Law Commons^™

Reproducing Gender And Race Inequality In The Blawgosphere, Jane C. Murphy, Solangel Maldonado

All Faculty Scholarship

The use of the Internet and other digital media to disseminate scholarship has great potential for expanding the range of voices in legal scholarship. Legal blogging, in particular, with its shorter, more informal form, seems ideal for encouraging commentary from a diverse group of scholars. This Chapter tests this idea by exploring the role of blogging in legal scholarship and the level of participation of women and scholars of color on the most visible academic legal blogs. After noting the predominance of white male scholars as regular contributors on these blogs, we analyze the relative lack of diversity in this …

Implementing A First-Year Research Assessment, Savanna L. Nolan

All Faculty Scholarship

University of Baltimore Law librarians do not have a formal role in teaching legal research, but are frequent guest lecturers and recognized research experts. As such, we volunteered to administer UB's first summative assessment in accordance with the recent implementation of ABA Standard 314. This poster shows the steps taken to design, execute, and grade this legal research assessment, as well as how we reported the results to stakeholders.

The assessment had an objective true/false and multiple-choice section, and a subjective essay question. The librarians selected objective questions considering the core legal research competencies identified by RIPS-SIS following the MacCrate …

Another Look At The Need For Family Law Education Reform: One Law School's Innovations, Barbara A. Babb

All Faculty Scholarship

The pressing need to change family law education stems from increased numbers and types of family law matters before the courts, changing legal standards, and the evolution of family law practice. The Family Law Education Reform Project, the Families Matter Report, and the IAALS Family Bar Summit recommend that traditional family law education be supplemented to reflect the importance of a holistic blend of theory and practice. This involves expanding student clinical or experiential programs, incorporating interdisciplinary studies specific to the context of family law, and enhancing continuing legal education opportunities. As one law school example, the University of Baltimore …

From The Technical To The Personal: Teaching And Learning Health Insurance Regulation And Reform, Allison K. Hoffman, Whitney A. Brown, Lindsay Cutler

All Faculty Scholarship

In the Fall of 2016, I taught Health Law and Policy for the fourth consecutive semester. Over time, one thing has become increasingly clear: the aspect of this course that I work with most closely as a scholar—the regulation of health care financing and insurance, including the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA)—is also the material that I find the most challenging to teach. Every time I reflect on teaching this material, and hear from students about how they learn this material, the thing that stands out is how critical it is that my students understand the profound impact …

Law As Instrumentality, Jeremiah A. Ho

All Faculty Scholarship

Our conceptions of law affect how we objectify the law and ultimately how we study it. Despite a century’s worth of theoretical progress in American law—from legal realism to critical legal studies movements and postmodernism—the formalist conception of “law as science,” as promulgated by Christopher Langdell at Harvard Law School in the late-nineteenth century, still influences methodologies in American legal education. Subsequent movements of legal thought, however, have revealed that the law is neither scientific nor “objective” in the way the Langdellian formalists once envisioned. After all, the Langdellian scientific objectivity of law itself reflected the dominant class, gender, power, …

Solving Ethical Puzzles To Unlock University Technology Transfer Client Work For An Intellectual Property Legal Clinic, Cynthia L. Dahl

All Faculty Scholarship

Intellectual property (IP) and technology legal clinics are experiencing an unprecedented surge in popularity. Before 2000 there were only five such clinics, but by 2016 there were seventy-four, with fifty added since 2010 alone. As law schools are approving new IP clinics and as practitioners are developing syllabi, there is an increasing need to share knowledge about models that work and how to avoid pitfalls.

One potentially fertile – but traditionally underutilized -- source of client work for an IP and technology clinic is the university technology transfer office (“TTO”), the department that protects, markets, and licenses all university intellectual …

How To Think (Like A Lawyer) About Rape, Kimberly Kessler Ferzan, Peter K. Westen

All Faculty Scholarship

From the American Law Institute to college campuses, there is a renewed interest in the law of rape. Law school faculty, however, may be reluctant to teach this deeply debated topic. This article begins from the premise that controversial and contested questions can be best resolved when participants understand the conceptual architecture that surrounds and delineates the normative questions. This allows participants to talk to one another instead of past each other. Accordingly, in this article, we begin by diffusing two non-debates: the apparent conflict created when we use “consent” to mean two different things and the question of whether …

Law, Society, And Setsuo: Miyazawa’S Influence On Socio-Legal Studies, Eric A. Feldman

All Faculty Scholarship

What Setsuo has accomplished over these past 30 years is nothing short of remarkable. I can think of no other scholar within or outside of Japan who has had a greater impact on both the legal academic community and society more generally. Indeed, when Setsuo was still quite young he had already written a number of influential articles. But they turn out to represent only a fraction of his extraordinary output over the next years. In reflecting on Setsuo’s many achievements, I am particularly drawn to comment on three of them. First, his empirical and comparative law and society scholarship, …

A Human Rights Code Of Conduct: Ambitious Moral Aspiration For A Public Interest Law Office Or Law Clinic, Lauren Bartlett

All Faculty Scholarship

The standards regulating the decision-making and behavior of lawyers in the U.S. currently provide inadequate guidance for many of the ethical dilemmas that practicing attorneys face on a daily basis. Universal human rights principles—the concepts of morality underlying much of human rights law—provide more ambitious moral direction that lawyers can use to guide decision-making and behavior. This article discusses why additional aspirational goals are needed for the legal profession and explains how and why to apply universal human rights principles to lawyering in the U.S. The article goes on to introduce the idea of adopting a human rights code of …

Bridging The Gap: A Joint Negotiation Project Crossing Legal Disciplines, K. E. Powell, Lauren Bartlett

All Faculty Scholarship

This article discusses the creation and implementation of a cross-discipline negotiation simulation project designed by two law professors at Ohio Northern University Claude W. Pettit College of Law. The project bridged the gap between podium classes and clinical experience, exposing two separate groups of students to new subject areas. Professors Lauren E. Bartlett and Karen Powell brought together two distinct law classes, one doctrinal tax class and one pretrial litigation skills class, to exercise legal skills, and learn substantive and procedural law from their classmates, while acting as an attorney or a client in a simulated negotiation.