Law Commons^™

The Carnegie Effect: Elevating Practical Training Over Liberal Education In Curricular Reform, Mark Yates

Publications

The Carnegie Foundation issued its book-length report, Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law (Carnegie Report) in 2007. Although there have been numerous responses to it, relatively few have engaged it with any degree of critical analysis. Law schools across the country have enthusiastically mentioned the Carnegie Report in connection with curricular changes intended to “prepare” students, in the words of the Report, for the practice of law. Mostly these changes amount to adding clinical options or even clinical requirements, adding units to legal writing programs, and updating professional responsibility courses. Very few, if any law schools, however, have …

The Law School Firm, Bradley T. Borden, Robert J. Rhee

UF Law Faculty Publications

This Article introduces the concept of the law school firm. The concept calls for law schools to establish affiliated law firms. The affiliation would provide opportunities for students, faculty, and attorneys to collaborate and share resources to teach, research, write, serve clients, and influence the development of law and policy. Based loosely on the medical school model, the law school firm will help bridge the gap between law schools and the practice of law.

Racing Towards Colorblindness: Stereotype Threat And The Myth Of Meritocracy, Jonathan Feingold

Faculty Scholarship

Education law and policy debates often focus on whether college and graduate school admissions offices should take race into account. Those who advocate for a strictly merits-based regime emphasize the importance of colorblindness. The call for colorblind admissions relies on the assumption that our current admissions criteria are fair measures, which accurately capture talent and ability. Recent social science research into standardized testing suggests that this is not the case.

Part I of this Article explores the psychological phenomenon of stereotype threat. Stereotype threat has been shown to detrimentally impact the performance of individuals from negatively stereotyped groups when performing …

A Primer For Teaching Law As An Adjunct Professor, Rachel A. Van Cleave

Publications

After practicing law and perhaps specializing in a particular area for several years, you cannot help but think, "I wish they had taught me [blank] in law school." You start to wonder whether you could teach a class at a local law school. Here are some tips for pursuing such an endeavor.

So You Want To Teach Law, Rachel A. Van Cleave

Publications

After practicing law and perhaps specializing in a particular area for several years, you cannot help but think, "I wish they had taught me [blank] in law school." You start to wonder whether you could teach a class at a local law school. Here are some tips for pursuing such an endeavor.

Improving Legal Education By Improving Casebooks: Fourteen Things Casebooks Can Do To Produce Better And More Learning, Michael Hunter Schwartz

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

A Call To Combine Rhetorical Theory And Practice In The Legal Writing Classroom, Kristen Konrad Robbins-Tiscione

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The theory and practice of law have been separated in legal education to their detriment since the turn of the twentieth century. As history teaches us and even the 2007 Carnegie Report perhaps suggests, teaching practice without theory is as inadequate as teaching theory without practice. Just as law students should learn how to draft a simple contract from taking Contracts, they should learn the theory of persuasion from taking a legal writing course. In an economy where law apprenticeship has reverted from employer to educator, legal writing courses should do more than teach analysis, conventional documents, and the social …

Time For A Top-Tier Law School In Arkansas, Richard J. Peltz-Steele

Faculty Publications

A simple change in state law could improve the quality of legal education in Arkansas and the quality of legal services available to our consumers - and save significant amounts of taxpayers' money. With an Afterword on academic freedom. Also available from Advance Arkansas Institute website.

Interdisciplinary Transactional Courses, Eric J. Gouvin, Robert Statchen, Anthony J. Luppino, William Kell

Faculty Scholarship

This Article represents a panel presentation on interdisciplinary work in law school transactional courses. The Authors’ focus is on the Small Business Clinic at Western New England University School of Law. Topics covered are: interdisciplinary work and the classroom, professional liability and competency issues in rendering services through a clinic, culture class issues, ethical dilemmas, delivering professional products to the client, and co-curricular opportunities.

Renaissance Or Retrenchment: Legal Education At A Crossroads, Lauren Carasik

Faculty Scholarship

This Article begins to synthesize the literature criticizing the current state of legal education with the scholarship proposing solutions, and argues that whatever review is undertaken must be expansive, with a careful and critical look at how each piece supports the endeavor. None of the ideas discussed, taken alone, are novel, as scholarship abounds on all of the topics. Considered together, the analysis suggests that a comprehensive and holistic approach to reform is necessary. In essence, the goal is to catalyze a wholesale reconsideration of the very foundation of legal education. Many of the seemingly disparate themes comprise a Gordian …

They Do Teach That In Law School: Incorporating Best Practices Into Land Use Law, Patricia E. Salkin

Scholarly Works

This article, prepared as a follow-up to Salkin & Nolon, Practically Grounded: Convergence of Land Use Pedagogy and Best Practice, 60 J.Legal Education 519 (2011), describes how practice-based assignments can supplement the traditional casebook method of instruction to meet goals and measure outcome assessments for students in the course. The article is based on my own course goals and explains how each assignment relates to individual outcome assessments.

Online, Distance Legal Education As An Agent Of Social Change, Michael L. Perlin

Articles & Chapters

New York Law School (NYLS) created its online, distance learning mental disability law program in an effort to provide education in an area of the law that remains hidden in most law school curricula. Since 2000, it has offered its mental disability law courses in an online, distance learning format to its own students, to law students from other US-based law schools, to mental health professionals, to students in all the allied mental health professions and in the fields of criminology and criminal justice, and to activists and advocates (including members of the psychiatric survivor movement). It has offered the …

Outcomes & Assessment: A Golden Opportunity For Lrw Professors, David I.C. Thomson

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

The American Bar Association is currently discussing drafts of a proposal to shift the law school accreditation standards from inputs measurements (such as numbers of books, faculty student ratios, etc.) to outcomes assessment. While still in discussion, this shift has the potential to create profound change in legal education. For the first time, law schools may be held accountable – beyond the bar exam – for what and how they teach their students. Law schools all across the country are busy trying to determine what this will mean, and how to go about meeting the new ABA standard.

New Ways To Teach Drafting And Drafting Ethics, Lisa Penland, David I.C. Thomson, Susan Duncan, Karen J. Sneddon, Susan M. Chesler

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

As foreign as it can seem to not be in a physical classroom with bodies sitting in the chairs listening, it is a very different way of teaching but it can be very effective. If you go through this process of developing and dividing outcomes, dividing modules, and selecting the right technology, it can work. And that is kind of a scary thought to some people. Perhaps not people who have come to this section today or to this conference about What's Next, but for many of our colleagues, this is kind of a scary thought – that you might …

Upper-Level Courses: Three Exemplars, Eric J. Gouvin, Mark Fagan, Tamar Frankel, Kathy Z. Heller

Faculty Scholarship

This Article presents three exemplars of upper-level law school classes, and is divided into three parts. Part I discusses "Securitization and Asset-Backed Securities"; Part II discusses "Using Transactions to Teach Secured Transactions"; and Part III discusses "Teaching Deals Through a Focus on the Entertainment Industry."

Bridging Gaps And Blurring Lines: Integrating Analysis, Writing, Doctrine, And Theory, Susan J. Hankin

Faculty Scholarship

This article is an outgrowth of the author’s participation in a July 29, 2009 panel presentation, “Change in Legal Education: Practical Skills,” at the Symposium, YES WE CArNegie: Change in Legal Education after the Carnegie Report. The article responds to the Carnegie Report’s call to “bridge the gap between analytical and practical knowledge” by presenting two models for integrating skills with doctrine in the first-year curriculum. The first model, built into the curriculum at the University of Maryland School of Law, involves teaching the first semester Legal Analysis & Writing course by pairing it with another required first-semester course, Torts, …

On Legal Education And Reform: One View Formed From Diverse Perspectives, Robert J. Rhee

Faculty Scholarship

This article identifies two interconnected problems in legal education. First, legal education and practice are more disconnected than they should be, a reality which distinguishes law schools from other professional schools. The major flaw of legal education as the failure to produce more market-ready lawyers who have a mix of skills and knowledge to add value in a complex and challenging practice environment. Second, law school imposes large direct and opportunity costs on its students. These costs combine with the problem of a deficiency in academic training and post-graduation financing of additional training in the workplace to impose a growing …

The Law School Firm, Bradley T. Borden, Robert J. Rhee

Faculty Scholarship

This Article introduces the concept of the law school firm. The concept calls for law schools to establish affiliated law firms. The affiliation would provide opportunities for students, faculty, and attorneys to collaborate and share resources to teach, research, write, serve clients, and influence the development of law and policy. Based loosely on the medical school model, the law school firm will help bridge the gap between law schools and the practice of law.

The New Rules For Law Schools, Barbara S. Gontrum

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Innovative Transactional Pedagogies, Joan Macleod Heminway, Michael A. Woronoff, Lyman P.Q. Johnson

Scholarly Articles

Our law schools are embracing in a more powerful way innovative transactional pedagogies that address not only theory, policy, and doctrine, but also legal skills. This transcribed panel discussion explores three of these pedagogies – teaching corporate finance as advanced contract drafting, teaching numeracy, and teaching substance and skill in contract drafting through the use of in-office meetings and analytical memos – and describes how they are being implemented in law teaching. The panel was part of the “Transactional Education: What’s Next?” conference hosted by the Emory University School of Law’s Center for Transactional Law and Practice on June 4-5, …

Techniques To Teach Substance And Skill In Contract Drafting: In-Office Meetings And Analytical Memos, Lyman P. Q. Johnson

Scholarly Articles

This short article is based on a talk at Emory Law School on Transactional Lawyering. One overall pedagogical aim of a transactional course (or any business contract drafting course) is to link skills training with insistence on in-depth substantive learning about law and business. In this way, skills training – although acknowledged to be practical – also can be recognized as intellectually demanding, a point not always appreciated by proponents of more traditional law teaching. Two techniques for making the connection – in-office meetings and detailed “companion” analytical memos – are described.

Beyond Chalk And Talk: The Law Classroom Of The Future, Oren R. Griffin, Karen J. Sneddon

Articles, Chapters in Books and Other Contributions to Scholarly Works

Law schools are rethinking the traditional Langdellian classroom as they construct the law classroom of the future. Although the reform of legal education has long been heralded, law schools are now on the cusp of actual change. Carnegie's Educating Lawyers and the Clinical Legal Education Association's Best Practices for Legal Education are promoting a rethinking of the law classroom. Also encouraging the examination of legal education are changes in the incoming student population, such as the influx of students from the Millennial Generation; technological innovations; and shifting realities and economics of law practice, such as the increased focus on efficiency …

Demands Of The Marketplace Require Practical Skills: A Necessity For Emerging Practicioners, And Its Clinical Impact On Society--A Paradigm For Change, Ann Marie Cavazos

Journal Publications

Many articles have been written focusing on the benefits that the law students receive from participating in a rigorous program of clinical study early on in their careers. However, little focus has been given to the clients who participate in law school clinics. Most of the time these clients are poor and minorities with few, if any, options for legal representation. In general, law student clinical work has been confined to local clients with local issues. Even law schools that handle national issues have clients that are local and the issues that give rise to the national representation occur locally. …

Teaching Contracts From A Transactional Perspective, Michael Hunter Schwartz

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Legal Education Comes To Nevada: The Creation Of The William S. Boyd School Of Law, Mary Berkheiser

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Getting Real About Legal Realism, New Legal Realism And Clinical Legal Education, Katherine R. Kruse

Scholarly Works

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 …

Intellectual Property, Innovation, And The Future: Toward A Better Model For Educating Leaders In Intellectual Property Law, Robert W. Gomulkiewicz

Articles

Intellectual property sits at the center of today’s global information economy. Today, producers and users of intellectual property come from both developed and developing nations. Intellectual property matters as much to China and India as it does to Germany and the United States. This reality has driven a monumental demand for lawyers who can make and implement intellectual property law - that is to say, the new leaders in intellectual property law. Indeed, the demand for intellectual property law-trained lawyers triggered a “big bang” in the creation of advanced intellectual property law programs at American law schools. The new leaders …

How Much Clinic For How Many Students?: Examining The Decision To Offer Clinics For One Semester Or An Academic Year, Kele Stewart

Articles

Many law schools are engaged in curricular reform aimed at more effectively preparing students for practice. Two publications that have influenced these reform efforts, Best Practices for Legal Education and the Carnegie Foundation's report Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law, suggest that there should be more clinical opportunities. With limited resources, there is an apparent tension between providing live-client clinics to as many students as possible versus a deeper clinical experience over an academic year. This Article examines the questions raised by a law school's decision to offer a clinic for one semester or two. In designing …

E.U. Law In U.S. Legal Academia, Daniela Caruso

Faculty Scholarship

The history of EU law in the JD curriculum is a classical tale of rise and fail. An avant garde, boutique offering in the 1970s, and a fairly popular course in the 1990s, today EU law in US law schools is slowly losing prominence. This Article begins by tracking this parabolic trajectory and argues that the discipline both rose and fell for contingent reasons that are mostly unrelated to its pedagogical and analytical significance. The Article then provides a critical appraisal of what EU law is uniquely poised to offer both in the classroom and as a subject for legal …

The Changing Face Of Legal Education: Its Impact On What It Means To Be A Lawyer, Thomas D. Morgan

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

In recent years, it has become less clear what it means to be a lawyer. Current efforts by the ABA to change accreditation standards for U.S. law schools make it important to think about the ways in which lawyers have common qualities. This paper considers both the changes in law practice and what they are likely to mean for U.S. law schools as they try to equip lawyers for the new reality.