Law Commons^™

Technical Standards And Lawsuits Involving Accommodations For Health Professions Students, Samuel R. Bagenstos

Articles

This article will discuss the legal obligations of medical schools to accommodate applicants and students with disabilities. The article begins by describing the problem of denial of medical education to such students, a problem that results from both discrimination in admissions and denial of accommodations to incumbent students with disabilities. The article then discusses the disability rights legislation that prohibits discrimination against—and requires reasonable accommodation of—qualified medical students with disabilities. It concludes by reviewing a number of lawsuits involving requests for accommodation and how disability rights law was applied in those cases.

Mismatch And Science Desistance: Failed Arguments Against Affirmative Action, Richard O. Lempert

Articles

When I attended Michigan Law School in 1966, as a 2L Harvard transfer, there was only one, or perhaps two, African Americans in a student body of about 1100 students, and if there were any students of Latino heritage their presence went unnoticed. When I began teaching at Michigan in the fall of 1968, the situation had begun to change. There were eight or nine African American students in the first year class, the first cohort to be admitted under a newly approved racially sensitive affirmative action program. Since then, Michigan has graduated more than 1500 minority students, most of …

Justice Kennedy And The Fisher Revisit: Will The Irrelevant Prove Decisive?, Richard O. Lempert

Articles

Most Court watchers expect Justice Kennedy to cast the deciding vote when the Supreme Court hands down its decision in this term’s installment of Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin or, as it is colloquially titled, Fisher II. What divides observers is not whose vote will be crucial, but the law that vote will make. At one extreme, Justice Kennedy could vote to uphold the Fifth Circuit’s reaffirmation of its earlier decision. When the case was heard, this would almost certainly have meant affirming the circuit court’s decision by an equally divided Court. (Justice Kagan, an almost certain supporter …

Post-Graduate Legal Training: The Case For Tax-Exempt Programs, Philip Hackney, Adam Chodorow

Articles

The challenging job market for recent law school graduates has highlighted a fact well known to those familiar with legal education: A significant gap exists between what students learn in law school and what they need to be practice-ready lawyers. Legal employers historically assumed the task of providing real-world training, but they have become much less willing to do so. At the same time, a large numbers of Americans – and not just those living at or below the poverty line – are simply unable to afford lawyers. In this Article, we argue that post-graduate legal training, similar to post-graduate …

Lawyers At Work: A Study Of The Reading, Writing, And Communication Practices Of Legal Professionals, Ann N. Sinsheimer, David J. Herring

Articles

This paper reports the results of a three-year ethnographic study of attorneys in the workplace. The authors applied ethnographic methods to identify how junior associates in law firm settings engaged in reading and writing tasks in their daily practice. The authors were able to identify the types of texts junior associates encountered in the workplace and to isolate the strategies these attorneys used to read and compose texts.

The findings suggest that lawyering is fundamentally about reading. The attorneys observed for this study read constantly, encountering a large variety of texts and engaging in many styles of reading, including close …

The Trouble With 'Bureaucracy', Deborah L. Brake

Articles

Despite heightened public concern about the prevalence of sexual assault in higher education and the stepped-up efforts of the federal government to address it, new stories from survivors of sexual coercion and rape, followed by institutional betrayal, continue to emerge with alarming frequency. More recently, stories of men found responsible and harshly punished for such conduct in sketchy campus procedures have trickled into the public dialogue, forming a counter-narrative in the increasingly polarized debate over what to do about sexual assault on college campuses. Into this frayed dialogue, Jeannie Suk and Jacob Gersen have contributed a provocative new article criticizing …

Lessons From The Gender Equality Movement: Using Title Ix To Foster Inclusive Masculinities In Men's Sport, Deborah L. Brake

Articles

This article was written for a symposium issue in Law & Inequality: A Journal of Theory and Practice on the topic of LGBT inclusion in sports. The symposium, which was held at the University of Minnesota Law School in November of 2015, was precipitated by the controversy that erupted when NFL player Chris Kluwe sued and settled with the Minnesota Vikings for allegedly firing him over his outspoken support for marriage equality. The article situates the Chris Kluwe controversy in the broader context of masculinity in men’s sports. At a time when support for LGBT rights has resulted in striking …

Rick's Taxonomy, Mary Crossley

Articles

This Essay uses the influential educational work Bloom’s Taxonomy as a jumping-off point for exploring how Rick Matasar’s scholarship relating to leadership in and the goals of legal education provides a guide for identifying, prioritizing and pursuing the core values and objectives of the legal education enterprise in a time of profound change. This Essay briefly describes Bloom’s Taxonomy and its status in the educational literature. Then it highlights two ways that Matasar’s leadership scholarship displays kinship to Bloom’s Taxonomy. His approach to describing a problem, analyzing its nature, and synthesizing and evaluating possible responses to the problem is …