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.

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 …

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 …

Creating Shared Understanding: Preparing Students For A Modern Client Base, Jaclyn Celebrezze, Mireille Butler

Presentations

The Legal Writing Institute hosted a series of one-day workshops at various law schools, including at CWRU, where the theme of the workshops was "Preparing Students for the Modern Practice of Law." This presentation discusses how to prepare students for a modern, globalized client base, and provides tips and tools to help create a shared understanding between clients and future practitioners.

What Inclusive Instructors Do Book Review, Jamie Abrams

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Inclusive teaching is not just an aspirational goal. It is our ethical obligation to students. Our students can spend years dreaming of attending law school and working to achieve that goal. They can spend decades paying off the costs of attendance. Law faculty owe every student of all backgrounds, races, religions, genders, learning abilities, ages, socioeconomic statuses, immigration statuses, and military statuses an environment in which they feel like they belong and can thrive. WHAT INCLUSIVE INSTRUCTORS Do powerfully reminds us that inclusive teaching is not identified by obscenity law's "I know it when I see it" murkiness. Rather, it …

2020-2021 Annual Report, Caroline L. Osborne

Law Library Annual Reports and Assessments

No abstract provided.

The Dream Of Property Professors, Ezra Rosser

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Michael Heller and James Salzman's new book, Mine! How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives, is a dream come true for property professors.

I suspect that many of us have moments when we think to ourselves, "wow, this stuff is really interesting," imagining that property law could somehow be of general interest. Too often that dream is killed when the eyes of non-lawyers, including family members, start to glaze over when they hear words like rule against perpetuities or trademark. Heller and Salzman have succeeded in making the stories property professors tell the stuff of a bestseller. They …

The Unified Legal Skills Program: How One Law School Adapted To Meet The Needs Of Students Online, And How Those Adaptations May Inform Post-Pandemic Teaching, David Austin, Allison D. Cato, Amy E. Day, Liam Vavasour

Faculty Scholarship

When CWSL was forced to switch to online learning for the COVID-19 pandemic, we worked hard to follow best practices for online learning by attending online conferences and voraciously reading everything we could find to make the learning experience the best we could for our students. CWSL's Legal Skills program earned high praise in student evaluations for adapting so quickly given the difficult circumstances.

During the summer of 2020, we met as a Legal Skills team to discuss how to approach the regular school term. Specifically, we faced a larger-than-anticipated first-year class and contemplated how to remedy the sense of …

Justice Ginsburg, Civil Procedure Professor And Champion Of Judicial Federalism, Rodger D. Citron

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

How To Train Your Supervisor, Kris Franklin, Paula J. Manning

Articles & Chapters

In an ideal world every meeting between law students and professors, or between beginning lawyers and their supervisors, would leave supervisors impressed by their charges and junior lawyers/students with a clear sense of direction for their work. But we do not live in that ideal world. Instead, supervisors, supervisees, law professors and law students frequently leave such meetings feeling frustrated, disconnected and without a shared understanding of how to improve the experience (and future performance).

This Article seeks to improve supervisory meetings, and to do so from the perspective of the ones under supervision. There is a genuine art to …

Teasing The Arc Of Electric Spark: Fostering And Teaching Creativity In The Law School Curriculum, Jason G. Dykstra

Articles

No abstract provided.

Speaking The Truth: Supporting Authentic Advocacy With Professional Identity Formation, Laura A. Webb

Law Faculty Publications

When law students are asked to articulate legal rules in a persuasive communication such as a brief, they may experience internal tension. Their version of the rule, as framed to benefit a particular client’s position, may be different from the way they would articulate the rule if they were not taking on an advocate’s role. The conflict between those two versions of a legal rule leads some students to wonder if advocacy itself is deceptive, if an advocate’s role requires one to sacrifice ethics for success, and if ancient Greek philosophers were correct when they derided persuasive communication as “trickery …

Distance Legal Education: Lessons From The *Virtual* Classroom, Jacqueline D. Lipton

Articles

Abstract

In the 2018-2019 revision of the American Bar Association (ABA) Standards and Rules of Procedure for Approval of Law Schools, the ABA further relaxed the requirements relating to distance education in J.D. programs. However, outside of a handful of schools that have received permission to teach J.D. courses almost entirely online, most experiments in distance legal education have occurred in post-graduate (i.e. post-J.D.) programs: LL.M. degrees, and various graduate certificates and Master’s degrees in law-related subjects. These programs can be taught completely online without requiring special ABA permission.

This essay reflects on the author’s experiences over a number of …

2018-2019 Annual Report, Caroline L. Osborne

Law Library Annual Reports and Assessments

No abstract provided.

Access To Law Or Access To Lawyers? Master's Programs In The Public Educational Mission Of Law Schools, Mark Burge

Faculty Scholarship

The general decline in juris doctor (“J.D.”) law school applicants and enrollment over the last decade has coincided with the rise of a new breed of law degree. Whether known as a master of jurisprudence, juris master, master of legal studies, or other names, these graduate degrees all have a target audience in common: adult professionals who neither are nor seek to become practicing attorneys. Inside legal academia and among the practicing bar, these degrees have been accompanied by expressed concerns that they detract from the traditional core public mission of law schools—educating lawyers. This Article argues that non-lawyer master’s …

Ok, Google, Will Artificial Intelligence Replace Human Lawyering?, Amy Vorenberg, Julie A. Oseid, Melissa Love Koenig

Law Faculty Scholarship

Will Artificial Intelligence (AI) replace human lawyering? The answer is no. Despite worries that AI is getting so sophisticated that it could take over the profession, there is little cause for concern. Indeed, the surge of AI in the legal field has crystalized the real essence of effective lawyering. The lawyer’s craft goes beyond what AI can do because we listen with empathy to clients’ stories, strategize to find that story that might not be obvious, thoughtfully use our imagination and judgment to decide which story will appeal to an audience, and creatively tell those winning stories.

This article reviews …

Keeping Up With A Kardashian: Shedding Legal Educations' Vestigial Trade School Anxiety And Replacing The Dated Casebook Method With Modern Case-Based Learning, Jason G. Dykstra

Articles

No abstract provided.

Time Traveling With Timelines: Web Apps For Storytelling In Libraries, Sharon Bradley, Rachel S. Evans

Articles, Chapters and Online Publications

From online embeds to interactive displays, timelines can serve many purposes and tell powerful stories. At the University of Georgia’s Law Library we have teamed up with faculty and staff to bring history to life, engage students, and preserve scholarly and institutional milestones. Through trial and error we have found a variety of tools for creating timelines digitally. In this article we share our four favorite web-based applications for creating timelines including Tiki-Toki, TimeToast, Prezi and Piktochart.

An Introduction To Legal Research, Anne Burnett, Stephen Wolfson

Presentations

As part of UGA Summer Academy Legal Camp two law librarians teamed up to give an introduction to legal research to high school students from across the country, including tips and strategies for using Google effectively.

From Decoder Rings To Deep Fakes: Translating Complex Technologies For Legal Education, Jason Tubinis, Rachel S. Evans

Presentations

Technological developments are disrupting the practice of law” is a common refrain, but the last few years has seen some particularly complex pieces of technology become the hot new thing in legal tech. This session will look at blockchain, quantum computing, artificial intelligence, and ‘Deep Fakes’ as examples of how instructors can stay abreast of technological developments and inform themselves about their impacts in the legal profession. Then we will look at how to translate the complexities and jargon of these examples into lessons for for-credit courses, one-off informational sessions, or meetings with stakeholders.

Learning outcomes:

• Participants will be able …

Data Visualization: Tips & Tricks, Amy Taylor, Carol A. Watson

Presentations

Data visualization has quickly become a fixture in daily life, from presentations of charts and graphs by media organizations to presentations of data analytics and case relationships by legal database providers. This program will walk participants through the four conceptualizations of data presentation, as well as an exploration on using data visualization to persuade your audience. We will present law library examples for each concept, using free and low cost data visualization tools.

The Deconstructed Issue-Spotting Exam, Jamie Abrams

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This article proposes a teaching technique for use in large, Socratic-style law school classes to embed exam preparation, formative assessment, and lawyering simulations in the course without overburdening the professor or students. This technique is sustainable, yet highly efficacious for students.

Law schools nationwide are implementing new reforms pushing law schools toward stronger assessment techniques and client-based simulations better preparing students for the practice of law. Many law schools have implemented these reforms around the margins or outside of the traditional doctrinal course. Law schools have generally added new classes with experiential learning components or with simulations integrated into the …

From The Courtroom To The Classroom: How A Litigator Became A Transactional Drafting Professor, Amy Bauer

Publications

No abstract provided.

On The Values Of Words, Michael J. Cedrone

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Mary Norris' Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen and Kory Stamper's Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries use observations about language as a touchstone for a nuanced examination of deeper truths about language, culture, and law in a changing world. In so doing, they point to deeper truths about the use of language and its consequences. Law students, lawyers, and law professors will benefit from journeying with Norris and Stamper towards the goal of crafting prose that is clear, accurate, and inclusive. In particular, the legal community will benefit from the books' efforts to define …

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 …

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.

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 …

Externship Assessment Project: An Empirical Study Of Supervisor Evaluations Of Extern Work Performance, Margaret Reuter

Faculty Works

Field supervisors’ evaluations of their student externs are packed with lively stories. They deliver a fly-on-the-wall perspective, giving us color about the work entrusted to our students, the behaviors our students exhibited, and the enjoyment the attorneys reaped. The authors decided the evaluations were so fertile that they should be systematically scrutinized to seek meaningful, reliable insights about the extern experience, especially regarding the variety, complexity, and responsibility levels of their work. We also saw a prime opportunity to assess an externship program and find ways to improve it. Thus, the Externship Assessment Project was born. We deployed qualitative data …

Narrative Topoi In The Digital Age, Jessica Silbey, Zahr Said

Faculty Scholarship

Decades of thoughtful law and humanities scholarship have made the case for using humanistic texts and methods in the legal classroom. We build on that scholarship by identifying and describing three “narrative topoi” of the twenty-first century – podcasts, twitter and fake news. We use the term “topos” (from the Greek meaning “place”) and its plural, “topoi,” to mean “a literary commonplace” and “general setting for discussion” in the context of literary forms. Like an identifiable genre, narrative topoi are familiar story paths for audiences to travel. These narrative topoi live in contemporary popular culture and are products of digital …

Decision Making Models In 2/2 Time: Two Speakers, Two Models (Maybe), Sharon Bradley, Tim Tarvin

Presentations

Our students have to learn so many new skills to be successful in law school and law practice. Legal research, client interviewing, and case analysis just for starters. Our teaching methods have to engage our students while preparing them to “think like a lawyer.” We also have the responsibility to familiarize students in evaluating the “benefits and risks associated with relevant technology” and to develop efficient practices and processes. The speakers will look at decision making models that are practical and useable.

One speaker will discuss his experiences in a clinical setting using decision trees, teaching his students to visualize …