Law Commons^™

Legal Education Unbundled (And Rebundled), Megan Carpenter

Law Faculty Scholarship

This essay calls for an unbundling of legal education, much like the kind of unbundling we have seen in the cable, music, and print news media. It suggests that the standard legal education "bundle"-the generalized JD-is just one of many forms of legal education that can be packaged appropriately for today's legal education market needs.

Domicile, Student Voters And The Constitution, John M. Greabe

Law Faculty Scholarship

[Excerpt] "The wisdom of using the Electoral College to choose our president is a hot topic. For the second time in 16 years (and the fifth time in our history), the "winner" of the national popular vote lost the presidential election in the Electoral College. To many, this "undemocratic" outcome seems wrong."

Patent Law, Copyright Law, And The Girl Germs Effect, Ann Bartow

Law Faculty Scholarship

[Excerpt] "Inventors pursue patents and authors receive copyrights.

No special education is required for either endeavor, and nothing

precludes a person from being both an author and an inventor.

Inventors working on patentable industrial projects geared

toward commercial exploitation tend to be scientists or engineers.

Authors, with the exception of those writing computer code, tend

to be educated or trained in the creative arts, such as visual art,

performance art, music, dance, acting, creative writing, film

making, and architectural drawing. There is a well-warranted

societal supposition that most of the inventors of patentable

inventions are male. Assumptions about the genders …

Unh School Of Law Ip Library: 20th Anniversary Reflection On The Only Academic Ip Library In The United States, Jon R. Cavicchi

Law Faculty Scholarship

[Excerpt] The UNH School of Law Intellectual Property Library celebrates its twentieth anniversary this year. It is a fortuitous time for this look back and for strategic considerations for the future. This anniversary comes at a time in the history of legal education when conditions over the past few years have intensified the analysis of mission and resources for law school libraries. This article is a retrospective review of the history and dynamics surrounding the founding and first twenty years of growth. It is also an analysis of the future growth and mission of the IP Library during times that …

Podia And Pens: Dismantling The Two-Track System For Legal Research And Writing Faculty, Kristen K. Tiscione, Amy Vorenberg

Law Faculty Scholarship

At the 2015 AALS Annual Meeting, a panel was convened under this title to discuss whether separate tracks and lower status for legal research and writing (“LRW”) faculty make sense given the current demand for legal educators to better train students for practice. The participants included law professors, an associate dean, and a federal judge.2 Each panelist was asked to respond to questions about the “two-track” system—a shorthand phrase for the two tracks of employment at many law schools whereby full-time LRW faculty are treated differently than tenured and tenure-track faculty. The panelists represented differing views on the topic. This …

Professor Thomas G. Field, Jr.: Pioneer In Intellectual Property Education, Teacher, Mentor, And Scholar, Jon R. Cavicchi

Law Faculty Scholarship

It is almost an impossible endeavor to summarize the forty plus year career of Thomas G. Field, Jr. Regarding this inquiry, Field might say, "If you want to know what I have done, look at my C. V. on the web!" His ten page, single-spaced "Abbreviated Curriculum Vitae" only sets the factual stage for the incredible career that spanned the entire life of the University of New Hampshire School of Law ("UNH School of Law" or "UNH Law"). The real story is only told by Field himself, his contemporaries, colleagues, and the thousands of students whose life he touched. This …

Brief Amicus Curiae Of The Honorable Margaret W. Hassan Governor Of The State Of New Hampshire In Support Of The Plaintiffs/Cross-Appellants, Lucy C. Hodder, John M. Greabe

Law Faculty Scholarship

SUMMARY OF ARGUMENT

The Governor confines her argument in this amicus brief to whether the superior court correctly concluded that the education tax credit program enacted under RSA § 77-G violates Article 83 insofar as it permits organizations authorized to receive donations subsidized by the credit to use those donations to fund student scholarships to religious, non-public schools. In the Governor’s view, the superior court’s finding of unconstitutionality was correct.

In its text, structure, and history (including its interpretive history), the New Hampshire Constitution significantly differs from the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause with respect to the question whether revenue generated …

University Of New Hampshire School Of Law Library, Susan Drisko Zago

Law Faculty Scholarship

Review of The University of New Hampshire School of Law Library, Concord, NH.

Team-Based Learning In Law, Sophie M. Sparrow, Margaret Sova Mccabe

Law Faculty Scholarship

Used for over thirty years in a wide variety of fields, Team-Based Learning is a powerful teaching strategy that improves student learning. Used effectively, it enables students to actively engage in applying legal concepts in every class -- without sacrificing coverage. Because this teaching strategy has been used in classes with over 200 students, it also provides an efficient and affordable way to provide significant learning. Based on the principles of instructional design, Team-Based Learning has built-in student accountability, promotes independent student preparation, and fosters professional skills. This article provides an overview of Team-Based Learning, reasons to adopt this teaching …

Can They Work Well On A Team? Assessing Students' Collaborative Skills, Sophie M. Sparrow

Law Faculty Scholarship

[Excerpt] "Among the many critiques of legal education are criticisms that law students do not graduate with effective emotional intelligence skills-in particular, they have not learned to work well with others. Working with others is an important legal skill; and as law practice increasingly relies on collaboration among lawyers, legal staff, clients, and other individuals, so have legal employers raised the demand for effective collaborative skills among law students and recent graduates.

This essay will focus on ways to engage students in collaborating and assessing that collaboration effectively. Students' interpersonal collaborative skills can be effectively taught and assessed in large …

Indecent Exposure: Do Warrantless Searches Of Cell Phones Violate The Fourth Amendment?, Amy Vorenberg

Law Faculty Scholarship

This article argues that searches of student’s cell phone should require a warrant in most circumstances. The amount and personal nature of information on a smart phone warrants special Fourth Amendment protection. This issue is particularly relevant in the public school setting where administrators routinely confiscate phones from students caught using them in school. With more frequency, administrators are looking at the phones, scrolling through text messages and photos, and on some occasions, responding to text messages.

The U.S. Supreme Court in Safford v. Redding, acknowledges the special considerations that school children should be afforded in part because of the …

Using Individual And Group Multiple-Choice Quizzes To Deepen Students' Learning, Sophie M. Sparrow

Law Faculty Scholarship

For years, I was highly skeptical about using multiple-choice questions to assess law students' learning.' Clients, after all, do not ask lawyers to solve multiple-choice problems. I have realized, however, that multiple-choice quizzes can be a highly effective technique to include in any doctrinal class. Well-designed multiple-choice quizzes can help students in any size class learn foundational doctrine, provide feedback to teachers and students, develop students' interpersonal skills, and prepare students for the bar exam. Having used multiple-choice quizzes in first year and upper-level courses for several years, I now value multiple-choice quizzes as an effective first step in preparing …

Practice Writing: Responding To The Needs Of The Bench And Bar In First-Year Writing Programs, Amy Vorenberg, Margaret Sova Mccabe

Law Faculty Scholarship

Do first year legal writing programs really prepare law students for the rigors of practice writing? This article begins to answer this question based on attorney and judge survey results, as well as interviews with judges who had also read student work in preparation for their interview. We found that while legal writing programs do provide a good foundation for legal writing skills, improvement can be made. Important changes that we have made at Pierce Law include shorter, more frequent assignments, variation/flexibility in choice of organizational paradigm, understanding the difference between settled and unsettled areas of law, and increased emphasis …

What Helps Law Professors Develop As Teachers? -- An Empirical Study, Gerald F. Hess, Sophie M. Sparrow

Law Faculty Scholarship

The overall goal of this article is to provide concrete suggestions for how law schools can improve teaching and enrich law student learning. In doing so, it reviews and analyzes the data collected from two national surveys about the kinds of faculty development activities that are most effective in improving law professors’ teaching. One survey was designed to quantify how many law teachers engaged in twenty-two types of teaching development activities over the previous five years and to assess the effectiveness of each of those activities. The other survey focused on the effectiveness of a national conference on teaching and …

Lexis V. Westlaw For Research - Better, Different, Or Same And The Qwerty Effect?, Jon R. Cavicchi

Law Faculty Scholarship

There are synchronistic moments when in the process of writing. While contemplating this article, an email message made its way to my desk, past Pierce Law Center's spam firewall with the following subject line: "Pepsi v. Coke-Tell Us--Get $10." Do IP researchers choose Lexis or Westlaw justified by taste? Surely you jest, some voice said to me. Repressing this message, I proceeded to compare platform content, perform literature searches, and poll students and IP professors.

Yet another synchronistic moment came as the email from those taking the poll steamed into my email. Many IP professors indicated that they made the …

Practicing Civility In The Legal Writing Course: Helping Law Students Learn Professionalism, Sophie M. Sparrow

Law Faculty Scholarship

This Article suggests some concrete ways to teach civility— one component of professionalism—to law students. Professionalism certainly includes much more than civility, incorporating the concepts of ethics, morals, public service, life-long learning, personal integrity, professional identity, and a commitment to selfdevelopment. This Article begins with a brief overview of civility in Part I. Part II provides a few of the many arguments for why we should teach law students to be civil. Part III explores some concrete ways in which we can teach civility within individual classes, using the dynamics of student engagement in the classroom as an opportunity to …

Intellectual Property Research: From The Dustiest Law Book To The Most Far Off Database, Jon R. Cavicchi

Law Faculty Scholarship

This issue of IDEA introduces a regular series of articles on intellectual property research tools and strategies based on my experience for over a decade as Intellectual Property Librarian and Research Professor at Franklin Pierce Law Center. Pierce Law is consistently ranked among the top law schools training IP professionals. I have taught IP legal research, patent, trademark and copyright searching to hundreds of students and IP professionals in Pierce Law Graduate Programs. I have tackled hundreds of reference and research questions as well as working on countless projects requiring IP information. So I have been faced with challenges and …

Describing The Ball: Improve Teaching By Using Rubrics - Explicit Grading Criteria, Sophie M. Sparrow

Law Faculty Scholarship

Assessment is crucial to effective teaching and learning. Carnegie's Educating Lawyers and Roy Stuckey's Best Practices for Legal Education emphasize the importance of assessment. This article explains how detailed, written grading criteria describing what students should learn and how they will be evaluated should be a central part of law teachers' assessment plans. The article details how rubrics can improve law student learning, and contains both detailed, step-by-step directions on creating rubrics and examples of rubrics from many different law school courses.

Notice Students' Similarities - Not Differences [With Previous Generations], Sophie M. Sparrow

Law Faculty Scholarship

This article discusses one law professor’s successful teaching strategies for strengthening the analytical and writing skills of her students.

Using A Civil Procedure Exam Question To Teach Persuasion, Sophie M. Sparrow

Law Faculty Scholarship

Studies show that learners master new material more effectively when it builds upon what they already know. By revisiting assignments from a previous semester, students can focus their efforts on persuading, rather than learning new doctrine or facts. Turning a predictive discussion into a persuasive argument demonstrates that making an argument requires the same rigorous thinking as predicting a result. One way to do this is to assign students to write an argument based on their fall Civil Procedure exam.

In The Title Ix Race Toward Gender Equity, The Black Female Athlete Is Left To Finish Last: The Lack Of Access For The “Invisible Woman", Tonya M. Evans

Law Faculty Scholarship

Although each of us is defined by race and gender, those of us who are neither white nor male often experience invisibility as a result of our dual subordinate status.... Black women have been disproportionately located at the lower end of the economic hierarchy and, therefore, have been unable to afford private golf, swimming, or tennis lessons. Overt racial discrimination prevented black women from gaining access to the sports participated in by white women. To the extent that the main thrust of solutions to gender inequity and a lack of adherence to Title IX mandates has been the addition of …