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Michigan Law Review

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Full-Text Articles in Legal Education

Will Legal Education Change Post-2020?, Heather K. Gerken Apr 2021

Will Legal Education Change Post-2020?, Heather K. Gerken

Michigan Law Review

The famed book review issue of the Michigan Law Review feels like a reminder of better days. As this issue goes to print, a shocking 554,103 people have died of COVID-19 in the United States alone, the country seems to have begun a long-overdue national reckoning on race, climate change and economic inequality continue to ravage the country, and our Capitol was stormed by insurrectionists with the encouragement of the president of the United States. In the usual year, a scholar would happily pick up this volume and delight in its contents. This year, one marvels at the scholars who …


Affirmative Inaction: A Quantitative Analysis Of Progress Toward “Critical Mass” In U.S. Legal Education, Loren M. Lee Mar 2021

Affirmative Inaction: A Quantitative Analysis Of Progress Toward “Critical Mass” In U.S. Legal Education, Loren M. Lee

Michigan Law Review

Since 1978, the Supreme Court has recognized diversity as a compelling government interest to uphold the use of affirmative action in higher education. Yet the constitutionality of the practice has been challenged many times. In Grutter v. Bollinger, for example, the Court denied its use in perpetuity and suggested a twenty-five-year time limit for its application in law school admissions. Almost two decades have passed, so where do we stand? This Note’s quantitative analysis of the matriculation of and degrees awarded to Black and Latinx students at twenty-nine accredited law schools across the United States illuminates a stark lack of …


The Changing Market For Criminal Law Casebooks, Jens David Ohlin Apr 2016

The Changing Market For Criminal Law Casebooks, Jens David Ohlin

Michigan Law Review

Criminal law is a nasty business. The field takes as its point of departure the indignities that human beings visit upon each other—each one worse than the one before. A book or article about criminal law often reads like a parade of horribles, an indictment of humanity’s descent into moral weakness. For those who teach criminal law, everything else pales in comparison. Neither the business disputes of contract law nor the physical injuries described in a torts casebook can compare with the depravity of what we teach in criminal law. Criminal law professors are often addicted to their subject. Nothing …


In Praise Of Law Books And Law Reviews (And Jargon-Filled Academic Writing), Cass R. Sunstein Apr 2016

In Praise Of Law Books And Law Reviews (And Jargon-Filled Academic Writing), Cass R. Sunstein

Michigan Law Review

Many people, including many lawyers and judges, disparage law reviews and the books that sometimes result from them on the ground that they often deal with abstruse topics, of little interest to the bar, and are sometimes full of jargon, including excessively academic and impenetrable writing. Some of the objections are warranted, but at their best, law books and law reviews show a high level of rigor, discipline, and care; they have a kind of internal morality. What might seem to be jargon is often a product of specialization, similar to what is observed in other fields (such as economics, …


What Is Criminal Law About?, Guyora Binder, Robert Weisberg Apr 2016

What Is Criminal Law About?, Guyora Binder, Robert Weisberg

Michigan Law Review

In “The Changing Market for Criminal Casebooks,” Jens David Ohlin offers an appreciative, but nevertheless critical review of established criminal law casebooks. He then introduces his own offering by describing “a vision for a new casebook” that will better serve the needs and wants of contemporary students. Ohlin begins with the arresting claim that criminal law professors are passionate about their subject because they are fascinated by human depravity. Then, throughout his essay, he stresses efficient, consumer-focused delivery of doctrinal instruction as the defining task of a successful casebook. Moreover, he argues, casebooks should devote less attention to academic theories …


Letting Go Of Old Ideas, William D. Henderson Apr 2014

Letting Go Of Old Ideas, William D. Henderson

Michigan Law Review

Two recently published books make the claim that the legal profession has changed (Steven Harper’s The Lawyer Bubble: A Profession in Crisis) or is changing (Richard Susskind’s Tomorrow’s Lawyers: An Introduction to Your Future). The books are interesting because they discuss the types of changes that are broad, sweeping, and dramatic. In suitable lawyer fashion, both books are unfailingly analytical. They both also argue that the old order is collapsing. The Lawyer Bubble is backward looking and laments the legacy we have squandered, while Tomorrow’s Lawyers is future oriented and offers fairly specific prescriptive advice, particularly to those lawyers entering …


What Ails The Law Schools?, Paul Horwitz Apr 2013

What Ails The Law Schools?, Paul Horwitz

Michigan Law Review

In January 2012, law professors from across the country arrived in Washington, D.C., for the annual conference of the Association of American Law Schools ("AALS"). It was an opportune moment. The legal economy was struggling. Graduates were begging for jobs and struggling with unprecedented levels of debt. The smart talk from the experts was that the legal economy was undergoing a fundamental restructuring. For these and other reasons, law schools were under fire, from both inside and outside of the academy. Judges - including the keynote speaker at the AALS conference himself! - derided legal scholarship as useless. Law school …


Becoming A Legal Scholar, Samuel W. Buell Apr 2012

Becoming A Legal Scholar, Samuel W. Buell

Michigan Law Review

What does it take to become a law professor? With the publication of Brannon Denning, Marcia McCormick, and Jeffrey Lipshaw's Becoming a Law Professor: A Candidate's Guide, we can now say-as academics do that there is a literature on this question. Previously, much of the advice on this topic consisted of postings to blogs and other websites, which comprise probably the most detailed set of writings law professors have created in that medium. The arrival of a monograph pulls this body of advice together, organizes it, adds substantially to it, and supplies a handy tool for the kit of any …


Explaining The Importance Of Public Choice For Law, D. Daniel Sokol Apr 2011

Explaining The Importance Of Public Choice For Law, D. Daniel Sokol

Michigan Law Review

The next generation of government officials, business leaders, and members of civil society likely will draw from the current pool of law school students. These students often lack a foundation of the theoretical and analytical tools necessary to understand law's interplay with government. This highlights the importance of public choice analysis. By framing issues through a public choice lens, these students will learn the dynamics of effective decision making within various institutional settings. Filling the void of how to explain the decision-making process of institutional actors in legal settings is Public Choice Concepts and Applications in Law by Maxwell Steams …


The Future Of Books Related To The Law?, Eugene Volokh Apr 2010

The Future Of Books Related To The Law?, Eugene Volokh

Michigan Law Review

People have been reading books for over 500 years, in more or less the same format. Book technology has changed in some measure during that time. Fonts have become more readable. Books have become more affordable. Still, the general form of the book has remained much the same. But the arrival of e-readers, such as the Kindle and the Sony eBook, offers the possibility of a major change. First, people may shift to reading existing books on those e-readers. Second, the shift may lead them to change the way they use books, for instance by letting people have many reference …


Why Write?, Erwin Chemerinsky Apr 2009

Why Write?, Erwin Chemerinsky

Michigan Law Review

This wonderful collection of reviews of leading recent books about law provides the occasion to ask a basic question: why should law professors write? There are many things that law professors could do with the time they spend writing books and law review articles. More time and attention could be paid to students and to instructional materials. More professors could do pro bono legal work of all sorts. In fact, if law professors wrote much less, teaching loads could increase, faculties could decrease in size, and tuition could decrease substantially. The answer to the question "why write" is neither intuitive …


Against Practice, Anthony V. Alfieri Jan 2009

Against Practice, Anthony V. Alfieri

Michigan Law Review

This Review examines the theory/practice dichotomy in legal education through the prism of the Carnegie Foundation's Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law. Descriptively, it argues that the Foundation's investigation of law school curricular deficiencies in the areas of clinical-lawyer skills, professionalism, and public service overlooks the relevance of critical pedagogies in teaching students how to deal with difference-based identity and how to build cross-cultural community in diverse, multicultural practice settings differentiated by mutable and immutable characteristics such as class, gender, and race. Prescriptively, it argues that the Foundation's remedial call for the curricular integration of clinical lawyer …


Educative Friendship - A Personal Note, Jeanne Gaakeer May 2007

Educative Friendship - A Personal Note, Jeanne Gaakeer

Michigan Law Review

In 1992, when I started my doctorate research in the interdisciplinary field of Law and Literature, The Legal Imagination was one of the first books I read. To European eyes, it was a most unusual book since in continental legal theory in those days, the Anglo-analytical tradition was predominant, and French deconstruction had for some time been the up-and coming stream. Fascinated as I became with Professor White's works, I decided to try to get in contact with him in order to ask him about the genesis of his ideas. So much for the dangers of the intentional fallacy Whimsatt …


Mickey, Can You Spare A Dime? Disneywar, Executive Compensation, Corporate Governance, And Business Law Pedagogy, Kenneth M. Rosen Jan 2007

Mickey, Can You Spare A Dime? Disneywar, Executive Compensation, Corporate Governance, And Business Law Pedagogy, Kenneth M. Rosen

Michigan Law Review

American business executives are under fire. Recent, notorious difficulties at companies such as the Enron Corporation brought attention to these individuals. Notwithstanding the conclusion of the trials of some of those top executives, skepticism remains about the inner workings of U.S. corporations and the quality of corporate governance. Drawing special scrutiny from some quarters is the compensation granted to corporate officers and directors. For instance, the timing of certain stock option grants, a key component of some compensation packages, raised ire because of those options' supposed backdating and fortuitous proximity to increases in share prices. Further, some questioned more generally …


A Teacher, H. Jefferson Powell Jan 2007

A Teacher, H. Jefferson Powell

Michigan Law Review

James Boyd White is, above all, a teacher. Of course, that is in fact an inexact statement: Jim White is many things, some of them of greater or more central human importance - husband, father, friend, person of faith. But in this essay my concern is with Jim as an academic, and in that context I believe the title teacher captures best his goals and his achievement.


The Multistate Bar Exam As A Theory Of Law, Daniel J. Solove May 2006

The Multistate Bar Exam As A Theory Of Law, Daniel J. Solove

Michigan Law Review

What is the most widely read work of jurisprudence by those in the legal system? Is it H.L.A. Hart's The Concept of Law? Ronald Dworkin's Law's Empire? No. It is actually the Multistate Bar Exam ("Bar Exam"). Perhaps no other work on law has been so widely read by those in the legal profession. Although the precise text of the Bar Exam is different every year, it presents a jurisprudence that transcends the specific language of its text. Each year, thousands of lawyers-to-be ponder over it, learning its profound teachings on the meaning of the law. They study …


Herbert Hart Elucidated, A. W. Brian Simpson May 2006

Herbert Hart Elucidated, A. W. Brian Simpson

Michigan Law Review

There are a number of good biographies of judges, but very few of individual legal academics; indeed, so far as American legal academics are concerned, the only one of note that comes to mind is William Twining's life of Karl Llewellyn. Llewellyn was, of course, a major figure in the evolution of American law, and his unusual life was a further advantage for his biographer. In this biography, Nicola Lace has taken as her subject an English academic who also had an unusual career, one whose contribution was principally not to the evolution of the English legal system but to …


What Nobody Knows, John C. P. Goldberg May 2006

What Nobody Knows, John C. P. Goldberg

Michigan Law Review

By meditating on displays of cunning in literature, history, and current events, Don Herzog in his new book isolates and probes difficult puzzles concerning how to understand and evaluate human conduct. The point of the exercise is not to offer a system or framework for resolving these puzzles. Quite the opposite, Cunning aims to discomfit its academic audience in two ways. First, it sets out to show that some of the central dichotomies of modem thought-those between means and ends, reason and desire, self-interest and morality, fact and value, virtue and vice, knowledge and politics, authenticity and artifice, and appearance …


Inspiring Generations, Nancy J. King Jan 2004

Inspiring Generations, Nancy J. King

Michigan Law Review

It is difficult to imagine Michigan Law School without Yale Kamisar. He seems as much a part of the place as the Reading Room, the heavy oak doors, and the sounds of the marching band practicing, the steam heaters knocking, and the footsteps on the stone floors. That Michigan students will no longer experience his inspiration and guidance in person is sad, but inevitable. Fortunately, law students everywhere, and the law that they have learned to love, will never escape his influence. The editors of this issue have encouraged us to relate our own experiences with Yale. Mine started long …


Professor Yale Kamisar: "Awesome", Harry T. Edwards Jan 2004

Professor Yale Kamisar: "Awesome", Harry T. Edwards

Michigan Law Review

Yale Kamisar arrived in Ann Arbor in the fall of 1965, just after I graduated from the University of Michigan Law School, so I never had him as a teacher. We were colleagues, however, for almost ten years during the 1970s when we were both members of the Michigan faculty. And we have remained good friends ever since. When the editors of the Michigan Law Review asked me if I would submit a "tribute" to Professor Kamisar commemorating his retirement from the faculty, I was happy to accept the invitation. Yale is one of my heroes in the academy - …


Yale Kamisar The Teacher, Jeffrey S. Lehman Jan 2004

Yale Kamisar The Teacher, Jeffrey S. Lehman

Michigan Law Review

I first heard Yale Kamisar's name in the spring of 1977 while deciding where to go to law school. The then Dean of Admissions at Michigan suggested I call a graduate practicing law near me in upstate New York. The graduate eloquently endorsed Michigan. But what impressed me most was his statement, "When you go to Michigan you must be sure to take a course from a professor named Yale Kamisar. That course changed the way I thought about law. Every day we'd go to class and talk about interesting cases and I was always confused. But at the very …


Tribute To Yale Kamisar, Ruth Bader Ginsburg Jan 2004

Tribute To Yale Kamisar, Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Michigan Law Review

When the editors of this issue told me of Professor Yale Kamisar's decision to retire from full-time teaching after a near half century of law faculty service, two thoughts came immediately to mind. First, I thought of the large loss to Michigan students unable to attend his classes and to faculty colleagues at Ann Arbor unable routinely to engage his bright mind. Second, I thought it altogether right for the Michigan Law Review to publish an issue honoring one of the Law School's most prized professors. When invited to write a tribute, I could not resist saying yes.


Yale Kamisar: Warrior Scholar, Francis A. Allen Jan 2004

Yale Kamisar: Warrior Scholar, Francis A. Allen

Michigan Law Review

My association with Yale Kamisar dates back to the 1950s. At that time I became aware of the interesting publications of a young faculty member at the University of Minnesota. The articles were well done, most of them dealing with the Supreme Court's notable expansion of constitutional doctrine relating to criminal procedure, then at full tide, a field in which I also was writing. In addition, Yale had published a remarkable article on the subject of euthanasia, impressive for the thoroughness of its research and the clarity and force of its argument. Fortunately, I decided to write to Yale and …


Saying Goodbye To A Legend: A Tribute To Yale Kamisar - My Mentor, Teacher, And Friend, Eve Brensike Primus Jan 2004

Saying Goodbye To A Legend: A Tribute To Yale Kamisar - My Mentor, Teacher, And Friend, Eve Brensike Primus

Michigan Law Review

I remember it as though it was yesterday - dozens of students filing into Hutchins Hall for their first criminal procedure class. The legendary Yale Kamisar walked briskly to the front of the room, his upper body moving first slightly forward and then ever so slightly backward in almost a rocking manner. He carried nothing except for a two-inch black notebook, tattered at the edges and marked with brightly colored tabs protruding from each page. Paying no attention to the hundreds of eyes fixed on his every move, he dropped the notebook on the podium, stepped up to the blackboard, …


Yale Kamisar: Collaborator, Colleague, And Friend, Jesse H. Choper Jan 2004

Yale Kamisar: Collaborator, Colleague, And Friend, Jesse H. Choper

Michigan Law Review

Yale Kamisar was absent when I was first interviewed by a number of faculty members from the University of Minnesota Law School where he was then teaching. These sessions took place between Christmas and New Year's in 1959 (when I was a third-year student at Penn), at the annual meeting of the Association of American Law Schools, that year in St. Louis. Yale had planned to be there, I was told, but cancelled because he was behind schedule in completing an article. So while I didn't meet him on that occasion, I surely learned what would ring familiar many times …


"What Is A Kamisar?", Wayne R. Lafave Jan 2004

"What Is A Kamisar?", Wayne R. Lafave

Michigan Law Review

My good and old friend Yale Kamisar is said to be "retiring" after a remarkable life in academe spanning almost half a century. I deem it my extraordinary good fortune to have been able to count Yale as a friend for thirty-seven of those years (not that we were enemies the rest of the time), and to have been able to serve as a collaborator of his, working together in the vineyards of the law, for virtually the entirety of our acquaintance. And thus I am especially delighted to have this opportunity to offer up a "fair and balanced" appraisal …


Reflections (On Law Review, Legal Education, Law Practice, And My Alma Mater), Harry T. Edwards Aug 2002

Reflections (On Law Review, Legal Education, Law Practice, And My Alma Mater), Harry T. Edwards

Michigan Law Review

It is an honor for me to offer some reflections in commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the Michigan Law Review. I have many fond memories of my time at the University of Michigan Law School, both as a law student and a member of the faculty. I was therefore pleased to accept the assignment to present the keynote address at the Centennial Celebration banquet. It is hard for me to believe that it has been almost 40 years since I was invited to serve on the Michigan Law Review. I remember it like it was yesterday, for it was …


The Rhetoric Of Constitutional Law, Erwin Chemerinsky Aug 2002

The Rhetoric Of Constitutional Law, Erwin Chemerinsky

Michigan Law Review

I spend much of my time dealing with Supreme Court opinions. Usually, I download and read them the day that they are announced by the Court. I edit them for my casebook and teach them to my students. I write about them, lecture about them, and litigate about them. My focus, like I am sure most everyone's, is functional: I try to discern the holding, appraise the reasoning, ascertain the implications, and evaluate the decision's desirability. Increasingly, though, I have begun to think that this functional approach is overlooking a crucial aspect of Supreme Court decisions: their rhetoric. I use …


Foreword, Jeffrey S. Lehman Jun 2002

Foreword, Jeffrey S. Lehman

Michigan Law Review

Why celebrate? Some people hate law reviews. They would think it unseemly to celebrate a centennial such as this. They might compare it to a 1448 celebration of the first hundred years of the Bubonic Plague. Their criticisms are familiar. Why do we entrust the development of the scholarly canon to second- and third-year law students? Why do law reviews publish really bad things and reject really good things? Why do they encourage a style of argument in which each article must begin by summarizing all that has been written before? Why do they insist that any assertion of fact, …


Foreword: Interdisciplinarity, Kathleen M. Sullivan May 2002

Foreword: Interdisciplinarity, Kathleen M. Sullivan

Michigan Law Review

In the beginning, there was law. Then came law-and. Law and society, law and economics, law and history, law and literature, law and philosophy, law and finance, statistics, game theory, psychology, anthropology, linguistics, critical theory, cultural studies, political theory, political science, organizational behavior, to name a few. The variety of extralegal disciplines represented in the books reviewed in this issue attests to this explosion of perspectives on the law in legal scholarship. This development makes clear that the vocation of the legal scholar has shifted from that of priest to theologian. No longer is a law professor successful by virtue …