Law Commons^™

Breaking The Rules, Rima Sirota

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

“Breaking the Rules” is a legal research and writing assignment that I crafted for students completing their first year of law school. The assignment honors new students’ desire for skills that will allow them to effectively challenge the status quo of settled but discriminatory legal rules. Part I of this article is an essay that contextualizes and explains the assignment; Part II provides the assignment itself.

New Crossroads And The Opportunity For A Crisis: The State Of Canadian Legal Education, Catherine Dauvergne

All Faculty Publications

This article considers the challenges facing Canadian law schools and compares the current state of affairs to that analyzed in the 1983 Arthurs Report. The opening sections describe how Canadian legal education is globally unique because of the tacit agreement between law schools and the legal profession that limits the number of law school seats in Canada and helps ensure the success of law schools and law students. On the fortieth anniversary of the Arthurs Report, the article concludes that legal education in Canada is overdue for a new mapping of its strengths, challenges, and future directions that takes the …

An Empirical Analysis Of Clinical Legal Education At Middle Age, Robert R. Kuehn

Scholarship@WashULaw

This article provides the first comprehensive empirical analysis of clinical legal education’s development and growth over the past fifty years. By analyzing dozens of surveys and reports on aspects of clinical legal education, including unique data developed by the authors, and comparing the results over time, this article presents a factual picture of clinical legal education’s progression from early adulthood to today’s middle age.

This article seeks to inform the present and help legal educators shape the future role of law clinic and field placement courses in the preparation of law students for the practice of law. It provides an …

Dean's Report, 2023, Peter B. Rutledge

Dean’s Reports

"The University of Georgia School of Law is continuing to redefine what it means to be a great national public law school by offering a world-class, hands-on, purpose-driven educational experience while never surrendering our commitment to accessibility.

Throughout 2023, the law school saw many successes, including:

• Being named the nation’s Best Value in legal education for the fourth time in six years by National Jurist
• Achieving a historic ranking of #20 among the nation’s 196 fully ABA-accredited law schools by U.S. News & World Report
• Posting the #4 employment rate in the nation, with nearly 95% of the Class of …

David F. Levi, Gerald B. Tjoflat

Special Collections

Dean David F. Levi interviews Judge Gerald B. Tjoflat about his experiences on the bench, at Duke Law School. and his legal career.

Faculty Services Newsletter, Maggie Kiel-Morse

Faculty Services Newsletter

No abstract provided.

Defying Middle Child Syndrome: A Proposal For Achieving Bar Success By Reimagining The 2l Experience, Eurilynne A. Williams

Journal Publications

Middle child syndrome is the belief that middle children are excluded, ignored, or even outright neglected because of their birth order. Traditional American law schools, just like many families, are comprised of several “children,” or more accurately stated, groupings of children consisting of 1L, 2L, and 3L students. The unspoken (or at least not very often spoken) truth about law schools is that the proverbial middle children, the 2Ls, have to a degree been excluded, ignored, or even outright neglected by the legal academy. While there is a body of research dedicated to children's personality traits based upon birth order,2 …

“Presentation Principles”: Connecting Core Lawyering Skills To A Contemporary Lawyering Framework In The Digital Age, Ann Shalleck

Presentations

One way we try to make the connection between core lawyering skills and those inherent in contemporary practice is to examine what unifies what might otherwise be considered discrete lawyering skills. Because we are so aware of how technology is constantly changing and how lawyers and our students need to adapt to its forms and logics in their practice, familiar issues of how to communicate become more evident to us. Technology, therefore, gives us the opportunity to reexamine long held practices, habits of mind, and approaches to teaching students how to present information to colleagues, supervisors, clients, adversaries, tribunals, and …

Externships' Role In Training Practice-Ready Lawyers, Robert E. Kaplan

Popular Media

No abstract provided.

Taking Our Space: Service, Scholarship, And Radical Citation Practice, Priya Baskaran

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.

Practicing The Be Practice Ready: Making Competent Legal Researchers Using The New Process And Practice Method, Jason Murray

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Finding New Classroom Tricks In A Virtual Teaching World: One ‘Old Dog’S’ Tale, Daniel Keating

Scholarship@WashULaw

It has been hard to find many silver linings in this dark cloud we call the pandemic, but here’s one: Two colleagues and I, all three of us at different law schools, were having an e-mail discussion about how online instruction had affected us and challenged our “business as usual” approach to teaching. Among the three of us, we have taught for more than 100 years combined. Yet here we were, trading notes on our successes and failures with polls, online discussion boards, and virtual breakout rooms. Finally, the most senior member of our trio summed it up with this …

Untangling Attorney Retainers From Creditor Claims, Cassandra Burke Robertson, Jesse Wynn

Faculty Publications

Clients will often use a retainer to secure an attorney’s representation. But clients in economic distress may have creditors that are eager to access the client’s funds in the attorney’s hands. Attorneys, clients, courts, and regulators have struggled to understand who has the best claim to such retainer funds. In this Article, we attempt to untangle the most common areas of confusion. We conclude that Article 9 of the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) offers strong protection for an attorney’s interest in client retainers through security interests, even though some courts have misapplied the UCC in this context. Further, we recommend …

Inclusivity In Admissions And Retention Of Diverse Students: Leadership Determines Dei Success, Danielle M. Conway, Bekah Saidman-Krauss, Rebecca Schreiber

Faculty Scholarly Works

Penn State Dickinson Law has been leading with an Antiracist admissions philosophy and corresponding plans for implementation before the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. Arguably, this approach to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)was not identified explicitly as a vision priority for the law school until July 2019, when Dickinson Law welcomed Danielle M. Conway as the first Black Dean and first woman Dean in the law school’s 186-year history. Dean Conway outlined four vision priorities to accomplish within her first five years at Dickinson Law. Vision priority number two calls upon the law school’s administrators to move the needle substantially on …

Together And Apart In An Online Classroom, Laura A. Heymann

Popular Media

No abstract provided.

2019-20 Survey Of Applied Legal Education, Robert R. Kuehn, Margaret Reuter, David A. Santacroce

Faculty Works

This report presents the results of the 2019-20 Center for the Study of Applied Legal Education (CSALE) Survey of Applied Legal Education. The survey was composed of two parts – a Master Survey directed to ABA accredited U.S. law schools and a Sub-Survey distributed to each person teaching in a law clinic or field placement course. Ninety-five percent of law schools and over 1,300 clinical teachers participated in the survey. The results provide valuable insight into clinical programs and law clinic and field placement courses in areas such as design, capacity, administration, funding, and pedagogy, and into the role and …

Repealing The Statute Of Wizarding Secrecy In Legal Education, Mark Burge

Faculty Scholarship

In the fictional Harry Potter universe, J.K. Rowling has fashioned a parallel world based on our own, but with the fundamental difference of a separate magical society grafted onto it. In Rowling’s fictional version, the magical population lives among the non-magical Muggle population, but we Muggles are largely unaware of them. This secrecy is by elaborate design and was brought about by centuries-long hostility toward wizards by the non-magical majority. But what if secrecy is precisely the wrong approach? What if widespread wizard-Muggle collaboration were precisely the thing needed to address the enormous and pressing problems of the day?

The …

Dean's Perspective: The Bar Exam: It's Time For Indiana To Adopt A Uniform Bar Exam, Austen L. Parrish

Articles by Maurer Faculty

For most of us, the Bar Exam conjures up memories of grueling prep courses, intensive studying, and a couple of long days of exhaustive tests. In a way, the exam is the final rite of passage from law student to law practitioner. The exam is intended to test minimal professional competency, evaluating an applicant's legal reasoning and ability to apply general legal principles to various fact patterns.

Recently, bar exams throughout the United States have come under scrutiny. Nationwide pass rates have declined significantly. The same has been true for Indiana. Even though pass rates for first-time takers at the …

A Starting Point For Disability Justice In Legal Education, Christina Payne-Tsoupros

Journal Articles

This article explores how a disability justice framework would provide greater access to law school and therefore the legal profession for disabled students of color; specifically, disabled Black, Indigenous, and Latinx students. Using DisCrit principles formulated by Subini Annamma, David Connor, and Beth Ferri (2013), this article provides suggestions for incorporating a disability justice lens to legal education. In doing so, this article specifically recognizes the work of three disability justice activist-attorney-scholars, Lydia X.Z. Brown, Talila “TL” Lewis, and Katherine Pérez, and considers lessons from their advocacy and leadership that can apply in the law school setting.

The 2019-20 Survey Of Applied Legal Education, Robert R. Kuehn, Margaret Reuter, David A. Santacroce

Scholarship@WashULaw

This report presents the results of the 2019-20 Center for the Study of Applied Legal Education (CSALE) Survey of Applied Legal Education. The survey was composed of two parts – a Master Survey directed to ABA accredited U.S. law schools and a Sub-Survey distributed to each person teaching in a law clinic or field placement course. Ninety-five percent of law schools and over 1,300 clinical teachers participated in the survey. The results provide valuable insight into clinical programs and law clinic and field placement courses in areas such as design, capacity, administration, funding, and pedagogy, and into the role and …

Teaching With Feminist Judgments: A Global Conversation, Susan Frelich Appleton, Gabrielle J. Appleby, Ross Astoria, Linda L. Berger, Bridget J. Crawford, Sharon Cowan, Rosalind Dixon, Troy Lavers, Andrea L. Mcardle, Elisabeth Mcdonald, Teri A. Mcmurtry-Chubb, Vanessa Munro, Kathryn M. Stanchi, Pam Wilkins

Scholarship@WashULaw

This conversational-style essay is an exchange among fourteen professors — representing thirteen universities across five countries — with experience teaching with feminist judgments. Feminist judgments are “shadow” court decisions rewritten from a feminist perspective, using only the precedent in effect and the facts known at the time of the original decision. Scholars in Canada, England, the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, Scotland, Ireland, India and Mexico have published (or are currently producing) written collections of feminist judgments that demonstrate how feminist perspectives could have changed the legal reasoning or outcome (or both) in important legal cases.

This essay begins to explore …

It’S Complicated: Reflections On Teaching Negotiation For Women, Rebecca E. Hollander-Blumoff

Scholarship@WashULaw

What does it mean to be a woman negotiator? In the two decades that I have been teaching negotiation, I have encountered a wide range of human behavior in the negotiation setting. Individuals run the gamut in terms of their strategies, tactics, worldviews, charisma, perspicacity, flexibility, and other factors that affect negotiation behavior and negotiation outcomes. But one area that negotiation students are always curious about—be they top executives, law students, government employees, lawyers, or doctors—is the role of gender in negotiation. The maddening but intriguing answer to this question is the same as the answer to many other questions …

The 'Other' Market, Cody Jacobs

Faculty Scholarship

The hiring market for tenure-track non–legal writing positions is a world unto itself with its own lingo (i.e., “meat market” and “FAR form”), its own unwritten rules (i.e., “Do not have two first-year courses in your preferred teaching package.”), and carefully calibrated expectations for candidates and schools with respect to the process and timing of hiring. These norms and expectations are disseminated to the participants in this market through a relatively well-established set of feeder fellowships, visiting assistant professor programs, elite law schools, blogs, and academic literature on the subject.

But there is another market that goes on every year …

Mindsets In Legal Education, Victor D. Quintanilla, Sam Erman

Articles by Maurer Faculty

If you teach 1Ls, you may share the following concern. At the start of each year, we meet enthusiastic and successful students who are passionate about law. They arrive on campus invested in learning, ready to work hard, and eager to participate in class. But trouble brews soon thereafter. Students worry whether they have what it takes to do well, whether they will fit in, and whether they belong in law school. Answering questions in class, many sense (rightly or wrongly) that their professors and peers think that they aren’t smart and that they will not do well. When they …

Of Wigs, Wickets, And Moonshine: Leadership Development Lessons From An International Collaboration, Douglas A. Blaze

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

The Institute For The Future Of Law Practice: A New Narrative For Legal Education And The Legal Profession, William D. Henderson

Articles by Maurer Faculty

"The mission of IFLP is to produce more legal professionals who have strong legal knowledge plus foundational training in allied disciplines — in other words, “T-shaped” legal professionals."

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You look down at your smartphone and see that you just got a text from a close family relative. They are asking to schedule a phone call.

The next line reads, “I’m thinking about going to law school.”

Well, if you read PD Quarterly, you’re likely a logical person to seek out for advice. You’ve got some time to think about it. What are you going to say?

Whatever your counsel, …

Developing A Culturally Competent Legal Research Curriculum, Shamika Dalton

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Ask A Director Making The Library More Accessable, Lorelle Anderson

Library Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Rebooting Empathy For The Digital Generation Lawyer, Lauren A. Newell

Law Faculty Scholarship

There is a growing preference in today’s technology-saturated society for online interaction via email, text messages, social networks, and instant messaging, rather than real-world interaction through face-to-face or telephonic conversations. For today’s young people—the Digital Generation—this is more than a mere preference; it is a way of life. Research indicates that the movement toward virtual communication comes with negative consequences, such as poor real-world communication skills and underdeveloped social skills. Most significantly, research suggests that the Digital Generation are less empathic than elder generations are. Some researchers speculate that the rising prominence of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in everyday …

Accidental Scholar: Navigating Academia As A Clinician And Reflecting On Intergenerational Change, Binny Miller

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.