Law Commons^™

Institutional Triage: Reflections On Being Acquired, Aric K. Short

Faculty Scholarship

On June 25, 2012, I walked into the dean's office at Texas Wesleyan University School of Law. He and I had been summoned by our university president to a hastily called meeting to discuss the law school's "academic program." Since I helped oversee our academic program as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at the time, I was not particularly looking forward to the meeting. I assumed there would be bad news of some sort.

Instead, we were told that Texas Wesleyan University ("TWU") and Texas A&M University ("TAMU") were in negotiations that, it was expected, would result in a "strategic …

"Just Another Little Black Boy From The South Side Of Chicago": Overcoming Obstacles And Breaking Down Barriers To Improve Diversity In The Law Professoriate, Michael Z. Green

Faculty Scholarship

As I reflected on my personal experience to help address the persistence of discrimination in legal academia, I chose to focus on five areas of discussion for the open mic portion of the program held at the Association of American Law Schools Cross-Cutting Program, “The More Things Change ...: Exploring Solutions to Persistent Discrimination in Legal Academia,” held on January 4, 2015, in Washington, D.C. First, I decided to address my personal development as an only child and male in a family of mostly black women struggling through the socioeconomic challenges of being poor and black. To add to that …

Synergy And Tradition: The Unity Of Research, Service, And Teaching In Legal Education, Frank Pasquale

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Incubating Community Law Practices: Post-Graduate Models For Lawyer Training & Access To Law, Luz E. Herrera

Faculty Scholarship

While the greatest number of lawyers practice in solo and small firms, law schools do not devote sufficient resources to preparing law students for the opportunities and challenges that these types of law firms present. The recent economic recession has highlighted the need to better train lawyers to launch law practices right out of law school. However, experienced lawyers, law professors and state bar policy makers worry that individuals who start their own practices are not sufficiently trained to practice and could irreparably harm a client. Many new lawyers share that concern but also worry about the financial instability that …

Experiential Teaching In Theory And Practice: An Annotated International Business Transactions Syllabus, Maya Steinitz, Orit Shalomson, Naomi Steinitz-Edelman

Faculty Scholarship

In this short piece we provide an interactive, annotated International Business Transactions (IBT) syllabus. The introduction and annotations seek to connect the current discourse on experiential legal education to andragogy — the study of adult learning.

In 2013 we set out to re-develop a 3-credit IBT course. We applied various experiential pedagogical methodologies — developed initially to train Israeli air force pilots and later adapted to medical training and grounded in theoretical and empirical education research — to serve in a traditional IBT course. The goal was not only to develop legal skills such as negotiation, contract drafting, and client …

Teaching Remedial Problem-Solving Skills To A Law School's Underperforming Students, John F. Murphy

Faculty Scholarship

This article describes a course called the "Art of Lawyering" developed by the Texas A&M University School of Law to help the bottom quarter of the 2L class develop the critical-thinking and problem-solving skills they should have learned in their first year of law school. Students in the bottom quarter of the class at the beginning of their 2L year are most at risk for failing the bar exam after graduation. The Art of Lawyering gives these students the structural framework necessary to solve problems like a lawyer, improve their performance in law school, and pass the bar exam.

The …

Launching The Los Angeles Incubator Consortium, Laura Dym Cohen, Luz E. Herrera, William T. Tanner

Faculty Scholarship

This Article offers a snapshot of the initial two-month development process of a new law firm incubator program-the Los Angeles Incubator Consortium (LAIC). LAIC is a collaborative project of Pepperdine University School of Law, Southwestern Law School, and UCLA School of Law that was launched in collaboration with the Los Angeles Law Library and various local legal aid providers through seed funding from the California Commission on Access to Justice.14 Part II discusses the leadership role of California's Commission on Access to Justice in promoting incubators as models to increase the availability of affordable legal services for the modest-means population. …

Democratizing Higher Education: Defending And Extending Income-Based Repayment Programs, Frank Pasquale

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Academic Duty And Academic Freedom, Amy Gajda

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Teaching And Assessing Professional Communication Skills In Law School, Denitsa R. Mavrova Heinrich

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Legal Education In Transition: Trends And Their Implications, Michael A. Millemann, Sheldon Krantz

Faculty Scholarship

This is a pivotal moment in legal education. Revisions in American Bar Association accreditation standards, approved in August 2014, impose new requirements, including practice-based requirements, on law schools. Other external regulators and critics are pushing for significant changes too. For example, the California bar licensing body is proposing to add a practice-based, experiential requirement to its licensing requirements, and the New York Court of Appeals, New York’s highest court, is giving third-year, second semester students the opportunity to practice full-time in indigent legal services programs and projects. Unbeknown to many, there have been significant recent changes in legal education that …

Are We There Yet? Aligning The Expectations And Realities Of Gaining Competency In Legal Writing, Sherri Lee Keene

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Assessing Experiential Learning, Jobs And All: A Response To The Three Professors, Robert J. Condlin

Faculty Scholarship

Does clinical practice experience improve a law student’s chances of getting a legal job? If not, would it, if employers were given better information about that experience? And if not, are there other reasons to justify a law school’s decision to fund a clinical program? The answer to the first two questions is almost certainly no. For many reasons—the uneven and situation-driven nature of clinical practice experience, the Delphic quality of practice evaluations, the availability of more effective in-house training options, and the like—most private law firms prefer to trust conventional academic credentials more than practice experience in deciding whom …

Synergy And Tradition: The Unity Of Research, Service, And Teaching In Legal Education, Frank A. Pasquale

Faculty Scholarship

Most non-profit law schools generate public goods of enormous value: important research, service to disadvantaged communities, and instruction that both educates students about present legal practice and encourages them to improve it. Each of these missions informs and enriches the others. However, technocratic management practices menace law schools’ traditional missions of balancing theory and practice, advocacy and scholarly reflection, study of and service to communities. This article defends the unity and complementarity of law schools’ research, service, and teaching roles. (For those short on time, the chart on pages 45-46 encapsulates the conflicting critiques of law schools which this article …

What To Expect At The Intersection Of Law And Social Work, Jada Fehn

Faculty Scholarship

Hamline University School of Law recently launched a medical-legal partnership (MLP) with United Family Medicine (UFM), a community clinic on West Seventh Street. UFM is a nonprofit provider of primary health care that strives to meet the needs of the medically uninsured, underinsured, and underserved residents of Saint Paul. One of the main components of the partnership is a law school clinic that will provide legal assistance and educate student attorneys as part of a holistic approach to medical care.

Law Libraries And Laboratories: The Legacies Of Langdell And His Metaphor, Richard A. Danner

Faculty Scholarship

Law Librarians and others have often referred to Harvard Law School Dean C.C. Langdell’s statements that the law library is the lawyer’s laboratory. Professor Danner examines the context of what Langdell through his other writings, the educational environment at Harvard in the late nineteenth century, and the changing perceptions of university libraries generally. He then considers how the “laboratory metaphor” has been applied by librarians and legal scholars during the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. The article closes with thoughts on Langdell’s legacy for law librarians and the usefulness of the laboratory metaphor.

Foreword: Reflections On Our Founding, Guy-Uriel Charles, Luis E. Fuentes-Rohwer

Faculty Scholarship

Law Journals have been under heavy criticism for as long as we can remember. The criticisms come from all quarters, including judges, law professors, and even commentators at large. In an address at the Fourth Circuit Judicial Conference almost a decade ago, for example, Chief Justice Roberts complained about the “disconnect between the academy and the profession.” More pointedly, he continued, “[p]ick up a copy of any law review that you see, and the first article is likely to be, you know, the influence of Immanuel Kant on evidentiary approaches in 18th Century Bulgaria, or something, which I’m sure was …

Contract Law And Fundamental Legal Conceptions: An Application Of Hohfeldian Terminology To Contract Doctrine, Daniel P. O'Gorman

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Law School Deans And The “New Normal.", Peter C. Alexander

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Teamwork, Linda H. Morton, Janet Weinstein

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Learning And Lawyering Across Personality Types, Ian Weinstein

Faculty Scholarship

Personality theory illuminates recurring problems in law school teaching. While the roots of modern personality theory extend back to Hippocrates and the theory of the four humors, contemporary ideas owe much to Carl Jung's magisterial book, Psychological Types. Jung's work gave us the categories of introvert and extrovert, as it explored what has come to be understood as the cognitive bases for our habits of mind. These are powerful ideas but also complex and sometimes obscure. Applying them to law school teaching and learning (and law practice) can be very fruitful, if we pay careful attention to ourselves and colleagues, …

Effective Client Selection In Transactional Clinics, Manoj Viswanathan

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Reforming Law Schools: A Manifesto, Frank H. Wu

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Hidden Life Of Andrew Taslitz, Frank H. Wu

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Library Director As Opportunity Identifier, Ronald E. Wheeler

Faculty Scholarship

A successful contemporary law library director should seek opportunities to insert the law library, wherever possible, into projects that benefit the law school and its mission and that draw on the talents and expertise of the law librarians. The goal of the modern law library director should be to make the law library an integral part of each and every undertaking within the law school community. Every facet of the law school and its various departments and offices can benefit from either law library research and instructional services or the creative thinking and analytical orientation that librarians bring to the …

Legal Education In A Modern World: Evolution At Work, Leo P. Martinez

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Collaboration And Teamwork, Janet Weinstein, Linda H. Morton

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Parts Are Greater Than The Sum: What I Learned From My Mediation Clinic Students, Floralynn Einesman

Faculty Scholarship

I co-created the Mediation Clinic at California Western School of Law (hereafter CWSL) with my colleague Linda Morton in 1996 to provide students the opportunity to learn the process of mediation and to mediate live disputes in the community. We recognized the importance of “soft skills” such as communication, collaboration, initiative, and adaptability and therefore we sought to create an experiential learning opportunity for the students that encouraged them to nurture those skills. We wanted to teach students conflict resolution skills and to have them work together to use those skills to help individuals in the community resolve actual disputes. …

Law School Based Incubators And Access To Justice, Patricia Salkin, Ellen Suni, Niels Schaumann, Mary Lu Bilek

Faculty Scholarship

At the end of February 2015, law professors, law deans, incubator staff and attorneys, and self-selected others gathered at California Western School of Law for the Second Annual Conference on Law School Incubators and Residency Programs. The incubators that are the subject of this article tend to focus on transition to law practice and access to justice, and some are also working to incorporate technology for the practice of law as a means of enhancing access to justice. As more law schools decide to host, sponsor or offer an incubator, and following our panel discussion at the February 2015 incubator …

Library Director As Change Agent: Analysis Two, Implementing Change In Difficult Times, Femi Cadmus

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.