Law Commons^™

The Insidious War Powers Status Quo, Rebecca Ingber

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This Essay highlights two features of modern war powers that hide from public view decisions that take the country to war: the executive branch’s exploitation of interpretive ambiguity to defend unilateral presidential authority, and its dispersal of the power to use force to the outer limbs of the bureaucracy.

Feedback Loops: Going Negative, Patrick Barry

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Aelet Fishbach is a professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business who has studied how people seek out and process negative feedback. One of the ways she has done this is through a classroom exercise in which she divides the students into two groups: feedback givers and feedback receivers. The givers are told to pair up with a receiver and communicate the following feedback in a one-on-one setting: The person's performance s unsatisfactory; improvement is needed; and there are concrete ways they can get on the right track.

Toward A Better Criminal Legal System: Improving Prisons, Prosecution, And Criminal Defense, David A. Harris, Created And Presented Jointly By Students From State Correctional Institution - Greene, Waynesburg, Pa, And University Of Pittsburgh School Of Law, Chief Editor: David A. Harris

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During the Fall 2023 semester, 15 law (Outside) students from the University of Pittsburgh School of Law and 13 incarcerated (Inside) students from the State Correctional Institution – Greene, in Waynesburg, Pennsylvania, took a full semester class together called Issues in Criminal Justice and Law. The class, occurring each week at the prison, utilized the Inside-Out Prison Exchange pedagogy, and was facilitated by Professor David Harris. Subjects include the purposes of prison, addressing crime, the criminal legal system and race, and issues surrounding victims and survivors of crime. The course culminated in a Group Project; under the heading “improving the …

Feedback Loops: More Valuable Than Money, Patrick Barry

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In an essay called "Secrets of Positive Feedback,” Douglas Conant, the former CEO of Campbell Soup Company, shares a key element of the leadership style that helped him resurrect Campbell’s from financial ruin in 2001 and turn it into both a highly profitable business by the time he stepped down in 2011 and an award-winning, much more inclusive workplace: During his ten years at the helm, he wrote more than 30,000 thank-you notes to his employees and customers.

Wrong Search At The Wrong Time: Keyword Search Warrants And The Fourth Amendment, Nicole Chan

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This Note will advocate for the view that when presented with the issue, state and federal courts should establish that keyword search warrants are unconstitutional because they violate the Fourth Amendment. Keyword search warrants cannot meet the Fourth Amendment’s requirements of probable cause and particularity because the subjects of the search cannot be identified until after the search is completed. These warrants are unnecessary and have the potential of implicating millions of internet users who have no connection to a crime. This Note will contend that individuals have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their search history data, and that …

Feedback Loops: Appreciators, Coaches, & Evaluators, Patrick Barry

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No individual person is likely to be able to satisfy all of our feedback needs. Which is why I tell my students to assemble a “Feedback Board of Directors.” Focus in particular, I tell them, on recruiting people who can collectively provide what Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen of Harvard Law School identify as the three basic forms of feedback in their book “Thanks for the Feedback”:

"Communities That Care": Incorporating Socially Engaged Artistic Practices Into Clinical Legal Education, Bernard P. Perlmutter, Xavier Cortada

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This Article, co-authored by a law school clinician and an artist and lawyer, explores collaborations between the artist, a child advocacy clinic, and its clients (children in state foster care) in building a community that empowers clients by giving them voice through both traditional legal advocacy and non-traditional forms of socially engaged artistic expression. The Article aims to address some of the challenges and benefits of clinics creating alliances with artists and community-based arts organizations as part of their teaching and advocacy missions. We describe and provide examples of the practice of law as a creative exercise and argue that …

Unsettling Human Rights Clinical Pedagogy And Practice In Settler Colonial Contexts, Jocelyn Getgen Kestenbaum, Caroline Bishop Laporte

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In settler colonial contexts, law and educational institutions operate as structures of oppression, extraction, erasure, disempowerment, and continuing violence against colonized peoples. Consequently, clinical legal advocacy often can reinforce coloniality--the logic that perpetuates structural violence against individuals and groups resisting colonization and struggling for survival as peoples. Critical legal theory, including Third World Approaches to International Law (“TWAIL”), has long exposed colonial laws and practices that entrench discriminatory, racialized power structures and prevent transformative international human rights advocacy. Understanding and responding to these critiques can assist in decolonizing international human rights clinical law teaching and practice but is insufficient in …

Introduction To A Festschrift Honoring Professor Rhonda Wasserman, Deborah L. Brake

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Rhonda Wasserman joined the faculty of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law in 1986, after graduating from Yale Law School and practicing law in New York City for three years. She has been a powerhouse on the Pitt Law faculty for three and a half decades. In that time, she served in many roles, including Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and, outside the law school, Reporter to the Local Rules Committee of the United States District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania. She has been recognized with numerous titles and honors, such as John E. Murray Faculty Scholar, …

The Futures Of Law, Lawyers, And Law Schools: A Dialogue, Sameer M. Ashar, Benjamin H. Barton, Michael J. Madison, Rachel F. Moran

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On April 19 and 20, 2023, Professors Bernard Hibbitts and Richard Weisberg convened a conference at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law titled “Disarmed, Distracted, Disconnected, and Distressed: Modern Legal Education and the Unmaking of American Lawyers.” Four speakers concluded the event with a spirited conversation about themes expressed during the proceedings. Distilling a lively two days, they asked: what are the most critical challenges now facing US legal education and, by extension, lawyers and the communities they serve? Their agreements and disagreements were striking, so much so that Professors Hibbitts and Weisberg invited those four to extend their …

Feedback Loops: E-D-I-T (Continued), Patrick Barry

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In the "Feedback Loops" column back in March, we introduced the "E-D-I-T" framework:

• Find something to Eliminate
• Find something to Decrease
• Find something to Increase
• Find something to Try

This new column will discuss each category more in depth.

Creating A Better, Fairer Criminal Justice System, David A. Harris, Created And Presented Jointly By Students From State Correctional Institution - Greene, Waynesburg, Pa, And University Of Pittsburgh School Of Law, Chief Editor: David A. Harris

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In the Fall 2022 semester, 14 law (Outside) students from the University of Pittsburgh School of Law and 14 incarcerated (Inside) students at the State Correctional Institution at Greene, in Waynesburg, Pennsylvania, took a full-semester class together called "Issues in Criminal Justice and the Law." The class, taught and facilitated by Professor David Harris, utilized the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program pedagogy, emphasizing dialogic learning and peer teaching. The semester culminated with a group project, with the topic selected by the students: "creating a better, fairer criminal justice system." Members of the class organized themselves into small groups, each working for …

I Owe My Teaching Career To Peter Henning, David A. Moran

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In the late 1990s, I was very happily working as an appellate public defender in Detroit when the then-dean of Wayne State University Law School, Jim Robinson, contacted me to ask if I could teach a section of Criminal Procedure at night. Joe Grano, who had taught at Wayne for many years, had fallen ill, and so a replacement was needed. Dean Robinson was a close friend of Ralph Guy, the judge for whom I had clerked some years earlier, and Judge Guy had recommended me. I accepted the offer.

Even though I was just a lowly adjunct scheduled to …

Feedback Loops: E-D-I-T, Patrick Barry

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The Keep/Cut Framework we learned about back in the December 2022 Feedback Loops column is, admittedly, a bit of a blunt feedback instrument. When the only feedback you can give is “Keep” or “Cut,” there’s not a ton of room for nuance or gradation. Your comments are restricted to either endorsing what already exists or pushing for something to be removed. hat’s a pretty limited menu.

So in both this column and in the June 2023 column, we’re going to learn about a feedback framework that creates opportunities for a greater range of opinions and recommendations: “E-D-I-T.”

Dethroning Langdell, Beth H. Wilensky

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I come not to bury the case method. I come merely to dethrone it. While the case method’s monopolistic hold on the law school classroom has loosened somewhat in recent years, it is still the dominant approach to pedagogy in many law school classrooms—and especially in the first-year law student experience. That is also true of the case method’s traditional pedagogical partners, the Socratic method and the cold call: their dominance has declined somewhat, even while they still have remarkable staying power.

This Essay identifies one fault with our continued acquiescence to these pedagogical mainstays of law school classrooms: it …

Terrible Freedom, Ambiguous Authenticity, And The Pragmatism Of The Endangered: Why Free Speech In Law School Gets Complicated, Leonard M. Niehoff

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We idealize colleges and universities as places of unfettered inquiry, where freedom of expression flourishes. The Supreme Court has described the university classroom as “peculiarly the ‘marketplace of ideas.’” It declared: “The Nation’s future depends upon leaders trained through wide exposure to that robust exchange of ideas which discovers truth out of a multitude of tongues, [rather] than through any kind of authoritative selection.” The exchange of competing ideas takes place not only in classrooms, but also in public spaces, dormitories, student organizations, and in countless other campus contexts.

Designing A Fulfilling Life In The Law, Bridgette Carr, Vivek Sankaran, Taylor J. Wilson

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There is a mental health crisis in the legal profession. This isn’t news; in 2017, the National Task Force on Lawyering Well-Being acknowledged that the profession has failed to give adequate regard to the well-being of lawyers. High rates of chronic stress, depression, and substance use suggest that “the current state of lawyers’ health cannot support a profession dedicated to client service and dependent on the public trust.”

Conditions Of Participation: Incorporating The History Of Hospital Desegregation, Sallie Sanford

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Our students ought to know about the history of formal hospital segregation and desegregation. To that end, this article urges those who teach foundational health law and policy courses to do three things. First, to teach the Simkins case. Second, to swap out the usual Medicare signing ceremony picture for one that includes W. Montague Cobb, M.D., Ph.D. Third, to highlight how the implementation of that program for the elderly led, in a matter of months, to the desegregation of hospitals throughout the country.

Square Pegs And Round Holes: Differentiated Instruction And The Law Classroom, Karen J. Sneddon

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As the academic semester begins, law students enter the classroom with sharpened pencils and charged laptops. Law professors enter the classroom with prepared notes and tabbed casebooks. But how will law professors ensure that the learning of each individual student is supported? Students do not take one path to law school. From English majors to engineering majors, students enter law school immediately upon graduating from college or years after graduation with various professional experiences. Despite criticism that legal education is resistant to change and over-relies on the Socratic Method, law school educators know that learning is not a one-size-fits-all experience. …

Inoculating The Next Generation Of Lawyers: Mandating Substances Use And Mental Health Education For Law Students, Janet Stearns

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No abstract provided.

Survey Says--How To Engage Law Students In The Online Learning Environment, Andrele Brutus St. Val

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The pandemic experience has made it clear that not everyone loves teaching or learning remotely. Many professors and students alike are eager to return to the classroom. However, our experiences over the last year and a half have also demonstrated the potentials and possibilities of learning online and have caused many professors to recalibrate their approaches to digital learning. While the tools for online learning were available well before March of 2020, many instructors are only now beginning to capitalize on their potential. The author of this article worked in online legal education before the pandemic, utilizing these tools and …

The Impact Of The Covid-19 Pandemic On First-Generation Women Test-Takers: Magnifying Adversities, Stress, And Consequences For Bar Exam Performance., Freiburger Erin, Victor D. Quintanilla, Kurt Hugenberg, Sam Erman, Nedim Yel, Anita Kim, Mary C. Murphy

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By magnifying gender- and socioeconomic status-based inequalities, the COVID-19 pandemic caused stress and disrupted career progress for professional students. The present work investigated the impact of pandemic-related stress and prevailing barriers on structurally disadvantaged women preparing for a high-stakes professional exam. In Study 1, we found that among US law students preparing for the October 2020 California Bar Exam—the professional exam that enables one to become a practicing attorney in California—first-generation women reported the greatest stress from pandemic-related burdens and underperformed on the exam relative to others overall, and particularly compared to continuing-generation women. This underperformance was explained by pandemic-related …

Calls For Change: Seeing Cancel Culture From A Multi-Level Perspective, Tomar Pierson-Brown

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Transition Design offers a framework and employs an array of tools to engage with complexity. “Cancel culture” is a complex phenomenon that presents an opportunity for administrators in higher education to draw from the Transition Design approach in framing and responding to this trend. Faculty accused of or caught using racist, sexist, or homophobic speech are increasingly met with calls to lose their positions, titles, or other professional opportunities. Such calls for cancellation arise from discreet social networks organized around an identified lack of accountability for social transgressions carried out in the professional school environment. Much of the existing discourse …

Legal Fiction: Reading Lolita As A Sentencing Memorandum, Christina Frohock

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No abstract provided.

Listening To Our Students: Fostering Resilience And Engagement To Promote Culture Change In Legal Education, Ann N. Sinsheimer, Omid Fotuhi

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In this Article, we describe a dynamic program of research at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law that uses mindset to promote resilience and engagement in law students. For the last three years, we have used tailored, well-timed, psychological interventions to help students bring adaptive mindsets to the challenges they face in law school. The act of listening to our students has been the first step in designing interventions to improve their experience, and it has become a kind of intervention in itself. Through this work, we have learned that simply asking our law students about their experiences and …

Designing Interdisciplinary, Early Intervention Dispute Resolution Tools To Decrease Evictions And Increase Housing Stability, Christine N. Cimini

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This Article provides a unique glimpse into the development of an early-intervention, pre-court, interdisciplinary dispute resolution project intended to decrease evictions and increase housing stability for recipients of subsidized housing in Seattle. With a grant from the Seattle Housing Authority (SHA), a coalition of non-profit organizations had the rare opportunity to design a dispute resolution system into existence. A dispute system design team was formed and began by examining the interconnected problems of housing instability, eviction, and houselessness. Despite thorough research on dispute system design and extensive meetings with stakeholders, the deign team encountered numerous challenges. This Article identifies the …

Feedback Loops: Keep/Cut, Patrick Barry

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In the first of installment of this new column on feedback in the September Illinois Bar Journal, we began to address the pernicious problem of vague feedback—that unhelpful, empty-calories form of (non) guidance that deprives people of learning what they’re currently doing well and what they need to ix. Without concrete, explicit guidance, it can be really tough to grow and improve.

Feedback Loops: Surviving The Feedback Desert, Patrick Barry

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I ask my law students the following set of parallel questions on the very first day of “Feedback Loops,” a course I have been teaching for the past couple of years: What did you get better at last year? How do you know? What should you get better at this year? How do you know?

Race Belongs In Week One Of Lrw, Beth H. Wilensky

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I talk to my 1Ls about race and the law in their first week of law school. In doing so, I have discovered that discussing race helps me introduce foundational concepts about legal writing and law school that we will return to throughout the year. That is partly because race is relevant to nearly every topic law school touches on. But it is also because race is present in—and often conspicuous in its absence from—court opinions in ways that provide rich fodder for discussing how to approach law school. That topic interests all students—even those who might be skeptical about …

An Empirical Analysis Of Clinical Legal Education In Middle Age, Robert R. Kuehn, David A. Santacroce

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Modern clinical legal education has turned fifty. Much has been written on its development and history, both as a pedagogy and in relation to the broader enterprise of legal education. But there has been no longitudinal empirical analysis documenting that growth until now. By looking at a series of nationwide surveys starting in 2007 and comparing those results to surveys dating back to the 1970s, this article paints a factual picture of clinical legal education’s progression from early adulthood to middle age.