Law Commons^™

Leveraging Professional Identity Formation In The Doctrinal Law School Class, Louis D. Bilionis

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

American law schools are paying increased attention to the professional identity formation of their students. The trend should grow now that the American Bar Association’s Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar has revised its accreditation standards to prescribe that “a law school shall provide substantial opportunities to students for … (3) the development of a professional identity.”

As law school faculty and staff proceed, professors who teach traditional doctrinal classes may doubt they can do much if anything differently in their courses to support professional identity formation. Questions about course coverage and their own competency to focus …

Law School Leadership And Leadership Development For Developing Lawyers, Louis D. Bilionis

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

A growing number of legal educators are calling for greater attention to leadership development as an element of legal education at American law schools. Some make the case directly in the name of leadership education. Others see leadership development as part of a broader law school responsibility to provide purposeful support for students in the formation of their professional identity. For yet others, development of leadership skills figures in a law school’s appropriate commitment to the professionalism, professional development, or wellness of its students. These educators, though employing different locutions, constitute a “coalition of the willing” – law school faculty …

Reclaiming The Intellectual, Emily Houh

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

I was invited to deliver the September 2017 Dean's Lecture, on which this essay is based, in March of 2017, shortly after the inauguration of Donald J. Trump as the 45th president of the United States. I had originally planned to present on one of my longstanding research areas, the intersections of contract law and critical race theory, but as the spring wore on, I began to feel an urgency about using my expertise to comment more directly on the increasingly overt but trenchant race, gender, sex, and class inequalities and conflicts that have plagued our nation for centuries.

Yet, …

Standard 405 And Terms And Conditions Of Employment: More Chaos, Conflict And Confusion Ahead, Joseph P. Tomain, Donald J. Polden

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

In 2008, the Section on Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar of the American Bar Association commenced a comprehensive review of the accreditation standards for American legal education. By July of 2011, most of the revised standards and rules of procedure had been drafted, discussed and approved by the section's Standards Review Committee ("SRC") and were ready for submission to the council. However, the SRC's revised accreditation policies were not submitted for action by the council until 2014, more than six years after the review process began, as a result of decisions made by section leaders. The revised standards …

Client Science: Advice For Lawyers On Initial Client Interviews, Marjorie Corman Aaron

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

My intent is to offer an informed, wise, practical, and concise guide for initial lawyer-client meetings – meetings that are mostly an interview process for the client and the lawyer. It is written for the Client Science Course website to supplement my book, Client Science: Advice for Lawyers on Counseling Clients Through Bad News and Other Legal Realities (Oxford University Press, 2012), referred to here as Client Science. That book was intentionally focused on particular challenges of client counseling

Crowdsourcing And Open Access: Collaborative Techniques For Disseminating Legal Materials And Scholarship, Timothy K. Armstrong

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

This short essay surveys the state of open access to primary legal source materials (statutes, judicial opinions and the like) and legal scholarship. The ongoing digitization phenomenon (illustrated, although by no means typified, by massive scanning endeavors such as the Google Books project and the Library of Congress's efforts to digitize United States historical documents) has made a wealth of information, including legal information, freely available online, and a number of open-access collections of legal source materials have been created. Many of these collections, however, suffer from similar flaws: they devote too much effort to collecting case law rather than …

Scholarship And Teaching After 175 Years, Gordon A. Christenson

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

A quarter century ago, I presided at the 150th anniversary celebration of the founding of the Cincinnati Law School. Newly appointed Justice Sandra Day O'Connor came to dedicate the radically refurbished Taft Hall in the spring of 1983 and to say good things about our long history. This year we begin to celebrate the College's 175th anniversary. For its dedicatory issue, the editor-in-chief of the Law Review, Matthew Singer, invited me to write an introduction as well as to reflect on those twenty-five years and the challenges and opportunities I see ahead for us. Especially as an emeritus dean and …

On Being A Mentor, Verna L. Williams

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

A tribute to Charles J. Ogletree, Jr.

Between Law And Virtue, Joseph P. Tomain, Barbara Watts

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

Legal ethics, professional responsibility, and professionalism are timely topics as lawyers continually reevaluate the standards of their profession, particularly in light of the challenges of multidisciplinary and multijurisdictional practice, as well as the embarrassment facing lawyers involved in and surrounding the Enron collapse. In this article, our goal is to discuss how to think and talk about ethics and professionalism. By way of preview, we need to understand that ethics and professionalism use different vocabularies and, consequently, talk past each other to some extent. Our hope is that understanding the existence of these two vocabularies helps reduce the misunderstanding. Both …

A Code Of One's Own, Joseph P. Tomain

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

A Code of One's Own is an essay exploring the idea that we can learn about professionalism by reflecting on the humanities. The paper is modeled on Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own which is a series of lectures in six chapters. The essay uses those chapters to develop the idea that lawyers, through self-reflection and observation, can develop a professional code of their own. The paper was developed through co-teaching a course entitled, Law in Literature and Philosophy as well as by attending the Aspen Institute and the Glenmoor Institute of Justice for the Legal Profession, which are …

Reading The Law In The Office Of Calvin Fletcher: The Apprenticeship System And The Practice Of Law In Frontier Indiana, A. Christopher Bryant

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

The university law school is a relatively recent innovation, not just in Nevada but throughout much of the United States as well. In this inaugural issue of the Nevada Law Journal, which marks the establishment in 1998 of the Boyd School of Law, the first state-supported and the only existing law school in Nevada, it is fitting that we examine the methods of legal education and entry to the practice of law that preceded the rise of legal education within the university.

Until the latter part of the nineteenth century, the apprenticeship system constituted the dominant mode of preparation for …

Dedication To Professor Nora Jane Lauerman - In Memoriam, Gordon A. Christenson

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

Tribute to legal scholar, Nora Jane Lauerman.

Barbara Salken: A Rememberance, Barbara Black

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

A remembrance of Barbara Salken.

From "Moral Stupidity" To Professional Responsibility, Thomas D. Eisele

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

Within the context-even, the challenge-presented by the first chapter of Seymour Wishman's book, Confessions of a Criminal Lawyer, we symposiasts have been invited to say something about the teaching of courses which in law school go under the titles, "Legal Ethics," "Professional Ethics," or "Professional Responsibility." This last is the
title of a two-credit course that I teach, in what I take to be a fairly traditional form, over the span of a semester at the University of Cincinnati. In this essay, I want to talk about the teaching of such a course; not about how I manage to teach …

Using Decision Trees As Tools For Settlement, Marjorie Corman Aaron

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

While experienced lawyers can some­ times develop an intuitive sense of what a case is worth, their intuition may not be sufficient in a case of considerable complexity. Furthermore, intuitive "gut sense" valuations are hard to support or explain to clients.

Decision trees allow the parties and their lawyers to see more clearly how the strengths and weaknesses of their positions on specific issues will affect the overall value of a case. Long popular in the business community, deci­sion analysis has evolved as a tool for lawyers to help make decisions in complex litigation.

Richard Bonnot Lillich. In Remembrance Of A Civilized Scholar, Gordon A. Christenson

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

Tribute to international scholar, Richard Bonnot Lillich.

Professor Eugene M. Corbin - In Memoriam, Gordon A. Christenson

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

Tribute to legal scholar, Eugene Corbin.

On Choosing Clients And Careers: A Speculative Essay On The Problems Of Initial Choice, Joseph P. Tomain

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

This paper deals with the moral dimensions of initial choices of careers and clients. Although the foregoing tale is addressed to the initial choice of career, similar considerations enter into the initial choice of clients. The problems of initial career choice were highlighted because they are more immediate to law students.' In addition, one's choice of career may have a significant effect on future choices of clients.

In order for a lawyer to make an initial choice of either career or client, moral questions of the first rank must be answered. The purpose of this paper is to discuss these …

Irvin C. Rutter, Gordon A. Christenson

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

Tribute to legal scholar, Irvin Rutter.

In Memoriam Of Professor George D. Horning Jr., Gordon A. Christenson

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

Tribute to legal scholar, George D. Horning Jr.

In Pursuit Of The Art Of Law, Gordon A. Christenson

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

The following is the address given by the author upon his installation as Dean of The American University Law School, on October 31, 1971.