Law Commons^™

The Integrated Law School Curriculum, Adam Lamparello

Adam Lamparello

In January 2014, the American Bar Association’s Task Force on the Future of Legal Education stated that “[a]n evolution is taking place in legal practice and legal education needs to evolve with it.” To this end, the Task Force recommended that the law school curriculum “needs to shift still further toward developing the competencies and professionalism required of people who will deliver services to clients.” In fact, the Task Force emphasized that “[a] graduate’s having some set of competencies in the delivery of law and related services, and not just some body of knowledge, is an essential outcome …

Learning From And About The Numbers, Carole Silver, Louis Rocconi

Carole Silver

In this article, we enter the debate about the value of legal education, taking aim at the issue of the ways in which law schools prepare students for practice. But rather than focusing on skills training, our concern is with the approach of law schools to preparing students to understanding the context of the legal issues they will encounter, and specifically on their preparation for working with numbers, whether with regard to business, finance or information presented in statistical form generally.

Our contribution to this debate is to emphasize the importance of data in analyzing the value of law school, …

Some Key Things Entrepreneurs Need To Know About The Law And Lawyers, Lawrence J. Trautman, Anthony Luppino, Malika S. Simmons

Lawrence J. Trautman Sr.

New business formation is a powerful economic engine that creates jobs. Diverse legal issues are encountered as a start-up entity approaches formation, initial capitalization and fundraising, arrangements with employees and independent contractors, and relationships with other third parties. The endeavors of a typical start-up in the United States will likely implicate many of the following areas of law: intellectual property; business organizations; tax laws; employment and labor laws; securities regulation; contracts and licensing agreements; commercial sales; debtor-creditor relations; real estate law; health and safety laws/codes; permits and licenses; environmental protection; industry specific regulatory laws and approval processes; tort/personal injury, products …

The Moral Lawyer And The Machiavellian Nature Of Law Practice, David Barnhizer

David Barnhizer

In Western culture the name Niccolo Machiavelli has become Machiavellianism, a pejorative signifying the willingness to do anything to achieve desired ends. American lawyers do have limits, however, and are expected to operate according to an ethical code that is at least intended to prevent the worst abuses. The effectiveness of this ethical code has often been questioned, as have the questionable efforts of the organized bar to enforce its rules, but on the surface it differentiates law practice from hand-to-hand combat and military struggles. Even though I have sometimes used the concepts of the warrior lawyer, the general and …

Building A More Critical Lens Into The Five Habits Of Cross-Cultural Lawyering, Kiran Sidhu

Kiran Sidhu

No abstract provided.

Law Schools And Learning Outcomes: Developing A Coherent, Cohesive, And Comprehensive Law School Curriculum, Anthony S. Niedwiecki

Anthony S. Niedwiecki

No abstract provided.

An Empirical Analysis Of Diversity In The Legal Profession, Jason P. Nance, Paul E. Madsen

Jason P. Nance

The purpose of this Study is to empirically examine the diversity of the legal profession. The primary distinctive features of this empirical analysis are that it evaluates diversity in the legal profession by (a) carefully comparing it against other prestigious professions that have significant barriers to entry, and (b) focusing on young individuals who recently began their careers. These distinctions are made to isolate anomalies that are more likely caused by forces specific to the legal profession rather than general social forces that limit the eligibility of historically disadvantaged groups to pursue prestigious employment opportunities. Further, by narrowing our focus …

Holistic Lawyering, Jonathan R. Cohen

Jonathan R. Cohen

Transforming Practices documents profound changes occurring within legal practice and simultaneously helps illuminate the road ahead. Indeed, the psychological insight, moral questioning, concrete applications, and eloquent writing on a topic of significance combine to impart a sacred quality to this book. Whether you are a practitioner, a student, or a scholar, I suspect that you will learn from reading this book. I know that I did.

A Tale Of Three “Professions”: Search Engine Optimization, Lawyering & Law Teaching, Ray Campbell

Ray W Campbell

The question has been posed: is legal practice today a profession? This leads, naturally enough, to another question: should society treat it as one? Using the concept of ‘profession’ in different ways, some argue that one thing modern legal practice needs is a good dose of 'professionalism;' others argue that, whatever once might have been true, treating law practice as a ‘profession’ is a rum game best abandoned.

These questions matter. Law enjoys special regulatory privileges and market protections that make little sense if law has become just another form of business – a specialized form of consulting, perhaps. At …

The Codification Of Professionalism: Can You Sanction Lawyers Into Being Nice?, Debra Moss Curtis

Debra Moss Curtis

On October 31, 2013, the Florida Supreme Court in The Florida Bar v. Norkin made it clear that “it wants the trend of escalating incivility among lawyers to stop.” With that decision, in which a lawyer was suspended and publicly reprimanded for his behavior, the court urged “Members of the Florida Bar, law professors, and law students should study” this case “as a glaring example of unprofessional behavior.” This article heeds the courts’ directive to do so, but also places it in the context of the movement to enhance professionalism statewide.At the heart of the professionalism movement is a conflict—between …

International Trade V. Intellectual Property Lawyers: Globalization And The Brazilian Legal Profession, Vitor M. Dias

Vitor M. Dias

No abstract provided.

The High Price Of Poverty: A Study Of How The Majority Of Current Court System Procedures For Collecting Court Costs And Fees, As Well As Fines, Have Failed To Adhere To Established Precedent And The Constitutional Guarantees They Advocate., Trevor J. Calligan

Trevor J Calligan

No abstract provided.

Using Occam’S Razor To Solve International Attorney-Client Privilege Choice Of Law Issues: An Old Solution To A New Problem, Nathan M. Crystal, Francesca Giannoni-Crystal

Nathan M. Crystal

The practice of law is increasingly becoming “delocalized.” Globalization and the use of technology are two important factors in this fundamental change in practice. Delocalization is affecting almost all areas of practice, including issues involving attorney-client privilege (ACP). To some extent the choice-of-law rules governing ACP are also – like other fields of the law - being “delocalized,” but in our view only partially. This paper discusses six approaches to choice of law issues governing ACP that are being used by the courts. Aside from the traditional lex loci approach (which simply applies the law of the forum to the …

Lee’S Atticus Finch Represents A Will To Change, Mary Ellen Maatman

Mary Ellen Maatman

No abstract provided.

Toward A New Language Of Legal Drafting, Matthew Roach

Matthew Roach

Lawyers should write in document markup language just like web developers, digital publishers, scientists, and almost everyone else.

Navigating Legal Cultures: The Limits Of Self-Help For Immigrants At A Law Clinic In Norway, Ana Maria Vargas Falla

Ana Maria Vargas Falla

No abstract provided.

The Hypocrisy Of "Equal But Separate" In The Courtroom: A Lens For The Civil Rights Era, Jaimie K. Mcfarlin

Jaimie K. McFarlin

This article serves to examine the role of the courthouse during the Jim Crow Era and the early stages of the Civil Rights Movement, as courthouses fulfilled their dual function of minstreling Plessy’s call for “equality under the law” and orchestrating overt segregation.

Transnational Legal Practice, Laurel Terry, Carole Silver

Faculty Scholarly Works

This 2015 Year-in-Review article continues the tradition of collecting and publicizing the developments that occurred during the year related to transnational legal practice (TLP). This year’s article builds on the work set forth in the 2014 Year-in-Review.

The 2014 TLP Year-in-Review provided a departure from the Year-in-Review’s typical method of presentation by identifying two categories of what that article called “TLP-Nets.” One group of TLP-Nets is nationally based and the other is inherently transnational. The 2014 article identified examples of TLP-Nets and highlighted the meeting points and relationships that facilitate border-crossing for the variety of actors involved in TLP policy-making …

Redefining Professionalism, Rebecca Roiphe

Rebecca Roiphe

REdefining PRofessionalism

Abstract

Rebecca Roiphe*

Most scholars condemn professionalism as self-serving, anti-competitive rhetoric. This Article argues that professionalism can be a positive and productive way of thinking about lawyers’ work. While it is undoubtedly true that the Bar has used the ideology of the professional role to support self-interested and bigoted causes, professionalism has also served as an important way of developing and marshalling group identity to promote useful ends. The critics of professionalism tend to view it as an ideology, according to which professionals, unlike businessmen, are concerned not with their own financial gain but with the good …

Encouraging Physician-Attorney Collaboration Through More Explicit Professional Standards, Linda Morton Jd, Howard Taras Md, Vivian Reznik Md, Mph

Linda H Morton

In this age of multi-layered global problem solving, the skill of working with other disciplines is a necessary tool for any professional. Societal ills can no longer be solved by narrow approaches learned in graduate training but call for interdisciplinary collaboration. Effective collaboration of this nature requires the professions to understand the differences in professional cultures and to bridge the communication gap caused by these differences. Legal and medical training offer useful, but often conflicting, approaches to problem solving, thus, potentially impeding our abilities to understand and communicate with others regarding a shared issue or problem. Though each profession has …

Why The Bar Examination Fails To Raise The Bar, Carol Goforth

Carol Goforth

Breaking Bad Facts: What Intriguing Contradictions In Fiction Narratives Can Teach Lawyers About Coping With Harmful Evidence, Cathren Page

Cathren Page

Abstract: Breaking Bad Facts: What Intriguing Contradictions in Fiction Narratives Can Teach Lawyers About Coping with Harmful Evidence by Cathren Koehlert-Page Walter White is the “nerdiest old dude” that Jesse Pinkman knows. His students ignore him and whisper and laugh during class. They make fun of him at his after school job at the car wash where he is forced to stay late. His home décor and personal fashion could best be described as New American Pathetic. And yet by the end of the hit television series, Breaking Bad, White is a feared multi-million dollar drug lord known as Heisenberg. …

Impartiality And Independence: Misunderstood Cousins, James E. Moliterno

James E. Moliterno

No abstract provided.

The New-Breed, “Die-Hard” Chinese Lawyer: A Comparison With American Civil Rights Cause Lawyers, James E. Moliterno

James E. Moliterno

No abstract provided.

A Government Of Laws Not Of Precedents 1776-1876: The Google Challenge To Common Law Myth, James Maxeiner

James R Maxeiner

Conventional wisdom holds that the United States is a common law country of precedents where, until the 20th century (the “Age of Statutes”), statutes had little role. Digitization by Google and others of previously hard to find legal works of the 19th century challenges this common law myth. At the Centennial in 1876 Americans celebrated that “The great fact in the progress of American jurisprudence … is its tendency towards organic statute law and towards the systematizing of law; in other words, towards written constitutions and codification.” This article tests the claim of the Centennial Writers of 1876 and finds …

Why Lawyers Fear Love: Mohandas Gandhi’S Significance To The Mindfulness In Law Movement, Nehal A. Patel

Nehal A. Patel

Although mindfulness has gained the attention of the legal community, there are only a handful of scholarly law articles on mindfulness. The literature effectively documents the Mindfulness in Law movement, but there has been minimal effort to situate the movement into the broader history of non-Western ideas in the legal academy and profession. Similarly, there has been little recent scholarship offering a critique of the American legal system through the insights of mindfulness. In this Article, I attempt to fill these gaps by situating the Mindfulness in Law movement into the history of modern education’s western-dominated world-view. With this approach, …

Art-Iculating The Analysis: Systemizing The Decision To Use Visuals As Legal Reasoning, Ruth Anne Robbins, Steve Johansen

Ruth Anne Robbins

This Article first assumes that visuals belong and are ethically permitted in legal documents -- something explored by other authors -- and then begins to answer the questions of effective inclusion. The article explores the specific use of analytical visuals, which are those that do not attempt to prove what happened in a legal dispute, but instead help explain how the dispute should be resolved under the legal standards. Thus, the included analytical visual, when used effectively, creates a stronger understanding of the abstract legal analysis. The article suggests a taxonomy for categories of analytical visuals. It also acknowledges that …

The Moral Lawyer And The Machiavellian Nature Of Law Practice, David Barnhizer

David Barnhizer

In Western culture the name Niccolo Machiavelli has become Machiavellianism, a pejorative signifying the willingness to do anything to achieve desired ends. American lawyers do have limits, however, and are expected to operate according to an ethical code that is at least intended to prevent the worst abuses. The effectiveness of this ethical code has often been questioned, as have the questionable efforts of the organized bar to enforce its rules, but on the surface it differentiates law practice from hand-to-hand combat and military struggles. Even though I have sometimes used the concepts of the warrior lawyer, the general and …

Negotiator's Nook: The Ins And Outs Of Effective Negotiation, David Spratt

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

No abstract provided.

Transformations In Health Law Practice: The Intersections Of Changes In Healthcare And Legal Workplaces, Louise G. Trubek, Barbara Zabawa, Paula Galowitz

Faculty Works

The passage and implementation of the Affordable Care Act is propelling transformations in health care. The transformations include integration of clinics and hospitals, value based care, patient centeredness, transparency, computerized business models and universal coverage. These shifts are influencing the practice of health law, a vibrant specialty field considered a "hot" area for new lawyers. The paper examines how the transformations in health care are intersecting with ongoing trends in law practice: increase in in-house positions, collaboration between medical and legal professionals, and the continued search for increased access to legal representation for ordinary people. Three health law workplace sites …