Law Commons^™

What Law Schools Should Leave Behind, L. Danielle Tully

Utah Law Review

Legal education is at a crossroads, again. Perhaps the more apt transportation metaphor is that legal education is stuck in a roundabout. Crossroads require introspection and decision-making. You can’t move past a crossroad without making an affirmative choice. Roundabouts provide the illusion of movement while keeping you in one place. But don’t be fooled; staying in the roundabout is still a choice.

2020 disrupted this lull. Amid a polarizing political climate, state-sanctioned violence, and the coronavirus pandemic, students said enough.They were right: Enough. Staying in the roundabout right now, choosing the status quo, might be expedient; but it’s also the …

Pivoting Under Pressure: Cultural Proficiency, Race, And Reforms, Anastasia M. Boles

Utah Law Review

There is a new conversation in legal education about a pernicious problem. As the COVID-19 pandemic raged in spring 2020, legal educators around the country had to pivot to remote teaching. At the same time, racial protests erupted in response to the brutal and successive killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd. As law schools grappled with the pressure of the latest racial reckoning, Black law faculty and students demanded cultural change within legal education in response to their devastation, desperation, battle fatigue, and frustration. Unwilling to accept the performative diversity efforts of the past, there was a …

Law’S Contributions To The Mindfulness Revolution, Elizabeth F. Emens

Utah Law Review

These are phenomenally challenging times. Mindfulness is a tool that can help lawyers support themselves, each other, their clients, and their collaborators in the hard work needed to build community and take action. For these and other reasons, mindfulness has made major inroads into law and legal institutions. Law firms, law schools, and courthouses offer training in mindfulness meditation to support the cognitive clarity and emotional self-regulation necessary for the demanding work of analyzing problems, resolving conflicts, overcoming bias, and doing justice. A growing literature, from empirical social science to legal scholarship, catalogs these and other benefits of mindfulness for …

Critical Interviewing, Laila L. Hlass, Lindsay M. Harris

Utah Law Review

Critical lawyering—also at times called rebellious, community, and movement lawyering—attempts to further social justice alongside impacted communities. While much has been written about the contours of this form of lawyering and case examples illustrating core principles, little has been written about the mechanics of teaching critical lawyering skills. This Article seeks to expand critical lawyering theory, and in doing so, provide an example of a pedagogical approach to teaching what we term “critical interviewing.” Critical interviewing means using an intersectional lens to collaborate with clients, communities, interviewing partners, and interpreters in a legal interview. Critical interviewers identify and take into …

Examining The Role Of Law Of War Training In International Criminal Accountability, Laurie R. Blank

Utah Law Review

Training and dissemination of the fundamental rules and principles of law of armed conflict (LOAC) is the first step in any process to ensure lawful military operations. A soldier, a military unit, an entire military must know the rules and parameters for appropriate, lawful and effective action during armed conflict. In the same manner, accountability for violations of LOAC — whether individual criminal accountability or state responsibility — is an equally essential tool for enforcing the law. Exploring the intersection between these two endpoints of the spectrum of LOAC implementation highlights how training and accountability can actually work together to …

This Is Your Brain On Law School: The Impact Of Fear-Based Narratives On Law Students, Abigail A. Patthoff

Utah Law Review

Law students regularly top the charts as among the most dissatisfied, demoralized, and depressed of graduate-student populations. As their teachers, we cannot ignore the palpable presence of this stress in our classrooms—unchecked, it stifles learning, encourages counterproductive behavior, and promotes illness.

By more thoughtfully using cautionary tales, we can actively manage one source of law student anxiety. Although reining in cautionary tales will certainly not be a panacea to law student distress, elimination of all law student anxiety is neither a realistic nor a desirable goal. Fear-based stress, in moderation, can compel students to overcome challenges they never thought possible; …

Greed, Envy, And The Criminalization Of Insider Trading, John P. Anderson

Utah Law Review

In October 2011, a U.S. district court sentenced Raj Rajaratnam to eleven years in federal prison for insider trading. This is the longest sentence for insider trading in U.S. history, but it is significantly less than the nineteen to twenty-four-year term requested by the government. Such harsh prison terms (equal in some cases to those meted out for murder or rape) require sound justification in a liberal society. Yet jurists, politicians, and scholars have failed to offer a clear articulation of either the economic harm or the moral wrong committed by the insider trader.

This Article looks to fill this …

Equal Justice From A New Perspective: The Need For A First-Year Clinical Course On Public Interest Mediation, David Dominguez

Utah Law Review

It really is possible to deliver enough no-cost or low-cost legal problem solving services to provide equal justice. To get there, however, we need to experiment with new strategies and methods to achieve the goal, including the new skill of PIM. My hunch is that if first-year law students can prove to themselves in a clinical setting that public service lawyering can produce a multiplier effect for the greater public good, a new commitment to equal justice will emerge in the legal profession.