Law Commons^™

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 …

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 …

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 …

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.