Law Commons^™

One Small Step For Legal Writing, One Giant Leap For Legal Education: Making The Case For More Writing Opportunities In The "Practice-Ready" Law School Curriculum, Sherri Lee Keene

Faculty Scholarship

Legal writing is more than an isolated practical skill or a law school course; it is a valuable tool for broadening and deepening law students’ and new attorneys’ knowledge and understanding of the law. If experienced legal professionals, both professors and practitioners alike, take a hard look back at their careers, many will no doubt remember how their work on significant legal writing projects advanced their own knowledge of the law and enhanced their professional competence. Legal writing practice helps the writer to gain expertise in a number of ways: first, the act of writing itself promotes learning; second, close …

Embedding Assessment Principles In Externships, Kelly S. Terry

Faculty Scholarship

Externships have become an increasingly important component of legal education, as law schools seek to increase experiential learning opportunities for students to gain practice skills prior to entering the profession. As externship courses grow and become an integral part of the law school curriculum, externship teachers should implement best practices for assessing their students' learning, including setting learning outcomes for their courses, selecting assessment tools, gathering and analyzing assessment data, and using assessment data to make course adjustments that will improve student learning. This Article provides a primer on the process of course-level assessment and then explains how to apply …

Teaching “The Wire”: Crime, Evidence, And Kids, Andrea L. Dennis

Scholarly Works

I have a confession: I have only watched Season 1 of The Wire, and it has been many years since I did that. Thus, both my knowledge and pedagogical use of the show are limited. What explanation can I offer for my failings? I am a Maryland native with family who resides in Baltimore City, or Charm City as it is affectionately called. I worked for several years as an assistant federal public defender in Baltimore City. Over time, I have seen the city evolve, and I have seen it chew up and spit out many good people and some …

The World Needs More Rod Macdonald: The Potential Of Big Ideas, Kim Brooks

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

In this article, the author makes the case for thinking boldly and experimentally about the possibilities for legal education and law schools and urges us to embrace the potential for big ideas. She illustrates this approach through the lens of admissions, curriculum, and research. Within each of those aspects of legal education, the article suggests some guidelines that might be used to evaluate reform proposals and proposes one major change to spur reflection.

Representing Entities: The Value Of Teaching Students How To Draft Board Resolutions And Other Similar Documentation, Joan Mcleod Heminway, Marcia Narine

Articles

No abstract provided.

What Cornell Veterinary School Taught Me About Legal Education, Tina Stark

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Critical Race Action: Queer Lessons And Seven Legacies From The One And Only Professor Bell, Francisco Valdes

Articles

No abstract provided.

The Role Of Mindfulness In The Ongoing Evolution Of Legal Education, Scott L. Rogers

Articles

No abstract provided.

Friends Of Justice: Does Social Media Impact The Public Perception Of The Justice System?, Nicola A. Boothe-Perry

Journal Publications

Lawyers have long been recognized as being necessary in the effective functioning of an ordered society in roles as both officers of the court and, more broadly, as officers of the system of justice. In 2014, the ABA Task Force on the Future of Legal Education report noted that "[s]ociety has a deep interest in the competence of lawyers, in their availability to serve society and clients, in the broad public role they can play, and in their professional values." Values such as those noted in the Model Rules of Professional Conduct (advisor, counselor, and advocate) are instrumental in the …

Review Essay: Bilingual Legal Education In The United States: An Idea Whose Time Has Come, S. I. Strong

Faculty Publications

The long-standing and close connection among law, language and the state has traditionally led law schools to provide legal education in a single language. Indeed, bilingual legal education could in some cases be viewed as potentially contrary to state interests, given that "[t]he main instrument of nation-building is the imposition of a common state language. Indeed, bilingual legal education could in some cases be viewed as potentially contrary to state interests, given that "[t]he main instrument of nation-building is the imposition of a common state language."' However, the historical model of monolingual legal education may be in jeopardy. For example, …

The Professor And The Judge: Introducing First Year Students To The Law In Context, Michael B. Mushlin, Lisa Margaret Smith

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

For the past five years the authors, one a law professor, and the other a federal judge, have joined forces to teach introductory civil procedure to first semester first year students. Our approach is contrary to the traditional theory of legal instruction which holds that students learn first by a rigid diet of Socratic teaching of the fundamentals of legal analysis without any exposure to the real world or even a simulation of it. The central idea behind our experiment is that at the beginning of law school it is essential to provide a contextual introduction to the work of …

Breaking Glass: Identity, Community And Epistemology In Theory, Law And Education, Francisco Valdes

Articles

No abstract provided.

Mindful Ethics - A Pedagogical And Practical Approach To Teaching Legal Ethics, Developing Professional Identity, And Encouraging Civility, Jan L. Jacobowitz, Scott L. Rogers

Articles

Aristotle spoke of virtue and ethics as a combination of practical wisdom and habituation-an individual must learn from the application of critical reasoning skills to experience. Perhaps one of the earliest proclamations of the value of experiential learning, the Aristotelian view, reappears throughout history and is captured once again by the Carnegie Foundation's Report on Legal Education, which includes a call for instruction that provides practical skills and ethical grounding to complement the teaching of legal analysis. The Carnegie Report continues to play a role in the ongoing discussion of the need to reform legal education; a debate that is …

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 …

The Sincerest Form Of Flattery: Examples And Model-Based Learning In The Law School Classroom, Terrill Pollman

Scholarly Works

Responding to a changing landscape of law practice, law schools are searching for ways to structure the classroom experience and broader curriculum to promote more efficient and better learning outcomes. Although imitation, modeling, and the use of examples have become pre-eminent features of modern legal education, these pedagogies have remained largely unexamined. This article shows the power of teaching with examples in both the traditional and legal writing classroom, as well as how skillfully to limit the use of such pedagogy for maximum effect. Specifically, this article applies the findings of cognitive load research and composition theory to show that …

Duty To Rescue? Exploring Legal Analysis Through The Lens Of Photojournalists’ Storytelling Dilemmas, Iselin Magdalene Gambert

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

In depicting scenes of tragedy, what happens when photojournalists become the story? Do photojournalists have a duty to rescue those they photograph? Should they? This article will use a series of iconic images – and the stories of the photojournalists behind the camera – to illustrate how exploring these questions can be a provocative vehicle through which to engage new law students in legal writing and analysis. The article focuses on an exercise that centers around a fictional “Duty to Rescue” statute modeled after European statutes of the same kind. The exercise is anchored by four images – three still …

Balancing Between Two Worlds: A Dakota Woman’S Reflections On Being A Law Professor, Angelique Eaglewoman

Faculty Scholarship

There were many paths I considered as a young woman and none of them included becoming a law professor. My journey to my present life as a Dakota woman law professor is about balancing between the worlds I travel back and forth in. There is my tribal world, where I feel replenished and part of an on-going community experience stretching back to time immemorial. I feel that I am part of an unfolding history of endurance, strong Native women, and a participant in sustaining our traditional Native ways. On the other hand, there is the non-Indian world, where I often …

The Doctrine Of Legal Writing - Book Review Of Linda H. Edwards's Readings In Persuasion: Briefs That Changed The World, Lucille Jewel

Scholarly Works

In legal education, the word “doctrinal” is most often used to refer to courses such as Contracts, Torts, Property, and Criminal Procedure. Doctrinal has long been used as a descriptive adjective, but also as a word of exclusion. We often hear that legal writing courses are not substantive and not as significant as doctrinal courses. Linda Edwards’s new book, Readings in Persuasion: Briefs that Changed the World, persuasively challenges this view.

This paper evaluates what we mean when we use the term doctrinal in a legal education context and considers six powerful descriptors for the doctrine of legal writing, all …

Teaching Transactional Skills Using Real Clients From Clinic To Classroom, Brian Krumm, Shelley Dunck

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Experiential Education As Critical Pedagogy: Enhancing The Law School Experience, Spearit, Stephanie Ledesma

Articles

This article examines the shift to greater experiential education in law school through the lens of critical pedagogy. At its base, critical pedagogy is about devising more equitable methods of teaching, helping students develop consciousness of freedom, and helping them connect knowledge to power. The insights of critical pedagogy are valuable for a fuller understanding of experiential education and its potential to affect students in profound ways, particularly as a means of empowerment. Although this is an understudied area of pedagogical scholarship, power relations are at the heart of legal education. Critical pedagogy offers a frame for considering how experiential …

Visions Of The Future Of (Legal) Education, Michael J. Madison

Articles

One law professor takes a stab at imagining an ideal law school of the future and describing how to get there. The Essay spells out a specific possible vision, taking into account changes to the demand for legal services and changes to the economics and composition of the legal profession. That thought experiment leads to a series of observations about values and vision in legal education in general and about what it might take to move any vision forward.

Deal Deconstructions, Case Studies, And Case Simulations: Toward Practice Readiness With New Pedagogies In Teaching Business And Transactional Law, Michelle M. Harner, Robert J. Rhee

UF Law Faculty Publications

In this short commentary, we explore the use of two interrelated pedagogical methods for teaching transactional and business law. The first method is deal deconstruction, which analyzes the set of final deal documents and outcomes. This method is backward-looking, conducting a post-mortem on business transactions and analyzing the parties’ choices memorialized in the agreement against the legal and financial alternatives. The second method involves case studies and simulations, which are commonly seen in business schools. This method is forward-looking, exposing students to the uncertainties and situational contexts of doing deals and deal-related litigation. Together, these complementary methods help students understand …