Law Commons^™

Feedback Loops: Going Negative, Patrick Barry

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Aelet Fishbach is a professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business who has studied how people seek out and process negative feedback. One of the ways she has done this is through a classroom exercise in which she divides the students into two groups: feedback givers and feedback receivers. The givers are told to pair up with a receiver and communicate the following feedback in a one-on-one setting: The person's performance s unsatisfactory; improvement is needed; and there are concrete ways they can get on the right track.

Feedback Loops: More Valuable Than Money, Patrick Barry

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In an essay called "Secrets of Positive Feedback,” Douglas Conant, the former CEO of Campbell Soup Company, shares a key element of the leadership style that helped him resurrect Campbell’s from financial ruin in 2001 and turn it into both a highly profitable business by the time he stepped down in 2011 and an award-winning, much more inclusive workplace: During his ten years at the helm, he wrote more than 30,000 thank-you notes to his employees and customers.

Feedback Loops: Appreciators, Coaches, & Evaluators, Patrick Barry

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No individual person is likely to be able to satisfy all of our feedback needs. Which is why I tell my students to assemble a “Feedback Board of Directors.” Focus in particular, I tell them, on recruiting people who can collectively provide what Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen of Harvard Law School identify as the three basic forms of feedback in their book “Thanks for the Feedback”:

Feedback Loops: E-D-I-T (Continued), Patrick Barry

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In the "Feedback Loops" column back in March, we introduced the "E-D-I-T" framework:

• Find something to Eliminate
• Find something to Decrease
• Find something to Increase
• Find something to Try

This new column will discuss each category more in depth.

I Owe My Teaching Career To Peter Henning, David A. Moran

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In the late 1990s, I was very happily working as an appellate public defender in Detroit when the then-dean of Wayne State University Law School, Jim Robinson, contacted me to ask if I could teach a section of Criminal Procedure at night. Joe Grano, who had taught at Wayne for many years, had fallen ill, and so a replacement was needed. Dean Robinson was a close friend of Ralph Guy, the judge for whom I had clerked some years earlier, and Judge Guy had recommended me. I accepted the offer.

Even though I was just a lowly adjunct scheduled to …

Feedback Loops: E-D-I-T, Patrick Barry

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The Keep/Cut Framework we learned about back in the December 2022 Feedback Loops column is, admittedly, a bit of a blunt feedback instrument. When the only feedback you can give is “Keep” or “Cut,” there’s not a ton of room for nuance or gradation. Your comments are restricted to either endorsing what already exists or pushing for something to be removed. hat’s a pretty limited menu.

So in both this column and in the June 2023 column, we’re going to learn about a feedback framework that creates opportunities for a greater range of opinions and recommendations: “E-D-I-T.”

Dethroning Langdell, Beth H. Wilensky

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I come not to bury the case method. I come merely to dethrone it. While the case method’s monopolistic hold on the law school classroom has loosened somewhat in recent years, it is still the dominant approach to pedagogy in many law school classrooms—and especially in the first-year law student experience. That is also true of the case method’s traditional pedagogical partners, the Socratic method and the cold call: their dominance has declined somewhat, even while they still have remarkable staying power.

This Essay identifies one fault with our continued acquiescence to these pedagogical mainstays of law school classrooms: it …

Terrible Freedom, Ambiguous Authenticity, And The Pragmatism Of The Endangered: Why Free Speech In Law School Gets Complicated, Leonard M. Niehoff

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We idealize colleges and universities as places of unfettered inquiry, where freedom of expression flourishes. The Supreme Court has described the university classroom as “peculiarly the ‘marketplace of ideas.’” It declared: “The Nation’s future depends upon leaders trained through wide exposure to that robust exchange of ideas which discovers truth out of a multitude of tongues, [rather] than through any kind of authoritative selection.” The exchange of competing ideas takes place not only in classrooms, but also in public spaces, dormitories, student organizations, and in countless other campus contexts.

Designing A Fulfilling Life In The Law, Bridgette Carr, Vivek Sankaran, Taylor J. Wilson

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There is a mental health crisis in the legal profession. This isn’t news; in 2017, the National Task Force on Lawyering Well-Being acknowledged that the profession has failed to give adequate regard to the well-being of lawyers. High rates of chronic stress, depression, and substance use suggest that “the current state of lawyers’ health cannot support a profession dedicated to client service and dependent on the public trust.”

The Impact Of The Covid-19 Pandemic On First-Generation Women Test-Takers: Magnifying Adversities, Stress, And Consequences For Bar Exam Performance., Freiburger Erin, Victor D. Quintanilla, Kurt Hugenberg, Sam Erman, Nedim Yel, Anita Kim, Mary C. Murphy

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By magnifying gender- and socioeconomic status-based inequalities, the COVID-19 pandemic caused stress and disrupted career progress for professional students. The present work investigated the impact of pandemic-related stress and prevailing barriers on structurally disadvantaged women preparing for a high-stakes professional exam. In Study 1, we found that among US law students preparing for the October 2020 California Bar Exam—the professional exam that enables one to become a practicing attorney in California—first-generation women reported the greatest stress from pandemic-related burdens and underperformed on the exam relative to others overall, and particularly compared to continuing-generation women. This underperformance was explained by pandemic-related …

Feedback Loops: Keep/Cut, Patrick Barry

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In the first of installment of this new column on feedback in the September Illinois Bar Journal, we began to address the pernicious problem of vague feedback—that unhelpful, empty-calories form of (non) guidance that deprives people of learning what they’re currently doing well and what they need to ix. Without concrete, explicit guidance, it can be really tough to grow and improve.

Feedback Loops: Surviving The Feedback Desert, Patrick Barry

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I ask my law students the following set of parallel questions on the very first day of “Feedback Loops,” a course I have been teaching for the past couple of years: What did you get better at last year? How do you know? What should you get better at this year? How do you know?

Race Belongs In Week One Of Lrw, Beth H. Wilensky

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I talk to my 1Ls about race and the law in their first week of law school. In doing so, I have discovered that discussing race helps me introduce foundational concepts about legal writing and law school that we will return to throughout the year. That is partly because race is relevant to nearly every topic law school touches on. But it is also because race is present in—and often conspicuous in its absence from—court opinions in ways that provide rich fodder for discussing how to approach law school. That topic interests all students—even those who might be skeptical about …

An Empirical Analysis Of Clinical Legal Education In Middle Age, Robert R. Kuehn, David A. Santacroce

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Modern clinical legal education has turned fifty. Much has been written on its development and history, both as a pedagogy and in relation to the broader enterprise of legal education. But there has been no longitudinal empirical analysis documenting that growth until now. By looking at a series of nationwide surveys starting in 2007 and comparing those results to surveys dating back to the 1970s, this article paints a factual picture of clinical legal education’s progression from early adulthood to middle age.

Editing And Interleaving, Patrick Barry

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This essay suggests that a powerful learning strategy called "interleaving"--which involves strategically switching between cognitive tasks--is being underused. It can do more than make study sessions more productive; it can also make editing sessions more productive.

Caring For The Souls Of Our Students: The Evolution Of A Community Economic Development Clinic During Turbulent Times, Gowri J. Krishna, Kelly Pfeifer, Dana Thompson

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Community Economic Development (CED) clinicians regularly address issues surrounding economic, racial, and social justice, as those are the core principles motivating their work to promote vibrant, diverse, and sustainable communities. When COVID-19 arrived, and heightened attention to police brutality and racial injustice ensued, CED clinicians focused not only on how to begin to address these issues in their clinics, but on how to discuss these issues more deeply and effectively with their students. This essay highlights the ways in which the pandemic school year influenced significant rethinking of one CED clinic’s operations: first, the pandemic sharpened the clinic’s mission to …

How Serving Jobless Workers During The Pandemic’S Economic Recession Grounded Students: A Reflection From Michigan’S Workers’ Rights Clinic, Rachael Kohl, Nancy Vettorello

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The COVID-19 pandemic drastically changed the delivery of legal education. Many courses switched to remote instruction, and that change was particularly complicated for clinical courses. For Michigan's Workers' Right Clinic (WRC), however, the pandemic brought more than a change in course delivery - it brought a huge influx of new cases and community need with rapidly and continually changing laws. This article describes how the WRC navigated and thrived, despite the rapid changes brought about by the pandemic, and how the clinic provided an opportunity for students to engage in more complex work that benefited students both academically and mentally. …

How I Finally Overcame My Apprehension About Peer Review, Beth H. Wilensky

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I’ll admit it: I was afraid to try peer review in my Legal Practice class. I’ve been teaching legal analysis, writing, and research for 17 years. I know all of the benefits of peer review. I’ve read plenty of scholarship about why and how to do it well. I have space in my syllabus to incorporate it into my teaching. But I’ve been reluctant. I worried that students would be averse to sharing their work with a classmate. I worried that the exercise would embarrass students who felt self-conscious about their writing. And I worried that the truly excellent writers …

What Will (Or Might?) Law School Look Like This Fall?: Teaching In The Midst Of A Pandemic, Ted Becker

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January 2020 marked the start of a new semester for Michigan law schools. There was little reason to suspect it wouldn’t be a semester like any other: for 3Ls, the start of the stretch run to graduation; for 1Ls, a chance to begin anew after the stress of their first set of law school final exams; for law school faculty, administrators, and staff, a return to the excitement and activity of crowded hallways and classrooms after the brief interlude of winter break. Classes began and proceeded as normal.

Using Transactional Practice Competitions To Introduce Students To Key Deal-Making Skills, Ted Becker, Eric Zacks

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Law school moot court competitions are everywhere. That is a bit of an exaggeration, to be sure, but not by much. At last count, students with an interest in litigation had more than 60 interschool appellate advocacy competitions to choose from, ranging in topics from admiralty to space law to veterans law. Toss in trial advocacy competitions, and the number of opportunities to hone litigation skills increases significantly. And seemingly every law school has its own intraschool litigation competitions, ranging from part of a 1L legal writing program to school-wide appellate advocacy competitions whose final rounds attract prominent judges or …

Spoiler Alert: When The Supreme Court Ruins Your Brief Problem Mid-Semester, Margaret Hannon

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Partway through the winter 2019 semester,1 the Supreme Court ruined my favorite summary judgment brief problem while my students were working on it. I had decided to use the problem despite the Court granting cert and knowing it was just a matter of time before the Court issued its decision. In this Article, I share some of the lessons that I learned about the risks involved in using a brief problem based on a pending Supreme Court case. I conclude that, while I have not typically set out to base a problem on a pending Supreme Court case, doing so …

Transferability: Helping Students And Attorneys Apply What They Already Know To New Situations (Part 2), Edward R. Becker

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Part 1 of this column (January 2019) described several ways that professors and supervisors can help young attorneys transfer their knowledge of legal skills and legal practice to new situations. The pedagogical techniques discussed in Part 1 look forward, helping novice lawyers make connections between what they learn today and how to put those lessons into play tomorrow. This month’s column changes direction. Successful knowledge transfer also looks to the past. When young lawyers and law students are introduced to what might first appear to be brand-new legal skills, their ability to quickly make sense of that new information is …

Transferability: Helping Students And Attorneys Apply What They Already Know To New Situations (Part 1), Edward R. Becker

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Every fall, I work with my first year law students to begin developing their legal writing skills. They work hard learning how to analyze cases objectively, predict how a court might resolve a dispute, and convey their assessments to an experienced attorney. Their improvement from September to December is noticeable. They have only one semester of law school behind them and still have much to learn, but they’re on their way…In the second semester, we begin focusing on advocacy. The first assignment asks students to draft a pretrial brief. When I review the drafts, I’m struck by how many problems …

Collaboration With Doctrinal Faculty To Introduce Creac, Beth Hirschfelder Wilensky

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When legal writing professors introduce CREAC (or IRAC, TREAT, etc.), our examples necessarily use some area of substantive law to demonstrate how the pieces of legal analysis fit together. And when we ask students to try drafting a CREAC analysis, they also have to learn the relevant substantive law first. Students might be asked to analyze whether a worker is an employee or independent contractor or whether the elements of a tort claim are satisfied. But that means that students need to learn the relevant substantive doctrine while they are also grappling with the basics of CREAC. In the language …

The Rule Of Three, Patrick Barry

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Judges use the Rule of Three. Practitioners use the Rule of Three. And so do all manner of legal academics. Yet although many people seem to have an intuitive feel for how useful this rhetorical move is, no extended explanation of its mechanics and variety of forms exists. This essay offers that explanation. It begins with an introduction to the more straightforward form of the rule of three, which simply involves arranging information not in twos or fours or any other set of numbers-but rather in the trusty, melodic structure of threes. It then moves on to a closer look …

Using Appellate Clinics To Focus On Legal Writing Skills, Timothy Pinto

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Five years ago, I went to lunch with a colleague. I was teaching a legal writing course to 1L students, and he taught in a clinic in which 2L and 3L students were required to write short motions and briefs. Several of his students had taken my writing class as 1Ls, and he had a question for me. "What the heck are you teaching these students?" he asked as we sat down. He explained that several of his students were struggling with preparing simple motions. They were not laying out facts clearly. They were not identifying key legal rules. In …

Experiential Skills In Legal Education: Introducing Tomorrow’S Practitioners To Practicing Law, Edward R. Becker

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Welcome to the “Future of Law,” a new column that will appear regularly in the Michigan Bar Journal. This month, we kick off a recurring series devoted to legal education. These articles will highlight new developments and ongoing efforts at the five Michigan law schools to introduce students to experiential skills and more effectively prepare them to practice law. In future columns, authors will shed light on what law schools are doing to prepare students for practice and, we hope, inspire more Michigan attorneys to get involved—or, for some of you, become further involved—in those efforts. Why is this inaugural …

The Downside Of Requiring Additional Experiential Courses In Law School, Douglas A. Kahn

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In recent years, the bar has expressed dissatisfaction with what is considered by some to be inadequate preparation of law students to begin practicing law immediately after graduation. There are several reasons why this has become a matter of concern for the legal profession. The profession itself has undergone significant changes. Although there are a few exceptions, most law firms no longer wish to spend time training their young associates or allowing them much time to develop the skills they need. First, clients are unwilling to pay for the time a young lawyer spends in acquiring needed skills. Second, the …

Resurrecting (And Modernizing) The Research Treasure Hunt, Nancy E. Vettorello

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First-year associates will spend forty-five percent of their time on legal research; second- and third-year associates will spend thirty percent. And unfortunately, employers find their associates’ research skills lacking. This is not a new complaint. Employers have been complaining for more than a hundred years that recent law graduates cannot research well. None of this is lost on those who teach legal research, who have long debated the best way to do so. Techniques for teaching research have changed over time, and methods once thought appropriate were sometimes later disfavored. Changes were driven both by pedagogy and by the ever-changing …

Reimagining Legal Education: Incorporating Live-Client Work Into The First-Year Curriculum, Nancy Vettorello, Beth Hirschfelder Wilensky

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Since 2015, Legal Practice faculty have partnered with local legal services organizations and the law school’s own clinics to provide our 1L students with client interaction, under the close supervision of experienced attorneys. So far, our students have worked with the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center, Legal Services of South Central Michigan, and the school’s Unemployment Law Clinic.