Law Commons^™

The Futures Of Law, Lawyers, And Law Schools: A Dialogue, Sameer M. Ashar, Benjamin H. Barton, Michael J. Madison, Rachel F. Moran

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On April 19 and 20, 2023, Professors Bernard Hibbitts and Richard Weisberg convened a conference at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law titled “Disarmed, Distracted, Disconnected, and Distressed: Modern Legal Education and the Unmaking of American Lawyers.” Four speakers concluded the event with a spirited conversation about themes expressed during the proceedings. Distilling a lively two days, they asked: what are the most critical challenges now facing US legal education and, by extension, lawyers and the communities they serve? Their agreements and disagreements were striking, so much so that Professors Hibbitts and Weisberg invited those four to extend their …

Creating A Better, Fairer Criminal Justice System, David A. Harris, Created And Presented Jointly By Students From State Correctional Institution - Greene, Waynesburg, Pa, And University Of Pittsburgh School Of Law, Chief Editor: David A. Harris

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In the Fall 2022 semester, 14 law (Outside) students from the University of Pittsburgh School of Law and 14 incarcerated (Inside) students at the State Correctional Institution at Greene, in Waynesburg, Pennsylvania, took a full-semester class together called "Issues in Criminal Justice and the Law." The class, taught and facilitated by Professor David Harris, utilized the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program pedagogy, emphasizing dialogic learning and peer teaching. The semester culminated with a group project, with the topic selected by the students: "creating a better, fairer criminal justice system." Members of the class organized themselves into small groups, each working for …

Calls For Change: Seeing Cancel Culture From A Multi-Level Perspective, Tomar Pierson-Brown

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Transition Design offers a framework and employs an array of tools to engage with complexity. “Cancel culture” is a complex phenomenon that presents an opportunity for administrators in higher education to draw from the Transition Design approach in framing and responding to this trend. Faculty accused of or caught using racist, sexist, or homophobic speech are increasingly met with calls to lose their positions, titles, or other professional opportunities. Such calls for cancellation arise from discreet social networks organized around an identified lack of accountability for social transgressions carried out in the professional school environment. Much of the existing discourse …

Listening To Our Students: Fostering Resilience And Engagement To Promote Culture Change In Legal Education, Ann N. Sinsheimer, Omid Fotuhi

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In this Article, we describe a dynamic program of research at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law that uses mindset to promote resilience and engagement in law students. For the last three years, we have used tailored, well-timed, psychological interventions to help students bring adaptive mindsets to the challenges they face in law school. The act of listening to our students has been the first step in designing interventions to improve their experience, and it has become a kind of intervention in itself. Through this work, we have learned that simply asking our law students about their experiences and …

Latina And Latino Critical Legal Theory: Latcrit Theory, Praxis And Community, Marc Tizoc Gonzaléz, Sarudzayi M. Matambanadzo, Sheila I. Velez Martinez

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LatCrit theory is a relatively recent genre of critical “outsider jurisprudence” – a category of contemporary scholarship including critical legal studies, feminist legal theory, critical race theory, critical race feminism, Asian American legal scholarship and queer theory. This paper overviews LatCrit’s foundational propositions, key contributions, and ongoing efforts to cultivate new generations of ethical advocates who can systemically analyze the sociolegal conditions that engender injustice and intervene strategically to help create enduring sociolegal, and cultural, change. The paper organizes this conversation highlighting Latcrit’s theory, community and praxis.

Technology And The (Re)Construction Of Law, Christian Sundquist

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Innovative advancements in technology and artificial intelligence have created a unique opportunity to re-envision both legal education and the practice of law. The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the technological disruption of both legal education and practice, as remote work, “Zoom” client meetings, virtual teaching, and online dispute resolution have become increasingly normalized. This essay explores how technological innovations in the coronavirus era are facilitating radical changes to our traditional adversarial system, the practice of law, and the very meaning of “legal knowledge.” It concludes with suggestions on how to reform legal education to better prepare our students for the emerging …

Foreword: The Dispossessed Majority: Resisting The Second Redemption In América Posfascista (Postfascist America) With Latcrit Scholarship, Community, And Praxis Amidst The Global Pandemic, Sheila I. Velez Martinez

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As LatCrit reaches its twenty-fifth anniversary, we aspire for this symposium Foreword to remind its readers of LatCrit’s foundational propositions and ongoing efforts to cultivate new generations of ethical advocates who can systemically analyze the sociolegal conditions that engender injustice and intervene strategically to help create enduring sociolegal, and cultural, change. Working for lasting social change from an antisubordination perspective enables us to see the myriad laws, regulations, policies, and practices that, by intent or effect, enforce the inferior social status of historically- and contemporarily-oppressed groups. In turn, working with a perspective and principle of antisubordination can inspire us to …

The Future Of Law Schools: Covid-19, Technology, And Social Justice, Christian Sundquist

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The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare not only the social and racial inequities in society, but also the pedagogical and access to justice inequities embedded in the traditional legal curriculum. The need to re-envision the future of legal education existed well before the current pandemic, spurred by the shifting nature of legal practice as well as demographic and technological change. This article examines the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on legal education, and posits that the combined forces of the pandemic, social justice awareness and technological disruption will forever transform the future of both legal education and practice.

(Systems) Thinking Like A Lawyer, Tomar Pierson-Brown

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This Article discusses systems thinking as an innovative approach to contextualizing legal advocacy. Systems thinking, a paradigm that emphasizes universal interconnectivity, provides a theoretical basis for parsing the structural environment in which law-related problems emerge and are addressed. From the array of conceptions about what it means to engage in systems thinking, this Article identifies four key tenets to this perspective: (1) every outcome is the product of some structure; (2) these structures are embedded within and connected to one another; (3) the structure producing an outcome can be discerned; and (4) these structures are resilient, but not fixed. This …

Distance Legal Education: Lessons From The *Virtual* Classroom, Jacqueline D. Lipton

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Abstract

In the 2018-2019 revision of the American Bar Association (ABA) Standards and Rules of Procedure for Approval of Law Schools, the ABA further relaxed the requirements relating to distance education in J.D. programs. However, outside of a handful of schools that have received permission to teach J.D. courses almost entirely online, most experiments in distance legal education have occurred in post-graduate (i.e. post-J.D.) programs: LL.M. degrees, and various graduate certificates and Master’s degrees in law-related subjects. These programs can be taught completely online without requiring special ABA permission.

This essay reflects on the author’s experiences over a number of …

An Invitation Regarding Law And Legal Education, And Imagining The Future, Michael J. Madison

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This Essay consists of an invitation to participate in conversations about the future of legal education in ways that integrate rather than distinguish several threads of concern and revision that have emerged over the last decade. Conversations about the future of legal education necessarily include conversations about the future of law practice, legal services, and law itself. Some of those start with the somewhat stale questions: What are US law professors doing, what should they be doing, and why? Those questions are still relevant and important, but they are no longer the only relevant questions, and they are not the …

Post-Graduate Legal Training: The Case For Tax-Exempt Programs, Philip Hackney, Adam Chodorow

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The challenging job market for recent law school graduates has highlighted a fact well known to those familiar with legal education: A significant gap exists between what students learn in law school and what they need to be practice-ready lawyers. Legal employers historically assumed the task of providing real-world training, but they have become much less willing to do so. At the same time, a large numbers of Americans – and not just those living at or below the poverty line – are simply unable to afford lawyers. In this Article, we argue that post-graduate legal training, similar to post-graduate …

Leading New Lawyers: Leadership And Legal Education, Michael J. Madison

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Lawyers may become leaders, but leaders also may become lawyers. The path to leadership can begin in law school. This short essay describes a leadership development course developed and implemented at a law school over the last four years.

Rick's Taxonomy, Mary Crossley

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This Essay uses the influential educational work Bloom’s Taxonomy as a jumping-off point for exploring how Rick Matasar’s scholarship relating to leadership in and the goals of legal education provides a guide for identifying, prioritizing and pursuing the core values and objectives of the legal education enterprise in a time of profound change. This Essay briefly describes Bloom’s Taxonomy and its status in the educational literature. Then it highlights two ways that Matasar’s leadership scholarship displays kinship to Bloom’s Taxonomy. His approach to describing a problem, analyzing its nature, and synthesizing and evaluating possible responses to the problem is …

Foreword Snx 2014: Challenges To Justice Education: South-North Perspectives, Sheila I. Velez Martinez

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“Towards an Education for Justice: South North Perspectives” was the theme of the XI LatCrit South North Exchange on Theory, Culture and Law, convened at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia in 2014. Scholars, students and activists from more than 10 countries encompassing the Global South and Global North engaged in a critical and animated exchange on the changing space of legal studies and how this change can be stirred towards acknowledging the need to integrate a concern for justice as part of legal education. The premise of the Conference was that the dominant model of legal education, …

'Experiential Education Through The Vis Moot' And 'Building On The Bergsten Legacy: The Vis Moot As A Platform For Legal Education', Ronald A. Brand

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Recent discussions of experiential education have at times considered the role of moot opportunities in legal education. Many, if not most, moot courts and related activities have been designed primarily as competitions. One moot, the Willem Vis International Commercial Arbitration Moot, is different in that it was designed, and has been consistently administered, as a tool for educating future lawyers. That education has included both skills training of the highest order and the development of a doctrinal understanding of important international legal instruments, especially those created and administered by the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL). This pair …

Preparing For Service: A Template For 21st Century Legal Education, Michael J. Madison

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Legal educators today grapple with the changing dynamics of legal employment markets; the evolution of technologies and business models driving changes to the legal profession; and the economics of operating – and attending – a law school. Accrediting organizations and practitioners pressure law schools to prepare new lawyers both to be ready to practice and to be ready for an ever-fluid career path. From the standpoint of law schools in general and any one law school in particular, constraints and limitations surround us. Adaptation through innovation is the order of the day.

How, when, and in what direction should innovation …

Improving The Performance Of The Performance Test: The Key To Meaningful Bar Exam Reform, Ben Bratman

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If there are going to be bar exams in the United States — and there are, for the foreseeable future — then the lingering question is how to improve them to better serve the goal of evaluating minimum competence. The bar exam is roundly and rightly criticized by academics and practitioners as disconnected from the actual functions that lawyers perform. The focus of the exam, critics say, is too much on knowledge and memorization of law. That focus is exacerbated by the recent addition of a seventh substantive subject, Civil Procedure, to the Multistate Bar Examination (MBE).

The path to …

Innovators, Esq.: Training The Next Generation Of Lawyer Social Entrepreneurs, Stephanie Dangel, Michael J. Madison

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Today’s law school graduates need to be entrepreneurial to succeed, but traditional legal education tends to produce lawyers who are “strange bedfellows” with entrepreneurs. This article begins by examining the innovative programs at many law schools that ameliorate this tension, including the programs offered by our Innovation Practice Institute (IPI) at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. Although these programs train law students to represent entrepreneurs and to be entrepreneurial in law-related careers, few (if any) law schools train law students to be “business” entrepreneurs. Drawing on our own experiences and the writings of Bill Drayton, the lawyer who …

Experiential Education As Critical Pedagogy: Enhancing The Law School Experience, Spearit, Stephanie Ledesma

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This article examines the shift to greater experiential education in law school through the lens of critical pedagogy. At its base, critical pedagogy is about devising more equitable methods of teaching, helping students develop consciousness of freedom, and helping them connect knowledge to power. The insights of critical pedagogy are valuable for a fuller understanding of experiential education and its potential to affect students in profound ways, particularly as a means of empowerment. Although this is an understudied area of pedagogical scholarship, power relations are at the heart of legal education. Critical pedagogy offers a frame for considering how experiential …

Visions Of The Future Of (Legal) Education, Michael J. Madison

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One law professor takes a stab at imagining an ideal law school of the future and describing how to get there. The Essay spells out a specific possible vision, taking into account changes to the demand for legal services and changes to the economics and composition of the legal profession. That thought experiment leads to a series of observations about values and vision in legal education in general and about what it might take to move any vision forward.

Teaching Law And Digital Age Legal Practice With An Ai And Law Seminar: Justice, Lawyering And Legal Education In The Digital Age, Kevin D. Ashley

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A seminar on Artificial Intelligence ("Al") and Law can teach law students lessons about legal reasoning and legal practice in the digital age. Al and Law is a subfield of Al/computer science research that focuses on designing computer programs—computational models—that perform legal reasoning. These computational models are used in building tools to assist in legal practice and pedagogy and in studying legal reasoning in order to contribute to cognitive science and jurisprudence. Today, subject to a number of qualifications, computer programs can reason with legal rules, apply legal precedents, and even argue like a legal advocate.

This article provides a …

Cooperation In Legal Education And Legal Reform, Ronald A. Brand

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This contribution to the symposium Special Report on Kosovo After the ICJ Opinion focuses on legal education and its role in the legal reform necessary to any state that is transitioning to a new system of government. It does so by considering first the importance of legal education as a U.S. export to transition countries. This necessarily requires a reciprocal consideration of the importance to U.S. law schools of considering the external, international effect of implementing changes in the traditional structure of U.S. legal education, and about how teaching methods both distinguish differing legal systems and require cross-system consideration of …

Special Report: Kosovo After The Icj Opinion, Introduction, Ronald A. Brand

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On October 22-25, 2012, judges, government officials, and scholars from Kosovo and the United States gathered at the University of Pittsburgh for a conference on “Kosovo after the ICJ Opinion.” The conference was organized by the Center for International Legal Education (CILE) at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, and the University of Prishtina Faculty of Law. It was co-sponsored by the Ministry of Justice, Kosovo; the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Kosovo; the Forum for Civic Initiatives, Kosovo; the American Society of International Law (ASIL); and the Center for Russian and Eastern European Studies at the University of Pittsburgh …

Exporting Legal Education: Lessons Learned From Efforts In Transition Countries, Ronald A. Brand

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A convergence of inward and outward-looking processes in US law schools creates both risk and potential reward in the development of legal education. As law faculties engage in the current process of changing the traditional law school curriculum, they should carefully coordinate a desire for internal goals with an understanding of external impact, realizing that this process is likely to affect not just US law schools, but legal education across the globe. Changes in the curriculum at US law schools should be responsive, not only to concerns about the legal marketplace in the United States, but also to the impact …

The Technology Of Law, Bernard J. Hibbitts

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This paper argues that contemporary fascination with the law of technology (IP, cyberlaw, etc.) has led us to overlook the fundamental impact of the "technology of law," and offers suggestions for creating "neterate" lawyers more comfortable with and cognizant of technology itself. The author describes how the legal news service JURIST implements many of these suggestions and provides a unique learning experience for its law student staffers.

Promoting The Rule Of Law: Cooperation And Competition In The Eu-Us Relationship, Ronald A. Brand

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Both the United States and the European Union fund programs designed to develop the rule of law in transition countries. Despite significant expenditures in this area, however, neither has developed either a clear definition of what is meant by the rule of law or a catalogue of programs that can result in coordination of rule of law efforts. This article is the result of a presentation at a May 2010 policy conference at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, at which U.S. and EU government officials, scholars, and practitioners discussed the concept of rule of law and efforts to …

The Role Of Foreign Languages In Educating Lawyers For Transnational Challenges, Vivian Grosswald Curran

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In a world in which every other country seems intent on teaching English to their youth, and in which the United States educational system does not place a high priority on teaching foreign languages, the American law student, dean and professor may doubt if foreign language knowledge is anything more than marginally helpful to law graduates. Similarly, educators at the primary school level may not be likely to assess foreign language education as warranting a greater allocation of scarce public resources.

The usefulness of foreign languages to the United States lawyer gradually has been gaining increased recognition in the profession, …

The Lawyer As Legal Scholar, Michael J. Madison

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I review Eugene Volokh's recent book, Academic Legal Writing. The book is nominally directed to law students and those who teach them (and for those audiences, it is outstanding), but it also contains a number of valuable lessons for published scholars. The book is more than a writing manual, however. I argue that Professor Volokh suggests implicitly that scholarship is underappreciated as a dimension of the legal profession. A well-trained lawyer, in other words, should have experience as a scholar. The argument sheds new light on ongoing discussions about the character of law schools.

The Developing Field Of Elder Law Redux: Ten Years After, Lawrence A. Frolik

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In 1993, Professor Frolik helped initiate The Elder Law Journal's first issue with his essay, The Developing Field of Elder Law: A Historical Perspective. Today, with the publication of the tenth volume of the Journal, Professor Frolik looks back over the past decade to reflect on the changes that have occurred within the field. In the past, he writes, Medicaid planning was thought by many to be the core of an elder law practice. This was not the case ten years ago, however, and it is certainly not true in the twenty-first century; elder law attorneys must practice in multifarious …