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Full-Text Articles in Legal Education
Tax Law Is An Ideal Subject For Advanced Legal Research, Kincaid C. Brown
Tax Law Is An Ideal Subject For Advanced Legal Research, Kincaid C. Brown
Law Librarian Scholarship
Tax law is an ideal regulatory area for advanced legal research classes when you want to teach a comprehensive research topic putting together all of the various case, regulatory, legislative, and analytical sources that are needed in the real world. Since everyone pays taxes, tax is accessible and a good starting point to expend from the first-year common law focus, especially for those students resistant to regulatory research. Every regulatory area is different in terms of agency practice, resources, and the tools available, but tax law is an ideal example area because the tools used by law firms are great …
Incorporating Social Justice Into The 1l Legal Writing Course: A Tool For Empowering Students Of Color And Of Historically Marginalized Groups And Improving Learning, Sha-Shana Crichton
Incorporating Social Justice Into The 1l Legal Writing Course: A Tool For Empowering Students Of Color And Of Historically Marginalized Groups And Improving Learning, Sha-Shana Crichton
Michigan Journal of Race and Law
The media reports of police shootings of unarmed Black men and women; unprovoked attacks on innocent Jews, Muslims, religious minority groups, and LGBTQ persons; and current pervasive, divisive, and misogynistic rhetoric all cause fear and anxiety in impacted communities and frustrate other concerned citizens. Law students, and especially law students of color and of historically marginalized groups, are often directly or indirectly impacted by these reports and discrimination in all its iterations. As a result, they are stressed because they are fearful and anxious. Research shows that stress impairs learning and cognition. Research also shows that beneficial changes are made …
Using Appellate Clinics To Focus On Legal Writing Skills, Timothy Pinto
Using Appellate Clinics To Focus On Legal Writing Skills, Timothy Pinto
Articles
Five years ago, I went to lunch with a colleague. I was teaching a legal writing course to 1L students, and he taught in a clinic in which 2L and 3L students were required to write short motions and briefs. Several of his students had taken my writing class as 1Ls, and he had a question for me. "What the heck are you teaching these students?" he asked as we sat down. He explained that several of his students were struggling with preparing simple motions. They were not laying out facts clearly. They were not identifying key legal rules. In …
Using Advanced Conflict Waivers To Teach Drafting, Ethics, And Professionalism, Edward R. Becker
Using Advanced Conflict Waivers To Teach Drafting, Ethics, And Professionalism, Edward R. Becker
Articles
On a substantive and ethical level, I tell my students to take on faith that if you were to do all of this and take all this into account, if you were to apply the conflict of interest and the disqualifications rules, it could make it extremely difficult or many of the firms involved in these matters to avoid being conflicted out; especially, if the parties and the kind of firms involved were not dealing with these conflicts and issues until a problem arose. The question I ask my students again at this point is what could be done. What …
How Cosmopolitan Are International Law Professors?, Ryan Scoville, Milan Markovic
How Cosmopolitan Are International Law Professors?, Ryan Scoville, Milan Markovic
Michigan Journal of International Law
This Article offers an empirical answer to a question of interest among scholars of comparative international law: why do American views about international law appear at times to differ from those of other countries? We contend that part of the answer lies in legal education. Conducting a survey of the educational and professional backgrounds of nearly 150 legal academics, we reveal evidence that professors of international law in the United States often lack significant foreign legal experience, particularly outside of the West. Sociological research suggests that this tendency leads professors to teach international law from predominantly nationalistic and Western perspectives, …
Law School Institutional Repositories: A Survey, Kincaid C. Brown
Law School Institutional Repositories: A Survey, Kincaid C. Brown
Law Librarian Scholarship
There has been a dramatic rise in the number of law libraries managing institutional repositories for their law schools. In 2011, there were some 30 law schools with such repositories; now, 80 of the top 100 law schools have their own or participate in a university-wide repository wherein the law school has an identifiable, school-specific collection or community. This article discusses a survey of the of the top 101 law schools, in hopes of facilitating an understanding of the breadth of material to be found in law school institutional repositories.
Transactional Drafting: Using Law Firm Marketing Materials As A Research Resource For Teaching Drafting, Edward R. Becker
Transactional Drafting: Using Law Firm Marketing Materials As A Research Resource For Teaching Drafting, Edward R. Becker
Articles
Since I started teaching drafting, I would like to think that I have continued to learn some lessons about teaching both the substance and the skills of transactional drafting. One of those lessons that I am going to be talking about today is one that I stumbled across by happy accident rather than one that I consciously sought. Specifically, I want to talk about and highlight the ways that law students can use law firm marketing materials to increase their understanding of both drafting and lawyering skills in law school and, hopefully, in practice.
Rookie Mistakes To Avoid, Edward R. Becker
Rookie Mistakes To Avoid, Edward R. Becker
Other Publications
I'm Ted Becker from the University of Michigan. My part of today's presentation is to fall on the sword. I say that because my topic is rookie mistakes to avoid. Many of us up here on the panel aren't rookies but I certainly am. I just completed my first semester of teaching transactional drafting so I'm new to the game, and then when it comes to mistakes, oh yes, there's a bunch of them that we can talk about. Because the semester just ended, these missteps are as fresh in my mind as they could possibly be, and I hope …
Peking University School Of Transnational Law: A New Venture In International Legal Relations, Howard Bromberg
Peking University School Of Transnational Law: A New Venture In International Legal Relations, Howard Bromberg
Articles
The School of Transnational Law (STL) is largely the work of two men of vision, Hai Wen, Vice-President of Peking University, and Jeffrey Lehman, former Dean of the University of Michigan Law School and President of Cornell University. Both were instrumental members of the Joint Center for China-U.S. Law and Policy Studies Institute (the Joint Center), founded in 2005, whose mission is to “nurture harmony between the Chinese and American legal systems through the dissemination of knowledge.” Hai and Lehman aspired to create a law school that would integrate China’s bold entry into global business and international diplomacy with a …
Life's Golden Tree: Empirical Scholarship And American Law, Carl E. Schneider, Lee E. Teitelbaum
Life's Golden Tree: Empirical Scholarship And American Law, Carl E. Schneider, Lee E. Teitelbaum
Articles
What follows is a simplified introduction to legal argument. It is concerned with the scheme of argument and with certain primary definitions and assumptions commonly used in legal opinions and analysis. This discussion is not exhaustive of all the forms of legal argument nor of the techniques of argument you will see and use this year. It is merely an attempt to introduce some commonly used tools in legal argument. It starts, as do most of your first-year courses, with the techniques of the common-law method and then proceeds to build statutory, regulatory, and constitutional sources of law into the …
The Economics Of Open Access Law Publishing, Jessica D. Litman
The Economics Of Open Access Law Publishing, Jessica D. Litman
Articles
The conventional model of scholarly publishing uses the copyright system as a lever to induce commercial publishers and printers to disseminate the results of scholarly research. Recently, we have seen a number of high-profile experiments seeking to use one of a variety of forms of open access scholarly publishing to develop an alternative model. Critics have not quarreled with the goals of open access publishing; instead, they've attacked the viability of the open access business model. If we are examining the economics of open access publishing, we shouldn't limit ourselves to the question whether open access journals have fielded a …
A Look Back On A Half-Century Of Teaching, Writing And Speaking About Criminal Law And Criminal Procedure, Yale Kamisar
A Look Back On A Half-Century Of Teaching, Writing And Speaking About Criminal Law And Criminal Procedure, Yale Kamisar
Articles
When I look back at my academic career, I realize that, as hard as I tried to plan things, various events often overrode my plans.
Avoiding Common Problems In Using Teaching Assistants: Hard Lessons Learned From Peer Teaching Theory And Experience, Edward R. Becker, Rachel Croskery-Roberts
Avoiding Common Problems In Using Teaching Assistants: Hard Lessons Learned From Peer Teaching Theory And Experience, Edward R. Becker, Rachel Croskery-Roberts
Articles
A majority of American law schools rely on teaching assistants to help administer first-year legal writing, research, and analysis (LWRA) courses. Specifically, surveys jointly conducted by the Association of Legal Writing Directors (ALWD) and the Legal Writing Institute (LWI) consistently detail the extensive use many LWRA professors make of teaching assistants. Likewise, Julie Cheslik recognized in her article about her 1994 survey on the use of TAs in the typical LWRA course that "[o]ne of the most prevalent uses of peer teachers in the law school setting is the employment of upper-level law students as teaching assistants in the first-year …
Bye-Bye Bluebook?, Pamela Lysaght, Grace C. Tonner
Bye-Bye Bluebook?, Pamela Lysaght, Grace C. Tonner
Articles
In March 2000, Aspen Law & Business published a new citation manual, the ALWD Citation Manual-A Professional System of Citation.' Developed mostly as a "restatement of citation," the ALWD Citation Manual not only provides the legal academy with a text that simplifies teaching legal citation, but also provides judges and lawyers with a helpful desktop reference book. This article explains why a new citation manual was created and highlights some of its significant features?
Selecting And Designing Effective Legal Writing Problems, Grace C. Tonner, Diana Pratt
Selecting And Designing Effective Legal Writing Problems, Grace C. Tonner, Diana Pratt
Articles
Legal research and writing courses are unlike most substantive first year law school classes in that they teach using the problem method. The success of a legal writing course depends on the quality of the problems. The purpose of this article is to provide some guidance for legal writing professors in designing legal writing problems. The article addresses (1) general considerations in problem design, (2) designing expository problems, (3) designing persuasive problems, and (4) sources of problems. In the first section, we discuss problem design as it relates to the overall goals for teaching the basic forms of legal analysis, …
On Becoming A Law Professor, Terrance Sandalow
On Becoming A Law Professor, Terrance Sandalow
Articles
Thirty-five years ago, when I first joined a law faculty, only one job description existed for law professors, that for the conventional classroom teacher. In the years since, the opportunities available to lawyers interested in teaching have become a bit more varied. In addition to conventional classroom teachers, a growing number of law teachers are employed by law schools to provide what I shall somewhat misleadingly call clinical instruction.1 Although these comments are addressed mainly to men and women interested in classroom teaching, a few lines about clinical teaching may be in order because the initial question for anyone considering …
The Growth Of Interdisciplinary Research And The Industrial Structure Of The Production Of Legal Ideas: A Reply To Judge Edwards, George L. Priest
The Growth Of Interdisciplinary Research And The Industrial Structure Of The Production Of Legal Ideas: A Reply To Judge Edwards, George L. Priest
Michigan Law Review
This brief response will attempt to repair these various deficiencies, though only in part because of the difficulty of the subject. It will try to explain more fully the rise of interdisciplinary legal research and will sketch the broader structure of the production and dissemination of new ideas about law and the legal system. The relationship between legal education and legal practice implicates an understanding of the "market" for legal ideas. To describe ideas as the subject of a "market," of course, has become conventional. In my view, however, the market metaphor most typically distorts our understanding of the issue, …
Judge Edwards' Indictment Of "Impractical" Scholars: The Need For A Bill Of Particulars, Sanford Levinson
Judge Edwards' Indictment Of "Impractical" Scholars: The Need For A Bill Of Particulars, Sanford Levinson
Michigan Law Review
I can summarize my response as follows: Although Judge Edwards' article certainly seems to be leveling a heartfelt indictment, it lacks a sufficiently precise bill of particulars to know exactly whom he has accused of doing what. Nor does one know exactly what penalty Judge Edwards would exact from the miscreants. Unless he supplies such a bill, his indictment should be dismissed, though, presumably, without prejudice to its reinstatement should he wish to do the hard work of supplying evidence for the charges he set out.
Lawyers, Scholars, And The "Middle Ground", Robert W. Gordon
Lawyers, Scholars, And The "Middle Ground", Robert W. Gordon
Michigan Law Review
The Judge seems to be arguing that both teachers and firm lawyers have been seduced from their real vocation by the fatal attraction of neighboring cultures: the practitioners by the commercial culture of their business clients, the academics by the disciplinary paradigms and prestige of theory in the rest of the university. The "deserted middle ground" is the ground of professional practice - practical, yet also public-minded. Perhaps without straining his thesis too far we could ascribe to Judge Edwards a "republican" view of the legal profession, in which legal scholars, practitioners, judges, legislators, and administrators - despite their separate …
Mad Midwifery: Bringing Theory, Doctrine, And Practice To Life, Barbara Bennett Woodhouse
Mad Midwifery: Bringing Theory, Doctrine, And Practice To Life, Barbara Bennett Woodhouse
Michigan Law Review
I share Judge Edwards' concern about the health of legal education and about lawyers as a force in society. I differ, however, in defining the sickness and prescribing the cure, at least when it comes to teaching. In my view, we need to integrate, not to dichotomize and polarize further, the practical and the impractical, the doctrinal and the theoretical. His critique, and my intuitive response to it, challenged me to examine and articulate where we disagree, based on what I have learned in my five years in the classroom and what it is I hope to accomplish in my …
Law Teachers' Writing, James Boyd White
Law Teachers' Writing, James Boyd White
Michigan Law Review
Judge Edwards divides scholarship into the theoretical and the practical, and, while conceding the place and value of both, argues that there is today too much of the former, too little of the latter. The result, he says, is an increasing and unfortunate divide between the life of law practice and the writing of law teachers. One can understand his complaint readily enough, especially coming as it does from an overworked judge. I myself have had perceptions and feelings somewhat like those that seem to animate Judge Edwards, though I would express them differently: for me the relevant line is …
The Anatomy Of A Leading Case: Lawrence V. Fox In The Courts, The Casebooks, And The Commentaries, M. H. Hoeflich, E. Perelmuter
The Anatomy Of A Leading Case: Lawrence V. Fox In The Courts, The Casebooks, And The Commentaries, M. H. Hoeflich, E. Perelmuter
University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform
In spite of the wide diversity of training, practice, and location of lawyers throughout the United States, virtually all share one experience: the standard core curriculum of the first year of law school taught by the case method. The extent to which that experience in parsing cases in contracts, torts, and property shapes the American legal mentality is open to debate, but it undeniably has an impact. The first-year experience socializes law students in the culture of the law. During this period, students learn the language of the law and the ways that lawyers think. During this period, too, students …
Legal Education, Henry M. Bates
Legal Education, Henry M. Bates
Articles
Bates describes the growth of law schools and the changing nature of legal education: "The outstanding fact in legal education in this country during the past twenty-five years is the shift from the law office to the law school as the avenue of approach to the bar.... This increase in the number of institutions teaching law and in the number of students preparing for the bar in this way makes on the whole for improvement, but the ointment is not without its flies..."