Law Commons^™

Where Do The Prophets Stand?: Hamdi, Myth And The Master's Tools, Linda H. Edwards

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Joining The Conversation: Law Library Research Assistant Programs And Current Criticisms Of Legal Education, David Mcclure

Scholarly Works

Law libraries should play a greater role in addressing the current crisis in legal education. Proponents for educational reform often view libraries as a vehicle for cost savings, while overlooking the ability of libraries to train students in the skills and competencies that are essential for the practice of law. Libraries’ research assistant programs can be particularly effective in imparting workplace values and lawyering skills beyond the traditional law school curriculum. This article encourages libraries to build on the strengths of their research assistant programs as a substantive way to equip law students with essential skills for today’s legal marketplace.

Plus Ça Change, Plus C’Est La Même Chose, Nancy B. Rapoport

Scholarly Works

This essay takes the original plans from NYU Law School and draws analogies between those plans and the issues facing legal education today.

Benjamin Butler's 1835 Plan for the Organization of a Law Faculty and for a System of Instruction in Legal Science in the University for the City of New-York will make any law school dean feel like Yogi Berra: it’s “deja-vu all over again.” The issue of how best to organize a curriculum to train legal professionals was a hot topic then, and it’s a hot topic now.

Law Clinics And Lobbying Restrictions, Kevin Barry, Marcy Karin

University of Colorado Law Review

"Can law school clinics lobby?" This question has plagued professors for decades but has gone unanswered, until now. This Article situates law school clinics within the labyrinthine law of lobbying restrictions and concludes that clinics may indeed lobby. For ethical, pedagogical, and, ultimately, practical reasons, it is critical that professors who teach in clinics understand these restrictions. This Article offers advice to professors and students on safely navigating this complicated terrain.

Experiential Education In The Lecture Hall, Jessica M. Erickson

Law Faculty Publications

Legal education today is composed of two separate worlds. The first world includes clinical faculty, law skills faculty, and other related faculty. These faculty members have long embraced experiential education, and they organize and attend conferences like the "Experience the Future" symposium, hosted by Northeastern University School of Law and the Alliance for Experiential Learning in Law. The other world includes people like me- doctrinal faculty members who are still largely teaching the way we always have. As we see it, our role is to teach doctrine and legal analysis, leaving skills training and other experiential teaching to others. Experiential …

Beyond Langdell: Innovation In Legal Education, Beverly Peterson Jennison

Catholic University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Legal Education And Professional Skills: Myths And Misconceptions About Theory And Practice, Kate Kruse

Faculty Scholarship

Current critiques of legal education push law schools toward seemingly contradictory goals: (1) provide more practical training to a greater number of students; and (2) lower operational costs. This article addresses those who have a sincere desire to meet both goals. Although it offers a proposal for restructuring legal education, its primary focuses is on the mental and psychological barriers — the mistakes in thinking — that prevent law faculties from engaging in substantial. At the deepest level is a basic myth: that professional education can meaningfully separate theory from practice. This myth divides legal education into a series of …

Reforming Legal Education To Prepare Law Students Optimally For Real-World Practice, John M. Lande

Faculty Publications

This article synthesizes major points in the October 2012 symposium of the University of Missouri School of Law Center for the Study of Dispute Resolution, entitled "Overcoming Barriers in Preparing Law Students for Real-World Practice." There is a growing consensus that American law schools need to do a better job of preparing students to practice law. Teaching students to think like a lawyer is still necessary but it is not sufficient for students to act like a lawyer soon after they graduate.

Teaching American Legal History In A Law School, Peter D. Garlock

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Professor Peter Garlock describes his legal history course.

The Lawyer's Toolbox: Teaching Students About Risk Allocation, Dana Malkus, Scott Stevenson, Eric J. Gouvin, Usha Rodriques

Faculty Scholarship

This Article is the transcript of a panel presented at Emory’s Third Biennial Conference on Transactional Education. The panel focuses on techniques for teaching risk allocation as part of transactional skills classes. The panelists describe their approaches to teaching risk allocation, from syllabus design to final evaluations. How can a professor help students to understand the basic concepts of risk, the role risk plays in business and legal decisions, and how they can help clients manage risk. The techniques for teaching risk allocation include hypotheticals, visual aids, and hands-on assignments. The panelists each take their students down a different path …

Tackling "Arithmophobia": Teaching How To Read, Understand, And Analyze Financial Statements, Paula J. Williams, Kris Anne Tobin, Eric Franklin, Robert J. Rhee

UF Law Faculty Publications

This discussion presents different ideas on how to teach accounting and practical finance to law students.

A Case For Grade Inflation In Legal Education, Joshua M. Silverstein

Law Faculty Scholarship

This Article contends that every American law school ought to substantially eliminate C grades by setting its good academic standing grade point average at the B- level. Grading systems that require or encourage law professors to award a significant number of C marks are flawed for two reasons. First, low grades damage students' placement prospects. Employers frequently consider a job candidate's absolute GPA in making hiring decisions. If a school systematically assigns inferior grades, its students are at an unfair disadvantage when competing for employment with students from institutions that award mostly A's and B's. Second, marks in the C …

Contract Stories: Importance Of The Contextual Approach To Law, Larry A. Dimatteo

UF Law Faculty Publications

How law is taught is at the center of the debate over the need to change legal education to better prepare students for a difficult and changing marketplace for legal services. This Article analyzes the benefits of using “stories” to teach law. The stories to be discussed relate to contract law: this Article asks whether they can be used to improve the method and content of teaching law. The ruminations offered on teaching contract law, however, are also relevant to teaching other core, first-year law courses.

Hidden Curriculum Of Legal Education: Toward A Holistic Model For Reform, The, David M. Moss

Journal of Dispute Resolution

The following section of this article directly addresses the notion of the hidden curriculum and why this construct is essential for legal educators to consider as they contemplate reforms. Core principles of curriculum theory will then be briefly discussed as a precursor to the subsequent section that addresses the notion of a transdisciplinary curriculum. A transdisciplinary perspective will offer a holistic lens for considering law school curriculum. Finally, such notions as curriculum mapping offer tangible solutions to addressing the challenge of preparing practice-ready graduates in the legal profession.

Training The Heads, Hands And Hearts Of Tomorrow's Lawyers: A Problem Solving Approach , Lisa A. Kloppenberg

Journal of Dispute Resolution

I hope this essay on preparing practice-ready graduates is a useful resource for those considering circular reform or for those in legal education undertaking assessment and strategic planning processes. I begin with four goals: (a) to offer a brief synopsis of the two major critiques of legal education which have influenced deeply recent curricular reforms by many law schools and the challenges facing law schools today; (b) to summarize recently published data from the ABA Curriculum Committee on trends in law school curricula, showing some significant areas of reform in legal education over the past decade, and offering some thoughts …

A Community Of Procedure Scholars: Teaching Procedure And The Legal Academy, Elizabeth Thornburg, Erik S. Knutsen, Carla Crifo', Camille Cameron

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

This article asks whether the way in which procedure is taught has an impact on the extent and accomplishments of a scholarly community of proceduralists. Not surprisingly, we find a strong correlation between the placement of procedure as a required course in an academic context and the resulting body of scholars and scholarship. Those countries in which more civil procedure is taught as part of a university degree — and in which procedure is recognized as a legitimate academic subject — have larger scholarly communities, a larger and broader corpus of works analyzing procedural issues, and a richer web of …

Adaptive Clinical Teaching, Colleen F. Shanahan, Emily Benfer

Faculty Scholarship

Teaching is an exercise in adaptation and clinical legal teaching is no exception. Clinical teachers develop effective approaches through instinct, training, pedagogy, skill, and trial and error. Building on the trials, errors, and instincts of clinical teachers, this article offers a more intentional approach: "adaptive clinical teaching" (ACT). ACT is a structured method of guided analysis and reflection that applies to any clinical teaching situation, allowing a clinician to make her teaching choices based on as much knowledge and with as much intentionality as possible. ACT provides clinicians with an approach for new issues as they arise and builds a …

Roger Williams University School Of Law 20th Anniversary Celebration Announcements, Roger Williams University School Of Law

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

Bramble Bush Revisited: Karl Llewellyn, The Great Depression, And The First Law School Crisis, 1929-1939, Anders Walker

All Faculty Scholarship

This article recovers the plight of legal education during the Great Depression, showing how debates over practical training, theoretical research and the appropriate length of law school all emerged in the 1930s. Using Bramble Bush author Karl Llewellyn as a guide, it strives to make three points. One, Depression-era critics of law school called for increased attention to practical skills, like today, but also a more interdisciplinary curriculum – something current reformers discount. Two, the push for theoretical, policy-oriented courses in the 1930s set the stage for claims that law graduates deserved more than a Bachelor of Laws degree, bolstering …

The Lawyer's Toolbox: Teaching Students About Risk Allocation, Dana Malkus, Scott Stevenson, Eric J. Gouvin, Usha Rodrigues

All Faculty Scholarship

This Article is the transcript of a panel presented at Emory’s Third Biennial Conference on Transactional Education. The panel focuses on techniques for teaching risk allocation as part of transactional skills classes. The panelists describe their approaches to teaching risk allocation, from syllabus design to final evaluations. How can a professor help students to understand the basic concepts of risk, the role risk plays in business and legal decisions, and how they can help clients manage risk. The techniques for teaching risk allocation include hypotheticals, visual aids, and hands-on assignments. The panelists each take their students down a different path …

Professionalism And The New Normal, Philip J. Weiser

Publications

No abstract provided.

Next Phase Pedagogy Reform For The Twenty-First Century Legal Education: Delivering Competent Lawyers For A Consumer-Driven Market, Ann Marie Cavazos

Journal Publications

The underpinnings for law school training has or, I submit, soon will be, outstripped by real world requirements dictated by the demands of the legal profession marketplace. This Article is designed to add to the discourse relating to the question of what law schools supply and what law practice requires-a paradigm shift in the methodology of implementing legal education. The Article begins by reporting on the state of the law school process and how it has evolved from an apprenticeship, replete with on-the-job training, to an intellectual exercise that is somewhat removed from the requirements for becoming competent legal professionals. …

Did Legal Education Fail Health Reform? And How Health Law Can Help, Wendy K. Mariner

Faculty Scholarship

Arguments over the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act illustrate the pervasiveness of health law issues in society. In court, arguments on both sides also demonstrated insufficient knowledge of the health care system and health insurance to identify and present useful arguments. Too many lawyers remained wedded to theories of constitutional law that have become disconnected from twenty-first century realities. Legal education may have something to answer for in this respect. This essay examines how legal education in health law may offer some valuable responses to ongoing critiques of legal education in general. The more law moves away from strict …

Out Of The Shadows: What Legal Research Instruction Reveals About Incorporating Skills Throughout The Curriculum , Barbara Glesner Fines

Journal of Dispute Resolution

The article first examines the politics of curricular reform. Before a law school will be able to increase or improve any skills instruction, the targeted skill must be important to enough to affect the curriculum. For example, sometimes law schools send inconsistent messages about the importance of legal research instruction. While external voices such as ABA accreditation standards and surveys of the practicing bar have long-recognized importance of the skills of legal research, evidence of the importance of the skill in the law school curriculum is mixed. If asked, most faculty members will agree that a given skill, such as …

Reforming Legal Education To Prepare Law Students Optimally For Real-World Practice , John Lande

Journal of Dispute Resolution

This article synthesizes some of the main points of the symposium contributors. They covered a wide range of key issues and thus this symposium provides a good overview of the challenges of and options for legal education reform. Of course, given the vast scope of the problems presented, this symposium issue of the Journal of Dispute Resolution cannot provide an all-encompassing analysis nor a comprehensive set of recommendations for reform. We do, however, hope that it will be a useful contribution to the growing movement and literature designed to improve legal education in the U.S. Part II of this article …

Motions In Motion: Teaching Advanced Legal Writing Through Collaboration, Elizabeth Shaver, Sarah Morath, Richard Strong

Akron Law Faculty Publications

Legal education is at a crossroads. Practitioners, academics, and students agree that more experiential learning opportunities are needed in law school.

In 2007, the Carnegie Foundation report, Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law (Carnegie Report), called for law schools to provide apprentice experiences to better prepare prospective attorneys for the world of practice. That same year, the Best Practices in Legal Education advocated for “experiential education” and “encourage[d] law school[s] to expand its use.” More recently, in August 2011, the American Bar Association adopted a resolution sponsored by the New York Bar Association summoning law schools to “focus …

Motions In Motion: Teaching Advanced Legal Writing Through Collaboration, Richard Strong, Elizabeth Shaver, Sarah Morath

Akron Law Faculty Publications

Legal education is at a crossroads. Practitioners, academics, and students agree that more experiential learning opportunities are needed in law school.

In 2007, the Carnegie Foundation report, Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law (Carnegie Report), called for law schools to provide apprentice experiences to better prepare prospective attorneys for the world of practice. That same year, the Best Practices in Legal Education advocated for “experiential education” and “encourage[d] law school[s] to expand its use.” More recently, in August 2011, the American Bar Association adopted a resolution sponsored by the New York Bar Association summoning law schools to “focus …

Financial Retrenchment And Institutional Entrenchment: Will Legal Education Respond, Explode, Or Just Wait It Out?, Ian Weinstein

Faculty Scholarship

Both markets and ideas have turned against the American legal profession. Legal hiring has contracted, and law school enrollments are decreasing. The business models of big law and legal education are under pressure, current levels of student indebtedness seem unsustainable, and a hero has yet to emerge from our fragmented regulatory structures. In the realm of ideas, the information revolution has sparked deep critiques of structured knowledge and expertise, opening the roles of the law and the university in society to reexamination. We are less enamored of the scholar-lawyer and gaze with longing at technocrats. I hope that clinical law …

Across The Curriculum: Integrating Transactional Skills Instruction, Jean Whitney, Lori D. Johnson, Richard Rawson, Carol Morgan

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Preparing "Main Street" Lawyers: Practicing Without Big Firm Experience, Lisa Reel Schmidt, Steve Garland, Robert Statchen

Faculty Scholarship

This Article is the transcript of a panel presented at Emory’s Third Biennial Conference on Transactional Education. The panelists advance two premises: First, that law schools need to teach transactional skills because many students will either focus on transactional law or practice general law where transactional skills are necessary; and second, that some of the transactional skills the schools teach should be specific to main street lawyering because a number of students will be main street lawyers. The panelists explain how the transactional skills necessary for main street lawyering differ from skills needed in litigation and big law firms. They …