Law Commons^™

Platform Selection And Strategic Alignment – Fall 2013 Symposium Presentation, Roger Skalbeck

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Whether providing services or resources, every library is faced with questions of selecting the right resource for the right reason. You need a website, a process for updating content, a way to manage operations, and a system for responding to constant change. Increasingly, new service opportunities are found in cloud and virtual platforms. This presentation looks at opportunities in selecting the right tools for the right job. The presentation will explore some unique aspects of law libraries and legal subject content many libraries rely on, including the strategic value of content from law libraries in metropolitan areas.

Against Endowment Theory: Experimental Economics And Legal Scholarship, Gregory Klass, Kathryn Zeiler

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Endowment theory holds the mere ownership of a thing causes people to assign greater value to it than they otherwise would. The theory entered legal scholarship in the early 1990s and quickly eclipsed other accounts of how ownership affects valuation. Today, appeals to a generic “endowment effect” can be found throughout the legal literature. More recent experimental results, however, suggest that the empirical evidence for endowment theory is weak at best. When the procedures used in laboratory experiments are altered to rule out alternative explanations, the “endowment effect” disappears. This and other recent evidence suggest that mere ownership does not …

Adaptive Clinical Teaching, Colleen F. Shanahan, Emily A. Benfer

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Legal education has a clear mission–to develop competent and committed members of the legal profession–but this goal can be an elusive one to meet. This is because legal educators often develop their most effective approaches to teaching through trial and error and instinct. A microcosm of this struggle for effective legal teaching is clinical legal education’s distinct set of commitments, pedagogy and teaching methodologies. Building on the trials, errors, and instincts of clinical teachers, this article offers a more intentional approach for designing, teaching, and supervising in a clinic: “adaptive clinical teaching” (ACT). ACT is a structured method of guided …

Representing Social Enterprise, Alicia E. Plerhoples

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This article explores the representation of social enterprises—i.e., nonprofit and for-profit organizations whose managersstrategically and purposefully work to create social, environmental, and economic value or achieve a social good through the use of business techniques—in the Social Enterprise & Nonprofit Law Clinic at Georgetown University Law Center. Representation of social enterprises helps create a dynamic curriculum through which law students learn to merge corporate legal theory with transactional law practice. Through service to social enterprises, law students (i) learn about corporate governance and corporate legal theory as well as business models and mechanisms that support social and environmental value creation …

The Rhetoric Of Email In Law Practice, Kristen Konrad Robbins-Tiscione

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This article responds to and appears alongside an article by Professor Kirsten Davis in the December 2013 issue of the Oregon Law Review. An interesting debate has arisen among legal writing faculty with respect to the primary form of communication today between attorneys, and between attorneys and clients. Although most legal writing faculty agree that teaching traditional memoranda continues to have pedagogical benefits for first-year students, there is disagreement on how to conceptualize and teach the use of email memoranda in law practice. Professor Davis argues that to think of and label “email memoranda” as something different from traditional memoranda …

The Developmental Path Of The Lawyer, Michael J. Cedrone

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

My mother does not drive, and I own a towel that I cannot use-these are my reasons for studying law.

I am an integrated tapestry of elation and disappointment, risk and reward, ambiguity and conviction .. .. I discovered [through adversity] that transitional challenges were not permanent impediments to my progress, but were instead emboldening catalysts to my personal evolution and professional development.

These two stories come from admissions essays submitted by members of Georgetown University Law Center's class of 2014, recently published in the Law Center's alumni magazine. The published essays provide fascinating views into the personal experiences and …

Top 10 Law School Home Pages Of 2012, Roger V. Skalbeck, Matthew L. Zimmerman

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

For a fourth consecutive year, every website home page of every ABA-accredited law school is evaluated and ranked based on objective criteria. The goal is to identify well-executed sites adopting best practices. For the 2012 report, twenty-six elements are evaluated across these three categories: Design Patterns and Metadata, Accessibility and Validation, & Marketing and Communications. For 2012, there are four new elements, two prior elements have been combined, and one element was dropped.

For 2012, forty-six schools now use the HTML5 doctype, which is up from thirteen in 2011 and just one in 2010. Eighteen schools achieve perfect scores in …

National Security Pedagogy: The Role Of Simulations, Laura K. Donohue

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This article challenges the dominant pedagogical assumptions in the legal academy. It begins by briefly considering the state of the field of national security, noting the rapid expansion in employment and the breadth of related positions that have been created post-9/11. It considers, in the process, how the legal academy has, as an institutional matter, responded to the demand.

Part III examines traditional legal pedagogy, grounding the discussion in studies initiated by the American Bar Association, the Carnegie Foundation, and others. It suggests that using the law-writ-large as a starting point for those interested in national security law is a …

Grades Matter; Legal Writing Grades Matter Most, Jessica L. Clark

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In this study of 380 students in a law school’s 2011 graduating class, the data demonstrates a strong correlation between high performance in legal writing courses and high performance in non-legal writing courses. There is also a strong correlation at the opposite end: low performers in legal writing courses are low performers in non-legal writing courses. This article provides the hard data to support the significance of writing skills by demonstrating the correlation between performance in legal writing courses and performance in other law school courses by comparing grades and Grade Point Averages (GPAs). Of course grades and GPA data …