Law Commons^™

(Anti)Canonizing Courts, Jamal Greene

Faculty Scholarship

Within U.S. constitutional culture, courts stand curiously apart from the society in which they sit. Among the many purposes this process of alienation serves is to “neutralize” the cognitive dissonance produced by Americans’ current self-conception and the role our forebears’ social and political culture played in producing historic injustice. The legal culture establishes such dissonance in part by structuring American constitutional argument around anticanonical cases: most especially “Dred Scott v. Sandford,” “Plessy v. Ferguson,” and “Lochner v. New York.” The widely held view that these decisions were “wrong the day they were decided” emphasizes the role of independent courts in …

Deals Or No Deals: Integrating Transactional Skills In The First Year Curriculum, Lynnise E. Pantin

Faculty Scholarship

This article joins a growing body of scholarship on the pedagogy of transactional law and skills. This article challenges the traditional pedagogy of teaching law students to think like a lawyer and argues that law schools should shift the analytical framework of a litigation-dominated model, which is typically taught in the first year, to a model that incorporates transactional skills teaching into the first year law school curriculum. This approach will (1) create a greater balance of skills taught in the first year and (2) address the mandate to train more practice-ready lawyers. This article argues that the best place …

An Examination Of The Challenges, Successes And Setbacks For Clinical Legal Education In Eastern Europe, Dubravka Aksamovic, Philip Genty

Faculty Scholarship

The authors first met in 2000, and have collaborated in conferences, workshops, and other projects since then. We also represent two sides of an international exchange that has frequently occurred in the past 15 years: a European law teacher who attends training sessions, networks with colleagues from other European universities, learns about American models of clinical education, and possibly receives some outside funding; and an American law teacher who is graciously hosted by Europeans, promotes American models of clinical education, and, one hopes, observes, listens and learns about the European system. We are also experienced teachers within our own universities …

Reaching Backward And Stretching Forward: Teaching For Transfer In Law School Clinics, Shaun Archer, James P. Eyster, James J. Kelly Jr., Tonya Kowalski, Colleen F. Shanahan

Faculty Scholarship

In thinking about education, teachers may spend more time considering what to teach than how to teach. Unfortunately, traditional teaching techniques have limited effectiveness in their ability to help students retain and apply the knowledge either in later classes or in their professional work. What, then, is the value of our teaching efforts if students are unable to transfer the ideas and skills they have learned to later situations? Teaching for transfer is important to the authors of this article, four clinical professors and one psychologist.

The purpose of this article is to provide an introduction to some of the …