Law Commons^™

Assessing Law Students As Reflective Practitioners, Margaret Reuter

Faculty Works

We begin with two premises. One, legal educators, particularly clinical faculty who teach experiential courses, aim for their students to become reflective practitioners. Two, despite the highly personal nature of reflection, law faculty can assess law students’ ability to reflect meaningfully by reviewing and evaluating their reflective journals and essays. This is a story about the three authors of this essay: the genesis of our teaching techniques in reflective practice; how we discovered our similar approaches to assessing reflective practice; and how we have embarked on a project to discover whether a rubric we developed collectively can become the basis …

Race, Rhetoric, And Judicial Opinions: Missouri As A Case Study, Brad Desnoyer, Anne Alexander

Faculty Works

This Essay studies the relationship between race, rhetoric, and history in three twentieth century segregation cases: State ex rel. Gaines v. Canada, Kraemer v. Shelley, and Liddell v. Board of Education. Part I gives a brief overview of the scholarship of Critical Race Theory, majoritarian narratives and minority counter-narratives, and the judiciary’s rhetoric in race-based cases. Part II analyzes the narratives and language of Gaines, Kraemer, and Liddell, provides the social context of these cases, and traces their historical outcomes.

The Essay contends that majoritarian narratives with problematic themes continue to perpetuate even though court opinions have evolved to use …