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Full-Text Articles in Law

Assessing Ourselves: Confirming Assumptions And Improving Student Learning By Efficiently And Fearlessly Assessing Student Learning Outcomes., Lori Roberts Aug 2010

Assessing Ourselves: Confirming Assumptions And Improving Student Learning By Efficiently And Fearlessly Assessing Student Learning Outcomes., Lori Roberts

Lori A Roberts

The American Bar Association’s (ABA) proposed accreditation standards for law schools that would require faculty to not only assess individual student performance, but also to assess themselves as legal educators to ensure they are meeting their institutions’ goals of student learning, have stirred a debate among legal educators regarding the justification for assessment and a scramble to figure out how to comply. This article contends that assessment is justified as an ABA accreditation standard given the history of questionable quality and unaccountability in post secondary education, and the increasing reliance on accreditation as a form of consumer protection. Furthermore, cognitive …


Missing Missions: Further Reflections On Institutional Pluralism (Or Its Absence), Jerome Organ Aug 2010

Missing Missions: Further Reflections On Institutional Pluralism (Or Its Absence), Jerome Organ

Journal of Legal Education

No abstract provided.


Learning By Doing: An Experience With Outcomes Assessment, Mary Crossley, Lu-In Wang Jan 2010

Learning By Doing: An Experience With Outcomes Assessment, Mary Crossley, Lu-In Wang

Articles

An emphasis on assessment and outcomes measures is a drum beat that is growing louder in American legal education. Prompted initially by the demands of regional university accreditation bodies, the attention paid to outcomes assessment is now growing with the forecast that the ABA will revise its accreditation standards to incorporate outcomes measures. For the past three years, the University of Pittsburgh School of Law has been developing a system for assessing the learning outcomes of its students. By describing our experience here at Pitt Law, with both its high and low points, we hope to suggest some helpful pointers …


Accrediting The Accreditors: A New Paradigm For Correctional Oversight, Lynn S. Branham Jan 2010

Accrediting The Accreditors: A New Paradigm For Correctional Oversight, Lynn S. Branham

All Faculty Scholarship

Correctional accreditation processes can be revamped to bring more transparency and accountability into the operation of correctional facilities and to help ensure that they comport with sound correctional practices, legal requirements, and basic human-rights precepts. Becoming accredited is now largely optional, and correctional accreditation processes are fee-based. Consequently, correctional accrediting entities are vulnerable to pressures to water down accreditation standards and make accreditation procedures more lax. The federal government should therefore adopt two requirements. First, prisons, jails, and other correctional facilities should have to be accredited by a certified accrediting entity in order to be eligible to receive federal funds. …


The Potential Contribution Of Adr To An Integrated Curriculum: Preparing Law Students For Real World Lawyering, John M. Lande, Jean R. Sternlight Jan 2010

The Potential Contribution Of Adr To An Integrated Curriculum: Preparing Law Students For Real World Lawyering, John M. Lande, Jean R. Sternlight

Faculty Publications

This Article briefly reviews the long history of critiques of legal education that highlight the failure to adequately prepare students for what they will and should do as attorneys. It takes a sober look at the hurdles reformers face when trying to make significant curricular changes and proposes a modest menu of reforms that interested faculty and law schools can largely achieve without investing substantial additional resources.This Article emphasizes the special contributions that alternative dispute resolution (ADR) can provide to legal education more generally. ADR instruction is an important corrective to a curriculum that routinely conveys the erroneous implication that …


The Potential Contribution Of Adr To An Integrated Curriculum: Preparing Law Students For Real World Lawyering, Jean R. Sternlight Jan 2010

The Potential Contribution Of Adr To An Integrated Curriculum: Preparing Law Students For Real World Lawyering, Jean R. Sternlight

Scholarly Works

This Article briefly reviews the long history of critiques of legal education that highlight the failure to adequately prepare students for what they will and should do as attorneys. It takes a sober look at the hurdles reformers face when trying to make significant curricular changes and proposes a modest menu of reforms that interested faculty and law schools can largely achieve without investing substantial additional resources. This Article emphasizes the special contributions that alternative dispute resolution (ADR) can provide to legal education more generally. ADR instruction is an important corrective to a curriculum that routinely conveys the erroneous implication …


Governing Board Accountability: Competition, Regulation And Accreditation, Judith C. Areen Jan 2010

Governing Board Accountability: Competition, Regulation And Accreditation, Judith C. Areen

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This article examines the three primary ways in which the governing boards of American colleges and universities are held to account: (1) competition; (2) regulation, including state nonprofit corporation laws, tax laws, and licensing laws; and (3) accreditation. It begins by tracing how lay (meaning nonfaculty) governing boards became the dominant form of governance in American higher education. It argues that governing boards provide American institutions of higher education with an exceptional degree of autonomy from state control and that, together with the shared governance approach that gives faculties primary responsibility for academic matters, they have been a vital factor …