Law Commons^™

Professional Training, Diversity In Legal Education, And Cost Control: Selection, Training And Peer Review For Adjunct Professors, Marcia R. Gelpe

Faculty Scholarship

The thesis of this article is that adjunct faculty make a unique and valuable contribution to legal education, that law is best taught by a combination of full-time and adjunct faculty members, and that serious consideration should be given to the issues of how best to divide teaching between full-time faculty and adjuncts. In addition, if adjunct faculty are to be viewed as a positive part of the teaching endeavor, it is essential to consider the ways to maximize their contribution. This article recommends a serious change in the way law schools think about and relate to adjunct faculty. Part …

And Then There Was One, Douglas R. Heidenreich

Faculty Scholarship

In the twentieth century's second decade, Minneapolis lawyers created four night law schools, all of which William Mitchell College of Law numbers among its predecessor institutions. By 1940, a single law school remained, an amalgam of the original four. It would unite in 1956 with its St. Paul counterpart to form William Mitchell College of Law.

Hiram F. Stevens And The Founding Of The St. Paul College Of Law, Douglas R. Heidenreich

Faculty Scholarship

The St. Paul College of Law, one of William Mitchell College of Law's predecessor institutions, was established by five attorneys in 1900. Especially prominent among these attorneys was Hiram F. Stevens (1852-1904), who served as the first dean and was also a legislator, teacher, scholar, popular orator, and a founding member of the American Bar Association.

Keynote Address: Redefining Our Roles In The Battle For Inclusion Of People Of Color In Legal Education, Phoebe A. Haddon

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

A Decade Of Developments In Performance-Based Legal Education, Deborah A. Schmedemann, Christina L. Kunz

Faculty Scholarship

This tribute summarizes some of the accomplishments of William Mitchell college of Law in performance-based learning in legal education between 1986 and 1996. It first chronicles developments in the first-and second-year performance-based courses and then turns to upper-level curricular developments. At each point, it touches on course development and scholarship--the parallel tracks pursued by faculty focusing on performance-based legal education. As a result of these developments, the college is well positioned to contribute to the growth of performance-based learning in legal education nationally.

Searches, Seizures, Confessions, And Some Thoughts On Criminal Procedure: Regulation Of Police Investigation -- Legal, Historical, Empirical, And Comparative Materials, Daniel B. Yeager

Faculty Scholarship

Criminal procedure casebooks densely populate the market but rarely are reviewed. In Criminal Procedure: Regulation of Police Investigation-Legal, Historical, Empirical, and Comparative Materials, Christopher Slobogin copes with the anxiety of influence by writing a different sort of text. Simply put, the book is outwardly somewhat homely. Aesthetics aside, the book is mostly excellent and astonishingly so for a first edition. As the subtitle promises, the book has something for everyone: historians, empiricists, comparativists, theoreticians, case-crunchers, and practitioners. This review essay tracks the book's crowning achievement-the refreshing and inventive "perspectives" chapter that opens the book. The essay then reflects on …

Comment On Moliterno, Legal Education, Experiential Education, And Professional Responsibility, Lance Liebman

Faculty Scholarship

In attempting to predict and prescribe the future, my vision of the recent history of legal education differs from Professor Moliterno's in certain relevant ways.

I graduated from Law School in 1967. I learned largely through doctrinal courses that delivered steady training in thinking like a lawyer and information about areas of law. These courses exposed me and my classmates to legal lingo and to the standard types of legal arguments. We learned, largely by hearing the teacher and our fellow students, to make verbal moves and to see the strengths and limitations of others' argumentation skills and techniques. We …

Paying Attention To The Signs, Susan P. Koniak, Geoffrey C. Hazard

Faculty Scholarship

After all our efforts and all Keck's money, where are we? Some good has been accomplished. By committing its resources to the study of legal ethics, the W.M. Keck Foundation has encouraged law schools to pay attention to a subject all too often ignored. That itself is good. The money has made things happen. Schools have held conferences devoted to legal ethics that otherwise would not have been held;¹ schools have experimented with teaching programs in legal ethics that otherwise might have been left untried;' members of the practicing bar have had conversations and debates with academics about the …

Rosalie Wahl: Her Extraordinary Contributions To Legal Education, James F. Hogg

Faculty Scholarship

Justice Rosalie Wahl is well-known as the first woman to be appointed to the Minnesota Supreme Court, but she has made a lesser known, yet critical, contribution to the quality and effectiveness of legal education in this country. As chair of the American Bar Association's Section on Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar, Wahl created the MacCrate Commission. The MacCrate Report charts the way for improvement in law school teaching and learning, and the discussion following the report lead to the creation of an ABA Commission to take testimony and review the ABA Accreditation Standards. Wahl also chaired this …

Learning By Doing - Preparing Law Students For The Practice Of Law: The Legal Practicum, John O. Sonsteng, Roger S. Haydock

Faculty Scholarship

The MacCrate Report outlined ten skills that are essential for every practicing attorney and should ideally be taught in every law school. The Association of American Law Schools (AALS) concluded that these ten skills cannot be effectively obtained through every law school curriculum because of each school's individual, economic limitations. This article demonstrates how one law school—William Mitchell College of Law, in St. Paul, Minnesota—has , since 1984, incorporated a cost effective Legal Practicum course into its curriculum to help meet the MacCrate Report goal of providing the law student with the opportunity to learn and apply fundamental lawyering skills. …

Our Perspective On Irac, Christina L. Kunz, Deborah A. Schmedemann

Faculty Scholarship

In this brief article, the authors present their view of IRAC, an acronym for Issue, Relevant law, Application to facts, and Conclusion. The authors conclude that IRAC can be taught so that students understand not only why it is useful as a thinking and writing tool, but also that proper use of it requires judgment and creativity. When IRAC is presented this way, the authors assert, it can serve first-year students well as they study legal writing. And they will operate accordingly, even without being aware of its influence, during their years as practicing lawyers.

Business Lawyers And Value Creation For Clients, Ronald J. Gilson, Robert H. Mnookin

Faculty Scholarship

This Symposium marks an important milestone in legal scholarship and education: The spotlight falls on business lawyers for a change. Ten years ago, when one of us first wrote about what business lawyers really do, no one had devoted much attention to this part of the profession. In his broadside against lawyers, Derek Bok, then President of Harvard University and formerly dean of its law school, reserved his invective for litigators and the litigation process. Business lawyers captured the attention of very few critics; even on the unusual occasion when we were noticed, the criticism was at least funny. If …

Education For A Public Calling In The 21st Century, Phoebe A. Haddon

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Using The Maccrate Report To Strengthen Live-Client Clinics, Ann Juergens

Faculty Scholarship

Clinical teachers can use the "MacCrate Report"—the Report of the ABA Task Force on Law Schools and the Profession: Narrowing the Gap and its Statement of Skills and Values—in a variety of ways to help live-client clinics. This paper assumes that the reader has basic background knowledge of the MacCrate Report. It also makes a fundamental judgment about the value and role of live-client clinics: it assumes that strengthening live-client clinics is important for the future of legal education. Strategies for negotiation for educational change, of course, must be tailored to each negotiation's context. Each law school has its own …

"Skilling" Time, Peter B. Knapp

Faculty Scholarship

This article describes disagreements about the "MacCrate Report" on skills education for law students, as well as the connections between the Report's recommendations and legal education at William Mitchell College of Law. The final commentary focuses on what William Mitchell can do to further ensure that teaching prepares students for the learning they will have to do when they begin working as lawyers.

The Mind In The Major American Law School, Lee C. Bollinger

Faculty Scholarship

Legal scholarship is significantly, even qualitatively, different from what it was some two or three decades ago. As with any major change in intellectual thought, this one is composed of several strands. The inclusion in the legal academic community of women and minorities has produced, not surprisingly, a distinctive and at times quite critical body of thought and writing. The emergence of the school of thought known as critical legal studies has renewed and extended the legal realist critique of law of the first half of the century. But more than anything else it is the interdisciplinary movement in legal …

Mandatory Prelicensure Legal Internship: An Idea Whose Time Has Come Again, Stephen R. Alton

Faculty Scholarship

This Article explores the wisdom of imposing an internship requirement on aspiring lawyers as a prerequisite for licensure. It is my position that such a requirement can be beneficial to the new attorney, to the profession, and to the public and should thus be mandated for all those who seek admission to the practice of law. This Article begins by briefly examining the history in the United States of law-office, apprenticeship as a means of legal education. I then proceed to an examination of modern internship requirements in England and Canada. There follows a discussion of some of the more …

The Faces Of Law In Theory And Practice: Doctrine, Rhetoric, And Social Context, Richard C. Boldt, Marc Feldman

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Teaching Appellate Advocacy In An Appellate Clinical Law Program, J Thomas Sullivan

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Clinics And "Contextual Integration": Helping Law Students Put The Pieces Back Together Again, Eric S. Janus

Faculty Scholarship

In legal education, as in all education aimed at practice, the relationship between theory and practice is an uneasy one. William Mitchell College of Law, one of the nation’s few free-standing law schools, has traditionally placed itself squarely on the practice side of the theory/practice axis. It has aimed to produce law graduates who could walk into a law office and begin practicing law—not lawyers who would spend additional years learning the profession at someone’s elbow. In recent years, William Mitchell has begun to embrace a more academic approach to legal education. This paper suggests that the College need not, …

Health Law At The Turn Of The Century: From White Dwarf To Red Giant, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

The evolution of stars is inexorable. From the form in which we currently view our own Sun, it and similar stars eventually expand as their exteriors cool to become red giants. When a red giant runs out of fuel, its exposed core will collapse to form a degenerate white dwarf and, eventually, a dead black dwarf.¹ Health law, as a discipline worthy of our attention, seems to have an opposite trajectory: from black dwarf to white dwarf, it is now on its way to becoming a red giant. The relevance of health law and the reasons for its exponentially …

What Are Professional Skills And Why Should Law Schools Teach Them?, Donald G. Gifford

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The U.C.C. (Sales) As An Introductory Law School Course, Ronald B. Brown

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Changing Directions At Columbia, Michael I. Sovern

Faculty Scholarship

Each period in history handles reform in its own way. In the earlier days we placed a heavy emphasis on legal realism. We stressed the need to adapt the learning of other disciplines to legal education and to bring the learning of other disciplines into the law school instructional program. As you know, that is an incomplete revolution. It remains a part of our present concern, but our focus today is different.

2-1-1: The 4th Revolution In Legal Education, Michael I. Sovern

Faculty Scholarship

If we were to count the great changes in legal education from Charles Evans Hughes' day to this, we would find ourselves with a short list. The shift from apprenticeship to school was already well begun by the time Mr. Hughes was graduated from the Columbia School of Law in 1884. The case method was a new idea, but it would become the orthodox methodology in a startlingly short time. By the turn of the century, a number of law schools had moved from two- to three-year programs, but two years was still enough for admission to the bar in …

The Delivery Of Legal Services: Some Ethical Considerations In The Use Of Law Students, Roger C. Wolf

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Role Of The Law School In Continuing Legal Education, Robert R. Wright

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.