Law Commons^™

The Uc-Irvine Experiment: Will It Be Effective At Teaching Contract Law?, Greg Crespi

Greg Crespi

The new law school at the University of California, Irvine is attempting to implement an innovative vision of top-tier legal education that focuses upon preparing students for the practice of law, and which emphasizes skills-based and experiential training. As part of that effort the school has restructured the traditional first-year law school curriculum so that several of the courses each focus on particular analytical methods, specifically common law analysis, statutory analysis, procedural analysis, constitutional analysis, and international legal analysis, rather than on a particular subject matter such as contracts, torts, etc. While there are some advantages to this new approach, …

Hitting The Wall As A Legal Writer, Elizabeth Fajans

Elizabeth Fajans

This article tries to answer a question students frequently ask, but which I often find hard to answer, namely, how they can move from a “B+” or “A-” on a paper to an “A.” Papers at the “B” level or lower have clearly identifiable faults: they lack thoroughness, misstate authority, draw imperfect analogies, make implausible arguments, or contain organizational, grammatical, or citation errors. In contrast, a “B+” or “A-“ paper may make none of these errors; they just lack a certain something, some value-added factor not captured by standard rubrics. Not only are the value-added factors harder to identify and …

Escaping The Appellate Litigation Straitjacket: Incorporating An Alternative Dispute Resolution Simulation Into A First-Year Legal Writing Class, Mary Dunnewold, Mary Trevor

Mary L Dunnewold

This article discusses the incorporation of a mediation exercise into the first semester of a legal research and writing course. At the author’s institution, we have been including this exercise in our curriculum for sixteen years. In the article, we first briefly review the historical underpinnings for incorporating ADR into non-ADR law school classes. We then examine the current pedagogical theories supporting such incorporation. We next discuss why the exercise fits well within the LRW curriculum. Finally, we address the nuts-and-bolts of the exercise and offer our observations and conclusions about the exercise, including discussion of student feedback obtained through …

Expanding Pro Bono's Role In Legal Education, Margaret M. Cordray

Margaret M Cordray

As an increasing number of Americans are unable to afford an attorney to help with urgent legal problems, they are left to navigate a complex legal system on their own. In the effort to motivate more attorneys to provide desperately needed pro bono services, law schools must play a greater role in introducing students to the value and importance of pro bono work. This article contends that by implementing a program which offers students meaningful pro bono work that is both educational and easily accessible, law schools can involve more students in pro bono activities. The article also offers an …

Come A Little Closer So That I Can See You My Pretty: The Use And Limits Of Fiction Point Of View Techniques In Appellate Briefs, Cathren Page

Cathren Page

Come a Little Closer so That I Can See You my Pretty, The Use and Limits of Fiction Point of Techniques in Appellate Briefs began when I was struggling to explain point of view to my students in Appellate Advocacy. They represented a fictional criminal defendant whose bag was searched when the police were executing a premises warrant at his friend’s house. My students scrunched up their faces when I tried to explain why they should not start their facts with the friend’s crime that spurred the search. The crime happened first in time, so to them it came first. …

Electronic Discovery: Sanctioning Spoliation With An Adverse Inference Instruction, Robert A. Weninger

Robert A Weninger

This article discusses the spoliation of ESI (electronically stored evidence) in a completely non-technical way. It focuses on the law governing sanctions and not on computer technology.

Professor Richard L. Marcus, the Special Reporter to the Civil Rules Advisory Committee and a primary drafter of the 2006 amendments addressing the discovery of ESI, reviewed my article and was enthusiastic about it. The article is particularly timely because the Advisory Committee is presently considering whether to propose further amendments to address problems created by the disparate positions taken by federal courts on issues concerning sanctions for spoliation.

Courts divide over the …

Clients: Essential To A Legal Practice, Needed In Doctrinal Legal Education, Cheryl B. Wattley

Cheryl B. Wattley

ABSTRACT Drawing from my almost thirty years of law practice experience, it is my belief that clients are looking for an attorney who will communicate effectively with them, focus on their situation and give them an assurance that the attorney will use his or her expertise to the client’s benefit to achieve the best possible result. Client concerns reflect a humanity of relationship, an affective dimension, that is stifled in traditional doctrinal instruction. The article begins with a brief section about legal education, noting the spotlight that the publications of the Carnegie Report and Best Practices have brought to the …

A Better Beginning: Why And How To Help Novice Legal Writers Build A Solid Foundation By Shifting Their Focus From Product To Process, Miriam E. Felsenburg, Laura P. Graham

Miriam E Felsenburg

Several years ago, we set out to discover why early legal writing is so difficult for many beginning law students and what we can do to make it easier. In a prior article, we described several key factors that contributed to student overconfidence and illustrated how this overconfidence impeded students’ progress in both early legal analysis and early legal writing. In this follow-up article, we suggest strategies for better orienting students to law school learning and better managing their goals for legal writing at the beginning of the first-year course.The legal writing classroom is usually the place where students are …

The Ugly Ducking Comes Of Age: The Promise Of Full-Time Field Placements, Robert A. Parker, Sue Schechter

Robert A. Parker

This article locates field placement offerings within a landscape of legal education that is being transformed by incisive critiques, new regulations, advances in technology, and harsh economic conditions. Drawing upon our combined experience of over 15 years working with students enrolled in full-time field placements and with faculties who define the parameters of field placement programs, we offer a description of the advantages of these programs, innovative options for implementation, and some traps for the unwary. The heart of our article is a discussion of the results of our comprehensive survey of all 200 ABA approved law schools. The information …

Helping Ideas Have Consequences: Political And Intellectual Investment In The Unitary Executive Theory, 1981-2000, Amanda L. Hollis-Brusky

Amanda Hollis-Brusky

This article explains the remarkable frequency with which the Unitary Executive Theory (UET) was used in the George W. Bush Justice Department (2001-2008) as legal justification for Executive branch action. It shows how this seemingly sudden turn in Executive branch interpretation was actually the result of a series of long-term political investments by key conservative and libertarian actors who worked to develop the intellectual underpinnings of the UET first within the Reagan and George H. W. Bush Justice Departments and then within the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy. Specifically, it draws on interview data and other ethnographic evidence …

Fixing Students' Fixed Mindsets: Paving The Way To Meaningful Assessment, Carrie Sperling

Carrie Sperling

Soon every law school in the country will be turning its attention to the important topic of assessment. Responding to a new ABA guideline, schools will be tackling the difficult task of defining, refining, and creating more assessment opportunities for their students. The guideline’s purpose is to improve student learning through more assessment, but nothing in the ABA proposal changes the fact that many of our students fail to react adaptively to feedback. Instead, many students will become hostile, defensive, or despondent and will, therefore, not further develop their competencies.

With the American Bar Association putting emphasis on formative assessment …

Fixing Students' Fixed Mindsets: Paving The Way For Meaningful Assessment, Carrie Sperling

Carrie Sperling

Soon every law school in the country will be turning its attention to the important topic of assessment. Responding to a new ABA guideline, schools will be tackling the difficult task of defining, refining, and creating more assessment opportunities for their students. The guideline’s purpose is to improve student learning through more assessment, but nothing in the ABA proposal changes the fact that many of our students fail to react adaptively to feedback. Instead, many students will become hostile, defensive, or despondent, and will therefore not further develop their competencies.

With the American Bar Association putting emphasis on formative assessment …

Fixing Students' Fixed Mindsets: Paving The Way For Meaningful Assessment, Carrie Sperling

Carrie Sperling

Soon every law school in the country will be turning its attention to the important topic of assessment. Responding to a new ABA guideline, schools will be tackling the difficult task of defining, refining, and creating more assessment opportunities for their students. The guideline’s purpose is to improve student learning through more assessment, but nothing in the ABA proposal changes the fact that many of our students fail to react adaptively to feedback. Instead, many students will become hostile, defensive, or despondent, and will therefore not further develop their competencies.

With the American Bar Association putting emphasis on formative assessment …

The "Plus One" Clinic: Adding (Political) Value To The Clinical Experience By Representing Landlords Alongside Tenants, Raja Raghunath

Raja Raghunath

This article proposes a novel clinical methodology for teaching “political” values, which it defines as values that are not encompassed by the Rules of Professional Conduct, but extend beyond personal morality, and include the values that fall under the Carnegie Report’s “third apprenticeship” of professional education. Under the “plus one” approach, a clinic with an existing docket of eviction defense representation would add to that docket at least one case representing a landlord seeking to evict a tenant, and a clinic representing workers in wage or employment discrimination claims would add at least one case representing an employer defending one …

American Biglaw Lawyers And The Schools That Produce Them: A Profile And Rankings, Paul Oyer, Scott Schaefer

Paul Oyer

We profile the lawyers that work at the largest 300 American law firms as of the Summer of 2008. We show how gender, years of experience, prestige of law school, and other qualities vary across lawyers of different rank and firms of different prestige. Geography is an important determinant of where lawyers work, with many going to undergraduate school and law school near where they ultimately practice. Geography is less important, however, at more prestigious firms and for graduates of higher ranked firms. We then go on to rank law firms based on the prestige of the law schools they …

The Path, Posner, And Persuasion: Jurisprudential Stances And Style In Judicial Writing And Their Influence On Legal Education, Amy C. Thorn

Amy C Thorn

No abstract provided.