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Lawyers’, Law Professors’ And Law Students’ Free Speech: The Rule Of Law, Civility, And Informed Engagement, Eli Wald

Journal of Civil Rights and Economic Development

(Excerpt)

The Article is organized as follows. Part I summarizes the traditional doctrine governing lawyers’ free speech, as well as the related doctrines of free speech, academic freedom, and tenure on college campuses. Part II explores twenty-first century developments that have thrown these old established doctrines into a state of flux.

Part III consists of three sections. The first suggests a new understanding of lawyers’ free speech, arguing that unprecedented twenty-first-century attacks on the rule of law justify recognizing a third, narrowly tailored restriction on lawyers’ free speech. In addition to the traditional restrictions grounded in protecting clients from lawyers’ …

Chatgpt, Professor Of Law, Tammy Oltz

Faculty Scholarship

In this Paper, I test the ability of ChatGPT to assist with common tasks performed by law professors. To conduct the experiment, I ran four service-related prompts and three teaching-related prompts through the free version of ChatGPT and then analyzed the results. ChatGPT performed very well on the service-related prompts and moderately well on the teaching-related prompts. I conclude that ChatGPT can provide law professors with near-finished products for routine tasks and a solid jumping-off point for those that are more complex.

Tribute To Bob Burdick, Naomi M. Mann

Faculty Scholarship

In losing Bob, we have truly lost a legal giant. He was a visionary in poverty law. He led significant litigation that improved the lives of countless individuals in the Commonwealth. It is because of him, a team of legal aid attorneys, and his students that individuals who are considered mentally incapacitated are entitled to Rogers hearings before being administered medication. It is also under his leadership that student attorneys throughout the Commonwealth can get attorney’s fees for their legal services organizations. Through his guidance and teaching, generations of law students have learned how to infuse their work (wherever they …

A Tribute To Robert (“Bob”) G. Burdick: A Man Of Vision And Light, Constance A. Browne

Faculty Scholarship

One of Bob’s former students said it best: “Bob was the lawyer I wanted to be. He was the person I wanted to be.”1 Bob was also the mentor, teacher, and innovator I aspired to be. For many marginalized clients, Bob brought the change they needed; the change justice required. He embodied hope—he saw the light and strove to enable others to share in its glow.

Extrapolating Lessons From A Master Mentor: What Bob Burdick Taught Me, Susan M. Akram

Faculty Scholarship

Bob Burdick began his career in clinical practice as a student in the clinic at Boston University School of Law in 1970, shortly after the civil clinic had been established as the Legal Aid Program in Hyde Park in 1969. Right out of law school, Bob worked at Greater Boston Legal Services (“GBLS”), he then was hired at BU as a clinical instructor and later promoted to director of what became the Civil Litigation Program in 1979. During the forty years Bob led the civil clinic (now renamed the Civil Litigation and Justice Program), he was the creative and innovative …

Some Special Words For Robert Burdick, Mary Connaughton

Faculty Scholarship

Many words can be used to describe Bob Burdick, my supervisor, colleague, and friend at the Boston University Civil Litigation Program since the fall of 1993. BU has recognized him as a “Quiet Legal Giant”; as his colleagues, we have commented on his compassion, low-key humility, creativity and innovation, strength as a mentor, and expertise in negotiation. We share common images and experiences as well: the open door to his office and the light already burning at 6:30 on dark mornings as we arrived early to go to court. His insight and understanding after a disturbing experience with an opposing …

Is Law A Discipline? Forays Into Academic Culture, Gene R. Shreve

Cleveland State Law Review

This Article explores academic culture. It addresses the reluctance in academic circles to accord law the full stature of a discipline. It forms doubts that have been raised into a series of four criticisms. Each attacks an academic feature of law, inviting the question: Is law different from the rest of the university in a way damaging its stature as an academic discipline? The Article concludes that, upon careful examination of each criticism, none establishes a difference between law and other disciplines capable of damaging law’s stature.

Join With Me, Won't You? Civic Engagement, Covid-19, And The Millennial Generation Of Law Professors, Joseph Schremmer

Faculty Articles

My goals in this essay are to place legal education’s COVID-19 crisis into this broader context and illuminate the unique opportunity that millennial law professors have to create the conditions for more robust community participation within and outside of our law schools. Part I summarizes the decline of civic engagement and social capital in preceding decades and its consequences for law, public discourse, and quality of life. Part II outlines how this deficit of social capital exacerbates the challenges facing law schools and professors in delivering legal education and constructing community during the coronavirus pandemic. Part III explores the unique …

The Downside Of Requiring Additional Experiential Courses In Law School, Douglas A. Kahn

Articles

In recent years, the bar has expressed dissatisfaction with what is considered by some to be inadequate preparation of law students to begin practicing law immediately after graduation. There are several reasons why this has become a matter of concern for the legal profession. The profession itself has undergone significant changes. Although there are a few exceptions, most law firms no longer wish to spend time training their young associates or allowing them much time to develop the skills they need. First, clients are unwilling to pay for the time a young lawyer spends in acquiring needed skills. Second, the …

The Law School (2013), Margaret A. Leary

Book Chapters

This chapter describes the growth and changes to the University of Michigan Law School for the period 1973-2013.

Using Advanced Conflict Waivers To Teach Drafting, Ethics, And Professionalism, Edward R. Becker

Articles

On a substantive and ethical level, I tell my students to take on faith that if you were to do all of this and take all this into account, if you were to apply the conflict of interest and the disqualifications rules, it could make it extremely difficult or many of the firms involved in these matters to avoid being conflicted out; especially, if the parties and the kind of firms involved were not dealing with these conflicts and issues until a problem arose. The question I ask my students again at this point is what could be done. What …

Think Like A Businessperson: Using Business School Cases To Create Strategic Corporate Lawyers​., Alicia J. Davis

Articles

For the past twenty-five years, my academic and professional pursuits have straddled the line between business and law. I majored in business administration in college and then worked as an analyst in the Corporate Finance department at a bulge bracket Wall Street firm. After completing a JD/MBA, I returned to investment banking with a focus on middle-market mergers and acquisitions (M&A) and subsequently practiced law with a focus on private equity and M&A. Finally, in 2004, I found my current home as a corporate law professor. In my courses, which include Mergers & Acquisitions, Enterprise Organization, and Investor Protection, I …

What Ails The Law Schools?, Paul Horwitz

Michigan Law Review

In January 2012, law professors from across the country arrived in Washington, D.C., for the annual conference of the Association of American Law Schools ("AALS"). It was an opportune moment. The legal economy was struggling. Graduates were begging for jobs and struggling with unprecedented levels of debt. The smart talk from the experts was that the legal economy was undergoing a fundamental restructuring. For these and other reasons, law schools were under fire, from both inside and outside of the academy. Judges - including the keynote speaker at the AALS conference himself! - derided legal scholarship as useless. Law school …

Vol. 63, March 27, 2013, University Of Michigan Law School

Res Gestae

• Teaching Gone Wrong • Letter from the Editor • Detroit: Mid-Size Market • Goodbye, Ma'am Prez Och! • Moran & Friedman's Guide to SCOTUS • RG Mailbag • Halberstam: Squirrel Fan • Debt WIZard • Phid Style Dinners • New LSSS Lunch Series • Mr. Wolverine Letters • Law Student Comics • Photos of Stuff that Happened this year!

Transactional Drafting: Using Law Firm Marketing Materials As A Research Resource For Teaching Drafting, Edward R. Becker

Articles

Since I started teaching drafting, I would like to think that I have continued to learn some lessons about teaching both the substance and the skills of transactional drafting. One of those lessons that I am going to be talking about today is one that I stumbled across by happy accident rather than one that I consciously sought. Specifically, I want to talk about and highlight the ways that law students can use law firm marketing materials to increase their understanding of both drafting and lawyering skills in law school and, hopefully, in practice.

Self-Congratulation And Scholarship, Paul Campos

Publications

Professor Jay Silver’s criticism of the reform proposals put forward in Brian Tamanaha’s book Failing Law Schools displays some characteristic weaknesses of American legal academic culture. These weaknesses include a tendency to make bold assertions about the value of legal scholarship and the effectiveness of law school pedagogy, while at the same time providing no support for these assertions beyond a willingness to repeat self-congratulatory platitudes about who professors are and what we do. The high costs for our students of the current scholarly expectations at American law schools are clear. What is not clear is whether those costs are …

Bridging The Law School Learning Gap Through Universal Design, Jennifer Jolly-Ryan

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

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 …

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 …

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 …

What Is "Good Legal Writing" And Why Does It Matter?, Mark Osbeck

Articles

Law schools face increasing pressure to improve instruction in practice-oriented skills. One of the most important of these skills is legal writing. The existing literature on legal writing contains various rules and suggestions as to how legal writers can improve their writing skills. Yet it lacks an adequate theoretical account of the fundamental nature of good legal writing. As a result, legal writers are left without a solid conceptual framework to ground the individual rules and suggestions. This Article attempts to fill the theoretical void in the literature by offering a systematic analysis of what it is for a legal …

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" …

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 …

Vol. 62, No. 3, October 13, 2011, University Of Michigan Law School

Res Gestae

• What are LLMs doing here anyway? • Gnaw Journal • When You Were Cooler • Zack Letter Law • Ginsberg • Book Review • Sudoku • Phid House Party Pies • Kicking It Old School • Crossword

University Of Michigan Law School Faculty, 2011-2012, University Of Michigan Law School

Miscellaneous Law School History & Publications

Biographies of the University of Michigan Law School faculty.

If I Had A Hammer: Can Shepardizing, Synthesis, And Other Tools Of Legal Writing Help Build Hope For Law Students?, Edward R. Becker

Articles

Are lawyers mechanics? In 1920, photographer Lewis Hines took a striking photo of a powerhouse mechanic sure-handedly wielding a large wrench to tighten bolts on a steam pump. This picture may bring to mind many things, but I suspect that many legal writing professors in our (past or present) incarnations as practicing attorneys would not look at this image and think, "My job is a lot like that." Similarly, I assume that many of our students do not think of a lawyer's role in this way. Indeed, many of our students might have chosen to pursue a career in law …

Vol. 59, No. 1, August 25, 2008, University Of Michigan Law School

Res Gestae

•All I Ever Needed to Know About OCI I Learned Doing My Laundry •How to Succeed at OCI Without Really Trying •Baby I'm an L-STAR •Dining for Dollars •Summertime Blues •Expert Advice •Kicking It Old School •Between the Briefs •No Other Warranties, Expressed or Implied •The On-Campus Interview ad Lib •Vintage RG: OCI R(G)ad Lib

Vol. 59, No. 3, September 30, 2008, University Of Michigan Law School

Res Gestae

•The Inaugural ELPP Conference •Letter to the Editor •MLawLive •Kennedy •Best of LawOpen •Generation Project •Kicking it Old School •Mamdouh •The Food Court •Between the Briefs •LSSS Statements

University Of Michigan Law School Faculty, 08/09, University Of Michigan Law School

Miscellaneous Law School History & Publications

Biographies of the University of Michigan Law School faculty.

Vol. 58, No. 3, September 25, 2007, University Of Michigan Law School

Res Gestae

•Rear Admiral Houck '85 Speaks at Law School •Don't be a Slave to the Curve •Elections to be Held for LSSS 1L Reps and Junior Board of Governors Rep •An Open Letter from BLSA •Six Tips to Contributing to a Cleaner Environment •Environmental Law at UM •Save Yourself •The Grade Curves •Bar Night Pics •Between the Briefs •Primus Enters The Pantheon