Law Commons^™

Progressive Prosecution Or Zealous Public Defense? The Choice For Law Students Concerned About Our Flawed Criminal Legal System, Abbe Smith

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This Article addresses a question asked by many law students concerned about our flawed criminal legal system: should they become a prosecutor in an office run by a progressive prosecutor, or a public defender in an office devoted to zealous, client-centered (or holistic) defense? The Article starts with an anecdote about Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner’s road show to recruit law students and young lawyers, and then proceeds as follows: First, this Article makes the case for progressive prosecution; then, it makes the case for zealous indigent defense; then, it identifies the obstacles and challenges for both kinds of lawyers …

Medical-Legal Partnership As A Model For Access To Justice, Yael Cannon

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The United States is plagued with a “justice gap” that leaves many Americans with unmet civil legal needs. Americans with low income do not receive the legal help they require for as many as 92% of their substantive civil legal problems. The justice gap requires many legal aid agencies to triage, becoming “emergency rooms” for clients with unmet legal needs. This national crisis calls for new innovations so that access to justice (A2J) can function more like primary care, promoting better use of resources and preventing legal crises that can cause long-lasting harm.

Medical-Legal Partnerships (MLPs) embed lawyers in healthcare …

Disrupting Data Cartels By Editing Wikipedia, Eun Hee Han, Amanda Levendowski, Jonah Perlin

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Legal discourse in the digital public square is driven by memoranda, motions, briefs, contracts, legislation, testimony, and judicial opinions. And as lawyers are taught from their first day of law school, the strength of these genres of legal communication is built on authority. But finding that authority often depends on a duopoly of for-profit legal research resources: Westlaw and Lexis. Although contemporary legal practice relies on these databases, they are far from ethically neutral. Not only are these “data cartels” expensive-- creating significant access to justice challenges--they also are controlled by parent companies that profit by providing information to Immigration …

Setting The Health Justice Agenda: Addressing Health Inequity & Injustice In The Post-Pandemic Clinic, Emily Benfer, James Bhandary-Alexander, Yael Cannon, Medha Makhlouf, Tomar Pierson-Brown

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The COVID-19 pandemic surfaced and deepened entrenched preexisting health injustice in the United States. Racialized, marginalized, poor, and hyper-exploited populations suffered disproportionately negative outcomes due to the pandemic. The structures that generate and sustain health inequity in the United States—including in access to justice, housing, health care, employment, and education—have produced predictably disparate results. The authors, law school clinicians and professors involved with medical-legal partnerships, discuss the lessons learned by employing a health justice framework in teaching students to address issues of health inequity during the pandemic. The goal of health justice is to eliminate health disparities that are linked …

Gender Inequity Throughout The Legal Academy: A Quick Look At The (Surprisingly Limited) Data, Kristen K. Tiscione

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The long-standing overrepresentation of female law faculty in skills teaching and service-oriented positions is well documented. In contrast, the historical underrepresentation of female law faculty in top dean and tenured or tenure-track teaching positions has been widely recognized but difficult to quantify. The American Bar Association has a link in the statistics archives of its website to a chart from Fall 2013 on the gender, ethnicity, and status of law faculty. The Association of American Law Schools (AALS) links to the same chart on its website. This chart replaced a similar chart covering 2008 to 2009 that the ABA has …

On Being Old Codgers: A Conversation About A Half Century In Legal Education, Mark Tushnet, Louis Michael Seidman

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This conversation, conducted over three evenings, captures some of our thoughts about the last half century of legal education as both of us near retirement. We have edited the conversations so as to eliminate verbal stumbles and present our ideas more coherently, slightly reorganized a small part of the conversation, and added a few explanatory footnotes. However, we have attempted to keep the informal tone of our discussions.

Reflections On A More “Catholic” Catholic Legal Education, William M. Treanor

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

I am grateful to Professors Breen and Strang for their thoughtful book about Catholic legal education in the United States. It is an important topic, and their work promises to be a significant contribution to the conversation about the mission of Catholic law schools. My reflections here will focus on Chapter Five.

All of us participating in this symposium are engaged in the collective enterprise of thinking through and implementing what it means to be a Catholic law school. As a historian, personally I am well aware of the value of studying where we have been as part of the …

On The Values Of Words, Michael J. Cedrone

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Mary Norris' Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen and Kory Stamper's Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries use observations about language as a touchstone for a nuanced examination of deeper truths about language, culture, and law in a changing world. In so doing, they point to deeper truths about the use of language and its consequences. Law students, lawyers, and law professors will benefit from journeying with Norris and Stamper towards the goal of crafting prose that is clear, accurate, and inclusive. In particular, the legal community will benefit from the books' efforts to define …

Analogical Reasoning, Susan A. Mcmahon, Sonya G. Bonneau

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This chapter from our book Legal Writing in Context aims to demystify analogical reasoning for law students.

A Call To Combine Rhetorical Theory And Practice In The Legal Writing Classroom, Kristen Konrad Robbins-Tiscione

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The theory and practice of law have been separated in legal education to their detriment since the turn of the twentieth century. As history teaches us and even the 2007 Carnegie Report perhaps suggests, teaching practice without theory is as inadequate as teaching theory without practice. Just as law students should learn how to draft a simple contract from taking Contracts, they should learn the theory of persuasion from taking a legal writing course. In an economy where law apprenticeship has reverted from employer to educator, legal writing courses should do more than teach analysis, conventional documents, and the social …

Accreditation Reconsidered, Judith C. Areen

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Higher education is one of the most successful sectors in the nation at a time when much of the economy is struggling. Its quality has been buoyed by a long tradition of investment, both public and private, and by a healthy degree of autonomy from governmental control. America’s three governance innovations, citizen governing boards, shared governance, and accreditation, also have encouraged both quality and institutional autonomy in higher education.

Accreditation has been a particularly important contributor to the institutional diversity and vitality of American colleges and universities. Most nations have a ministry of education that oversees institutions of higher education. …

Educating Lawyers For The Global Economy: National Challenges, Carole Silver

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This essay addresses the challenge of educating law students to work in an increasingly global context. For students enrolled in United States law school, insight into the ways in which globalization matters can be drawn from the structural approaches to globalization of US-based law firms. These firms pursue their international practices by integrating lawyers educated and licensed in the firm’s home country (the US) and in the host jurisdictions in which the firm has offices. As a result, the success of the firm in its international practice depends upon the ability of its lawyers to develop strong and effective cross-national …

Pierson V. Post: The New Learning, Daniel R. Ernst

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Pierson v. Post, 3 Caines 175 (N.Y. 1805), one of the most commonly assigned cases in the first-year Property course, was a dispute over the ownership of a fox discovered at large “upon a certain wild and uninhabited, unpossessed and waste land, called the beach.” For a very long time, all that was known about the case, other than the report itself, was a vivid but antiquarian account published in the Sag Harbor Express of October 24, 1895, by the judge and local historian Henry Parsons Hedges (1817-1911). Hedges claimed to have met Jesse Pierson (1780-1840) and Lodowick Post …

Dean Mary Daly: A Tribute, William Michael Treanor

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

I met Mary Daly for the first time on the day I began work at Fordham Law in 1991. I had an office on the second floor of the faculty corridor, and Mary's office was a few offices down the hall. Mary was already a well-established member of the faculty, a star at the U.S. Attorney's Office who had become a star in academia. I was new to Fordham and anxious as I began my career in teaching. Characteristically, and not surprisingly, Mary was the first one to come to my office to greet me. It has been almost twenty …

Robert L. Oakley: In Memoriam, James V. Feinerman

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In January 1968, the New York Times Magazine printed a speech prepared by George F. Kennan for the dedication of a new library at Swarthmore College under the title "Rebels Without a Program." The response from students and teachers on the campuses was so great that a book was prepared, titled "Democracy and the Student Left." Among the student respondents was the young Bob Oakley.

Father Charles Whelan: A Career In The Service Of Others, William Michael Treanor

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Fordham Law School's motto, "In the service of others," perfectly captures our law school's great aspirations and commitments. In a most distinguished and multifaceted career, Father Charles Whelan has been the personal embodiment of that ideal, through his dedication to education, to advocacy, and to service to a broader community. His has been a career shaped by his Ignatian ideals, and the legacy he leaves as he retires is extraordinary.

Hamdan V. Rumseld: The Legal Academy Goes To Practice, Neal K. Katyal

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Hamdan v. Rumsfeld is a rare Supreme Court rebuke to the President during armed conflict. The time is not yet right to tell all of the backstory of the case, but it is possible to offer some preliminary reflections on how the case was litigated, the decision, and its implications for the oft-noticed divide between legal theory and practice.

In a widely cited article, Judge Harry Edwards lamented "the growing disjunction between legal education and the legal profession," claiming that "many law schools. .. have abandoned their proper place, by emphasizing abstract theory at the expense of practical scholarship and …

Introduction: The Jurisprudence Of Justice Stevens Symposium, William Michael Treanor

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Fordham Law School opened its doors on September 28, 1905, a school with ten students and six faculty members. That day marked a great beginning, and on September 28, 2005, we began a year-long celebration of Fordham Law's history and the law school community's remarkable achievements over 100 years. The heart of any great academic institution is, of course, academics, and, as part of the centennial celebration, we are hosting an extraordinary series of conferences. This issue of the Fordham Law Review presents the papers produced by the first of the year's conferences, the Symposium on the jurisprudence of Justice …

Introduction: One Hundred Years Of International Law At Fordham University, William Michael Treanor

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In the past 100 years, the connotations of the term "international" have changed dramatically. The ideas we have of concepts such as "international communication" and "global travel" are dramatically different from what those concepts would have meant to our forebears - if they had even thought in such terms. But an international perspective is not new at Fordham Law School. The idea of the interconnectedness of our social and legal systems with those of other Nations is one of the foundational values of our school, and it has shaped our history since we opened our doors 100 years ago.

From …

Words, Words, Words!!! Teaching The Language Of Tax, Stephen B. Cohen

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The basic course in federal income tax is usually a challenge for both teacher and student because so many different and difficult things are being taught at once: a prolix and opaque statute; complex financial transactions; and economic, political, and social analysis of the effects of the tax law. In addition, I believe that a teacher of tax must be a teacher of language, focusing explicitly and self-consciously on the ambiguous, imprecise, and confusing words that are embedded in tax law and discourse and that constitute a significant obstacle for students taking the basic course in federal income taxation.

The Gifts Of Mary Dunlap (1949-2003), Wendy Webster Williams

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

I guess it never really occurred to me that Mary was mortal. It certainly never crossed my mind that I would somehow be around, alive and kicking, in a world without Mary in it. Mary Cynthia Dunlap, larger than life, a force of nature, who filled up a room with her presence, her tall solid self, her waving arms, her energy, her laugh, her voice, her words and words and more words, her hair that (of course) stood straight up on her head, electrified. Mary who, Saint Frances-like, rescued birds and fed them in her big palms, loved dogs and …

Book Review Of Mark E. Wojcik, Illinois Legal Research (2003), Jennifer Locke Davitt

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Designed as a "teaching tool rather than a bibliographic compilation of state legal research sources" (p.xviii), "Illinois Legal Research" provides practical instruction primarily to law students. It can also serve as a ready reference tool for practitioners and others interested in researching laws specific to Illinois.

Mark Wojcik, associate professor of law at the John Marshall Law School in Chicago, begins with a quick review of basic legal research methods and gives tips for developing effective and efficient research skills. He transitions into in-depth explanations of Illinois law, covering topics such as constitutions, judicial decisions, statutes and ordinances, administrative law, …

The Politics Of (Mis)Recognition: Islamic Law Pedagogy In American Academia, Lama Abu-Odeh

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The combination of presence (of Islamic law) and absence (of legal transplant) in the course materials assigned by Islamic law instructors, the scholarship on law in the Islamic world by Islamic law scholars as well as by Comparatists, betrays an ideological project. I would describe it as an identitarian one with an underlying teleological notion of history. By identitarian I mean the positing of a common identity shared by all "Muslims" based on their religio/legal beliefs, a project that to my mind recalls what I called earlier the "fantasy effect." "[F]antasy is the means by which real relations of identity …

Tribute To Harold Jacobson, John H. Jackson

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Harold Jacobson was not only a fine scholar and excellent teacher who devoted a career to the University of Michigan, but he was also a very trusted colleague and a close friend. His scholarly work was very well recognized and admired. He was one of my colleagues while I taught at Michigan, to whom I willingly recommended students for a multidisciplinary approach to international relations. He was a theorist of political science and international relations who was willing and able to come to grips with the role of law in those fields.

Torts Teaching: From Basic Training To Legal-Process Theory: Dominick Vetri, "Tort Law And Practice", Joseph A. Page

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

It was in the course of my meanderings through the torts-casebook landscape that I came upon Professor Dominick Vetri's entry in the field. The quality that first attracted me was the way it fashioned a user-friendly introduction to the study of law, to the uniqueness of the common law, and to the centrality of process. The book demonstrated an unusual sensitivity to the bewilderment of beginners and made a special effort to anticipate their needs and concerns. Yet what made Vetri's approach particularly intriguing was that it managed to play not only to nervous neophytes, but also to students in …

Legal Scholarship As A Vocation, David Luban

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Law professors occupy a twin role as scholars and (most of them, at any rate) as lawyers. Deborah Rhode has pointed out, in her contribution to this symposium, that the lawyer role of the professor carries with it some frequently overlooked obligations, specifically the obligation to perform pro bono service. I agree with her, and have ventured similar arguments myself. Here I will address the more purely theoretical side of the legal scholar's vocation. The text I will take for my sermon is the famous speech on the scholar's role that Max Weber delivered to a student audience eighty years …

Striving To Teach “Justice, Fairness, And Morality”, Jane H. Aiken

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The MacCrate Report has reinvigorated legal education by identifying fundamental skills and values that are essential to effective lawyering. As we go through the process of ensuring that we train students in these fundamentals, we should not ignore the values identified in the report. At the heart of these values is the injunction that lawyers should strive to promote justice, fairness, and morality. Law schools and law teachers can play a significant role in instilling in our students a passion to ensure justice.