Law Commons^™

Of Wigs, Wickets, And Moonshine: Leadership Development Lessons From An International Collaboration, Douglas A. Blaze

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No abstract provided.

Developing A Culturally Competent Legal Research Curriculum, Shamika Dalton

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No abstract provided.

Silencing Discipline In Legal Education, Lucille Jewel

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In current times, the production of critical legal knowledge has become constrained by a neoliberal education mindset that emphasizes economic performance and measured outcomes over critical thought. In this essay, I argue that academic freedom, in the sense of being free to speak, write, and teach critical knowledge, both in the intellectual sense and in the law practice sense, is being eroded. And, I urge my critically minded colleagues that are traditional law scholars (tenure-track or tenured) to consider the circumstances of law teachers who currently do not have the protections of tenure but who generate valuable knowledge, particularly in …

Oil And Water: How Legal Education's Doctrine And Skills Divide Reproduces Toxic Hierarchies, Lucille Jewel

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The longstanding categorical distinction that elevates doctrinal teaching over skills teaching continues to harm the profession of law. In this Article, I consider two distinct effects produced by the doctrine/skills dichotomy. First, the dichotomy is responsible for reinforcing class, gender, and race segmentation in legal education, which limits the quality of instruction that law schools can provide and abets the reproduction of existing power relations in the legal profession and society at large.

Second, the antipodal positioning of doctrine and theory over skills and practice harms law schools’ ability to prepare a new generation of law students to engage in …

A More Cost Effective Model For Legal Education, Jack Graves

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In his most recent book, Richard Susskind focuses on three primary drivers of change in the market for legal services: (1) the “more-for-less” challenge; (2) the “liberalization” of the regulatory environment; and (3) the effective use of “information technology.” These same three drivers provide the keys to unlocking a more efficient and effective system of legal education. The price of a legal education must be significantly reduced at the vast majority of law schools, and we must deliver a better education at this reduced price. Together, these two objectives comprise the obvious, yet daunting, “more-for-less” challenge we face as educators. …

An Essay On Rebuilding And Renewal In American Legal Education, Jack Graves

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The American model of legal education is broken as a value proposition. Like a building with an undermined foundation, it must be rebuilt rather than refurbished. And, like any rebuilding project, it will be costly and disruptive to many of its occupants. However, it will also present unique opportunities for innovation and renewal. This essay suggests a few of the contours for such a rebuilding project and describes a few of the benefits that might result.

Rethinking U.S. Legal Education: No More "Same Old, Same Old", Nancy B. Rapoport

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In this Essay, I suggest that we should think about how to create a curriculum that encourages students to develop a variety of skill sets. Law students simply don’t need three years of Socratic questioning regarding the fine details of court opinions. They need a wide range of experiences, preferably building on skill sets (like the twenty-six Berkeley factors) that effective lawyers have developed. A law school’s curriculum should have courses that focus on different factors in each year of law school. Ultimately, what we should be teaching law students is how to develop the judgment to advise clients. Teaching …

On Teaching Conflicts And Why I Dislike Allstate Insurance Co. V. Hague, Thomas O. Main

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No abstract provided.

Towards A New World Of Externships: Introduction To Papers From Externships 4 And 5, Alex Scherr, Harriet N. Katz

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The scholarly literature on externships is growing and deepening, addressing concerns of importance to field placement programs and to clinicians in general. This Introduction places the issues raised by the subsequent four articles on externships into the context of current national debates about the externship method. These issues, which both extend and diverge from current thinking about externship pedagogy, include: 1) the impact of a harsh economic climate; 2) the educational potential of placements in corporate counsel offices; 3) the argument for compensating students in for-credit placements; and 4) the value of course design for teaching power dynamics in supervisory …

Report And Recommendations On The Status Of Clinical Faculty In The Legal Academy, Katherine R. Kruse

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"Report and Recommendations on the Status of Clinical Faculty in the Legal Academy" identifies and evaluates the most appropriate modes for clinical faculty appointments in the legal academy, concluding that legal education is best served when full-time clinical faculty are appointed predominantly on a unitary tenure-track model. Drawing on data collected through a survey of clinical program directors and faculty, the Report analyzes the five most identifiable clinical faculty models: unitary tenure track; clinical tenure track; long-term contract; short-term contract; and clinical fellowships. It determines that, despite great strides in the growth of clinical legal education in the last 30 …

The Best Of Times, The Worst Of Times: Securities Regulation Scholarship And Teaching In The Global Financial Crisis, Joan Macleod Heminway

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This short piece is an annotated version of remarks that I gave to introduce a roundtable discussion on securities regulation scholarship at the University of Maryland School of Law program on “Corporate Governance and Securities Law Responses to the Financial Crisis” held on April 17, 2009. The piece represents my current thoughts about what it is like to teach, research, and write in the area of securities regulation. Ultimately, the message I deliver is a positive one; there is much opportunity for securities regulation teachers and scholars in an environment like the one we have been wrestling with since at …

Bourdieu And American Legal Education: How Law Schools Reproduce Social Stratification And Class Hierarchy, Lucille Jewel

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The American legal profession has long been organized along hierarchical lines, and in many instances, status inequalities between attorneys are based on perceived differences in attorneys' educational credentials. Relying upon the theories of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, this essay will discuss how American legal educational institutions operate to reproduce the stratification within the legal profession and within society as a whole.

American law schools are not equalizing institutions that erase all class differences among students to create a profession that awards all of its members a monolithic class status. By allocating professional status based on a system of educational tiers, …

Vico, Llewellyn And The Task Of Legal Education, Francis J. Mootz Iii

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Legal education fails students by not appreciating the rhetorical basis of legal reasoning and argumentation. I draw from Vico's "On the Study Methods of Our Time" and Llewellyn's legal realism; both argued that law and legal reasoning are exemplary sites of rhetoric. I suggest that contemporary cognitive studies of the metaphorical structure of human understanding and the initiatives of the "new legal realism" carry forward the insights of Vico and Llewellyn. This re-orientation corrects the shallow and instrumentalist outlook of most lawyers.

Vico's "Ingenious Method" And Legal Education, Francis J. Mootz Iii

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Contemporary discussions about the need to reform legal education, culminating in the 2007 Carnegie Report, should be put into a broader historical, philosophical and ethical perspective. Three hundred years ago the Italian humanist, Giambattista Vico delivered his famous oration, "On the Study Methods of Our Time," in which he lamented the rise of Cartesian critical philosophy at the expense of the cultivation of imagination, prudence and eloquence. Vico discussed law and legal education as his primary example, and his oration therefore provides an incredible resource for our contemporary deliberations.

Part One considers the literature addressing the demise of legal professionalism …

Recruiting Sexual Minorities And People With Disabilities To Be Dean, Joan W. Howarth

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As our day-to-day work lives make abundantly clear, a law faculty is a many-headed creature: an assortment of people with a variety of interests, strengths, foibles, personalities, and identities. Within the legal academy, a dominant consensus acknowledges that a strong faculty embodies diversity along multiple axes, including, for example, race, gender, religion, age, political ideology, research and teaching methodologies, and subject matter expertise.

The dean, however, stands alone, and stands above. Thus, issues of expectation, representation, comfort with and fear of difference operate quite differently when deans are selected, and when they do their jobs. The dean exercises authority over …

The Willem C. Vis International Commercial Arbitration Moot: Making The Most Of An Extraordinary Educational Opportunity, Jack M. Graves, Stephanie A. Vaughan

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No abstract provided.

Women In Corporate Law Teaching: A Tale Of Two Generations, Margaret V. Sachs

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This Article is divided into three parts. Part I focuses on [Margaret Harris] Amsler and Part II addresses the second generation. Part III explores a question that was prompted by the second generation and that goes to the heart of this Symposium: Do women corporations professors damage their standing in the academic community by examining the interface between corporate law and gender?

Torts In Verse: The Foundational Cases, R. Perry Sentell Jr.

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This Article contains a "verse," "rhyme," or "poem" for each of the truly foundational cases ordinarily studied in first year Torts. The arrangement assumes a typical Torts casebook's order of presentation, but is fairly flexible. Each entry initially sketches the selected case's significance to the body of Tort law and then follows with the verse. The "rhymes" themselves are admittedly (indeed, intentionally) contrived and pedantic, seeking to elicit groans--but hopefully groans of recognition and familiarity. Ideally, the student will most "enjoy" a verse while reading and studying the case itself; indeed, some verse references make little sense otherwise.

Lyman Ray Patterson: Scholar And Gentle Man, Paul M. Kurtz

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The University of Georgia School of Law community and the legal academy lost a dear friend, an outstanding scholar, and a wonderful colleague and teacher when Ray Patterson died after a long career and a short illness in November 2003.

Legal Education Reform: Modest Suggestions, Alan Watson

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No approach to legal education will be perfect, given that (in my opinion) a law school should serve various purposes. But I should like to offer a few modest and practical suggestions. They are modest in that they do not require additional time for law studies. They are practical in that they will increase the exposure of students both to law as practice and to law as an intellectual discipline. In addition they involve no greater burden on law schools.

First, and this should not be controversial -- but I fear will be the most controversial -- would be the …

Foreword: The Many Passions Of Teaching Corporations, Charles R.T. O'Kelley

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This Symposium belies such skeptical views of the Corporations course and those of us who teach it. The 1999 Teaching Corporate Law Conference was organized around teachers' self-identified passions in teaching Corporations--the themes, insights, skills or puzzles about which they are most intrigued or enthused. Thirty-seven professors made presentations at the Conference; twenty-eight have converted their presentations into the essays in this Symposium edition, which have been grouped substantively rather than in the exact order presented at the Conference.

Emotional Intelligence And Legal Education, Marjorie A. Silver

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The traditional knowledge-based law school curriculum is slowly giving way to one that increasingly exposes students to various lawyering skills. Nonetheless, legal educators are generally averse — or at best ill equipped — to support that training with the empathic and psychological skills good lawyering demands. The author discusses how emotional intelligence is essential to good lawyering and argues that it can and should be cultivated in law school. The article draws upon three examples of popular culture to explore both the absence and possibilities of interpersonal intelligence in the practice of law. The author also describes her own law …

Introduction To Law For Second-Year Students?, Alan Watson

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The casebook method of teaching is, in fact, an exercise in futility. It is the students themselves who are expected to build up a picture of law from the few generally disconnected scraps available to them and with virtually no tools. Students are left to guess what the editors' view of the law is rather than getting to what the law is all about. Instead of looking at the reasoning of a case in the light of the developed conceptual thought that preceded it, and of its place in a structured web of reasoned principle, they are provided in the …

Busting The Hart & Wechsler Paradigm, Michael L. Wells

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Federal Courts law was once a vibrant area of scholarship and an essential course for intellectually ambitious students. Now its prestige has diminished so much that scholars debate its future in a recent issue of the Vanderbilt Law Review, where even one of its champions calls it (albeit in the subjunctive mood) a “scholarly backwater.” What, if anything, went wrong, and what should Federal Courts scholars do about it? In his contribution to the Vanderbilt symposium, Richard Fallon defends the reigning model of Federal Courts law, an approach to jurisdictional issues that dates from the publication in 1953 of Henry …