Law Commons^™

A Dose Of Color, A Dose Of Reality: Contextualizing Intentional Tort Actions With Black Documentaries, Regina Austin

All Faculty Scholarship

This article describes the way documentary films can provide important cultural context in the assessment of tort claims. This kind of contextual analysis exposes the social conditions that drive legal disputes. For example, in the case of Klayman v. Obama, Larry Klayman claimed that Black Lives Matter, among other defendants, was liable for various intentional torts (including intentional infliction of emotional distress) by fomenting hostility toward the police in black communities. The court dismissed the case but declined to hold Klayman liable for sanctions. One documentary film, I Am Not Your Negro, locates Klayman’s claims in a historical …

The Key To Law Student Well-Being? We Have To Love Our Law Students, David Jaffe

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.

An Invitation Regarding Law And Legal Education, And Imagining The Future, Michael J. Madison

Articles

This Essay consists of an invitation to participate in conversations about the future of legal education in ways that integrate rather than distinguish several threads of concern and revision that have emerged over the last decade. Conversations about the future of legal education necessarily include conversations about the future of law practice, legal services, and law itself. Some of those start with the somewhat stale questions: What are US law professors doing, what should they be doing, and why? Those questions are still relevant and important, but they are no longer the only relevant questions, and they are not the …

How To Build A Better Bar Exam, Eileen Kaufman, Andrea Anne Curcio, Carol L. Chomsky

Scholarly Works

As a licensing exam, the purpose of the bar exam is consumer protection–-ensuring that new lawyers have the minimum competencies required to practice law effectively. As critics point out, however, the exam, and particularly the multiple-choice question portion of the exam, has significant flaws because it assesses legal knowledge and analysis in an artificial and unrealistic context, and the closed-book format rewards the ability to memorize thousands of legal rules, a skill unrelated to law practice.

This essay discusses how to improve the exam by changing its multiple-choice content and format. We use two law licensing exams to illustrate how …

Afterword: What's Next? Into A Third Decade Of Latcrit Theory, Community, And Praxis, Steven W. Bender, Francisco Valdes, Jorge R. Roig, Jasmine Gonzalez Rose, Saru Matambanadzo, Roberto Corrada, Shelley Cavalieri, Tayyab Mahmud, Zsea Bowmani, Anthony E. Varona

Scholarly Works

In this multi-vocal Afterword, we reflect-personally and collectively to help chart renewed agendas toward and through a third decade of LatCrit theory, community, and praxis. This personal collective exercise illustrates and reconsiders the functions, guideposts, values, and postulates for our shared programmatic work a framework for our daily work as individuals and teams through our portfolio of projects, which in turn emerged as a "reflection and projection of LatCrit theory, community and praxis." These early anchors expressly encompassed (1) a call to recognize and accept the inevitable political nature of U.S. legal scholarship; (2) a concomitant call toward anti-subordination praxis …

Integrating Performance Tests Into Doctrinal Courses, Skills Courses, And Institutional Benchmark Testing: A Simple Way To Enhance Student Engagement While Furthering Assessment, Bar Passage, And Other Aba Accreditation Objectives, Sara J. Berman

Scholarly Works

This article explores ways to weave performance tests into the law school curriculum to enhance student engagement and active learning, and to further ABA-mandated assessment and accreditation objectives. Some options include using them as discrete simulation exercises in doctrinal courses, as content for certain dedicated skills courses, or as possible institutional benchmark testing. Section II provides an overview of PTs, suggesting how they can be effective teaching tools. Section III demonstrates how integrating PTs into the law school curriculum, at both the course and institutional levels, may help law schools comply with numerous ABA Standards, including those regarding assessment and …

A Tribute To Douglas Scherer, Howard A. Glickstein

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

A Law Professor’S Modest Response To Trumpism: Supervising Student Directed Research Papers On Impeachment, Gregory S. Crespi

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

This short essay discusses my motivation for and the reading materials and procedures I use when offering about a half-dozen law students each semester a Directed Research option to research and write papers on the topic of Presidential impeachment. I recommend that those faculty members who may have only a modest Constitutional Law background, but who feel as I do that greater understanding and more sustained discussion of the merits and drawbacks of removal of President Trump from office through impeachment is called for, and who wish to facilitate such understanding and discussion without compromising their professional and ethical obligations …

Assessments All The Way Down, James Mcgrath, Andrew P. Morriss

Faculty Scholarship

The role of assessments is getting attention throughout legal education. A growing acceptance of the Graduate Record Examination (“GRE”) as an alternative to the Law School Aptitude Test (“LSAT”) and its incorporation into the U.S. News & World Report (“USN&WR”) law school rankings opened the door to changes in who is going to law school and how they are recruited. At the other end of students’ journey through legal education, the discussion of recent graduates’ bar exam performance – linked by some to declining LSAT scores of entering students – raised questions about the design of bar exams as well …

Joe Williams And Discourse Communities-The Journal Of Legal Writing Institute And Community Service, Terrill Pollman

Scholarly Works

Professor Pollman writes a tribute to The Journal of the Legal Writing Institute.

Rethinking Digital Repositories And The Future Of Open Access, Margaret Schilt, Karen Shephard, Carol A. Watson

Scholarly Works

Over the last two years, changes in the legal publishing arena involving digital repository platforms have raised concerns about the future of open access. This article reviews the current status of the various repository platforms and how they impact legal scholarship. The article goes on to analyze the areas that law libraries should focus on in platform selection.

The Case For More Debt: Expanding College Affordability By Expanding Income-Driven Repayment, John R. Brooks

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Income-Driven Repayment (IDR) for federal student loans is rapidly becoming the primary tool that the federal government uses to provide progressive funding to individuals to pay for college. Under these programs, borrowers can choose to pay back their loans as a percentage of income, with eventual debt forgiveness after 10-25 years. If administered well, these programs can make student loans affordable for everyone, regardless of income. In this symposium essay, I argue that for IDR to meet its goal of providing affordable higher education to everyone, the federal government needs to raise the individual borrowing limits on Direct Loans and …

Curing The Cost Disease: Legal Education, Legal Services, And The Role Of Income-Contingent Loans, John R. Brooks

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The costs of both legal education and legal services have been rising steadily for decades. This is because they share a common root: the constant above-inflation growth in the cost of labor-intensive goods and services known as the “cost disease.” The cost disease story roots cost growth not in market failure or bureaucratic waste, but in natural, even healthy, economic forces—productivity and wage growth. Because the source of this cost growth is productivity growth, the nature of the cost disease is such that an economy as a whole can afford these rising costs. But in a world of deep income …

Developing Workplace Law Programming: A Labor Of Love, Michael Z. Green

Faculty Scholarship

Professor Green reflects and comments on his work in developing workplace law programming as a key component of the annual SEALS program.

Planning Your Class To Take Advantage Of Highly Effective Learning Techniques, James Mcgrath

Faculty Scholarship

What are the most highly effective learning techniques? Take a moment and consider what you think they are. Write them down if it is convenient. The symposium that is the subject of this law review volume examines the impact of formative assessment. In this article, I will connect formative assessment possibilities with ideas on how to take advantage of some of the proven highly effective learning techniques. The road there is a bit tortuous, but it is my hope that even the most well-informed teacher will find something that they can add to their quiver of techniques to help with …

Who Speaks For The Paralegal Studies Student? - An Educator’S Perspective When Teaching Forensic Science To The Legal Studies Student, Marissa Moran

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

A Simple Low-Cost Institutional Learning-Outcomes Assessment Process, Andrea A. Curcio

Faculty Publications By Year

Law school institutional learning outcomes require measuring nuanced skills that develop over time. Rather than look at achievement just in our own courses, institutional outcome-measures assessment requires collective faculty engagement and critical thinking about our students’ overall acquisition of the skills, knowledge, and qualities that ensure they graduate with the competencies necessary to begin life as professionals. Even for those who believe outcomes assessment is a positive move in legal education, in an era of limited budgets and already over-burdened faculty, the new mandated outcomes assessment process raises cost and workload concerns. This essay addresses those concerns. It describes a …

Measuring Law School Clinics, Colleen F. Shanahan, Jeffrey Selbin, Alyx Mark, Anna E. Carpenter

Faculty Scholarship

Legal education reformers have long argued that law school clinics address two related needs: first, clinics teach students to be lawyers; and second, clinics serve low-income clients. In clinics, so the argument goes, law students working under the close supervision of faculty members learn the requisite skills to be good practitioners and professionals. In turn, clinical law students serve clients with civil and criminal justice needs that would otherwise go unmet.

Though we have these laudable teaching and service goals – and a vast literature describing the role of clinics in both the teaching and service dimensions – we have …

Legal Deserts, Lauren Sudeall, Lise R. Pruitt, Danielle M. Conway, Michele Statz, Hannah Haksgaard, Amanda L. Kool

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Rural America faces an increasingly dire access-to-justice crisis, which serves to exacerbate the already disproportionate share of social problems afflicting rural areas. One critical aspect of the crisis is the dearth of information and research regarding the extent of the problem and its impacts. This Article begins to fill that gap by providing surveys of rural access to justice in six geographically, demographically, and economically varied states: California, Georgia, Maine, Minnesota, South Dakota, and Wisconsin. In addition to providing insights about the distinct rural challenges confronting each of these states, the legal resources available, and existing policy responses, the Article …

Advocacy In Ideas: Legal Education And Social Movements, Monica Bell, Tanya K. Hernandez, Solangel Maldonado, Rachelle Perkins, Chantal Thomas, Olatunde C.A. Johnson, Elsie Lopez

Faculty Scholarship

Panel moderated by Professor Olatunde Johnson, featuring Professors Monica Bell, Tanya K. Hernández, Solangel Maldonado, and Chantal Thomas. Introduced by Elise Lopez.

Reflections On Us Involvement In The Promotion Of Clinical Legal Education In Europe, Philip Genty

Faculty Scholarship

What is the influence of the United States on European clinical legal education? The first reaction of many would be that this is not a particularly difficult question to answer. After all, clinical legal education is largely a US invention. Although one can find early examples of clinics in European law schools, the large-scale development of law school clinical education happened in the United States beginning in the 1960s. At present, there are clinical programs in each of the 207 American Bar Association (ABA)-approved US law schools. The Clinical Legal Education Association now lists 1,325 clinical teachers in its membership …