Law Commons^™

From Print To Digital And Back Again: Three Decades Of Lessons From A Library Newsletter, Rachel S. Evans

Presentations

This session shared the many lessons learned over the years of publishing the UGA Law Library’s longstanding newsletter Amicus Briefs both in print and electronically. It also shared current tools used for online and print publication, as well as assessing readership including Drupal, WordPress, MailChimp, Google Analytics and DataStudio, Piktochart, iTunes, YouTube, Feedburner, and Digital Commons.

Ereserves, Annotations, And Registration: Copyright At The 11th Circuit, Stephen Wolfson

Presentations

This presentation discusses eReserves, the 11th circuit and copyright issues surrounding the Georgia State University case heard by Judge Evans in 2008.

The Blockchain Explained, Or How To Make Lots Of Money In Cryptocurrency, Jason Tubinis

Presentations

The School of Law's Information Technology Librarian summarizes blockchain, the current impact is having on business, finance and e-commerce, and the potential implications for our not so distant future as it pertains to the law.

The Content Of Consumer Law Classes Iii, Jeff Sovern

Faculty Publications

This paper reports on a 2018 survey of law professors teaching consumer protection, and follows up on similar 2010 and 2008 surveys, which appeared in Jeff Sovern, The Content of Consumer Law Classes II, 14 J. Consumer & Commercial L. 16 (No. 1 2010), at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1657624 and Jeff Sovern, The Content of Consumer Law Classes, 12 J. Consumer & Commercial L. 48 (No. 1 2008), at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1139894, respectively. As reported in previous surveys, professors teaching consumer law report considerable variation in coverage. Professors want to cover relatively current subjects within their courses, such as FinTech, credit invisibles, and mortgage …

Tenth Anniversary Of The University Of Idaho's Native Law Program, Dylan R. Hedden-Nicely

Articles

No abstract provided.

Let's Teach Our Students Legal Technology... But What Should We Include?, Randy J. Diamond, Darin Fox, Kenneth J. Hirsh, Heidi Frostestad Kuehl, Michael Robak

Faculty Publications

A "renaissance” is often described as a cultural rebirth, a movement ushering in a modern age and leaving behind the old ways of doing things. There is every indication that we are entering a technology-driven renaissance in the legal profession. Artificial intelligence (AI), “big data,” document automation, e-discovery tools, cloud-based case management systems, and communication and collaboration tools are just a few of the ways that technology is transforming the practice of law in the twenty-first century.

Training Powerful Legal Communicators: What Does The Future Hold, Nicholas W. Allard, Heidi K. Brown

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Nurturing A More Just And Sustainable Food System: The First Year Of Pace Law's Food And Beverage Law Clinic, Jonathan Brown

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

This article looks back at the Clinic's first year and explores lessons learned in putting the theory behind the Clinic's model into practice. Launching the Clinic required a leap of faith. Was there in fact a client demand for its services? Was there sufficient interest from law students in the intersection of transactional law and food systems? Was the scope of legal matters too broad? Was the client focus too narrow? The early returns from the first year have given us valuable insights and experience from which to draw. First, this article discusses the unmet legal need the Clinic seeks …

Of Mind Maps And Makerspaces: Technology Approach To Law Teaching, Sharon Bradley

Presentations

Mind maps and makerspaces are two potential approaches to instruction that might inject a little fun and zing into the classroom. Mind maps are a more visual or graphical tool for teaching analysis, problem solving, and decision-making. Makerspaces embrace Langdell’s model of the law library as the “laboratory” of the law school. A makerspace could allow students to experiment, create, and learn to evaluate the “benefits and risks associated with relevant technology,” as reflected in the recent change to Rule 1.1 of the Model Rules of Professional Conduct.

Battling Fake News And Developing Digital Literacy Skills In The Legal Profession, Carol A. Watson, Caroline Osborne, Kris Niedringhaus

Presentations

Alternative facts? Truthiness? Post Truth? Hardly a day passes without someone making a reference to fake news. But why should lawyers care and what can information technology professionals and the legal academy do about it?
In order to fulfil a lawyer's duty of technology competency, digital information literacy is essential. Legal professionals must be able to locate, evaluate and use online information effectively. Evaluation of the reliability of digital information is a complex skill that must be mastered for the successful practice of law.
This program will discuss digital information literacy in the context of fake news. The session will …

Law School Leadership And Leadership Development For Developing Lawyers, Louis D. Bilionis

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

A growing number of legal educators are calling for greater attention to leadership development as an element of legal education at American law schools. Some make the case directly in the name of leadership education. Others see leadership development as part of a broader law school responsibility to provide purposeful support for students in the formation of their professional identity. For yet others, development of leadership skills figures in a law school’s appropriate commitment to the professionalism, professional development, or wellness of its students. These educators, though employing different locutions, constitute a “coalition of the willing” – law school faculty …

Designing Effective Legal Research Rubrics: The Foundation For Successful Assessment, Carol A. Watson, Katie Hanschke, Zanada Joyner

Presentations

Increasingly librarians are teaching many, if not all, of the legal research courses at their law schools. Most librarians are not experts in education assessment design. Assessment with rubrics creates a learner centric environments in which instructors objectively evaluate student progress and assures that students receive consistent and meaningful feedback. Rubrics provide both students and instructors with a clear understanding of whether learning outcomes have been achieved. Guided by the instructors' experience and an in-depth review of the literature law librarians will be exposed to the best practices when creating rubrics including alignment with the course goals and instructor expectations.

The Changing Landscape Of Digitization And Preservation, Sharon Bradley

Presentations

Digitization and the preservation of digitized materials presents many complex legal questions, like ownership, copyright, and conflicting laws. Digital materials may be subject to many levels of legal restrictions like copying, storage, access, and modification of content. The speaker will probably confuse things even more by talking about some issues that are coming over the hill including legally enforceable duties of stewardship, loss of academic scholarship and legal authority, and arguments against strict enforcement of copyright law. It’s also time to move from collaborations, because they’re good idea, to legally established partnerships, because they have teeth.

Fake News, Post-Truth & Information Literacy, Carol A. Watson, Caroline Osborne, Kristina L. Niedringhaus

Presentations

What is fake news? How did it arise? Why does recognizing fake news matter? How do we create information literate consumers in the legal community? This program will discuss the intersection of fake news and information literacy theory. We’ll provide an overview of the rise and proliferation of fake news including highlights of historical instances; a discussion of the impact of failing to detect fake news; and strategies for creating successful information literacy programming.

Mini-Law School: Civic Education Making A Difference In The Community, Pat Newcombe, Beth Cohen

Faculty Scholarship

Western New England’s Mini-Law School Program increases civic engagement and awareness and provides opportunities for law schools and educators to help non-lawyers better understand the legal system. This article will discuss the Mini-Law School Program, a creative and extremely successful five-week community outreach program focused on demystifying the law. Our society is in dire need of greater civic education. Public policy surveys consistently reveal disturbing statistics about the public’s lack of civic awareness (e.g., 15 percent of the public knew that John Roberts is Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, but 66 percent could name an American Idol judge; 70 …

Visual Literacy For The Legal Profession, Richard K. Sherwin

Articles & Chapters

Digital technology has transformed the way we communicate in society. Swept along on a digital tide, words, sounds, and images easily, and often, flow together. This state of affairs has radically affected not only our commercial and political practices in society, but also the way we practice law.

Unfortunately, legal education and legal theory have not kept up. Inconsistencies and unpredictability in the way courts ascertain the admissibility of various kinds of visual evidence and visual argumentation, lapses in the cross examination of visual evidence at trial, and inadequately theorized notions of visual meaning and the epistemology of affect tell …

The Power Of Imagination: Diversity And The Education Of Lawyers And Judges, Barry Sullivan

Faculty Publications & Other Works

No abstract provided.

A Dose Of Color, A Dose Of Reality: Contextualizing Intentional Tort Actions With Black Documentaries, Regina Austin

All Faculty Scholarship

This article describes the way documentary films can provide important cultural context in the assessment of tort claims. This kind of contextual analysis exposes the social conditions that drive legal disputes. For example, in the case of Klayman v. Obama, Larry Klayman claimed that Black Lives Matter, among other defendants, was liable for various intentional torts (including intentional infliction of emotional distress) by fomenting hostility toward the police in black communities. The court dismissed the case but declined to hold Klayman liable for sanctions. One documentary film, I Am Not Your Negro, locates Klayman’s claims in a historical …

Teaching And Assessing Soft Skills, Sophie M. Sparrow

Law Faculty Scholarship

[excerpt from article] It is our job as legal educators to put our law graduates in the best position to succeed as new lawyers.1 And to succeed, law graduates must possess certain qualities or character traits that will enable them to thrive within legal organizations.2 Despite many calls for reform in legal education to include more practice-related skills, including professionalism, many law professors teaching doctrinal courses are reluctant to incorporate teaching professional competencies and behaviors.3 They are unwilling to do so even though they have long decried students’ lack of professional skills.4 Professors complain that students show up late for …

How To Build A Better Bar Exam, Eileen Kaufman, Andrea Anne Curcio, Carol L. Chomsky

Scholarly Works

As a licensing exam, the purpose of the bar exam is consumer protection–-ensuring that new lawyers have the minimum competencies required to practice law effectively. As critics point out, however, the exam, and particularly the multiple-choice question portion of the exam, has significant flaws because it assesses legal knowledge and analysis in an artificial and unrealistic context, and the closed-book format rewards the ability to memorize thousands of legal rules, a skill unrelated to law practice.

This essay discusses how to improve the exam by changing its multiple-choice content and format. We use two law licensing exams to illustrate how …

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 …

Legal Education En Español: A Pedagogical Model, Jayesh Rathod

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Law schools in the United States are pursuing various strategies to prepare their graduates to compete in a global marketplace for jobs. One such strategy is the development of courses and programs designed to equip law graduates with the knowledge and skills needed to serve as effective bilingual advocates. As part of this effort, in recent years, teachers and scholars have engaged in curricular experimentation and ongoing theorizing about the optimal methods and approaches for bilingual legal education. This essay builds upon existing theoretical work and outlines a unique, bilingual instructional model that involves adding an optional credit hour – …

Legal Deserts, Lauren Sudeall, Lise R. Pruitt, Danielle M. Conway, Michele Statz, Hannah Haksgaard, Amanda L. Kool

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Rural America faces an increasingly dire access-to-justice crisis, which serves to exacerbate the already disproportionate share of social problems afflicting rural areas. One critical aspect of the crisis is the dearth of information and research regarding the extent of the problem and its impacts. This Article begins to fill that gap by providing surveys of rural access to justice in six geographically, demographically, and economically varied states: California, Georgia, Maine, Minnesota, South Dakota, and Wisconsin. In addition to providing insights about the distinct rural challenges confronting each of these states, the legal resources available, and existing policy responses, the Article …

The Culturally Proficient Law Professor: Beginning The Journey, Anastasia M. Boles

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Beyond The "Practice Ready" Buzz: Sifting Through The Disruption Of The Legal Industry To Divine The Skills Needed By New Attorneys, Jason G. Dykstra

Articles

A heightened velocity of change enveloped the legal profession over the last two decades. From big law to rural practitioners, the traditional law firm model proved ripe for disruption. This disruption is fueled by several discrete changes in how legal services are provided, including technological advances that allow for the automation of many routine tasks and the disaggregation of legal services; enhanced client sophistication and cost-consciousness; global competition from offshoring routine legal services; the rise of the domestic gig economy, creating a new wave of home-shoring legal services; and competition from non-traditional legal services providers. In the face of declining …

Towards A Jurisprudence (And Pedagogy) Of Access: A Reflection On 25 Years Of The Public Interest Practicum, Alex Scherr, Elizabeth M. Grant, Graham Goldberg

Scholarly Works

The Public Interest Practicum (PIP), a course at the University of Georgia School of Law, fosters awareness among law students of the demand for access to justice. For more than 25 years, PIP has served many purposes: to explore a street level jurisprudence; to challenge students’ professional identities; to generate new models of clinical legal education; to inculcate the habit of public service; and to help individuals with legal problems. Through its many iterations, PIP has consistently exposed future lawyers to ways of helping those in need. This reflection traces the history of PIP as a course, contextualizes it within …

An Invitation Regarding Law And Legal Education, And Imagining The Future, Michael J. Madison

Articles

This Essay consists of an invitation to participate in conversations about the future of legal education in ways that integrate rather than distinguish several threads of concern and revision that have emerged over the last decade. Conversations about the future of legal education necessarily include conversations about the future of law practice, legal services, and law itself. Some of those start with the somewhat stale questions: What are US law professors doing, what should they be doing, and why? Those questions are still relevant and important, but they are no longer the only relevant questions, and they are not the …

Adventures In Higher Education, Happiness, And Mindfulness, Peter H. Huang

Publications

This Article recounts my unique adventures in higher education, including being a Princeton University freshman mathematics major at age 14, Harvard University applied mathematics graduate student at age 17, economics and finance faculty at multiple schools, first-year law student at the University of Chicago, second- and third-year law student at Stanford University, and law faculty at multiple schools. This Article also candidly discusses my experiences as student and professor and openly shares how I achieved sustainable happiness by practicing mindfulness to reduce fears, rumination, and worry in facing adversity, disappointment, and setbacks. This Article analyzes why law schools should teach …

Two Pedagogies In Search Of Synergy, Lisa Schultz, Susan Nevelow Mart

Publications

Anyone who has taught a first-year legal research course understands the dilemma: How do we weave research skills into the writing program without sacrificing the quality or quantity of either discipline? In fact, it is difficult and time consuming to interweave any serious legal research instruction into a first-year writing course. What the students need to know is not just how to do a little case law research or how to find a statute: they need to also know how to formulate a research plan, how to evaluate a database, what kind of search works in different information environments, and …

Legal Deserts: A Multi-State Perspective On Rural Access To Justice (Forthcoming), Danielle M. Conway

Faculty Publications

Rural America faces an increasingly dire access to justice crisis, which serves to exacerbate the already disproportionate share of social problems afflicting rural areas. One critical aspect of that crisis is the dearth of information and research regarding the extent of the problem and its impacts. This article begins to address that gap by providing surveys of rural access to justice in six geographically, demographically, and economically varied states: California, Georgia, Maine, Minnesota, South Dakota, and Wisconsin. In addition to providing insights about the distinct rural challenges confronting each of these states, the legal resources available, and existing policy responses, …