Law Commons^™

Closing The Feedback Gap: Reflections As Diagnostic Resource, Jaclyn Celebrezze

Presentations

Providing students with helpful, actionable feedback is a perennial challenge. This presentation identifies an additional data source for instructors when drafting feedback: digital student reflections. This process has a dual benefit for both instructors and students. For instructors, digitized reflections unlock an understanding of why a student drafted a certain way, minimizing guesswork and ensuring more targeted feedback. For students, this process directs the instructor’s gaze to a concrete concern or discomfort for immediate response. While not a solution for all feedback problems, digitizing student reflections allows instructors and students to work together to close the gap.

Progressive Prosecution Or Zealous Public Defense? The Choice For Law Students Concerned About Our Flawed Criminal Legal System, Abbe Smith

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This Article addresses a question asked by many law students concerned about our flawed criminal legal system: should they become a prosecutor in an office run by a progressive prosecutor, or a public defender in an office devoted to zealous, client-centered (or holistic) defense? The Article starts with an anecdote about Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner’s road show to recruit law students and young lawyers, and then proceeds as follows: First, this Article makes the case for progressive prosecution; then, it makes the case for zealous indigent defense; then, it identifies the obstacles and challenges for both kinds of lawyers …

Here Are Ways Professional Education Leaders Can Prepare Students For The Rise Of Ai, A. Benjamin Spencer

Popular Media

No abstract provided.

Maurer School Of Law, Iu Northwest Partner On Law Scholars Program, James Owsley Boyd

Keep Up With the Latest News from the Law School (blog)

The Indiana University Maurer School of Law, working in collaboration with Indiana University Northwest, has established a new program to act as a pipeline into law school, the schools announced today (June 27).

The Indiana University Northwest Law Scholars Program will substantially reduce tuition for up to four IU Northwest graduates interested in pursuing a legal education in Bloomington, as well as supply qualifying students with dedicated faculty mentorship to help ensure their success.

Medical-Legal Partnership As A Model For Access To Justice, Yael Cannon

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The United States is plagued with a “justice gap” that leaves many Americans with unmet civil legal needs. Americans with low income do not receive the legal help they require for as many as 92% of their substantive civil legal problems. The justice gap requires many legal aid agencies to triage, becoming “emergency rooms” for clients with unmet legal needs. This national crisis calls for new innovations so that access to justice (A2J) can function more like primary care, promoting better use of resources and preventing legal crises that can cause long-lasting harm.

Medical-Legal Partnerships (MLPs) embed lawyers in healthcare …

What Lawyers Can Teach Their Employed Law Students About 'Impactful Legal Writing', Douglas E. Abrams

Faculty Publications

This article concerns the value of teaching employed law students about the potency of “impactful legal writing” – legal writing that can have a substantial impact on someone other than the student writer. Much of the employer’s most instructive teaching about impactful legal writing occurs at the beginning of an assignment, rather than solely during review after the student has completed the assignment. This article identifies four ways an employed law student’s impactful writing when fulfilling assignments differs from the effect of students’ academic writing in law school. Each of the four ways enables the employer to deliver practical lessons …

John Osborn's Enduring Words On Law & Learning, Walter Effross

Popular Media

When I started my first year at Harvard Law School, 17 years after Osborn did, I wasn’t looking for enlightenment. But I expected to be — and was — intimidated by Socratic taskmasters who, like the movie version of Osborn’s Professor Kingsfield (a role for which John Houseman won an Academy Award and a Golden Globe Award in 1973), were ready with “always another question, another question to follow your answer.”

"Civil Procedure Is What It's All About": Law School Dean A. Benjamin Spencer Reflects On Career, Molly Parks, A. Benjamin Spencer

Popular Media

No abstract provided.

Tribute To Professor James Moliterno, Patricia Roberts, Soledad Atienza, Eleanor Myers, James S. Heller, Gary Tamsitt, Neal Devins, Peter Čuroš, Veronika Tomoszek, Maxim Tomoszek, Paul Žilinčík, Rongjie Lan, José M. De Areilza, Irina Lortkipanidze, Ján Mazúr, Javier Guillen, Lucia Berdisová, James Étienne Viator

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Prison Libraries, Intellectual Freedom And Social Justice In Nigeria, Olusegun Adebayo Opesanwo, Oluyomi Abidemi Awofeso Phd

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

This paper deployed a systematic review to examine prison libraries and intellectual freedom towards attaining social justice in Nigeria. Information resources used cover the periods of 2010 and 2020 to articulate the necessary development in prison libraries, intellectual freedom and social justice in Nigeria. Search engines such as Google scholar, Semantic Scholar, and RefSeek were used to retrieve information and through different queries yielded several results but very few of them were selected to fit in the study due to limited studies directed to address the focus of this study particularly in the Nigeria scenario. Information obtained were subjected to …

The Lawyer As Dream Enabler, Gerald S. Reamey

Faculty Articles

In law school and in law practice, the power of preparation is reinforced. Generations of law students have heard me extol the virtue of preparation above all others. While it is true, even the best preparation will never beat luck; luck is fickle and not subject to our control. On the other hand, we totally control the amount and quality of the preparation we put into any project. I discovered preparation is more important than good looks, nice clothes, a shiny leather briefcase, eloquence, experience, or even intelligence.

The Association Of Participating In A Summer Prelaw Training Program And First-Year Law School Students’ Grades, Heather M. Buzick, Christopher Robertson, Jessica Findley, Heidi Burross, Matthew Charles, David M. Klieger

Faculty Scholarship

This study estimates the association of participation in a nine-week online educational program to prepare students for post-graduate (juris doctorate) education and law school grades. We collected registrar data from 17 U.S. law schools for participants and non-participants from the same year and a prior year. We compared first-semester law school grades between participating and non-participating students weighted by propensity scores. Course participation was associated with improved first-semester grades in a keyed course (Contracts Law) and overall grade point average. According to pre- and post-survey responses, a substantial portion of those who completed the program reported feeling more prepared for …

Uga Again Named Nation’S Best Value In Legal Education, University Of Georgia School Of Law

Dean's Messages

Announcement from Dean Rutledge that the University of Georgia School of Law was recently named the nation’s Best Value in legal education. Notably, this is the fourth time in the last six years that the school has occupied the top spot in the National Jurist ranking, including an historic three-peat at the number one position from 2018 to 2020.

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 …

A Critical Jeffersonian Mind For A Community Reinvestment Bind, Chaz Brooks

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

The Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 ("CRA") primarily sought to remedy decades of government sanctioned disinvestment in so-called “redlined communities.” Through the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation and later the Federal Housing Administration, the United States of America created from whole cloth a structure that encouraged and subsidized the explosion of homeownership in white American households. Following decades of racialized wealth generation, the United States had a change of heart. Congress determined that financiers needed a gentle push to invest fairly. Additionally, Congress wanted one thing clear in the drafting of this remedy—it must not allocate credit.

This essay considers how …

Restoring Confidence In Educational Technologies, Ariel Newman

Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Creating A Better, Fairer Criminal Justice System, David A. Harris, Created And Presented Jointly By Students From State Correctional Institution - Greene, Waynesburg, Pa, And University Of Pittsburgh School Of Law, Chief Editor: David A. Harris

Articles

In the Fall 2022 semester, 14 law (Outside) students from the University of Pittsburgh School of Law and 14 incarcerated (Inside) students at the State Correctional Institution at Greene, in Waynesburg, Pennsylvania, took a full-semester class together called "Issues in Criminal Justice and the Law." The class, taught and facilitated by Professor David Harris, utilized the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program pedagogy, emphasizing dialogic learning and peer teaching. The semester culminated with a group project, with the topic selected by the students: "creating a better, fairer criminal justice system." Members of the class organized themselves into small groups, each working for …

The Futures Of Law, Lawyers, And Law Schools: A Dialogue, Sameer M. Ashar, Benjamin H. Barton, Michael J. Madison, Rachel F. Moran

Articles

On April 19 and 20, 2023, Professors Bernard Hibbitts and Richard Weisberg convened a conference at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law titled “Disarmed, Distracted, Disconnected, and Distressed: Modern Legal Education and the Unmaking of American Lawyers.” Four speakers concluded the event with a spirited conversation about themes expressed during the proceedings. Distilling a lively two days, they asked: what are the most critical challenges now facing US legal education and, by extension, lawyers and the communities they serve? Their agreements and disagreements were striking, so much so that Professors Hibbitts and Weisberg invited those four to extend their …

The University Of Georgia School Of Law And Early Legal Education, Paul Deforest Hicks

Other Law School Publications

The history of the University of Georgia School of Law examines how developments in American legal education and local attitudes and traditions influenced its formative years. Founded in 1859 as the Lumpkin Law School, it was among the newest of 21 university law schools (those that awarded law degrees) on the eve of the Civil War.

To head the revived law school, the UGA board of trustees chose William L. Mitchell. As chairman of the board’s Prudential Committee, he was a principal architect of the 1859 reorganization of the university that included creation of the law school.

Almost all southern …

Dethroning Langdell, Beth H. Wilensky

Articles

I come not to bury the case method. I come merely to dethrone it. While the case method’s monopolistic hold on the law school classroom has loosened somewhat in recent years, it is still the dominant approach to pedagogy in many law school classrooms—and especially in the first-year law student experience. That is also true of the case method’s traditional pedagogical partners, the Socratic method and the cold call: their dominance has declined somewhat, even while they still have remarkable staying power.

This Essay identifies one fault with our continued acquiescence to these pedagogical mainstays of law school classrooms: it …

Disrupting Data Cartels By Editing Wikipedia, Eun Hee Han, Amanda Levendowski, Jonah Perlin

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Legal discourse in the digital public square is driven by memoranda, motions, briefs, contracts, legislation, testimony, and judicial opinions. And as lawyers are taught from their first day of law school, the strength of these genres of legal communication is built on authority. But finding that authority often depends on a duopoly of for-profit legal research resources: Westlaw and Lexis. Although contemporary legal practice relies on these databases, they are far from ethically neutral. Not only are these “data cartels” expensive-- creating significant access to justice challenges--they also are controlled by parent companies that profit by providing information to Immigration …