential learning faculty who frequently are on the front lines of teaching professionalism. While there are many ways to teach students what professional and …

Trending @ Rwu Law: Olabisi Davies's Post: Remembering A Perfect Summer -- In The Bronx!, Olabisi Davies

Law School Blogs

No abstract provided.

Experiential Teaching In Theory And Practice: An Annotated International Business Transactions Syllabus, Maya Steinitz, Orit Shalomson, Naomi Steinitz-Edelman

Faculty Scholarship

In this short piece we provide an interactive, annotated International Business Transactions (IBT) syllabus. The introduction and annotations seek to connect the current discourse on experiential legal education to andragogy — the study of adult learning.

In 2013 we set out to re-develop a 3-credit IBT course. We applied various experiential pedagogical methodologies — developed initially to train Israeli air force pilots and later adapted to medical training and grounded in theoretical and empirical education research — to serve in a traditional IBT course. The goal was not only to develop legal skills such as negotiation, contract drafting, and client …

From Mock Trial To Real World Court, Ggu Center Preps Litigators, Lawdragon.Com

Articles About GGU Law

This blog post is also available online at: http://campus.lawdragon.com/2015/04/23/from-mock-trial-to-real-world-court-ggu-center-preps-litigators/

Trending @ Rwulaw: Ed Weiss's Post: From The Red Sox Gc: Knowing The Law, Knowing The Business, Weiss Ed

Law School Blogs

No abstract provided.

Trending@Rwu Law: Professor Diana Hassel's Post: Providence, Here We Come!, Diana Hassel

Law School Blogs

No abstract provided.

Defining Experiential Legal Education, David I.C. Thomson

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

This article offers in Part I the major sources for a possible new definition of experiential learning, and describes the limitations of the definitional elements that we currently have. Part II argues that the definitions we currently have are not only limited but their limitations are being further exposed by the growth and variety in experiential learning opportunities currently being offered in many law schools. Part III offers a new definition for experiential learning in law, together with a series of questions that can be used in applying the definition. Finally, Part IV offers application of the new definition to …

Understanding The Costs Of Experiential Legal Education, Martin J. Katz

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

Law schools across the country are under pressure to do two seemingly contradictory things. First, we must do a better job of preparing our graduates for practice. Most commentators, including me, believe that this requires law schools to increase the quantity and quality of experiential education we provide. At the same time, law schools are under pressure to control costs. If we do not do so, we risk pricing a large and growing segment of the population out of our market. Can law schools meet both of these mandates simultaneously? The received wisdom seems to be that experiential education is …

When Experiential Learning Takes Center Stage - Not Yet, Wes R. Porter

Publications

While experiential learning for decades has been part of the law school experience, it was not the part traditionally portrayed as integral to a student’s path to becoming an attorney. Law schools today, however, appear to celebrate and even extoll experiential learning and the once isolated pockets of law schools which brought it into the mainstream. Unfortunately, closer inspection reveals that the experiential learning movement in law school may be more marketing and spin than an honest shift in pedagogy, curriculum and culture. The next step for experiential learning may be the most difficult: progressing beyond the marketing doublespeak and …

Legal Education In Transition: Trends And Their Implications, Michael A. Millemann, Sheldon Krantz

Faculty Scholarship

This is a pivotal moment in legal education. Revisions in American Bar Association accreditation standards, approved in August 2014, impose new requirements, including practice-based requirements, on law schools. Other external regulators and critics are pushing for significant changes too. For example, the California bar licensing body is proposing to add a practice-based, experiential requirement to its licensing requirements, and the New York Court of Appeals, New York’s highest court, is giving third-year, second semester students the opportunity to practice full-time in indigent legal services programs and projects. Unbeknown to many, there have been significant recent changes in legal education that …

The Practice Value Of Experiential Legal Education: An Examination Of Enrollment Patterns, Course Intensity, And Career Relevance, Margaret Reuter, Joanne M. Ingham

Articles & Chapters

How will law schools meet the challenge of expanding their education in lawyering skills as demanded from critics and now required by the ABA? This article examines the details of the experiential coursework (clinic, field placement, and skills courses) of 2,142 attorneys. It reveals that experiential courses have not been comparably pursued or valued by former law students as they headed to careers in different settings and types of law practice. Public interest lawyers took many of these types of courses, at intensive levels, and valued them highly. In marked contrast, corporate lawyers in large firms took far fewer. When …

Preparing For Service: A Template For 21st Century Legal Education, Michael J. Madison

Articles

Legal educators today grapple with the changing dynamics of legal employment markets; the evolution of technologies and business models driving changes to the legal profession; and the economics of operating – and attending – a law school. Accrediting organizations and practitioners pressure law schools to prepare new lawyers both to be ready to practice and to be ready for an ever-fluid career path. From the standpoint of law schools in general and any one law school in particular, constraints and limitations surround us. Adaptation through innovation is the order of the day.

How, when, and in what direction should innovation …

Implementing Effective Education In Specific Contexts, Ruth Anne Robbins, Amy E. Sloan, Kristen Konrad Robbins-Tiscione

All Faculty Scholarship

This chapter of Building on Best Practices: Transforming Legal Education in a Changing World includes contributions from many authors:

• Section A, The Socratic Method, is by Elizabeth G. Porter
• Section B, Analysis, Research, and Communication in Skills-Focused Courses, is by Ruth Anne Robbins, Amy Sloan & Kristen K. Tiscione
• Section C, Use of Technology in Teaching, is by Michele Pistone and Warren Binford
• Section D, Law Libraries and Legal Education, is by Jonathan Franklin
• Section E, Cross-Border Teaching and Collaboration, is by Kimberly D. Ambrose, William H. D. Fernholz, Catherine F. Klein, Dana Raigrodski, Stephen A. Rosenbaum & Leah Wortham …

Golden Gate University School Of Law Ranked Among Top 20 In Nation For Practical Training, Lisa Lomba

Press Releases

The National Jurist this month unveiled its honor roll of law schools offering the best practical training, naming Golden Gate University’s School of Law among its top 20 nationwide. GGU Law ranked 19th out of over 200 ABA-accredited schools. The magazine based the rankings on the number of students engaged in faculty-supervised clinic positions, field placements, externships and simulation courses, and gave bonus points for innovative program efforts dedicated to experiential learning.