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Full-Text Articles in Law
Teaching Enron, Milton C. Regan
Teaching Enron, Milton C. Regan
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
What follows is a discussion of several transactions that the Examiner analyzed for the Enron bankruptcy court. These represent only a portion of the many transactions that the Examiner analyzed, but constitute a large number of the transactions with respect to which he focused on the conduct of attorneys. In most of these cases, the Examiner found that Enron's lawyers potentially could be liable to the company under various causes of action. In some instances, the Examiner did not find potential liability. These transactions are included in my discussion, however, because they can be used to explore certain ethical issues …
Clients As Teachers, Jane H. Aiken
Clients As Teachers, Jane H. Aiken
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
I am deeply honored to have been selected to hold the William Van Cleve Chair. After the announcement several months ago, I have had the pleasure of having people tell me just how wonderful a man Bill Van Cleve was and how lucky I am to have this chair in honor of him. The picture that I have gotten of this man is truly that of the lawyer statesman. He took his profession very seriously. He approached his work with dedication and passion but, more significantly, he loved his profession in the broadest sense. He understood that the practice of …
Teaching And Doing: The Role Of Law School Clinics In Enhancing Access To Justice, Jane H. Aiken, Stephen Wizner
Teaching And Doing: The Role Of Law School Clinics In Enhancing Access To Justice, Jane H. Aiken, Stephen Wizner
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
This Essay revisits the issue of the role that law school clinics can, and should play, in expanding access to justice. To do so we need to cast a critical eye on what we do, who we are, what we have become, and whether we need to rediscover, redefine, and reimagine our professional role as law school clinical teachers.
The Joy Of Teaching Legislation, Chai R. Feldblum
The Joy Of Teaching Legislation, Chai R. Feldblum
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
I am going to talk about teaching legislation, a class I have taught several times at Georgetown University Law Center, as well as teaching a federal legislation clinic, which I founded ten years ago at the law school. Bill Eskridge has done a wonderful job laying out the different ways one can teach a course in legislation; you will see that my approach focuses on teaching the skills that, as Bill also correctly noted, all young lawyers will need when they start practicing.
Leveling The Playing Field: Federal Rules Of Evidence 412 & 415: Evidence Class As A Platform For Larger (More Important) Lessons, Jane H. Aiken
Leveling The Playing Field: Federal Rules Of Evidence 412 & 415: Evidence Class As A Platform For Larger (More Important) Lessons, Jane H. Aiken
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
Teachers often approach Federal Rules of Evidence 412 and 415 with trepidation. After all, it means that a law teacher will have to talk about sex, with a group (often a large group) of law students - many of whom are in their early twenties and have never had a non-peer conversation about sex. It looks like a recipe for disaster. Let me suggest just the opposite - it offers the law teacher an opportunity to address perhaps one of the most important lessons of law school: the law only works if there is a level playing field.
Lessons From Nepal: Partnership, Privilege And Potential, Jane H. Aiken
Lessons From Nepal: Partnership, Privilege And Potential, Jane H. Aiken
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
Dramatic differences in culture present students with the opportunity to gain considerable perspective on their own perceptions and a chance to operate in a legal environment that, like most endeavors in the world today, has become increasingly globalized. This kind of experience has generally been missing in the training of our university law students. The students in Washington University's Civil Justice Clinic have provided legal services to women and children who have been victims of violence in a wide array of socio-economic settings. They have also worked on policy initiatives that shape government on city, state and federal levels. But …
Law As Social Work, Jane H. Aiken, Stephen Wizner
Law As Social Work, Jane H. Aiken, Stephen Wizner
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
In our work as lawyers for low income clients and as clinical teachers, we are sometimes told by our professional counterparts in private practice - especially those who work in large corporate firms - that what we do "isn't law, it's social work." Similarly, our students sometimes complain that the work they do on behalf of low income clients "isn't law, it's social work." In the past we have tended to respond to this "social worker" charge defensively. We insisted that what we and our students do is "law," that it is really no different from what private practitioners do …
Aha? Is Creativity Possible In Legal Problem Solving And Teachable In Legal Education?, Carrie Menkel-Meadow
Aha? Is Creativity Possible In Legal Problem Solving And Teachable In Legal Education?, Carrie Menkel-Meadow
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
This article continues and expands on my earlier project of seeking to describe how legal negotiation should be understood conceptually and undertaken behaviorally to produce better solutions to legal problems. As structured problem solving requires interests, needs and objectives identification, so too must creative solution seeking have its structure and elements in order to be effectively taught. Because research and teaching about creativity and how we think has expanded greatly since modern legal negotiation theory has been developed, it is now especially appropriate to examine how we might harness this new learning to how we might examine and teach legal …
Provocateurs For Justice, Jane H. Aiken
Provocateurs For Justice, Jane H. Aiken
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
Clinical legal education offers unique opportunities to inspire law students to commit to justice. Merely providing a justice experience is not enough. We must provoke a desire to do justice in our students. As provocateurs, we determine where our students are in the developmental process toward "justice readiness." This article outlines those developmental stages and suggests interventions to assist students in their transition from stage to stage. Being "justice ready" requires sensitivity to the ways in which assumptions color all aspects of our cases. The article closes with suggestions and examples of how to critically reflect on assumptions that hinder …
Wellington’S Labors, Michael H. Gottesman
Wellington’S Labors, Michael H. Gottesman
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
My first class as a student at Yale Law School was the first class Harry Wellington taught there. It was the Fall of 1956. The course was Contracts. Harry entered the classroom, looking no older than the students (in truth, he 'wasn't much older), but surely better dressed. He settled himself on the corner of the desk, and the magic began. Without introduction or fanfare, Harry embarked on a monologue about a magazine that kept arriving, uninvited, in his mailbox each month. He confessed to leafing through the pages from time to time, and wondered if this obligated him to …
The Federal Income-Contingent Repayment Option For Law Student Loans, Philip G. Schrag
The Federal Income-Contingent Repayment Option For Law Student Loans, Philip G. Schrag
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
Many idealistic law school graduates feel precluded from taking legal aid and other low-paying public service jobs because they have incurred high educational debt, often exceeding $100,000. In 1993, however, Congress created an "income-contingent" debt repayment option that was intended to enable high-debt, low-income graduates, including lawyers, to afford accepting public service positions. This program caps loan repayments at a reasonable percentage of the graduates' incomes, and it forgives any remaining balance at the end of twenty-five years. To date, this program has failed to meet the needs of public interest lawyers. It is rarely used. Law students are largely …
Tribute To Norman Dorsen, Robert Pitofsky
Tribute To Norman Dorsen, Robert Pitofsky
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
It is an enormous delight for me to contribute to this dedication ceremony honoring Norman Dorsen. It did require, however, that I go back and note the fact that I wrote for the Annual Survey thirty-seven years ago. Not only did I discuss antitrust, I made some confident predictions. I noted with alarm that there had been five hundred corporate mergers in the previous year, but pointed out that that would level off as time went on. Well, five hundred would be a quiet month at the Federal Trade Commission these days. I am delighted with the Annual Survey's decision …
The Canon(S) Of Constitutional Law: An Introduction, Mark V. Tushnet
The Canon(S) Of Constitutional Law: An Introduction, Mark V. Tushnet
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
Any discipline has a canon, a set of themes that organize the way in which people think about the discipline. Or, perhaps, any discipline has a number of competing canons. Is there a canon of constitutional law? A group of casebook authors met in December 1999 to discuss the choices they had made - what they had decided to include, what to exclude, what they regretted excluding (or including), what principles they used in developing their casebooks. Most of the authors were affiliated with law schools, but some had developed coursebooks for use in undergraduate political science and constitutional history …
Hard Choices: Thoughts For New Lawyers, David C. Vladeck
Hard Choices: Thoughts For New Lawyers, David C. Vladeck
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
Rarely do law schools challenge students to examine their assumptions about what being a lawyer really means. Seldom do law schools undertake a probing examination of the role that lawyers play in society and the choices that lawyers have to make in terms of how they spend their working lives. For example, how many of you have a clue about the basic facts of our profession? How many lawyers there are in the United States? What do they do? What percentage work for the government? For large law firms? For small firms? For legal services organizations? For public interest groups? …
A Greener Shade Of Crimson: Law And The Environment Alumni Forum, Richard J. Lazarus
A Greener Shade Of Crimson: Law And The Environment Alumni Forum, Richard J. Lazarus
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
With the few minutes that I have, I want to respond to or elaborate on some of what was said and speak more directly about the development of the Environmental Law Program. Then I cannot resist commenting on some things which have not been said, but should be . . . In developing a program, one does not need to have gobs and gobs of environmental law courses. You need a core set of courses. You need a minimum of four courses - a minimum - taught by permanent faculty. You need an environmental law survey class. You need a …