Law Commons^™

Cultivating Justice For The Working Poor: Clinical Representation Of Unemployment Claimants, Colleen F. Shanahan

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The combination of current economic conditions and recent changes in the United States’ welfare system makes representation of unemployment insurance claimants by clinic students a timely learning opportunity. While unemployment insurance claimants often share similarities with student attorneys, they are unable to access justice as easily as student attorneys, and as a result, face the risk of severe poverty. Clinical representation of unemployment claimants is a rich opportunity for students to experience making a difference for a client, and to understand the issues of poverty and justice that these clients experience along the way. These cases reveal that larger lessons …

Coordinating Loan Repayment Assistance Programs With New Federal Legislation, Philip G. Schrag, Charles Pruett

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

For decades, law school administrators, faculty members, students and graduates have worried about the problem of the ever-increasing cost of attendance at the nation’s law schools, and the rapidly rising average debt of graduating law students. The problem was particularly acute for students who desired careers in public service, because starting salaries in the government and non-profit sectors failed to keep pace with the increase in educational debt of law school graduates. In response, many law schools created loan repayment assistance programs (LRAPs), through which they subsidized loan repayment for some or all of their graduates who undertook public service …

A Call To Combine Rhetorical Theory And Practice In The Legal Writing Classroom, Kristen Konrad Robbins-Tiscione

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The theory and practice of law have been separated in legal education to their detriment since the turn of the twentieth century. As history teaches us and even the 2007 Carnegie Report perhaps suggests, teaching practice without theory is as inadequate as teaching theory without practice. Just as law students should learn how to draft a simple contract from taking Contracts, they should learn the theory of persuasion from taking a legal writing course. In an economy where law apprenticeship has reverted from employer to educator, legal writing courses should do more than teach analysis, conventional documents, and the social …

Using Discourse Analysis Methodology To Teach "Legal English", Craig Hoffman

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In this study, I propose a curriculum focused on raising students’ linguistic awareness through rigorous discourse analysis and reflective writing in a legal context. Students analyze authentic, full-text legal documents using discourse analysis methodology. By carefully analyzing the language in legal opinions, appellate briefs, law review articles, law school exams, typical commercial contracts, and statutes, students become experts in analyzing and evaluating legal texts. Students learn to manipulate legal language to achieve various desired linguistic and legal effects. This approach has three primary advantages. First, it forces the students to carefully read authentic legal texts. Second, it gives students the …

Toward The Study Of The Legislated Constitution, Robin West

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Law schools, both innovative and traditional, cutting edge and hidebound, demand and therefore teach tolerance, civil respect for those whose views and dreams differ from our own, a commitment to the equal dignity of all persons, an awareness of the individuality of each of us, and the challenges that those differences and that equality pose to the generalizing impulse in law. Likewise, law schools, virtually everywhere, convey or should convey a sensitivity to bare or naked human vulnerability, mortality, weakness, and need, and therefore a sense in students of the moral need of all of us for law’s protection, as …

Top 10 Law School Home Pages Of 2010, Roger Skalbeck, Jason Eiseman

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This ranking report attempts to identify the best law school home pages based exclusively on objective criteria. The goal is to assess elements that make websites easier to use for sighted as well as visually-impaired users. Most elements require no special design skills, sophisticated technology or significant expenses.

Ranking results in this report represent reasonably relevant elements. In this report, 200 ABA-accredited law school home pages are analyzed and ranked for twenty elements in three broad categories: Design Patterns & Metadata; Accessibility & Validation; and Marketing & Communications. As was the case in 2009, there is still no objective way …

Accreditation Reconsidered, Judith C. Areen

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Higher education is one of the most successful sectors in the nation at a time when much of the economy is struggling. Its quality has been buoyed by a long tradition of investment, both public and private, and by a healthy degree of autonomy from governmental control. America’s three governance innovations, citizen governing boards, shared governance, and accreditation, also have encouraged both quality and institutional autonomy in higher education.

Accreditation has been a particularly important contributor to the institutional diversity and vitality of American colleges and universities. Most nations have a ministry of education that oversees institutions of higher education. …

Celebrating 100 Years Of The Georgetown Law Journal, Sherman L. Cohn

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

It was 1911. Georgetown Law was then forty-one years old. It was an undergraduate program, as a college degree was unnecessary. Indeed, it was only a dozen years or less since Georgetown had begun to require a high school diploma for admission and had expanded to a three-year program. The degree granted was an LL.B., a bachelor of law, usually the first academic degree the student received. The school had recently grown to over 900 students. It was time to move forward.

That year, three dynamic young men enrolled at Georgetown: Eugene Quay, Horace H. Hagan, and John Cosgrove. They …