Law Commons^™

Ninth Annual Pride Brunch, Cardozo Alumni Association, Cardozo Outlaw

Flyers 2023-2024

No abstract provided.

Legal Education And The Threat Response, Jane Mitchell

The Journal of Law Teaching and Learning

Law students struggle with disproportionately high rates of depression, anxiety, addiction, and disconnection. This paper offers a novel explanation for these negative outcomes that thus far has been absent from conversations on the subject: Law schools fuel students’ sense of threat. According to psychology’s well-established cognitive appraisal model, students “appraise” stressful situations as either challenging or threatening. Educational environments appraised as threatening consistently lead to negative outcomes—lower student performance, decreased student engagement, and increased anxiety. Situations appraised as challenging lead to positive outcomes—improved academic performance, increased participation, and better overall health.

Law schools facilitate students’ threat response rather than a …

Chatgpt As A Law Teaching Assistant, Tammy Pettinato Oltz

The Journal of Law Teaching and Learning

No abstract provided.

Law As A Liberal Art, Francis J. Mootz Iii

The Journal of Law Teaching and Learning

Law is a liberal art. Unfortunately, this fact is often forgotten by legal educators, legal practitioners, and citizens. This collective amnesia does not just pose a problem of proper academic categorization. Our inattention to law’s character as a liberal art of law has a profound effect on the full realization of the rule of law in contemporary constitutional democracies. Reclaiming law as a liberal art is critically important, and this effort should be at the center of our approach to legal education.

In this short essay, I begin by providing a brief overview of what I mean by saying that …

Pacing Beside The Pool: Coaching Champion Writers To A Strong Finish In Clinic (Without Jumping In And Finishing For Them), Hillary A. Wandler

The Journal of Law Teaching and Learning

No abstract provided.

An Empirical Study Of The Relationship Between Metacognitive Skills, Performance In A Bar Prep Course And Bar Passage, Jennifer A. Gundlach, Jessica R. Santangelo

The Journal of Law Teaching and Learning

This article builds on our prior research about metacognition and its importance for law students’ learning. We hypothesized that given our past findings about the relationship between metacognition and academic performance during the first year of law school, it was possible that metacognition might also play an important role in success with a third-year bar preparation course and/or on the bar exam.

Our current study documents law students’ metacognitive skills during a final-semester bar prep course and examines the relationship between those students’ metacognitive skills and performance in the course and bar passage. We found that students are capable of …

The Year Of Magical Teaching: Lessons Learned From One Class In Three Modalities, Debra Moss Vollweiler

The Journal of Law Teaching and Learning

No abstract provided.

Cardozo Celebrates The Class Of 2024 At 46th Annual Commencement, Benjamin N. Cardozo School Of Law

Cardozo News 2024

Cardozo School of Law celebrated the Class of 2024 during their graduation ceremony at David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center on June 3.

The Class Of 2024’S Achievements Celebrated At Pre-Commencement Awards Ceremony, Benjamin N. Cardozo School Of Law

Cardozo News 2024

Excellence, dedication, and stellar were just a few of the words used to describe the outstanding students who were recognized at this year’s Commencement Awards Ceremony. The awards ceremony, which takes place before the Commencement Ceremony, highlights students' hard work inside and outside of the classroom.

Raising The Bar: The Nextgen Bar Exam And Contract Drafting, Susan M. Chesler, Karen J. Sneddon

Articles

Set to debut in July 2026, the NextGen Bar Exam will test a broad range of foundational lawyering skills needed in today’s practice of law, including contract interpretation, drafting, and revising. According to the National Conference of Bar Examiners (“NCBE”), this exam is designed “to balance the skills and knowledge needed in litigation and transactional legal practice.” More specifically, the foundational skills that will be tested include drafting and revising contract provisions consistent with the facts, the law, and the client’s objectives, interests, and constraints. The NCBE has indicated that the examinees’ knowledge of the doctrinal subject matter topics, like …

New And Useful Improvements: The Role Of Institutional Culture, Leadership, Incentives, And Regulation In 30 Years Of Legal Education Since The Maccrate Report, Greg Brandes

The University of New Hampshire Law Review

New and useful improvements – in the words of the patent statute – have emerged from legal education’s pursuit of seamlessly developing contributing members of the legal profession, as the 1992 MacCrate Report advocated. These include the widespread adoption of distance learning techniques for better teaching and assessment, course pedagogy that is more inclusive for students with diverse learning needs, and a new subset of the academy schooled and interested in the science of teaching and learning. But it has not been easy.

Efforts to improve legal education have sometimes foundered and other times flourished because of varying faculty and …

What About Us? How Law Schools Can Help Historically Underrepresented Law Students Develop Their Professional Identities, David A. Grenardo

Mercer Law Review

Talking about race, gender, and sexual orientation can be painful, messy, and difficult. This country’s history of discrimination and violence against historically underrepresented, marginalized, excluded individuals—racial and ethnic minorities, women, LGBTQIA+, those living with disabilities, the socioeconomically disadvantaged/lower class—makes these topics fraught with controversy and risk. We can easily offend someone accidentally when we try to address these topics even with the best of intentions. For example, some people may get nervous trying to figure out whether to use the words African-American, Black, BIPOC, person of color, or all of the above when discussing these topics and referring to someone …

Cardozo Law Mourns The Loss Of Gail Cohen ’83, Benjamin N. Cardozo School Of Law

Cardozo News 2024

Cardozo School of Law and Yeshiva University mourn the passing of Gail Cohen, a member of Cardozo’s graduating class of 1983 and a pillar of the Cardozo community.

Risk Taking And Reform In Legal Education, Mariah E. Thomas Thurston

The University of New Hampshire Law Review

No abstract provided.

Major Reform With Minor Risk: Implementation Of Change Initiatives As A Learning Challenge, Sara J. Berman, Chance Meyer

The University of New Hampshire Law Review

The call for change in legal education has been loud and clear for more than a century. Despite some resistance among powerholders who benefit from status quo, faculty and administrators across the country work earnestly to solve problems, improve learning, and promote equity. Yet time and again, initiatives are logjammed, shot down as unworkable, misimplemented, or abandoned prematurely when they do not meet unrealistically high expectations for immediate, dramatic results. This article builds on the premises that (1) change is needed, (2) a wide range of sound change ideas for reform and progress are available, and (3) effective implementation of …

Boycotts, Race, Rankings, And Howard Law School's Peculiar Position, Michael Conklin

The University of New Hampshire Law Review

This Article seeks to explain the drastic, seventy-six spot ranking disparity that exists between Howard Law School’s overall ranking (based primarily on objective factors) and the purely subjective peer ranking. Potential explanations considered include location, law review quality, political ideological preference, use of promotional materials, notable alumni, professor quality, unwillingness to game the system, and random statistical noise. When all of these potential explanations come up short, Howard’s unique standing as the top HBCU law school is found to be the most likely explanation. This explanation is also consistent with the corresponding increase in racial salience and the increase in …

Language Models, Plagiarism, And Legal Writing, Michael L. Smith

The University of New Hampshire Law Review

Language models like ChatGPT are the talk of the town in legal circles. Despite some high-profile stories of fake ChatGPT-generated citations, many practitioners argue that language models are the way of the future. These models, they argue, promise an efficient source of first drafts and stock language. Others make similar claims about legal writing education, with a number of professors urging the acknowledgment of language models. Others go further and argue that students ought to learn to use these models to improve their writing and prepare for practice. I argue that those urging the incorporation of language models into legal …

Reimagining Legal Education: Insights From Unh Franklin Pierce's First 50 Years, Christopher S. Reed

The University of New Hampshire Law Review

Noted patent lawyer and MIT professor Dr. Robert Rines founded the Franklin Pierce Law Center in 1973 with the aim of training working professionals to practice patent law. The founding faculty comprised working patent lawyers from various fields, it offered the only patent practice course available at the time, and the curriculum overall emphasized practical skills over theory.

Today, half a century later, Dr. Rines’s vision not only endures, but flourishes.

In addition to becoming one of the world’s most celebrated intellectual property institutions, University of New Hampshire (UNH) Franklin Pierce School of Law∗ is the home of two pioneering …

A Bibliography Of Faculty Scholarship, Kathryn J. Dufour Law Library

Scholarly Articles

The purpose of this bibliography is to record in one place the substantial body of scholarship produced by the current faculty at the Catholic University, Columbus School of Law. From its humble beginnings under the tutelage of founding Dean William Callyhan Robinson, through its adolescent period when, like so many other American law schools, it was trying to define its pedagogical niche, to its eventual merger with the Columbus University Law School in 1954, the law school at Catholic University has always retained a scholarly and remarkably productive faculty. The sheer quantity of writing, the breadth of research and the …

Bridging The Paradigmatic Crevasse Between Lawyers And Scientists: The Need For New Institutional Models, Stanley P. Kowalski

The University of New Hampshire Law Review

The professions of science and law have traditionally been siloed paradigms, operating often in tandem with each other but rarely intersecting in the interdisciplinary pasture which separates them, a pasture from which an abundance of synergistic collaboration and ensuing creative concepts might sprout. However, the erstwhile never the twain shall meet situation is neither realistic nor even tenable in the current century, a century increasingly dominated by science, technology, invention, innovation, and intellectual property. Simply put, whereas lawyers are risk averse and build constructed realities to argue points and serve clients, scientists seek an objective assessment of truth and accept …

Risk-Taking And Reform: Innovation For A Better Education, Megan M. Carpenter

The University of New Hampshire Law Review

No abstract provided.

Dean Melanie Leslie Announces Six New Faculty Appointments, Benjamin N. Cardozo School Of Law

Cardozo News 2024

We welcome these six new members to the Cardozo faculty with great joy. Below are brief biographic sketches of each with links to full details of their academic and career achievements, which are too numerous to list here.

Cardozo Law News Brief: May 31, 2024, Benjamin N. Cardozo School Of Law

Cardozo Law News Brief 2024

Featured Faculty:

• Jessica Roth
• Alexander Reinert
• Saurabh Vishnubhakat
• Lindsay Nash
• Michel Rosenfeld

Campus News:

• Dean Melanie Leslie Announces 6 New Faculty Appointments
• Cardozo Welcomes Over 200 Alumni Back to Campus For Homecoming & Reunion
• Cardozo Celebrates Public Service at 32nd Annual Inspire! Awards

Cardozo Celebrates Public Service At 32nd Annual Inspire! Awards, Benjamin N. Cardozo School Of Law

Cardozo News 2024

Cardozo’s Center for Public Service Law celebrated the Inspire! Awards on May 28, a yearly event that honors students, alumni and community leaders who have made strides in public service over the past year.

Cardozo Welcomes More Than 200 Alumni For Homecoming & Reunion, Benjamin N. Cardozo School Of Law

Cardozo News 2024

More than 200 Cardozo alumni, from the first graduating class of 1979 to the class of 2024, were welcomed back to to the school for this year’s Homecoming & Reunion celebration, held on May 23.

Cardozo Law News Brief: May 24, 2024, Benjamin N. Cardozo School Of Law

Cardozo Law News Brief 2024

Featured Faculty:

• Jessica Roth
• Matthew Wansley
• Young Ran (Christine) Kim
• Jacob Noti-Victor

Cardozo Law News Brief: May 17, 2024, Benjamin N. Cardozo School Of Law

Cardozo Law News Brief 2024

Featured Faculty:

• Jessica Roth
• Kathryn Miller
• Kate Levine
• Jocelyn Getgen Kestenbaum
• Young Ran (Christine) Kim
• Michel Rosenfeld
• Edward Zelinsky

Events:

• 2024 Homecoming and Reunion

Law School News: Rwu Graduates Encouraged To 'Be Fearless' And To Always 'Seek Knowledge', Mel Thibeault

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Bad Therapy: Conceptualizing The Teaching Of “Thinking Like A Lawyer” As Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Chelsea Baldwin

St. Mary's Law Journal

Law students and lawyers experience mental illness and substance abuse at higher rates than the general population and other learned professions. This is bad for an individual’s wellbeing as well as their clients and society because mental illness and substance abuse increases stress which in turn decreases effective decision-making and judgment, and in worst case scenarios leads to attrition as individuals choose death by suicide which has cascading social and economic impacts. This Article identifies practices in legal education that likely combine in a causal mechanism, although not a sole cause, to the higher rates of mental illness and substance …

Law School News: Elisabeth D'Amelio Chosen As Class Of 2024 Graduate Student Commencement Speaker 5-14-24, Jordan J. Phelan

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.