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Full-Text Articles in Law
Is Law A Discipline? Forays Into Academic Culture, Gene R. Shreve
Is Law A Discipline? Forays Into Academic Culture, Gene R. Shreve
Cleveland State Law Review
This Article explores academic culture. It addresses the reluctance in academic circles to accord law the full stature of a discipline. It forms doubts that have been raised into a series of four criticisms. Each attacks an academic feature of law, inviting the question: Is law different from the rest of the university in a way damaging its stature as an academic discipline? The Article concludes that, upon careful examination of each criticism, none establishes a difference between law and other disciplines capable of damaging law’s stature.
Professional Identity Formation Through Pro Bono Revealed Through Conversation Analysis, Linda F. Smith
Professional Identity Formation Through Pro Bono Revealed Through Conversation Analysis, Linda F. Smith
Cleveland State Law Review
Law school is supposed to teach legal analysis and lawyering skills as well as mold law students’ professional identities. Pro bono work provides an opportunity for law students to use their legal knowledge and skills and to develop their identities as emerging legal professionals. As important as both pro bono work and identity formation are, there has been very little research regarding how pro bono contributes to students’ identity formation. This Article utilizes a data set of over forty student-client consultations at a pro bono brief advice project that have been recorded and transcribed. It uses conversation analysis to study …
"The Millennials Are Coming!" : Improving Self-Efficacy In Law Students Through Universal Design In Learning, Jason S. Palmer
"The Millennials Are Coming!" : Improving Self-Efficacy In Law Students Through Universal Design In Learning, Jason S. Palmer
Cleveland State Law Review
The Millennial generation has arrived in law school. This new generation of self-confident and extremely high achieving learners merits a new interdisciplinary approach to legal education. Some institutions have explored formative assessments and regulated self-learning to improve academic success. Other universities have looked to universal design, specifically universal design in learning or universal design in instruction, as a mechanism for furthering educational goals for their students. All agree that a lack of self-efficacy can prevent Millennial students from overcoming challenges in their educational growth, and that high self efficacy, the ability to put forth effort and persistence to successfully accomplish …
Situating Thinking Like A Lawyer Within Legal Pedagogy , David T. Butleritchie
Situating Thinking Like A Lawyer Within Legal Pedagogy , David T. Butleritchie
Cleveland State Law Review
The phrase "thinking like a lawyer" maintains as much relevance to today's legal academy as it ever has. In the face of recent criticism that the ideas connected with the concept of "thinking like a lawyer," e.g., the case law method with its focus on the adversarial litigation process, the fact is that legal educators must still teach their students to "think like lawyers." Critics have complained that the narrow focus of this traditional concept unduly restricts the ability of law students to develop refined analytical and practical skills which go beyond the adversarial context. In one sense these critics …
Homelessness And The Use Of Reality To Enrich The Experience Of Law School, Frank Trinity
Homelessness And The Use Of Reality To Enrich The Experience Of Law School, Frank Trinity
Cleveland State Law Review
When I arrived in New Haven in 1985 1 was shocked. I would go running near the campus and find myself in the middle of public housing projects. This was the first time I ever saw housing projects. I grew up in New Jersey suburbs and had never before seen a housing project. Now I was confronted with people on street comers asking for money. This experience was very upsetting. About the same time as this was occurring, I was attending first semester classes; my brain was being twisted in these courses in ways I never expected. As the semester …
Problems With The Structure Of Casebooks And Instruction, John Makdisi
Problems With The Structure Of Casebooks And Instruction, John Makdisi
Cleveland State Law Review
The case method of instruction has served to instruct generations of students from the time of its introduction by Christopher Langdell at the Harvard Law School. It has much to recommend it inasmuch as the lawyers who have been trained to think, analyze and solve problems by analyzing cases include some of the best minds in the country. However, this time-honored method of instruction contains some major flaws and it is time that we reexamine a pedagogic approach satirized for its punishing role in The Paper Chase. A pedagogic approach to law training that focuses on problem solving is not …
Law Schools Should Be About Justice Too, Henry Rose
Law Schools Should Be About Justice Too, Henry Rose
Cleveland State Law Review
Millions of low and middle-income Americans face legal problems every day. Most cannot afford an attorney. What is remarkable about these legal problems is that they are ignored by legal educators. American law schools, the training ground for our lawyers, do not focus on the civil legal problems of low and middle income persons. American law students are taught to focus on the legal problems of persons or entities able to pay for legal services. Not only are the common legal problems of Americans not studied in our law schools, the maldistribution of legal services in the society is barely …
Nurturing The Impulse For Justice, Lynne Henderson
Nurturing The Impulse For Justice, Lynne Henderson
Cleveland State Law Review
By dwelling on doctrine and appellate case analysis we too often lose sight of the underlying assumptions behind the law and the social consequences of the law. By doing so we fail to give students even a glimmer of understanding as to what they need to know to fight injustice effectively. We spend much classroom time rationalizing the real and evading difficult questions of social justice. We do almost nothing to help our students develop any sense of justice or injustice or ways of identifying how the law produces justice and injustice. Let me work through an example of how …
Building Bridges Between Theory And Practice, Scholarship And Activism, Elizabeth M. Schneider
Building Bridges Between Theory And Practice, Scholarship And Activism, Elizabeth M. Schneider
Cleveland State Law Review
The recent events of the last few weeks, the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings concerning Anita Hill's allegations of sexual harassment against Clarence Thomas, and Clarence Thomas' confirmation to the Supreme Court, have shaken the nation and I'm sure all of us in this room. These events underscore the urgency and challenge of the justice mission of legal education. In these remarks, I will briefly explore a critical dimension of this mission, the building of bridges between theory and practice, scholarship and activism, in American legal education. Our presence here signifies our commitment to the idea that law schools have a …
The Distinction Between Lawyers As Advocates And As Activists; And The Role Of The Law School Dean In Facilitating The Justice Mission, James Douglas
The Distinction Between Lawyers As Advocates And As Activists; And The Role Of The Law School Dean In Facilitating The Justice Mission, James Douglas
Cleveland State Law Review
When David Barnhizer invited me to be involved in the Justice Mission conference I jumped at the opportunity; because justice is an issue that is extremely important to me, especially being a person of color in America. In presenting my ideas about the justice mission, I will be talking about two distinct concerns. One is the role of the law school dean in facilitating the justice mission in the law schools. The second is related but applies even more broadly since it draws upon the experiences of lawyers both in their roles as practitioners and as social activists. The point …
Clinical Scholarship And The Justice Mission, Robert D. Dinerstein
Clinical Scholarship And The Justice Mission, Robert D. Dinerstein
Cleveland State Law Review
To many people, the relationship between clinical programs and the justice mission of American law schools is so clear as to be self-evident. These programs may pursue justice on behalf of individual clients or for groups of clients through class-action or other impact litigation. Moreover, clinical teachers frequently discuss with their students the need for the latter to serve justice in their legal careers, whether as the principal focus of their legal work or through pro bono publico activities. Indeed, for many law students, the law clinic may be the only place in which concerns about justice are discussed and, …
Advocacy Strategies In Social Welfare Policy: Homelessness, Barbara Sard
Advocacy Strategies In Social Welfare Policy: Homelessness, Barbara Sard
Cleveland State Law Review
I currently direct the homelessness unit at Greater Boston Legal Services after having been a welfare lawyer for fifteen years. When I first started teaching at Harvard about six years ago, I taught a course on Welfare Law. There is a value in teaching homelessness law as a discrete topic rather than lumping it under the traditional topics of welfare law or housing law. Initially, when I started teaching at Harvard, my goal was to impress the students with the fact that a poverty law subject like Welfare Law was as complicated doctrinally as anything else that they might learn. …
Research And The Justice Mission Of Law Schools, Mark Tushnet
Research And The Justice Mission Of Law Schools, Mark Tushnet
Cleveland State Law Review
There are some obvious things to say about research and the justice mission of law schools, and many other contributors to this discussion have said them. For example, jurisprudence lies at the core of the classical legal curriculum, and-at least in the contemporary law school-definitions of justice are part of the jurisprudence syllabus. Because the concept of justice is not self-defining, conceptual inquiry into the meaning of justice, a traditional mode of legal research, is recurrently needed. In this way, research is tightly linked to the justice mission of law schools. In this piece, I move from global concerns--jurisprudence in …
Teaching Morality, Robert A. Solomon
Teaching Morality, Robert A. Solomon
Cleveland State Law Review
Students come to law school filled with passion, with morality, with a sense of justice, and we, the law school itself, spends three years doing our best to crush them under the weight of the rule of law instead of helping them to integrate their ideas and values with the law. To the extent students are looking at clinics, they are not only looking at them as a means of touching reality. They are looking at clinics as a furlough from prison. In this conference we are talking about our goal as being that of trying to teach justice. I …
Finding Yourself In Law School, Joel Jay Finer
Finding Yourself In Law School, Joel Jay Finer
Cleveland State Law Review
Congratulations on your acceptance and your decision to enter law school. Some might say after reading this commentary that it was more appropriate for a commencement address. But stop to think. Commencement means beginning. This is your commencement, the beginning of your legal career. And if the values to which I refer are not somewhere in your thoughts during your law school education, when you can begin to see how your technical skills can be put to use in service of whatever justice goals you personally find most meaningful, it may be more difficult to make the connections later on. …
Professional Education In Medicine And Law: Structural Differences, Common Failings, Possible Opportunities, Roger C. Cramton
Professional Education In Medicine And Law: Structural Differences, Common Failings, Possible Opportunities, Roger C. Cramton
Cleveland State Law Review
Medicine and law emerged in the early decades of the twentieth century as strong, highly organized professions with high status, increasing rewards, and growing autonomy. Professional claims of esoteric knowledge, collegial solidarity, and disinterestedness were accepted by members of the profession and the general public. Professional schools in both disciplines forged university connections and achieved dominant positions in the preparation of new professionals. Patterns of medical and legal education established during this formative period, extending roughly from 1890 to 1920, have been highly persistent. Despite these similarities, educators in the two professions have proceeded in isolation from one another. There …
Legal Education: Confronting Reality And Too Many Siblings, Ralph Slovenko
Legal Education: Confronting Reality And Too Many Siblings, Ralph Slovenko
Cleveland State Law Review
What do we-all of us-want out of legal education? Why is there so much concern and dissatisfaction with regard to the third, and to some extent, the second year of the curriculum? Questions most often raised are: What does one want or expect of legal education?; why is there so much dissatisfaction?; what really is the problem, and what can be done about it?
Part-Time And First-Rate Legal Education: Some Random Observations, Stanley E. Harper Jr.
Part-Time And First-Rate Legal Education: Some Random Observations, Stanley E. Harper Jr.
Cleveland State Law Review
This article goes through a comparison of a full-time versus a part-time law school experience. Further, the article examines the quality of student or the planning of a curriculum and surveys the statistical significance of part-time legal education from 1947 to 1962.
Part-Time And First-Rate Legal Education: Some Random Observations, Stanley E. Harper Jr.
Part-Time And First-Rate Legal Education: Some Random Observations, Stanley E. Harper Jr.
Cleveland State Law Review
This article goes through a comparison of a full-time versus a part-time law school experience. Further, the article examines the quality of student or the planning of a curriculum and surveys the statistical significance of part-time legal education from 1947 to 1962.
Boredom In Legal Education, Ralph Slovenko
Boredom In Legal Education, Ralph Slovenko
Cleveland State Law Review
The law school should strive to educate the lawyer and nonlawyer not only on law but also on society. In this enterprise, there will be no boredom. Law, viewed as an interplay of history, logic, and sociology, is second to none as an exciting and liberal subject.