Law Commons^™

How Cosmopolitan Are International Law Professors?, Ryan Scoville, Milan Markovic

Milan Markovic

This Article offers an empirical answer to a question of interest among scholars of comparative international law: why do American views about international law appear at times to differ from those of other countries? The authors contend that part of the answer lies in legal education. Conducting a survey of the educational and professional backgrounds of nearly 150 legal academics, the authors reveal evidence that professors of international law in the United States often lack significant foreign legal experience, particularly outside of the West. Sociological research suggests that this tendency leads professors to teach international law from predominantly nationalistic and …

Who Wants To Be A Muggle? The Diminished Legitimacy Of Law As Magic, Mark Edwin 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 …

Inclusive Teaching Methods Across The Curriculum: Academic ·Resource And Law Teachers Tie A Knot At The Aals, David Dominguez, Laurie Zimet, Fran Ansley, Charles Daye, Rodney O. Fong

Rodney Fong

This article describes an educational journey of seven diverse law teachers, located in different parts of the country, at various stages of our careers, who, in the course of preparing a simple panel, found that we had created a truly rewarding experience of our own. We write with the conviction that we need to share what we learned from those four months of "schoolwork" and from the AALS program we eventually presented in January, 1997. As we reconstruct our collaboration on inclusive teaching methods and ponder where it is taking us, we find we worked through the following stages of …

Dickinson Law's Contexts & Competencies Course: A "One-Pager" For Nalp, Laurel S. Terry

Laurel S. Terry