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Full-Text Articles in Legal Education

The Crisis In Legal Education: Dabbling In Disaster Planning, Kyle P. Mcentee, Patrick J. Lynch, Derek M. Tokaz Sep 2012

The Crisis In Legal Education: Dabbling In Disaster Planning, Kyle P. Mcentee, Patrick J. Lynch, Derek M. Tokaz

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

The legal education crisis has already struck for many recent law school graduates, signaling potential disaster for law schools already struggling with their own economic challenges. Law schools have high fixed costs caused by competition between schools, the unchecked expansion of federal loan programs, a widely exploited information asymmetry about graduate employment outcomes, and a lack of financial discipline masquerading as innovation. As a result, tuition is up, jobs are down, and skepticism of the value of a J.D. has never been higher. If these trends do not reverse course, droves of students will continue to graduate with debt that …


The Crisis Of The American Law School, Paul Campos Sep 2012

The Crisis Of The American Law School, Paul Campos

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

The economist Herbert Stein once remarked that if something cannot go on forever, it will stop. Over the past four decades, the cost of legal education in America has seemed to belie this aphorism: it has gone up relentlessly. Private law school tuition increased by a factor of four in real, inflation-adjusted terms between 1971 and 2011, while resident tuition at public law schools has nearly quadrupled in real terms over just the past two decades. Meanwhile, for more than thirty years, the percentage of the American economy devoted to legal services has been shrinking. In 1978 the legal sector …


Learning From The Unique And Common Challenges: Clinical Legal Education In Jordan, Nisreen Mahasneh, Kimberly A. Thomas Jan 2012

Learning From The Unique And Common Challenges: Clinical Legal Education In Jordan, Nisreen Mahasneh, Kimberly A. Thomas

Articles

Legal education worldwide is undergoing scrutiny for its failure to graduate students who have the problem-solving abilities, skills, and professional values necessary for the legal profession.1 Additionally, law schools at universities in the Middle East have found themselves in an unsettled environment, where greater demands for practical education are exacerbated by several factors such as high levels of youth unemployment. More specifically, in Jordan there is a pressing need for universities to respond to this criticism and to accommodate new or different methods of legal education. Clinical legal education is one such method.3 We use the term "clinical legal education" …


Externship Demographics Across Two Decades With Lessons For Future Surveys, J.P. "Sandy" Ogilvy, Sudeb Basu Jan 2012

Externship Demographics Across Two Decades With Lessons For Future Surveys, J.P. "Sandy" Ogilvy, Sudeb Basu

Scholarly Articles

Sudeb Basu (J.D., Catholic University, 2011) and Professor J.P. “Sandy” Ogilvy (Catholic University) report on the results of a 2007-2009 national survey of externship programs at American law schools and compare many of the data points to previous surveys of externship programs, the 2007-2008 CSALE survey, and some ABA/LSAC data, to chart the growth and increasing sophistication and complexity of the pedagogy associated with legal externships. Some of the data discussed include limits on the number of externship credits or externship courses, student involvement in externships, the distribution of credits awarded for externship courses, the average number of hours of …