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Full-Text Articles in Law
Using Appellate Clinics To Focus On Legal Writing Skills, Timothy Pinto
Using Appellate Clinics To Focus On Legal Writing Skills, Timothy Pinto
Articles
Five years ago, I went to lunch with a colleague. I was teaching a legal writing course to 1L students, and he taught in a clinic in which 2L and 3L students were required to write short motions and briefs. Several of his students had taken my writing class as 1Ls, and he had a question for me. "What the heck are you teaching these students?" he asked as we sat down. He explained that several of his students were struggling with preparing simple motions. They were not laying out facts clearly. They were not identifying key legal rules. In …
The Downside Of Requiring Additional Experiential Courses In Law School, Douglas A. Kahn
The Downside Of Requiring Additional Experiential Courses In Law School, Douglas A. Kahn
Articles
In recent years, the bar has expressed dissatisfaction with what is considered by some to be inadequate preparation of law students to begin practicing law immediately after graduation. There are several reasons why this has become a matter of concern for the legal profession. The profession itself has undergone significant changes. Although there are a few exceptions, most law firms no longer wish to spend time training their young associates or allowing them much time to develop the skills they need. First, clients are unwilling to pay for the time a young lawyer spends in acquiring needed skills. Second, the …
Clinical Collaborations: Going Global To Advance Social Entrepreneurship, Deborah Burand, Susan R. Jones, Jonathan Ng, Alicia E. Plerhoples
Clinical Collaborations: Going Global To Advance Social Entrepreneurship, Deborah Burand, Susan R. Jones, Jonathan Ng, Alicia E. Plerhoples
Articles
In the summer of 2012, transactional law clinics from three U.S. law schools: George Washington University; Georgetown University; and the University of Michigan launched a collaboration to serve a common client — Ashoka, a global nonprofit organization that supports close to 3,000 social entrepreneurs across 76 countries. While clinic collaborations within universities happen occasionally, clinic collaborations across universities are unusual. This essay focuses on the motivations, operations, lessons, and next steps of this cross-university, clinical collaboration aimed at advancing social entrepreneurship globally. Specifically, this essay examines why the collaboration was launched, how the collaboration is structured, what the collaboration offers …
The Crisis In Legal Education: Dabbling In Disaster Planning, Kyle P. Mcentee, Patrick J. Lynch, Derek M. Tokaz
The Crisis In Legal Education: Dabbling In Disaster Planning, Kyle P. Mcentee, Patrick J. Lynch, Derek M. Tokaz
University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform
The legal education crisis has already struck for many recent law school graduates, signaling potential disaster for law schools already struggling with their own economic challenges. Law schools have high fixed costs caused by competition between schools, the unchecked expansion of federal loan programs, a widely exploited information asymmetry about graduate employment outcomes, and a lack of financial discipline masquerading as innovation. As a result, tuition is up, jobs are down, and skepticism of the value of a J.D. has never been higher. If these trends do not reverse course, droves of students will continue to graduate with debt that …
The Crisis Of The American Law School, Paul Campos
The Crisis Of The American Law School, Paul Campos
University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform
The economist Herbert Stein once remarked that if something cannot go on forever, it will stop. Over the past four decades, the cost of legal education in America has seemed to belie this aphorism: it has gone up relentlessly. Private law school tuition increased by a factor of four in real, inflation-adjusted terms between 1971 and 2011, while resident tuition at public law schools has nearly quadrupled in real terms over just the past two decades. Meanwhile, for more than thirty years, the percentage of the American economy devoted to legal services has been shrinking. In 1978 the legal sector …
Learning From The Unique And Common Challenges: Clinical Legal Education In Jordan, Nisreen Mahasneh, Kimberly A. Thomas
Learning From The Unique And Common Challenges: Clinical Legal Education In Jordan, Nisreen Mahasneh, Kimberly A. Thomas
Articles
Legal education worldwide is undergoing scrutiny for its failure to graduate students who have the problem-solving abilities, skills, and professional values necessary for the legal profession.1 Additionally, law schools at universities in the Middle East have found themselves in an unsettled environment, where greater demands for practical education are exacerbated by several factors such as high levels of youth unemployment. More specifically, in Jordan there is a pressing need for universities to respond to this criticism and to accommodate new or different methods of legal education. Clinical legal education is one such method.3 We use the term "clinical legal education" …
Teaching Transactional Skills And Law In An International Context, Deborah Burand, Kojo Yelpaala, Peter Linzer
Teaching Transactional Skills And Law In An International Context, Deborah Burand, Kojo Yelpaala, Peter Linzer
Other Publications
Today, we are going to be discussing how we think about transactional skills in an international context. It doesn't surprise me that this is a smaller group. This is a subspecialty, but let me just do a very quick survey of you. How many of you now in this room are teaching an international course? And what are you doing?
Doing Good While Doing Deals: Early Lesson In Launching An International Transactions Clinic, Deborah Burand
Doing Good While Doing Deals: Early Lesson In Launching An International Transactions Clinic, Deborah Burand
Articles
That is not to say that the launch of this clinic was easy. Four of the most challenging issues the ITC faced in its first year of operation were: 1) developing a client pool, 2) defining client projects so as to be appropriate to student clinicians’ skill levels and capacity, 3) making use of efficient and inexpensive technology to foster international communication with clients and transaction management, and 4) tapping supervisory attorney talent capable of supporting student clinicians in their international transactional work. The first two issues were the biggest challenges that we faced in launching the ITC and so …
Learning To Trust: Thoughts From A Law Clinic, David A. Santacroce
Learning To Trust: Thoughts From A Law Clinic, David A. Santacroce
Articles
The State Bar Legal Education Committee is now the Legal Education and Professional Standards Committee. This marriage seems an apt occasion to raise, through the prism of students, the issue of trust in client relations, though not in the traditional sense of "getting the client to trust me." Rather, the more ignored "getting me to trust the client" is the focus.
The Pro Bono Priority: The University Of Michigan's Approach To Instilling Public Service, Robert E. Precht, Suellyn Scarnecchia
The Pro Bono Priority: The University Of Michigan's Approach To Instilling Public Service, Robert E. Precht, Suellyn Scarnecchia
Articles
The Pro Bono Priority is a two-part feature on pro bono service in Michigan law schools. in Crossing the Bar, the column of the Legal Education Committee, Dolores M. Coulter discusses how Michigan law schools measure up to the recommendations made in Learning to Serve, the report of the Commission on Pro Bono and Public Service Opportunities from the Association of American Law Schools. In the Access to Justice column, Robert E. Precht and Suellyn Scarnecchia focus specifically on the University of MichiHgan's unique approach to pro bono service.
Essay: Recent Trends In American Legal Education, Paul D. Reingold
Essay: Recent Trends In American Legal Education, Paul D. Reingold
Articles
An American law professor in Japan has much more to learn than to teach. A foreigner like me - who comes to Japan on short notice, with no knowledge of Japanese culture and institutions, and with no Japanese language skills - sets himself a formidable task. Happily, the courtesy of my hosts, the patience of my colleagues, and the devotion of my students, have made for a delightful visit. I thank all of you. You asked me to talk about American legal education. As you surely know, the system of legal education in the U.S. is very different from the …
Building Pediatric Law Careers: The University Of Michigan Law School Experience, Melissa Breger, Suellyn Scarnecchia, Frank E. Vandervort, Naomi Woloshin
Building Pediatric Law Careers: The University Of Michigan Law School Experience, Melissa Breger, Suellyn Scarnecchia, Frank E. Vandervort, Naomi Woloshin
Articles
There are several obstacles to training and supporting pediatric lawyers. Children are a relatively new group of clients and law schools have not traditionally provided pediatric training. The required training is particularly challenging to deliver because it is inherently interdisciplinary, requiring faculty and students to look outside of the law school to obtain necessary knowledge. The greatest obstacle to developing the careers of pediatric lawyers is the low pay and low prestige typically afforded children's lawyers. As a result, law students reasonably question the likelihood of developing a successful career in the field. The number of available jobs is limited …
Learning And Serving: Pro Bono Legal Services By Law Students, David L. Chambers, Cynthia F. Adcock
Learning And Serving: Pro Bono Legal Services By Law Students, David L. Chambers, Cynthia F. Adcock
Articles
All lawyers' codes of professional ethics in the United States expect members of the bar to perform legal services for low-income persons. In practice, as we all know, many lawyers perform a great deal of such service while others do little or none. By much the same token, the accreditation rules of the American Bar Association urge all law schools to provide students with opportunities to do pro bono legal work; by much the same token, some schools in the United States have extensive programs for their students but many do not. In 1998, the Association of American Law Schools …
The Role Of Clinical Programs In Legal Education, Suellyn Scarnecchia
The Role Of Clinical Programs In Legal Education, Suellyn Scarnecchia
Articles
In clinic, students get a glance at the lawyer they will be someday. They gain confidence that, indeed, they will be a "good" lawyer. They understand the context in which their classroom learning will be applied. In short, they are able to integrate their law school experience.
Why Hard Cases Make Good (Clinical) Law, Paul D. Reingold
Why Hard Cases Make Good (Clinical) Law, Paul D. Reingold
Articles
In 1992, when the University of California's Hastings College of Law decided to offer a live-client clinic for the first time, its newly hired director had to make several decisions about what form the program should take.1 The first question for the director was whether the clinic should be a single-issue specialty clinic or a general clinic that would represent clients across several areas of the law. The second question, and the one that will be the focus of this essay, was whether the program should restrict its caseload to "easy" routine cases or also accept non-routine, less controllable litigation. …
Harry Edward's Nostalgia, Paul D. Reingold
Harry Edward's Nostalgia, Paul D. Reingold
Articles
Until fairly recently, the work of people who thought and wrote about the law in its broadest cultural sense, and the work of those who thought and wrote about the law as it was practiced, did not intersect very much. The broad cultural issues tended to be the province of philosophers or political theorists or other academic social critics, while traditional legal scholarship - as it appeared in law school journals - remained firmly rooted in lawyers' questions. This is not to suggest that legal academics wrote nothing but practice manuals, but it is true that until the last twenty …
Clinical Legal Education: Is Taking Rites Seriously A Fantasy, Folly, Or Failure?, Steven D. Pepe
Clinical Legal Education: Is Taking Rites Seriously A Fantasy, Folly, Or Failure?, Steven D. Pepe
University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform
This article assesses the primary product of law schools-the practicing lawyer-and reviews the criticisms of the adequacy of the initial training for attorneys that law schools provide. After a brief. review of goals of legal education and goals of clinical teaching methods, the article argues that properly structured clinical programs are not based on flawed premises and that the nation's law schools, particularly the leading schools, should not abandon their clinical experiments without further efforts to help clinical legal education achieve its unfulfilled promises. The premises and assertions of this article are not new. Indeed, they are reiterations of a …
Lawyers And Professionalism: A Further Psychiatric Perspective On Legal Education, Andrew S. Watson
Lawyers And Professionalism: A Further Psychiatric Perspective On Legal Education, Andrew S. Watson
University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform
In recent years, clinical teaching methods have played an increasingly significant role in the education of this nation's lawyers. With the consequential accumulation of data pertaining to various institutional experiences, it is now worthwhile to explore, from a clinician's perspective, some of the psychodynamics of this educational process as it appears to affect a student's future professional behavior. In addition to such an examination, this article will delineate methods for dealing with the stresses of a lawyer's professional life, suggesting ways in which the attorney may satisfy his goals as well as those of his client. It is hoped that …
Ann Arbor And Legal Aid, James J. White
Ann Arbor And Legal Aid, James J. White
Articles
Since the leasing of its office in August 1965, the Washtenaw County Legal Aid Society has been open nearly 50 hours per week and has been staffed exclusively by second and third-year law students from the University of Michigan Law School. The bulk of the practice has been in family law--divorce, support, custody--but there have been a substantial number of creditor-debtor cases, a handful of misdemeanor defense cases, and a large batch of miscellaneous cases.