Law Commons^™

A Revealed Preferences Approach To Ranking Law Schools, Brian L. Frye, Christopher J. Ryan Jr.

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

The U.S. News & World Report (U.S. News) “Best Law Schools Rankings” defines the market for legal education. Law schools compete to improve their standing in the U.S. News rankings and fear any decline. But the U.S. News rankings are controversial, at least in part because they rely on factors that are poor proxies for quality, like peer reputation and expenditures per student. While many alternative law school rankings exist, none have challenged the market dominance of the U.S. News rankings. Presumably the U.S. News rankings benefit from a first-mover advantage, other rankings fail to provide a clearly superior alternative, …

John Marshall, The Great Chief Justice, William & Mary Law School

Popular Media

John Marshall, the nation's fourth chief justice, was among the first to study law at W&M.

Lawyer ≠ Luddite, Jason Tubinis, Khelani Clay, Jim Henneberger, Zanada Joyner, Shannon Roddy

Presentations

Being a competent attorney means being a competent technologist. ABA Model Rule 1.1 (Competence) requires all lawyers to stay abreast of technology even if they still use a Dictaphone and typewriter and think “the cloud” refers to the fluffy white stuff in the sky. It can be malpractice to misuse or misunderstand technology, and this misuse can take many forms. Lack of familiarity with technology can lead to improper production of confidential information, delays in litigation, wasting time and client funds, ending up on Above the Law (and not in a good way), and more.

Legal technology courses are becoming …

Decision Making Models In 2/2 Time: Two Speakers, Two Models (Maybe), Sharon Bradley, Tim Tarvin

Presentations

Our students have to learn so many new skills to be successful in law school and law practice. Legal research, client interviewing, and case analysis just for starters. Our teaching methods have to engage our students while preparing them to “think like a lawyer.” We also have the responsibility to familiarize students in evaluating the “benefits and risks associated with relevant technology” and to develop efficient practices and processes. The speakers will look at decision making models that are practical and useable.

One speaker will discuss his experiences in a clinical setting using decision trees, teaching his students to visualize …

The Care And Feeding Of Law Student Research Assistants, Alyssa Dragnich, Rachel H. Smith

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)
Hiring, training, managing, and mentoring research assistants can be highly gratifying. When it works well, the relationship between a professor and a research assistant (RA) can be a distillation of all the best parts of teaching legal writing. It benefits professor and student. It results in a bond of friendship and collegiality. It produces useful and thoughtful work.

But it can also go horribly wrong. The relationship can be a waste of student and professor time and energy. The professor can feel burdened, rather than assisted. The student can feel confused and underappreciated. As any professor knows who has …

Virginia Bar Exam, February 2017, Section 1

Virginia Bar Exam Archive

No abstract provided.

Virginia Bar Exam, February 2017, Section 2

Virginia Bar Exam Archive

No abstract provided.

Bringing Purposefulness To The American Law School’S Support Of Professional Identity Formation, Louis D. Bilionis

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

Ten years after the publication of Educating Lawyers, a growing number of American law schools are taking initiative to better support their students in the formation of professional identity. There is widespread recognition that success in these efforts requires an element of “purposefulness” on the part of law faculty and staff. Experiences, environments, and pedagogies that actually work for professional identity formation must be crafted and promoted with intentionality. Bringing the requisite purposefulness to the effort, however, will take a mindset about the education of a lawyer that will be new to many in legal education. This article explores that …

Standard 405 And Terms And Conditions Of Employment: More Chaos, Conflict And Confusion Ahead, Joseph P. Tomain, Donald J. Polden

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

In 2008, the Section on Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar of the American Bar Association commenced a comprehensive review of the accreditation standards for American legal education. By July of 2011, most of the revised standards and rules of procedure had been drafted, discussed and approved by the section's Standards Review Committee ("SRC") and were ready for submission to the council. However, the SRC's revised accreditation policies were not submitted for action by the council until 2014, more than six years after the review process began, as a result of decisions made by section leaders. The revised standards …

Bridges Ii: The Law-Stem Alliance & Next Generation Innovation, Jacob S. Sherkow

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

My Grandmother Was Mrs. Palsgraf: Ways To Rethink Legal Education To Help Students Become Lawyers, Rather Than Just Thinking Like Them, Ian Gallacher

College of Law - Faculty Scholarship

This article uses my family history, and its striking similarities to the Palsgraf case, as a starting point for a consideration of the ways law schools teach the law to their students, the problems that approach appears to cause, and some possible alternative, and potentially healthier, approaches to legal education.

My grandmother, grandfather, mother, and uncle were all in a house that was blown-up and destroyed by a bomb during the Second World War. And while the cause of the explosion was very different to that in Palsgraf, the fact of an explosion that drastically changed the lives of …

Why Legal Writers Should Think Like Teachers, Laura A. Webb

Law Faculty Publications

This article proposes that new legal writers can improve their work by “thinking like teachers.” I assert that legal writing is fundamentally educative. Good writing thus requires good teaching. The article discusses the “curse of knowledge,” which makes it difficult for a writer who fully understands her topic to remember how a reader who is less knowledgeable about the topic will approach the material. It then explores three concepts from the science of learning — context, chunking, and connections — and discusses how a writer can use these concepts to effectively teach her readers.

Leadership In Online Non-Traditional Legal Education: Lessons Learned & Questions Raised, Lawrence E. Singer

Faculty Publications & Other Works

No abstract provided.

Experiential Learning And Assessment In The Era Of Donald Trump, Jamie Abrams

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Law teaching is turning a critical corner with the implementation of new ABA accreditation standards requiring greater skills development, experiential learning, and student assessment. Years of debate and discourse preceded the adoption of these ABA Standards, followed by a surge in programming, conferencing, and list-serv activity to prepare to implement these standards effectively. Missing from the dialogue about effective implementation of standards has been thoughtful consideration of how implementing these requirements will intersect with the challenges, realities, opportunities, and complexities of political divisiveness and polarization so prevalent in society and university campuses today.

Law schools are notably implementing these pedagogical …

Can Practicing Mindfulness Improve Lawyer Decision-Making, Ethics, And Leadership?, Peter H. Huang

Publications

Jon Kabat-Zinn, the founder of mindfulness-based stress reduction, defines mindfulness as paying attention in a curious, deliberate, kind, and non-judgmental way to life as it unfolds each moment. Psychologist Ellen Langer defines mindfulness as a flexible state of mind actively engaging in the present, noticing new things, and being sensitive to context. Langer differentiates mindfulness from mindlessness, which she defines as acting based upon past behavior instead of the present and being stuck in a fixed, solitary perspective, oblivious to alternative multiple viewpoints. Something called mindfulness is currently very fashionable and has been so for some time now in American …

Transforming Justice, Lawyers And The Practice Of Law, Marjorie A. Silver

Scholarly Works

This is the Preface and Introduction to Transforming Justice, Lawyers and the Practice of Law, an anthology of writings by participants in the Project for Integrating Spirituality, Law and Politics (PISLAP) and others actively engaged in transforming law, legal education and social justice. It showcases the abundant ways in which lawyers, judges, law professors and others are employing more communitarian, peaceful and healing ways to resolve conflicts, plan legal relationships and achieve justice. It is written for lawyers, law professors, law students and others who share similar goals and are eager to learn new ways to practice law and create …

Divided Selves: Professional Role Distancing Among Law Students And New Lawyers In A Period Of Market Crisis, John Bliss

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

In the terms of Erving Goffman’s classic role distancing analysis, newly admitted law students often aspire to an “embraced” lawyer role that directly expresses their personal and political values. Empirical research has suggested that during law school these students are instructed in an amoral and apolitical vision of professionalism. The literature has paid less attention to how students internally experience these norms within their continual processes of self-construction. This article takes an exploratory microdynamic look at professional identity formation drawing on longitudinal interviews and identity mapping with three student cohorts. I find that over the course of their legal education …

Bridging The Reading Gap In The Law School Classroom, Patricia G. Montana

Faculty Publications

Many students struggle in law school, particularly in the first year, because they are weak readers. They do not know how to read text closely and have limited practice in reading complex or lengthy pieces of writing. Nor are they accustomed to reading works that demand deep thinking and reflection.

Yet legal analysis and writing depends on a careful reading and thoughtful understanding of the authority on which a lawyer relies. Without strong reading and critical thinking skills, it is no surprise that incoming law students have difficulty following a structured analysis and mastering legal writing. As the gap between …

"Your Mission, Should You Choose To Accept It . . .": Taking Law School Mission Statements Seriously, Vanessa Merton

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

Learning about the process and the results of mission definition in law schools has made palpable the tension between clarity and inflexibility, candor and marketing concerns, and the specificity that fosters accountability as opposed to the generality that embraces a vague multitude of approaches to the law school endeavor. Building on the strong endorsement of the use of mission statements in the original Best Practices for Legal Education, we present some “Best Practices” for both the development and the content of law school mission statements. We hope that this piece hastens further conversation and commentary that will foster a richer …

Seeking Inclusion From The Inside Out: Towards A Paradigm Of Culturally Proficient Legal Education, Anastasia M. Boles

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Is Legal Scholarship Worth Its Cost?, Paul Campos

Publications

No abstract provided.

When Torts Met Civil Procedure: A Curricular Coupling, Laura G. Dooley, Brigham A. Fordham, Ann E. Woodley

Scholarly Works

Law students must become adept at understanding how various bodies of law interact-supporting, balancing, and even conflicting with each other. This article describes an attempt to achieve these goals by merging two canonical first-year courses, civil procedure and torts, into an integrated class titled ‘Introduction to Civil Litigation’. Our most pressing motivation was concern that students who study civil procedure and torts in isolation develop a skewed, unrealistic view of how law works in the real world. By combining these courses, we hoped to teach students early in their careers to approach problems more like practicing lawyers, who must deal …

A Tale Of Two Clinics: Similarities And Differences In Evidence Of The Clinic Effect On The Development Of Law Students' Ethical And Altruistic Professional Identities, Jonel Newman, Donald Nicolson

Articles

No abstract provided.

Incorporating Social Justice Into The Law School Curriculum With A Hybrid Doctrinal/Writing Course, Rosa Castello

Faculty Publications

Educating future lawyers is about more than just teaching them substantive law. We are preparing professionals who will go out into our world and shape and affect it in deep and impacting ways. They will make law, enforce law, determine policy, defend people, advocate, and influence lives and businesses. Therefore, any thorough law school education should teach social justice and encourage students to become more engaged in activism.

One way to incorporate social justice into the law school curriculum is to offer specific courses focused on social justice. However, administrators may be concerned about demand for such classes or ability …

The Forest And The Trees: What Educational Purposes Can A Course On Christian Legal Thought Serve?, Randy Beck

Scholarly Works

In this short essay, I want to consider the educational purposes a course in Christian legal thought might serve. How could having such a course in the curriculum help accomplish the goals of legal education? One can understand why a law school with a Christian identity would want to offer this sort of course. Such law schools embrace a theology that helps adherents make sense of the world, including the world of human law. The less obvious question I want to consider is why a law school that does not subscribe to a particular theological understanding of the world (or …

Teaching The Law Of American Health Care, Elizabeth Weeks, Nicole Huberfeld, Kevin Outterson

Scholarly Works

In writing our casebook, The Law of American Health Care, we started from scratch, rethinking the topics to include and themes around which to organize them. Like many health law professors, we were schooled in and continued to propound the traditional themes of cost, quality, access, and choice. While those concerns certainly pervade many areas of health care law, our casebook's overarching themes emphasize different issues, namely: federalism, individual rights, fiduciary relationships, the modem administrative state, and market regulation. These new themes, we believe, better capture the range of issues and topics essential for the new generation of health lawyers. …

Fostering Student Authorship, Amy R. Mashburn, Sharon E. Rush

UF Law Faculty Publications

In this essay, we suggest that law schools may provide every student with the opportunity to become involved in the process of producing a publishable paper by establishing on-line repositories for student publications. We describe what such a program, which we call "student authorship," might look like and further explore several primary benefits that such a program would confer upon students.

Tribute To Sam Davis: A Georgia Perspective, Ronald L. Carlson

Scholarly Works

Sam Davis had a twenty-seven year history at Georgia, commencing in 1970. After a distinguished record as a student at the University of Mississippi School of Law, he joined the Georgia law faculty. Sam moved through the academic ranks, ultimately becoming Allen Post Professor of Law. Along the way he served, at various times, as Assistant Dean, as Associate Dean, and he was for a time the University's Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs. In 1997 he took over as Dean at the University of Mississippi School of Law. This article comments on his life and professional career, with some …

End Of The Racial Age: Reflections On The Changing Racial And Ethnic Ancestry Of Blacks On Affirmative Action, Kevin D. Brown

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Thinking On Your Feet: Reflections Of A First-Time Online Instructor, Ashley A. Ahlbrand

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Online education continues to rise in popularity for both undergraduate and graduate education. Among the reasons commonly stated for this preference is flexibility, both of time and location. It came as little surprise, therefore, when our Law Library’s long-term proposal to develop an online advanced legal research course found itself on the fast track. This article will discuss the process we went through to develop this course, the end result, and the lessons learned along the way.