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Consumer Law For Gen Z Law Students, Neil Sobol Mar 2024

Consumer Law For Gen Z Law Students, Neil Sobol

Faculty Scholarship

Whether they are consumers, representing consumers, or advising clients dealing with consumers, law school graduates will inevitably confront numerous consumer law issues. Moreover, most students entering law school are members of Generation Z and face a new wave of consumer laws arising from the 2007–2009 recession and the rapid growth of new technologies. Clickwrap agreements, email spoofing, cybercrimes, cryptocurrencies, fintech, identity theft, online disparagement, data privacy, artificial intelligence, robocalling, and autonomous vehicles are among the evolving topics in modern consumer law. Despite the growth in consumer law concerns, many law students have limited access to consumer law options, with almost …


Latinas In The Legal Academy: Progress And Promise, Raquel E. Aldana, Emile Loza De Siles, Solangel Maldonado, Rachel F. Moran Jun 2023

Latinas In The Legal Academy: Progress And Promise, Raquel E. Aldana, Emile Loza De Siles, Solangel Maldonado, Rachel F. Moran

Faculty Scholarship

The 2022 Inaugural Graciela Oliva ́rez Latinas in the Legal Academy (“GO LILA”) Workshop convened seventy-four outstanding and powerful Latina law professors and professional legal educators (collectively, “Latinas in the legal academy,” or “LILAs”) to document and celebrate our individual and collective journeys and to grow stronger together. In this essay, we, four of the Latina law professors who helped to co-found the GO LILA Workshop, share what we learned about and from each other. We invite other LILAs to join our community and share their stories and journeys. We hope that the data and lessons that we share can …


Creating Persistent Law Review Article Links With Digital Object Identifiers, Valeri Craigle, Benjamin J. Keele, Aaron Retteen May 2023

Creating Persistent Law Review Article Links With Digital Object Identifiers, Valeri Craigle, Benjamin J. Keele, Aaron Retteen

Faculty Scholarship

A case study for how to use digital object identifiers (DOIs) to make online journals more accessible and improve their site user reports.


Reconceiving Argument Schemes As Descriptive And Practically Normative, Brian N. Larson, David Seth Morrison Mar 2023

Reconceiving Argument Schemes As Descriptive And Practically Normative, Brian N. Larson, David Seth Morrison

Faculty Scholarship

We propose a revised definition of “argument scheme” that focuses on describing argumentative performances and normative assessments that occur within an argumentative context, the social context in which the scheme arises. Our premise-and-conclusion structure identifies the typical instantiation of an argument in the argumentative context, and our critical framework describes a set of normative assessments available to participants in the context, what we call practically normative assessments. We distinguish this practical normativity from the rationally or universally normative assessment that might be imposed from outside the argumentative context. Thus, the practical norms represented in an argument scheme may still be …


Centering Students’ Rhetorical Knowledge: The Community Of Inquiry As Formative Assessment, Brian N. Larson Mar 2023

Centering Students’ Rhetorical Knowledge: The Community Of Inquiry As Formative Assessment, Brian N. Larson

Faculty Scholarship

This essay describes an approach to peer review and classroom workshopping intended to develop a community of inquiry in the first-year law school classroom, center students’ own rhetorical knowledge, and establish the authority of students—especially minoritized students—as rhetorical agents. The technique described in this essay works from the presumption that each student who comes to law school comes with rich rhetorical experience. In other words, they have extensive experience constructing discourse suited to certain audiences and certain contexts. They use a variety of tools to construct such discourse, including linguistic registers (or styles) and rhetorical genres (such as the academic …


Norms Of Public Argumentation And The Ideals Of Correctness And Participation, Frank Zenker, Jan Albert Van Laar, Bianca Cepollaro, Anca Gâță, Martin Hinton, Colin Guthrie King, Brian N. Larson, Marcin Lewinski, Christoph Lumer, Steve Oswald, Maciej Pichlak, Blake D. Scott, Mariusz Urbanski, Jean H.M. Wagemans Mar 2023

Norms Of Public Argumentation And The Ideals Of Correctness And Participation, Frank Zenker, Jan Albert Van Laar, Bianca Cepollaro, Anca Gâță, Martin Hinton, Colin Guthrie King, Brian N. Larson, Marcin Lewinski, Christoph Lumer, Steve Oswald, Maciej Pichlak, Blake D. Scott, Mariusz Urbanski, Jean H.M. Wagemans

Faculty Scholarship

Argumentation as the public exchange of reasons is widely thought to enhance deliberative interactions that generate and justify reasonable public policies. Adopting an argumentation-theoretic perspective, we survey the norms that should govern public argumentation and address some of the complexities that scholarly treatments have identified. Our focus is on norms associated with the ideals of correctness and participation as sources of a politically legitimate deliberative outcome. In principle, both ideals are mutually coherent. If the information needed for a correct deliberative outcome is distributed among agents, then maximising participation increases information diversity. But both ideals can also be in tension. …


Ethical Quagmires For Government Lawyers: Lessons For Legal Education, Susan Saab Fortney Jul 2022

Ethical Quagmires For Government Lawyers: Lessons For Legal Education, Susan Saab Fortney

Faculty Scholarship

Each presidential administration faces its own challenges related to the ethics of government officials and lawyers. What distinguished the Trump presidency was the steady stream of news reports that related to controversies involving government lawyers. In examining various controversies, this Essay argues that the ethical standards applicable to government lawyers are often thorny and debatable. Fortney discusses how controversies involving alleged misconduct by government lawyers reveal the range and complexity of ethical dilemmas that government lawyers encounter. This Essay asserts that legal educators should do more to empower government lawyers to deal with such ethics issues. To highlight key ethics …


Protecting The Guild Or Protecting The Public? Bar Exams And The Diploma Privilege, Milan Markovic Jun 2022

Protecting The Guild Or Protecting The Public? Bar Exams And The Diploma Privilege, Milan Markovic

Faculty Scholarship

The bar examination has long loomed over legal education. Although many states formerly admitted law school graduates into legal practice via the diploma privilege, Wisconsin is the only state that recognizes the privilege today. The bar examination is so central to the attorney admissions process that all but a handful of jurisdictions required it amidst a pandemic that turned bar exam administration into a life-or-death matter.

This Article analyzes the diploma privilege from a historical and empirical perspective. Whereas courts and regulators maintain that bar examinations screen out incompetent practitioners, the legal profession formerly placed little emphasis on bar examinations …


Infusing Leadership Competencies Into 1l Professional Identity Formation, Aric Short Apr 2022

Infusing Leadership Competencies Into 1l Professional Identity Formation, Aric Short

Faculty Scholarship

Law schools across the country are beginning to address the growing need to incorporate leadership training into their curricula; however, very few explicitly cover leadership in the 1L year. This article argues for the value of providing leadership training to 1Ls as part of a required course on professional identity formation. Because foundational leadership concepts overlap in meaningful ways with core lawyering competencies, such integration is both practical and efficient. Beginning leadership in the 1L year allows law schools to build on that foundational material in later clinics, externships, upper-level classes, and other experiences, creating deeper leadership skills in their …


From Pandemic To Pedagogy: Teaching The Technology Of Lawyering In Law Clinics, Sarah R. Boonin, Luz E. Herrera Apr 2022

From Pandemic To Pedagogy: Teaching The Technology Of Lawyering In Law Clinics, Sarah R. Boonin, Luz E. Herrera

Faculty Scholarship

The COVID-19 pandemic has transformed the nation’s approach to work and learning. Law schools, law firms, courts, and administrative agencies abruptly closed their offices and quickly reimagined how to perform their daily functions remotely. Many of these institutions have plans to maintain aspects of remote operations and services post-pandemic. With this in mind, the authors of this Article conducted a survey of law school clinical faculty during the winter of 2021 to better understand how clinicians pivoted their instruction and practice using technology during the pandemic. The authors use the survey results to show how the COVID-19 experience positions clinical …


Evaluating Legal Needs, Luz E. Herrera, Amber Baylor, Nandita Chaudhuri, Felipe Hinojosa Apr 2022

Evaluating Legal Needs, Luz E. Herrera, Amber Baylor, Nandita Chaudhuri, Felipe Hinojosa

Faculty Scholarship

This article is the first to explore legal needs in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas––a region that is predominantly Latinx and has both rural and urban characteristics. There are few legal needs assessments of majority Latinx communities, and none that examine needs in areas that are also U.S. border communities. Access to justice studies often overlook this area of the U.S. and this segment of the population despite their unique qualities. Latinos are projected to constitute the largest ethnic group in the country by 2060, making it imperative that we study access to justice-related assets, needs, opportunities, and barriers …


Teaching And Assessing Active Listening As A Foundational Skill For Lawyers As Leaders, Counselors, Negotiators, And Advocates, Lindsey P. Gustafson, Aric Short, Neil W. Hamilton Apr 2022

Teaching And Assessing Active Listening As A Foundational Skill For Lawyers As Leaders, Counselors, Negotiators, And Advocates, Lindsey P. Gustafson, Aric Short, Neil W. Hamilton

Faculty Scholarship

Our students will be more effective leaders, counselors, negotiators, and advocates as they deepen their ability to actively listen. As a professional and interpersonal skill linked closely with a lawyer’s success, our students’ ability to listen should demand our attention as legal educators. This attention is worth the effort because studies indicate active listening is not a static ability: we can teach students to be better listeners. But “active listening” is missing from most law schools’ learning outcomes or curricula, or it is only included as an undefined element of effective communication. Consequently, it is a critical lawyering skill that …


Review: The Dialogical Roots Of Deduction: Historical, Cognitive, And Philosophical Perspectives On Reasoning, Brian N. Larson Mar 2022

Review: The Dialogical Roots Of Deduction: Historical, Cognitive, And Philosophical Perspectives On Reasoning, Brian N. Larson

Faculty Scholarship

The balance of this review addresses matters in the book that should be of particular interest to readers in the legal rhetoric and communication community. First, it addresses some concepts central to Dutilh Novaes’ effort. Second, it surveys the book’s organization, identifying some key observations and conclusions that she supports with careful evidence and argumentation. Third, it addresses Dutilh Novaes’ attention to non-European and non-Western research and logical traditions. Finally, it considers some difficult and technical passages, noting those readers should work through because the payoff is worth it and others I believe readers in our field might skip.


Getting Comfortable With Discomfort, Diversity & Repair, Luz E. Herrera Oct 2021

Getting Comfortable With Discomfort, Diversity & Repair, Luz E. Herrera

Faculty Scholarship

The topic of this year's conference, diversity, pluralism, and repair, gives us so much to talk about, that for me, it was hard to know where we were to begin. Dean Angela Onwuachi-Willig focused on judicial appointments and the importance of a diverse bench for the legal profession, and in our society. She also discussed becoming comfortable with discomfort and I wanted to pick up on that thread. When I think about discomfort, I think about my own journey in the legal profession.


Introduction: Lenses, Methods, And Approaches In Intellectual Property Research, Irene Calboli, Maria Lillà Montagnani Jun 2021

Introduction: Lenses, Methods, And Approaches In Intellectual Property Research, Irene Calboli, Maria Lillà Montagnani

Faculty Scholarship

The relevance of Intellectual Property (IP) Law in our society has increased dramatically over the last several years. Globalization, digitization, and the rise of post-industrial information-based industries have all contributed to a new prominence of IP Law as one of the most important factors in driving innovation and economic development. At the same time, the significant expansion of IP rules has impacted many areas of public policy such as public health, the environment, biodiversity, agriculture, and information, in an unprecedented manner. No longer relegated to a cohort of few specialized experts, IP Law is now at the front and centre …


School Finance Reform And Professor Stephen D. Sugarman’S Lasting Legacy, Rachel F. Moran Apr 2021

School Finance Reform And Professor Stephen D. Sugarman’S Lasting Legacy, Rachel F. Moran

Faculty Scholarship

Once, over lunch, I recall a law professor reflecting on scholarly work’s ephemeral nature. Legal academics, he thought, should consider themselves lucky if their articles sparked a discussion that lasted for even a few years. By that standard, Professor Stephen Sugarman’s seminal work on school finance reform, done in collaboration with John Coons and William Clune, must count as a Methuselah of academic concepts. Decades later, this research continues to prompt scholarly debate, legal advocacy, and legislative reform. In this essay, I first describe the origins of the theory of school finance reform. I then turn to the ongoing influence …


Inside The Master's Gates: Resources And Tools To Dismantle Racism And Sexism In Higher Education, Susan Ayres Jan 2021

Inside The Master's Gates: Resources And Tools To Dismantle Racism And Sexism In Higher Education, Susan Ayres

Faculty Scholarship

The spring of 2020 saw waves of protest as police killed people of color. After George Floyd’s death, protests erupted in over 140 cities. The systemic racism exhibited by these killings has been uncontrollable, hopeless, and endless. Our country is facing a national crisis. In response to the police killings, businesses, schools, and communities held diversity workshops across the nation, and businesses and organizations posted antiracism statements. Legislators and City Councils introduced bills and orders to defund police and to limit qualified immunity. As schools prepared for the fall semester, teachers considered ways to incorporate antiracism materials into the curriculum. …


Precedent As Rational Persuasion, Brian N. Larson Jan 2021

Precedent As Rational Persuasion, Brian N. Larson

Faculty Scholarship

The ways that judges and lawyers make and justify their arguments and decisions have profound impacts on our lives. Understanding those practices in light of theories of reasoning and argumentation is thus critical for understanding law and the society it shapes. An inquiry that explores the very foundations of all legal reasoning leads to a broad, important question: How do lawyers and judges use cited cases in their legal arguments? It turns out there is practically no empirical research to suggest the answer. As the first step in a comprehensive empirical effort to answer this question, this article performs a …


Repealing The Statute Of Wizarding Secrecy In Legal Education, Mark Burge Jul 2020

Repealing The Statute Of Wizarding Secrecy In Legal Education, Mark Burge

Faculty Scholarship

In the fictional Harry Potter universe, J.K. Rowling has fashioned a parallel world based on our own, but with the fundamental difference of a separate magical society grafted onto it. In Rowling’s fictional version, the magical population lives among the non-magical Muggle population, but we Muggles are largely unaware of them. This secrecy is by elaborate design and was brought about by centuries-long hostility toward wizards by the non-magical majority. But what if secrecy is precisely the wrong approach? What if widespread wizard-Muggle collaboration were precisely the thing needed to address the enormous and pressing problems of the day?

The …


The Emerging Legal Architecture For Social Justice, Luz E. Herrera, Louise G. Trubek Jul 2020

The Emerging Legal Architecture For Social Justice, Luz E. Herrera, Louise G. Trubek

Faculty Scholarship

Lawyers advocating for social change are now front and center in newspapers and social media. This article discusses how a new breed of progressive lawyers envision social justice law practice today. These “critical lawyers” are diverse in background, gender, ethnicity and race. They see law as a complex, contradictory tool rather than a necessary and sufficient route to justice. Their practices differ from the traditional non-profit public interest firms of the earlier generation that assumed justice would result if law and lawyers were accessible. To highlight the differences, the article discusses the law practices of Beyond Legal Aid, Law for …


The Law Professor Pipeline, Milan Markovic Jun 2020

The Law Professor Pipeline, Milan Markovic

Faculty Scholarship

Throughout U.S. legal education’s history, a small number of elite law schools have produced the vast majority of law professors. Although law professor hiring is now more inclusive in certain respects, the law school an aspiring professor attended continues to serve as a powerful predictor of hiring market success. Some scholars have maintained that this preference for graduates of elite law schools infects legal education with class bias and distorts legal pedagogy, but the absence of reliable data on socioeconomic diversity within law schools has muted these criticisms.

This Essay reorients the debate on law school hiring by focusing on …


In Times Of Chaos: Creating Blueprints For Law School Responses To Natural Disasters, Jeffrey R. Baker, Christine E. Cerniglia, Davida Finger, Luz E. Herrera, Jonel Newman Jan 2020

In Times Of Chaos: Creating Blueprints For Law School Responses To Natural Disasters, Jeffrey R. Baker, Christine E. Cerniglia, Davida Finger, Luz E. Herrera, Jonel Newman

Faculty Scholarship

A recent onslaught of domestic natural disasters created acute, critical needs for legal services for people displaced and harmed by storms and fires. In 2017, Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, Maria and Michael struck much of Texas, Florida, and Puerto Rico, displacing millions from their homes. Wildfires burned throughout California and tested the capacity of pro bono and legal aid systems across the state. In 2018, Hurricane Florence flooded North Carolina, and Hurricane Michael devastated the Florida Panhandle. California again suffered wildfires, the largest and most devastating in recorded history. Natural disasters are both more common and more destructive, the “new abnormal.” …


Access To Law Or Access To Lawyers? Master's Programs In The Public Educational Mission Of Law Schools, Mark Burge Oct 2019

Access To Law Or Access To Lawyers? Master's Programs In The Public Educational Mission Of Law Schools, Mark Burge

Faculty Scholarship

The general decline in juris doctor (“J.D.”) law school applicants and enrollment over the last decade has coincided with the rise of a new breed of law degree. Whether known as a master of jurisprudence, juris master, master of legal studies, or other names, these graduate degrees all have a target audience in common: adult professionals who neither are nor seek to become practicing attorneys. Inside legal academia and among the practicing bar, these degrees have been accompanied by expressed concerns that they detract from the traditional core public mission of law schools—educating lawyers. This Article argues that non-lawyer master’s …


The Three Ages Of Modern American Lawyering And The Current Crisis In The Legal Profession And Legal Education, Rachel F. Moran Jan 2019

The Three Ages Of Modern American Lawyering And The Current Crisis In The Legal Profession And Legal Education, Rachel F. Moran

Faculty Scholarship

During the first months of 2018, two short pieces on legal education were published. One reported on the results of a survey of college graduates, law school graduates, and holders of other advanced degrees. The study found that today’s law graduates were less likely than pre-recession counterparts to report that the J.D. degree was worth the cost and more likely to have second thoughts about the decision to go to law school. The findings prompted Aaron Taylor, executive director of the Access Lex Center for Legal Education Excellence, to conclude that there are “two distinct worlds of law graduates” made …


Assessments All The Way Down, James Mcgrath, Andrew P. Morriss Jan 2018

Assessments All The Way Down, James Mcgrath, Andrew P. Morriss

Faculty Scholarship

The role of assessments is getting attention throughout legal education. A growing acceptance of the Graduate Record Examination (“GRE”) as an alternative to the Law School Aptitude Test (“LSAT”) and its incorporation into the U.S. News & World Report (“USN&WR”) law school rankings opened the door to changes in who is going to law school and how they are recruited. At the other end of students’ journey through legal education, the discussion of recent graduates’ bar exam performance – linked by some to declining LSAT scores of entering students – raised questions about the design of bar exams as well …


Developing Workplace Law Programming: A Labor Of Love, Michael Z. Green Jan 2018

Developing Workplace Law Programming: A Labor Of Love, Michael Z. Green

Faculty Scholarship

Professor Green reflects and comments on his work in developing workplace law programming as a key component of the annual SEALS program.


Planning Your Class To Take Advantage Of Highly Effective Learning Techniques, James Mcgrath Jan 2018

Planning Your Class To Take Advantage Of Highly Effective Learning Techniques, James Mcgrath

Faculty Scholarship

What are the most highly effective learning techniques? Take a moment and consider what you think they are. Write them down if it is convenient. The symposium that is the subject of this law review volume examines the impact of formative assessment. In this article, I will connect formative assessment possibilities with ideas on how to take advantage of some of the proven highly effective learning techniques. The road there is a bit tortuous, but it is my hope that even the most well-informed teacher will find something that they can add to their quiver of techniques to help with …


Measuring Scholarly Impact: A Guide For Law School Administrators And Legal Scholars, Gary M. Lucas Jr Apr 2017

Measuring Scholarly Impact: A Guide For Law School Administrators And Legal Scholars, Gary M. Lucas Jr

Faculty Scholarship

The author intends for this Essay to serve as a guide for law deans and legal scholars interested in measuring the impact of legal scholarship. In addition, university administrators should find it helpful for comparing the impact of their own law faculty’s scholarship with the scholarship of law faculties at other universities. The primary obstacle to such comparisons is a dearth of publicly available information. To that end, the Essay recommends that each law school create a Google Scholar profile for its faculty and explains the procedures for doing so. By acting on this recommendation, administrators would dramatically improve our …


Teaching Public Policy Drafting In Law School: One Professor's Approach, Lisa A. Rich Jan 2017

Teaching Public Policy Drafting In Law School: One Professor's Approach, Lisa A. Rich

Faculty Scholarship

This article provides an overview of the Drafting for Public Policy course offered at the Texas A&M University School of Law. The article addresses the theoretical and pedagogical underpinnings of the course, including how such a course easily encompasses the teaching of cultural context and awareness, as well as professional identity, and encourages students to engage deeply in the policymaking process. It also explores the continued relevance of the work of Harold D. Lasswell, as well as that of Myres McDougal and Anthony Kronman. These works, from 1943 and 1993 respectively, resonate now because they called on law schools to …


How Cosmopolitan Are International Law Professors?, Ryan Scoville, Milan Markovic Apr 2016

How Cosmopolitan Are International Law Professors?, Ryan Scoville, Milan Markovic

Faculty Scholarship

This Article offers an empirical answer to a question of interest among scholars of comparative international law: why do American views about international law appear at times to differ from those of other countries? The authors contend that part of the answer lies in legal education. Conducting a survey of the educational and professional backgrounds of nearly 150 legal academics, the authors reveal evidence that professors of international law in the United States often lack significant foreign legal experience, particularly outside of the West. Sociological research suggests that this tendency leads professors to teach international law from predominantly nationalistic and …