Law Commons^™

Building Community, Recognizing Dignity: Beyond The Ada, Karen Rothenberg, Alan Hornstein

Karen H. Rothenberg

No abstract provided.

Test Your Legal Literacy By Answering One Question, John M. Bosco

John M Bosco

No abstract provided.

The Unplanned Obsolescence Of American Legal Education, Rena I. Steinzor, Alan D. Hornstein

Rena I. Steinzor

No abstract provided.

Alinsky's Prescription: Democracy Alongside Law, Barbara L. Bezdek

Barbara L Bezdek

This Article examines the import of the life’s work of Saul Alinsky—arguably the most prominent founder of contemporary organizing—to the content and methodologies of today’s legal education. I review the community organizing theory and practice of Saul Alinsky for its synergies and lessons on two approaches by legal theorists and educators working in law schools today — “community lawyering” and “social justice”education. These approaches embrace the special responsibility of the legal profession for the quality of justice in society[1] by extending the traditional conceptions of lawyers’ relationships with clients in ways that are informed by the insights of community organizers, …

The Cartography Of Legal Inquiry, Tonya Kowalski

Tonya Kowalski

As lifelong learners, we all know the feelings of discomfort and bewilderment that can come from being asked to apply existing skills in a completely new situation. As legal educators, we have also experienced the frustration that comes from watching our students struggle to identify and transfer skills from one learning environment to another. For example, a first-semester law student who learns to analogize case law to a fact pattern in a legal writing problem typically will not see the deeper applications for those skills in a law school essay exam several weeks later. Similarly, when law students learn how …

A Tale Of Election Day 2008: Teaching Storytelling Through Repeated Experiences, Serge A. Martinez, Stefan H. Krieger

Stefan H Krieger

The article was inspired by a one-day project November 4, 2008, when we supervised a number of clinic students representing voters who had been denied the right to vote. As they represented client after client, we noticed significant improvement in their storytelling skills over a very short period, despite having little training in storytelling theory or techniques. Using our Election Day project as a starting point, the article questions the dominant pedagogical model for teaching storytelling, which focuses primarily on teaching storytelling and narrative theory. We propose a new method, based on cognitive science findings about experiential learning, that emphasizes …

Refashioning Legal Pedagogy After The Carnegie Report: Something Borrowed, Something New, Debra M. Schneider

Debra M Schneider

The Carnegie Foundation published in 2007 its ground-breaking book titled Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law, in which it pointed out significant pedagogical imbalance in legal education. In particular, the Carnegie report said that law schools should infuse their curricula with more practical and ethical training. How a law school ought to accomplish the Carnegie aim is another challenge, one that this paper squarely addresses.

Traditional legal education is sorely imbalanced. A law student receives rigorous training in legal doctrine and analytical skills—he learns to “think like a lawyer”—but is left with little training in practical skills or …

Coalescing With Salt: A Taste For Inclusion, Phoebe A. Haddon

Phoebe A. Haddon

No abstract provided.

Beginning Legal Writers In Their Own Words: Why The First Weeks Of Legal Writing Are So Tough And What We Can Do About It, Miriam E. Felsenburg, Laura P. Graham

Miriam E Felsenburg

ABSTRACT

In the summer of 2007, the authors undertook a study designed to illuminate the reasons why many first-year legal writing students find the first few weeks of the class so difficult and so frustrating. Their own students’ struggles during early legal writing classes were of deep concern to the authors, primarily because these early classes were devoted to teaching fundamental skills, including legal reasoning and analysis. To isolate the reasons for these struggles, the authors administered a series of three surveys to first-year law students at two diverse law schools, seeking to learn how the students’ attitudes toward and …

Balancing Law Student Privacy Interests And Progressive Pedagogy: Dispelling The Myth That Ferpa Prohibits Cutting-Edge Academic Support Methodologies, Louis N. Schulze

Louis N. Schulze Jr.

Controversy exists over whether the Family Education Records Privacy Act prohibits certain progressive law school academic support methodologies. This Article analyzes these claims, using the text of the statute, the related regulations, case law from the Supreme Court of the United States and other federal courts, and statements from the Department of Education. The thesis of this Article is that most academic support methods are perfectly lawful and that FERPA and progressive pedagogy can peaceably coexist.

Legal Reading And Success In Law School: Law Students With Attention Deficit Disorder (Add), Leah M. Christensen

Leah M Christensen

The new reality in legal education is that a certain percentage of our students will come to us with ADD or with another learning disability, either disclosed or undisclosed. Yet there has been little empirical research on how law students with learning disabilities read and understand the law. This study examined how three law students with ADD read a judicial opinion. The results suggested a relationship between successful law school performance and the use of problematizing and rhetorical reading strategies; and less successful law school performance and the use of default reading strategies. Further, the results suggest that law students …

Judging By The Numbers: An Empirical Study Of The Power Of Story, Kenneth D. Chestek

Kenneth D. Chestek

The recent debate about whether “empathy” is a desirable trait in Supreme Court Justices begs a more fundamental question: are appellate court judges in fact persuaded by appeals to pathos? This article attempts to answer that question by reporting the results of an empirical study the author conducted that investigates whether narrative reasoning, or “stories,” are persuasive to appellate judges. It is the first rigorous study to ever confront this issue directly. The article first describes how the author wrote four test briefs, two on each side of a hypothetical lawsuit. One brief on each side was written as a …

Reconstructing A Pedagogy Of Responsibility, Barbara Bezdek

Barbara L Bezdek

No abstract provided.

To Forge New Hammers Of Justice: Deep-Six The Doing-Teaching Dichotomy And Embrace The Dialectic Of "Doing Theory", Barbara L. Bezdek

Barbara L Bezdek

This essay argues that the teaching-doing tightrope bemoaned among clinicians, while posing real tensions, is overdrawn. The asserted dichotomy is between the demands of teaching legal theory and of doing daily law practice for clients enmeshed in poverty. The dichotomy is misleading because the development of transformative legal theory arises repeatedly on the front lines of client work, and interdependently with the works of attentive scholars. Two bellwether cases, Goldberg v. Kelly and Javins v. First National Realty, illustrate the vital interdependence of justice-seeking scholarship and justice-serving representation of clients in challenging the reigning structure of legal rules and constraining …

Reflections On The Practice Of A Theory: Law, Teaching, And Social Change, Barbara L. Bezdek

Barbara L Bezdek

No abstract provided.

Clinical Programs Of The University Of Maryland School Of Law, Barbara L. Bezdek

Barbara L Bezdek

The University of Maryland provides 'clinical education' in two distinct ways, through its Clinical Law Office, and through its Legal Theory and Practice courses. For many years the Law School has operated The Clinical Law Office, one of the largest and longest-lived 'in-house' clinics in any law school in the United States. Students may elect to enroll in this course in the upper years of the law degree program. It is a year-long, intensive practice experience, under faculty supervision. Quite recently, the Law Faculty began the Legal Theory and Practice courses, which combine the study of doctrine and legal theory …

The Cuny Law Program: Integration Of Doctrine, Practice & Theory In The Preparation Of Lawyers, Barbara L. Bezdek

Barbara L Bezdek

The CUNY Law Program differs markedly from every other law school in the United States. Founded in 1983, at a great, diverse, public university sprawling across New York City, its curriculum emerged from the Law School's mandate to rethink the traditional law school curriculum and develop approaches oriented toward public interest and public service law, with emphasis on clinical teaching methods. In this paper, the author provides a concrete description of the CUNY Program, and articulates the principles expressed by CUNY's extensive redesign of typical American legal education. Since it began in 1983, the CUNY Law Program has been the …

"Legal Theory And Practice" Development At The University Of Maryland: One Teacher's Experience In Programmatic Context, Barbara Bezdek

Barbara L Bezdek

No abstract provided.

On-Line Legal Research Workshops, Frederick B. Jonassen

Frederick B. Jonassen

Like riding a bicycle, playing tennis, or driving a car, legal research is a skill, and like any other skill it is learned by doing and not by listening to a lecture, though lectures are indispensable for introducing the skill. The mental processes applied in electronic legal research may differ from those applied to book legal research, but because both electronic and book research are skills, a guided workshop in electronic legal research may be based on similar principles to that underlying a workshop in book legal research with appropriate modifications.

The aspects of the electronic legal workshop proposed here …

What Law Schools Should Teach Future Transactional Lawyers: Perspectives From Practice, Michael A. Woronoff

Michael A Woronoff

Since at least the 1980’s, law schools have been chided for doing a poor job at teaching skills. This criticism has been accompanied by pressure to increase their emphasis on skills training. The pressure increased with the publication of the McCrate Report in 1992, and then again with the publication of the Carnegie Report in 2007. This article is based on my remarks given on June 10 at the 2009 mid-year meeting of the AALS Conference on Business Associations. In those remarks, I respond to the questions “Are law schools teaching students adequate transactional skills?” and “From the standpoint of …

The Socratic Method And The Mathematical Heuristic Of George Polya, Robert J. Rhee

Robert Rhee

A number of commentators have observed the decline of the Socratic method. This is unfortunate as the Socratic method can be an effective teaching tool. But this article recognizes that the Socratic method can be monochromatic. This article argues that the Socratic method should not be conceived simply as a method to teach analytic skills. Rather, once learned, it can be a concrete analytic tool for the students to use without the help of professors. In other words, it is an end to itself rather than a means. To do this, we can adopt George Polya's heuristic for teaching mathematical …

Education For A Public Calling In The 21st Century, Phoebe A. Haddon

Phoebe A. Haddon

No abstract provided.

The Mdp Controversy: What Legal Educators Should Know, Phoebe A. Haddon

Phoebe A. Haddon

No abstract provided.

Academic Freedom And Governance: A Call For Increased Dialogue And Diversity, Phoebe A. Haddon

Phoebe A. Haddon

No abstract provided.

Misuse And Abuse Of The Lsat: Making The Case For Alternative Evaluative Efforts And A Redefinition Of Merit, Phoebe A. Haddon, Deborah W. Post

Phoebe A. Haddon

No abstract provided.

Keynote Address: Redefining Our Roles In The Battle For Inclusion Of People Of Color In Legal Education, Phoebe A. Haddon

Phoebe A. Haddon

No abstract provided.

Korean Legal Education For The Age Of Professionalism: Suggestions For More Concerted Curricula, Young-Cheol K. Jeong

Young-Cheol K. Jeong

No abstract provided.

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

David Mears

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 service …

"Sending Down" Sabbatical: Lawyering In The Legal Services Trenches Has Benefits For Professor And Practitioner Alike, Suzanne Rabe

Suzanne Rabe

This article proposes that clinical professors, and legal writing professors in particular, consider practicing law -- in real-life, non-clinical settings –- during some significant portion of their sabbaticals from teaching. This proposal would (1) improve the learning experience for students in clinics, writing classes, and skills classes, (2) offer a vital public service to the under-represented, and (3) improve the overall administration of justice. At little cost, this proposal would foster a richer engagement by clinicians and legal writing professors with the world of legal practice. This idea could also infuse increased life and meaning into our law school classes. …

Universal Instructional Design: Engaging The Whole Class, Suzanne J. Schmitz, Douglas K. Rush

Suzanne J. Schmitz

UNIVERSAL INSTRUCTIONAL DESIGN: ENGAGING THE WHOLE CLASS By Douglas K. Rush and Suzanne J. Schmitz ABSTRACT This paper explores the application of Universal Instructional Design principles to law school pedagogy. Universal design originated as an architectural concept whose goal was to make structures accessible to people of all ability levels. The best known examples of universal design are sidewalk curb-cuts. Originally intended to allow access to mobility impaired individuals, sidewalk curb-cuts are now recognized as aiding people of all abilities in negotiating urban environments. Parents with small children in strollers, delivery people, travelers with roller luggage and even urban skateboarders …