Law Commons^™

Creating Shared Understanding: Preparing Students For A Modern Client Base, Jaclyn Celebrezze, Mireille Butler

Presentations

The Legal Writing Institute hosted a series of one-day workshops at various law schools, including at CWRU, where the theme of the workshops was "Preparing Students for the Modern Practice of Law." This presentation discusses how to prepare students for a modern, globalized client base, and provides tips and tools to help create a shared understanding between clients and future practitioners.

We Are...Community!, Michael A. Mogill

Faculty Scholarly Works

The concept of “community” has become increasingly important in law schools, relating both to our professionalism and the education of our students. During the recent celebration of our school’s 185^th anniversary of its founding, I addressed one of the school’s core values, that of “community”. This article explores that value and its meaning both within our law schools and the greater society, serving to advance the public interest and the interests of our law students, the legal academy and practicing attorneys everywhere. The message conveys is universal and contemporary, going well beyond our anniversary celebration. Ultimately, it can help …

Criminal Legal Education, Shaun Ossei-Owusu

All Faculty Scholarship

The protests of 2020 have jumpstarted conversations about criminal justice reform in the public and professoriate. Although there have been longstanding demands for reformation and reimagining of the criminal justice system, recent calls have taken on a new urgency. Greater public awareness of racial bias, increasing visual evidence of state-sanctioned killings, and the televised policing of peaceful dissent have forced the public to reckon with a penal state whose brutality was comfortably tolerated. Scholars are publishing op-eds, policy proposals, and articles with rapidity, pointing to different factors and actors that produce the need for reform. However, one input has gone …

Clinicians Reflect On Covid-19: Lessons Learned And Looking Beyond, The Association Of American Law Schools (Aals) Policy Committee, Deborah Archer, Caitlin Barry, Lisa Bliss, Gautam Hans, Vida Johnson, Carolyn Haas, Lynnise E. Pantin, Kele Stewart, Erica Wilson, The Clinical Legal Education Association (Clea) Committee For Faculty Equity And Inclusion, Priya Baskaran, Jennifer Fernandez, Crystal Grant, Anjum Gupta, Julia Hernandez, Alexis Karteron, Shobha Mahadev

Faculty Scholarship

As a result of the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic, clinical faculty had to abruptly adapt their clinical teaching and case supervision practices to adjust to the myriad restrictions brought on by the pandemic. This brought specialized challenges for clinicians who uniquely serve as both legal practitioners and law teachers in the law school setting. With little support and guidance, clinicians tackled never before seen difficulties in the uncharted waters of running a clinical law practice during a pandemic.

In this report, we review the responses of 220 clinicians to survey questions relating to how law clinics and clinicians were treated by …

Technology And The (Re)Construction Of Law, Christian Sundquist

Articles

Innovative advancements in technology and artificial intelligence have created a unique opportunity to re-envision both legal education and the practice of law. The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the technological disruption of both legal education and practice, as remote work, “Zoom” client meetings, virtual teaching, and online dispute resolution have become increasingly normalized. This essay explores how technological innovations in the coronavirus era are facilitating radical changes to our traditional adversarial system, the practice of law, and the very meaning of “legal knowledge.” It concludes with suggestions on how to reform legal education to better prepare our students for the emerging …

How I Finally Overcame My Apprehension About Peer Review, Beth H. Wilensky

Articles

I’ll admit it: I was afraid to try peer review in my Legal Practice class. I’ve been teaching legal analysis, writing, and research for 17 years. I know all of the benefits of peer review. I’ve read plenty of scholarship about why and how to do it well. I have space in my syllabus to incorporate it into my teaching. But I’ve been reluctant. I worried that students would be averse to sharing their work with a classmate. I worried that the exercise would embarrass students who felt self-conscious about their writing. And I worried that the truly excellent writers …

(Systems) Thinking Like A Lawyer, Tomar Pierson-Brown

Articles

This Article discusses systems thinking as an innovative approach to contextualizing legal advocacy. Systems thinking, a paradigm that emphasizes universal interconnectivity, provides a theoretical basis for parsing the structural environment in which law-related problems emerge and are addressed. From the array of conceptions about what it means to engage in systems thinking, this Article identifies four key tenets to this perspective: (1) every outcome is the product of some structure; (2) these structures are embedded within and connected to one another; (3) the structure producing an outcome can be discerned; and (4) these structures are resilient, but not fixed. This …

The Systems Approach To Teaching Business Associations, Lynn M. Lopucki, Andrew Verstein

UF Law Faculty Publications

The systems approach applies the methods of systems analysis to law. The principal method is to describe the system, situate a problem within the system, and take system mechanics into account in solving it. The system might be the “legal system”—essentially litigation. But more often, it is a “law-related system”—one not composed of law, but one in which law plays a role. That system might be crime, the Internet, the corporation, or any other activity substantially affected by law. The analyst situates the application of law in the context of the physical system as it actually operates. In business associations, …

Using Appellate Clinics To Focus On Legal Writing Skills, Timothy Pinto

Articles

Five years ago, I went to lunch with a colleague. I was teaching a legal writing course to 1L students, and he taught in a clinic in which 2L and 3L students were required to write short motions and briefs. Several of his students had taken my writing class as 1Ls, and he had a question for me. "What the heck are you teaching these students?" he asked as we sat down. He explained that several of his students were struggling with preparing simple motions. They were not laying out facts clearly. They were not identifying key legal rules. In …

Experiential Skills In Legal Education: Introducing Tomorrow’S Practitioners To Practicing Law, Edward R. Becker

Articles

Welcome to the “Future of Law,” a new column that will appear regularly in the Michigan Bar Journal. This month, we kick off a recurring series devoted to legal education. These articles will highlight new developments and ongoing efforts at the five Michigan law schools to introduce students to experiential skills and more effectively prepare them to practice law. In future columns, authors will shed light on what law schools are doing to prepare students for practice and, we hope, inspire more Michigan attorneys to get involved—or, for some of you, become further involved—in those efforts. Why is this inaugural …

Reimagining Legal Education: Incorporating Live-Client Work Into The First-Year Curriculum, Nancy Vettorello, Beth Hirschfelder Wilensky

Articles

Since 2015, Legal Practice faculty have partnered with local legal services organizations and the law school’s own clinics to provide our 1L students with client interaction, under the close supervision of experienced attorneys. So far, our students have worked with the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center, Legal Services of South Central Michigan, and the school’s Unemployment Law Clinic.

Curricular Limitations, Cost Pressures, And Stratification In Legal Education: Are Bold Reforms In Short Supply?, Nora V. Demleitner

Scholarly Articles

Many critics of legal education and reformers alike demand "bold reforms," though so far most change seems restricted to haphazard modifications of the curriculum, the hope for quick fixes, and a focus on shedding staff and faculty to balance budgets with a smaller student body. Whether those changes alone amount to bold action, defined as "not afraid of danger or difficult situations; showing or needing confidence or lack of fear; very confident in a way that may seem rude or foolish," is questionable. Curricular changes may merely camouflage or even detract from the crucial need to strategically rethink cost structures, …

The American Legal Profession In The Twenty-First Century, Stephen M. Sheppard

Faculty Articles

Lawyers in the United States work in public service, private counseling, and dispute resolution, but many also work outside of traditional legal practice. The million-member American bar, second largest in the world, grows more diverse by gender, and ethnicity and older on average. All members of this learned profession must qualify by education or examination and by proof of good character and fitness before taking an oath to serve as an attorney. Thence, there are few limitations on the form of legal practice, though many law firms require an associateship before an attorney becomes an owner of the firm. Economic …

Teaching Legal History Through Legal Skills, Howard Bromberg

Articles

I revolve my legal history courses around one methodology: teaching legal history by means of legal skills. I draw on my experience teaching legal practice and clinical s.kills courses to assign briefs and oral arguments as a means for law students to immerse themselves in historical topics. Without detracting from other approaches, I frame this innovation as teaching legal history not to budding historians but to budding lawyers.

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 …

Transactional Drafting: Using Law Firm Marketing Materials As A Research Resource For Teaching Drafting, Edward R. Becker

Articles

Since I started teaching drafting, I would like to think that I have continued to learn some lessons about teaching both the substance and the skills of transactional drafting. One of those lessons that I am going to be talking about today is one that I stumbled across by happy accident rather than one that I consciously sought. Specifically, I want to talk about and highlight the ways that law students can use law firm marketing materials to increase their understanding of both drafting and lawyering skills in law school and, hopefully, in practice.

The First Year: Integrating Transactional Skills, Lynnise E. Pantin

Faculty Scholarship

My name is Lynnise Pantin. I teach at New York Law School, and my talk today focuses on integrating transactional skills into the first-year curriculum.

As a first premise, the law school curriculum is dominated by litigation oriented skills, and I can argue that there is a litigation bias that is pervasive in legal education. I am hoping that, by engaging with those of you who teach first year students, we can start to talk about creating and developing transactional skills within a context that is already there in the first-year curriculum.

Not Everyone Works For Biglaw: A Response To Neil J. Dilloff, Louis N. Schulze Jr., Lawrence Friedman

Faculty Publications

In a law review article entitled "The Changing Cultures and Economics of Large Law Firm Practice and Their Impact on Legal Education," DLA Piper partner Neil J. Dilloff details recent changes in the way that BigLaw does business. He then suggests a number of improvements in legal education ostensibly compelled by the new economic realities of large firm practice. While many of Attorney Dilloff's suggestions make very good sense, several problems exist. In this short essay, we take the position that law schools should not pattern current reforms solely on the needs of BigLaw. Instead, we suggest that reforming legal …

Learning From The Unique And Common Challenges: Clinical Legal Education In Jordan, Nisreen Mahasneh, Kimberly A. Thomas

Articles

Legal education worldwide is undergoing scrutiny for its failure to graduate students who have the problem-solving abilities, skills, and professional values necessary for the legal profession.1 Additionally, law schools at universities in the Middle East have found themselves in an unsettled environment, where greater demands for practical education are exacerbated by several factors such as high levels of youth unemployment. More specifically, in Jordan there is a pressing need for universities to respond to this criticism and to accommodate new or different methods of legal education. Clinical legal education is one such method.3 We use the term "clinical legal education" …

Miami's Medical-Legal Partnership: Preparing Lawyers And Physicians For Holistic Practice, Jonel Newman

Articles

No abstract provided.

Religious Shunning And The Beam In The Lawyer's Eye, Edward R. Becker

Articles

Some LRW professors design assignments so that students begin learning fundamental legal skills in the context of issues of particular interest to the professor-–what Sue Liemer calls “teaching the law you love.” Recent articles have explained how this might work when applied to such varying matters as multiculturalism or transactional practice. But exposing LRW students to diversity of religious belief does not appear to have found as much traction, at least in the literature. This essay describes one attempt to design a problem that grounds students in just such a larger firmament, while not distracting students (or the professor) from …

Teaching Transactional Skills And Law In An International Context, Deborah Burand, Kojo Yelpaala, Peter Linzer

Other Publications

Today, we are going to be discussing how we think about transactional skills in an international context. It doesn't surprise me that this is a smaller group. This is a subspecialty, but let me just do a very quick survey of you. How many of you now in this room are teaching an international course? And what are you doing?

If I Had A Hammer: Can Shepardizing, Synthesis, And Other Tools Of Legal Writing Help Build Hope For Law Students?, Edward R. Becker

Articles

Are lawyers mechanics? In 1920, photographer Lewis Hines took a striking photo of a powerhouse mechanic sure-handedly wielding a large wrench to tighten bolts on a steam pump. This picture may bring to mind many things, but I suspect that many legal writing professors in our (past or present) incarnations as practicing attorneys would not look at this image and think, "My job is a lot like that." Similarly, I assume that many of our students do not think of a lawyer's role in this way. Indeed, many of our students might have chosen to pursue a career in law …

Against Practice, Anthony V. Alfieri

Articles

No abstract provided.

Dean Mary Daly: A Tribute, William Michael Treanor

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

I met Mary Daly for the first time on the day I began work at Fordham Law in 1991. I had an office on the second floor of the faculty corridor, and Mary's office was a few offices down the hall. Mary was already a well-established member of the faculty, a star at the U.S. Attorney's Office who had become a star in academia. I was new to Fordham and anxious as I began my career in teaching. Characteristically, and not surprisingly, Mary was the first one to come to my office to greet me. It has been almost twenty …

Peking University School Of Transnational Law: A New Venture In International Legal Relations, Howard Bromberg

Articles

The School of Transnational Law (STL) is largely the work of two men of vision, Hai Wen, Vice-President of Peking University, and Jeffrey Lehman, former Dean of the University of Michigan Law School and President of Cornell University. Both were instrumental members of the Joint Center for China-U.S. Law and Policy Studies Institute (the Joint Center), founded in 2005, whose mission is to “nurture harmony between the Chinese and American legal systems through the dissemination of knowledge.” Hai and Lehman aspired to create a law school that would integrate China’s bold entry into global business and international diplomacy with a …

Review: Voices Of American Law: Us Supreme Court Cases Meet The 21st Century, Lauren M. Collins

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Review of documentary series Voices of American Law (Thomas B. Metzloff & Sarah Wood, producers)

Overcoming Cultural Blindness In International Clinical Collaboration: The Divide Between Civil And Common Law Cultures And Its Implications For Clinical Education, Philip Genty

Faculty Scholarship

This essay reflects upon the work that U.S. clinical teachers have done in helping to bring clinical methodology to law schools in European civil law jurisdictions. The essay examines some of the differences between the U.S. common law and European civil law systems with respect to the conception, teaching, and practice of law. The essay suggests that U.S. clinical teachers have not been sufficiently sensitive to these differences in legal culture. The essay describes five core differences between the two systems and their implications for effective clinical education in civil law systems. The essay concludes with recommendations for future cross-cultural …

Father Charles Whelan: A Career In The Service Of Others, William Michael Treanor

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Fordham Law School's motto, "In the service of others," perfectly captures our law school's great aspirations and commitments. In a most distinguished and multifaceted career, Father Charles Whelan has been the personal embodiment of that ideal, through his dedication to education, to advocacy, and to service to a broader community. His has been a career shaped by his Ignatian ideals, and the legacy he leaves as he retires is extraordinary.

Introduction: One Hundred Years Of International Law At Fordham University, William Michael Treanor

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In the past 100 years, the connotations of the term "international" have changed dramatically. The ideas we have of concepts such as "international communication" and "global travel" are dramatically different from what those concepts would have meant to our forebears - if they had even thought in such terms. But an international perspective is not new at Fordham Law School. The idea of the interconnectedness of our social and legal systems with those of other Nations is one of the foundational values of our school, and it has shaped our history since we opened our doors 100 years ago.

From …