Law Commons^™

Reflections On Presumed Incompetent: The Intersections Of Race And Class For Women In Academia Symposium - The Plenary Panel, Maritza I. Reyes, Angela Mae Kupenda, Angela Onwuachi-Willig, Stephanie M. Wildman, Adrien Katherine Wing

Angela Onwuachi-Willig

No abstract provided.

Learning From And About The Numbers, Carole Silver, Louis Rocconi

Carole Silver

In this article, we enter the debate about the value of legal education, taking aim at the issue of the ways in which law schools prepare students for practice. But rather than focusing on skills training, our concern is with the approach of law schools to preparing students to understanding the context of the legal issues they will encounter, and specifically on their preparation for working with numbers, whether with regard to business, finance or information presented in statistical form generally.

Our contribution to this debate is to emphasize the importance of data in analyzing the value of law school, …

A Tale Of Three “Professions”: Search Engine Optimization, Lawyering & Law Teaching, Ray Campbell

Ray W Campbell

The question has been posed: is legal practice today a profession? This leads, naturally enough, to another question: should society treat it as one? Using the concept of ‘profession’ in different ways, some argue that one thing modern legal practice needs is a good dose of 'professionalism;' others argue that, whatever once might have been true, treating law practice as a ‘profession’ is a rum game best abandoned.

These questions matter. Law enjoys special regulatory privileges and market protections that make little sense if law has become just another form of business – a specialized form of consulting, perhaps. At …

Teaching The Newly Essential Knowledge, Skills, And Values In A Changing World, Section E: Intercultural Effectiveness, Rhonda Magee, Mary Lynch, Robin Boyle, Antoinette Lopez

Rhonda V Magee

Chapter from the forthcoming book "Building on Best Practices: Transforming Legal Education in a Changing World" (2015). addresses the need of legal education to prepare cross-culturally competent lawyers. Outlines techniques and educational outcomes to develop law students' intercultural awareness.

What Firms Want: Investigating Globalization's Influence On The Market For Lawyers In Korea, Carole Silver, Jae-Hyup Lee, Jeeyoon Park

Carole Silver

This article addresses one of the central debates regarding globalization: how best to approach liberalizing markets in order to balance the interests of local and non-local actors and institutions. It takes the legal services market as its focus and draws on the South Korean experience as a case study. Korea recently liberalized its regulatory approach to legal services by changing both its method of producing lawyers (including initiating a graduate level law school system and drastically increasing the proportion of bar exam passers) and allowing foreign competition to directly enter its market through foreign law firms and foreign-licensed lawyers working …

Diversity Matters: Race, Gender And Ethnicity In Legal Education., Nancy E. Dowd, Kenneth B. Nunn, Jane E. Pendergast

Kenneth B. Nunn

This Article presents more evidence of the inequality that persists in legal education for students. Based on a survey of University of Florida law students conducted in 2001, this study reaffirms the existence of differential experience and an inegalitarian culture in legal education. However, it also demonstrates the importance of diversity and the recognition by a significant majority of students of the value of race and gender pluralism. These competing findings provide a clear guide to the future direction of legal education.

Diversity Matters: Race, Gender And Ethnicity In Legal Education., Nancy E. Dowd, Kenneth B. Nunn, Jane E. Pendergast

Nancy Dowd

This Article presents more evidence of the inequality that persists in legal education for students. Based on a survey of University of Florida law students conducted in 2001, this study reaffirms the existence of differential experience and an inegalitarian culture in legal education. However, it also demonstrates the importance of diversity and the recognition by a significant majority of students of the value of race and gender pluralism. These competing findings provide a clear guide to the future direction of legal education.

Globalization And The Monopoly Of Aba-Approved Law Schools: Missed Opportunities Or Dodged Bullets?, Carole Silver

Carole Silver

As the market for lawyers and for law itself has responded to global forces, legal education also is becoming accustomed to working within a global context. U.S. law schools routinely look beyond the country’s borders to attract new students and opportunities. As with law firms and business generally, it no longer is sufficient to be domestic only; in order to gain prestige and to effectively compete in the U.S. market, schools must have a credible claim to being globally connected, if not global themselves. But despite the reorientation of law schools toward globalization, the regulatory regime in which U.S. law …

The First Thing We Do, Jorge R. Roig

Jorge R Roig

Vulnerable Populations And Transformative Law Teaching: A Critical Reader, Chapter 6 - Vulnerability In Contracting: Teaching First-Year Law Students About Inequality And Its Consequences, Deborah Post, Deborah Zalesne

Deborah W. Post

Traditional legal pedagogy fails to demonstrate the relationship of contract to the subordination of vulnerable populations. As a result, students rarely see the complex web of interrelationships where economic activity takes place or the legal regime that maintains it. Students are not taught how to interrogate the discourse or dismantle the systems and structures that oppress subordinated communities. This Essay describes a technique that we have developed to help students learn the meaning of law and its cultural, social, and structural significance. The traditional framing of the study of contract doctrine as one that is objective, neutral, and fair avoids …

Time For A Top-Tier Law School In Arkansas, Richard J. Peltz-Steele

Richard J. Peltz-Steele

A simple change in state law could improve the quality of legal education in Arkansas and the quality of legal services available to our consumers - and save significant amounts of taxpayers' money. With an Afterword on academic freedom. Also available from Advance Arkansas Institute website.

Getting Real About Globalization And Legal Education: Potential And Perspectives For The U.S., Carole Silver

Carole Silver

This article addresses whether US law schools are preparing their JD students to work in the global environment that many - if not most – law graduates will encounter. It begins by considering the significance of globalization for legal education, drawing on research analyzing its influence on legal practice as well as on higher education. It then explores possible settings and opportunities for learning to work in a global environment. For the vast majority of students whose learning must occur in the US, the presence of international students in their law school offers the potential for creating a global learning …

Gaining From The System: Lessons From The Law School Survey Of Student Engagement About How Students Benefit From Law School, Carole Silver, Lindsay Watkins, Louis Rocconi, Heather Haeger

Carole Silver

This paper considers the factors that influence law students’ assessment of their development professionally and academically during law school. It uses responses of 5,612 third- and fourth-year law students to the Law School Survey of Student Engagement to identify student activities and behaviors that influence professional and academic gains; individual and law school characteristics also are examined. Four aspects of the law school experience emerge as common influences of students’ professional and academic development.

Gaining From The System: Lessons From The Law School Survey Of Student Engagement About How Students Benefit From Law School, Carole Silver, Lindsay Watkins, Louis Rocconi, Heather Haeger

Heather Haeger

This paper considers the factors that influence law students’ assessment of their development professionally and academically during law school. It uses responses of 5,612 third- and fourth-year law students to the Law School Survey of Student Engagement to identify student activities and behaviors that influence professional and academic gains; individual and law school characteristics also are examined. Four aspects of the law school experience emerge as common influences of students’ professional and academic development.

A Strategy For Teaching Objectivity To The Domestic Relations Student: Utilizing Psychodrama To Explore Attorney Empathy Toward Improving Family Law Outcomes, Bruce L. Beverly

Bruce L. Beverly

The basic domestic relations law course is often taught by the casebook method, with little reference to actual underlying human drama. In order to produce effective advocates, it is necessary for student to be brought out of the sterile case recitation model and into a role where the student experiences, in a controlled and directed fashion, some of the hardships faced by the players in a family law case. This article proposes that, in line with new emphasis on experiential learning and alternate learning styles, one might employ a psychodramatic approach to teaching the domestic relations course, in order to …

Book Review: Stacey Steele And Kathryn Taylor, Eds., Legal Education In Asia: Globalization, Change And Contexts, Carole Silver

Carole Silver

U.S. legal education is under fire from all sides. Travel outside of the U.S., however, and the U.S. often is a model for reform efforts, even the standard against which legal education programs in much of the rest of the world measure themselves. In Legal Education in Asia, Stacey Steele, Kathryn Taylor and their co-authors offer insight into globalization’s influence on legal education. They find that globalization has sharpened the peripheral vision of reformers by encouraging them to consider the approaches followed elsewhere to educating lawyers as well as the role lawyers play in society. Their analysis also identifies the …

Law School As A Culture Of Conversation: Re-Imagining Legal Education As A Process Of Conversion To The Demands Of Authentic Conversation, Gregory A. Kalscheur S.J.

Gregory A. Kalscheur, S.J.

Conventional wisdom holds that the principal task of a law school is to teach law students to "think like lawyers." However, law school can be experienced as a form of narrow training that diminishes something central to the human person: the fundamental drive to question and to follow those questions wherever they lead. This Article will explore the ways in which the thought of two scholars, Bernard Lonergan and James Boyd White, can usefully inform our understanding of this crisis of meaning and value within the context of a conception of law as a social and cultural activity. First, this …

Rebellious Lawyering, Regnant Lawyering, And Street-Level Bureaucracy, Paul R. Tremblay

Paul R. Tremblay

This Article explores the professional responsibilities of progressive lawyers representing the poor and disadvantaged. The author argues that lawyers representing the poor are generally good, energetic lawyers committed to social justice and lessening the pain of poverty. Subsequently, the defects found in poverty lawyering are structural, institutional, political, economic, and ethical. Therefore, the author posits that the mission of teachers and practitioners should be to develop practice patterns and proposals that account for the street-level experiences of legal services lawyers on the front lines. By examining the notions of rebellious and regnant lawyering, the author seeks to illuminate how these …

Through The Looking Glass Of Eminent Domain: Exploring The "Arbitrary And Capricious" Test And Substantive Rationality Review Of Governmental Decisions, Zygmunt J.B. Plater

Zygmunt J.B. Plater

The day-to-day realities of different systems of government can be discerned in the way they handle, in theory and practice, clashes between the individual and the collective will. The structure of contemporary American democracy is no exception. It is comprised of a variegated assortment of judicial formulae for balancing the interests of the individual and the state, most of these formulae tracing back with differing degrees of directness to textual bases in the first nine amendments to the federal Constitution or their state constitutional equivalents. One of these basic structural balancings, encountered early on by every student of American law …

Environmental Law In The Political Ecosystem - Coping With The Reality Of Politics, Zygmunt J.B. Plater

Zygmunt J.B. Plater

In this Essay, the proposition the author draws from the narrative of the endangered species litigation is derivatively Aristotelian – that we must consciously, actively, and explicitly integrate an informed consideration of human politics into what we teach and do in environmental law. The proposition is not that we should steep ourselves in party politics, although there are interesting observations aplenty that could be made on the direct consequences that the two major parties (and occassionally their wistful smaller incarnations) have on the evolution of environmental law. The proposition offered here operates at two different levels: practical politics and political …

Thinking Like Thinkers: Is The Art And Discipline Of An "Attitude Of Suspended Conclusion" Lost On Lawyers?, Donald J. Kochan

Donald J. Kochan

In his 1910 book, How We Think, John Dewey proclaimed that “the most important factor in the training of good mental habits consists in acquainting the attitude of suspended conclusion. . .” This Article explores that insight and describes its meaning and significance in the enterprise of thinking generally and its importance in law school education specifically. It posits that the law would be best served if lawyers think like thinkers and adopt an attitude of suspended conclusion in their problem solving affairs. Only when conclusion is suspended is there space for the exploration of the subject at hand. The …

The Variable Value Of Us Legal Education In The Global Legal Services Market, Carole Silver

Carole Silver

Many U.S. law firms now claim to be global organizations, and they seek to occupy the same high status everywhere they work. In part, simply supporting overseas offices is an indication of status for U.S.-based firms. But firms want more than this and they strive for recognition as elite advisors around the world. In this pursuit, have firms identified a set of common characteristics and credentials that define a “global lawyer?” That is, is there a uniform and universal profile, or perhaps a set of assets that comprise global professional capital, which are emerging as the indicia of credibility and …

Teaching Transactional Skills In Partnership With The Bar, Carl J. Circo

Carl J. Circo

Who Wants To Be A Muggle? The Diminished Legitimacy Of Law As Magic, Mark E. Burge

Mark Edwin Burge

In the Harry Potter world, the magical population lives among the non-magical Muggle population, but we Muggles are largely unaware of them. This secrecy is by elaborate design and is necessitated by centuries-old hostility to wizards by the non-magical majority. The reasons behind this hostility, when combined with the similarities between Harry Potter-stylemagic and American law, make Rowling’s novels into a cautionary tale for the legal profession that it not treat law as a magic unknowable to non-lawyers. Comprehensibility — as a self-contained, normative value in the enactment interpretation, and practice of law — is given short-shrift by the legal …

Educating Lawyers For The Global Economy: National Challenges, Carole Silver

Carole Silver

This essay addresses the challenge of educating law students to work in an increasingly global context. For students enrolled in United States law school, insight into the ways in which globalization matters can be drawn from the structural approaches to globalization of US-based law firms. These firms pursue their international practices by integrating lawyers educated and licensed in the firm’s home country (the US) and in the host jurisdictions in which the firm has offices. As a result, the success of the firm in its international practice depends upon the ability of its lawyers to develop strong and effective cross-national …

Internationalizing U.S. Legal Education: A Report On The Education Of Transnational Lawyers, Carole Silver

Carole Silver

This article analyses the role of U.S. law schools in educating foreign lawyers and the increasingly competitive global market for graduate legal education. U.S. law schools have been at the forefront of this competition, but little has been reported about their graduate programs. This article presents original research on the programs and their students, drawn from interviews with directors of graduate programs at 35 U.S. law schools, information available on law school web sites about the programs, and interviews with graduates of U.S. graduate programs. Finally, the article considers the responses of U.S. law schools to new competition from foreign …

The Case Of The Foreign Lawyer: Internationalizing The U.S. Legal Profession, Carole Silver

Carole Silver

This article contriubtes a new perspective to existing scholarship on internationalization of the legal profession by focusing on the increasing presence of foreign lawyers in U.S. law schools and law firms. It analyzes the interaction between foreign-educated lawyers and the legal profession in the U.S. based upon two sources of information: first, a series of interviews with foreign-educated lawyers and U.S. law firm hiring partners regarding experiences in law school and in firms, and second, a database comprised of biographical information for more than 300 foreign-educated lawyers who were working in New York during 1999 and 2000. The various roles …