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Bourdieu And American Legal Education: How Law Schools Reproduce Social Stratification And Class Hierarchy, Lucille Jewel

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The American legal profession has long been organized along hierarchical lines, and in many instances, status inequalities between attorneys are based on perceived differences in attorneys' educational credentials. Relying upon the theories of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, this essay will discuss how American legal educational institutions operate to reproduce the stratification within the legal profession and within society as a whole.

American law schools are not equalizing institutions that erase all class differences among students to create a profession that awards all of its members a monolithic class status. By allocating professional status based on a system of educational tiers, …

Vico, Llewellyn And The Task Of Legal Education, Francis J. Mootz Iii

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Legal education fails students by not appreciating the rhetorical basis of legal reasoning and argumentation. I draw from Vico's "On the Study Methods of Our Time" and Llewellyn's legal realism; both argued that law and legal reasoning are exemplary sites of rhetoric. I suggest that contemporary cognitive studies of the metaphorical structure of human understanding and the initiatives of the "new legal realism" carry forward the insights of Vico and Llewellyn. This re-orientation corrects the shallow and instrumentalist outlook of most lawyers.

Vico's "Ingenious Method" And Legal Education, Francis J. Mootz Iii

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Contemporary discussions about the need to reform legal education, culminating in the 2007 Carnegie Report, should be put into a broader historical, philosophical and ethical perspective. Three hundred years ago the Italian humanist, Giambattista Vico delivered his famous oration, "On the Study Methods of Our Time," in which he lamented the rise of Cartesian critical philosophy at the expense of the cultivation of imagination, prudence and eloquence. Vico discussed law and legal education as his primary example, and his oration therefore provides an incredible resource for our contemporary deliberations.

Part One considers the literature addressing the demise of legal professionalism …

Recruiting Sexual Minorities And People With Disabilities To Be Dean, Joan W. Howarth

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As our day-to-day work lives make abundantly clear, a law faculty is a many-headed creature: an assortment of people with a variety of interests, strengths, foibles, personalities, and identities. Within the legal academy, a dominant consensus acknowledges that a strong faculty embodies diversity along multiple axes, including, for example, race, gender, religion, age, political ideology, research and teaching methodologies, and subject matter expertise.

The dean, however, stands alone, and stands above. Thus, issues of expectation, representation, comfort with and fear of difference operate quite differently when deans are selected, and when they do their jobs. The dean exercises authority over …