Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Lessons Learned In Prison, Daniel Keating

Scholarship@WashULaw

One way that I have tried to stay fresh as a teacher through the decades is to periodically force myself outside of my teaching comfort zone by trying something completely different. Sometimes these initiatives will end up being a one-time experiment. That was the case a little over ten years ago when I decided to teach a new course (Contracts) in a new format (online, but well before Zoom had become commonplace). Other times, my teaching experiment will prove to be more than just a frolic and detour, as was true eight years ago when I began offering a free …

An Empirical Analysis Of Clinical Legal Education At Middle Age, Robert R. Kuehn

Scholarship@WashULaw

This article provides the first comprehensive empirical analysis of clinical legal education’s development and growth over the past fifty years. By analyzing dozens of surveys and reports on aspects of clinical legal education, including unique data developed by the authors, and comparing the results over time, this article presents a factual picture of clinical legal education’s progression from early adulthood to today’s middle age.

This article seeks to inform the present and help legal educators shape the future role of law clinic and field placement courses in the preparation of law students for the practice of law. It provides an …

Finding New Classroom Tricks In A Virtual Teaching World: One ‘Old Dog’S’ Tale, Daniel Keating

Scholarship@WashULaw

It has been hard to find many silver linings in this dark cloud we call the pandemic, but here’s one: Two colleagues and I, all three of us at different law schools, were having an e-mail discussion about how online instruction had affected us and challenged our “business as usual” approach to teaching. Among the three of us, we have taught for more than 100 years combined. Yet here we were, trading notes on our successes and failures with polls, online discussion boards, and virtual breakout rooms. Finally, the most senior member of our trio summed it up with this …

Teaching With Feminist Judgments: A Global Conversation, Susan Frelich Appleton, Gabrielle J. Appleby, Ross Astoria, Linda L. Berger, Bridget J. Crawford, Sharon Cowan, Rosalind Dixon, Troy Lavers, Andrea L. Mcardle, Elisabeth Mcdonald, Teri A. Mcmurtry-Chubb, Vanessa Munro, Kathryn M. Stanchi, Pam Wilkins

Scholarship@WashULaw

This conversational-style essay is an exchange among fourteen professors — representing thirteen universities across five countries — with experience teaching with feminist judgments. Feminist judgments are “shadow” court decisions rewritten from a feminist perspective, using only the precedent in effect and the facts known at the time of the original decision. Scholars in Canada, England, the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, Scotland, Ireland, India and Mexico have published (or are currently producing) written collections of feminist judgments that demonstrate how feminist perspectives could have changed the legal reasoning or outcome (or both) in important legal cases.

This essay begins to explore …

A Study Of The Relationship Between Law School Coursework And Bar Exam Outcomes, Robert R. Kuehn

Scholarship@WashULaw

The recent decline in bar exam passage rates has triggered speculation that the decline is being driven by law students taking more experiential courses and fewer bar-subject courses. These concerns arose in the absence of any empirical study linking certain coursework to bar exam failure.

This article addresses speculation about the relationship between law school coursework and bar exam outcomes. It reports the results of a large-scale study of the courses of over 3800 graduates from two law schools and the relationship between their experiential and bar-subject coursework and bar exam outcomes over a ten-year period. At both schools, the …

Aba Standard 405(C): Two Steps Forward And One Step Back For Legal Education, Peter A. Joy

Scholarship@WashULaw

There has long been opposition to guaranteeing that all full-time law faculty have security of position and participation in faculty governance the same as or substantially similar to tenure. ABA Accreditation Standard 405(c), was meant to provide such security of position and faculty governance for clinical faculty, though this standard has not been consistently interpreted to do so. The situation for legal writing faculty is even more precarious, because the standards only require a law school to provide legal writing faculty with the security of position and other rights necessary to attract and retain well-qualified faculty. As a result, most …

Lawyering In The Academy: The Intersection Of Academic Freedom And Professional Responsibility, Peter A. Joy

Scholarship@WashULaw

The legal academy has given little thought to how practicing law within law schools affects professional responsibilities and is different from representing clients in a traditional law firm or how notions of academic freedom affect lawyering in law schools. Yet repeated attempts to interfere with law clinic representation starkly illustrate how lawyering in the academy might be different, under notions of professional responsibility and academic freedom, from other lawyering or typical law teaching.

Scholarship on interference in clinical programs has focused primarily on the impropriety of interference on the institutional autonomy of law schools by those outside the university, such …