Law Commons^™

The First Woman Dean Of A Texas Law School: Barbara Bader Aldave At St. Mary's University, Vincent R. Johnson

Faculty Articles

Long-time St. Mary's law professor Vincent Johnson details the arrival and tenure of Barbara Bader Aldave as Dean of St. Mary's University School of Law.

From Academic Freedom To Cancel Culture: Silencing Black Women In The Legal Academy, Renee Nicole Allen

Faculty Publications

In 1988, Black women law professors formed the Northeast Corridor Collective of Black Women Law Professors, a network of Black women in the legal academy. They supported one another’s scholarship, shared personal experiences of systemic gendered racism, and helped one another navigate the law school white space. A few years later, their stories were transformed into articles that appeared in a symposium edition of the Berkeley Women’s Law Journal. Since then, Black women and women of color have published articles and books about their experiences with presumed incompetence, outsider status, and silence. The story of Black women in the legal …

Using Appellate Clinics To Focus On Legal Writing Skills, Timothy Pinto

Articles

Five years ago, I went to lunch with a colleague. I was teaching a legal writing course to 1L students, and he taught in a clinic in which 2L and 3L students were required to write short motions and briefs. Several of his students had taken my writing class as 1Ls, and he had a question for me. "What the heck are you teaching these students?" he asked as we sat down. He explained that several of his students were struggling with preparing simple motions. They were not laying out facts clearly. They were not identifying key legal rules. In …

Of Brutal Murder And Transcendental Sovereignty: The Meaning Of Vested Private Rights, Adam J. Macleod

Faculty Articles

The idea of vested private rights is divisive; it divides those who practice law from those who teach and think about law. On one side of the divide, practicing lawyers act as though (at least some) rights exist and exert binding obligations upon private persons and government officials, such that once vested, the rights cannot be taken away or retrospectively altered. Lawyers convey estates in property, negotiate contracts, and write and send demand letters on the supposition that they are specifying and vindicating rights, which are rights not as a result of a judgment by a court in a subsequent …

The Downside Of Requiring Additional Experiential Courses In Law School, Douglas A. Kahn

Articles

In recent years, the bar has expressed dissatisfaction with what is considered by some to be inadequate preparation of law students to begin practicing law immediately after graduation. There are several reasons why this has become a matter of concern for the legal profession. The profession itself has undergone significant changes. Although there are a few exceptions, most law firms no longer wish to spend time training their young associates or allowing them much time to develop the skills they need. First, clients are unwilling to pay for the time a young lawyer spends in acquiring needed skills. Second, the …

On Legal Scholarship, Danielle K. Citron, Robin West

Shorter Faculty Works

Academic critics contend that legal scholarship is overly argumentative or too “normative,” simply stating what the law should be, as well as what the law is. It isn’t about pure scholarship’s pursuit of knowledge within the discipline of a recognized academic field. Critics from the bar and the judiciary proffer the opposite complaint: legal scholarship is too academic and not professional enough, enamored with fads, unmoored from any discipline and of little use to the practicing lawyer or sitting judge. Law schools’ legions of cost-conscious critics complain that paying high salaries to professors with low course loads drives up tuitions. …

Transactional Drafting: Using Law Firm Marketing Materials As A Research Resource For Teaching Drafting, Edward R. Becker

Articles

Since I started teaching drafting, I would like to think that I have continued to learn some lessons about teaching both the substance and the skills of transactional drafting. One of those lessons that I am going to be talking about today is one that I stumbled across by happy accident rather than one that I consciously sought. Specifically, I want to talk about and highlight the ways that law students can use law firm marketing materials to increase their understanding of both drafting and lawyering skills in law school and, hopefully, in practice.

Learning From The Unique And Common Challenges: Clinical Legal Education In Jordan, Nisreen Mahasneh, Kimberly A. Thomas

Articles

Legal education worldwide is undergoing scrutiny for its failure to graduate students who have the problem-solving abilities, skills, and professional values necessary for the legal profession.1 Additionally, law schools at universities in the Middle East have found themselves in an unsettled environment, where greater demands for practical education are exacerbated by several factors such as high levels of youth unemployment. More specifically, in Jordan there is a pressing need for universities to respond to this criticism and to accommodate new or different methods of legal education. Clinical legal education is one such method.3 We use the term "clinical legal education" …

Teaching Transactional Skills And Law In An International Context, Deborah Burand, Kojo Yelpaala, Peter Linzer

Other Publications

Today, we are going to be discussing how we think about transactional skills in an international context. It doesn't surprise me that this is a smaller group. This is a subspecialty, but let me just do a very quick survey of you. How many of you now in this room are teaching an international course? And what are you doing?

A Response To Professor Bix, Robert F. Nagel

Publications

No abstract provided.

On American Legal Education Reform In Japanese Legal Education, Carl E. Schneider

Articles

The one hundredth anniversary of the Kyoto University Faculty of Law is the kind of splendid occasion when, as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes remarked, a distinguished institution "becomes conscious of itself and its meaning." I can hardly express my pleasure at being invited to join in your celebration; but I must express my fear that I can add little to it. When Dean Tanaka kindly invited me, I should probably have declined, for I, a foreigner, can hardly know enough about an institution so central to the life of its country and its profession to speak of it and its …

Essay: Recent Trends In American Legal Education, Paul D. Reingold

Articles

An American law professor in Japan has much more to learn than to teach. A foreigner like me - who comes to Japan on short notice, with no knowledge of Japanese culture and institutions, and with no Japanese language skills - sets himself a formidable task. Happily, the courtesy of my hosts, the patience of my colleagues, and the devotion of my students, have made for a delightful visit. I thank all of you. You asked me to talk about American legal education. As you surely know, the system of legal education in the U.S. is very different from the …

Muddling Along With The Federal Wealth Transfer Tax: A Survey Of Practitioners And Law School Professors, Wayne M. Gazur

Publications

Recent efforts to repeal the wealth transfer tax system have prompted enormous discussion. In this Article, the author presents the results of his survey of members of the American Bar Association Real Property, Probate and Law Section about this issue and other reforms which have been enacted or suggested.

Do They Practice What We Teach?: A Survey Of Practitioners And Estate Planning Professors, Wayne M. Gazur

Publications

This article presents the results of a 1998 mail survey sent to members of the American Bar Association Real Property, Probate & Trust Law Section and to law professors teaching estate planning. The principal goal of the survey was to compare the opinions of practitioners and law professors concerning the importance of 31 estate planning issues and techniques. The survey also included an open-ended solicitation of issues deemed significant by the participant.

The survey found consistency between practitioner and professor responses with respect to techniques such as Crummey planning. Legal education appears to be effective in dealing with core principles. …

The Role Of Clinical Programs In Legal Education, Suellyn Scarnecchia

Articles

In clinic, students get a glance at the lawyer they will be someday. They gain confidence that, indeed, they will be a "good" lawyer. They understand the context in which their classroom learning will be applied. In short, they are able to integrate their law school experience.

Protecting Intellectual Property Rights Through Civil Litigation: A Symposium, Eric Easton

All Faculty Scholarship

On September 30, 1996, nineteen lawyers, law professors and judges from the People's Republic of China began a six-week program of classroom study, practical experience, and scholarly exchange that focused on the American system of protecting intellectual property rights through civil litigation. The program was funded by a $107,000 grant from the United States Information Agency's Office of Citizen Exchange Programs to the University of Baltimore's Center for International and Comparative Law, in cooperation with the Maryland Department of Business and Economic Development.

The initial, two-week phase of the program included field trips to the U.S. Copyright Office, the Patent …

Why Hard Cases Make Good (Clinical) Law, Paul D. Reingold

Articles

In 1992, when the University of California's Hastings College of Law decided to offer a live-client clinic for the first time, its newly hired director had to make several decisions about what form the program should take.1 The first question for the director was whether the clinic should be a single-issue specialty clinic or a general clinic that would represent clients across several areas of the law. The second question, and the one that will be the focus of this essay, was whether the program should restrict its caseload to "easy" routine cases or also accept non-routine, less controllable litigation. …

The Rhythms Of Hope And Disappointment In The Language Of Judging (St. John's University School Of Law: Rededication Symposia), James Boyd White

Articles

I want to talk today about a certain aspect or dimension of the language of judging. From one point of view the quality I mean can be seen as a kind of idealism inherent in legal lan­guage; from another, as a kind of fundamental hypocrisy; from still another, as a simultaneously tragic and comic element in le­gal life.

Class Of 1995 Five Year Report, University Of Michigan Law School

UMLS Alumni Survey Class Reports

This report summarizes the findings of a questionnaire sent to University of Michigan Law School alumni five years after graduation.

Class Of 1995 Five Year Report Alumni Comments, University Of Michigan Law School

UMLS Alumni Survey Class Reports

This addendum is a compilation of alumni responses to the open-ended comments sections.

A Holistic Approach To Criminal Justice Scholarship, William T. Pizzi

Publications

No abstract provided.

Class Of 1994 Five Year Report Alumni Comments, University Of Michigan Law School

UMLS Alumni Survey Class Reports

This addendum is a compilation of alumni responses to the open-ended comments sections.

Class Of 1994 Five Year Report, University Of Michigan Law School

UMLS Alumni Survey Class Reports

This report summarizes the findings of a questionnaire sent to University of Michigan Law School alumni five years after graduation.

Class Of 1993 Five Year Report Alumni Comments, University Of Michigan Law School

UMLS Alumni Survey Class Reports

This addendum is a compilation of alumni responses to the open-ended comments sections.

Class Of 1993 Five Year Report, University Of Michigan Law School

UMLS Alumni Survey Class Reports

This report summarizes the findings of a questionnaire sent to University of Michigan Law School alumni five years after graduation.

The Scholar As Advocate, Rebecca S. Eisenberg

Articles

Academic freedom in this country has been so closely identified with faculty autonomy that the two terms are often used interchangeably, especially by faculty members who are resisting restraints on their freedom to do as they please. While there may be some dispute as to whether or how far academic freedom protects the autonomy of universities or of students, the autonomy of faculty members seems to lie close to the core of the traditional American conception of academic freedom. As elaborated by the American Association of University Professors, this conception of academic freedom calls for protecting individual faculty members from …

Letter To Judge Harry Edwards, James J. White

Articles

Dear Harry: I write to second your statements concerning the disjunction between legal education and the legal profession and also to quibble with you. By examining the faculty, the curriculum, and the research agenda at Michigan, your school and mine, I hope to illustrate the ways in which you are right and to suggest other ways in which you and your clerk informants may be too pessimistic.

Harry Edward's Nostalgia, Paul D. Reingold

Articles

Until fairly recently, the work of people who thought and wrote about the law in its broadest cultural sense, and the work of those who thought and wrote about the law as it was practiced, did not intersect very much. The broad cultural issues tended to be the province of philosophers or political theorists or other academic social critics, while traditional legal scholarship - as it appeared in law school journals - remained firmly rooted in lawyers' questions. This is not to suggest that legal academics wrote nothing but practice manuals, but it is true that until the last twenty …

Class Of 1992 Five Year Report, University Of Michigan Law School

UMLS Alumni Survey Class Reports

This report summarizes the findings of a questionnaire sent to University of Michigan Law School alumni five years after graduation.

Class Of 1992 Five Year Report Alumni Comments, University Of Michigan Law School

UMLS Alumni Survey Class Reports

This addendum is a compilation of alumni responses to the open-ended comments sections.