Law Commons^™

The St. Thomas Effect: Law School Mission And The Formation Of Professional Identity, Jennifer Wright

Jennifer Wright

The legal profession has long been criticized for declining standards of professionalism. Recent studies have pointed to the crucial role of legal education in forming the professional identity of lawyers. Law schools must take seriously their duty to intentionally and thoughtfully shape their students’ sense of what it means to be a lawyer and of how their professional identities will align and coexist with their other personal and ethical commitments. In this article, I examine a case study of one law school, the University of St. Thomas School of Law, whose self-proclaimed raison d’etre is to produce a “different kind …

Modern Disparities In Legal Education: Emancipation From Racial Neutrality, David Mears

David Mears

Abstract

Wealth, leadership and political power within any democratic society requires the highest caliber of a quality legal education. The Black experience is not necessarily a unique one within legal education but rather an excellent example of either poor to substandard quality disseminated unequally among racial and socioeconomic stereotypes based upon expected outcomes of probable success or failure. It is often said, “Speak and so it will happen” – many within the halls of academia work hard to openly predict failure yet seemingly do very little to foster success internally within the academic procedures and processes based on the customer …

A Critique Of The Aals Hiring Process, Allen R. Kamp

Allen R. Kamp

The article citiques the process of hiring professors in legal academia.

The Future's So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades: Law School Through The Lens Of Hope, Faith A. Knotts, Allison D. Martin, Kevin L. Rand

R. George Wright Professor

Law students need hope. The Carnegie Foundation’s recent report about legal education, Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law, has urged legal educators to begin a revitalization and reawakening in the law school environment. Legal educators can accomplish this goal by engendering hope in their students. Research by Dr. C. R. Snyder, the father of hope theory, and his progeny has shown that hope improves academic performance and psychological well-being among undergraduate students. This article applies hope theory to law students and concludes that instilling hope can and should be an aim of every legal educator.

Part I of …

Pro Bono Publico As A Conscience Good, Deborah A. Schmedemann

Deborah Schmedemann

Pro bono work performed by American lawyers serves a critical role in the American civil justice system. This paper seeks to explain pro bono through the lens of social science research into volunteering, in particular the economic concept of a conscience good. The paper presents the results of an empirical study involving over 1,100 law students and lawyers. The results include data on lawyers’ motivations to perform pro bono, the impact of various pro bono rules and invitations to perform pro bono, the satisfactions of pro bono work, emotions triggered by pro bono work and pro bono clients, and the …

Into The Twilight Zone: Informing Judicial Discretion In Federal Sentencing, Mary K. Ramirez

mary k ramirez

Into the Twilight Zone: Informing Judicial Discretion in Federal Sentencing

Recent changes in federal sentencing have shifted discretionary decision-making back to federal district court judges, while appellate courts review challenged sentences for reasonableness. Each judge brings considerable legal experience and qualifications to the bench, however, cultural experiences cannot necessarily prepare judges for the range of persons or situations they will address on the bench. Social psychologists who have studied social cognition have determined that the human brain creates categories and associations resulting in implicit biases and associations that are often unconscious or subconscious. Moreover, research suggests that such biases may …

Curriculum Reform In Context, 1870-2008: Understanding And Overcoming The Limitations Of Contemporary Legal Education, William A. Langer

William A Langer

Curriculum Reform in Context, 1870-2008: Understanding and Overcoming the Limitations of Contemporary Legal Education

William Langer

In 2006, the law schools at Harvard and Stanford announced plans to implement innovative reforms to their traditional legal curricula. While the two law schools’ reform programs are quite different from one another, they both proceed on the premise that legal education has not kept pace with the changes that have taken place in the law, the legal profession, and the global economy over the last several decades, and that the traditional form of legal education, centered around the “case method,” has long been …

Into The Twilight Zone: Informing Judicial Discretion In Federal Sentencing, Mary K. Ramirez

mary k ramirez

Into the Twilight Zone: Informing Judicial Discretion in Federal Sentencing

Recent changes in federal sentencing have shifted discretionary decision-making back to federal district court judges, while appellate courts review challenged sentences for reasonableness. Each judge brings considerable legal experience and qualifications to the bench, however, cultural experiences cannot necessarily prepare judges for the range of persons or situations they will address on the bench. Social psychologists who have studied social cognition have determined that the human brain creates categories and associations resulting in implicit biases and associations that are often unconscious or subconscious. Moreover, research suggests that such biases may …

The New Boys: Women With Disabilities And The Legal Profession, Carrie G. Basas

Carrie G Basas

This essay fuses the fields of law, feminist theory, and cultural studies to examine the status of women attorneys with disabilities. It is the first study of its kind in the United States. The author conducted an empirical, qualitative, and ethnographic study of women attorneys with disabilities in the United States. Thirty-eight attorneys participated and their narratives form the basis for critical analysis of disability animus and discrimination in the legal profession. The results show an alarming trend toward disabled women attorneys self-accommodating in the workplace, rather than enforcing their employment rights under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Relying on …

"The Lord Speaks Through Me": Moving Beyond Conventional Law School Pedagogy And The Reasons For Doing So, Robert C. Schehr

Robert C. Schehr

ABSTRACT Maintenance of status quo law school curricular design and delivery, along with the continued marginalization of live client clinic programs, and the discordant objectives of law schools as compared to the expectations of Bar passage, serve to stifle the role of juridic practitioners in the service of justice. Decades of careful scholarship regarding the problems associated with the quality of legal education have repeatedly called for curricular revisions that should enhance the knowledge and skill base of graduates, develop their level of preparedness to actually serve in the profession, and demonstrate care for students. And while there has been …

Predicting Law School Success: A Study Of Goal Orientations, Academic Achievement And The Declining Self-Efficacy Of Our Law Students, Leah M. Christensen

Leah M Christensen

This study asked 157 law students to respond to a survey about their learning goals and motivations for learning in law school. The student responses were correlated to different academic variables, including class rank, LSAT scores, undergraduate GPA. Further, the study explored whether any relationships existed between goal orientations (mastery or performance) and law school success (class rank). The results were illuminating: despite the performance-based curriculum of law school, the most successful students were mastery oriented learners. In contrast, there was no statistical correlation between performance-oriented learning and law school success. Further, the LSAT score was the weakest predictor of …

Gender And The Chinese Legal Profession In Historical Perspective: From Heaven And Earth To Rule Of Woman?, Mary Szto

Mary Szto

This article first discusses the current phenomenon of women judges and male lawyers in China. Many women have joined the ranks of the Chinese judiciary because this is considered a stable job conducive to caring for one’s family, as opposed to being a lawyer, which requires business travel and heavy client entertaining. I then trace this phenomenon to ancient views of Heaven, earth, gender and law in China. In this yin/yang framework, men had primary responsibility for providing sustenance for both this life and the life to come and women were relegated to the “inner chambers”. Also, law was secondary …

Professional Skills And Values In Legal Education: The Gps Model, Gerald F. Hess

Gerald F Hess

Over the last four decades, a series of studies by the bar and the academy assessed the strengths and weaknesses of legal education and advocated that law schools aim to better prepare students for the profession – the Cramton Report, MacCrate Report, Carnegie Report, and Best Practices Project. Surveys of practicing lawyers in Illinois, Minnesota, Montana, and Arizona identified the professional skills and values important to success in the practice of law. This article briefly summarizes the recommendations of those reports and the survey results. It then offers one model of educating law students in professional skills and values. It …

"The Lord Speaks Through Me": Moving Beyond Conventional Law School Pedagogy And The Reasons For Doing So, Robert C. Schehr

Robert C. Schehr

No abstract provided.

A Curriculum Design For Living In The 21st Century: Multicultural Curriculum In The Law Sschool, Christie Christie

Christie A Christie

This paper will formulate a multicultural curriculum for law schools, focusing on the first year curriculum and class size. It will also draw heavily on the work of James A. Banks, who was cited frequently in the articles that did address multicultural education in law schools. Banks’ book, Teaching Strategies for Ethnic Studies, discusses the factors to be integrated into a multicultural curriculum—ethnicity, racial, cultural and language diversity. (Banks, 2003, p. 8). The book is essentially a handbook on implementing a multicultural curriculum, with an emphasis on ethnic identity. While this paper addresses multicultural education with a focus on curriculum, …

Mind The Gaps: Teaching Students To Address Flaws In Their Analysis, Christopher R. Trudeau

Christopher R Trudeau

A main problem for law students is that they make too many logical assumptions – or logical leaps, as I call them – in their analysis. Generally, students tend to do two things. First, students leave gaps in their law; that is, students fail to fully develop the law, define key terms, and use analogy to past cases to help bolster their arguments. Second, some students leave gaps in their application – they assume the reader knows the facts, so they don’t explain things to the reader.This presentation explores various techniques used to teach students to find and fill gaps …

Rankings: A Dramatization Of The Incentives Created By Ranking Law Schools, Jeff Sovern

Jeff Sovern

Rankings: A Dramatization of the Incentives Created by Ranking Law Schools Sellers in a competitive market shift resources from attributes buyers don't care about to attributes buyers do care about. In markets in which buyers rely on imperfect signals for quality, sellers move resources away from improving the quality of their product to enhancing the illusion of quality. For example, before freshness dating, when consumers tested the freshness of bread by squeezing it, bakers reportedly added chemicals to bread to preserve its softness longer, thereby creating the illusion of freshness. Similarly, law school rankings encourage schools to shift resources away …

Understanding The Socratic Method In Law School Teaching After The Carnegie Foundation's Educating Lawyers: Preparation For The Legal Profession, Joseph A. Dickinson

Joseph A Dickinson

For many committed law school teachers, the traditional Socratic pedagogy they practice is the irreducible core of legal education. For others its continued practice is a scandal and,more damning, an impediment to learning the practice of law. The Carnegie Foundation's Educating Lawyers: chose not to take a position in this debate, while framing it, thus leaving its call for reform ungrounded.

Rankings: A Dramatization Of The Incentives Created By Ranking Law Schools, Jeff Sovern

Jeff Sovern

Rankings: A Dramatization of the Incentives Created by Ranking Law Schools Sellers in a competitive market shift resources from attributes buyers don't care about to attributes buyers do care about. In markets in which buyers rely on imperfect signals for quality, sellers move resources away from improving the quality of their product to enhancing the illusion of quality. For example, before freshness dating, when consumers tested the freshness of bread by squeezing it, bakers reportedly added chemicals to bread to preserve its softness longer, thereby creating the illusion of freshness. Similarly, law school rankings encourage schools to shift resources away …

Why Every Law Student Should Be A Gunner, Robert M. Lloyd

Robert M Lloyd

This essay forcefully urges law students to stand up to peer pressure and volunteer frequently in class.

Why Every Law Student Should Be A Gunner, Robert M. Lloyd

Robert M Lloyd

This 2,200 essay tells law students why they need to stop being intimidated by their peers and talk in class. Some will find it offensive.

Holistic Approaches To Classroom Instruction, A Precursor To More Collaborative Lawyers: Reflections Of A Professor And Collaborative Lawyer, Kathy-Ann K. Hart

Kathy-Ann K Hart

Coupling of academia and practice in legal curricula can make programs of law study more holistic than many of them currently are. Encouraging law students to learn in more than one way in the classroom engages them as multi-dimensional learners or beings. As a collaborative lawyer I have a vested interest in increasing the numbers of lawyers who choose collaborative practice and I believe that peaceful, more co-operative ways of practicing law (like employing collaborative principles) can create future lawyers and a legal profession that’s healthier and happier. In this article, I reflect on my application of holistic approaches in …

Legal Studies: How To Narrow The Gap Between Law And Society, Leonardo J. Raznovich

Dr Leonardo J Raznovich

The main thesis of this paper is that the teaching of law should take a different approach to that of the current law degree. Students should be equipped with the various knowledge and competences that make them suitable to appreciate not only the theory of law but the interactions between law and society. This paper will conclude that a law degree that follows the socio-legal approach from a critical legal perspective should be the appropriate methodology because it exposes students to the influences and impacts made on legal theory by the social sciences as well as that made on society …

Student Evaluations Of Law Teaching Work Well: Strongly Agree, Agree, Neutral, Disagree, Strongly Disagree, Arthur Best

Arthur Best

Academics in the fields of psychology and education generally describe student evaluations of teaching as reliable and useful. On the other hand, law professors often criticize them as unreliable and impaired by students’ biases. This Article considers resolving these discrepant views by paying close attention to the various purposes for which student evaluations of teaching are used. For some uses, such as guidance for students in course selection, shortcomings of the evaluations would be of slight consequence. For promotion or tenure decisions, despite law professors’ skepticism, schools should use the data to identify outlier instructors. Basing conclusions only on large …

When Theory Met Practice: Teaching Tort Law From A Practical Perspective, Prentice L. White

Prentice L White

WHEN THEORY MET PRACTICE: TEACHING TORT LAW FROM A PRACTICAL PERSPECTIVE ABSTRACT When I initially entered the world of academia, I did so with the intention of not only teaching my students the black letter law, but I also envision an opportunity to share with them my experiences in the practice. My philosophy has always been “How can you teach what you have not learned.” Learning is an on-going process and it is not limited to the classroom—especially in professional school. That’s why it was so important for me to share a practical experience with my students as much as …

An Aesthetic Defense Of The Non-Precedential Opinion: The Easy Cases Debate In The Wake Of The 2007 Amendments To The Federal Rules Of Appellate Procedure, Caleb E. Mason

Caleb E. Mason

Abstract: In this article I extol the virtues of the short, nonprecedential opinions (NPOs) that make up more than 80% of the output of the courts of appeals. The recent amendment to Fed. R. App. Proc. 32.1(a), requiring that all circuits allow citation to nonprecedential opinions, has provoked considerable debate about how, and whether, to issue opinions in the class of cases currently resolved by NPOs. I defend the issuance of NPOs not as a necessary concession to overwork, but rather as a valuable decisional form that plays a useful if not vital role in inculcating in practitioners the perceptual …

Kuwait University, Civil Law And The Internet: Genesis Of A Dedicated Civil Law-Teaching Website (Being A Unesco Cited Project), Mashael Alhajeri

Mashael Alhajeri

No abstract provided.

Transnational Study Programs And The Global Law School, Luca C.M. Melchionna

Luca Melchionna

TRANSNATIONAL STUDY PROGRAMS AND THE GLOBAL LAW SCHOOL. Luca C. M. Melchionna ABSTRACT The “knowledge-based” economy, namely the new world economy based on the exploration, production, sharing and protection of knowledge, is growing. Europe and the U.S. are the leading destinations for U.S. and international students seeking to study or work abroad. However, still today less than 1% of the current U.S. student body decides to temporarily go abroad during college or graduate school. Aware of the importance of international education, Congress is in the process of enacting the Paul Simon Study Abroad Foundation Act with the aim of sending …

Employment As Transaction, Rachel S. Arnow-Richman

Rachel S. Arnow-Richman

This paper offers a fresh perspective on the upper-level employment law class based on the theme of employment as transaction. Like much of law school, employment law is often taught from a public advocacy perspective in which the primary role of the lawyer is to vindicate workers’ rights or defend managerial action. As a doctrinal matter, however, courts are showing increased attention to the role of private ordering in defining workplace rights and assessing liability. Courts routinely examine employers’ efforts to redress unlawful behavior under antidiscrimination law and consistently sanction the use of arbitration agreements waiving rights to a federal …

Happy Law Students, Happy Lawyers, Nancy Levit, Douglas Linder

Nancy Levit

This article draws on research into the science of happiness and asks a series of interrelated questions: Whether law schools can make law students happier? Whether making happier law students will translate into making them happier lawyers, and the accompanying question of whether making law students happier would create better lawyers? After covering the limitations of genetic determinants of happiness and happiness set-points, the article addresses those qualities that happiness research indicates are paramount in creating satisfaction: control, connections, creative challenge (or flow), and comparisons (preferably downward). Those qualities are then applied to legal education, while addressing the larger philosophical …