Law Commons^™

Educating For The Future: Teaching Evidence In The Technological Age, Denise H. Wong

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The advent of the technological age has had significant effect on litigation practice, none more so than in the area of evidence gathering and presentation in court. A significant proportion of evidence that is gathered for both criminal and civil matters is now electronic in nature, and this necessitates a change in the way that lawyers think and advise on evidential issues. It is argued here that rather than simply focusing on principles relating to the admissibility of evidence in court, the traditional course on evidence law should be modified to equip students with an intellectual framework that conceives of …

Constructing Modern-Day U.S. Legal Education With Rhetoric: Langdell, Ames, And The Scholar Model Of The Law Professor Persona, Carlo A. Pedrioli

Faculty Scholarship

This article explains how lawyers like Christopher Columbus Langdell and James Barr Ames, a disciple of Langdell, employed rhetoric between 1870, when Langdell assumed the deanship at Harvard Law School, and 1920, when law had emerged as a credible academic field in the United States, to construct a persona, that of a scholar, appropriate for the law professor situated within the university. To do so, the article contextualizes the rhetoric with historical background on the law professor and legal education, draws upon rhetorical theory to give an overview of persona theory and persona analysis as a means of conducting the …

Time: An Empirical Analysis Of Law Student Time Management Deficiencies, Christine P. Bartholomew

Journal Articles

This Article begins the much needed research on law students’ time famine. Time management complaints begin early in students’ legal education and generally go unresolved. As a result, practicing attorneys identify time famine as a leading cause of job dissatisfaction. To better arm graduating students, law schools must treat time as an essential component of practice-readiness. Unfortunately, most law schools ignore their students’ time management concerns, despite growing calls for greater “skills” training in legal education.

To date, legal scholarship has overlooked psychological research on time management. Yet, this research is an essential starting point to effective instruction. Rather than …

Teaching American Legal History In A Law School, Peter D. Garlock

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Professor Peter Garlock describes his legal history course.

A Case For Grade Inflation In Legal Education, Joshua M. Silverstein

Faculty Scholarship

This Article contends that every American law school ought to substantially eliminate C grades by setting its good academic standing grade point average at the B- level. Grading systems that require or encourage law professors to award a significant number of C marks are flawed for two reasons. First, low grades damage students' placement prospects. Employers frequently consider a job candidate's absolute GPA in making hiring decisions. If a school systematically assigns inferior grades, its students are at an unfair disadvantage when competing for employment with students from institutions that award mostly A's and B's. Second, marks in the C …

A Community Of Procedure Scholars: Teaching Procedure And The Legal Academy, Elizabeth Thornburg, Erik S. Knutsen, Carla Crifo', Camille Cameron

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

This article asks whether the way in which procedure is taught has an impact on the extent and accomplishments of a scholarly community of proceduralists. Not surprisingly, we find a strong correlation between the placement of procedure as a required course in an academic context and the resulting body of scholars and scholarship. Those countries in which more civil procedure is taught as part of a university degree — and in which procedure is recognized as a legitimate academic subject — have larger scholarly communities, a larger and broader corpus of works analyzing procedural issues, and a richer web of …

Experiential Education In The Lecture Hall, Jessica Erickson

Law Faculty Publications

Legal education today is composed of two separate worlds. The first world includes clinical faculty, law skills faculty, and other related faculty. These faculty members have long embraced experiential education, and they organize and attend conferences like the "Experience the Future" symposium, hosted by Northeastern University School of Law and the Alliance for Experiential Learning in Law. The other world includes people like me- doctrinal faculty members who are still largely teaching the way we always have. As we see it, our role is to teach doctrine and legal analysis, leaving skills training and other experiential teaching to others. Experiential …

Joining The Conversation: Law Library Research Assistant Programs And Current Criticisms Of Legal Education, David Mcclure

Scholarly Works

Law libraries should play a greater role in addressing the current crisis in legal education. Proponents for educational reform often view libraries as a vehicle for cost savings, while overlooking the ability of libraries to train students in the skills and competencies that are essential for the practice of law. Libraries’ research assistant programs can be particularly effective in imparting workplace values and lawyering skills beyond the traditional law school curriculum. This article encourages libraries to build on the strengths of their research assistant programs as a substantive way to equip law students with essential skills for today’s legal marketplace.

Legal Writing: A Doctrinal Course, Linda H. Edwards

Scholarly Works

Legal writing instruction in American law schools has come a long way. Although scattered experiential courses and co-curricular activities have existed since legal education moved into a university setting, the modern era of skills education began in the 1950s and 1960s, with the creation of live-client clinics at many law schools. Early legal writing programs soon followed, moving into the main stream of curricular reform during the 1980s and 1990s. As these new courses and new instructors moved into the academy, the language of legal education naturally changed. Law faculties found themselves wanting to describe these new additions to the …

Why Environmental Law Clinics?, Adam Babich, Jane F. Barrett

Faculty Scholarship

The law clinic has become an increasingly important part of legal education, giving students the opportunity to learn practical skills as well as to internalize core legal values. Pedagogical concerns preclude clinics from letting fear of criticism drive decisions about how they represent clients. The legal profession's idealistic aspirations pose challenges, and political attacks have answered clinicians' efforts to live up to these aspirations. An error underlies such attacks, however: holding lawyers responsible for their clients' legal positions despite the profession's duty to ensure that such positions get a fair hearing.

Across The Curriculum: Integrating Transactional Skills Instruction, Jean Whitney, Lori D. Johnson, Richard Rawson, Carol Morgan

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Improving Law School "Transparency", Jeffrey E. Stake

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Teaching Legal History In The Age Of Practical Legal Education, Douglas E. Abrams

Faculty Publications

Historian Henry Steele Commager said, “History is useful in the sense that art is useful--or music or poetry or flowers; perhaps even in the sense that religion and philosophy is useful .... For without these things life would be poorer and meaner.” For law students who anticipate a career representing private and public clients and participating in public discussion, however, study of legal history carries rewards beyond intellectual stimulation and personal satisfaction. Law students contemplating client representation should ponder Justice Holmes's advice that “[h]istory must be a part of the study [of law], because without it we cannot know the …

Cooperation In Legal Education And Legal Reform, Ronald A. Brand

Articles

This contribution to the symposium Special Report on Kosovo After the ICJ Opinion focuses on legal education and its role in the legal reform necessary to any state that is transitioning to a new system of government. It does so by considering first the importance of legal education as a U.S. export to transition countries. This necessarily requires a reciprocal consideration of the importance to U.S. law schools of considering the external, international effect of implementing changes in the traditional structure of U.S. legal education, and about how teaching methods both distinguish differing legal systems and require cross-system consideration of …

Special Report: Kosovo After The Icj Opinion, Introduction, Ronald A. Brand

Articles

On October 22-25, 2012, judges, government officials, and scholars from Kosovo and the United States gathered at the University of Pittsburgh for a conference on “Kosovo after the ICJ Opinion.” The conference was organized by the Center for International Legal Education (CILE) at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, and the University of Prishtina Faculty of Law. It was co-sponsored by the Ministry of Justice, Kosovo; the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Kosovo; the Forum for Civic Initiatives, Kosovo; the American Society of International Law (ASIL); and the Center for Russian and Eastern European Studies at the University of Pittsburgh …

Teaching Law And Digital Age Legal Practice With An Ai And Law Seminar: Justice, Lawyering And Legal Education In The Digital Age, Kevin D. Ashley

Articles

A seminar on Artificial Intelligence ("Al") and Law can teach law students lessons about legal reasoning and legal practice in the digital age. Al and Law is a subfield of Al/computer science research that focuses on designing computer programs—computational models—that perform legal reasoning. These computational models are used in building tools to assist in legal practice and pedagogy and in studying legal reasoning in order to contribute to cognitive science and jurisprudence. Today, subject to a number of qualifications, computer programs can reason with legal rules, apply legal precedents, and even argue like a legal advocate.

This article provides a …

Legal Education At A Crossroads: Innovation, Integration, And Pluralism Required!, Karen Tokarz, Antoinette Sedillo Lopez, Peggy Maisel, Robert Seibel

Faculty Scholarship

Although historically slow to change, law schools are now facing enormous pressure from educators, students, lawyers, judges, clients, and the public to rethink legal education and the lawyer‘s role in society. Now more than ever, there is robust national debate on the threshold contributions law schools should make to the preparation of law graduates for entry into practice. The clamor for reform in legal education is precipitated by a confluence of factors, including new insights about lawyering competencies and experiential legal education; the shifting nature of legal practice in the United States; a decrease in law jobs; changes in the …

Measuring The Racial Unevenness Of Law School, Jonathan Feingold, Doug Souza

Faculty Scholarship

In "Measuring the Racial Unevenness of Law School," Jonathan Feingold and Doug Souza introduce and analyze the concept of racial unevenness, which refers to the particularized burdens an individual encounters as a result of her race. These burdens, which often arise because an individual falls outside of the racial norm, manifest across a spectrum. At one end lie obvious forms of overt and invidious racial discrimination. At the other end, racial unevenness arises from environmental factors and institutional culture independent from any identifiable perpetrator. As the authors detail, race-dependent burdens can arise in institutions and communities that expressly promote racial …

Plus Ça Change, Plus C’Est La Même Chose, Nancy B. Rapoport

Scholarly Works

This essay takes the original plans from NYU Law School and draws analogies between those plans and the issues facing legal education today.

Benjamin Butler's 1835 Plan for the Organization of a Law Faculty and for a System of Instruction in Legal Science in the University for the City of New-York will make any law school dean feel like Yogi Berra: it’s “deja-vu all over again.” The issue of how best to organize a curriculum to train legal professionals was a hot topic then, and it’s a hot topic now.

Did Legal Education Fail Health Reform? And How Health Law Can Help, Wendy K. Mariner

Faculty Scholarship

Arguments over the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act illustrate the pervasiveness of health law issues in society. In court, arguments on both sides also demonstrated insufficient knowledge of the health care system and health insurance to identify and present useful arguments. Too many lawyers remained wedded to theories of constitutional law that have become disconnected from twenty-first century realities. Legal education may have something to answer for in this respect. This essay examines how legal education in health law may offer some valuable responses to ongoing critiques of legal education in general. The more law moves away from strict …

Self-Congratulation And Scholarship, Paul Campos

Publications

Professor Jay Silver’s criticism of the reform proposals put forward in Brian Tamanaha’s book Failing Law Schools displays some characteristic weaknesses of American legal academic culture. These weaknesses include a tendency to make bold assertions about the value of legal scholarship and the effectiveness of law school pedagogy, while at the same time providing no support for these assertions beyond a willingness to repeat self-congratulatory platitudes about who professors are and what we do. The high costs for our students of the current scholarly expectations at American law schools are clear. What is not clear is whether those costs are …

Tackling "Arithmophobia": Teaching How To Read, Understand, And Analyze Financial Statements, Paula J. Williams, Kris Anne Tobin, Eric Franklin, Robert J. Rhee

UF Law Faculty Publications

This discussion presents different ideas on how to teach accounting and practical finance to law students.

Contract Stories: Importance Of The Contextual Approach To Law, Larry A. Dimatteo

UF Law Faculty Publications

How law is taught is at the center of the debate over the need to change legal education to better prepare students for a difficult and changing marketplace for legal services. This Article analyzes the benefits of using “stories” to teach law. The stories to be discussed relate to contract law: this Article asks whether they can be used to improve the method and content of teaching law. The ruminations offered on teaching contract law, however, are also relevant to teaching other core, first-year law courses.

Professionalism And The New Normal, Philip J. Weiser

Publications

No abstract provided.

Peer Review Across The Curriculum, Patricia G. Montana

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

In 2007, two very influential institutes published reports that challenged legal educators to reconsider how they design courses, deliver instruction, assess their students’ learning and explore new ways to prepare students for the profession of law. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching published its report, Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law (“Carnegie Report”), and the Clinical Legal Education Association published its study, Best Practices for Legal Education (“Best Practices Report”) (collectively, the “Reports”). Both Reports came to the same conclusion: law schools must devote more attention and resources to helping students develop the professional skills …

A Community Of Procedure Scholars: Teaching Procedure And The Legal Academy, Elizabeth G. Thornburg, Erik S. Knutsen, Carla Crifo, Camille Cameron

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

This article asks whether the way in which procedure is taught has an impact on the extent and accomplishments of a scholarly community of proceduralists. Not surprisingly, we find a strong correlation between the placement of procedure as a required course in an academic context and the resulting body of scholars and scholarship. Those countries in which more civil procedure is taught as part of a university degree — and in which procedure is recognized as a legitimate academic subject — have larger scholarly communities, a larger and broader corpus of works analyzing procedural issues, and a richer web of …

The Fun Of Teaching American Legal History, Geoffrey R. Watson

Scholarly Articles

I teach a pair of two-credit legal history courses: History of Early American Law and History of Modern American Law. I teach a variety of other courses, but none is more fun to teach than legal history.

Adaptive Clinical Teaching, Colleen F. Shanahan, Emily Benfer

Faculty Scholarship

Teaching is an exercise in adaptation and clinical legal teaching is no exception. Clinical teachers develop effective approaches through instinct, training, pedagogy, skill, and trial and error. Building on the trials, errors, and instincts of clinical teachers, this article offers a more intentional approach: "adaptive clinical teaching" (ACT). ACT is a structured method of guided analysis and reflection that applies to any clinical teaching situation, allowing a clinician to make her teaching choices based on as much knowledge and with as much intentionality as possible. ACT provides clinicians with an approach for new issues as they arise and builds a …

There Is No Santa Claus: The Challenge Of Teaching The Next Generation Of Civil Rights Lawyers In A ‘Post-Racial’ Society, Deborah N. Archer

Articles & Chapters

This essay takes a fresh look at the scholarship on the practice of cross-cultural and client-centered lawyering. The current scholarship explores methods of training law students to be mindful of the ways that cultural differences can impact legal representation. However, this scholarship has not addressed how to equip students to address issues of racial discrimination in light of the post-racial lens through which many view these problems. Legal educators must examine how law students’ beliefs regarding the current relevance of race in America affects their ability to represent clients who believe they are victims of racial discrimination.

The essay charts …