Law Commons^™

The Secret Sauce: Examining Law Schools That Overperform On The Bar Exam, Derek T. Muller, Christopher J. Ryan Jr.

Journal Articles

Since 2010, law schools have faced declining enrollment and entering classes with lower predictors of success despite recent signs of improvement. At least partly as a result, rates at which law school graduates pass the bar exam have declined and remain at historic lows. Yet, during this time, many schools have improved their graduates' chances of success on the bar exam, and some schools have dramatically outperformed their predicted bar exam passage rates. This Article examines which schools do so and why.

Research for this Article began by accounting for law schools' incoming class credentials to predict an expected bar …

Persons And The Point Of The Law, Richard Garnett

Journal Articles

This short essay is a comment and reflection on a manuscript by Professors John Breen and Lee
Strang, "A Light Unseen: A History of Catholic Legal Education in the United States." It is based on remarks presented at a February 14, 2020 conference, sponsored by the Journal of Catholic Legal Studies and the Center for Law and Religion at St. John's University School of Law. It
addresses, among other things, Breen and Strang's argument that a Catholic law school should have a distinctive "intellectual architecture" and proposes that a distinctive moral anthropology -- that is, an account of what the …

Teaching Trademark Theory Through The Lens Of Distinctiveness, Mark P. Mckenna

Journal Articles

This contribution to the annual teaching edition of the Saint Louis University Law Journal encourages teachers to begin trademark law courses using the concept of distinctiveness as a vehicle for articulating producer and consumer perspectives in trademark law. Viewing the law through these sometimes different perspectives helps in approaching a variety of doctrines in trademark law, and both perspectives are relatively easy to grasp in the context of distinctiveness.

A Search For Balance In The Whirlwind Of Law School: Spirituality From Law Teachers, Thomas L. Shaffer

Journal Articles

The first-year introductory course in property law is about all that is left of the traditional black-box curriculum. It is where beginning law students cope with and despair of the arcana of English common law; where, with more detachment than, say, in the torts course, analysis of appellate opinions is what "thinking like a lawyer" means, with no more than peripheral and begrudging attention to modem legislation and administrative law; where legal reasoning is a stretching exercise and initiatory discipline. And, incidentally, surviving bravely the rude invasion of teachers of public law, it is where a teaching lawyer can point …

An American Tale, Geoffrey J. Bennett

Journal Articles

How much influence should the legal profession in England and Wales have over law degree courses? Geoffrey Bennett says to consider the U.S. experience before ditching the idea.

The Catholic Tradition, Thomas L. Shaffer

Journal Articles

If you stand in the road near one of the on-campus Roman Catholic university law schools in the United States, you can probably see a church spire. You can squint past whatever fire wall or battlement or gothic tower there is on the law building and see the campus church. You can do this at Notre Dame, St. Louis, Creighton, San Francisco, Boston College, and San Diego. If you go inside one of these law buildings, you may find crucifixes, chapels, holy-water fonts, or a statute of Thomas More. But none of these things will tell you what those law …

Moral Implications And Effects Of Legal Education Or: Brother Justinian Goes To Law School, Thomas L. Shaffer

Journal Articles

This Article explores the moral implications of a legal education. Specifically, the author addresses three moral points of view—teleologically, interpersonally, and responsibility—and explains how a legal education advances or is in opposition to a moral community.

Civil Rights And Legal Order: The Work Of A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr., Donald P. Kommers, Eugenia S. Schwartz

Journal Articles

On October 11-12, 1978, Judge A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr.' delivered the Notre Dame Law School's Seventh Annual Civil Rights Lecture under the general title, "From Thomas Jefferson to Bakke: Race and the American Legal Process." It seems to us appropriate, therefore, on the occasion of the Higginbotham lecture, to consider his work as both historian and judge. Specifically, this article will serve the threefold purpose of (1) reviewing Matter of Color, (2) illustrating the author's use of history in two judicial opinions dealing with the rights of black Americans, and (3) reflecting upon the implications of Higginbotham's work in legal …

Reassessing Law Schooling: The Sterling Forest Group, Thomas L. Shaffer

Journal Articles

This Article is the result of a weekend in December 1976 at the Sterling Forest Conference Center. Several legal educators came together there to explore the possible relevance of humanistic educational psychology to legal education, and the pieces that follow flow from the experiences in learning we shared there. The concerns that brought the ten of us together were not new; rather, they emanated from a longstanding challenge within the profession.

Although we taught at different institutions and in different fields, our experiences had led us to a common dissatisfaction with legal education and a hope that more was possible. …

Studies Of Legal Education: A Review Of Recent Reports, Thomas L. Shaffer, Robert S. Redmount

Journal Articles

Early in 1972, the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education published its report on legal education. It is the most prominent study of legal education in the last decade, and typical of discourse in and about law schools—urbane, speculative, unempirical, conceptual, rarely student-centered. The authors of the Carnegie report were articulate law teachers. They wrote with their feet up and their pipes lit, without attention to facts which did not come from their considerable experience. The value of such reports is the thoughtfulness of the people who write them, and their predictive accuracy is due to the fact that people who …

Learning The Law-Thoughts Toward A Human Perspective, Thomas L. Shaffer, Robert S. Redmount

Journal Articles

The history of American legal education is notable for a sparsity of ideas on how to convey learning about law. There has been even less focal understanding of what learning is and what it takes to establish a process which will prepare lawyers for their profession. A window on this history was provided in historical survey by Alfred Z. Reed in 1921 and, more recently, by Professors Preble Stolz and Calvin Woodward. It is principally their accounts of eighteenth and nineteenth century developments that we here briefly integrate and summarize. The perspective-a consideration of legal education in terms of social …

Legal Education: The Classroom Experience, Thomas L. Shaffer, Robert S. Redmount

Journal Articles

Law students learn from what is in them, from what is directed at them, and from what is around them. The following is a study of an external dimension of the law-school learning experience-the classroom. Research strategy consisted of approaching the classroom phenomenon from two perspectives; what is presented and how students perceive it.

Report Of The Dean 1973-1974, Thomas L. Shaffer

Journal Articles

My assessments of the Law School have tended more to describe developments than to state aspirations. I continue to assess things in that vein; my preference for leadership in the Dean's Office is to build on the goals which are implicit in the work of the tireless, dedicated people who teach and learn law at Notre Dame. My hope in approaching our enterprise in this way is to discover myself, and to help my colleagues discover, the power with which they serve God, the University, the community, our embattled profession, and one another. "This power in us," St. Paul said, …

Collaboration In Studying Law, Thomas L. Shaffer

Journal Articles

This articles provides a description of the experiments used in curriculum, teaching methods, and administration. It urges the Law School to assist students in seeing collaboration in studying law is a winning style. The author hopes that through experiments, students will actually start to see that collaboration encourages success among law students, and especially first-year law students where collaboration is valuable because of the situation students are in.

Report Of The Dean 1972-1973, Thomas L. Shaffer

Journal Articles

These are curious times for American legal education, especially curious perhaps at this university law school, because we claim adherence to the traditions of Thomas More. Our profession has for more than two centuries provided rulers for America, as it provided leaders, including More himself, for More's England—presidents and speakers, senators and administrators, benign manipulators in American corridors of power. More than a few of America's lawyer leaders have been educated at Christian, university law schools, and, as I think about Notre Dame law students this summer, I hope we are educating more than a few replacements for the lawyer-leaders …

Report Of The Dean 1971-1972, Thomas L. Shaffer

Journal Articles

This is my first report to you as dean of the Notre Dame Law School. It seems to me important to begin it with an assessment of the decade that intervened between 1961, when I graduated from the Law School, and 1971, when Father Hesburgh appointed me to be dean. I assess, of course, a decade of law at Notre Dame during most of which (1963-71) I participated as a member of the faculty. I made this assessment, in approximately these terms, to Father Burtchaell and to our students in March, 1971; to our Advisory Council in April, 1971; and …

Thirteen Rules For Academic Meetings, Thomas L. Shaffer

Journal Articles

This comment presents Thomas L. Shaffer’s thirteen rules for academic meetings.