Law Commons^™

Michigan's Minority Graduates In Practice: Answers To Methodological Queries, Richard O. Lempert, David L. Chambers, Terry K. Adams

Articles

Before making a few remarks in response to those who commented on our article (Lempert, Chambers, and Adams 2000), we would like to express our gratitude to the editors of Law and Social Inquiry for securing these commentaries and to the people who wrote them. The comments both highlight the potential uses to which our research and similar studies may be put and give us the opportunity to address methodological concerns and questions that other readers of our article may share with those who commented on it. The responses to our work are of two types. Professors Nelson, Payne, and …

Michigan's Minority Graduates In Practice: The River Runs Through Law School, Richard O. Lempert, David L. Chambers, Terry K. Adams

Articles

This paper reports the results of a 1997-98 survey designed to explore the careers of the University of Michigan Law School's minority graduates from the classes of 1970 through 1996, and of a random sample of Michigan Law School's white alumni who graduated during the same years. It is to date the most detailed quantitative exploration of how minority students fare after they graduate from law school and enter law practice or related careers. The results reveal that almost all of Michigan Law School's minority graduates pass a bar exam and go on to have careers that appear successful by …

Learning And Serving: Pro Bono Legal Services By Law Students, David L. Chambers, Cynthia F. Adcock

Articles

All lawyers' codes of professional ethics in the United States expect members of the bar to perform legal services for low-income persons. In practice, as we all know, many lawyers perform a great deal of such service while others do little or none. By much the same token, the accreditation rules of the American Bar Association urge all law schools to provide students with opportunities to do pro bono legal work; by much the same token, some schools in the United States have extensive programs for their students but many do not. In 1998, the Association of American Law Schools …

Doing Well And Doing Good: The Careers Of Minority And White Graduates Of The University Of Michigan Law School, David L. Chambers, Richard O. Lempert, Terry K. Adams

Articles

Of the more than 1,000 law students attending the University of Michigan Law School in the spring of 1965, only one was African American. The Law School faculty, in response, decided to develop a program to attract more African American students. One element of this program was the authorization of a deliberately race-conscious admissiosn process. By the mid-1970s, at least 25 African American students were represented in each graduating class. By the late 1970s, Latino and Native American students were included in the program as well. Over the nearly three decades between 1970 and 1998, the admissions efforts and goals …

The African American, Latino, And Native American Graduates Of One American Law School, 1970-1996, David L. Chambers, Richard O. Lempert, Terry K. Adams

Articles

In the spring of 1965, only one African American student and no Latino students attended the University of Michigan Law School. At the time, Michigan, like most American law schools, was a training place for white males. In 1966, the law school faculty adopted a new admissions policy that took race into account as a plus factor in the admissions process. This policy of affirmative action has taken many forms over the years, but, across the decades of the 1970's, the 1980's and the 1990's, about 800 African Americans, 350 Latinos, 200 Asian Americans and 100 Native Americans have graduated …

The Role Of Clinical Programs In Legal Education, Suellyn Scarnecchia

Articles

In clinic, students get a glance at the lawyer they will be someday. They gain confidence that, indeed, they will be a "good" lawyer. They understand the context in which their classroom learning will be applied. In short, they are able to integrate their law school experience.

Moving Ground, Breaking Traditions: Tasha's Chronicle, Angela I. Onwuachi-Willig

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

This Note uses a fictional dialogue to analyze and engage issues concerning stereotypes, stigmas, and affirmative action. It also highlights the importance of role models for students of color and the disparate hiring practices of law firms and legal employers through the conversations and thoughts of its main character, Tasha Crenshaw.

Aba Accreditation Of Law Schools: An Antitrust Analysis, Andy Portinga

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

The accreditation activities of the American Bar Association are under attack. From within legal academia, professors and deans complain that the ABA accreditation process is overly formalistic and intrusive. In addition, the Massachusetts School of Law has sued the ABA, alleging that the ABA's accreditation standards violate the Sherman Act. From outside legal academia, the Department of Justice has investigated the ABA's accreditation activities and initiated an antitrust suit against the ABA. The Department of Justice and the ABA immediately settled this suit, and, as a result of this settlement, the ABA has agreed not to enforce certain standards and …

Why Hard Cases Make Good (Clinical) Law, Paul D. Reingold

Articles

In 1992, when the University of California's Hastings College of Law decided to offer a live-client clinic for the first time, its newly hired director had to make several decisions about what form the program should take.1 The first question for the director was whether the clinic should be a single-issue specialty clinic or a general clinic that would represent clients across several areas of the law. The second question, and the one that will be the focus of this essay, was whether the program should restrict its caseload to "easy" routine cases or also accept non-routine, less controllable litigation. …

Eyes To The Future, Yet Remembering The Past: Reconciling Tradition With The Future Of Legal Education, Amy M. Colton

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

This Note explores the relationship between legal education and the legal profession, and what can be done to stop the two institutions from drifting farther and farther apart. Part I examines the history of the American law school, focusing on how the schools came into existence and what goals they intended to serve. Part II questions whether these goals have been reached, and dissects the present-day law school curriculum in search of both its triumphs and its failures. A necessary part of this curriculum analysis includes examining the evolution of the profession into a creature of both law and business, …

Making Elite Lawyers: Visions Of Law At Harvard And Beyond, Daniel A. Cohen

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Making Elite Lawyers: Visions of Law at Harvard and Beyond by Robert Granfield

The Deprofessionalization Of Legal Teaching And Scholarship, Richard A. Posner

Michigan Law Review

The editors have asked me to comment on Judge Edwards' double-barreled blast at legal education and the practice of law. This I am happy to do. It is an important article, stating with refreshing bluntness concerns that are widely felt but have never I think been so forcefully, so arrestingly expressed. Nevertheless I have deep disagreements with it.

The Growth Of Interdisciplinary Research And The Industrial Structure Of The Production Of Legal Ideas: A Reply To Judge Edwards, George L. Priest

Michigan Law Review

This brief response will attempt to repair these various deficiencies, though only in part because of the difficulty of the subject. It will try to explain more fully the rise of interdisciplinary legal research and will sketch the broader structure of the production and dissemination of new ideas about law and the legal system. The relationship between legal education and legal practice implicates an understanding of the "market" for legal ideas. To describe ideas as the subject of a "market," of course, has become conventional. In my view, however, the market metaphor most typically distorts our understanding of the issue, …

A Response From The Visitor From Another Planet, J. Cunyon Gordon

Michigan Law Review

In order to admit, as I do, that the related planets of practice and academia are conjoined, one has to realize, as I have, that the legacy of the heavily doctrinal education Edwards wants to preserve may be precisely the lawyers he upbraids - lawyers who generally do not live, work, and behave ethically (with fairness, compassion, and creativity) in a complex, heterogeneous society. This recognition in turn compels the conclusion I reach that the outsiders - with their challenges to the status quo's values, their upstart theories and innovative pedagogies, and even their Star Trek-and-the-law scholarship - may help …

Students As Teachers, Teachers As Learners, Derrick Bell, Erin Edmonds

Michigan Law Review

Judge Edwards divides his analysis of the cause of the crisis in ethical lawyering into an overview and three parts. The overview and first two parts deal mainly with the role of law schools and legal curriculum in what he views as the deterioration of responsible, capable practitioners. This article takes issue with some of the assumptions, analyses, and conclusions those sections contain. The third part of Edwards' article analyzes the role of law firms in causing that same deterioration. This article agrees with and will elaborate upon that part of Edwards' treatment.

We approach Judge Edwards' article, we hope, …

Clerks In The Maze, Pierre Schlag

Michigan Law Review

It must be very difficult to be a judge - particularly an appellate judge. Not only must appellate judges reconcile often incommensurable visions of what law is, what it commands, or what it strives to achieve, but judges must do this largely alone. What little help they have in terms of actual human contact, apart from their clerks, typically takes the form of two or more advocates whose entire raison d'être is to persuade, coax, and manipulate the judge into reaching a predetermined outcome - one which often instantiates or exemplifies only the most tenuous positive connection to the rhetoric …

The Disjunction Between Judge Edwards And Professor Priest, Louis H. Pollak

Michigan Law Review

With characteristic vigor, Judge Harry Edwards, in his essay The Growing Disjunction Between Legal Education and the Legal Profession, has censured the law schools and, secondarily, the bar, for what he sees as profoundly disturbing trends pulling academics and practitioners farther and farther apart. Judge Edwards' censure is not proffered off the cuff. He has carefully polled his former law clerks on their perceptions of their law school years and of their postclerkship professional experiences - whether in private practice, in government, or in teaching. In the text and footnotes of his essay, Judge Edwards quotes his law clerks' …

Pro Bono Legal Work: For The Good Of Not Only The Public, But Also The Lawyer And The Legal Profession, Nadine Strossen

Michigan Law Review

I agree with Judge Edwards that "the lawyer has an ethical obligation to practice public interest law - to represent some poor clients; to advance some causes that he or she believes to be just." I also concur in Judge Edwards' opinion that "[a] person who deploys his or her doctrinal skill without concern for the public interest is merely a good legal technician - not a good lawyer."

Rather than further develop Judge Edwards' theme that lawyers have a professional responsibility to do pro bono work, I will offer another rationale for such work, grounded in professional and individual …

Stewardship, Donald B. Ayer

Michigan Law Review

While I agree with much that Judge Edwards has proposed, I thus submit that his formulations of the problem are partial - a bit like those of the blind men examining different parts of the elephant. The law's current unhappiness is only partly described as that of law schools and practicing lawyers going in different directions, of law practice becoming too commercial, or of law schools failing to serve the needs of the practicing lawyers and judges with practical teaching and scholarship. All of these observations, while correct as far as they go, miss the root of the problem, which …

Commentary On Judge Edwards' "Growing Disjunction Between Legal Education And The Legal Profession", James L. Oakes

Michigan Law Review

Perhaps this little piece should be entitled Grace Notes rather than Commentary because I agree with so much of what Judge Edwards had to say in the Michigan Law Review. When I first read his piece, I have to say I was quite skeptical of his methodology, namely, running a survey past a group of former law clerks who, by virtue of their own super achievement, primarily in so-called elite law schools, quite easily could have ethereal points of view. But in typical Edwardsian fashion, the judge made appropriate disclaimers, and the clerks' comments seemed to me, for the most …

The Growing Disjunction Between Legal Education And The Legal Profession: A Postscript, Harry T. Edwards

Michigan Law Review

In this essay I offer a postscript to "The Growing Disjunction." It is not possible for me to "respond" directly to the other participants in this symposium, because I had no opportunity before publication to read what they have written. I will therefore limit myself to two tasks. First, I will briefly discuss several issues raised in the article. Second, and most important, I wish to share a representative sample of the responses I have received regarding the article. These responses, I think, provide good evidence of the magnitude of the problem that we face.

Letter To Judge Harry Edwards, James J. White

Articles

Dear Harry: I write to second your statements concerning the disjunction between legal education and the legal profession and also to quibble with you. By examining the faculty, the curriculum, and the research agenda at Michigan, your school and mine, I hope to illustrate the ways in which you are right and to suggest other ways in which you and your clerk informants may be too pessimistic.

The Scholar As Advocate, Rebecca S. Eisenberg

Articles

Academic freedom in this country has been so closely identified with faculty autonomy that the two terms are often used interchangeably, especially by faculty members who are resisting restraints on their freedom to do as they please. While there may be some dispute as to whether or how far academic freedom protects the autonomy of universities or of students, the autonomy of faculty members seems to lie close to the core of the traditional American conception of academic freedom. As elaborated by the American Association of University Professors, this conception of academic freedom calls for protecting individual faculty members from …

Deconstructing Los Angeles Or A Secret Fax From Magritte Regarding Postliterate Legal Reasoning: A Critique Of Legal Education, C. Garrison Lepow

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

This Article asks readers to imagine the shapes and colors of legal issues; it examines how people communicate and develop ideas through moving, metamorphosing images, especially computer graphics, and why methodology affects the eventual product of thought. Like dance, legal issues are described better through action than through words. Therefore, this Article challenges the principles of verbal reasoning upon which our legal system is based.

The Growing Disjunction Between Legal Education And The Legal Profession, Harry T. Edwards

Michigan Law Review

This article is my response to Professor Priest and all other legal academicians who disdain law teaching as an endeavor in pursuit of professional education. My view is that if law schools continue to stray from their principal mission of professional scholarship and training, the disjunction between legal education and the legal profession will grow and society will be the worse for it. My arguments are quite straightforward, and probably not wholly original. Nevertheless, they surely merit repetition.

On Retiring From A Deanship, John W. Reed

Other Publications

The reason for the italicized "from" in the title of my remarks is to distinguish it from the comments that I made at our meeting in Tucson four years ago, under the title "On Retiring to a Deanship." For those of you who were not there, I should mention that five years ago, as I was about to reach retirement age at the University of Michigan Law School-what the late William L. Prosser used to call the age of mandatory senility-Wayne State University in Detroit asked me to serve as its dean for a term of five years. Lobbied by …

The Burdens Of Educational Loans: The Impacts Of Debt On Job Choice And Standards Of Living For Students At Nine American Law Schools, David L. Chambers

Articles

American law students are borrowing large sums of money. For graduates at many schools, cumulative debts of $40,000 from college and law school have become the norm, and debts of $50,000, $60,000, and even more are common. The sums students are borrowing are much larger today than they were ten years ago, even after adjusting for increases in the cost of living. They have risen at a considerably faster pace than the starting salaries at small law firms and government agencies. They have even risen at a faster pace than the starting salaries in many large firms. The new pattern …

Debts, Job Choices, And Financial Burden: Educational Debts At Nine American Law Schools, David L. Chambers

Books

American law students are borrowing large sums of money. For graduates at many schools, cumulative debts of $35,000 from college and law school have become the norm and debts of $40,000, $50,000 and even more are common. The sums students are borrowing are much larger today than they were ten years ago, even after adjusting for increases in the cost of living. They have risen at a vastly faster pace than the initial salaries at small law firms and government agencies. They have even risen at a faster pace than the initial salaries in many large firms. The new pattern …

Persuasion, Joseph William Singer

Michigan Law Review

Lawyers spend a lot of time attempting to persuade other people. They persuade judges to promulgate rules of law that favor their clients. They persuade their law partners to adopt their interpretation of existing law or to adopt their strategy for litigation. They persuade clients to accept the dictates of the law. They persuade adversaries in settlement negotiations and their clients' business associates in contract negotiations. They persuade legislatures to fund legal services for the poor, to adopt or to reject law reforms.

Law professors spend most of their time teaching - or at least practicing - the art of …

Accommodation And Satisfaction: Women And Men Lawyers And The Balance Of Work And Family, David L. Chambers

Articles

This study of graduates of the University of Michigan Law School from the late 1970s reports on the differing ways that women and men have responded to the conflicting claims of work and family. It finds that women with children who have entered the profession have indeed continued to bear the principalr esponsibilitiesf or the care of children, but it alsof inds that these women, with all their burdens, are more satisfied with their careers and with the balance of their family and professional lives than other women and than men.