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Clinics & Externships: Reflections From The Front Lines, University Of Michigan Law School

Newsletters

Fall 2012 / Winter 2013 issue of the University of Michigan Law School Clinics' newsletter.

Clinic Newsletter, University Of Michigan Law School

Newsletters

Fall 2012 issue of the University of Michigan Law School Clinics' newsletter

Developing A Teacher Training Program For New Clinical Teachers, Wallace J. Mlyniec

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Where to Begin? Training New Teachers in the Art of Clinical Pedagogy, an article published in the Spring, 2012, issue of the Clinical Law Review, gave a full description of Georgetown’s course in clinical pedagogy. That article set forth some of the critical questions new teachers must ask and answer by describing the goals, content, and execution of the course.

This article describes hows, whens, and whys of the program, focusing on how our faculty, over a period of many years, created and revised the curriculum for the Pedagogy course. It also describes the choices we made as we …

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

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 …

Where To Begin? Training New Teachers In The Art Of Clinical Pedagogy, Wallace J. Mlyniec

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Legal educators and the legal academy have long made the mistaken assumption that new teachers have an intuitive grasp of teaching methodology based on their experiences as students, and that therefore they can begin and continue teaching throughout their careers without any understanding of teaching methodology. Clinical teachers in particular face unique pedagogical challenges relating to class goals, supervisory methods, feedback, and grading. These challenges are magnified by the existence of clients and by the need to engage with students regarding the ethics of legal practice and cultural difference.

This article attempts to set forth some of the critical questions …

Report On The 2010-11 Csale Survey Of Applied Legal Education, David A. Santacroce, Robert R. Kuehn

Other Publications

This report summarizes the results of the Center for the Study of Applied Legal Education’s (CSALE) 2010-11 Survey of Applied Legal Education. The 2010-11 Survey was CSALE’s second triennial survey. The results provide valuable insight into the state and nature of applied legal education in areas like program design, capacity, administration, funding, pedagogy, and the role of applied legal education and educators in the legal academy. Law schools, legal educators, scholars, and governmental agencies examining or navigating issues in these and other areas rely on CSALE’s data. They do so with the summary results provided here, in the Report on …

The Status Of Clinical Faculty In The Legal Academy: Report Of The Task Force On The Status Of Clinicians And The Legal Academy, Bryan L. Adamson, Bradford Colbert, Kathy Hessler, Katherine R. Kruse, Robert R. Kuehn, Mary Helen Mcneal, Calvin G. C. Pang, David A. Santacroce

Other Publications

In the midst of ongoing debates within the legal academy and the American Bar Association on the need for 'practice-ready" law school graduates through enhanced attention to law clinics and externships and on the status of faculty teaching in those courses, this report identifies and evaluates the most appropriate modes for clinical faculty appointments. Drawing on data collected through a survey of clinical program directors and faculty, the report analyzes the five most identifiable clinical faculty models: unitary tenure track; clinical tenure track; long-term contract; short-term contract; and clinical fellowships. It determines that, despite great strides in the growth of …

Clinical Faculty In The Legal Academy: Hiring, Promotion And Retention, Bryan L. Adamson, Calvin G. C. Pang, Bradford Colbert, Kathy Hessler, Katherine R. Kruse, Robert R. Kuehn, Mary Helen Mcneal, David A. Santacroce

Articles

The Chair of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) Section on Clinical Legal Education appointed us in 2005 to the Task Force on the Status of Clinicians and the Legal Academy (Task Force) to examine who is teaching in clinical programs and using clinical methodologies in American law schools and to identify the most appropriate models for clinical appointments within the legal academy. Our charges reflected two ongoing concerns: 1) the need to collect valid, reliable, and helpful data that would inform discussions on the breadth of clinical education in the legal academy and the status of clinical educators …

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" …