Legal Education Commons^™

The White Whale: Bringing Emotion And Relevance To The Contemporary Trusts And Estates Course, Wayne M. Gazur

Publications

No abstract provided.

Legal Academia And The Blindness Of The Elites, Paul Campos

Publications

No abstract provided.

Clinical Collaborations: Going Global To Advance Social Entrepreneurship, Deborah Burand, Susan R. Jones, Jonathan Ng, Alicia E. Plerhoples

Articles

In the summer of 2012, transactional law clinics from three U.S. law schools: George Washington University; Georgetown University; and the University of Michigan launched a collaboration to serve a common client — Ashoka, a global nonprofit organization that supports close to 3,000 social entrepreneurs across 76 countries. While clinic collaborations within universities happen occasionally, clinic collaborations across universities are unusual. This essay focuses on the motivations, operations, lessons, and next steps of this cross-university, clinical collaboration aimed at advancing social entrepreneurship globally. Specifically, this essay examines why the collaboration was launched, how the collaboration is structured, what the collaboration offers …

Testing, Diversity, And Merit: A Reply To Dan Subotnik And Others, Andrea A. Curcio, Carol L. Chomsky, Eileen Kaufman

Scholarly Works

The false dichotomy between achieving diversity and rewarding merit frequently surfaces in discussions about decisions on university and law school admissions, scholarships, law licenses, jobs, and promotions. “Merit” judgments are often based on the results of standardized tests meant to predict who has the best chance to succeed if given the opportunity to do so. This Article criticizes over-reliance on standardized tests and responds to suggestions that challenging the use of such tests reflects a race-comes-first approach that chooses diversity over merit. Discussing the firefighter exam that led to the Supreme Court decision in Ricci v. DiStefano, as well as …

Teaching Llcs Through A Problem-Based Approach, Michelle M. Harner, Robert J. Rhee

UF Law Faculty Publications

Case studies and case simulations can be used to teach LLCs with an eye toward training business lawyers. These tools can be used in the traditional four-credit Business Associations (BA) course to supplement traditional teaching materials with mini-case studies that accent and apply analysis of primary legal sources. Alternatively, case studies and case simulations can be the centerpiece of a specialized course on LLCs. We discuss both approaches in this short essay.

Deal Deconstructions, Case Studies, And Case Simulations: Toward Practice Readiness With New Pedagogies In Teaching Business And Transactional Law, Michelle M. Harner, Robert J. Rhee

UF Law Faculty Publications

In this short commentary, we explore the use of two interrelated pedagogical methods for teaching transactional and business law. The first method is deal deconstruction, which analyzes the set of final deal documents and outcomes. This method is backward-looking, conducting a post-mortem on business transactions and analyzing the parties’ choices memorialized in the agreement against the legal and financial alternatives. The second method involves case studies and simulations, which are commonly seen in business schools. This method is forward-looking, exposing students to the uncertainties and situational contexts of doing deals and deal-related litigation. Together, these complementary methods help students understand …

Visions Of The Future Of (Legal) Education, Michael J. Madison

Articles

One law professor takes a stab at imagining an ideal law school of the future and describing how to get there. The Essay spells out a specific possible vision, taking into account changes to the demand for legal services and changes to the economics and composition of the legal profession. That thought experiment leads to a series of observations about values and vision in legal education in general and about what it might take to move any vision forward.

Individual Academic Freedom: An Ordinary Concern Of The First Amendment, Scott R. Bauries

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Our Nation is deeply committed to safeguarding academic freedom, which is of transcendent value to all of us, and not merely to the teachers concerned. That freedom is therefore a special concern of the First Amendment, which does not tolerate laws that cast a pall of orthodoxy over the classroom.

There is some argument that expression related to academic scholarship or classroom instruction implicates additional constitutional interests that are not fully accounted for by this Court's customary employee-speech jurisprudence. We need not, and for that reason do not, decide whether the analysis we conduct today would apply in the same …

Toward A Critical Corporate Law Pedagogy And Scholarship, André Ddouglas Pond Cummings, Steven A. Ramirez, Cheryl L. Wade

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

In recent years, the publicly held corporation has assumed a central position in both the economic and political spheres of American life. Economically, the public corporation has long acted as the key institution within American capitalism. Politically, the public corporation now can use its economic might to sway electoral outcomes as never before. Indeed, individuals who control public firms wield more economic power and political power today than ever before. These truths profoundly shape American society. The power, control, and role of the public corporation under law and regulation, therefore, hold more importance than ever before.

Even though corporate …

Process, Practice, And Principle: Teaching National Security Law And The Knowledge That Matters Most, James E. Baker

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The meaningful application of national security law requires a commitment to substantive knowledge, good process, and a capacity to cope (and indeed thrive) under the prevailing conditions of practice. This paper describes how and why to teach these three essential elements of national security law from an academic and practitioner perspective.

The paper starts with substantive law, placing emphasis not just on the breadth of knowledge and interpretive skills required, but also on the importance of depth, perspective, theory, purpose, history, and legal values in teaching the law. Next, the paper describes the importance of timely, meaningful, and contextual process, …

(Anti)Canonizing Courts, Jamal Greene

Faculty Scholarship

Within U.S. constitutional culture, courts stand curiously apart from the society in which they sit. Among the many purposes this process of alienation serves is to “neutralize” the cognitive dissonance produced by Americans’ current self-conception and the role our forebears’ social and political culture played in producing historic injustice. The legal culture establishes such dissonance in part by structuring American constitutional argument around anticanonical cases: most especially “Dred Scott v. Sandford,” “Plessy v. Ferguson,” and “Lochner v. New York.” The widely held view that these decisions were “wrong the day they were decided” emphasizes the role of independent courts in …

Intellectual Diversity In The Legal Academy, Nicholas Quinn Rosenkranz

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Elite law faculties are overwhelmingly liberal. Jim Lindgren has proven the point empirically. The author adds his impressions from Georgetown Law School to reinforce the point. Georgetown Law School is a faculty of 120, and, to the author's knowledge, the number of professors who are openly conservative, or libertarian, or Republican or, in any sense, to the right of the American center, is three—three out of 120. There are more conservatives on the nine-member United States Supreme Court than there are on this 120-member faculty. Moreover, the ideological median of the other 117 seems to lie not just left of …

Clinical Collaborations: Going Global To Advance Social Entrepreneurship, Deborah Burand, Susan R. Jones, Jonathan Ng, Alicia E. Plerhoples

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In the summer of 2012, transactional law clinics from three U.S. law schools: George Washington University; Georgetown University; and the University of Michigan launched a collaboration to serve a common client—Ashoka, a global nonprofit organization that supports close to 3,000 social entrepreneurs across 76 countries. While clinic collaborations within universities happen occasionally, clinic collaborations across universities are unusual. This essay focuses on the motivations, operations, lessons, and next steps of this cross-university, clinical collaboration aimed at advancing social entrepreneurship globally. Specifically, this essay examines why the collaboration was launched, how the collaboration is structured, what the collaboration offers clients and …

A Writing Revolution: Using Legal Writing's 'Hobble' To Solve Legal Education's Problem, Kristen Konrad Robbins-Tiscione

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The attached article responds to a 2011 article by John Lynch, published in the Journal of Legal Education, that urged legal writing faculty to return to an outmoded and ineffective writing pedagogy, the “product approach,” on the grounds that it would make teaching legal writing easier. This article builds on the work of Carol McCrehan Parker and others interested in writing across the curriculum and argues that the only way to reduce legal writing’s “hobble” and to solve legal education’s problem is to create a six-semester writing requirement. The reason law students are graduating without adequate preparation for practice is …

Guidelines For The Self Evaluation Of Legal Education Clinics And Clinical Programs, J.P. "Sandy" Ogilvy

Scholarly Articles

This volume is an effort to present a comprehensive set of guidelines for the self-evaluation of legal clinics and programs. The last time that guidelines were developed for legal clinics was in 1980 when a joint AALS and ABA Committee on Guidelines for Clinical Legal Education published its Guidelines for Clinical Legal Education. The present guidelines trace their lineage to the efforts of a group of clinicians working under the auspices of the CLEA-AALS Section on Clinical Legal Education Joint Task Force on Clinical Standards, which was formed in 1995 and was active for several years. These guidelines also draw …

Narrowing The Gap Between Rights And Resources: Finding A Role For Law Students In Court-Annexed Resource Centers, Faith Mullen

Scholarly Articles

This article relates the experience of law students from The Catholic University of America providing assistance in the Small Claims Resource Center during the past eight years. During this time, the District of Columbia Bar Pro Bono Program has played a pivotal role in the development and the ongoing success of court-annexed resource centers in the District of Columbia. They have recruited law firms and legal services providers (including law school clinics) to staff the resource centers, sought changes in the rules of professional responsibility, and developed intake forms and model pleadings. Their steady oversight, provided by knowledgeable and resourceful …

Tax Recognition, Barry Cushman

Journal Articles

This article was prepared for the St. Louis University Law Journal’s “Teaching Trusts & Estates” issue. Many law students take a course in Trusts & Estates, but comparatively few enroll in a class devoted to the federal wealth transfer taxes. For most law students, the Trusts & Estates course provides the only opportunity for exposure to some of the basic features of the estate tax, the gift tax, the generation-skipping transfer tax, and some related features of the income tax. The coverage demands of the typical Trusts & Estates course do not allow for intensive discussion of these issues, but …

What Cornell Veterinary School Taught Me About Legal Education, Tina Stark

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Teaching Llcs By Design, Anne M. Tucker

Faculty Publications By Year

Experiential learning is intended to contextualize studying the law and equip students with lawyering skills required in practice. “Experiential education integrates theory and practice by combining academic inquiry with actual experience.” From a pedagogical perspective, LLC-based experiential exercises provide an efficient vehicle to teach the traditional doctrinal foundation of LLCs such as the unique attributes of the entity i.e., limited liability with pass-through taxation and flexible management structures), the default statutory rules that govern LLCs, and a host of transactional skills.

Teaching unincorporated business entities, particularly LLCs, presents a unique platform to design a course — or a course element …

Reaching Backward And Stretching Forward: Teaching For Transfer In Law School Clinics, Shaun Archer, James P. Eyster, James J. Kelly Jr., Tonya Kowalski, Colleen F. Shanahan

Faculty Scholarship

In thinking about education, teachers may spend more time considering what to teach than how to teach. Unfortunately, traditional teaching techniques have limited effectiveness in their ability to help students retain and apply the knowledge either in later classes or in their professional work. What, then, is the value of our teaching efforts if students are unable to transfer the ideas and skills they have learned to later situations? Teaching for transfer is important to the authors of this article, four clinical professors and one psychologist.

The purpose of this article is to provide an introduction to some of the …

Empathy And Reasoning In Context: Thinking About Anti-Gay Bullying, Kris Franklin

Articles & Chapters

“Empathy” has negative connotations for many legal theorists, who may conceive of it as subjective, lacking in intellectual rigor, and emphasizing sensitivity over reason. Even those legal scholars who have embraced the importance of empathy in legal work have emphasized its affective dimensions: pointing out that empathy is central to human relations and motivations, and is therefore a crucial lawyering skill. This paper builds on social science literature that identifies both cognitive and affective dimensions to empathy, and recasts empathy as in part a central component to higher-order thinking in law. It draws examples from empathetic reasoning in foundational cases …

An Examination Of The Challenges, Successes And Setbacks For Clinical Legal Education In Eastern Europe, Dubravka Aksamovic, Philip Genty

Faculty Scholarship

The authors first met in 2000, and have collaborated in conferences, workshops, and other projects since then. We also represent two sides of an international exchange that has frequently occurred in the past 15 years: a European law teacher who attends training sessions, networks with colleagues from other European universities, learns about American models of clinical education, and possibly receives some outside funding; and an American law teacher who is graciously hosted by Europeans, promotes American models of clinical education, and, one hopes, observes, listens and learns about the European system. We are also experienced teachers within our own universities …

Deals Or No Deals: Integrating Transactional Skills In The First Year Curriculum, Lynnise E. Pantin

Faculty Scholarship

This article joins a growing body of scholarship on the pedagogy of transactional law and skills. This article challenges the traditional pedagogy of teaching law students to think like a lawyer and argues that law schools should shift the analytical framework of a litigation-dominated model, which is typically taught in the first year, to a model that incorporates transactional skills teaching into the first year law school curriculum. This approach will (1) create a greater balance of skills taught in the first year and (2) address the mandate to train more practice-ready lawyers. This article argues that the best place …