Law Commons^™

The Misguided Use Of The Harvard/Unc Ruling To Thwart Law Firm And Other Private Employer Dei Efforts, Ronald A. Norwood

SLU Law Journal Online

This article explores the Harvard/UNC ruling and what, in the author’s view, is the misguided efforts by certain political and well-financed private actors to use that ruling to justify the eradication of private employers and law firm DEI efforts. It is the author’s firm belief that because the Supreme Court’s holding is limited to an analysis of the Constitution’s Equal Protection clause (limited to state actors) and Title VI (covering private actions receiving federal funding), that ruling should not be used by courts to quash DEI programs designed to level the employment playing field for minorities, women and other protected …

Outsourcing Self-Regulation, Marsha Griggs

All Faculty Scholarship

Answerable only to the courts that have the sole authority to grant or withhold the right to practice law, lawyers operate under a system of self-regulation. The self-regulated legal profession staunchly resists external interference from the legislative and administrative branches of government. Yet, with the same fervor that the legal profession defies non-judicial oversight, it has subordinated itself to the controlling influence of a private corporate interest. By outsourcing the mechanisms that control admission to the bar, the legal profession has all but surrendered the most crucial component of its gatekeeping function to an industry that profits at the expense …

Book Review Of Shaping The Bar: The Future Of Attorney Licensing, Marsha Griggs

All Faculty Scholarship

In Shaping the Bar: The Future of Attorney Licensing, Professor Joan Howarth issues a clarion call to the academy, the legal community, and the judiciary to reform the way we license lawyers in the United States. In this book Howarth identifies the current crisis in law licensing, the history of racism that created this crisis, and the tools available to address it. Shaping the Bar challenges our entrenched notions of professional identity, and it forces us to confront vulnerabilities in attorney self-regulation. It does so in a manner that will stir even those not immersed in the current debate about …

Race, Rules, And Disregarded Reality, Marsha Griggs

All Faculty Scholarship

Exploring issues of racial bias and social injustice in the law school classroom is a modern imperative. Yet, important conversations about systemic inequality in the law and legal profession are too often dissociated from core doctrinal courses and woodenly siloed to the periphery of the curriculum. This dissociation creates a paradigm of irrelevancy-by-omission that disregards the realities of the lived experiences of our students and the clients they will ultimately serve. Using Evidence as a launch pad, Professor Deborah Merritt has paved a pathway to incorporate these disregarded realities in doctrinal teaching. This important pathway leads to safe spaces necessary …

Diploma Privilege And The Constitution, Claudia Angelos, Sara Berman, Mary Lu Bilek, Carol L. Chomsky, Andrea Anne Curcio, Marsha Griggs, Joan W. Howarth, Eileen R. Kaufman, Deborah Jones Merritt, Patricia Salkin, Judith W. Wegner

All Faculty Scholarship

The COVID-19 pandemic and resulting shutdowns are affecting every aspect of society. The legal profession and the justice system have been profoundly disrupted at precisely the time when there is an unprecedented need for legal services to deal with a host of legal issues generated by the pandemic, including disaster relief, health law, insurance, labor law, criminal justice, domestic violence, and civil rights. The need for lawyers to address these issues is great but the prospect of licensing new lawyers is challenging due to the serious health consequences of administering the bar examination during the pandemic.

State Supreme Courts are …

An Epic Fail, Marsha Griggs

All Faculty Scholarship

All at once, the U.S. found itself embattled with the threat of COVID-19, the new normal of social distancing, and the perennial scourge of racial injustice. While simultaneously battling those ills, the class of 2020 law graduates found themselves also contending with inflexible bar licensing policies that placed at risk their health, safety, and careers. During a global health pandemic, bar licensing authorities made the bar exam a moving target riddled with uncertainty and last-minute cancellations. This costly and unsettling uncertainty surrounding the bar exam administration was unnecessary because multiple alternatives were available to safely license new attorneys. A ball …

Building A Better Bar Exam, Marsha Griggs

All Faculty Scholarship

In the wake of declining bar passage rates and limited placement options for law grads, a new bar exam has emerged: the UBE. Drawn to an allusive promise of portability, 36 U.S. jurisdictions have adopted the UBE. I predict that in a few years the UBE will be administered in all states and U.S. territories. The UBE has snowballed from an idea into the primary gateway for entry into the practice of law. But the UBE is not a panacea that will solve the bar passage problems that U.S. law schools face. Whether or not to adopt a uniform exam …

Law As Instrumentality, Jeremiah A. Ho

All Faculty Scholarship

Our conceptions of law affect how we objectify the law and ultimately how we study it. Despite a century’s worth of theoretical progress in American law—from legal realism to critical legal studies movements and postmodernism—the formalist conception of “law as science,” as promulgated by Christopher Langdell at Harvard Law School in the late-nineteenth century, still influences methodologies in American legal education. Subsequent movements of legal thought, however, have revealed that the law is neither scientific nor “objective” in the way the Langdellian formalists once envisioned. After all, the Langdellian scientific objectivity of law itself reflected the dominant class, gender, power, …

Function, Form, And Strawberries: Subverting Langdell, Jeremiah A. Ho

All Faculty Scholarship

So why do law schools place skills instruction below the dissemination of legal knowledge even though it is the practice of law that lawyers are engaged in doing and not just the mere knowing of it? Both should be equally significant. Although law teaching methodologies have shifted somewhat to accommodate the changing cognitive adaptations of the human mind in this age of digital technology, law instruction in classrooms still possess a deeply-rooted basis in legal formalist considerations of the law from the 19th century that displaces skills instruction for the advancement of the legal knowledge. Consequently, in order to further …

Called To Serve: Five Habits Of Effective Board Members, Dana M. Malkus

All Faculty Scholarship

In any given year, a single nonprofit organization has the potential to positively impact hundreds of lives. Given their training, passion, and community standing, young lawyers are often a great asset for such organizations. At the same time, nonprofit organizations can provide excellent training and networking opportunities for young lawyers.

With a relatively modest investment of time, you can provide the kind of board service that brings substantial impacts for our communities. Whether you currently serve on a board or are simply considering doing so in the future, developing the following five habits will help you more effectively advance your …

Collaboration In The Nonprofit Sector, Dana M. Malkus

All Faculty Scholarship

A practitioner who has had even casual contact with the nonprofit sector has undoubtedly noticed that both internal and external forces exert pressure on nonprofits to collaborate and to accomplish more with fewer resources. There are, of course, many factors driving this pressure, including the economic downturn, funder preferences, government policy changes, and the reality that many nonprofits focus on complicated issues that often require a multi-faceted approach.

In my work with the St. Louis nonprofit community, I see nonprofits grappling with this reality in a variety of ways. As practitioners, we can provide real value to our nonprofit clients …

Collaboration: Promises And Pitfalls, Dana M. Malkus

All Faculty Scholarship

Simply put, collaboration refers to two or more organizations coming together to accomplish a specific goal. It is helpful to think of collaboration as a spectrum: Collaborations range from informal arrangements (e.g., a committee, a task force, a joint initiative, information sharing, joint purchasing arrangements, co-locating arrangements, or program coordination) to more formal arrangements (e.g., the creation of a new entity).

Common reasons for collaborations include

• greater access to certain funding or grant streams;
• access to the expertise of the collaborating organization;
• an ability to increase the human resources that can be devoted to an event or cause;
• access to …

Helping Your Client Create And Grow A Successful Nonprofit Organization: A Checklist For The ‘Non’ Nonprofit Attorney, Dana M. Malkus

All Faculty Scholarship

The following feature is an abridged version of “Helping Your Client Create and Grow a Successful Nonprofit Organization,” an article which appeared in volume 67 of the Journal of The Missouri Bar in October 2011. The purpose of the original article was to provide Missouri attorneys with information and tools designed to enable them to offer pro bono legal assistance to start-up and established nonprofit organizations.

A Dean Of Character, Joel K. Goldstein

All Faculty Scholarship

Jeff Lewis’s deanship will be remembered for the tangible contributions it made to the development of Saint Louis University School of Law (the School) and to the University of which it is an important part. The size of the faculty increased dramatically through entry-level and lateral hiring (the latter something rarely done before). More resources were made available to support faculty scholarly activities. The School intensified its commitment to clinical and practical skills training, the curriculum was expanded and arranged in a coherent manner to better prepare students for practice, and small-section classes were introduced. The School’s program centers were …

Statutory Assistance For Attorneys Providing Pro Bono Services, Christine Rollins

All Faculty Scholarship

Missouri attorneys now have the statutory assistance they need to take a more active role in assisting the low-income and under-represented members of our communities.

Introduction, Joel K. Goldstein

All Faculty Scholarship

The Richard J. Childress Memorial Lecture has become the highpoint of the academic year at Saint Louis University School of Law. The Lecture, which honors the memory of a long-time dean and member of our faculty,[1] has been delivered each fall beginning in 2000 by a distinguished scholar on an important legal subject. Dean Jeffrey Lewis’s vision of the program was not simply to produce a typical speech on an academic topic, but to commission a preeminent scholar to write a substantial article on a critical issue and to invite responses from other thoughtful scholars and activists. Our Law Journal …