Law Commons^™

The Humanities In The Law School Curriculum: Courtship And Consummation, Linda H. Edwards

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Today the humanities occupy a small corner of the law school curriculum. Might they instead become a more vibrant partner in legal education? Might law and humanities scholarship escape the pages of law reviews and teach us something important about how to read and understand the law?

Despite the long theoretical dominance of legal realism in scholarly circles, much of legal education as we know it has remained mired in Langdell's formalist vision of the law—a vision of a narrow, abstract, impersonal system bereft of human meaning and value. But we can do better. We can approach law, and teach …

Seeing Higher Education And Faculty Responsibility Through Richard Matasar's Critiques Of Law Schools: College Completion, Economic Viability, And The Liberal Arts Ideal In Higher Education, John Valery White

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Professor John Valery White argues that the crisis in higher education has been framed around discomfort with and critiques of changes that have taken place in the last few decades as universities grew and became more complex, and more expensive. These arguments raise valid and significant concerns about higher education and its subcomponents like legal education but on the whole have missed the true challenge to higher education of recent years. He argues that the significant current policy push to improve college attainment has led to the loss of academic authority and leadership by higher education institutions, their administrators, and …

Finishing The Job Of Legal Education Reform, Mary Beth Beazley

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In this article, Professor Beazley advocates for the extension of tenure to skills faculty for the good of law faculty and of legal education. She argues that extending tenure to legal writing and other skills faculty will help to advance the goals of education reform in a variety of ways. First, equalizing the power of skills faculty will allow law schools to get the full benefit of their teaching and scholarship, a benefit that is currently blunted by ignorance and bias. Second, fair treatment of skills faculty will advance the values of equality, diversity, and inclusion: law students will benefit …

Book Review: “The Good Lawyer: Seeking Quality In The Practice Of Law”, Linda H. Edwards

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In their first collaboration, The Happy Lawyer, the writing team of Nancy Levit and Doug Linder tackled a crucially important subject: how to have a happy life in the law. As part of that project, they interviewed more than two hundred lawyers about what makes them happy in their jobs. Levit and Linder noticed that happy lawyers nearly always talked about doing good work. Curious about the connection, the authors turned to recent research in neuroscience and learned, not to their surprise, that a key to a happy life is, indeed, the sense of doing good work. It is …

The Sincerest Form Of Flattery: Examples And Model-Based Learning In The Law School Classroom, Terrill Pollman

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Responding to a changing landscape of law practice, law schools are searching for ways to structure the classroom experience and broader curriculum to promote more efficient and better learning outcomes. Although imitation, modeling, and the use of examples have become pre-eminent features of modern legal education, these pedagogies have remained largely unexamined. This article shows the power of teaching with examples in both the traditional and legal writing classroom, as well as how skillfully to limit the use of such pedagogy for maximum effect. Specifically, this article applies the findings of cognitive load research and composition theory to show that …

Joining The Conversation: Law Library Research Assistant Programs And Current Criticisms Of Legal Education, David Mcclure

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Law libraries should play a greater role in addressing the current crisis in legal education. Proponents for educational reform often view libraries as a vehicle for cost savings, while overlooking the ability of libraries to train students in the skills and competencies that are essential for the practice of law. Libraries’ research assistant programs can be particularly effective in imparting workplace values and lawyering skills beyond the traditional law school curriculum. This article encourages libraries to build on the strengths of their research assistant programs as a substantive way to equip law students with essential skills for today’s legal marketplace.

Legal Writing: A Doctrinal Course, Linda H. Edwards

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Legal writing instruction in American law schools has come a long way. Although scattered experiential courses and co-curricular activities have existed since legal education moved into a university setting, the modern era of skills education began in the 1950s and 1960s, with the creation of live-client clinics at many law schools. Early legal writing programs soon followed, moving into the main stream of curricular reform during the 1980s and 1990s. As these new courses and new instructors moved into the academy, the language of legal education naturally changed. Law faculties found themselves wanting to describe these new additions to the …

Plus Ça Change, Plus C’Est La Même Chose, Nancy B. Rapoport

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This essay takes the original plans from NYU Law School and draws analogies between those plans and the issues facing legal education today.

Benjamin Butler's 1835 Plan for the Organization of a Law Faculty and for a System of Instruction in Legal Science in the University for the City of New-York will make any law school dean feel like Yogi Berra: it’s “deja-vu all over again.” The issue of how best to organize a curriculum to train legal professionals was a hot topic then, and it’s a hot topic now.

Changing The Modal Law School: Rethinking U.S. Legal Education In (Most) Schools, Nancy B. Rapoport

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This essay argues that discussions of educational reform in U.S. law schools have suffered from a fundamental misconception: that the education provided in all of the American Bar Association-accredited schools is roughly the same. A better description of the educational opportunities provided by ABA-accredited law schools would group the schools into three rough clusters: the “elite” law schools, the modal (most frequently occurring) law schools, and the precarious law schools. Because the elite law schools do not need much “reforming,” the better focus of reform would concentrate on the modal and precarious schools; however, both elite and modal law schools …

Legal Education Comes To Nevada: The Creation Of The William S. Boyd School Of Law, Mary Berkheiser

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Getting Real About Legal Realism, New Legal Realism And Clinical Legal Education, Katherine R. Kruse

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Jerome Frank’s call for a “clinical lawyer-school” is cited so frequently in clinical scholarship that it borders on the canonical. Like many calls for reform in legal education, Frank’s plea for clinical lawyer-schools was based on a critique of the appellate case method of legal instruction. However, unlike most critiques, the legal realist critique was embedded within a jurisprudential challenge to the meaning of law itself, arising from American Legal Realism. Running through legal realist jurisprudence was a distinction between the “law in books” and the “law in action,” with the idea that law is not found primarily in statutes …

The Potential Contribution Of Adr To An Integrated Curriculum: Preparing Law Students For Real World Lawyering, Jean R. Sternlight

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This Article briefly reviews the long history of critiques of legal education that highlight the failure to adequately prepare students for what they will and should do as attorneys. It takes a sober look at the hurdles reformers face when trying to make significant curricular changes and proposes a modest menu of reforms that interested faculty and law schools can largely achieve without investing substantial additional resources. This Article emphasizes the special contributions that alternative dispute resolution (ADR) can provide to legal education more generally. ADR instruction is an important corrective to a curriculum that routinely conveys the erroneous implication …

Studying And Teaching “Law As Rhetoric”: A Place To Stand, Linda L. Berger

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This article proposes that law students may find a better fit within the legal culture of argument if they are introduced to rhetorical alternatives to counter narrowly formalist and realist perspectives on how the law works and how judges decide cases. To support this proposal, the article describes and evaluates an upper-level elective course in Law & Rhetoric, which I have offered at two law schools since 2003.

The article makes a two-part argument: first, introducing law students to rhetorical alternatives allows them to envision their role as lawyers as constructive, effective, and imaginative while grounded in law, language, and …

Where Have All The (Legal) Stories Gone?, Nancy B. Rapoport

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This essay examines whether law schools are doing a good job of teaching the art of storytelling to law students.

Three Ways Of Looking At A Health Law And Literature Class, Jennifer Bard, Thomas W. Mayo, Stacey A. Tovino

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The authors of this Article participated in a panel at the American Society of Law, Ethics & Medicine Conference in 2008 that discussed the use of literary materials in law school to teach medical ethics (and related matters) in a law school setting. Each author comes at the topic from a different perspective based on his or her own experience and background. This Article and the panel on which it was based reflect views on how literature can play a valuable role in helping law students, as well as medical students, understand important legal and ethical issues and concepts in …

Perelman In Legal Education: Recalling The Rhetorical Tradition Of Isocrates And Vico, Francis J. Mootz Iii

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This paper was presented on October 14, 2008 as part of a panel addressing "The Influence of Perelman in Legal Philosophy" at a conference hosted by the Perelman Center for the Philosophy of Law, Free University of Brussels.

I argue that Perelman's philosophy is connected with legal practice, but that he never made the connections between his philosophy and legal education explicit. I refer to the work of Isocrates and Vico, and conclude that Perelman's philosophy can teach us much about contemporary legal education as we strive to address the questions raised by the Carnegie Report.

Law On The Street: Legal Narrative And The Street Law Classroom, Elizabeth L. Macdowell

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This Article argues that the failure of anti-discrimination law to address the problems of subordination reflects the hegemonic perspective in legal narratives. For the lawyer concerned with social change, it is imperative to identify these narratives and the ways in which they not only inhibit deep social change, but may perpetuate the conditions of subordination. Yet, law school polices against the consciousness necessary for the lawyer to identify the hegemonic narrative in the law, and often instills attitudes, which are antithetical to the project of social change. In this context, Street Law - a practical law course taught by law …

Eating Our Cake And Having It, Too: Why Real Change Is So Difficult In Law Schools, Nancy B. Rapoport

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This essay discusses the experiences of one law school trying to integrate the rankings into its strategic plan. It discusses the intersection of considerations designed to improve the rankings with considerations designed to improve the school as a whole, and it mentions the difficulties inherent in strategic planning in an academic environment.

Better Writing, Better Thinking: Using Legal Writing Pedagogy In The "Casebook" Classroom (Without Grading Papers), Mary Beth Beazley

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In this Article, Professor Beazley proposes that a Legal Writing revolution is the next revolution in legal education, and that the revolution is not just coming, it has begun. She offers first steps for law school faculty to take in furtherance of this revolution. Professor Beazley argues that the pioneers of this new revolution are Legal Writing faculty. Section I of this Article examines some ways that the law school culture that segregates Legal Writing faculty has both promoted their opportunities to develop innovative pedagogies and inhibited their ability to share those pedagogies with other faculty. Section II explains certain …

Do Best Practices In Legal Education Include Emphasis On Compositional Modes Of Studying Law As A Liberal Art?, Linda L. Berger

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Reporter's Notes on "A Liberal Education in Law: Engaging the Legal Imagination through Research and Writing Beyond the Curriculum."

Is "Thinking Like A Lawyer" Really What We Want To Teach?, Nancy B. Rapoport

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This article argues that the phrase thinking like a lawyer assumes that other professions don't have their own ways of approaching problems and that law schools only need to teach how lawyers think, rather than how lawyers do what they do. It suggests that law schools should do much more than just teach law students how to think.

Introduction: Favorite Insurance Cases Symposium, Jeffrey W. Stempel

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Insurance law scholars and teachers sometimes feel, with a mixture of paranoia and justification, that insurance law simply does not receive its proper respect in the hierarchy of legal education and law generally.

Consider the law school curriculum. In none of America’s nearly 200 ABA-approved law schools in insurance law a required course. Nor is it considered a course that, although not required, prudent students “must” be sure to take before they graduate (e.g. Evidence, Corporations). Enrollments may be respectable but the class is seldom oversubscribed, even where the law school is located in an insurance hub city. Although other …

When Local Is Global: Using A Consortium Of Law Schools To Encourage Global Thinking, Nancy B. Rapoport

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Dean Rapoport will discuss students and faculty consortia focusing on the North American Consortium on Legal Education (NACLE), which, among other things, promotes student and faculty exchanges between and among three law schools in the U.S., three in Canada, and three in Mexico.

Applying New Rhetoric To Legal Discourse: The Ebb And Flow Of Reader And Writer, Text And Context, Linda L. Berger

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Applying New Rhetoric to law school pedagogy, this article suggests an ebb and flow of reader and writer, text and context drawn from New Rhetoric theory, research, and teaching practices. Almost all legal writing scholarship now focuses on some aspect of New Rhetoric. Yet it is likely that the product approach still prevails in the places where the papers are graded, in part because it is the more familiar and straightforward way that papers have always been graded. What follows is an initial attempt to more fully apply New Rhetoric theory and research to the teaching of legal reading and …

Continuing Classroom Conversation Beyond The Four Whys, Jeffrey W. Stempel, Bailey Kuklin

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LAW school classes regularly prove Santayana's aphorism. Although nearly every law teacher desires to keep discussion focused and forward-moving, there are more than a few moments of thundering silence experienced in the classroom. Most of us adjust to this inevitability by positing some pedagogical virtue to still air and contenting ourselves with the knowledge that conversation-stopping “whys?” are usually delivered by us as teachers rather than the students. Perhaps we are underappreciative of the value discomfitting silence has, but we generally prefer that the conversation continue, that we miss the opportunity to feel simultaneously smug and uncomfortable, and that students …

Teaching In The Shadow Of The Bar, Joan W. Howarth

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This Essay is a memorial tribute to Professor Trina Grillo. Trina took seriously what many of us know but find too hard to remember: the student who is academically disqualified or who fails the bar examination might be the most brilliant in the class or the most needed within the profession. When we conceive of the bar exam as a particularly grueling and potentially unfair rite of passage between law school and the practice of law, we collude in hiding the pervasive and often negative power of the bar exam. The bar examination permeates and controls fundamental aspects of legal …