Law Commons^™

Drawing (Gad)Flies: Thoughts On The Uses (Or Uselessness) Of Legal Scholarship, Sherman J. Clark

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform Caveat

In this essay, I argue that law schools should continue to encourage and support wide-ranging legal scholarship, even if much of it does not seem to be of immediate use to the legal profession. I do not emphasize the relatively obvious point that scholarship is a process through which we study the law so that we can ultimately make useful contributions. Here, rather, I make two more-subtle points. First, legal academics ought to question the priorities of the legal profession, rather than merely take those priorities as given. We ought to serve as Socratic gadflies—challenging rather than merely mirroring regnant …

Peggy Radin, Mentor Extraordinaire, R. Anthony Reese

Michigan Telecommunications & Technology Law Review

I write to celebrate Peggy Radin’s contributions to the legal academy in her role as a mentor. I know that others will speak to her significant scholarly achievements and important contributions across several fields. I want to pay tribute to the substantial time and energy that Peggy has devoted over the course of her career to mentoring students and young academics. I was extremely fortunate to have had a handful of mentors who helped me become a law professor. (I am also extremely fortunate that some of those mentors became generous senior colleagues who occasionally continue to help me navigate …

Trajectory Of A Law Professor, Meera E. Deo

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

Women of color are already severely underrepresented in legal academia; as enrollment drops and legal institutions constrict further, race and gender disparities will likely continue to grow. Yet, as many deans and associate deans, most of whom are white, step down from leadership positions during these tumultuous times in legal education, opportunities have arisen for women of color to fill those roles in record numbers. However, there are individual and structural barriers preventing access to the leadership level. Significant hurdles have long prevented women of color from entering law teaching. Thus, this Article provides evidence to support the thesis that …

Think Like A Businessperson: Using Business School Cases To Create Strategic Corporate Lawyers​., Alicia J. Davis

Articles

For the past twenty-five years, my academic and professional pursuits have straddled the line between business and law. I majored in business administration in college and then worked as an analyst in the Corporate Finance department at a bulge bracket Wall Street firm. After completing a JD/MBA, I returned to investment banking with a focus on middle-market mergers and acquisitions (M&A) and subsequently practiced law with a focus on private equity and M&A. Finally, in 2004, I found my current home as a corporate law professor. In my courses, which include Mergers & Acquisitions, Enterprise Organization, and Investor Protection, I …

Foundations: Curriculum & Faculty, University Of Michigan Law School

Miscellaneous Law School History & Publications

Michigan Law Faculty are the best of the best. As you look through these pages, you will see some of their accomplishments: They serve as senior advisers to policymakers and governments around the world, they argue important cases in courts of every level, and they produce superb research that addresses society's greatest problems.

Our faculty also take teaching very seriously. They are dedicated to using their research and experience to help create a curriculum that will challenge and transform you. Michigan Law's rich curriculum features foundational courses that evolve with the needs of the profession, a wide array of upper-level …

Letting Go Of Old Ideas, William D. Henderson

Michigan Law Review

Two recently published books make the claim that the legal profession has changed (Steven Harper’s The Lawyer Bubble: A Profession in Crisis) or is changing (Richard Susskind’s Tomorrow’s Lawyers: An Introduction to Your Future). The books are interesting because they discuss the types of changes that are broad, sweeping, and dramatic. In suitable lawyer fashion, both books are unfailingly analytical. They both also argue that the old order is collapsing. The Lawyer Bubble is backward looking and laments the legacy we have squandered, while Tomorrow’s Lawyers is future oriented and offers fairly specific prescriptive advice, particularly to those lawyers entering …

Foundations: Curriculum & Faculty, University Of Michigan Law School

Miscellaneous Law School History & Publications

Michigan Law Faculty are the best of the best. As you look through these pages, you will see some of their accomplishments: They serve as senior advisers to policymakers and governments around the world, they argue important cases in courts of every level, and they produce superb research that addresses society's greatest problems.

Our faculty also take teaching very seriously. They are dedicated to using their research and experience to help create a curriculum that will challenge and transform you. Michigan Law's rich curriculum features foundational courses that evolve with the needs of the profession, a wide array of upper-level …

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 …

Reflections On The End Of The Federal Law Clerk Hiring Plan, Aaron L. Nielson

Michigan Law Review First Impressions

As applicants, federal judges, and law school career counselors everywhere frantically come to terms with the new clerkship landscape, one truth is inescapable: the Federal Law Clerk Hiring Plan ("the Plan") is dead. On January 29, 2013, the D.C. Circuit-the Plan's last and best defender-announced that it would no longer follow the Plan. The consequences of that announcement have been swift. For the last several months, months earlier than almost anyone expected, untold numbers of federal judges across the country have been rushing to hire law clerks. For these judges, the unregulated clerkship market of the pre-Plan era is back. …

Satisfaction In The Practice Of Law: Findings From A Long-Term Study Of Attorneys' Careers, U. Of Mich. Public Law Research Paper No. 330. (2013), David L. Chambers

Bibliography of Research Using UMLS Alumni Survey Data

For forty years beginning in the late 1960s, the University of Michigan Law School conducted annual surveys of its alumni. The project included fifty successive graduating classes, with all but the most recent classes surveyed more than once. Over thirteen thousand alumni participated. Over the forty years, American legal education and the American legal profession underwent huge changes. When the study began, there were almost no women or minority students at Michigan and very few in the country as a whole. The vast majority of all students and lawyers were white and male. By the end, white men constituted far …

What Ails The Law Schools?, Paul Horwitz

Michigan Law Review

In January 2012, law professors from across the country arrived in Washington, D.C., for the annual conference of the Association of American Law Schools ("AALS"). It was an opportune moment. The legal economy was struggling. Graduates were begging for jobs and struggling with unprecedented levels of debt. The smart talk from the experts was that the legal economy was undergoing a fundamental restructuring. For these and other reasons, law schools were under fire, from both inside and outside of the academy. Judges - including the keynote speaker at the AALS conference himself! - derided legal scholarship as useless. Law school …

Vol. 63, March 27, 2013, University Of Michigan Law School

Res Gestae

• Teaching Gone Wrong • Letter from the Editor • Detroit: Mid-Size Market • Goodbye, Ma'am Prez Och! • Moran & Friedman's Guide to SCOTUS • RG Mailbag • Halberstam: Squirrel Fan • Debt WIZard • Phid Style Dinners • New LSSS Lunch Series • Mr. Wolverine Letters • Law Student Comics • Photos of Stuff that Happened this year!

Foundations: Curriculum & Faculty, University Of Michigan Law School

Miscellaneous Law School History & Publications

Michigan Law Faculty are the best of the best. As you look through these pages, you will see some of their accomplishments: They serve as senior advisers to policymakers and governments around the world, they argue important cases in courts of every level, and they produce superb research that addresses society's greatest problems.

Our faculty also take teaching very seriously. They are dedicated to using their research and experience to help create a curriculum that will challenge and transform you. Michigan Law's rich curriculum features foundational courses that evolve with the needs of the profession, a wide array of upper-level …

The Effect Of Time Of Day On Reference Interactions In Academic Law Libraries, Seth Quidachay-Swan

Law Librarian Scholarship

Libraries and librarians generally aspire to provide the best services they can to their user communities. But what does that mean? Assumptions about what is needed may not necessarily align with the actual preferences of a given user group. In this column, Seth Quidachay-Swan presents a case study that explores the interaction between time of day and medium of information delivery. Examining data gathered in a law library environment, the author concludes that modern presumptions about the diminishing need for traditional information services may not allow for effectively managing user expectations.

Accelerating The Growth Of The Next Generation Of Innovators, Dana Thompson

Articles

In a recent study on the best practices of business incubators that contribute to the success of startups, one of the best practices asserted is to include a business lawyer on the advisory board of business incubators, who may suggest necessary legal issues for startups to address and connect the incubator startups with legal assistance. Although many college and university incubators may have access to experienced attorneys who are able to provide advice, and who are able to represent student-led ventures, most do not have access to a university law clinic established to provide pro bono, direct legal representation and …

Transactional Drafting: Using Law Firm Marketing Materials As A Research Resource For Teaching Drafting, Edward R. Becker

Articles

Since I started teaching drafting, I would like to think that I have continued to learn some lessons about teaching both the substance and the skills of transactional drafting. One of those lessons that I am going to be talking about today is one that I stumbled across by happy accident rather than one that I consciously sought. Specifically, I want to talk about and highlight the ways that law students can use law firm marketing materials to increase their understanding of both drafting and lawyering skills in law school and, hopefully, in practice.

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

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 …

Becoming A Legal Scholar, Samuel W. Buell

Michigan Law Review

What does it take to become a law professor? With the publication of Brannon Denning, Marcia McCormick, and Jeffrey Lipshaw's Becoming a Law Professor: A Candidate's Guide, we can now say-as academics do that there is a literature on this question. Previously, much of the advice on this topic consisted of postings to blogs and other websites, which comprise probably the most detailed set of writings law professors have created in that medium. The arrival of a monograph pulls this body of advice together, organizes it, adds substantially to it, and supplies a handy tool for the kit of any …

Vol. 62, No. 6, March 22, 2012, University Of Michigan Law School

Res Gestae

•CopyFights •Zach Letter Law •The Beer Gal •SFF Auction Photos •LC Renovation •Sudoku •Facial Hair Photos •Grade Curves •Crossword

Vol. 62, No. 5, February 21, 2012, University Of Michigan Law School

Res Gestae

•Confronting the Supremes • J.J. White as a Fighter Pilot • When You Were Cooler • RG Mailbag, V-day Edition • Michigan Time at Michigan Law? • The Beer Gal Returns! • Mr. Wolverine Pictures • Crossword

Old Habits Die Hard: Disengaging From The Bluebook, Mark Garibyan

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform Caveat

Incoming first-year law students dread many aspects of what lies ahead: the cold calls, the challenging course load, and the general stress that is associated with starting a new phase in one’s life. Most students, however, do not expect that the Bluebook—the citation system used ubiquitously throughout the legal landscape—will inflict “more pain” on them “than any other publication in legal history.” This pain might be a shock to many who are accustomed to the simpler systems utilized in other academic fields. A citation itself is, after all, merely a reference; it is “neither scholarship nor analysis.” Preferably, a system …

Why I Do Law Reform, Lawrence W. Waggoner

Articles

In this Article, Professor Waggoner, newly retired, provides a retrospective on his career in law reform. He was inspired to write the Article by a number of articles by law professors explaining why they write. He contrasts law-reform work with law-review writing, pointing out that the work product of a law-reform reporter is directed to duly constituted law-making authorities. He notes that before getting into the law-reform business, he had authored or co-authored law review articles that advocated reform, but he also notes that those articles did not move the law a whit. The articles did, however, lead to his …

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" …

The Status Of Clinical Faculty In The Legal Academy: Report Of The Task Force On The Status Of Clinicians And The Legal Academy, Bryan L. Adamson, Bradford Colbert, Kathy Hessler, Katherine R. Kruse, Robert R. Kuehn, Mary Helen Mcneal, Calvin G. C. Pang, David A. Santacroce

Other Publications

In the midst of ongoing debates within the legal academy and the American Bar Association on the need for 'practice-ready" law school graduates through enhanced attention to law clinics and externships and on the status of faculty teaching in those courses, this report identifies and evaluates the most appropriate modes for clinical faculty appointments. Drawing on data collected through a survey of clinical program directors and faculty, the report analyzes the five most identifiable clinical faculty models: unitary tenure track; clinical tenure track; long-term contract; short-term contract; and clinical fellowships. It determines that, despite great strides in the growth of …

Report On The 2010-11 Csale Survey Of Applied Legal Education, David A. Santacroce, Robert R. Kuehn

Other Publications

This report summarizes the results of the Center for the Study of Applied Legal Education’s (CSALE) 2010-11 Survey of Applied Legal Education. The 2010-11 Survey was CSALE’s second triennial survey. The results provide valuable insight into the state and nature of applied legal education in areas like program design, capacity, administration, funding, pedagogy, and the role of applied legal education and educators in the legal academy. Law schools, legal educators, scholars, and governmental agencies examining or navigating issues in these and other areas rely on CSALE’s data. They do so with the summary results provided here, in the Report on …

Clinical Faculty In The Legal Academy: Hiring, Promotion And Retention, Bryan L. Adamson, Calvin G. C. Pang, Bradford Colbert, Kathy Hessler, Katherine R. Kruse, Robert R. Kuehn, Mary Helen Mcneal, David A. Santacroce

Articles

The Chair of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) Section on Clinical Legal Education appointed us in 2005 to the Task Force on the Status of Clinicians and the Legal Academy (Task Force) to examine who is teaching in clinical programs and using clinical methodologies in American law schools and to identify the most appropriate models for clinical appointments within the legal academy. Our charges reflected two ongoing concerns: 1) the need to collect valid, reliable, and helpful data that would inform discussions on the breadth of clinical education in the legal academy and the status of clinical educators …

Vol. 62, No. 4, December 7, 2011, University Of Michigan Law School

Res Gestae

•Final Exams: Tips and Strategies •Mailbag •LLMs •When You Were Cooler •Sudoku •Zack Letter Law •A Ding Letter •Crossword

Vol. 62, No. 3, October 13, 2011, University Of Michigan Law School

Res Gestae

• What are LLMs doing here anyway? • Gnaw Journal • When You Were Cooler • Zack Letter Law • Ginsberg • Book Review • Sudoku • Phid House Party Pies • Kicking It Old School • Crossword

Vol. 62, No. 2, September 28, 2011, University Of Michigan Law School

Res Gestae

•Gabbing with Dean Z: 1Ls & Beyond •Res Gestae Mailbag •Dean Caminker’s Speech Celebrating the Opening of Aikens Commons •OCI SOCSS: The Job Search Survey •SOCSS: Pretty Graphs •Fall-ing All Over Yourself: Oktober Beers •Winter 2011 Grade Curves! •Law Library Pick-Up Lines •A2SO: The New Kids on the Bach? •Crossword