Law Commons^™

Reflections On Law Schools And The Idea Of The University, Thomas E. Baker

Faculty Publications

Thomas Baker is one of the founding faculty members of the Florida International University College of Law and this article is based on a speech delivered in October of 2002 during the university's Annual Faculty Convocation. It details the composition of both the entering classes and the law faculty and discusses the law school's mission to provide opportunities for minorities to attain representation in the legal profession that is proportionate to their representation in the population. It explores the role of law schools in higher education and notes the FIU College of Law's efforts to incorporate important developments in the …

Taking Diversity Seriously: Affirmative Action And The Democratic Role Of Law Schools: A Response To Professor Brown, Carla Pratt

Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.

Reconciling Professional Legal Education With The Evolving (Trial-Less) Reality Of Legal Practice, Julie Macfarlane, John Manwaring

Journal of Dispute Resolution

Our focus in this paper is the impact of these trends on legal education, especially professional legal education. What is undeniable is that lawyers (and judges) are more and more involved in legal tasks which are not related to trials. This does not necessarily mean that the practice of law is focused exclusively on settlement activities, although such activities are increasingly important. Pre-trial processes and procedures including motions, discovery and mandatory settlement conferences take up more time than ever before. Lawyers are playing a different role, offering different kinds of service to their clients, and performing different tasks

Revisiting "The Need For Negro Lawyers": Are Today's Black Corporate Lawyers Houstonian Social Engineers?, H. Timothy Lovelace Jr.

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Rhetoric Of Academe, Curtis E. A. Karnow

University of San Francisco Law Review

This piece explores the ways in which legal education moved from clerkships in law offices to receiving law degrees from academic institutions. As such, this piece also tracks the formation of legal precedent over time, which too, has shifted from rigid reliance on case law, to more reliance on academic rhetoric propounded by legal scholars.

Incorporating Transnational Materials Into Traditional Courses, Franklin A. Gevurtz

McGeorge School of Law Scholarly Articles

No abstract provided.

Open Access In Law Teaching: A New Approach To Legal Education, Matthew T. Bodie

All Faculty Scholarship

The "open access" movement seeks to change our approach to the distribution of scholarship in the fields of science, medicine, the social sciences, and law. This Essay argues for the application of these principles to legal education itself. Open access would mean greater flexibility, interaction, and innovation in the creation of course materials. It would lead to new teaching methods and new forms of feedback between student and professor. Open access centers on particular legal subject areas could facilitate national and international collaboration. Ultimately, the open access law school would ameliorate the growing standardization and commodification of legal education by …

Library Research Labs: A Hands-On Approach To Taking The First Step With Your Students To Reflect Good Practice In Legal Education, Samantha A. Moppett, Rick Buckingham

Suffolk University Law School Faculty Works

In 2002, Suffolk University Law School began offering library research labs to students in the first-year Legal Practice Skills (LPS) course to give them the opportunity to tackle their first legal research exercises as part of a small group with the ready assistance of a reference librarian and an LPS professor.

This article describes the structure of the research labs and explains how they reflect the "Seven Principles of Good Practice in Legal Education" that were developed to improve student learning, enhance law school teaching, and increase faculty and student personal satisfaction.

Hamdan V. Rumseld: The Legal Academy Goes To Practice, Neal K. Katyal

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Hamdan v. Rumsfeld is a rare Supreme Court rebuke to the President during armed conflict. The time is not yet right to tell all of the backstory of the case, but it is possible to offer some preliminary reflections on how the case was litigated, the decision, and its implications for the oft-noticed divide between legal theory and practice.

In a widely cited article, Judge Harry Edwards lamented "the growing disjunction between legal education and the legal profession," claiming that "many law schools. .. have abandoned their proper place, by emphasizing abstract theory at the expense of practical scholarship and …

Choosing A Text For The Family Law Curriculum Of The Twenty-First Century, Catherine J. Ross

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

This article describes the Family Law Education Reform (FLER) Project Report and provides recommendations as to how a family law professor should select a course textbook. I note that the FLER Report focuses on the importance of new lawyers being sensitive to gender, race, and class and discuss how a textbook focusing on policy, practice problems, and collaborative skills will satisfy the FLER project’s recommendations.

An Introduction To The United States Legal System: Cases And Comments, Alberto M. Benítez

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

This casebook introduces non-U.S trained lawyers, law students, and college undergraduates to the intricacies and nuances of our legal system. The world is becoming a smaller place and as a consequence of this globalization, the need for lawyers who are international in perspective and competence is increasing. Whatever one's opinion about globalization, there is no doubt that the U.S. legal system is at the forefront of these changes. This book attempts to compress three years of U.S. legal education into one casebook.

The following materials in this chapter, and throughout this book, will help non-United States law students and pre-law …

Four Decades Later, Robert Covington

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

Hal Maier and I have taught on the same faculty for four decades. I still like him and enjoy his company, and there are not many people of whom I can say that forty years later. We have agreed and differed with one another on a whole range of issues, from the shape of the first-year curriculum to politics and back again, but have managed to stay friends through it all. Perhaps this is because we could put our differences to one side in the interest of what we insisted was music back when Hal was the drummer and I …

A Teacher's Teacher, Lonnie T. Brown

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

Jackie Robinson once said, "A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives." By that measure, Harold Maier has led an extraordinarily important life. I know that he has had a profound impact on innumerable students throughout his career and upon one in particular. I continue to learn because Professor Maier inspired me, and I teach others because of the wonderful example he set. Though he has now left the classroom, Professor Maier's legacy as a teacher will always endure through the countless minds he has awakened and lives he has touched.

Introduction: One Hundred Years Of International Law At Fordham University, William Michael Treanor

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In the past 100 years, the connotations of the term "international" have changed dramatically. The ideas we have of concepts such as "international communication" and "global travel" are dramatically different from what those concepts would have meant to our forebears - if they had even thought in such terms. But an international perspective is not new at Fordham Law School. The idea of the interconnectedness of our social and legal systems with those of other Nations is one of the foundational values of our school, and it has shaped our history since we opened our doors 100 years ago.

From …

Lawyering Across Multiple Legal Orders – Rethinking Legal Education In Comparative And International Law, Katharina Pistor

Faculty Scholarship

I appreciate the opportunity to briefly introduce a new course Columbia Law School is offering to first year students for the first time this spring semester. The course, which I will be co-teaching with my colleague George Bermann, is called "Lawyering in Multiple Legal Orders." The title reflects the basic "philosophy" of the course, namely that legal practitioners today will invariably work in more than one legal order. This notion is not unfamiliar to lawyers practicing in federal systems, such as the United States. By the end of the first semester students have a basic understanding of the federalist system …

Transsystemia – Are We Approaching A New Langdellian Moment? Is Mcgill Leading The Way?, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

To start, I'd like you to imagine an agglomeration of twenty to thirty jurisdictions experiencing a profound change in the nature of their economic realities. Their economies, and thus the transactions within them and the businesses that conduct them, have been predominantly local in character. Now, political and economic developments are producing businesses and transactions increasingly trans-jurisdictional in character. Increasingly the counseling, drafting, and litigating that goes on in lawyers' offices involves not one jurisdiction but two or three. What happens to legal education?

As the United States emerged from the Civil War and a truly national economy began to …

Introduction: The Jurisprudence Of Justice Stevens Symposium, William Michael Treanor

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Fordham Law School opened its doors on September 28, 1905, a school with ten students and six faculty members. That day marked a great beginning, and on September 28, 2005, we began a year-long celebration of Fordham Law's history and the law school community's remarkable achievements over 100 years. The heart of any great academic institution is, of course, academics, and, as part of the centennial celebration, we are hosting an extraordinary series of conferences. This issue of the Fordham Law Review presents the papers produced by the first of the year's conferences, the Symposium on the jurisprudence of Justice …

Misuse And Abuse Of The Lsat: Making The Case For Alternative Evaluative Efforts And A Redefinition Of Merit, Deobrah W. Post, Phoebe A. Haddon

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Eating Our Cake And Having It, Too: Why Real Change Is So Difficult In Law Schools, Nancy B. Rapoport

Scholarly Works

This essay discusses the experiences of one law school trying to integrate the rankings into its strategic plan. It discusses the intersection of considerations designed to improve the rankings with considerations designed to improve the school as a whole, and it mentions the difficulties inherent in strategic planning in an academic environment.

Internationalizing U.S. Legal Education: A Report On The Education Of Transnational Lawyers, Carole Silver

ExpressO

This article analyses the role of U.S. law schools in educating foreign lawyers and the increasingly competitive global market for graduate legal education. U.S. law schools have been at the forefront of this competition, but little has been reported about their graduate programs. This article presents original research on the programs and their students, drawn from interviews with directors of graduate programs at 35 U.S. law schools, information available on law school web sites about the programs, and interviews with graduates of U.S. graduate programs. Finally, the article considers the responses of U.S. law schools to new competition from foreign …

Advancing Public Interest Practitioner Research Skills In Legal Education, Randy J. Diamond

Faculty Publications

The information revolution has dramatically altered the legal research landscape, expanding the bounds of legal authority. Practitioner research requires more than traditional legal research. It also encompasses factual investigation, non-legal information, interdisciplinary and audience research. Many new lawyers are ill-prepared to research novel and unusual situations, to cope with unwritten laws and local customs, and to meet shifting authority expectations.

Teaching Legal Research And Writing With Actual Legal Work: Extending Clinical Education Into The First Year, Steven D. Schwinn

ExpressO

In this article, we advocate using actual legal work to teach legal research and writing courses, including first year courses. By “actual legal work,” we mean work that is part of an ongoing or planned lawsuit, transaction, negotiation or other form of legal representation. We offer an overview and critique of the traditional legal writing curriculum, and we describe our initiatives to build upon and enhance that curriculum with the use of actual legal work. We conclude with some thoughts on the relative merits of our approach and ideas for following our model.

Two Rules For Better Writing, Amy E. Sloan

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Legal Employment Market: Determinants Of Elite Firm Placement, And How Law Schools Stack Up, Anthony M. Ciolli

ExpressO

Data collected on 15,293 law firm associates from 1295 employers who graduated from law school between 2001 and 2003 were used to develop a “total quality score” for every ABA-accredited law school, both nationally and for nine geographic regions. Quantitative methods were then used to identify factors that help explain the variation in a law school’s national career placement success at elite law firms. The findings revealed that while a law school’s academic reputation is the single biggest predictor of placement, several other factors were also highly significant. Differences in grading system, class rank disclosure policies, and the number of …

The Discourse Beneath: Emotional Epistemology In Legal Deliberation And Negotiation, Erin Ryan

Scholarly Publications

All lawyers negotiate, and all negotiators deliberate. This article addresses the pervasive but unrefined use of emotional insight by deliberating and negotiating lawyers, and suggests that legal education could improve lawyering by adopting a fuller model of legal thinking that takes account of this "epistemological emotionality." In forming the beliefs that underlie choices made during deliberation and negotiation, people rely on insights informed by past and present emotional experience. Such epistemological emotionality fuels a pre-linguistic, quasi-inductive reasoning process that enables us to draw on stored information about emotional phenomena to hypothesize about motives, behavior, and potential consequences. As deliberation moves …

The Future Of The Casebook: An Argument For An Open-Source Approach, Matthew T. Bodie

ExpressO

Despite dramatic technological change, the thick, attractively-bound casebook remains ensconced as the written centerpiece of legal education. That will soon change – but its replacement has not been established. This paper argues that the legal academy should take this opportunity to implement an “open source” approach to future course materials. Guided by analysis and examples of commons-based peer production such as open source software, professors could establish electronic commons casebooks with a myriad of materials for every course. These joint databases would unshackle individual creativity while engendering collaboration on levels previously impossible. Although there may be concerns that such a …

Legal Education In The Americas: The Anchor For Hemispheric Justice, Jon L. Mills

UF Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

"In A Case, In A Book, They Will Not Take A Second Look!" Critical Reading In The Legal Writing Classroom, Debra Curtis, Judith Karp

Faculty Scholarship

This article is based on a presentation that was first assembled for the Southeastern Regional Legal Writing Conference in September 2003. The theme of that conference was "The Basics and Beyond: Building Solid Skills on Flawed Foundations." As legal writing professions with nine years of teaching experience between us, we immediately honed in on "reading" as a core lawyering skill--though it is the one that seemed most flawed in the first-year legal writing class. We determined that case analysis, statute analysis, synthesis, and application were not possible unless students critically read the material with which they were working. Many students …

Going On-Line With Justice Pedagogy: Four Ways Of Looking At A Web Site, Fran Ansley

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Sometimes You Have To Be The Guide On The Side, David I.C. Thomson

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

A saying in the literature of collaborative learning scolds us teachers for being too fond of the sound of our own voices: “You need to be less of the ‘Sage on the Stage’ and more of the ‘Guide on the Side.’” The night of my “best class” this saying really hit home to me. I was the Guide on the Side, and the students took over the teaching– and the learning.