Law Commons^™

Beyond "Hard" Skills: Teaching Outward - And Inward-Facing Character-Based Skills To 1ls In Light Of Aba Standard 303(B)(3)'S Professional Identity Requirement, Marni Goldstein Caputo, Kathleen Luz

Faculty Scholarship

In this article, we share some ways in which we have adjusted our teaching to comply with Standard 303(b)(3) by addressing professional identity formation through the vehicles of outward-facing and inward-facing character-based skills. We believe that if law students do not intentionally start *811 exploring their professional identities as soon as they step foot into law school, they run the risk of believing that legal education and practice are somehow separate from their inner, personal identities as lawyers when, of course, they are, and ought to be, enmeshed. By injecting skills into the 1L curriculum that force both the development …

Comment, Francesca Procaccini

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Let's start with the antecedent question that both the theme of this conference and all three papers in this session present. That is, before we ask how law schools might better advance the freedom of expression on campus, and even before asking what role law schools play in protecting or suppressing free speech more generally, we must ask the first order question: whether freedom of expression at U.S. law schools is indeed imperiled?

There is an underlying assumption in all three papers that something is amiss, that things are not quite at their optimal, that improve- ment is needed. And …

2022 Conference Of Religiously Affiliated Law Schools: Reflections On Faculty Vocation And Support, Lucia A. Silecchia

Touro Law Review

In the United States, numerous law schools identify themselves as “religiously affiliated.” There are many opportunities and challenges that come with such affiliation. What “religiously affiliated” may mean for a law school’s faculty is a particularly critical aspect of this question. I was grateful to have been invited to reflect on what religious affiliation might mean for faculty hiring at the “Past, Present, and Future of Religiously Affiliated Law Schools” conference. What follows are reflections that consider not merely that question—important as it is—but also explore what happens after the hiring decision to make the vocation to teach at a …

The Secret Sauce: Examining Law Schools That Overperform On The Bar Exam, Christopher J. Ryan Jr., Derek T. Muller

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Since 2010, law schools have faced declining enrollment and entering classes with lower predictors of success despite recent signs of improvement. At least partly as a result, rates at which law school graduates pass the bar exam have declined and remain at historic lows. Yet, during this time, many schools have improved their graduates’ chances of success on the bar exam, and some schools have dramatically outperformed their predicted bar exam passage rates. This Article examines which schools do so and why.

Research for this Article began by accounting for law schools’ incoming class credentials to predict an expected bar …

On Women Professors Who Teach Legal Writing: Addressing Stigma And Women's Health, Amanda L. Stephens, Sean A. Vina

Faculty Articles

Since the late 1980s, legal writing (LW) professors have been disproportionately white women because the LW field has been stigmatized as "women's work. "As a result, these teaching positions typically have been low status and afforded with less pay and job security in comparison to tenure-track doctrinal law professor positions. Compounding--or intersecting--with the stigma of teaching LW are LW professors' social statuses as women and/or other marginalized statuses. These statuses intersect and influence how and what they teach and the legal academy's attitudes toward them.

Although previous scholarship has briefly addressed legal skill classes' stigmatization, no scholarship to date has …

The Association Of Participating In A Summer Prelaw Training Program And First-Year Law School Students’ Grades, Heather M. Buzick, Christopher Robertson, Jessica Findley, Heidi Burross, Matthew Charles, David M. Klieger

Faculty Scholarship

This study estimates the association of participation in a nine-week online educational program to prepare students for post-graduate (juris doctorate) education and law school grades. We collected registrar data from 17 U.S. law schools for participants and non-participants from the same year and a prior year. We compared first-semester law school grades between participating and non-participating students weighted by propensity scores. Course participation was associated with improved first-semester grades in a keyed course (Contracts Law) and overall grade point average. According to pre- and post-survey responses, a substantial portion of those who completed the program reported feeling more prepared for …

Rethinking Introductory Statutory Research Instruction, Leslie A. Street, Frederick Dingledy

Library Staff Publications

No abstract provided.

Applying Universal Design In The Legal Academy, Matthew L. Timko

College of Law Faculty Publications

Too often barriers to access in the form of physical, technological, and cognitive environments play a large role in keeping many people out of law school. While federal and state laws address these barriers, universal design provides the clearest policy change for law schools to remedy these issues.

The Rise And Fall Of Jews At Law Schools, Rebecca Roiphe

Other Publications

No abstract provided.

Protecting The Guild Or Protecting The Public? Bar Exams And The Diploma Privilege, Milan Markovic

Faculty Scholarship

The bar examination has long loomed over legal education. Although many states formerly admitted law school graduates into legal practice via the diploma privilege, Wisconsin is the only state that recognizes the privilege today. The bar examination is so central to the attorney admissions process that all but a handful of jurisdictions required it amidst a pandemic that turned bar exam administration into a life-or-death matter.

This Article analyzes the diploma privilege from a historical and empirical perspective. Whereas courts and regulators maintain that bar examinations screen out incompetent practitioners, the legal profession formerly placed little emphasis on bar examinations …

Creating Tomorrow’S Change-Makers: Using Alternative Media In The 1l Skills Classroom To Connect Students With Real Practice And Enhance Established Methods For Teaching Appellate Advocacy, Marni Goldstein Caputo, Kathleen Luz

Faculty Scholarship

Fostering that idea of lawyers as change-makers can be difficult in the typical 1L curriculum. The traditional, doctrinal law school classroom typically has a formula comprised of extensive textbook reading, the Socratic classroom, in which that reading is processed in a large group, and, finally, a cumulative, high-stakes exam at the end of the semester.⁶ That formula has largely not changed for decades.⁷ The lawyering skills classroom is often the only outlier from that formula for first-year law students.⁸ Even so, the skills classroom can be formulaic in its own right—introduction of an assignment, classroom instruction regarding …

Survey Says--How To Engage Law Students In The Online Learning Environment, Andrele Brutus St. Val

Articles

The pandemic experience has made it clear that not everyone loves teaching or learning remotely. Many professors and students alike are eager to return to the classroom. However, our experiences over the last year and a half have also demonstrated the potentials and possibilities of learning online and have caused many professors to recalibrate their approaches to digital learning. While the tools for online learning were available well before March of 2020, many instructors are only now beginning to capitalize on their potential. The author of this article worked in online legal education before the pandemic, utilizing these tools and …

Tax Law Is An Ideal Subject For Advanced Legal Research, Kincaid C. Brown

Law Librarian Scholarship

Tax law is an ideal regulatory area for advanced legal research classes when you want to teach a comprehensive research topic putting together all of the various case, regulatory, legislative, and analytical sources that are needed in the real world. Since everyone pays taxes, tax is accessible and a good starting point to expend from the first-year common law focus, especially for those students resistant to regulatory research. Every regulatory area is different in terms of agency practice, resources, and the tools available, but tax law is an ideal example area because the tools used by law firms are great …

Litigation Bias, Adam N. Eckart

Suffolk University Law School Faculty Works

There is pervasive litigation bias in law schools. Despite significant interest in transactional law fields among law students, law schools disproportionately teach to the student interested in litigation: litigation-based legal writing assignments outnumber transactional-based ones 19 to 1; litigation-based clinics outnumber transactional ones 9 to 1; and doctrinal classes focus primarily on appellate court cases, often failing to entertain substantive discussion on the creation or content of the documents that led to the dispute. As a result, law school graduates are 44% less prepared for transactional careers than litigation careers.

This article is the first of its kind to highlight …

Directed Questions: A Non-Socratic Dialogue About Non-Socratic Teaching, Kris Franklin, Rory Bahadur

Articles & Chapters

Despite frequent criticism of Socratic and case-method teaching, the core teaching in most foundational law classes has been remarkably stagnant. But in a time of turmoil and reexamination of the traditions we have all inherited, there is also opportunity for meaningful adaptation to the modern era. This Article introduces Directed Questions methodology as an alternative to the traditional teaching models currently operating in most law schools. Directed reading pedagogy allows legal educators to seamlessly transition to a modern and effective pedagogy incorporating best practices which recognizes that fostering inclusion and the success of diverse students is mandatory in post-Langdellian legal …

Radical Imagination: Fostering Community In Legal Education, Adrienne Baker

Student Scholarship

Study after study alerts us to concerns about law student wellbeing. Statistics are staggering, and law students are more likely to become anxious, depressed, and turn to substance abuse. Self-care is framed as an antidote, but the individual responsibility is still placed on the student. Rather, the issue is better resolved upstream.

Law schools must transgress and transform; they must reimagine their function. This article reflects on law school pedagogy and simple ways to build community in the classroom as well as school-wide administrative suggestions to promote law student wellbeing.

Will Legal Education Change Post-2020?, Heather K. Gerken

Michigan Law Review

The famed book review issue of the Michigan Law Review feels like a reminder of better days. As this issue goes to print, a shocking 554,103 people have died of COVID-19 in the United States alone, the country seems to have begun a long-overdue national reckoning on race, climate change and economic inequality continue to ravage the country, and our Capitol was stormed by insurrectionists with the encouragement of the president of the United States. In the usual year, a scholar would happily pick up this volume and delight in its contents. This year, one marvels at the scholars who …

Affirmative Inaction: A Quantitative Analysis Of Progress Toward “Critical Mass” In U.S. Legal Education, Loren M. Lee

Michigan Law Review

Since 1978, the Supreme Court has recognized diversity as a compelling government interest to uphold the use of affirmative action in higher education. Yet the constitutionality of the practice has been challenged many times. In Grutter v. Bollinger, for example, the Court denied its use in perpetuity and suggested a twenty-five-year time limit for its application in law school admissions. Almost two decades have passed, so where do we stand? This Note’s quantitative analysis of the matriculation of and degrees awarded to Black and Latinx students at twenty-nine accredited law schools across the United States illuminates a stark lack of …

The Brief (Edition #6, February 2021), William & Mary Law School

The Brief

No abstract provided.

#Fortheculture: Generation Z And The Future Of Legal Education, Tiffany D. Atkins

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

Generation Z, with a birth year between 1995 and 2010, is the most diverse generational cohort in U.S. history and is the largest segment of our population. Gen Zers hold progressive views on social issues and expect diversity and minority representation where they live, work, and learn. American law schools, however, are not known for their diversity, or for being inclusive environments representative of the world around us. This culture of exclusion has led to an unequal legal profession and academy, where less than 10 percent of the population is non-white. As Gen Zers bring their demands for inclusion, and …

The Brief (Edition #5, February 2021), William & Mary Law School

The Brief

No abstract provided.

The Brief (Edition #4, January 2021), William & Mary Law School

The Brief

No abstract provided.

Maybe Law Schools Do Not Oppress Minority Faculty Women: A Critique Of Meera E. Deo’S “Unequal Profession: Race And Gender In Legal Academia” (Stanford University Press 2019), Dan Subotnik

Touro Law Review

This essay tests Professor Meera Deo’s unsettling assertion that “implicit bias” in law schools is holding minority female and, to a lesser extent minority male, faculty back. It then presents her second, and more provocative claim, that minority faculty can generally offer better training in “solving complex problems.”

Regarding the former claim, Deo explains that minority women are not hired according to fair standards, not welcomed when they are hired, and not fairly evaluated for promotion. In addition, she argues that minority women professors are abused by their students. Because Deo barely tries to substantiate the second claim, it is …

Criminal Legal Education, Shaun Ossei-Owusu

All Faculty Scholarship

The protests of 2020 have jumpstarted conversations about criminal justice reform in the public and professoriate. Although there have been longstanding demands for reformation and reimagining of the criminal justice system, recent calls have taken on a new urgency. Greater public awareness of racial bias, increasing visual evidence of state-sanctioned killings, and the televised policing of peaceful dissent have forced the public to reckon with a penal state whose brutality was comfortably tolerated. Scholars are publishing op-eds, policy proposals, and articles with rapidity, pointing to different factors and actors that produce the need for reform. However, one input has gone …

Maybe Law Schools Do Not Oppress Minority Faculty Women: A Critique Of Meera E. Deo’S “Unequal Profession: Race And Gender In Legal Academia” (Stanford University Press 2019), Dan Subotnik

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Conversations After Class: 'Becoming Critical,' Or The Steps Necessary To Achieve Critical Thought For Law Students, Daniel J. Sequeira

University of Colorado Law Review

No abstract provided.

From Academic Freedom To Cancel Culture: Silencing Black Women In The Legal Academy, Renee Nicole Allen

Faculty Publications

In 1988, Black women law professors formed the Northeast Corridor Collective of Black Women Law Professors, a network of Black women in the legal academy. They supported one another’s scholarship, shared personal experiences of systemic gendered racism, and helped one another navigate the law school white space. A few years later, their stories were transformed into articles that appeared in a symposium edition of the Berkeley Women’s Law Journal. Since then, Black women and women of color have published articles and books about their experiences with presumed incompetence, outsider status, and silence. The story of Black women in the legal …

The Brief (Edition #3, November 2020), William & Mary Law School

The Brief

No abstract provided.

Samy W. Abdallah '21: Reflections On The Fall 2020 Semester, Samy W. Abdallah

Law School Personal Reflections on COVID-19

No abstract provided.

Associate Dean Laura N. Shepherd: Reflections On The Fall 2020 Semester, Laura N. Shepherd

Law School Personal Reflections on COVID-19

No abstract provided.