Law Commons^™

Engaging Outside Counsel In Transactional Law Clinics, Alicia E. Plerhoples, Amanda M. Spratley

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This article examines the plurality of objectives and methods by which transactional law clinics collaborate with outside attorneys to competently represent their organizational clients on a wide range of legal issues. Some transactional law clinics rely on outside counsel as informal legal advisors or consultants; others collaborate with outside counsel for the development of community projects or referral of legal work; many transactional law clinics engage outside counsel as “local counsel” when assisting a client in other jurisdictions or internationally; still others engage outside counsel more formally to assist in student supervision of client work. For some, the idea of …

What Makes A Homepage Effective – Aals 2014 Presentation, Leslie R. Steinberg, Steven Barnes, Roger Skalbeck

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

As the approach to website development is constantly evolving to accommodate the latest technology, what are the best practices in law school home page design? Speakers will include Roger Skalbeck, author of the annual "Top 10 Law School Home Pages" ranking, who will explain the methodology, analysis and trends related to the study, and Steven Barnes, who will share the award-winning approach used at Penn Law to earn accolades from key constituencies, tie for #1 in “The Top 10 Home Pages” and earn a 2013 Webby People’s Voice Award.

A Writing Revolution: Using Legal Writing's 'Hobble' To Solve Legal Education's Problem, Kristen Konrad Robbins-Tiscione

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The attached article responds to a 2011 article by John Lynch, published in the Journal of Legal Education, that urged legal writing faculty to return to an outmoded and ineffective writing pedagogy, the “product approach,” on the grounds that it would make teaching legal writing easier. This article builds on the work of Carol McCrehan Parker and others interested in writing across the curriculum and argues that the only way to reduce legal writing’s “hobble” and to solve legal education’s problem is to create a six-semester writing requirement. The reason law students are graduating without adequate preparation for practice is …

Intellectual Diversity In The Legal Academy, Nicholas Quinn Rosenkranz

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Elite law faculties are overwhelmingly liberal. Jim Lindgren has proven the point empirically. The author adds his impressions from Georgetown Law School to reinforce the point. Georgetown Law School is a faculty of 120, and, to the author's knowledge, the number of professors who are openly conservative, or libertarian, or Republican or, in any sense, to the right of the American center, is three—three out of 120. There are more conservatives on the nine-member United States Supreme Court than there are on this 120-member faculty. Moreover, the ideological median of the other 117 seems to lie not just left of …

Process, Practice, And Principle: Teaching National Security Law And The Knowledge That Matters Most, James E. Baker

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The meaningful application of national security law requires a commitment to substantive knowledge, good process, and a capacity to cope (and indeed thrive) under the prevailing conditions of practice. This paper describes how and why to teach these three essential elements of national security law from an academic and practitioner perspective.

The paper starts with substantive law, placing emphasis not just on the breadth of knowledge and interpretive skills required, but also on the importance of depth, perspective, theory, purpose, history, and legal values in teaching the law. Next, the paper describes the importance of timely, meaningful, and contextual process, …

Clinical Collaborations: Going Global To Advance Social Entrepreneurship, Deborah Burand, Susan R. Jones, Jonathan Ng, Alicia E. Plerhoples

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In the summer of 2012, transactional law clinics from three U.S. law schools: George Washington University; Georgetown University; and the University of Michigan launched a collaboration to serve a common client—Ashoka, a global nonprofit organization that supports close to 3,000 social entrepreneurs across 76 countries. While clinic collaborations within universities happen occasionally, clinic collaborations across universities are unusual. This essay focuses on the motivations, operations, lessons, and next steps of this cross-university, clinical collaboration aimed at advancing social entrepreneurship globally. Specifically, this essay examines why the collaboration was launched, how the collaboration is structured, what the collaboration offers clients and …