Law Commons^™

David Hoffman's Law School Lectures, 1822-1833, Thomas L. Shaffer

Journal Articles

The Baltimore lawyer and teacher David Hoffman (1784-1854), the father of American legal ethics, was also the first of the systematic American legal educators. He held one of the first appointments in this country as a university law professor (at the University of Maryland, 1814-43) and wrote the first American outline of the study of law. Joseph Story, in a contemporary review of the 1817 Course, called Hoffman's work "an honour to our country[,] . . . by far the most perfect system for the study of the law that has ever been offered to the public. " Chancellor James …

Four Issues In The Accreditation Of Law Schools, Thomas L. Shaffer

Journal Articles

Four issues that have become prominent in law school accreditation as the profession adjusts to changes in itself, education, and the flow of consumers of legal education are discussed: the demand for new buildings, student faculty ratios, restricting law school admission to "A" and "B" level students, and faculty tenure.

Balzacian Legality: A Proposal For Natural Law Juridicial Standards Of Legality, Thomas E. Carbonneau

Journal Articles

The task of the present article is twofold. First, it represents an attempt to make an original English language contribution to the continuing interdisciplinary inquiry, begun in France, into the presence of law in Balzac's The Human Comedy, by focusing upon themes and novels that have not been the subject of previous individual study. Second, it seeks to contribute to an area of growing interest to legal scholars in the United States – the study of law and literature – by providing an example of the insights one French novelist with legal training and experience had into questions that …

Four Issues In The Accreditation Of Law Schools, Thomas L. Shaffer

Journal Articles

Most of the people who want to become lawyers in the United States have to come to terms with the American Bar Association. The ABA, in form and in tradition a voluntary association of lawyers, is a virtual governmental regulator of legal education.

People who want to become lawyers do not have to join the ABA—any more than people who are already lawyers have to join—but, in most states, a potential lawyer cannot sit for the bar examination unless he has first obtained a law degree from a school approved by the ABA. And, although in form and tradition the …

The French Legal Studies Curriculum: Its History And Relevance As A Model For Reform, Thomas E. Carbonneau

Journal Articles

This article attempts to describe and analyze those events which fostered the historical metamorphosis of the French legal studies curriculum. The predominance of a broad academic approach to law and the concomitant absence of a narrow "trade school" mentality in the French law schools might be attributed to the general organization of higher education in France. One of the primary contentions of this article is that the fundamental character of French legal education, which emphasizes the educating of jurists as opposed to the training of lawyers, is the product of a set of factors which are deeply rooted in French …

Civil Rights And Legal Order: The Work Of A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr., Donald P. Kommers, Eugenia S. Schwartz

Journal Articles

On October 11-12, 1978, Judge A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr.' delivered the Notre Dame Law School's Seventh Annual Civil Rights Lecture under the general title, "From Thomas Jefferson to Bakke: Race and the American Legal Process." It seems to us appropriate, therefore, on the occasion of the Higginbotham lecture, to consider his work as both historian and judge. Specifically, this article will serve the threefold purpose of (1) reviewing Matter of Color, (2) illustrating the author's use of history in two judicial opinions dealing with the rights of black Americans, and (3) reflecting upon the implications of Higginbotham's work in legal …

Reassessing Law Schooling: The Sterling Forest Group, Thomas L. Shaffer

Journal Articles

This Article is the result of a weekend in December 1976 at the Sterling Forest Conference Center. Several legal educators came together there to explore the possible relevance of humanistic educational psychology to legal education, and the pieces that follow flow from the experiences in learning we shared there. The concerns that brought the ten of us together were not new; rather, they emanated from a longstanding challenge within the profession.

Although we taught at different institutions and in different fields, our experiences had led us to a common dissatisfaction with legal education and a hope that more was possible. …

Studies Of Legal Education: A Review Of Recent Reports, Thomas L. Shaffer, Robert S. Redmount

Journal Articles

Early in 1972, the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education published its report on legal education. It is the most prominent study of legal education in the last decade, and typical of discourse in and about law schools—urbane, speculative, unempirical, conceptual, rarely student-centered. The authors of the Carnegie report were articulate law teachers. They wrote with their feet up and their pipes lit, without attention to facts which did not come from their considerable experience. The value of such reports is the thoughtfulness of the people who write them, and their predictive accuracy is due to the fact that people who …

Learning The Law-Thoughts Toward A Human Perspective, Thomas L. Shaffer, Robert S. Redmount

Journal Articles

The history of American legal education is notable for a sparsity of ideas on how to convey learning about law. There has been even less focal understanding of what learning is and what it takes to establish a process which will prepare lawyers for their profession. A window on this history was provided in historical survey by Alfred Z. Reed in 1921 and, more recently, by Professors Preble Stolz and Calvin Woodward. It is principally their accounts of eighteenth and nineteenth century developments that we here briefly integrate and summarize. The perspective-a consideration of legal education in terms of social …

Legal Education: The Classroom Experience, Thomas L. Shaffer, Robert S. Redmount

Journal Articles

Law students learn from what is in them, from what is directed at them, and from what is around them. The following is a study of an external dimension of the law-school learning experience-the classroom. Research strategy consisted of approaching the classroom phenomenon from two perspectives; what is presented and how students perceive it.

American Legal Education: An Agenda For Research And Reform, Barry B. Boyer, Roger C. Cramton

Journal Articles

Reprinted in American Legal Education: An Agenda for Research and Reform, Barry B. Boyer & Roger C. Cramton (American Bar Foundation 1974).

Report Of The Dean 1973-1974, Thomas L. Shaffer

Journal Articles

My assessments of the Law School have tended more to describe developments than to state aspirations. I continue to assess things in that vein; my preference for leadership in the Dean's Office is to build on the goals which are implicit in the work of the tireless, dedicated people who teach and learn law at Notre Dame. My hope in approaching our enterprise in this way is to discover myself, and to help my colleagues discover, the power with which they serve God, the University, the community, our embattled profession, and one another. "This power in us," St. Paul said, …

Report Of The Dean 1972-1973, Thomas L. Shaffer

Journal Articles

These are curious times for American legal education, especially curious perhaps at this university law school, because we claim adherence to the traditions of Thomas More. Our profession has for more than two centuries provided rulers for America, as it provided leaders, including More himself, for More's England—presidents and speakers, senators and administrators, benign manipulators in American corridors of power. More than a few of America's lawyer leaders have been educated at Christian, university law schools, and, as I think about Notre Dame law students this summer, I hope we are educating more than a few replacements for the lawyer-leaders …

Collaboration In Studying Law, Thomas L. Shaffer

Journal Articles

This articles provides a description of the experiments used in curriculum, teaching methods, and administration. It urges the Law School to assist students in seeing collaboration in studying law is a winning style. The author hopes that through experiments, students will actually start to see that collaboration encourages success among law students, and especially first-year law students where collaboration is valuable because of the situation students are in.

Some Professorial Fallacies About Rights, John M. Finnis

Journal Articles

Why do students usually get into a muddle when analysing legal situations in Hohfeldian terms? What is the use of trying to straighten out the muddles, and of teaching Hohfeldian analysis at all? The short answer to the first question is that Hohfeld was clear-headed in applying his scheme, but because of his writing style and his odd views about definition was regrettably gnomic about the meaning and inter-relations of the terms of that scheme. The short answer to the second question is that clear-headed familiarity with Hohfeld's scheme can bring with it an awareness of the questions regularly begged …

Report Of The Dean 1971-1972, Thomas L. Shaffer

Journal Articles

This is my first report to you as dean of the Notre Dame Law School. It seems to me important to begin it with an assessment of the decade that intervened between 1961, when I graduated from the Law School, and 1971, when Father Hesburgh appointed me to be dean. I assess, of course, a decade of law at Notre Dame during most of which (1963-71) I participated as a member of the faculty. I made this assessment, in approximately these terms, to Father Burtchaell and to our students in March, 1971; to our Advisory Council in April, 1971; and …

Dedication In Memory Of William Dewey Rollison, Thomas L. Shaffer, G. Robert Blakey, Charles M. Boynton, Robert E. Sullivan

Journal Articles

William Dewey Rollison, Professor of Law Emeritus: University of Notre Dame 1897-1971

Thirteen Rules For Academic Meetings, Thomas L. Shaffer

Journal Articles

This comment presents Thomas L. Shaffer’s thirteen rules for academic meetings.

The Changing Structure Of Education At Stanford Law School, Thomas Ehrlich, Thomas E. Headrick

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

Notre Dame Law School--The Future, William Burns Lawless

Journal Articles

Dean William Lawless of the University of Notre Dame Law School summarizes the future for the Law School in this article. Dean Lawless states that it will be Christian in tone, it will stress moral values, it will be highly competitive, it will supply the profession with highly skilled lawyers, legislators, legal scholars, public defenders, and judges; in a word, it will train men and women who really care about the shape and structure of this country. The famous Notre Dame will-to-win will stir in the minds of its magnificent alumni practicing at the bar.

Training The Trial Lawyer, William Burns Lawless

Journal Articles

Speaking at the dedication of the Stanford Law School in 1950, Mr. Justice Robert Jackson observed that "the unsolved problem of legal education is how to equip the law student for work at the bar of the court. . . ." He told his audience that the greatest opportunity for improvement in the legal profession, and where it is now most vulnerable on the score of performance, is its work in the trial courtroom. "It seems to me, that while the scholarship of the bar has been improving, the art of advocacy has been declining."

My report for 1968, as …

A Role For Law Schools In Oeo's Legal Services Program, Thomas F. Broden

Journal Articles

A breath of fresh air has blown into many law schools because of the national antipoverty program in general and the Legal Services Program of the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) in particular. The antipoverty program has quickened the consciences of many legal educators who for the first time clearly see how little they have done to focus attention on the legal problems of the poor.

The main focus of legal education has been on the typical problems of paying clients. Consequently, there has been little effort to teach law as a helpful instrumentality for the indigent except perhaps in …

Legal Education At Notre Dame, Joseph O'Meara

Journal Articles

I am grateful for this opportunity to discuss with you our plans and hopes for the Law School.

In my first appearance as dean before the student body I said this: "Our goal is to impart the know-how a lawyer must have and simultaneously to ignite the spark of a passion for justice. Most if not all of you came here to learn how to make a living practicing law. We owe a duty to you and to your parents to provide what you came to get. And we owe a duty to the clients who will consult you. But …

Law As An Educational Factor, William J. Hoynes

Journal Articles

In this article, William James Hoynes explores the full scope of education: the means by which all history is brought to knowledge in light of the past and sheds light on the future. He posits that education summarizes all of history, and creates a broadening influence upon the mind of a true scholar. Yet he explains that the law is not to be viewed as a system of arbitrary rules. It rests upon a consciousness of the needs of society. It adapts itself or is enacted with reference to these needs. Not only is the law the highest manifestation of …

The Case System--A Defense, Thomas Frank Konop

Journal Articles

This article is a constructive criticism of the Case System of instruction in law schools across the country. Thomas Frank Konop explores the idea that the principles deduced from case study "stick" longer in the student's mind.

History Of The Notre Dame College Of Law, Thomas Frank Konop

Journal Articles

In the summer of 1868 the Board of Trustees of the University passed a resolution "for the opening of a course in law at Notre Dame." At that time there were very few law schools in the country and the profession was almost wholly recruited from the law-offices. As a matter of fact there was great doubt among the lawyers at that time as to the advisability and the possibility of acquiring training for the bar at a university. There were even prejudices at that time against the study of law at law schools. It was during such doubts and …

Salutation, Francis Joseph Vurpillat

Journal Articles

Francis J. Vurpillat, '91, editor-in-chief on the faculty board for the new student publication The Notre Dame Law Reporter, encourages the alumni be supportive.

The Law And Its Study, William J. Hoynes

Journal Articles

The author seeks to give a sweeping discussion the study of law starting with the primitive sources of law and how laws and governance has developed among the great societies of old. Here, the author asserts that these societies studied the power of nature from which they developed their own laws or cultivated a conception natural law. Such societies mentioned are those from which we consider the foundations of legal form and jurisprudence; Babylon, ancient Israel, Egypt, classical Greece and Rome. Then the author offers a brief analysis of the nature of modern legal education, describing the practical and cultural …