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Full-Text Articles in Legal History

Latinas In The Legal Academy: Progress And Promise, Raquel E. Aldana, Emile Loza De Siles, Solangel Maldonado, Rachel F. Moran Jun 2023

Latinas In The Legal Academy: Progress And Promise, Raquel E. Aldana, Emile Loza De Siles, Solangel Maldonado, Rachel F. Moran

Faculty Scholarship

The 2022 Inaugural Graciela Oliva ́rez Latinas in the Legal Academy (“GO LILA”) Workshop convened seventy-four outstanding and powerful Latina law professors and professional legal educators (collectively, “Latinas in the legal academy,” or “LILAs”) to document and celebrate our individual and collective journeys and to grow stronger together. In this essay, we, four of the Latina law professors who helped to co-found the GO LILA Workshop, share what we learned about and from each other. We invite other LILAs to join our community and share their stories and journeys. We hope that the data and lessons that we share can …


Feminist Legal History And Legal Pedagogy, Paula A. Monopoli Jan 2022

Feminist Legal History And Legal Pedagogy, Paula A. Monopoli

Faculty Scholarship

Women are mere trace elements in the traditional law school curriculum. They exist only on the margins of the canonical cases. Built on masculine norms, traditional modes of legal pedagogy involve appellate cases that overwhelmingly involve men as judges and advocates. The resulting silence signals that women are not makers of law—especially constitutional law. Teaching students critical modes of analysis like feminist legal theory and critical race feminism matters. But unmoored from feminist legal history, such critical theory is incomplete and far less persuasive. This Essay focuses on feminist legal history as foundational if students are to understand the implications …


School Finance Reform And Professor Stephen D. Sugarman’S Lasting Legacy, Rachel F. Moran Apr 2021

School Finance Reform And Professor Stephen D. Sugarman’S Lasting Legacy, Rachel F. Moran

Faculty Scholarship

Once, over lunch, I recall a law professor reflecting on scholarly work’s ephemeral nature. Legal academics, he thought, should consider themselves lucky if their articles sparked a discussion that lasted for even a few years. By that standard, Professor Stephen Sugarman’s seminal work on school finance reform, done in collaboration with John Coons and William Clune, must count as a Methuselah of academic concepts. Decades later, this research continues to prompt scholarly debate, legal advocacy, and legislative reform. In this essay, I first describe the origins of the theory of school finance reform. I then turn to the ongoing influence …


Tenure Matters: The Anatomy Of Tenure And Academic Survival In American Legal Education, Stephen J. Leacock Jan 2019

Tenure Matters: The Anatomy Of Tenure And Academic Survival In American Legal Education, Stephen J. Leacock

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.


The Three Ages Of Modern American Lawyering And The Current Crisis In The Legal Profession And Legal Education, Rachel F. Moran Jan 2019

The Three Ages Of Modern American Lawyering And The Current Crisis In The Legal Profession And Legal Education, Rachel F. Moran

Faculty Scholarship

During the first months of 2018, two short pieces on legal education were published. One reported on the results of a survey of college graduates, law school graduates, and holders of other advanced degrees. The study found that today’s law graduates were less likely than pre-recession counterparts to report that the J.D. degree was worth the cost and more likely to have second thoughts about the decision to go to law school. The findings prompted Aaron Taylor, executive director of the Access Lex Center for Legal Education Excellence, to conclude that there are “two distinct worlds of law graduates” made …


Hls 200: A Latina's Story About The Bicentennial, Margaret E. Montoya Apr 2018

Hls 200: A Latina's Story About The Bicentennial, Margaret E. Montoya

Faculty Scholarship

This essay sketches an arc from my childhood to being an Harvard Law School student to my academic work and professional commitments as a law professor and an alumna of Harvard Law School, working to increase access and success in the legal and medical professions for students and faculty of color. I compare aspects of legal and medical education using demographic data as well as some observations about how diverse faculty have transformed the two professions in their respective approaches to and rationales for diversifying the professions and examine the work being done by diverse faculty in law and health. …


A Challenge To Bleached Out Professional Identity: How Jewish Was Justice Louis Brandeis?, Russell G. Pearce, Adam B. Winer, Emily Jenab Jan 2017

A Challenge To Bleached Out Professional Identity: How Jewish Was Justice Louis Brandeis?, Russell G. Pearce, Adam B. Winer, Emily Jenab

Faculty Scholarship

As an exemplar, Justice Louis D. Brandeis challenges the currently dominant conception that requires lawyers to, in Sanford Levinson's term, "bleach out" their personal identity from their professional identity. Under the dominant neutral partisan vision of the lawyer, clients will only receive the equal representation necessary to provide equal justice if lawyers exclude all personal and group identifications from their role. Brandeis, in contrast, asserted that his Jewish identity constructed his understanding of himself as a jurist. His distinguished career thereby provides a counter-narrative to bleaching-out that can serve as a model for all lawyers, whatever their personal and group …


Cases And Case-Lawyers, Richard A. Danner Jan 2016

Cases And Case-Lawyers, Richard A. Danner

Faculty Scholarship

In the nineteenth century, the term “case-lawyer” was used as a label for lawyers who seemed to care more about locating precedents applicable to their current cases than understanding the principles behind the reported case law. Criticisms of case-lawyers appeared in English journals in the late 1820s, then in the United States, usually from those who believed that every lawyer needed to know and understand the unchanging principles of the common law in order to resolve issues not found in the reported cases. After the Civil War, expressions of concern about caselawyers increased with the significant growth in the amount …


Contract Law And Fundamental Legal Conceptions: An Application Of Hohfeldian Terminology To Contract Doctrine, Daniel P. O'Gorman Jan 2015

Contract Law And Fundamental Legal Conceptions: An Application Of Hohfeldian Terminology To Contract Doctrine, Daniel P. O'Gorman

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.


Legislation And Regulation In The Core Curriculum: A Virtue Or A Necessity?, James J. Brudney Jan 2015

Legislation And Regulation In The Core Curriculum: A Virtue Or A Necessity?, James J. Brudney

Faculty Scholarship

The first-year curriculum at American law schools has been remarkably stable for more than 100 years. Many would say ossified. At Harvard, the First-Year Course of Instruction in 1879-80 consisted of Real Property, Contracts, Torts, Criminal Law and Criminal Procedure, and Civil Procedure. These five courses-focused heavily on judge-made common law-dominated Harvard's IL curriculum from the law school's founding into the 21st century. The same five subjects have long commanded the primary attention of first-year students at Fordham, founded in 1905, and at virtually every other U.S. law school throughout the 20th century. Starting in the 1990s, however, a growing …


Law Libraries And Laboratories: The Legacies Of Langdell And His Metaphor, Richard A. Danner Jan 2015

Law Libraries And Laboratories: The Legacies Of Langdell And His Metaphor, Richard A. Danner

Faculty Scholarship

Law Librarians and others have often referred to Harvard Law School Dean C.C. Langdell’s statements that the law library is the lawyer’s laboratory. Professor Danner examines the context of what Langdell through his other writings, the educational environment at Harvard in the late nineteenth century, and the changing perceptions of university libraries generally. He then considers how the “laboratory metaphor” has been applied by librarians and legal scholars during the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. The article closes with thoughts on Langdell’s legacy for law librarians and the usefulness of the laboratory metaphor.


50 Years Of Legal Education In Ethiopia: A Memoir, Stanley Z. Fisher Dec 2014

50 Years Of Legal Education In Ethiopia: A Memoir, Stanley Z. Fisher

Faculty Scholarship

In this paper I describe my experience as one of the early members of the Haile Selassie I University (H.S.I.U.), Law Faculty, and share my reflections on developments in the ensuing years.


Angela Harris: The Person, The Teacher, The Scholar, Rachel F. Moran Aug 2014

Angela Harris: The Person, The Teacher, The Scholar, Rachel F. Moran

Faculty Scholarship

Angela Harris has written eloquently about the creative tensions that define her as a person, a teacher, and a scholar. She has explored the challenges of maintaining a private identity when called upon to share her life experience with a public audience, whether in the classroom, at a conference, or in an essay. She has reflected on the ways in which legal teaching privileges reason over emotion, wondering whether this dynamic impoverishes the exchange of ideas and undervalues the joy that can motivate a caring advocate. And, she has explored the dialectic between identity politics and the structural forces that …


Critiquing Modern-Day U.S. Legal Education With Rhetoric: Frank's Plea And The Scholar Model Of The Law Professor Persona, Carlo A. Pedrioli Jan 2014

Critiquing Modern-Day U.S. Legal Education With Rhetoric: Frank's Plea And The Scholar Model Of The Law Professor Persona, Carlo A. Pedrioli

Faculty Scholarship

This article explains how, from 1920 to 1960, the role, or persona, of the law professor in the United States remained the situs of considerable rhetorical controversy that the role had been in the fifty years before 1920. On one hand, lawyers used rhetoric to promote a persona, that of a scholar, appropriate for the law professor situated within the university, a context suitable for the professionalization of law. On the other hand, different lawyers like Judge Jerome Frank used rhetoric to critique, often in a scathing manner, the scholar persona and put forth their own persona, that of a …


(Anti)Canonizing Courts, Jamal Greene Jan 2014

(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 …


Influences Of The Digest Classification System: What Can We Know?, Richard A. Danner Jan 2014

Influences Of The Digest Classification System: What Can We Know?, Richard A. Danner

Faculty Scholarship

Robert C. Berring has called West Publishing Company’s American Digest System “the key aspect of the new form of legal literature” that West and other publishers developed in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Berring argued that West’s digests provided practicing lawyers not only the means for locating precedential cases, but a “paradigm for thinking about the law itself” that influenced American lawyers until the development of online legal research systems in the 1970s. This article discusses questions raised by Berring’s scholarship, and examines the late nineteenth and early twentieth century legal environment in which the West digests were …


Foreword: A Tribute To Margaret Montoya, Rachel F. Moran Jan 2014

Foreword: A Tribute To Margaret Montoya, Rachel F. Moran

Faculty Scholarship

Dean Moran provides opening remarks to the Chicana/o-Latina/o Law Review symposium, "Un/Masking Power: The Past, Present, and Future of Marginal Identities in Legal Academia."


Financial Retrenchment And Institutional Entrenchment: Will Legal Education Respond, Explode, Or Just Wait It Out?, Ian Weinstein Jan 2013

Financial Retrenchment And Institutional Entrenchment: Will Legal Education Respond, Explode, Or Just Wait It Out?, Ian Weinstein

Faculty Scholarship

Both markets and ideas have turned against the American legal profession. Legal hiring has contracted, and law school enrollments are decreasing. The business models of big law and legal education are under pressure, current levels of student indebtedness seem unsustainable, and a hero has yet to emerge from our fragmented regulatory structures. In the realm of ideas, the information revolution has sparked deep critiques of structured knowledge and expertise, opening the roles of the law and the university in society to reexamination. We are less enamored of the scholar-lawyer and gaze with longing at technocrats. I hope that clinical law …


Constructing Modern-Day U.S. Legal Education With Rhetoric: Langdell, Ames, And The Scholar Model Of The Law Professor Persona, Carlo A. Pedrioli Jan 2013

Constructing Modern-Day U.S. Legal Education With Rhetoric: Langdell, Ames, And The Scholar Model Of The Law Professor Persona, Carlo A. Pedrioli

Faculty Scholarship

This article explains how lawyers like Christopher Columbus Langdell and James Barr Ames, a disciple of Langdell, employed rhetoric between 1870, when Langdell assumed the deanship at Harvard Law School, and 1920, when law had emerged as a credible academic field in the United States, to construct a persona, that of a scholar, appropriate for the law professor situated within the university. To do so, the article contextualizes the rhetoric with historical background on the law professor and legal education, draws upon rhetorical theory to give an overview of persona theory and persona analysis as a means of conducting the …


Commentary, Critical Legal Theory In Intellectual Property And Information Law Scholarship, Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal Spring Symposium, Sonia K. Katyal, Peter Goodrich Jan 2013

Commentary, Critical Legal Theory In Intellectual Property And Information Law Scholarship, Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal Spring Symposium, Sonia K. Katyal, Peter Goodrich

Faculty Scholarship

The very definition and scope of CLS (critical legal studies) is itself subject to debate. Some scholars characterize CLS as scholarship that employs a particular methodology—more of a “means” than an “end.” On the other hand, some scholars contend that CLS scholarship demonstrates a collective commitment to a political end goal—an emancipation of sorts —through the identification of, and resistance to, exploitative power structures that are reinforced through law and legal institutions. After a brief golden age, CLS scholarship was infamously marginalized in legal academia and its sub-disciplines. But CLS themes now appear to be making a resurgence—at least in …


Founding Legal Education In America, Paul D. Carrington Jan 2013

Founding Legal Education In America, Paul D. Carrington

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.


Professor Kingsfield In Conflict: Rhetorical Constructions Of The U.S. Law Professor Persona(E), Carlo A. Pedrioli Jan 2012

Professor Kingsfield In Conflict: Rhetorical Constructions Of The U.S. Law Professor Persona(E), Carlo A. Pedrioli

Faculty Scholarship

At least since the 1960s, a “‘two cultures’ phenomenon” has become quite apparent within the legal field in the United States. On one hand, some lawyers, usually those within the university, have been more academically oriented, and, on the other hand, other lawyers, usually those in legal practice or sitting on the bench, have been more pragmatically oriented. Problems arise when these two groups begin to talk differently from each other. In a way, the field of law has developed into at least two different legal professions, and, not surprisingly, scholars and practitioners have experienced tension because of this situation. …


Beyond Aristotle: Alternative Rhetorics And The Conflict Over The U.S. Law Professor Persona(E), Carlo A. Pedrioli Jan 2012

Beyond Aristotle: Alternative Rhetorics And The Conflict Over The U.S. Law Professor Persona(E), Carlo A. Pedrioli

Faculty Scholarship

Prior research has sketched out a picture in which, at least since 1960 and continuing to the present, advocates of the differing personae, or roles, of the U.S. law professor have been sharply divided over such personae. Lawyers have advocated two major personae for the law professor to perform. One major persona is that of the scholar, who is a full-time teacher, researcher, and sometimes public servant, but who often has limited practical experience. The other major persona is that of the practitioner, who has a substantial number of years of practice at the bar and is prepared for hands-on …


The Aba, The Aall, The Aals, And The “Duplication Of Legal Publications”, Richard A. Danner Jan 2012

The Aba, The Aall, The Aals, And The “Duplication Of Legal Publications”, Richard A. Danner

Faculty Scholarship

Between 1935 and 1940, the American Bar Association, the Association of American Law Schools, and the American Association of Law Libraries joined forces to work on solutions to a problem often referred to as the “duplication of legal publications.” The need for practicing attorneys and law libraries to purchase multiple and duplicative versions of published law reports and other law books was burdensome in costs, complicated the research process, and contributed to what the American Law Institute identified as the two chief defects of American law: “its uncertainty and its complexity.” This article highlights the efforts of the ABA, the …


Shouting "Fire!" In A Theater And Vilifying Corn Dealers, Vincent A. Blasi Jan 2011

Shouting "Fire!" In A Theater And Vilifying Corn Dealers, Vincent A. Blasi

Faculty Scholarship

Five years ago, Fred Schauer published an article with the intriguing title: "Do Cases Make Bad Law?" Playing off Holmes' observation that "[g]reat cases like hard cases make bad law," Schauer explored the possibility, as he put it, that "it is not just great cases and hard cases that make bad law, but simply the deciding of cases that makes bad law.” His concern, confirmed and deepened by his characteristically balanced inquiry, was that general principles forged in the resolution of specific legal disputes can suffer by virtue of that provenance. Because such principles by definition are meant to carry …


Roll Over Langdell, Tell Llewellyn The News: A Brief History Of American Legal Education, Stephen R. Alton Jul 2010

Roll Over Langdell, Tell Llewellyn The News: A Brief History Of American Legal Education, Stephen R. Alton

Faculty Scholarship

The origin of this essay is a presentation the author made at the Office of the Attorney General of the State of Texas on December 10, 2008. This essay is derived from the author's presentation, which originally was entitled "A Brief and Highly Selective History of American Legal Education and Jurisprudence. " In this essay, the author provides an overview of the history and development of legal education in America, emphasizing the establishment and evolution of the case method of instruction in American law schools and focusing on the influence of American jurisprudence on the development of legal education in …


Tributes To Professor Alice Brumbaugh, Alan D. Hornstein, Abraham Dash, Frederic N. Smalkin, Lynne A. Battaglia, Karen H. Rothenberg, David S. Bogen Jan 2004

Tributes To Professor Alice Brumbaugh, Alan D. Hornstein, Abraham Dash, Frederic N. Smalkin, Lynne A. Battaglia, Karen H. Rothenberg, David S. Bogen

Faculty Scholarship

Tributes to Professor Alice Brumbaugh upon her retirement from the University of Maryland School of Law.


Setting The Record Straight: Maryland's First Black Women Law Graduates, Taunya Lovell Banks Jan 2004

Setting The Record Straight: Maryland's First Black Women Law Graduates, Taunya Lovell Banks

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.


Minnesota Lawyers Evaluate Law Schools, Training And Job Satisfaction, John O. Sonsteng Jan 2000

Minnesota Lawyers Evaluate Law Schools, Training And Job Satisfaction, John O. Sonsteng

Faculty Scholarship

The MacCrate Report was published in 1992 and detailed the findings of a task force established by the American Bar Association. The purpose of the task force was to examine a perceived “gap” between legal education and law practice. The Report concluded that law schools needed to affirm their commitment to train students to practice effectively in the legal profession. This article analyzes the results of several surveys, each seeking to determine to what extent law schools provided Minnesota lawyers consistent training in the practice skills areas identified in the MacCrate Report. The findings discussed in this article were gleaned …


Porcupine Diplomacy Produces Summit (Ave.) Accord, Douglas R. Heidenreich Jan 1999

Porcupine Diplomacy Produces Summit (Ave.) Accord, Douglas R. Heidenreich

Faculty Scholarship

While William Mitchell College of Law was officially formed in 1956 through the merger of two local evening law schools, there had been discussion of a merger for years before 1956. Even after the merger, the two parts of the new institution continued to operate mostly separately. The acquisition of a building at 2100 Summit Avenue, in St. Paul, in 1958 finally allowed the two schools to become one and to enter the modern era of legal education.