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Notre Dame Law School: Catholicism, Conscience And Commitment, Martha Vazquez

Notre Dame Law Review

No abstract provided.

Celebration Of The 20th Anniversary:Roger Williams University School Of Law: The First Twenty Years - The Rise Of Rhode Island's Law School , Michael W. Field, Nicole J. Benjamin

Roger Williams University Law Review

No abstract provided.

"Practice Ready Graduates": A Millennialist Fantasy, Robert J. Condlin

Faculty Scholarship

The sky is falling on legal education say the pundits, and preparing “practice ready” graduates is one of the best strategies for surviving the fallout. This is a millennialist version of the argument for clinical legal education that dominated discussion in the law schools in the 1960s and 1970s. The circumstances are different now, as are the people calling for reform, but the two movements are alike in one respect: both view skills training as legal education’s primary purpose. Everything else is a frolic and detour, and a fatal frolic and detour in hard times such as the present.

No …

One Small Step For Legal Writing, One Giant Leap For Legal Education: Making The Case For More Writing Opportunities In The "Practice-Ready" Law School Curriculum, Sherri Lee Keene

Faculty Scholarship

Legal writing is more than an isolated practical skill or a law school course; it is a valuable tool for broadening and deepening law students’ and new attorneys’ knowledge and understanding of the law. If experienced legal professionals, both professors and practitioners alike, take a hard look back at their careers, many will no doubt remember how their work on significant legal writing projects advanced their own knowledge of the law and enhanced their professional competence. Legal writing practice helps the writer to gain expertise in a number of ways: first, the act of writing itself promotes learning; second, close …

Teaching Transactional Skills Using Real Clients From Clinic To Classroom, Brian Krumm, Shelley Dunck

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Infusing Technology Skills Into The Law School Curriculum, Simon Canick

Faculty Scholarship

Legal education has never considered technological proficiency to be a key outcome. Law professors may debate the merits of audiovisual teaching tools: do they work when they should?; do they facilitate learning objectives or are they just toys?; whom should they call when something breaks?; and so on. Teachers use course management sites like TWEN and Blackboard to share information and manage basic course functions. Many fear that laptops and other devices distract students in class, and some institute outright bans. Among many law teachers, technology is warily accepted, but only for the purpose of achieving traditional educational objectives.

What …

Review Essay: Bilingual Legal Education In The United States: An Idea Whose Time Has Come, S. I. Strong

Faculty Publications

The long-standing and close connection among law, language and the state has traditionally led law schools to provide legal education in a single language. Indeed, bilingual legal education could in some cases be viewed as potentially contrary to state interests, given that "[t]he main instrument of nation-building is the imposition of a common state language. Indeed, bilingual legal education could in some cases be viewed as potentially contrary to state interests, given that "[t]he main instrument of nation-building is the imposition of a common state language."' However, the historical model of monolingual legal education may be in jeopardy. For example, …

The American Legal Profession In The Twenty-First Century, Stephen M. Sheppard

Faculty Articles

Lawyers in the United States work in public service, private counseling, and dispute resolution, but many also work outside of traditional legal practice. The million-member American bar, second largest in the world, grows more diverse by gender, and ethnicity and older on average. All members of this learned profession must qualify by education or examination and by proof of good character and fitness before taking an oath to serve as an attorney. Thence, there are few limitations on the form of legal practice, though many law firms require an associateship before an attorney becomes an owner of the firm. Economic …

William Mitchell College Of Law's Hybrid Program For J.D. Study: Answering The Call For Innovation, Eric S. Janus, Gregory M. Duhl, Simon Canick

Faculty Scholarship

In January 2015, William Mitchell College of Law will launch the first American Bar Association (ABA)-approved, on-campus/ online J.D. program to further the college's mission: to provide accessible, experiential, rigorous training for tomorrow's lawyers. Known as the hybrid program, it will offer a legal education to talented, hard-working students who cannot access a traditional J.D. program because of location or family or work commitments. In this article, we explain the origins and pedagogical foundations of the program, as well as give an overview of the program.

Balancing Between Two Worlds: A Dakota Woman’S Reflections On Being A Law Professor, Angelique Eaglewoman

Faculty Scholarship

There were many paths I considered as a young woman and none of them included becoming a law professor. My journey to my present life as a Dakota woman law professor is about balancing between the worlds I travel back and forth in. There is my tribal world, where I feel replenished and part of an on-going community experience stretching back to time immemorial. I feel that I am part of an unfolding history of endurance, strong Native women, and a participant in sustaining our traditional Native ways. On the other hand, there is the non-Indian world, where I often …

Towards A Pedagogy Of Diversity In Legal Education, Faisal Bhabha

Osgoode Legal Studies Research Paper Series

There is resounding consensus that diversity in legal education is a priority. Yet, North American law schools continue to be criticized for failing to reflect the diversity of the society that they are training lawyers to serve. With the backdrop of critical scholarship and empirical evidence, this paper is a project of conceptual reorientation. The first part examines the past 20 years of diversity promotion in legal education and concludes that, while several advances have been made, especially in increasing numerical representation of diverse groups in law schools, the promise of meaningful diversity remains unfulfilled. The next part situates the …

Mindful Ethics - A Pedagogical And Practical Approach To Teaching Legal Ethics, Developing Professional Identity, And Encouraging Civility, Jan L. Jacobowitz, Scott L. Rogers

Articles

Aristotle spoke of virtue and ethics as a combination of practical wisdom and habituation-an individual must learn from the application of critical reasoning skills to experience. Perhaps one of the earliest proclamations of the value of experiential learning, the Aristotelian view, reappears throughout history and is captured once again by the Carnegie Foundation's Report on Legal Education, which includes a call for instruction that provides practical skills and ethical grounding to complement the teaching of legal analysis. The Carnegie Report continues to play a role in the ongoing discussion of the need to reform legal education; a debate that is …

Emergence On Contract Standards And Its Future Impact On Legal Education, Kingsley Martin

St. Thomas Law Review

Let me start with a story. It was almost thirty years ago that I graduated from Harvard Law School and joined my first law firm. I distinctly remember my first assignment, which was to draft a credit agreement. Despite my education, I had no clue how to perform the assignment. I had to do it the same way as everyone else, which was to go around the corridors, bang on some doors, get some examples, sit down and start to read them. I have no doubt that my first few attempts and, in all likelihood, years' worth of drafts, were …

Keep Calm And Carry On, René Reich-Graefe

Faculty Scholarship

This Essay examines some of the hard data available for today’s legal market and develops very basic forecasts and hypotheses about what the future will bring for the U.S. legal profession during the next decades. In conclusion, it projects that recent law school graduates and current and future law students are standing at the threshold of the most robust legal market that ever existed in this country—a legal market which will grow, exist for, and coincide with, their entire professional careers. Using admittedly back-of-the-envelope math based on current trends affecting the legal market (in particular, lawyer retirements, population growth, and …

A Judges's Perspective On Perspectives Courses: Three Suggested Rubrics…With Examples, Stephen J. Fortunato Jr.

Roger Williams University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Friends Of Justice: Does Social Media Impact The Public Perception Of The Justice System?, Nicola A. Boothe-Perry

Journal Publications

Lawyers have long been recognized as being necessary in the effective functioning of an ordered society in roles as both officers of the court and, more broadly, as officers of the system of justice. In 2014, the ABA Task Force on the Future of Legal Education report noted that "[s]ociety has a deep interest in the competence of lawyers, in their availability to serve society and clients, in the broad public role they can play, and in their professional values." Values such as those noted in the Model Rules of Professional Conduct (advisor, counselor, and advocate) are instrumental in the …

Legal Education In Crisis, And Why Law Libraries Are Doomed, James G. Milles

Journal Articles

The dual crises facing legal education - the economic crisis affecting both the job market and the pool of law school applicants, and the crisis of confidence in the ability of law schools and the ABA accreditation process to meet the needs of lawyers or society at large - have undermined the case for not only the autonomy, but the very existence, of law school libraries as we have known them. Legal education in the United States is about to undergo a long-term contraction, and law libraries will be among the first to go. A few law schools may abandon …

Are Clinics A Magic Bullet?, Deborah J. Cantrell

Publications

In the current conversation about reforming legal education, one of the constant refrains is that law schools must graduate students who are "practice ready." Commentators go on to argue that for law schools to produce "practice ready" students, they must expand how they offer experiential learning. One potential way to do that is to expand clinical legal education programs. I worry that law schools (and others) are envisioning clinical legal education as a magic bullet that will solve all of the ills and imbalances present in current legal education. In this article, I demonstrate the unhelpfulness of the phrase "practice …

Addressing Shortfalls In Traditional Legal Education: Ut's Concentrations And Capstones And Waller Lansden's Schola2juris Program, George Kuney, Joseph Watson

Scholarly Works

Law school’s traditional educational model needs to be revamped. The traditional law firm’s summer associate model needs restructuring. Some might say they are both broken. Across the country, educators, and commentators are talking about legal education reforms and leading law firms are confronting how to improve the age-old mechanism for recruiting law students.

In the recent past, the legal employment landscape provided no incentive for law firms to question their traditional recruiting practices. The traditional law-firm recruitment model — the summer-associate program — is often little more than a glorified summer camp for some of the most highly educated — …

Tales Of A Fourth Tier Nothing, A Response To Brian Tamanaha's Failing Law Schools, Lucille A. Jewel

Scholarly Works

This is a paper written in response to Professor Brian Tamanaha’s Failing Law Schools. Much of the book is laudable for highlighting the serious structural, policy, and moral issues confronting legal education today. However, I disagree with several of Professor Tamanaha’s ideas for reforming our system. In this paper, I write from the perspective of a tenured legal writing professor teaching at a for-profit fourth tier school, in fact, one of the schools that Tamanaha repeatedly implies are the problem and not the solution for the legal education crisis.

Part One addresses the idea, which dates back to 1921, that …

Lessons From Teaching Students To Negotiate Like A Lawyer, John M. Lande

Faculty Publications

This article reports my observations from teaching those courses and offers suggestions for future efforts to improve legal education. My experience supports the (1) focus on negotiation in a wide range of situations in addition to the final resolution of disputes and transactions, (2) addition of "ordinary legal negotiation" to the two traditional theories of negotiation, and (3) use of multi-stage simulations in addition to traditional single-stage simulations. These approaches were critical in providing students with a more realistic understanding of negotiation. This article also describes experiments with other teaching techniques in my courses.

Specialization In Law And Business: A Proposal For A J.D./'Mbl' Curriculum, Robert J. Rhee

UF Law Faculty Publications

This paper provides the specific details of how an interdisciplinary program of law and business can be structured in a three-year J.D. program. The program envisioned is a J.D./”M.B.L.”, which is distinguished from the better known J.D./M.B.A. The “M.B.L.” stands for “masters of business law,” which is simply an idea tag. The moniker can represent a program conferring a supplemental degree in law and business, or simply a specialized course of study to complete a J.D. Either way, the program is an interdisciplinary program of concentrated study in core transaction-oriented law courses and core business courses. The most effective education …

Access To Justice And Technology Clinics: A 4% Solution, Ronald W. Staudt, Andrew P. Medeiros

Chicago-Kent Law Review

This article argues that law schools should add Access to Justice and Technology Clinics: a new type of clinical course that teaches law students how to use and deploy technology to assist law practice. If widely adopted, these clinics will help law students learn core competencies needed in an increasingly technological profession while simultaneously building tools and content to help low income, self-represented litigants overcome serious barriers in their pursuit of justice. In our prototype course at Chicago-Kent, Justice and Technology Practicum, students use A2J Author to build A2J Guided Interviews and in the process students learn legal research, writing …

The Teaching Of Law Practice Management And Technology In Law Schools: A New Paradigm, Richard S. Granat, Stephanie Kimbro

Chicago-Kent Law Review

The teaching of law practice management in law schools is becoming more critical for our profession. Employment with a traditional law firm used to provide the training and mentorship necessary to practice law. As a result of fewer employment prospects with traditional law firms, law students are now faced with the prospect of entering into law practice without this critical training and knowledge base soon after they become members of the bar.

Additionally, the Internet and information technology is transforming the practice of law and, as a result, the management of law firms is also being transformed. Lawyers must understand …

Developing An E-Curriculum: Reflections On The Future Of Legal Education And On The Importance Of Digital Expertise, Oliver Goodenough

Chicago-Kent Law Review

Legal education is in the midst of significant change, where much of how and what we have taught is under scrutiny. As we reform our curriculums in this moment of change, we should be guided by considerations of value added, values added, economic sustainability. It is no longer enough for our programs to target bar passage, doctrinal coverage, a shared language of argument, and skills and perspectives, important as these may be. Practice in the foreseeable future requires us to add new knowledge and competencies. Law and technology is an area that is ripe for expansion, with the possibility of …

Law Schools As Knowledge Centers In The Digital Age, Vern R. Walker, A.J. Durwin, Philip H. Hwang, Keith Langlais, Mycroft Boyd

Chicago-Kent Law Review

This article explores what it would mean for law schools to be “knowledge centers” in the digital age, and to have this as a central mission. It describes the activities of legal knowledge centers as: (1) focusing on solving real legal problems in society outside of the academy; (2) evaluating the problem-solving effectiveness of the legal knowledge being developed; (3) re-conceptualizing the structures used to represent legal knowledge, the processes through which legal knowledge is created, and the methods used to apply that knowledge; and (4) disseminating legal knowledge in ways that assist its implementation. The Article uses as extended …

Specialization In Law And Business: A Proposal For A J.D./"Mbl" Curriculum, Robert J. Rhee

Faculty Scholarship

This paper provides the specific details of how an interdisciplinary program of law and business can be structured in a three-year J.D. program. The program envisioned is a J.D./”M.B.L.”, which is distinguished from the better known J.D./M.B.A. The “M.B.L.” stands for “masters of business law,” which is simply an idea tag. The moniker can represent a program conferring a supplemental degree in law and business, or simply a specialized course of study to complete a J.D. Either way, the program is an interdisciplinary program of concentrated study in core transaction-oriented law courses and core business courses. The most effective education …

Tackling "Arithmophobia": Teaching How To Read, Understand, And Analyze Financial Statements, Paula J. Williams, Kris Anne Tobin, Eric Franklin, Robert J. Rhee

Faculty Scholarship

This discussion presents different ideas on how to teach accounting and practical finance to law students.

Harmonizing Current Threats: Using The Outcry For Legal Education Reforms To Take Another Look At Civil Gideon And What It Means To Be An American Lawyer, Cathryn Miller-Wilson

University of Maryland Law Journal of Race, Religion, Gender and Class

"Harmonizing Current Threats: Using the Outcry for Legal Education Reforms to Take Another Look at Civil Gideon and What it Means to be an American Lawyer," makes the argument that, like medical education, legal education should be seen as a public responsibility. With the extra government funding that would come from this view of legal education, Miller-Wilson proposes incorporating "teaching law firms" after law school for students to practice in various specialties before graduation, similar to a medical residency.

Teaching Social Justice, Expanding Access To Justice: An Introduction, Jackie Gardina, Ngai Pindell

University of Maryland Law Journal of Race, Religion, Gender and Class

"Teaching Social Justice, Expanding Access to Justice: An Introduction" provides an introduction to the publications in this issue focusing on the need for a change in legal education to promote the moral and ethical obligation of providing affordable and accessible legal services. The article introduces this issues' publications which all support the underlying theme of providing social justice to the underprivileged by making legal services accessible or reforming legal education to promote a new generation of attorneys with an underlying passion for fostering affordable and accessible public service.