Law Commons^™

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.

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

Cathryn A. Miller-Wilson

"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.

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

John Lande

The legal education system is in a major crisis now, in part because law schools do not prepare students adequately to practice law. Law schools should do a better job of teaching negotiation, in particular, because it is a significant part of the work of virtually every practicing lawyer. This includes lawyers who handle civil and criminal matters and lawyers who do litigation as well as those who do transactional work. Negotiation is especially important because most litigated cases are settled and virtually all unstandardized transactions are negotiated. Most law school negotiation courses rely primarily or exclusively on simulations in …

Beyond Skills Training, Revisited: The Clinical Education Spiral, Carolyn Grose

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Clinical Legal Education & Access To Justice: Conflicts, Interests, & Evolution, Margaret B. Drew, Andrew P. Morriss

Faculty Publications

The explosive growth in the number of law school clinics over the last 50 years began with an individual client focus as a core component. This contributed to reducing unmet legal needs in substantive areas such as landlord-tenant, family, consumer and other areas. These service clinics accomplished the dual purpose of training students in the day-to-day challenges of practice while reducing the number of unrepresented poor. In recent years, however, the trend has been to broaden the law school clinical experience beyond individual representation and preparation for law firm practice. So-called “impact” clinics typically address systemic change without significant individual …

Good Practice Guide (Bachelor Of Laws): Law In Broader Contexts, Alex Steel

Alex Steel

This Good Practice Guide was commissioned by the Law Associate Deans Network to support the implementation of Threshold Learning Outcome 1: Knowledge. The Threshold Learning Outcomes (TLOs) for the Bachelor of Laws were developed in 2010 as part of the Learning and Teaching Academic Standards (LTAS) Project, led by Professors Sally Kift and Mark Israel. TLO 1 states: Graduates of the Bachelor of Laws will demonstrate an understanding of a coherent body of knowledge that includes: (a) the fundamental areas of legal knowledge, the Australian legal system, and underlying principles and concepts, including international and comparative contexts, (b) the broader …

Student, Esquire?: The Practice Of Law In The Collaborative Classroom, Nantiya Ruan

Nantiya Ruan

Law faculty and non-profit lawyers are working together in a variety of partnerships to offer students exposure to “real life” clients in the first year of law school, as well as in advanced courses in substantive areas. Teachers engaged in client-centered advocacy through experiential frameworks have broken out of their isolated silos in the law school (e.g., legal writing, clinical, externship, and doctrinal) and begun to work together. To help students develop a sense of professional identity, cultivate professional values, and tap into key intrinsic motivations for lawyering, such as serving the public good, collaborative classrooms have an important role …

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 …

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.

Legal Education At A Crossroads: Innovation, Integration, And Pluralism Required!, Karen Tokarz, Antoinette Sedillo Lopez, Peggy Maisel, Robert Seibel

Faculty Scholarship

Although historically slow to change, law schools are now facing enormous pressure from educators, students, lawyers, judges, clients, and the public to rethink legal education and the lawyer‘s role in society. Now more than ever, there is robust national debate on the threshold contributions law schools should make to the preparation of law graduates for entry into practice. The clamor for reform in legal education is precipitated by a confluence of factors, including new insights about lawyering competencies and experiential legal education; the shifting nature of legal practice in the United States; a decrease in law jobs; changes in the …

Time: An Empirical Analysis Of Law Student Time Management Deficiencies, Christine P. Bartholomew

Journal Articles

This Article begins the much needed research on law students’ time famine. Time management complaints begin early in students’ legal education and generally go unresolved. As a result, practicing attorneys identify time famine as a leading cause of job dissatisfaction. To better arm graduating students, law schools must treat time as an essential component of practice-readiness. Unfortunately, most law schools ignore their students’ time management concerns, despite growing calls for greater “skills” training in legal education.

To date, legal scholarship has overlooked psychological research on time management. Yet, this research is an essential starting point to effective instruction. Rather than …

Educating The Invincibles: Strategies For Teaching The Millennial Generation In Law School, Emily Benfer, Colleen F. Shanahan

Faculty Scholarship

Each new generation of law students presents its own set of challenges for law teachers seeking to develop competent and committed members of the legal profession. This article aims to train legal educators to recognize their students' generational learning style and to deliver a tailored education that supports the development of skilled attorneys. To help legal educators better understand the newest generation of law students, this article explores the traits associated with the Millennial Generation of law students, including their perspective on themselves and others, on education and on work. It then provides detailed and specific strategies for teaching millennial …

When Socrates Meets Confucius: Teaching Creative And Critical Thinking Across Cultures Through Multilevel Socratic Method, Erin Ryan

Erin Ryan

The "Reason Giving" Lawyer: An Ethical, Practical, And Pedagogical Perspective, Donald J. Kochan

Donald J. Kochan

Whether as a matter of duty or utility, lawyers give reasons for their actions all the time. In the various venues in which legal skills must be employed, reason giving is required in some, expected in others, desired in many, and useful in most. This Essay underscores the pervasiveness of reason giving in the practice of law and the consequent necessity of lawyers developing a skill at giving reasons. This Essay examines reason giving as an innate human characteristic related directly to our need for answers and our constant yearning to understand the answer to the question “why.” It briefly …