Law Commons^™

Non-Analytical Thinking In Law Practice: Blinking In The Forest, Kandis Scott

Faculty Publications

Non-analytical thinking is indispensable to good legal representation .Despite its importance in law practice, it is devalued and neglected in the conventional law school curriculum. Even in clinical legal education, where the potential to teach students to use this mode of thinking is most obvious, the elevation of theory and analysis has stifled the impulse of clinical professors to teach students to "blink." One way law schools can counteract this trend, and thereby better train law students for practice, is to enhance clinical teachers' nonanalytical skills through more practice opportunities.

The Case For A Flat-Earth Law School, Erik M. Jensen

Faculty Publications

This essay suggests - usually politely - that the American legal academy has been overdoing its push for globalization, and, as a result, education in the basics has suffered. That's a pity because law school graduates need to know the basics to be successful not only in Smalltown USA, but also on a world stage.

Death By Bluebook, Erik M. Jensen

Faculty Publications

This review considers a novel about life (and death) on the University of Chicago Law Review, where editors and associates seem to do little but have sex, connive to get ahead, have sex, kill (with Gunther's con law casebook, no less), and have sex. The reviewer, who didn't attend the U of C law school, believes it all.

Tough On Scholarship, Erik M. Jensen

Faculty Publications

This series of three articles (that's why it's a trilogy, duh-h-h) chronicles the legal-academic career of one S. Breckinridge Tushingham ("Breck" for short). As the trilogy unfolds, Breck works his way up (or maybe it's down) from his first academic position to an established professorship to dean of the South Soybean (Soso) State University law school. In the process of recording his professional history, and thus memorializing it for the ages, Breck provides (probably defamatory) insights into the American legal academy.

Reflections On Law Schools And The Idea Of The University, Thomas E. Baker

Faculty Publications

Thomas Baker is one of the founding faculty members of the Florida International University College of Law and this article is based on a speech delivered in October of 2002 during the university's Annual Faculty Convocation. It details the composition of both the entering classes and the law faculty and discusses the law school's mission to provide opportunities for minorities to attain representation in the legal profession that is proportionate to their representation in the population. It explores the role of law schools in higher education and notes the FIU College of Law's efforts to incorporate important developments in the …

Homer Simpson Meets The Rule Against Perpetuities: The Controversial Use Of Pop-Culture In Legal Writing Pedagogy, Louis N. Schulze Jr.

Faculty Publications

Imagine that you have returned to your first year of law school. In your legal writing course, you are required to finish the year with an extensive brief analyzing a legal problem. After months in your doctrinal courses dealing with mind-bending legal issues such as liquidated damages, substantive due process, felony murder, personal jurisdiction, and shifting executory interests, you are ready to sink your teeth into a challenging legal writing assignment. You want to show your stuff and prove that your writing is law review caliber. Your assignment starts as follows: Greenacre is a parcel of land bounded on three …

Segmented Rankings For Segmented Markets, Rafael Gely

Faculty Publications

A joke frequently told by and about economists begins with a group of colleagues searching one night under a lamppost for a key in a gutter. A bystander asks the group where they have lost the key. The economists explain that although they had lost the key in a gutter some distance away, they were looking under the lamppost because the light was better there. The three articles in this panel remind me of this story, albeit in a non-conventional way. By exploring issues regarding the broader context in which rankings exist, the three articles encourage us to look not …

Integrating Contract Drafting Skills And Doctrine, Eric Goldman

Faculty Publications

In February 2006, I participated in the Symposium, Teaching Writing and Teaching Doctrine: A Symbiotic Relationship?, at Brooklyn Law School. I prepared some personal and unscientific observations about the challenges of concurrently teaching legal doctrine and contract drafting. Obviously, there is a rich literature on these topics that I did not try to address; instead, my goal was simply to acknowledge my first-hand experiences wrestling with these challenges and discuss some specific solutions I have tried. This brief Essay recaps my presentation.

Can Legal Writing Programs Benefit From Evaluating Student Writing Using Single-Submission, Semester-Ending, Standardized, Performance-Type Assignments?, John Schunk

Faculty Publications

Many legal writing programs evaluate a student's performance based on a series of assignments that students write and then rewrite after receiving comments from their legal writing teacher. Over the last decade, some have proposed altering this model by introducing the Multistate Performance Test into the legal writing curriculum or by using traditional objective examinations in first-year legal writing courses.

Based on a three-year experience at Santa Clara University School of Law, this essay suggests that using these principles, those of performance testing and traditional examinations, in a slightly modified form can reap significant benefits for legal writing programs. In …

Law Students With Attention Deficit Disorder: How To Reach Them, How To Teach Them, Robin A. Boyle

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

Most law school classes are likely to include students with Attention Deficit Disorder ("ADD") or its related disorder - Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. ADD is a neurological disorder, and many people with it additionally have learning disabilities. Law students with ADD that manifests itself in learning disabilities are the focus of this Article. There has been a growth of services for those with ADD, such as counseling, but unfortunately, "less attention is paid to the thousands of teachers who have been charged with instructing" ADD students. It is imperative for teachers to be equipped for teaching ADD students. To …

Generation X In Law School: How These Law Students Are Different From Those Who Teach Them, Joanne Ingham, Robin A. Boyle

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

Generation X is the group of approximately forty-five million people born between 1961 to 1981. They have been dubbed Generation X, or Gen Xers for short, because there seemed to be nothing dramatic about their experience—not the Vietnam War, not the Civil Rights movement, not the Second Wave of the Feminist Movement. They also have a reputation for disengagement. Gen Xers have been described as disrespectful and suspicious of authority. These stereotypes can negatively influence how law professors conduct their classes and treat their students in general.

This article presents the results of a multi-year study that examined the …

Using Graphics To Teach Evidence, Kevin C. Mcmunigal

Faculty Publications

As an Assistant United States Attorney in the general crimes unit of a metropolitan United States Attorney's Office, I regularly tried a variety of cases ranging from bank robberies and drug offenses to white collar crimes. Regardless of the type of crime, I frequently found various types of graphics useful in presenting the case. Examples included a chart providing a point by point comparison of modus operandi in two armed bank robberies and a map of the scene of a controlled purchase of cocaine showing the locations and movements of multiple defendants, an informant, and federal agents. Such graphics helped …

Dead Poets And Academic Progenitors: The Next Generation Of Law School Rankings With Paul Caron, Rafael Gely, Paul L. Caron

Faculty Publications

This Symposium is an outgrowth of our Moneyball article. With the approaching twentieth anniversary of the first U.S. News law school rankings, it is a particularly propitious time to take a fresh look, to hear new voices, and to reconsider issues surrounding law school rankings. Many of America's most thoughtful law professors (as well as academics in other disciplines) gathered on April 15, 2005 at the Indiana University School of Law--Bloomington to discuss “The Next Generation of Law School Rankings.” Many of the participants previously have written about law school rankings, but others have not--all are poets, and many have …