Legal History Commons^™

Law Library Blog (October 2019): Legal Beagle's Blog Archive, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Law Library Newsletters/Blog

No abstract provided.

The Uneasy History Of Experiential Education In U.S. Law Schools, Peter A. Joy

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

This article explores the history of legal education, particularly the rise of experiential learning and its importance. In the early years of legal education in the United States, law schools devalued the development of practical skills in students, and many legal educators viewed practical experience in prospective faculty as a “taint.” This article begins with a brief history of these early years and how legal education subsequently evolved with greater involvement of the American Bar Association (ABA). With involvement of the ABA came a call for greater uniformity in legal education and guidelines to help law schools establish criteria for …

Law Firm Economics And Professionalism, Ward Bower

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

Both Dean Kronman in The Lost Lawyer and Professor Glendon in A Nation Under Lawyers attribute some of the problems and challenges facing lawyers today to economic pressures and to a preoccupation with profits and fees. For Kronman, this economic focus interferes with the “moral detachment” necessary for achievement of the “lawyer-statesman” ideal. For Glendon, professional dilemmas caused by the deterioration of the legal economy, competition in the marketplace, lawyer-shopping by clients, early specialization, lack of mentoring and emphasis on the billable hour have created an unhappy generation of ethically challenged practitioners.

Both authors accurately assess the state of the …

Lawyers In The Mist: The Golden Age Of Legal Nostalgia, Marc Galanter

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

No one watching the contemporary furor over the litigation explosion and lawsuits devouring America can fail to be impressed by the power of folklore to overwhelm workaday organized social knowledge. Time and again, the protestations of bean-counters and skeptics are vanquished by stories about perverse institutions peopled by malingering plaintiffs, greedy lawyers, capricious jurors, and arrogant judges, proving yet again that it is not what is so that matters, but what people—at least for the moment—think is so. Tenacious belief may not make it so, but can have powerful effects.

In this essay I address another cluster of folklore about …

Introduction To Section I: In The Beginning . . . Volume 1 And What It Means To Be A Lawyer, Kristina J. Kim

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

No abstract provided.

“The Lost Lawyer” Regained: The Abiding Values Of The Legal Profession, Robert Maccrate

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

No abstract provided.

A Golden-Age Of Civil Involvement: The Client-Centered Disadvantage For Lawyers As Law Makers, James E. Moliterno

James E. Moliterno

None available.

Lawyering In Place: Topographies Of Practice And Pleadings In Pittsburgh, 1775-1895, Bernard J. Hibbitts

Articles

Even in the digital age, lawyering is always located. Lawyers live and work in physical space, and they deal with other lawyers and with clients who also have at least some measure of physicalized existence. Distracted and ofttimes overwhelmed by written records, legal historians have traditionally paid little attention to the physical environment of lawyering, but under the influence of contemporary cultural factors this is beginning to change. Indeed, in light of recent works on American, English and even ancient law it may be time to recognize the birth pangs of a new interdisciplinary field that we might label “legal …

Thinking Like Thinkers: Is The Art And Discipline Of An "Attitude Of Suspended Conclusion" Lost On Lawyers?, Donald J. Kochan

Donald J. Kochan

In his 1910 book, How We Think, John Dewey proclaimed that “the most important factor in the training of good mental habits consists in acquainting the attitude of suspended conclusion. . .” This Article explores that insight and describes its meaning and significance in the enterprise of thinking generally and its importance in law school education specifically. It posits that the law would be best served if lawyers think like thinkers and adopt an attitude of suspended conclusion in their problem solving affairs. Only when conclusion is suspended is there space for the exploration of the subject at hand. The …

A Golden-Age Of Civil Involvement: The Client-Centered Disadvantage For Lawyers As Law Makers, James E. Moliterno

Scholarly Articles

None available.

Institutional And Individual Justification In Legal Ethics: The Problem Of Client Selection, W. Bradley Wendel

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.