Legal Education Commons^™

Active Learning Benefits All Learning Styles: 10 Easy Ways To Improve Your Teaching, Barbara Tyler

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Two things made me a better teacher: my blind student and my deaf student. I realized when forced to confront my deficiencies several years ago that I did not speak enough for the blind student's auditory needs, nor did I provide enough images for the deaf student's visual learning needs. I corrected those deficiencies. Yet, I was still dissatisfied with the extent of my students' retained knowledge when I assessed their learning through class questions, exercises, quizzes, and tests.Then I learned that I was a kinesthetic learner. I began to read about learning styles and found that my own impatience …

I Didn't Take The Road Less Traveled, And What A Long, Strange Trip It's Been, Brian A. Glassman

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

The author describes his career path and the ways he has sought to combine his interests in law and art. The article concludes with ten survival tips to help others on their career journeys.

Beyond Training: Law Librarianship's Quest For The Pedagogy Of Legal Research Education, Paul D. Callister

Faculty Works

The paper (I) outlines the nature and extent of the dissatisfaction with legal research instruction and demonstrates that the problem predates computer-assisted legal research, (II) presents the history of the debate (focusing on a heated exchange between advocates of a "process-oriented" approach and proponents of the traditional, "bibliographic" methods), and (III) presents the requisite elements of a satisfactory pedagogical model, discussing various issues surrounding each of these elements.

In part III, the paper proposes that a complete pedagogical model requires (A) an identifiable and fully understood objective in teaching legal research (which objective must distinguish between the kinds of research …

Evidence And The One Liner: A Beginning Evidence Professor’S Exploration Of The Use Of Humor In The Law School Classroom, John J. Capowski

John J. Capowski

No abstract provided.

The Phenomenon Of Substitution And The Statute Quia Emptores, Ronald B. Brown

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Ruminations On Tenure, Ronald E. Wheeler

Faculty Scholarship

As a newer law librarian having just completed by first year in a non-tenure track position, I often find myself wondering what my professional life would be like if my position were tenure track. After some reflection and discussion with peers, I've formulated the following thoughts on the subject of tenure for academic law librarians.

What We Share, Thomas D. Eisele

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

Anyone involved in legal education today may wonder where we are, and what we are doing, in our task of teaching. While I am no better placed than anyone else to be able to offer anything approaching a synoptic view of legal education, I can still offer a few thoughts on teaching law. These thoughts are meant neither as a dire warning nor as a call to action. They are published, rather, out of a desire to share some ideas I have culled from the experience of teaching these past twenty years in law school. Teachers and students who find …

Situating Thinking Like A Lawyer Within Legal Pedagogy , David T. Butleritchie

Cleveland State Law Review

The phrase "thinking like a lawyer" maintains as much relevance to today's legal academy as it ever has. In the face of recent criticism that the ideas connected with the concept of "thinking like a lawyer," e.g., the case law method with its focus on the adversarial litigation process, the fact is that legal educators must still teach their students to "think like lawyers." Critics have complained that the narrow focus of this traditional concept unduly restricts the ability of law students to develop refined analytical and practical skills which go beyond the adversarial context. In one sense these critics …

Using The Pervasive Method Of Teaching Legal Ethics In A Property Course, Thomas L. Shaffer

Journal Articles

The first-year introductory course in property law is about all that is left of the traditional black-box curriculum. It is where beginning law students cope with and despair of the arcana of English common law; where, with more detachment than, say, in the torts course, analysis of appellate opinions is what "thinking like a lawyer" means, with no more than peripheral and begrudging attention to modem legislation and administrative law; where legal reasoning is a stretching exercise and initiatory discipline. And, incidentally, surviving bravely the rude invasion of teachers of public law, it is where a teaching lawyer can point …

Teaching Torts Without Insurance: A Second-Best Solution, David A. Fischer, Robert H. Jerry Ii

UF Law Faculty Publications

Teachers, scholars and practitioners have long appreciated the symbiotic relationship of torts and insurance. The authors examine how the study of torts is enriched when insurance concepts play a role in students' analysis. The discussion is divided into two parts. Part I offers a "macro" perspective on the connections between tort and insurance, summarizing the principal issues in play when the purposes of tort law are analyzed against the backdrop of first-party and third-party insurance compensation mechanisms. Part II provides a "micro" perspective on tort-insurance connections, taking a sample of discrete tort law principles, representative of those discussed in a …

Make The Student The Professor, Katharine F. Nelson

Katharine F. Nelson

No abstract provided.

Reflections On Good (Law) Teaching, Mary Kate Kearney, Mary Jane Kearney

Mary Kate Kearney

No abstract provided.

Teaching Contracts From A Socioeconomic Perspective, Jeffrey L. Harrison

UF Law Faculty Publications

This essay begins with a brief discussion of what socioeconomics is. In this section I also address whether one must be well versed in conventional economics in order to apply a socioeconomic perspective. I then discuss the basic themes that are present throughout my contracts class that stem from my interest in socioeconomics. Underlying these themes is the more fundamental goal of devising methodologies for assessing the quality of contracts. By quality, I mean something more and perhaps more subtle than whether the parties have conformed to all the formal requirements. Instead, I encourage students to examine whether all of …

Bringing The Practice To The Classroom: An Approach To The Professionalism Problem, Steven H. Goldberg

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

The first section of this article presents a brief history and description of a professionalism movement that continues to urge law schools to do more to solve the “professionalism problem.” The second discusses legal education's failure to bring professionalism into the law school curriculum. The third describes the structure and teaching method of The Practice—a different kind of course about professionalism—while the fourth discusses the professionalism content of the course. I conclude with a plea for law faculty to direct their considerable talents toward collecting stories and data about the profession and creating material to facilitate law school courses that …

Of Learning Civil Procedure, Practicing Civil Practice, And Studying A Civil Action: A Low-Cost Proposal To Introduce First-Year Law Students To The Neglected Maccrate Skills, Raleigh Hannah Levine

Faculty Scholarship

This article proposes three exercises designed to help introduce law students to four of the lawyering skills that the American Bar Association's MacCrate Report has identified as fundamental, but that legal scholarship has largely ignored: factual investigation, client counseling, recognizing and resolving ethical dilemmas, and organization and management of legal work. My goal in devising these exercises has been to allow a professor teaching a traditional, first-year civil procedure class to incorporate them into her syllabus at low cost to herself (in terms of time expended and doctrine sacrificed) and to the law school as an institution (in terms of …

Teaching Interdisciplinarily: Law And Literature As Cultural Critique, Deborah Waire Post

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

(Baby) M Is For The Many Things: Why I Start With Baby M, Carol Sanger

Faculty Scholarship

For several years now I have begun my first-year contracts course with the 1988 New Jersey Supreme Court case In the Matter of Baby M. In this essay, I want to explain why. I offer the explanation in the spirit of modest proselytizing, recognizing that many of us already have a favored method or manner into the course: some introductory questions we pose before leaping into (or over) the introductions already provided by the editors of the many excellent casebooks available. But I have found that Baby M works extremely well in ways that others may want to consider. …

Herding Cats: Improving Law School Teaching, Mitchell M. Simon, M. E. Occhialino, Robert L. Fried

Law Faculty Scholarship

What makes a good law teacher? Is excellence in teaching largely a matter of intellectual brilliance, of superior organization and delivery of material, of friendliness and fairness to one's students? Or does it have more to do with style, with stage presence, with the ability to engage an audience in the act of reflective and spontaneous thinking?

While the question of how to define and evaluate teaching necessarily bedevils deans and tenure committees who must make personnel decisions, the focus on defining the competent teacher has obscured from faculty attention the more fundamental question: how can we implement a system …

Integrating International Law Into The First-Year Property Course, Stephen J. Schnably

Articles

No abstract provided.

Teaching Jewish Law In American Law Schools: An Emerging Development In Law And Religion, Samuel J. Levine

Scholarly Works

In recent years, religion has gained an increasing prominence in both the legal profession and the academy. Through the emergence of the "religious lawyering movement," lawyers and legal scholars have demonstrated the potential relevance of religion to many aspects of lawyering. Likewise, legal scholars have incorporated religious thought into their work through books, law journals and classroom teaching relating to various areas of law and religion. In this Essay, Levine discusses one particular aspect of these efforts, namely, the place of Jewish law in the American law school curriculum. Specifically, he outlines briefly three possible models for a course in …

The Art Of The Fact, Jethro K. Lieberman

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Do They Practice What We Teach?: A Survey Of Practitioners And Estate Planning Professors, Wayne M. Gazur

Publications

This article presents the results of a 1998 mail survey sent to members of the American Bar Association Real Property, Probate & Trust Law Section and to law professors teaching estate planning. The principal goal of the survey was to compare the opinions of practitioners and law professors concerning the importance of 31 estate planning issues and techniques. The survey also included an open-ended solicitation of issues deemed significant by the participant.

The survey found consistency between practitioner and professor responses with respect to techniques such as Crummey planning. Legal education appears to be effective in dealing with core principles. …

English Ideas On Legal Education In Virginia, William Hamilton Bryson

Law Faculty Publications

In 1700 the only methods of legal education in England and Virginia were apprenticeship to a practising lawyer, either a barrister, a solicitor or a court clerk, and independent reading of law books; most persons seeking active membership in the legal profession did an apprenticeship supplemented by reading and observing the courts in action. In 1700 the inns of court had long since ceased to provide legal instruction, and the universities in England and Virginia had not yet begun to do so. The obvious importance of legal education was, however, not overlooked on either side of the Atlantic Ocean.

Teaching Law Students Through Individual Learning Styles, Robin A. Boyle, Rita Dunn

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

Teaching can be rewarding, but it can also be frustrating when some students fail to grasp the material. Professor Robin A. Boyle of St. John’s University School of Law has been teaching Legal Research and Writing in small sections of approximately twenty to thirty students for four years. She, like many of her similarly exasperated colleagues, has repeated the same course content by using either lecture or collaborative learning, and has observed some students doing well, whereas others continued to perform poorly. Then, Dr. Rita Dunn was introduced to the law school faculty and suggested that law professors incorporate …

Faculty Highlights

Alfred Aman Jr. (1991-2002)

No abstract provided.

Teaching Electronically: The Chicago-Kent Experiment, Richard Warner

Seattle University Law Review

Certain basic goals are widely shared, relatively uncontroversial, and sufficiently important that it makes sense to ask whether computer technology can improve our ability to achieve those goals. Consider the following four goals. This Review will focus primarily on the second goal (understanding the rationales behind the rules). Of course, to improve students' abilities to achieve this goal may also improve their abilities to achieve the first goal (knowledge of black letter rules) as a knowledge of a rule is obviously a precondition of understanding its purpose. Improving students' abilities to understand the rationale behind a rule may also improve …

Tell Me A Story: Using Short Fiction In Teaching Law And Bioethics, Dena S. Davis

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

For some years now, I have been experimenting with the use of short stories. Despite rich resources for stories, there remains a void best filled by fiction. When discussing fiction, we can probe, criticize, and express ourselves freely without the constraints we feel when discussing real people. Good fiction lays bare the innermost thoughts and experiences of its characters, perhaps even their dreams and nightmares, in a way that would be intrusive, uncomfortable, or impossible, even in autobiography. When the entire class reads a short story, it provides a pool of shared experience, a fixed point for discussion. Just as …

Does Law Teaching Have Meaning? Teaching Effectiveness, Gauging Alumni Competence, And The Maccrate Report, Daniel Gordon

Fordham Urban Law Journal

This Article examines law school teaching evaluation techniques and probes the use of a law school alumni survey to measure teaching effectiveness. The Article focuses on a survey of St. Thomas University School of Law graduates. The Article also examines teaching effectiveness in the context of the MacCrate Report and the so called gaps between legal education and law practice it identified. The Article argues that the MacCrate Report was incomplete in its coverage of teaching effectiveness, and that much of the discord it created can be overcome by focusing on teaching effectiveness.

Class Participation: Random Calling And Anonymous Grading, John M. Rogers

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

My perception is that opposition has been growing to law teachers' demanding student participation in class. At least one new teacher recently suggested to me that no good reason supports calling on students who have not volunteered. Many teachers, not to mention students, find something like an invasion of the student's dignity in that practice. Other teachers worry about the pitfalls of calling on or not calling on members of ethnic or gender groups, so they simply lecture or call only on volunteers. On another, indirectly related issue, my perception is that students often do not trust the anonymity of …

Making The Move From Law Practitioner To Law Professor, Or How Not To Simplify Your Life, Susan J. Becker

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

The author discusses her transition from litigation practice to teaching law. She concludes that there are three discrete yet connected components of a law professor's job which closely parallel that of a litigator: teaching, administrative service, and scholarship.