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Full-Text Articles in Law
#Includetheirstories: Rethinking, Reimagining, And Reshaping Legal Education, Leslie Culver, Elizabeth A. Kronk Warner
#Includetheirstories: Rethinking, Reimagining, And Reshaping Legal Education, Leslie Culver, Elizabeth A. Kronk Warner
Utah Law Faculty Scholarship
The entire world was shaken by the events of 2020—a year that the historians will pen with infamy. Along with a global health pandemic that tested both human frailties and social infrastructures, the world witnessed the devastation of George Floyd, an African American man, dying under the knee of Derek Chauvin, a White male police officer. The nation erupted. As 2020 ended, many organizations and institutions clamored both to process ethnic divides and injustices, and to gain tools and skills to create meaningful change and lasting impact. Legal education was one such institution. During the summer and fall of 2020, …
The Institutional Mismatch Of State Civil Courts, Colleen Shanahan, Jessica Steinberg, Alyx Mark, Anna E. Carpenter
The Institutional Mismatch Of State Civil Courts, Colleen Shanahan, Jessica Steinberg, Alyx Mark, Anna E. Carpenter
Utah Law Faculty Scholarship
State civil courts are central institutions in American democracy. Though designed for dispute resolution, these courts function as emergency rooms for social needs in the face of the failure of the legislative and executive branches to disrupt or mitigate inequality. We reconsider national case data to analyze the presence of social needs in state civil cases. We then use original data from courtroom observation and interviews to theorize how state civil courts grapple with the mismatch between the social needs people bring to these courts and their institutional design. This institutional mismatch leads to two roles of state civil courts …
Judges And The Deregulation Of The Lawyer's Monopoly, Jessica Steinberg, Anna E. Carpenter, Colleen F. Shanahan, Alyx Mark
Judges And The Deregulation Of The Lawyer's Monopoly, Jessica Steinberg, Anna E. Carpenter, Colleen F. Shanahan, Alyx Mark
Utah Law Faculty Scholarship
In a revolutionary moment for the legal profession, the deregulation of legal services is taking hold in many parts of the country. Utah and Arizona, for instance, are experimenting with new regulations that permit nonlawyer advocates to play an active role in assisting citizens who may not otherwise have access to legal services. In addition, amendments to the Rules of Professional Conduct in both states, as well as those being contemplated in California, now allow nonlawyers to have a partnership stake in law firms, which may dramatically change the way capital for the delivery of legal services is raised as …
Law Talk In A Brief Advice Clinic, Linda F. Smith
Law Talk In A Brief Advice Clinic, Linda F. Smith
Utah Law Faculty Scholarship
Over three decades ago, Sarat and Felstiner published a ground-breaking ethnographic study of divorce client-lawyer conversations. They concluded that lawyers portrayed "a chaotic 'anti-system' in which [clients] cannot rely on the technical proficiency, or good faith, of judges and rival lawyers" but need to rely on their own lawyers' insider status to achieve reasonable outcomes.1 Although lawyers initially described the law and procedure to their clients, they rarely referenced that rational description when explaining what had occurred or would occur in their clients' cases. This law talk may have gradually and ultimately persuaded the clients to reach reasonable settlements, but …
Family Law By The Numbers: The Story That Casebooks Tell, Laura T. Kessler
Family Law By The Numbers: The Story That Casebooks Tell, Laura T. Kessler
Utah Law Faculty Scholarship
This Article presents the findings of a content analysis of 86 family law casebooks published in the United States from 1960 to 2019. Its purpose is to critically assess the discipline of family law with the aim of informing our understandings of family law’s history and exposing its ideological foundations and consequences. Although legal thinkers have written several intellectual histories of family law, this is the first quantitative look at the field.
The study finds that coverage of marriage and divorce in family law casebooks has decreased by almost half relative to other topics since the 1960s. In contrast, pages …
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
Utah Law Faculty Scholarship
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 paper utilizes a data set of over forty student-client consultations at a pro bono brief advice clinic that have been recorded and transcribed. It uses conversation analysis to study …
The Drive To Advise: A Study Of Law Students At A Pro Bono Brief Advice Project, Linda F. Smith
The Drive To Advise: A Study Of Law Students At A Pro Bono Brief Advice Project, Linda F. Smith
Utah Law Faculty Scholarship
Law school aims to teach lawyering skills as well as legal analysis. While all students must acquire the skills of legal analysis, research and writing, law schools may decide what other skills to teach. Students also acquire skills and habits in informal ways, through clerkship experiences or pro bono volunteer work. However, there has been almost no study of what “skills” students pick up in these informal ways, and whether there are skills that would better be learned as part of the curriculum. This study looks at the skill of legal interviewing employed by students in a pro bono brief …