Law Commons^™

Law Schools’ Untapped Resources: Using Advocacy Professors To Achieve Real Change In Legal Education, Wes R. Porter

Publications

If the current law school model is dilapidated, then the remodel requires more than a face-lift; it requires real structural and architectural changes. Legal education (finally) must cater to the needs of students. By most accounts, that means teaching students the knowledge, skills, and values required to serve clients and solve problems. However, to reinvent legal education in a meaningful way, law schools must involve and elevate their former second-class citizens on the faculty: advocacy professors, clinicians, and legal writing instructors. These faculty members already teach, and have long taught, in the way that would represent real change in law …

Future Of The Legal Profession, Rachel A. Van Cleave

Publications

Many books and articles in the last few years describe a "profession in crisis" with no shortage of demons to blame: many equity partners in large law firms pursuing ever increasing profits, tenured law professors sitting on big salaries with no incentive to change how they teach, accrediting institutions imposing expensive regulation on law schools, and the examples of finger-pointing continue. In the words of YouTube sensation Kid President, "I think we all need a pep talk."

Viewpoint: Happier Law Students, One Client At A Time, Susan Rutberg

Publications

It's not your parents' legal education anymore. To lawyers who came of age in days of yore, legal education today would be almost unrecognizable. True, students still learn how to analyze appellate opinions, and at some schools, still survive the socratic method. But at Golden Gate University and an increasing number of other schools, legal education consists of multiple opportunities to intertwine theory and practice; build oral and written communication skills, learn the values of the profession and shape professional identity, both in and beyond the classroom.

Practice Perfect, Rachel A. Van Cleave

Publications

Institutions of higher education and law schools in particular are currently addressing new questions about the value and form of the education they offer, due, in part, to economic reality, practical necessity, and public scrutiny. Changes in the nature of the legal profession and the market, the cost of legal education, and most recently the purpose of the third year of law school, have each been at the center of professional conversations, public debate and media stories about reform.

Like my colleagues at other law schools, I am certainly involved with these critical conversations. I am also working with GGU …

Professor Mort Cohen: An Advocate Professor's Journey, Leeor Neta

Publications

Professor Mort Cohen has taught at GGU Law for 30 years. In addition to teaching, Cohen has taken on pro bono cases as an advocate, most recently in service of the elderly and mentally ill. In 2012, Cohen successfully represented two individuals and the California Association of Mental Health Patients Rights Advocates in K.G. Et al v. Meredith as a Marin County Public Guardian. In an unprecedented, unanimous decision, a three-judge panel in The California Court of Appeal, First District stated that patients could not be treated with mind-altering drugs without their informed consent. It further stated that the County …