Law Commons^™

What Law Schools Must Change To Train Transactional Lawyers, Stephanie Mcmahon

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

Not all lawyers litigate, but you would not know that from the first-year curriculum at most law schools. Despite 50% of lawyers working in transactional practices, schools do not incorporate its legal doctrines or skills in the foundational first year. That the Progressives pushed through antitrust laws and the New Dealers founded the modern administrative state reframed how people use the law, particularly in transactional practices, and should be given equal weight as the appellate-based common law in any legal introduction. Nevertheless, the law school model created by Christopher Columbus Langdell in the 1870s remains dominant. As this review of …

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 …

Bringing Purposefulness To The American Law School’S Support Of Professional Identity Formation, Louis D. Bilionis

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

Ten years after the publication of Educating Lawyers, a growing number of American law schools are taking initiative to better support their students in the formation of professional identity. There is widespread recognition that success in these efforts requires an element of “purposefulness” on the part of law faculty and staff. Experiences, environments, and pedagogies that actually work for professional identity formation must be crafted and promoted with intentionality. Bringing the requisite purposefulness to the effort, however, will take a mindset about the education of a lawyer that will be new to many in legal education. This article explores that …

Standard 405 And Terms And Conditions Of Employment: More Chaos, Conflict And Confusion Ahead, Joseph P. Tomain, Donald J. Polden

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

In 2008, the Section on Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar of the American Bar Association commenced a comprehensive review of the accreditation standards for American legal education. By July of 2011, most of the revised standards and rules of procedure had been drafted, discussed and approved by the section's Standards Review Committee ("SRC") and were ready for submission to the council. However, the SRC's revised accreditation policies were not submitted for action by the council until 2014, more than six years after the review process began, as a result of decisions made by section leaders. The revised standards …

Cracking The Egg: Which Came First -- Stigma Or Affirmative Action?, Emily Houh, Angela Onwuachi-Willig, Mary Campbell

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

This Article examines the strength of arguments concerning the causal connection between racial stigma and affirmative action. In so doing, this Article reports and analyzes the results of a survey on internal stigma (feelings of dependency, inadequacy, or guilt) and external stigma (the burden of others' resentment or doubt about one's qualifications) for the Class of 2009 at seven public law schools, four of which employed race-based policies when the Class of 2009 was admitted and three of which did not use such policies at that time. Specifically, this Article examines and presents survey findings of 1) minimal, if any, …

Law School Education In The 21st Century: Adding Information Technology Instruction To The Curriculum, Kenneth J. Hirsh, Wayne Miller

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

For the past 120 years, legal education in the United States has been fundamentally unchanged, even while the practice of law has been revolutionized by information technology. The ideal of the Socratic Method is still dominant in first year and many upperclass courses. Clinical and practice courses have expanded since the early-1980s; however, although state-of-the-art technology is now commonplace in law offices, most federal courthouses, and some state courtrooms, until now, there has been little effort to contextualize the importance of technology for law students. The authors review the availability of courses covering use of technology in law practice at …

What We Share, Thomas D. Eisele

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

Anyone involved in legal education today may wonder where we are, and what we are doing, in our task of teaching. While I am no better placed than anyone else to be able to offer anything approaching a synoptic view of legal education, I can still offer a few thoughts on teaching law. These thoughts are meant neither as a dire warning nor as a call to action. They are published, rather, out of a desire to share some ideas I have culled from the experience of teaching these past twenty years in law school. Teachers and students who find …

Reading The Law In The Office Of Calvin Fletcher: The Apprenticeship System And The Practice Of Law In Frontier Indiana, A. Christopher Bryant

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

The university law school is a relatively recent innovation, not just in Nevada but throughout much of the United States as well. In this inaugural issue of the Nevada Law Journal, which marks the establishment in 1998 of the Boyd School of Law, the first state-supported and the only existing law school in Nevada, it is fitting that we examine the methods of legal education and entry to the practice of law that preceded the rise of legal education within the university.

Until the latter part of the nineteenth century, the apprenticeship system constituted the dominant mode of preparation for …

Symposium On Law, Literature, And The Humanities. Introduction: Conducting Our Educations In Public, Thomas D. Eisele

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

This symposium grew out of James Boyd White's Marx Lecture, given April 21, 1994, at the University of Cincinnati, and this issue owes its existence to some happy coincidences with that event. One coincidence was the idea occurring to a number of us that, as nice as it would be to publish Professor White's thoughts on the Crito in these pages of the Law Review, how much nicer still it would be to surround those thoughts, or to follow them, with the thoughts of other scholars in the field, showing how these others responded to the text discussed by White …

The Poverty Of Socratic Questioning: Asking And Answering In The Meno, Thomas D. Eisele

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

This Essay examines Socratic teaching by investigating Socrates' practice in the Meno. Its companion essay, Bitter Knowledge: Socrates and Teaching by Disillusionment, examines Socratic teaching by investigating my own practice in law school today. They are meant to complement and to complicate one another, as they also are meant to extend and to supplement some of the views of Socratic teaching expressed in two earlier essays of mine: Thomas D. Eisele, Must Virtue Be Taught?, 37 J. LEGAL EDUC. 495 (1987) [hereinafter Eisele, Virtue]; and Thomas D. Eisele, "Never Mind the Manner of My Speech": The Dilemma of Socrates' Defense …

Faith, Hope, And The Law Teacher: A Reaction To Professor Levinson, Joseph P. Tomain

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

In this symposium, the editors have assigned the commentators a difficult task by requesting a response to Professor Levinson's speech. I disagree with little, if any, of what Professor Levinson has written.

Professor Levinson's article of faith stands poised between modernist and postmodernist sentiments about law and contains a degree of skepticism that I understand, share, and find uncomfortable. The modernism in Levinson's remarks, as I see it, is contained in his recognition (and partial acceptance) of paradox and contradiction in law, and his consequent rejection of, or agnosticism toward, legal dogma as the Way to Truth and Justice. As …

Lawyering In First-Year Property, Joseph P. Tomain

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

This essay discusses the use of a role-playing exercise in a large (70-100 students), first-year Property II course. The central focus of the course is land use. The author uses a Board of Adjustment hypothetical, with students in the roles of lawyer, client, expert, and member of the Board of Adjustment. I first used the problem to encourage fact analysis. Even second-semester first-year students too easily ignore facts and focus on the "rules of law" seemingly to the exclusion of all else. After using this method, however, it became apparent that many more learning opportunities present themselves. In addition to …

Studying Law As The Possibility Of Principled Action, Gordon A. Christenson

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

The study of law may be viewed as the critical analysis of a system of logically coherent rules governing action. In the United States, the responsibility for legal education has traditionally fallen upon the law schools. Within the legal profession and law schools a restive spirit now prevails, seeking to further clarify the meaning of that responsibility.' Two responses appear in the law schools, for good or ill.

In Pursuit Of The Art Of Law, Gordon A. Christenson

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

The following is the address given by the author upon his installation as Dean of The American University Law School, on October 31, 1971.