Law Commons^™

Teaching Administrative Law Research: Preparing Law Students For Regulatory Practice, Susan Azyndar

Journal Articles

A quick skim of daily headlines shows the breadth of regulatory law, from recommendations to limit the F.B.I’s use of warrantless surveillance to how the Consumer Product Safety Commission defines e-bikes. Many lawyers practice exclusively in regulatory settings, confronting these new developments continuously, and even lawyers who focus on less regulation-centric areas will still encounter administrative law. Law students, therefore, need to develop skills particular to practicing in this legal environment.

Genteel Culture, Legal Education, And Constitutional Controversy In Early Virginia, Matthew J. Steilen

Journal Articles

This article focuses on the movement to reform legal education in early national Virginia, offering a fresh perspective by examining the connection between legal education and society and culture. It challenges the notion that constitutional ideas were the primary driving force behind reforms and argues that social status and “manners” played a more significant role. Wealthy elites in Virginia associated manners with education, sending their sons to college to become gentlemen, as it secured their aspirations to gentility and their influence over society and politics. Reformers sought to capitalize on this connection by educating a generation of university-trained, genteel lawyers …

The Secret Sauce: Examining Law Schools That Overperform On The Bar Exam, Derek T. Muller, Christopher J. Ryan Jr.

Journal Articles

Since 2010, law schools have faced declining enrollment and entering classes with lower predictors of success despite recent signs of improvement. At least partly as a result, rates at which law school graduates pass the bar exam have declined and remain at historic lows. Yet, during this time, many schools have improved their graduates' chances of success on the bar exam, and some schools have dramatically outperformed their predicted bar exam passage rates. This Article examines which schools do so and why.

Research for this Article began by accounting for law schools' incoming class credentials to predict an expected bar …

By The Inch, It’S A Cinch: The Case For Go-Ing Slow In First-Year Legal Writing Courses, Patrick J. Long

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

Swimming With Broad Strokes: Publishing And Presenting Beyond The Lw Discipline, Robin Boyle-Laisure, Stephen Paskey

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

Legal Uncertainties: Covid-19, Distance Learning, Bar Exams, And The Future Of U.S. Legal Education, Christine Corcos

Journal Articles

The COVID-19 pandemic forced the U.S. legal academy and legal profession to make changes to legal education and training very rapidly in order to accommodate the needs of students, graduates, practitioners, clients, and the public. Like most of the public, members of the profession assumed that most, if not all, of the changes would be temporary, and life would return to a pre-pandemic normal.

These assumed temporary changes included a rapid and massive shift to online teaching for legal education, to online administration of the bar exam in some jurisdictions, or the option to offer the diploma privilege in others. …

Critical Interviewing, Laila L. Hlass, Lindsay M. Harris

Journal Articles

Critical lawyering—also at times called rebellious, community, and movement lawyering—attempts to further social justice alongside impacted communities. While much has been written about the contours of this form of lawyering and case examples illustrating core principles, little has been written about the mechanics of teaching critical lawyering skills. This Article seeks to expand critical lawyering theory, and in doing so, provide an example of a pedagogical approach to teaching what we term “critical interviewing.” Critical interviewing means using an intersectional lens to collaborate with clients, communities, interviewing partners, and interpreters in a legal interview. Critical interviewers identify and take into …

On Being First, On Being Only, On Being Seen, On Charting A Way Forward, Veronica Root Martinez

Journal Articles

This Essay reflects upon my professional experiences as a Black woman both at Notre Dame and beyond. It argues that it is important for students to have demographically diverse professors within their educational environments. It calls for the Notre Dame Law School community to continue to create a diverse, equitable, and inclusive culture.

A Starting Point For Disability Justice In Legal Education, Christina Payne-Tsoupros

Journal Articles

This article explores how a disability justice framework would provide greater access to law school and therefore the legal profession for disabled students of color; specifically, disabled Black, Indigenous, and Latinx students. Using DisCrit principles formulated by Subini Annamma, David Connor, and Beth Ferri (2013), this article provides suggestions for incorporating a disability justice lens to legal education. In doing so, this article specifically recognizes the work of three disability justice activist-attorney-scholars, Lydia X.Z. Brown, Talila “TL” Lewis, and Katherine Pérez, and considers lessons from their advocacy and leadership that can apply in the law school setting.

Academic Law Library Director Status Since The Great Recession: Strengthened, Maintained, Or Degraded?, Elizabeth G. Adelman, Karen L. Shephard, Richard J. Patti, Robert M. Adelman

Journal Articles

The status of the academic law library director is central to the educational mission of the law library. We collected data from 2006 to 2016 showing a 25 percent decrease in tenure-track directorships. We also found one in four changes in directorships since 2013 resulted in the new director having a degraded status compared to her predecessor.

The Professor As Institutional Entrepreneur, Roger P. Alford

Journal Articles

Law professors are all about ideas, and the creation of an institute, clinic, or center within a law school is the instantiation of an idea. Ideas embodied in law school institutions become crystallized in the fabric of a school, changing its culture, internalizing its values, and reflecting its priorities. Robert Cochran has helped to establish multiple institutes, centers, and clinics at Pepperdine Caruso Law School, and in so doing he has become the law school's great serial entrepreneur. The institutes Cochran helped to establish have become laboratories to give expression to his ideas about the relationship between faith, ethics, and …

Persons And The Point Of The Law, Richard Garnett

Journal Articles

This short essay is a comment and reflection on a manuscript by Professors John Breen and Lee
Strang, "A Light Unseen: A History of Catholic Legal Education in the United States." It is based on remarks presented at a February 14, 2020 conference, sponsored by the Journal of Catholic Legal Studies and the Center for Law and Religion at St. John's University School of Law. It
addresses, among other things, Breen and Strang's argument that a Catholic law school should have a distinctive "intellectual architecture" and proposes that a distinctive moral anthropology -- that is, an account of what the …

To Dress For Dinner: Teaching Law In A Bureaucratic Age, John Henry Schlegel

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

Learning In "Baby Jail": Lessons From Law Student Engagement In Family Detention Centers, Lindsay M. Harris

Journal Articles

Between 2014 and 2017, more than 40 law schools and likely well over 1000 law students engaged in learning within immigration family detention centers. The Trump Administration’s “zero tolerance” policy and implementation of wide-scale family separation in 2018 led to increased involvement by professors and students in the constantly shifting landscape of immigration detention. As the detention of immigrant families becomes increasingly entrenched, this article hits the pause button and assesses the benefits and challenges of the various approaches to, and proposes some principles for, law student engagement in this crisis lawyering in immigration detention centers, for families, and beyond.

Can Female Academics Say "No" Both Professionally And Elegantly To Excessive Work Demand? Yes, But You Might Have To Call A Friend, Angela Mae Kupenda

Journal Articles

Whether one’s academic supervisor is a White man or woman, or a person of color, the ability to say “no” to our supervisors is critical for one’s professional success and personal wellbeing. Some of us are incessantly asked to take on extra service, extra duties, to relieve someone else because they have “more important things” to do, and “just to do it” because it must be done and because we have that extra strength in our DNA, some seem to think.

Continuing Derrick Bell's Devotion In Creative Action, Angela Mae Kupenda

Journal Articles

I remember my first time seeing Derrick Bell in person and hearing him speak, just a few years before he passed away. I was in awe of him for many reasons, but primarily for two reasons. First, I noted from watching him with his devoted students, how mutual was the devotion coming from him—devotion to them as people and as those who would surely carry on his great work of seeking to forge equality in America and beyond. And second, I was in awe of him because of his devotion to the elimination of racism, while at the same time …

Embracing Our First Responder Role As Academics - With Inspiration From Langston Hughes, Angela Mae Kupenda

Journal Articles

In the midst of the post-2016 political crisis, our role as academics is that of First Responders. In physical crises, like a fire, First Responders play an important role. They intentionally put themselves in harm’s way to fulfill an overarching purpose of helping others, even at their own risk. They strategically prepare, train, and work for years to prepare for this role in the midst of crisis. As academics who care about equality, we are First Responders.

Compensatory Women's Rights Legal Education In Eastern Europe: The Women's Human Rights Training Institute, Isabel Marcus

Journal Articles

To compensate for the absence/minimization of women's rights in the law faculty curriculum in post-socialist states, in 2002 a coalition of women's rights NGOs, funded by OSI, developed a Women's Human Rights Training Institute (WHRTI) in Sofia, Bulgaria. Now embarking on its sixth cycle and having graduated more than 100 lawyers (mostly working in NGOs in post-socialist states), WHRTI has developed a women's rights legal education and training program triad consisting of feminist legal theory, women's rights legal practice, and feminist legal pedagogy. The goal of the program is to educate and train lawyers to understand and use various domestic, …

Equality Lost In Time And Space: Examining The Race/Class Quandary With Personal Pedagogical Lessons From A Course, A Film, A Case, And An Unfinished Movement, Angela Mae Kupenda

Journal Articles

This essay is both personal and pedagogical. My hope is that it issues a clarion call to legal educators and administrators to choose the pursuit of racial and class equality. I believe that, as law faculty and administrators, we must first address our personal quandaries with race and class before we can effectively address the racial and class implications in our pedagogical or administrative roles in legal education. This essay focuses on race and class and is a clarion call for legal academics and administrators to address ongoing structural racism and classism in our institutions, by starting with our own …

Mentoring Pluses For Underrepresented Faculty, Angela Mae Kupenda

Journal Articles

Much has been written about the demands from mentoring students. Mentoring is regarded as service work placed on top of faculty demands of teaching, scholarship, and more service. While the benefits to underrepresented faculty are numerous, here I focus on three: mentoring students can help save our career when we are tempted to leave the building running fast; mentoring students can provide student allies to help verify the truth about our greatness; and, mentoring students helps to pass on the legacy.

What Is Criminal Law About?, Guyora Binder, Robert Weisberg

Journal Articles

In a recent critique, Jens Ohlin faults contemporary criminal law textbooks for emphasizing philosophy, history and social science at the expense of doctrinal training. In this response, we argue that the political importance of criminal law justifies including reflection about the justice of punishment in the professional education of lawyers. First, we argue that both understanding and evaluating criminal law doctrine requires consideration of political philosophy, legal history, and empirical research. Second, we argue that the indeterminacy of criminal law doctrine on some fundamental questions means that criminal lawyers often cannot avoid invoking normative theory in fashioning legal arguments. Finally, …

Latcrit Praxis @ Xx: Toward Equal Justice In Law, Education And Society, Tayyab Mahmud, Athena D. Mutua, Francisco Valdes

Journal Articles

This article marks the twentieth anniversary of Latina and Latino Critical Legal Theory or the LatCrit organization, an association of diverse scholars committed to the production of knowledge from the perspective of Outsider or OutCrit jurisprudence. The article first reflects on the historical development of LatCrit’s substantive, methodological, and institutional commitments and practices. It argues that these traditions were shaped not only by its members’ goals and commitments but also by the politics of backlash present at its birth in the form of the “cultural wars,” and which have since morphed into perpetual “crises” grounded in neoliberal policies. With this …

Chip Off The Old Block, Jim Rosenblatt

Journal Articles

What a proud moment it is for a father or mother to have a child pursue the same vocation as the parent. There is something affirming about knowing that a child has observed your work, your lifestyle, your colleagues, and your impact on the world, and chooses to follow in your vocational footsteps. A child who claims the lifestyle and work of the parent, after having observed it close at hand for a number of years, sends a positive message to the parents that what they are doing is worthwhile enough to be emulated. One son chose to attend law …

'Truth And Reconciliation': A Critical Step Toward Eliminating Race And Gender Violations In Tenure Wars, Angela Mae Kupenda, Tamara F. Lawson

Journal Articles

In this Article, the co-authors confront one of the next generation issues for underrepresented groups in legal education: what happens after tenure victories, especially for the victors in a war wrought with gender and racial inequities? Even if all is fair in love, war, and tenure battles, it remains most troubling when, even in this century, acts of racial and/or gender aggression are targeted at qualified tenure candidates. These violations of the "tenure rules of engagement" based on implicit or explicit racial or gender bias preserve discriminatory practices that impact underrepresented groups and maintain the status quo in the academy …

Reaching Backward And Stretching Forward: Teaching For Transfer In Law School Clinics, Shaun Archer, James Parry Eyster, James J. Kelly Jr., Tonya Kowalski, Colleen F. Shanahan

Journal Articles

In thinking about education, teachers may spend more time considering what to teach than how to teach. Unfortunately, traditional teaching techniques have limited effectiveness in their ability to help students retain and apply the knowledge either in later classes or in their professional work. What, then, is the value of our teaching efforts if students are unable to transfer the ideas and skills they have learned to later situations?

Teaching for transfer is important to the authors of this article, four clinical professors and one psychologist. The purpose of this article is to provide an introduction to some of the …

Teaching The Art Of Defending A White Collar Criminal Case, Katrice Bridges Copeland

Journal Articles

This Article discusses the author's experience with effectively teaching a white collar crime course.

Legal Education In Crisis, And Why Law Libraries Are Doomed, James G. Milles

Journal Articles

The dual crises facing legal education - the economic crisis affecting both the job market and the pool of law school applicants, and the crisis of confidence in the ability of law schools and the ABA accreditation process to meet the needs of lawyers or society at large - have undermined the case for not only the autonomy, but the very existence, of law school libraries as we have known them. Legal education in the United States is about to undergo a long-term contraction, and law libraries will be among the first to go. A few law schools may abandon …

Retaining Color, Veronica Root

Journal Articles

It is no secret that large law firms are struggling in their efforts to retain attorneys of color. This is despite two decades of aggressive tracking of demographic rates, mandates from clients to improve demographic diversity, and the implementation of a variety of diversity efforts within large law firms. In part, law firm retention efforts are stymied by the reality that elite large law firms require some level of attrition to function properly under the predominant business model. This reality, however, does not explain why firms have more difficulty retaining attorneys of color — in particular black and Hispanic attorneys …

Tax Recognition, Barry Cushman

Journal Articles

This article was prepared for the St. Louis University Law Journal’s “Teaching Trusts & Estates” issue. Many law students take a course in Trusts & Estates, but comparatively few enroll in a class devoted to the federal wealth transfer taxes. For most law students, the Trusts & Estates course provides the only opportunity for exposure to some of the basic features of the estate tax, the gift tax, the generation-skipping transfer tax, and some related features of the income tax. The coverage demands of the typical Trusts & Estates course do not allow for intensive discussion of these issues, but …

Reflections On Presumed Incompetent: The Intersections Of Race And Class For Women In Academia Symposium--The Plenary Panel, Maritza I. Reyes, Angela Mae Kupenda, Angela Onwuachi-Willig, Stephanie M. Wildman, Adrien K. Wing

Journal Articles

Presumed Incompetent was produced thanks to the vision and commitment of its editors: Dr. Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs, Dr. Yolanda Flores Niemann, Carmen G. González, and Angela P. Harris. This symposium came to fruition because the Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law & Justice invited the two law professor editors, Professor Harris and Professor González, to convene a distinguished group of scholars from Canada and the United States to expand and deepen the conversation initiated by the book. The very successful day-long symposium and the publication of the resulting articles were made possible by the resources, time, and dedication provided by …