Law Commons^™

Postscript To A Deanship, Annette E. Clark

Faculty Articles

The author reflects on her experiences as the dean of the Saint Louis University School of Law and tries to discern lessons that might be useful to other deans.

Derrick A. Bell, Jr.: Serving Two Masters Elegantly, Margaret Chon

Faculty Articles

Tribute to Professor Derrick Bell

A Tribute To Derrick Bell, Henry W. Mcgee

Faculty Articles

Tribute to Professor Derrick Bell

Bell Labs: Derrick Bell’S Inspirational Pedagogy, Charlotte Garden

Faculty Articles

Tribute to Professor Derrick Bell

The Fully Formed Lawyer: Why Law Schools Should Require Public Service To Better Prepare Students For Private Practice, Sara Rankin

Faculty Articles

It is now commonly accepted that law schools are graduating students who are under-prepared for practice in the real world. In other words, students that perform adequately in the classroom seem to struggle or suffer — to an unnecessary degree — when they enter practice. It is as though law schools are graduating inchoate or “partially-formed” lawyers, who demonstrate classroom fluency but lack meaningful ability to grapple with the wrinkles and complexity of real-world practice. This article argues that to create practice-ready or “fully formed” lawyers, law schools should reform to prioritize hands-on training in public service. It may seem …

Derrick Bell: Oregon Trailblazer, Steve Bender

Faculty Articles

Tribute to Professor Derrick Bell

Derrick Bell: Ethical Ambition And Law Teaching, Natasha Martin

Faculty Articles

Tribute to Professor Derrick Bell

Providing Dispute Resolution Expertise To The Community, Rishi Batra

Faculty Articles

As schools and other public institutions struggle for funding, law schools and their students have new opportunities to fill unmet needs by providing consulting expertise in facilitation and dispute resolution. Such partnerships can provide valuable service for the institutions while giving students a chance to apply their skills to issues in nearby communities.

The Least Of These: In Praise Of Professor Tom Holdych’S Integrity And Dedication To Justice For The Disadvantaged, Henry Mcgee

Faculty Articles

An obituary for Thomas J. Holdych, contracts and commercial law professor at the Seattle University is presented.

Tribute To Professor Tom Holdych, John Weaver

Faculty Articles

An obituary for Thomas J. Holdych, contracts and commercial law professor at the Seattle University is presented.

The Status Of Clinical Faculty In The Legal Academy: Report Of The Task Force On The Status Of Clinicians And The Legal Academy, Bryan Adamson

Faculty Articles

In the midst of ongoing debates within the legal academy and the American Bar Association on the need for "practice-ready" law school graduates through enhanced attention to law clinics and externships and on the status of faculty teaching in those courses, this report identifies and evaluates the most appropriate modes for clinical faculty appointments. Drawing on data collected through a survey of clinical program directors and faculty, the report analyzes the five most identifiable clinical faculty models: unitary tenure track; clinical tenure track; long-term contract; short-term contract; and clinical fellowships. It determines that, despite great strides in the growth of …

Tribute To Professor Thomas J. Holdych, Annette E. Clark

Faculty Articles

An obituary for Thomas J. Holdych, contracts and commercial law professor at the Seattle University is presented.

Tom Holdych: A Tribute, In “In Memory Of Professor Thomas J. Holdych”, Chris Rideout

Faculty Articles

An obituary for Thomas J. Holdych, contracts and commercial law professor at the Seattle University is presented.

A Senior Faculty Member’S Favorite Sabbatical: My Teaching Sabbatical, John B. Mitchell

Faculty Articles

Professor John Mitchell had taken several typical sabbaticals—travel and research culminating in several articles and a book—and up until the last minute, his spring 2009 sabbatical promised nothing very different. And then with a single phone call, his sabbatical book project collapsed. There was nothing else about which he was passionate at that time, and it seemed stupid to arbitrarily choose a topic and then spend the next four years writing a book he didn't care about. In the midst of scrambling desperation, the idea of a sabbatical focused not on a scholarly project, but on his primary teaching focus …

Darth Vader, John B. Kirkwood

Faculty Articles

An obituary for Thomas J. Holdych, contracts and commercial law professor at the Seattle University is presented.

Reflections On My Colleague, Tom Holdych, Janet Ainsworth

Faculty Articles

An obituary for Thomas J. Holdych, contracts and commercial law professor at the Seattle University is presented.

International Judicial Affairs, Robert Alsdorf

Faculty Articles

The article reports on training programs launched by several countries for their judges. It is reported that the International Judicial Affairs (IJA) Committee was established in the U.S. in the year 2007 to develop opportunities for judges to work with fellow judges in other jurisdictions in mutually beneficial ways. Sierra Leone, as reported, has also carried out reforms in their legal system through their Justice Sector Reform Programme (JSRP).

Externships For Millennial Generation Law Students: Bridging The Generation Gap, Susan Mcclellan

Faculty Articles

This article examines the literature about our newest generation of law students, the Millennials, and offers suggestions to help externship faculty work with supervisors and students to avoid potential problems that may arise from generational differences. After reviewing the literature, the article discusses both positive and negative Millennial generation traits and explains how identified generational problems might arise in externship field placements. The article then offers suggestions from psychologists, managerial literature, and the author's experience to help externship directors and faculty work with field supervisors and students to avoid or resolve issues. The article concludes that members of the Millennial …

Crossover, Richard Delgado

Faculty Articles

Should minority writers aim for a "crossover" audience of mainstream (white) readers or write mainly for a circle of readers like themselves, viz., minorities or people of color? Despite the attractions of achieving crossover status -- including fame, fortune, and book reviews -- the article argues that writers of color should usually visualize an audience of their peers, that is, readers of color. Writing for a broad audience of mostly white readers risks that the minority writer will adopt topics, language, and approaches that will appeal and ring true to this group. Consciously or unconsciously the writer may pull his …

Richard Delgado And The Politics Of Citation, Robert S. Chang

Faculty Articles

Twenty-five years ago, Professor Richard Delgado published The Imperial Scholar. The article asserted that a group of white scholars dominated the field of civil rights scholarship to the exclusion of minority scholars. It created a firestorm of sorts with what one critic called a "serious charge of invidious racism on the part of respected legal scholars." Professor Derrick Bell described the piece as "an intellectual hand grenade, tossed over the wall of the establishment as a form of academic protest." Whether as firestorm or grenade, this foundational piece had a tremendous impact on the legal landscape. This brief essay examines …

In Memoriam: Joseph M. Williams, Chris Rideout

Faculty Articles

Professor Chris Rideout pays tribute to Joseph M. Williams, 1933-2008, Professor Emeritus, University of Chicago and author of Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace, among other highly influential works. Professor Rideout shows his appreciation for Williams' generous support and many contributions to the world of writing instruction, especially legal writing.

Did Harvard Get It Right?, Laurel Oates

Faculty Articles

This article grapples with whether Harvard’s adoption of the casebook method over 150 years ago was correct. It contrasts the reading of judicial decisions for principles with the pedagogy of other disciplines: reading assignments, lectures, and exams that test whether students have learned the information set out in those textbooks and lectures. It details recent research from educational psychologies suggesting that the casebook method is not particularly effective in helping students learn either the law or to how to use the law to solve problems. At the same time, the casebook method may be an extremely effective method of helping …

You Are Not In Kansas Anymore: Orientation Programs Can Help Students Fly Over The Rainbow, Paula Lustbader

Faculty Articles

Analogizing Oz to Law School, this article discusses the role of orientation in the law school curriculum and offers implementation strategies to develop an effective orientation. An effective and comprehensive orientation program for law school would have many goals: it should attempt to construct the profession as a calling; create syntactical, substantive, and pedagogical context; communicate care and model empathy and compassion; cultivate community to promote mutual respect, cultural competence, and interdependence; and confirm student self-confidence. In addition to explaining why these are important goals, the article explores possible ways of achieving those goals. It ends with models of different …

Marketing Law Libraries: Strategies And Techniques In The Digital Age, Kristin Cheney

Faculty Articles

Marketing is no longer a sporadic activity undertaken on an ad hoc basis, but rather has become an integral component of every library’s day-to-day operations. This article provides an overview of basic marketing principles and then examines effective marketing strategies and promotional techniques in an academic environment. While viewed within the context of the law school setting, a majority of the marketing activities discussed are equally applicable in other types of law libraries.

Urban Law School Graduates In Large Law Firms, David Wilkins, Ronit Dinovitzer, Rishi Batra

Faculty Articles

Two major trends have dominated the American legal profession in recent years. First, "the legal profession has seen a striking growth in the largest firms during the latter part of the last century." In 1960, Shearman Sterling & Wright (now called Shearman & Sterling) was the largest firm in the country - and therefore the world. It had 125 lawyers. By the close of the century, there were more than 250 firms larger than Shearman & Sterling had been forty years before, with the largest ten topping the scales at 1000 lawyers or more. Today, in order to make the …

Using Global Law To Teach Domestic Advocacy, John B. Mitchell

Faculty Articles

There is currently a movement to integrate so-called global law into the law school curriculum. This essay, Using Global Law to Teach Domestic Advocacy, briefly explores this movement and its underlying rationales, and then focuses on using foreign procedural law in a traditional American trial advocacy course, principally to improve the students' domestic advocacy skills. Believing that such concepts are best understood in the concrete, Professor MitchellI has created a set of imaginary exercises to a trial advocacy class in which the instructor swaps various features of the Scotch Criminal Justice system (no opening statement, nor voir dire, three verdicts) …

The Law Is Not The Case: Incorporating Empirical Methods Into The Culture Of Case Analysis, Kay L. Levine

Faculty Articles

While I consider case analysis in the context of cultural defense jurisprudence, this Essay should be regarded as a case study of a more endemic problem in legal scholarship. In tackling such an area, my goal is not to overthrow centuries of legal analysis, but rather to explore how we, as legal scholars, might use social science techniques to more systematically investigate, document, analyze, and predict the state of a particular comer of the legal universe.

The argument proceeds in two parts. Part II considers empirical approaches to the question raised by Lee: how might we ascertain the relationship between …

Leveling The Playing Field: Helping Students Succeed By Helping Them Learn To Read As Expert Lawyers, Laurel Oates

Faculty Articles

The article explores a way in which law schools can level the field of student admission in order to ensure the success of students as law students and as lawyers in the United States. A study which compares the reading skills of a professor and four students who had been admitted to law school under a special admissions program is presented. It provides the techniques for students to develop their reading skills. It emphasizes on the importance of teaching legal reading.

A Conversation Among Deans On Results: Legal Education, Institutional Change, And A Decade Of Gender Studies, W. H. Knight, K. Bartlett, E. Rubin

Faculty Articles

On March 10, 2006, the Harvard Journal of Law & Gender, cosponsoring with the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review and the Harvard Law Review, hosted a conference, "Results: Legal Education, Institutional Change, and a Decade of Gender Studies," to address the number of student experience studies that detail women's lower performance in and dissatisfaction with law school. Rather than advocate for a particular set of responses to the different experiences of men and women in legal education, this conference sought to foster a discussion about the institutional challenges these patterns highlight. As one means of accomplishing this end, law …

A Call From Jerome, Robert S. Chang

Faculty Articles

This short article is a homage to the late Professor Jerome M. Culp, Jr. who provided courage necessary to propel critical race legal scholarship. He focused on building coalitions in the Crit community and his more recent work urged looking inwards. While he has passed away, his call to action remains.