Law Commons^™

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 …

Legal Uncertainties: Covid-19, Distance Learning, Bar Exams, And The Future Of U.S. Legal Education, Christine Corcos

Journal Articles

The COVID-19 pandemic forced the U.S. legal academy and legal profession to make changes to legal education and training very rapidly in order to accommodate the needs of students, graduates, practitioners, clients, and the public. Like most of the public, members of the profession assumed that most, if not all, of the changes would be temporary, and life would return to a pre-pandemic normal.

These assumed temporary changes included a rapid and massive shift to online teaching for legal education, to online administration of the bar exam in some jurisdictions, or the option to offer the diploma privilege in others. …

Persons And The Point Of The Law, Richard Garnett

Journal Articles

This short essay is a comment and reflection on a manuscript by Professors John Breen and Lee
Strang, "A Light Unseen: A History of Catholic Legal Education in the United States." It is based on remarks presented at a February 14, 2020 conference, sponsored by the Journal of Catholic Legal Studies and the Center for Law and Religion at St. John's University School of Law. It
addresses, among other things, Breen and Strang's argument that a Catholic law school should have a distinctive "intellectual architecture" and proposes that a distinctive moral anthropology -- that is, an account of what the …

Latcrit Praxis @ Xx: Toward Equal Justice In Law, Education And Society, Tayyab Mahmud, Athena D. Mutua, Francisco Valdes

Journal Articles

This article marks the twentieth anniversary of Latina and Latino Critical Legal Theory or the LatCrit organization, an association of diverse scholars committed to the production of knowledge from the perspective of Outsider or OutCrit jurisprudence. The article first reflects on the historical development of LatCrit’s substantive, methodological, and institutional commitments and practices. It argues that these traditions were shaped not only by its members’ goals and commitments but also by the politics of backlash present at its birth in the form of the “cultural wars,” and which have since morphed into perpetual “crises” grounded in neoliberal policies. With this …

Teaching The Art Of Defending A White Collar Criminal Case, Katrice Bridges Copeland

Journal Articles

This Article discusses the author's experience with effectively teaching a white collar crime course.

Legal Education In Crisis, And Why Law Libraries Are Doomed, James G. Milles

Journal Articles

The dual crises facing legal education - the economic crisis affecting both the job market and the pool of law school applicants, and the crisis of confidence in the ability of law schools and the ABA accreditation process to meet the needs of lawyers or society at large - have undermined the case for not only the autonomy, but the very existence, of law school libraries as we have known them. Legal education in the United States is about to undergo a long-term contraction, and law libraries will be among the first to go. A few law schools may abandon …

Time: An Empirical Analysis Of Law Student Time Management Deficiencies, Christine P. Bartholomew

Journal Articles

This Article begins the much needed research on law students’ time famine. Time management complaints begin early in students’ legal education and generally go unresolved. As a result, practicing attorneys identify time famine as a leading cause of job dissatisfaction. To better arm graduating students, law schools must treat time as an essential component of practice-readiness. Unfortunately, most law schools ignore their students’ time management concerns, despite growing calls for greater “skills” training in legal education.

To date, legal scholarship has overlooked psychological research on time management. Yet, this research is an essential starting point to effective instruction. Rather than …

Female Law Students, Gendered Self-Evaluation, And The Promise Of Positive Psychology, Dara Purvis

Journal Articles

For the last several decades, studies and surveys have shown that female law students perform worse and feel worse about their experiences in law school than do male students. Hidden in average figures, however, is a subgroup of female students who thrive. Positive psychology, focusing on what traits make people happy rather than how to alleviate depression, provides novel ideas of how to improve legal education for women without making accommodations specifically targeting gender.

Teaching Public Citizen Lawyering: From Aspiration To Inspiration, Mae Quinn

Journal Articles

A longtime social justice activist and clinical professor, Douglas Colbert,2 recently sought information from colleagues across the country3 for the second part of an important project examining a lawyer’s ethical obligation to engage in pro bono work during a time of crisis, such as the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina or 9/11.4 He sent out surveys to learn which schools actually taught the Preamble to the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct in ethics or other courses.5 As Professor Colbert’s letter explained, the Preamble states: “A lawyer, as a member of the legal profession, is a representative of clients, an officer …

Finding Power, Fighting Power (Or The Perpetual Motion Machine), Mae Quinn

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

Teaching Trademark Theory Through The Lens Of Distinctiveness, Mark P. Mckenna

Journal Articles

This contribution to the annual teaching edition of the Saint Louis University Law Journal encourages teachers to begin trademark law courses using the concept of distinctiveness as a vehicle for articulating producer and consumer perspectives in trademark law. Viewing the law through these sometimes different perspectives helps in approaching a variety of doctrines in trademark law, and both perspectives are relatively easy to grasp in the context of distinctiveness.

A Search For Balance In The Whirlwind Of Law School: Spirituality From Law Teachers, Thomas L. Shaffer

Journal Articles

The first-year introductory course in property law is about all that is left of the traditional black-box curriculum. It is where beginning law students cope with and despair of the arcana of English common law; where, with more detachment than, say, in the torts course, analysis of appellate opinions is what "thinking like a lawyer" means, with no more than peripheral and begrudging attention to modem legislation and administrative law; where legal reasoning is a stretching exercise and initiatory discipline. And, incidentally, surviving bravely the rude invasion of teachers of public law, it is where a teaching lawyer can point …

Leaky Boundaries And The Decline Of The Autonomous Law School Library, James G. Milles

Journal Articles

Academic law librarians have long insisted on the value of autonomy from the university library system, usually basing their arguments on strict adherence to ABA standards. However, law librarians have failed to construct an explicit and consistent definition of autonomy. Lacking such a definition, they have tended to rely on an outmoded Langdellian view of the law as a closed system. This view has long been discredited, as approaches such as law and economics and sociolegal research have become mainstream, and courts increasingly resort to nonlegal sources of information. Blind attachment to autonomy as a goal rather than a means …

An American Tale, Geoffrey J. Bennett

Journal Articles

How much influence should the legal profession in England and Wales have over law degree courses? Geoffrey Bennett says to consider the U.S. experience before ditching the idea.

Introduction: The Internationalization Of Law And Legal Practice, Thomas E. Carbonneau

Journal Articles

The Eason-Weinmann Colloquium entitled "The Internationalization of Law and Legal Practice," held in March 1988, addressed the challenges posed to conventional legal practice and rules of law by the evolution of the international marketplace. In light of the increasingly international character of commercial transactions, could or should disputes in transnational business ventures be adjudicated exclusively within national processes and according to domestic strictures? Does the character of these transactions portend the creation of a new genre of lawyering? Are current academic curricula adapted to the molding of this new breed of lawyers? Is a functional international bar possible? Do we …

The Catholic Tradition, Thomas L. Shaffer

Journal Articles

If you stand in the road near one of the on-campus Roman Catholic university law schools in the United States, you can probably see a church spire. You can squint past whatever fire wall or battlement or gothic tower there is on the law building and see the campus church. You can do this at Notre Dame, St. Louis, Creighton, San Francisco, Boston College, and San Diego. If you go inside one of these law buildings, you may find crucifixes, chapels, holy-water fonts, or a statute of Thomas More. But none of these things will tell you what those law …

Thinking Like A Statistician: The Report Of The American Statistical Association Committee On Training In Statistics In Selected Professions, David H. Kaye

Journal Articles

In 1983, a subcommittee of the American Statistical Association composed of legal educators and one judge issued a report describing existing programs for educating law students in statistics and offering recommendations for improving these programs. This article summarizes that report.

Moral Implications And Effects Of Legal Education Or: Brother Justinian Goes To Law School, Thomas L. Shaffer

Journal Articles

This Article explores the moral implications of a legal education. Specifically, the author addresses three moral points of view—teleologically, interpersonally, and responsibility—and explains how a legal education advances or is in opposition to a moral community.

The French Legal Studies Curriculum: Its History And Relevance As A Model For Reform, Thomas E. Carbonneau

Journal Articles

This article attempts to describe and analyze those events which fostered the historical metamorphosis of the French legal studies curriculum. The predominance of a broad academic approach to law and the concomitant absence of a narrow "trade school" mentality in the French law schools might be attributed to the general organization of higher education in France. One of the primary contentions of this article is that the fundamental character of French legal education, which emphasizes the educating of jurists as opposed to the training of lawyers, is the product of a set of factors which are deeply rooted in French …

Civil Rights And Legal Order: The Work Of A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr., Donald P. Kommers, Eugenia S. Schwartz

Journal Articles

On October 11-12, 1978, Judge A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr.' delivered the Notre Dame Law School's Seventh Annual Civil Rights Lecture under the general title, "From Thomas Jefferson to Bakke: Race and the American Legal Process." It seems to us appropriate, therefore, on the occasion of the Higginbotham lecture, to consider his work as both historian and judge. Specifically, this article will serve the threefold purpose of (1) reviewing Matter of Color, (2) illustrating the author's use of history in two judicial opinions dealing with the rights of black Americans, and (3) reflecting upon the implications of Higginbotham's work in legal …

Reassessing Law Schooling: The Sterling Forest Group, Thomas L. Shaffer

Journal Articles

This Article is the result of a weekend in December 1976 at the Sterling Forest Conference Center. Several legal educators came together there to explore the possible relevance of humanistic educational psychology to legal education, and the pieces that follow flow from the experiences in learning we shared there. The concerns that brought the ten of us together were not new; rather, they emanated from a longstanding challenge within the profession.

Although we taught at different institutions and in different fields, our experiences had led us to a common dissatisfaction with legal education and a hope that more was possible. …

Studies Of Legal Education: A Review Of Recent Reports, Thomas L. Shaffer, Robert S. Redmount

Journal Articles

Early in 1972, the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education published its report on legal education. It is the most prominent study of legal education in the last decade, and typical of discourse in and about law schools—urbane, speculative, unempirical, conceptual, rarely student-centered. The authors of the Carnegie report were articulate law teachers. They wrote with their feet up and their pipes lit, without attention to facts which did not come from their considerable experience. The value of such reports is the thoughtfulness of the people who write them, and their predictive accuracy is due to the fact that people who …

Learning The Law-Thoughts Toward A Human Perspective, Thomas L. Shaffer, Robert S. Redmount

Journal Articles

The history of American legal education is notable for a sparsity of ideas on how to convey learning about law. There has been even less focal understanding of what learning is and what it takes to establish a process which will prepare lawyers for their profession. A window on this history was provided in historical survey by Alfred Z. Reed in 1921 and, more recently, by Professors Preble Stolz and Calvin Woodward. It is principally their accounts of eighteenth and nineteenth century developments that we here briefly integrate and summarize. The perspective-a consideration of legal education in terms of social …

Legal Education: The Classroom Experience, Thomas L. Shaffer, Robert S. Redmount

Journal Articles

Law students learn from what is in them, from what is directed at them, and from what is around them. The following is a study of an external dimension of the law-school learning experience-the classroom. Research strategy consisted of approaching the classroom phenomenon from two perspectives; what is presented and how students perceive it.

Report Of The Dean 1973-1974, Thomas L. Shaffer

Journal Articles

My assessments of the Law School have tended more to describe developments than to state aspirations. I continue to assess things in that vein; my preference for leadership in the Dean's Office is to build on the goals which are implicit in the work of the tireless, dedicated people who teach and learn law at Notre Dame. My hope in approaching our enterprise in this way is to discover myself, and to help my colleagues discover, the power with which they serve God, the University, the community, our embattled profession, and one another. "This power in us," St. Paul said, …

Collaboration In Studying Law, Thomas L. Shaffer

Journal Articles

This articles provides a description of the experiments used in curriculum, teaching methods, and administration. It urges the Law School to assist students in seeing collaboration in studying law is a winning style. The author hopes that through experiments, students will actually start to see that collaboration encourages success among law students, and especially first-year law students where collaboration is valuable because of the situation students are in.

Report Of The Dean 1972-1973, Thomas L. Shaffer

Journal Articles

These are curious times for American legal education, especially curious perhaps at this university law school, because we claim adherence to the traditions of Thomas More. Our profession has for more than two centuries provided rulers for America, as it provided leaders, including More himself, for More's England—presidents and speakers, senators and administrators, benign manipulators in American corridors of power. More than a few of America's lawyer leaders have been educated at Christian, university law schools, and, as I think about Notre Dame law students this summer, I hope we are educating more than a few replacements for the lawyer-leaders …

Report Of The Dean 1971-1972, Thomas L. Shaffer

Journal Articles

This is my first report to you as dean of the Notre Dame Law School. It seems to me important to begin it with an assessment of the decade that intervened between 1961, when I graduated from the Law School, and 1971, when Father Hesburgh appointed me to be dean. I assess, of course, a decade of law at Notre Dame during most of which (1963-71) I participated as a member of the faculty. I made this assessment, in approximately these terms, to Father Burtchaell and to our students in March, 1971; to our Advisory Council in April, 1971; and …

Thirteen Rules For Academic Meetings, Thomas L. Shaffer

Journal Articles

This comment presents Thomas L. Shaffer’s thirteen rules for academic meetings.