Law Commons^™

The End Of Law Schools, Ray Worthy Campbell

Ray W Campbell

Law schools as we know them are doomed. They continue to offer an educational model originally designed to prepare lawyers to practice in common law courts of a bygone era. That model fails to prepare lawyers for today’s highly specialized practices, and it fails to provide targeted training for the emerging legal services fields other than traditional lawyering.

This article proposes a new ideology of legal education to meet the needs of modern society. Unlike other reform proposals, it looks not to tweaking the training of traditional lawyers, but to rethinking legal education in light of a changing legal services …

A Way Forward: Transparency At American Law Schools, Kyle P. Mcentee, Patrick J. Lynch

Kyle P McEntee

Law school has long been thought of as an investment in human capital inherently worth consuming. This is a dated view. Today, entering the legal profession through law school requires an increasingly significant financial investment. Yet very little information about the value of a legal education is available for prospective law students. In fact, much of the information tends to mislead rather than inform aspiring lawyers.

This Article surveys the available information with respect to one important segment of the value analysis: post-graduation employment outcomes. It then proposes a new standard for the presentation of post-graduation outcomes, "The LST Proposal." …

Privacy And Data Protection In Business: Laws And Practices (Sample Chapters), Jonathan I. Ezor

Jonathan I. Ezor

In the fields of digital privacy and data protection in the business world, effective compliance and risk management require not only knowledge of applicable laws and regulations, but at least a basic understanding of relevant technologies and the processes of the company or other organization that is collecting and/or using the personal information or monitoring behavior. This book is structured to provide a framework for law and other students to both learn the law and place it in the necessary technological and practical context, divided into topic areas such as children’s privacy, health information, governmental requirements, employee data and more. …

Social Capital Benefits Of Peer Mentoring Relationships In Law School, Meera E. Deo, Kimberly A. Griffin

Meera E Deo

Scholars have addressed the rigors of law school and suggest mentorship may help students better navigate their educational environments. However, literature largely addresses the role of faculty mentors, less often considering peer mentors in the law school context. This study explores first year law students’ motivation in forming peer mentoring relationships and the roles peer mentors play in students’ lives. Analyses of survey and focus group data collected from 203 first-year law students at 11 institutions reveal that the majority rely on peer support, forming formal, informal, and “organizational” peer mentoring relationships. Relationship formation is motivated by students’ acknowledged need …

American Biglaw Lawyers And The Schools That Produce Them: A Profile And Rankings, Paul Oyer, Scott Schaefer

Paul Oyer

We profile the lawyers that work at the largest 300 American law firms as of the Summer of 2008. We show how gender, years of experience, prestige of law school, and other qualities vary across lawyers of different rank and firms of different prestige. Geography is an important determinant of where lawyers work, with many going to undergraduate school and law school near where they ultimately practice. Geography is less important, however, at more prestigious firms and for graduates of higher ranked firms. We then go on to rank law firms based on the prestige of the law schools they …

Deepening The Discourse Using The Legal Mind’S Eye: Lessons From Neuroscience And Psychology That Optimize Law School Learning, Hillary Burgess

Hillary Burgess

Research demonstrates that incorporating visual aids and exercises into learning environments improves learning with higher-order cognitive skills such as “thinking like a lawyer.” This article argues that because law school learning focuses on the highest order cognitive skills, professors optimize the learning environment by including visual aids and visual exercises.

This article begins by defining what higher order cognitive skills are by mapping common law school learning tasks onto a leading taxonomy of learning objectives. This article argues that the legal curriculum engages all six levels of learning by traditionally teaching the lowest four levels of learning and by traditionally …

On Time: An Empirical Analysis Of U.S. Law School Admissions Deadlines, Clifford Chad Henson, Paul R. Dorasil

Clifford Chad Henson

Setting an application deadline is an important decision for a law school admissions committee because the deadline partly determines the quantity and quality of applications that a law school receives. As such, information that would help an admissions committee set its deadline appropriately and strategically is valuable. The intention of this essay is to provide such information. To do so, we treat law school admissions as a market and set up an econometric model, which provides information on how various types of schools set their deadlines. From this, we interpret a number of strategies in which law schools seem to …

The St. Thomas Effect: Law School Mission And The Formation Of Professional Identity, Jennifer Wright

Jennifer Wright

The legal profession has long been criticized for declining standards of professionalism. Recent studies have pointed to the crucial role of legal education in forming the professional identity of lawyers. Law schools must take seriously their duty to intentionally and thoughtfully shape their students’ sense of what it means to be a lawyer and of how their professional identities will align and coexist with their other personal and ethical commitments. In this article, I examine a case study of one law school, the University of St. Thomas School of Law, whose self-proclaimed raison d’etre is to produce a “different kind …

A Curriculum Design For Living In The 21st Century: Multicultural Curriculum In The Law Sschool, Christie Christie

Christie A Christie

This paper will formulate a multicultural curriculum for law schools, focusing on the first year curriculum and class size. It will also draw heavily on the work of James A. Banks, who was cited frequently in the articles that did address multicultural education in law schools. Banks’ book, Teaching Strategies for Ethnic Studies, discusses the factors to be integrated into a multicultural curriculum—ethnicity, racial, cultural and language diversity. (Banks, 2003, p. 8). The book is essentially a handbook on implementing a multicultural curriculum, with an emphasis on ethnic identity. While this paper addresses multicultural education with a focus on curriculum, …

Teach Justice, Steve Sheppard

Steve Sheppard

Law schools must improve their preparation of students to practice law ethically. Current law school curricula focus on preparing students to analyze legal issues but not ethical issues. A curriculum that encourages students to distance themselves from their ethical instincts is dangerous. A value-neutral approach to the law eventually leads to distortions of the law. Lawyers will be left without a proper way to sense the purpose behind the law, and they will instead focus solely on what the law requires or allows. While law schools could choose from limitless lists of moral values to include in their curricula, this …

Fuck And Law Faculty Rankings, Christopher M. Fairman

Christopher M Fairman

No abstract provided.

The Feminist Pervasion: How Gender-Based Scholarship Informs Law And Law Teaching, Ann Bartow

Ann Bartow

This is an edited, annotated transcript of a conference panel discussion on feminism, sex, and gender in law, legal education, and legal scholarship. The transcript reflects widely divergent views of the place of feminism, sex, and gender in the law and legal scholarship. Moreover, the panelists differ as to the role feminism has played in the lives of women as law students and practicing attorneys. In the latter part of the transcript, the panelists' remarks focus in on hotly debated issues surrounding possible gender (or sex) and racial bias in LSAT testing and the innate abilities of women and men …

Revisiting A Classic: Duncan Kennedy's Legal Education And The Reproduction Of Hierarchy The Ghost In The Law School: How Duncan Kennedy Caught The Hierarchy Zeitgeist But Missed The Point, Steve Sheppard

Steve Sheppard

In his manifesto, Duncan Kennedy aptly identified hierarchies within legal scholarship and the legal profession, but his conclusion--hierarchies in law are wrong and must be resisted--is misplaced. Kennedy’s Legal Education and the Reproduction of Hierarchy: A Polemic Against the System, claims law schools breed a hierarchical system, where rank plays an important part in how law schools relate to each other; how faculty members relate to each other and to students; and how students relate to other students. This system trains students to accept and prepare for their place within the hierarchy of the legal profession. According to Kennedy, such …