Law Commons^™

Special Introduction: October 2010, Lauren K. Robel

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

What Balance In Legal Education Means To Me: A Dissenting View, Lawrence Raful

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Teaching Posthumanist Ethics In Law School: The Race, Culture, And Gender Dimensions Of Student Resistance, Maneesha Deckha

Animal Law Review

This Essay challenges laws’ hegemonic humanist boundaries by analyzing the challenges involved in mainstreaming posthumanist subjects into the legal curricula. Posthumanist subjects in legal education are perceived as marginal and unworthy of serious discussion and scholarship. The author identifies the problems that can arise in introducing posthumanist critical content through her experience of teaching animal law as an optional course and as a part of a compulsory first-year course on property law and in advising on an upper-year student-led conference. She argues that the biases related to gendered, racialized, and otherwise differentiated norms inherited by the legal education system as …

Update: Using Casemap In Legal Research And Writing (Lrw) Classes And Clinics, David I. C. Thomson

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

Written “research logs” focus on the quality of the research path the student had taken, but not necessarily on the quality of the student’s thinking. CaseMap, a modern alternative to the old written research log, permits LRW teachers to enter into a student’s thinking in the critical pre-writing stage. With CaseMap, the LRW or clinical teacher can help refine the student’s legal analysis well before the student begins to write. Despite CaseMap’s limitations - namely its complexity and current incompatibility with Mac computers - this short article serves as an update of a more extensive article about using CaseMap in …

Games In The Law School Classroom: Enhancing The Learning Experience, Karin M. Mika

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Educators have always been concerned with devising ways to make education fun while engaging students in an activity that will be intellectually beneficial. This article explores the use of games in the legal writing classroom.

Journeys To 20th Street: The Inner City As Critical Pedagogical Space For Legal Education, Sarah Buhler

Dalhousie Law Journal

This essay draws on critical geographical theories to propose that the location of clinical legal education programs in inner city space can affect the production of professional identities and ideologies oflaw students. It anchors its analysis in an examination of the clinical law program at the University of Saskatchewan College of Law, where students work at a poverty law clinic in Saskatoon's inner city. The paper first turns to a critical examination of law school space, which can function to promote dominant notions about law and legal practice. The author cautions that ifnot navigated attentively, thejourney to inner city space …

Where Have All The (Legal) Stories Gone?, Nancy B. Rapoport

Scholarly Works

This essay examines whether law schools are doing a good job of teaching the art of storytelling to law students.

Pierson V. Post: The New Learning, Daniel R. Ernst

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Pierson v. Post, 3 Caines 175 (N.Y. 1805), one of the most commonly assigned cases in the first-year Property course, was a dispute over the ownership of a fox discovered at large “upon a certain wild and uninhabited, unpossessed and waste land, called the beach.” For a very long time, all that was known about the case, other than the report itself, was a vivid but antiquarian account published in the Sag Harbor Express of October 24, 1895, by the judge and local historian Henry Parsons Hedges (1817-1911). Hedges claimed to have met Jesse Pierson (1780-1840) and Lodowick Post …

Liberalization And The Development Of Legal Education Policy In East Africa: A Case Study Of Uganda, Pamela Tibihikirra-Kalyegira

Maurer Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation analyzes the liberalization of legal education and training in East Africa. It explores avenues for developing a legal education policy that addresses various problems with regard to the quality of law graduates and of legal services in the market place currently available given the large number of law graduates entering the professional field each year.

The legal systems in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda to a large extent follow the Common Law theories and practices of English Law. The three countries also share a history in the establishment of law schools and they face similar problems and challenges with …

The Benefits Of Podcasting, Karin M. Mika

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

This article discusses the benefits of podcasting in legal writing courses, based on the author's participation in CALI's 2005 inaugural podcasting project.

Wikis While You Work: Incorporating Wikis In The Classroom, Samantha A. Moppett

Suffolk University Law School Faculty Works

In many instances, today's students learn more effectively through the use of technology. Wikis-Web sites that allow numerous people to contribute and edit the content of the site-are one of the newer technology tools available. This article introduces wikis, describes one way the author has used wikis as a teaching tool, and explores the advantages of using wikis in the classroom.

Dan Freed: My Teacher, My Colleague, My Friend, Ronald Weich

All Faculty Scholarship

At a recent meeting of the National Association of Sentencing Commissions, Yale professor Dan Freed was honored during a panel discussion titled "Standing on the Shoulders of Sentencing Giants," Dan Freed is indeed a sentencing giant. but he is the gentlest giant of all. It is hard to imagine that a man as mild-mannered, soft-spoken, and self-effacing as Dan Freed has had such a profound impact on federal sentencing law and so many other areas of criminal justice policy, Yet he has.

I've been in many rooms with Dan Freed over the years — classrooms, boardrooms, dining rooms, and others. …

Foundational Competencies: Innovation In Legal Education, David E. Van Zandt

Faculty Working Papers

Spurred by a rapidly changing legal environment and a desire to differentiate and maximize the success of our graduates, Northwestern Law recently completed a major strategic planning initiative resulting in a revolutionary report entitled Plan 2008: Preparing Great Leaders for the Changing World. Plan 2008 is the most recent installment of a long-term process to enhance our student quality and programs. The new initiatives build upon a strategic plan that we have been refining since its implementation in 1998. Under the prior plan, we introduced the evaluative admissions interview and work-experience policy for applicants.1 We also added a number of …

Research Stories: Video Tales From The Summer Associate Workplace, Susan Herrick

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Recalibrating The Moral Compass: Expanding "Thinking Like A Lawyer" Into "Thinking Like A Leader", Karen H. Rothenberg

Faculty Scholarship

This essay was prepared for the Leadership in Legal Education Symposium IX.

"The Real World": Creating A Compelling Appellate Brief Assignment Based On A Real-World Case, Elizabeth Inglehart, Martha Kanter

Faculty Working Papers

Creating an appellate brief problem that is realistic, balanced, and interesting for students to work on is one of the most challenging opportunities facing a legal analysis and writing professor. Developing such a problem is particularly important because many legal writing courses use an appellate brief problem throughout an entire law school semester, usually requiring students to write at least one, and often two, appellate briefs based on the problem, and to argue that case in a moot court. This article provides advice, drawn from the authors' experience as professor of legal analysis and writing, as to how to develop …

Pedagogic Techniques: Multi-Disciplinary Courses, Annotated Document Review, Collaborative Work & Large Groups, George Kuney

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Who Gets To Be The Expert?: Legal Research Skills Certification In Legal Education, Richard Leiter

Marvin and Virginia Schmid Law Library: Faculty Publications

This article considers the question of whether there is a need for law schools to offer certification for specialization in legal research skills and discusses various approaches to legal research skills cer­tification. The author argues that it is unnecessary to offer legal research certification as it is presupposed that a basic legal educa­tion should include instruction in how to find and read the law. Anything less is a failed legal education.

Exactly how special are legal research skills? Are they special enough to warrant certification? As a matter of fact, the act of legal researching is so intimately connected with …

Law School 2.0: Legal Education For A Digital Age, David I.C. Thomson

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

Legal education is at a crossroads. As today's media-saturated students enter law school, they find themselves thrust into old style lecture-orientated, casebook modes of instruction, much of which is over 100 years old. Over those years legal education has resisted many studies recommending change, most recently from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Clinical Legal Education Association. . .

Implementing The Social And Economic Promise Of The Constitution: The Role Of South African Legal Education, Susan R. Jones, Peggy Maisel

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

The South African Constitution recognizes socio-economic rights as a necessary foundation for the enjoyment of civil and political rights. The South African Constitution, one of the most progressive in the world, contains many important protections such as the rights to equality, housing, and education. The Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment Law (BEE) was designated to address the economic inequities of apartheid. South Africa’s commitment to economic justice is also evidenced by the fact that it is a signatory to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). The challenge is translating these rights into opportunities for social and economic …

American Moment[S]: When, How, And Why Did Israeli Law Faculties Come To Resemble Elite U.S. Law Schools?, Pnina Lahav

Faculty Scholarship

Following independence in 1948, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem founded a law faculty and modeled it on the European example (Continental and British). Today, the Israeli law faculty is much more similar to the U.S. law school than to institutions of legal education in Europe. This Article traces the history of the changes in Israeli legal education. It argues that the shift began after 1967, faced resistance in the 1980s, and gained momentum in the 1990s. Presently we may be witnessing the beginning of a shift away from U.S. influence and back to Continental Europe or even Asia. The Article …

Finding Power, Fighting Power (Or The Perpetual Motion Machine), Mae Quinn

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

The Madoff Scandal, Market Regulatory Failure And The Business Education Of Lawyers, Robert J. Rhee

UF Law Faculty Publications

This essay suggests that a deficiency in legal education is a contributing cause of the regulatory failure. The most scandalous malfeasance of this new era, the Madoff Ponzi scheme, evinces the failure of improperly trained lawyers and regulators. It also calls into question whether the prevailing regulatory philosophy of disclosure is sufficient in a complex market. This essay answers an important question underlying these considerations: What can legal education do to better train business lawyers and regulators for a market that is becoming more complex. One answer, it suggests, is a simple one: law schools should teach a little more …

Employment As Transaction, Rachel Arnow-Richman

UF Law Faculty Publications

This piece offers a fresh perspective on the upper-level employment law class based on the theme of employment as transaction. Like much of law school, employment law is often taught from a public advocacy perspective in which the primary role of the lawyer is to vindicate workers' rights or responsively defend managerial action. As a doctrinal matter, however, courts are showing increased attention to the role of private ordering in defining workplace rights and assessing liability, even in regulatory areas. Courts routinely examine employers' efforts to redress unlawful behavior under antidiscrimination law and consistently sanction the use of arbitration agreements …

Externships: A Signature Pedagogy For The Apprenticeship Of Professional Identity And Purpose, Kelly S. Terry

Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

A Law Library Development Project In Iraq, Kimberli Morris Kelmor

Law Library Faculty Works

The author talks about her changing perspectives on her experiences while working in Iraq with the International Human Rights Law Institute from February 2004 to Jan 1, 2006. The contract was initially proposed as a three-year plan to help Iraqi law schools overcome the effects of more than twenty years of economic, physical, and intellectual isolation. The complete project included a program for clinical legal education, curriculum reform, rule of law, and library and educational technology. Accomplishing this in three geographically dispersed schools was a logical plan, but a very ambitious one. As the security situation and travel restrictions worsened, …

Teaching Business Lawyering In Law Schools: A Candid Assessment Of The Challenges And Some Suggestions For Moving Ahead, Eric J. Gouvin

Faculty Scholarship

As a result of several recent studies and changes in the ABA's Standards for Approval of Law Schools, legal education is paying more attention to skills training for law students. The need to bring the skills and values of business lawyers into the classroom has never been greater, yet there remains a real risk that "skills training" may be skewed in favor of litgation skills, with little emphasis given to transactional practice. This Article assesses some of the obstacles that stand in the way of effective integration of transactional skills into the law school curriculum and offers some concrete suggestions …

The Anti-Case Method: Herbert Wechsler And The Political History Of The Criminal Law Course, Anders Walker

All Faculty Scholarship

This article is the first to recover the dramatic transformation in criminal law teaching away from the case method and towards a more open-ended philosophical approach in the 1930s. It makes three contributions. One, it shows how Columbia Law Professor Herbert Wechsler revolutionized the teaching of criminal law by de-emphasizing cases and including a variety of non-case related material in his 1940 text Criminal Law and Its Administration. Two, it reveals that at least part of Wechsler's intention behind transforming criminal law teaching was to undermine Langdell's case method, which he blamed for producing a "closed-system" view of the law …

To And From The Community, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

I am glad to have been asked to share with the readers of Mizan Law Review, the thoughts that occurred to me at the end of my two-week stay in Ethiopia. It is difficult to express thoughts upon impromptu invitation. On the other hand, conversations like the one I had when I was invited to express my thoughts unveil one’s inner voice which readily responds although words from the heart might lack the pattern and the roadmap of thoughts and memories polished through the mind.

Spam Jurisprudence, Air Law, And The Rank Anxiety Of Nothing Happening (A Report On The State Of The Art), Pierre Schlag

Publications

In 1969, I saw The Endless Summer. It was a surfer movie about two guys (Robert and Mike) who traveled the world in search of the perfect wave. High art -- it was not. Plus the plot was thin. And it's for sure, there weren't enough girls. But there was one line which, for my generation, will go down as one of the all-time great movie lines ever. And always it was a line delivered by some local to Robert and Mike, the surfer dudes, as they arrived on the scene of yet another dispiritingly becalmed ocean. And every …