Law Commons^™

The Future Of Empirical Legal Scholarship: Where Might We Go From Here?, Kathryn Zeiler

Faculty Scholarship

The number of empirical legal studies published by academic journals is on the rise. Given theory’s dominance over the last few decades, this is a welcome development. This movement, however, has been plagued by a lack of rigor and a failure of editors to require disclosure of data and procedures that allow for easy replication of published results. Law journals, the editorial boards of which are manned solely by law students, might face the toughest hurdles in ensuring publication of only high quality empirical studies and in implementing and enforcing disclosure policies. While scholars in other fields including economics, psychology, …

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

Faculty Scholarship

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 …

Uncovering And Deconstructing The Binary: Teaching (And Learning) Critical Reflection In Clinic And Beyond, Carolyn Grose

Faculty Scholarship

For me as a clinical teacher, the stalemate that so often emerges in our ongoing national conversations about things like abortion and gun control has provided new ways to think about the value of clinical teaching methodologies. The contours and contexts of the debates around abortion and gun control shift from year to year - when I started writing this, Sandy Hook and "legitimate rape" were fresh on everyone's minds. Today, we mourn Michael Brown and the massacre in Charleston, and we rail against Hobby Lobby. Despite the shifting characters, however, these debates remain a constant presence in our national …

What Legal Writers Can Learn From Paint Nite, Beth Cohen, Pat Newcombe

Faculty Scholarship

Paint Nite activities and adult coloring have captured the nation’s interest and gone mainstream. Creating something on our own is what drives similar trends like the popular Do It Yourself movement and the resurgence of knitting after 9/11. At the same time, these fun, creative activities can provide us with a window into the process of legal writing. Using Paint Nite as a reference point throughout a legal writing course allows faculty to present a holistic view of the writing process and provides a useful analogy for faculty as well as an accessible context for students. Legal writing instructors share …

Teaching The Digital Caveman: Rethinking The Use Of Classroom Technology In Law School, James Levy

Faculty Scholarship

Law students who have never lived in a world without computers or the Internet are known as "digital natives."

Helping Our Students Reach Their Full Potential: The Insidious Consequences Of Stereotype Threat, Russell A. Mcclain

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Law And Economics: Contemporary Approaches, Martha T. Mccluskey, Frank A. Pasquale, Jennifer Taub

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Clinical Legal Education's Contribution To Building Constitutionalism And Democracy In South Africa: Past, Present, And Future, Peggy Maisel, Shaheda Mahomed, Meetali Jain

Faculty Scholarship

Clinical Legal Education (“CLE”) courses were first introduced in South Africa nearly fifty years ago. Since then, their role has changed from addressing legal problems perpetrated by an oppressive system, to strengthening South Africa’s transition to democracy. The end of apartheid has been accompanied by a transition of focus from private law to public law. South Africa currently has seventeen public universities, each of which has a law faculty and a legal clinic. Many clinical programs’ missions are primarily dedicated to community service and providing access to justice.

Although CLE programs have undertaken some human rights and law reform work, …

The Influence Of Algorithms: The Importance Of Tracking Technology As Legal Educators, Brian Sites

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Being Good Lawyers: A Relational Approach To Law Practice, Eli Wald, Russell G. Pearce

Faculty Scholarship

In response to past generations of debates regarding whether law is a business or profession, we advance an alternative approach that rejects the dichotomies of business and profession, or hired gun and wise counselor. Instead, we propose a relational account of law practice. Unlike frameworks grounded in assumptions of atomistic individualism or communitarianism, a relational perspective recognizes that all actors, whether individuals or organizations, have separate identities yet are intrinsically inter-connected and cannot maximize their own good in isolation. Through the lens of relational self-interest, maximizing the good of the individual or business requires consideration of the good of the …

The Market Myth And Pay Disparity In Legal Academia, Paula A. Monopoli

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The End(S) Of Legal Education, Frank H. Wu

Faculty Scholarship

Legal education is in jeopardy. There is no longer sufficient demand for the juris doctor degree from prospective students; the supply of seats exceeds the number of applicants possessing the credentials that have until recently been preferred by each respective institution. As a consequence, schools have had to implement “tuition discounting” at unprecedented levels even to enroll fewer individuals who are less qualified by conventional predictors. Meanwhile, the mainstream press, with encouragement from the organized bar, has excoriated the legal academy for its failures, whether real or perceived. These critics have wondered about the “return on investment.”

Fiduciary-Isms: A Study Of Academic Influence On The Expansion Of The Law, Daniel B. Yeager

Faculty Scholarship

Fiduciary law aspires to nullify power imbalances by obligating strong parties to give themselves over to servient parties. For example, due to profound imbalances of legal know-how, lawyers must as fiduciaries pursue their clients’ interests, not their own, lest clients get lost in the competitive shuffle. As a peculiar hybrid of status and contract relations, politics and law, compassion and capitalism, fiduciary law is very much in vogue in academic circles. As vogue as it is, there remains room for my “Fiduciary-isms...”, a meditation on the expansion of fiduciary law from its origins in the law of trusts through partnerships, …

Developing A Pedagogy Of Beneficiary Accountability In The Representation Of Social Justice Non-Profit Organizations, Amber Baylor, Daria Fisher Page

Faculty Scholarship

This article seeks to begin a conversation on how we teach the problem of beneficiary accountability in the representation of organizations with social justice missions: How do we guide students towards a fuller understanding of the moral responsibility to engage and respect the voices of the communities most directly affected by the non-profit organization’s mission? We look at the issue through the pedagogical lens of our experience supervising clinic students, deconstructing the problems of beneficiary accountability that students faced in the representation of two social justice organizations, surveying relevant legal scholarship on organizational representation and community lawyering, and considering alternative …

The Ph.D. Rises In American Law Schools, 1960-2011: What Does It Mean For Legal Education?, Justin Mccrary, Joy Milligan, James Cleith Phillips

Faculty Scholarship

At a time when some perceive law schools to be in crisis and the future of legal education is being debated, the structural shift toward law professors with Ph.Ds is an important, under-examined trend. In this article, we use an original dataset to analyze law school Ph.D hiring trends and consider their potential consequences. Over the last fifty years the proportion of law professors with Ph.Ds has risen dramatically. Over a third of new professors hired at elite law schools in recent years come with doctoral degrees in fields outside the law. We use our data to consider the scope, …

Cases And Case-Lawyers, Richard A. Danner

Faculty Scholarship

In the nineteenth century, the term “case-lawyer” was used as a label for lawyers who seemed to care more about locating precedents applicable to their current cases than understanding the principles behind the reported case law. Criticisms of case-lawyers appeared in English journals in the late 1820s, then in the United States, usually from those who believed that every lawyer needed to know and understand the unchanging principles of the common law in order to resolve issues not found in the reported cases. After the Civil War, expressions of concern about caselawyers increased with the significant growth in the amount …

The "Law" And "Spirit" Of The Accreditation Process In Legal Education, Maureen A. O'Rourke

Faculty Scholarship

In 1995, Dean Richard Matasar published an essay in the Journal of Legal Education entitled Perspectives on the Accreditation Process: Views from a Nontraditional School. With characteristic acuity, he focused on the question "whether the accreditation process promotes or discourages curricular experimentation and resource conservation," noting that "[a]s we enter an era of scarcity of resources and diminished demand for legal education, traditional well-endowed schools will continue to flourish. For the rest of us, however, only the fittest and most clever will survive. Accreditation must serve this end."

The Digital Revolution And The Future Of Law Reviews, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

Let me begin by congratulating the Marquette Law Review on reaching the threshold of its 100th anniversary. As you may know, Harvard established the first student-edited law review in 1887. Once the Harvard experiment was seen to be a success, other schools followed suit. Marquette was an early adopter, establishing its law review in 1916. By comparison, the school I attended, the University of Chicago, did not start a law review until 1933.

The title of my remarks could be “Will the Marquette Law Review Survive Another Hundred Years?” Or, perhaps, “Will the Marquette Law Review Survive Another Hundred Years, …

Christopher Columbus Langdell And The Public Law Curriculum, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

Teaching materials in public law courses typically rely almost wholly on judicial opinions as their primary materials, amplified by selections from the secondary literature. Constitutional text may appear independently, but statutory text rarely does, and the materials of the legislative process are generally absent. In administrative law course books, administrative opinions and the materials of rulemaking rarely fever appear. Yet these are primary materials with which lawyers must deal with increasing frequency. Lawyers encounter statutes, rules, administrative policies, and administrative disputes without judicial guidance, looking forward and not backward in time. The growth of courses in legislation and the regulatory …