Law Commons^™

How To Train Your Supervisor, Kris Franklin, Paula J. Manning

Articles & Chapters

In an ideal world every meeting between law students and professors, or between beginning lawyers and their supervisors, would leave supervisors impressed by their charges and junior lawyers/students with a clear sense of direction for their work. But we do not live in that ideal world. Instead, supervisors, supervisees, law professors and law students frequently leave such meetings feeling frustrated, disconnected and without a shared understanding of how to improve the experience (and future performance).

This Article seeks to improve supervisory meetings, and to do so from the perspective of the ones under supervision. There is a genuine art to …

Tele-Lawyering And The Virtual Learning Experience: Finding The Silver Lining For Remote Hybrid Externships & Law Clinics After The Pandemic, Lucy J. Johnston-Walsh, Alison Lintal

Faculty Scholarly Works

The COVID-19 pandemic has rocked the world in innumerable ways. This Article argues that the COVID-19 pandemic has a silver lining for law students in experiential learning programs. The pandemic has forced law schools across the country to fully utilize remote learning technology. The pandemic similarly forced courts to accept virtual tools in an environment that had previously relied primarily on in-person appearances. The lessons that law faculty and judges have learned from the pandemic will be permanent and may change the methods of operation going forward. Law schools that embrace the lessons they learned can help their law students …

Teaching First-Year Law Students To Read So Carefully That They Discover A "Mistake" In A Judicial Opinion, Jane Bloom Grisé

Law Faculty Popular Media

In this column for The Learning Curve, Professor Grisé discusses how to teach critical reading skills to first-year law students.

Towards A New Scholarship For Equal Justice, James S. Liebman

Faculty Scholarship

Over the last thirty years, the legal academy has turned a cold shoulder to the subject matter of this symposium: scholarship for equal justice. I am here to suggest that a thaw may be on the way. By scholarship for equal justice – as distinguished from scholarship about that topic – I mean academic work undertaken for the purpose of improving outcomes for individuals and members of groups who have been systematically held back by their race, sex, poverty, or any other basis for rationing success that our legal system treats with suspicion. With reference to some of my own …

Introduction: Favorite Insurance Cases Symposium, Jeffrey W. Stempel

Scholarly Works

Insurance law scholars and teachers sometimes feel, with a mixture of paranoia and justification, that insurance law simply does not receive its proper respect in the hierarchy of legal education and law generally.

Consider the law school curriculum. In none of America’s nearly 200 ABA-approved law schools in insurance law a required course. Nor is it considered a course that, although not required, prudent students “must” be sure to take before they graduate (e.g. Evidence, Corporations). Enrollments may be respectable but the class is seldom oversubscribed, even where the law school is located in an insurance hub city. Although other …

The Profession Of Law: Columbia Law School's Use Of Experiential Learning Techniques To Teach Professional Responsibility, Carol B. Liebman

Faculty Scholarship

Columbia Law School's ethics course, "The Profession of Law" ("POL"), is an interactive, experiential exploration of lawyer ethics. The course, required for all third-year students, is taught on an intensive basis during the first week of the fall semester. It begins on Monday morning, the first day of the semester, and runs through mid-afternoon on the following Friday. The course has five goals: to introduce students to the rules that govern professional conduct; to help them develop an analytic framework for making ethical decisions in those broad areas where the rules do not give clear answers; to provoke them to …

Foreword, Kimberlé W. Crenshaw

Faculty Scholarship

In 1987, I was honored to write the Foreword for a special issue on the National Black Law Journal. The special issue featured papers on race, racism and democracy written by students in a UCLA seminar that I had tailored to facilitate the production of publishable work by students. The state of legal education for African American students at the time was far from idyllic. Indeed, the Foreword was inspired by a host of events that I had witnessed both as a student and as a colleague that underscored the varied and subtle ways that race continued to marginalize students …

Toward A Race-Conscious Pedagogy In Legal Education, Kimberlé W. Crenshaw

Faculty Scholarship

It is both an honor and a pleasure to write the Foreword for this issue of the National Black Law Journal. This project represents the culmination of a joint effort involving the NBLJ, Dean Susan Westerberg Prager and me. The project grew out of discussions that began in the Spring of 1987 in which we explored various ways that the law school could support the production of publishable student material for the Journal. I initially considered sponsoring interested students in independent research projects; however, a high level of student interest, an obvious overlap between proposed student topics, and my …