Law Commons^™

Teaching "Is This Case Rightly Decided?", Steven Arrigg Koh

Faculty Scholarship

“Is this case rightly decided?” From the first week of law school, every law student must grapple with this classroom question. This Essay argues that this vital question is problematically under-specified, creating imprecision in thinking about law. This Essay thus advocates that law professors should present students with a three-part framework: whether a case is rightly decided legally, morally, or sociologically.

Additionally, this Essay argues that disaggregating the question exposes deeper deficiencies in legal education. Many law professors do not provide students with serious grounding to engage in rigorous thinking about the relationship between law, morality, and justice, not to …

The Intersectional Race And Gender Effects Of The Pandemic In Legal Academia, Angela Onwuachi-Willig

Faculty Scholarship

Just as the COVID-19 pandemic helped to expose the inequities that already existed between students at every level of education based on race and socioeconomic class status, it has exposed existing inequities among faculty based on gender and the intersection of gender and race. The legal academy has been no exception to this reality. The widespread loss of childcare and the closing of both public and private primary and secondary schools have disproportionately harmed women law faculty, who are more likely than their male peers to work a “second shift” in terms of childcare and household responsibilities. Similarly, women law …

If International Law Is Not International, What Comes Next? On Anthea Roberts’ Is International Law International?, Rebecca Ingber

Faculty Scholarship

I am thrilled that the editors of the Boston University Law Review have chosen to review Anthea Roberts’ recent book, Is International Law International?, for their annual symposium. In order to answer the title’s question, Roberts develops a research project to scrutinize a world she knows well: the field of teaching international law, her colleagues, and their students. The result is a rigorous disaggregation of the multifarious ways that international law is taught across the globe, thus demonstrating the lack of universality in the study of international law.

Affirmative Action, David Oppenheimer, Angela Onwuachi-Willig, Nancy Leong

Faculty Scholarship

There are consistent messages to people of color about their proper place in
society, which has always been a really important tool for maintaining and
advancing white supremacy. Referring back to what Professor Haney-Lopez
asserted earlier today, in today’s post-civil rights society, few people would
argue in favor of segregation in racial terms explicitly so. And few people would
assert that Blacks, for example, do not belong in certain places. However,
opponents of affirmative action have begun to articulate a form of these
arguments as an add-on to the mismatch theory. In the minds of these scholars,
affirmative action should …

Narrative Topoi In The Digital Age, Jessica Silbey, Zahr Said

Faculty Scholarship

Decades of thoughtful law and humanities scholarship have made the case for using humanistic texts and methods in the legal classroom. We build on that scholarship by identifying and describing three “narrative topoi” of the twenty-first century – podcasts, twitter and fake news. We use the term “topos” (from the Greek meaning “place”) and its plural, “topoi,” to mean “a literary commonplace” and “general setting for discussion” in the context of literary forms. Like an identifiable genre, narrative topoi are familiar story paths for audiences to travel. These narrative topoi live in contemporary popular culture and are products of digital …

Teaching The Law Of American Health Care, Nicole Huberfeld, Kevin Outterson

Faculty Scholarship

In writing our casebook, The Law of American Health Care, we started from scratch, rethinking the topics to include and themes around which to organize them. Like many health law professors, we were schooled in and continued to propound the traditional themes of cost, quality, access, and choice. While those concerns certainly pervade many areas of health care law, our casebook's overarching themes emphasize different issues, namely: federalism, individual rights, fiduciary relationships, the modem administrative state, and market regulation. These new themes, we believe, better capture the range of issues and topics essential forthe new generation of health lawyers. When …

The Future Of Empirical Legal Scholarship: Where Might We Go From Here?, Kathryn Zeiler

Faculty Scholarship

The number of empirical legal studies published by academic journals is on the rise. Given theory’s dominance over the last few decades, this is a welcome development. This movement, however, has been plagued by a lack of rigor and a failure of editors to require disclosure of data and procedures that allow for easy replication of published results. Law journals, the editorial boards of which are manned solely by law students, might face the toughest hurdles in ensuring publication of only high quality empirical studies and in implementing and enforcing disclosure policies. While scholars in other fields including economics, psychology, …

Library Director As Opportunity Identifier, Ronald E. Wheeler

Faculty Scholarship

A successful contemporary law library director should seek opportunities to insert the law library, wherever possible, into projects that benefit the law school and its mission and that draw on the talents and expertise of the law librarians. The goal of the modern law library director should be to make the law library an integral part of each and every undertaking within the law school community. Every facet of the law school and its various departments and offices can benefit from either law library research and instructional services or the creative thinking and analytical orientation that librarians bring to the …

Is This The Law Library Or An Episode Of The Jetsons?, Ronald E. Wheeler

Faculty Scholarship

In this brief essay penned for the inaugural online edition of the Journal of the Legal Writing Institute, Professor Wheeler discusses his vision for the future of law libraries and the future of legal research, legal research instruction, law teaching, and law related technologies.

Teaching Westlawnext: Next Steps For Teachers Of Legal Research, Ronald E. Wheeler

Faculty Scholarship

As a follow up to his earlier piece titled "Does WestlawNext Really Change Everything: The Implications of WestlawNext on Legal Research," Professor Wheeler here explores strategies for teaching students to effectively research using the WestlawNext legal research platform. He focuses on challenging law librarians and other teachers of legal research to embrace change, to innovate and to devise research exercises that highlight both the advantages and the alleged pitfalls of WestlawNext. In particular, Professor Wheeler discusses source selection, filters, addressing the volume of results, esoteric content, and Boolean searching.

Did Legal Education Fail Health Reform? And How Health Law Can Help, Wendy K. Mariner

Faculty Scholarship

Arguments over the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act illustrate the pervasiveness of health law issues in society. In court, arguments on both sides also demonstrated insufficient knowledge of the health care system and health insurance to identify and present useful arguments. Too many lawyers remained wedded to theories of constitutional law that have become disconnected from twenty-first century realities. Legal education may have something to answer for in this respect. This essay examines how legal education in health law may offer some valuable responses to ongoing critiques of legal education in general. The more law moves away from strict …

Measuring The Racial Unevenness Of Law School, Jonathan Feingold, Doug Souza

Faculty Scholarship

In "Measuring the Racial Unevenness of Law School," Jonathan Feingold and Doug Souza introduce and analyze the concept of racial unevenness, which refers to the particularized burdens an individual encounters as a result of her race. These burdens, which often arise because an individual falls outside of the racial norm, manifest across a spectrum. At one end lie obvious forms of overt and invidious racial discrimination. At the other end, racial unevenness arises from environmental factors and institutional culture independent from any identifiable perpetrator. As the authors detail, race-dependent burdens can arise in institutions and communities that expressly promote racial …

Legal Education At A Crossroads: Innovation, Integration, And Pluralism Required!, Karen Tokarz, Antoinette Sedillo Lopez, Peggy Maisel, Robert Seibel

Faculty Scholarship

Although historically slow to change, law schools are now facing enormous pressure from educators, students, lawyers, judges, clients, and the public to rethink legal education and the lawyer‘s role in society. Now more than ever, there is robust national debate on the threshold contributions law schools should make to the preparation of law graduates for entry into practice. The clamor for reform in legal education is precipitated by a confluence of factors, including new insights about lawyering competencies and experiential legal education; the shifting nature of legal practice in the United States; a decrease in law jobs; changes in the …

Racing Towards Colorblindness: Stereotype Threat And The Myth Of Meritocracy, Jonathan Feingold

Faculty Scholarship

Education law and policy debates often focus on whether college and graduate school admissions offices should take race into account. Those who advocate for a strictly merits-based regime emphasize the importance of colorblindness. The call for colorblind admissions relies on the assumption that our current admissions criteria are fair measures, which accurately capture talent and ability. Recent social science research into standardized testing suggests that this is not the case.

Part I of this Article explores the psychological phenomenon of stereotype threat. Stereotype threat has been shown to detrimentally impact the performance of individuals from negatively stereotyped groups when performing …

E.U. Law In U.S. Legal Academia, Daniela Caruso

Faculty Scholarship

The history of EU law in the JD curriculum is a classical tale of rise and fail. An avant garde, boutique offering in the 1970s, and a fairly popular course in the 1990s, today EU law in US law schools is slowly losing prominence. This Article begins by tracking this parabolic trajectory and argues that the discipline both rose and fell for contingent reasons that are mostly unrelated to its pedagogical and analytical significance. The Article then provides a critical appraisal of what EU law is uniquely poised to offer both in the classroom and as a subject for legal …

American Moment[S]: When, How, And Why Did Israeli Law Faculties Come To Resemble Elite U.S. Law Schools?, Pnina Lahav

Faculty Scholarship

Following independence in 1948, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem founded a law faculty and modeled it on the European example (Continental and British). Today, the Israeli law faculty is much more similar to the U.S. law school than to institutions of legal education in Europe. This Article traces the history of the changes in Israeli legal education. It argues that the shift began after 1967, faced resistance in the 1980s, and gained momentum in the 1990s. Presently we may be witnessing the beginning of a shift away from U.S. influence and back to Continental Europe or even Asia. The Article …

Creeping Impoverization: Material Conditions, Income Inequality, And Erisa Pedagogy Early In The 21st Century, Maria O'Brien

Faculty Scholarship

To say that poverty remains one of the most pressing issues of our time is a colossal understatement. A staggering number of people on the planet live in poverty. In the United States alone, the working poor and those living at or below the poverty line make up 12.6 percent of our populace.' While these individuals may not all be in imminent danger of starving or homelessness, they often lack basic safeguards that those in the upper socio-economic levels of society take for granted: basic health insurance, access to pension programs, disability coverage, and the certainty of a living wage …

An Alternative Model To United States Bar Examinations: The South African Community Service Experience In Licensing Attorneys, Peggy Maisel

Faculty Scholarship

This Article examines the system of educating and licensing attorneys in South Africa to determine whether that country’s experience can provide guidance to jurisdictions in the United States that are considering proposals to reduce or eliminate the importance of bar examinations. The analysis set out here is supplemented by a companion article, providing a first-hand account of the South African system by Ms. Thuli Mhlungu, who was educated and sought admission to the bar during the last years of apartheid and the early years of the new democratic regime.

Examining the situation in South Africa makes particular sense because South …

Paying Attention To The Signs, Susan P. Koniak, Geoffrey C. Hazard

Faculty Scholarship

After all our efforts and all Keck's money, where are we? Some good has been accomplished. By committing its resources to the study of legal ethics, the W.M. Keck Foundation has encouraged law schools to pay attention to a subject all too often ignored. That itself is good. The money has made things happen. Schools have held conferences devoted to legal ethics that otherwise would not have been held;¹ schools have experimented with teaching programs in legal ethics that otherwise might have been left untried;' members of the practicing bar have had conversations and debates with academics about the …

Health Law At The Turn Of The Century: From White Dwarf To Red Giant, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

The evolution of stars is inexorable. From the form in which we currently view our own Sun, it and similar stars eventually expand as their exteriors cool to become red giants. When a red giant runs out of fuel, its exposed core will collapse to form a degenerate white dwarf and, eventually, a dead black dwarf.¹ Health law, as a discipline worthy of our attention, seems to have an opposite trajectory: from black dwarf to white dwarf, it is now on its way to becoming a red giant. The relevance of health law and the reasons for its exponentially …

Extemporaneous Comment, Michael S. Baram

Faculty Scholarship

Well, I think today we have heard two ideas which are intuitive to the emerging role of the law school. One is Arthur Miller's idea of creating centers of policy analysis and the other is what several other speakers have suggested about interdisciplinary and clinical interdisciplinary programs. I would like to speak against the former and for the latter.