Legal Education Commons^™

A Conscious Institutional Strategy For Expanding Experiential Education, Lisa Radtke Bliss, Deborah Maranville

Chapters in Books

As law schools seek to better prepare students for the profession, they are expanding experiential education in traditional contexts such as theory and practice simulation skills courses, clinics, and externships. At the same time, they are also searching for opportunities to expose students to practical learning opportunities during the entire course of their legal education by incorporating experiential education throughout the curriculum. It is a best practice to develop conscious strategies for pursuing this effort. While Best Practices for Legal Education called for the integration of teaching theory, doctrine, and practice, it did not address strategies for integrating experiential education …

The Socratic Method, Elizabeth G. Porter

Chapters in Books

The Socratic method, one of Langdell’s most well-entrenched reforms to legal education, remains the law’s signature pedagogical technique. Although the term means different things to different people, its essence in the law school classroom is student analysis of cases led by a teacher, who calls on students to articulate gradually deeper understandings of a legal doctrine or theory.

Socratic learning requires students to think on the spot, answer precisely, and take intellectual risks. For over a decade now, the Socratic method has been out of fashion among those who write about legal pedagogy. In addition, the method’s critics describe what …

Pathways, Integration, And Sequencing The Curriculum, Deborah Maranville, Cynthia Batt

Books

Law school course offerings have proliferated in recent decades. This development reflects the addition of specialized doctrinal courses, a growing emphasis on interdisciplinary knowledge, and the incorporation of practice-oriented courses. From the perspective of the individual student, an expanded curriculum may create exciting educational opportunities while posing trade-offs between a generalist education and specialization.

Law schools face two key challenges. First, they must structure the curriculum so that the experiences of individual law students have some coherence, or, if you will, seem integrated. Second they must incorporate the full range of what the Carnegie Reports referred to as the apprenticeships …

Transfer Of Learning, Deborah Maranville

Books

A key characteristic of effective education is that students are able to retain and build on the information, skills, and values they learn in their work in later courses and in the world. Doing so is known as transfer of learning. Ultimately, for law students that means they are able to transfer what they learn into the work they do as professionals. Best Practices for Legal Education did not delve deeply into the educational literature on transfer of learning.

Underlying its preparation for practice theme, however, was an implicit recognition that both individual law teachers and law schools as institutions …

Incorporating Experiential Education Throughout The Curriculum, Deborah Maranville, Cynthia Batt, Lisa Radtke Bliss, Carolyn Wilkes Kaas

Books

In discussing experiential education, Best Practices for Legal Education focused primarily on the three traditional types of separate experiential courses: in-house clinics, externships, and simulations, and treated them in a separate chapter. These courses were defined as those where “experience is a significant or primary method of instruction” rather than a secondary method, and where “students must perform complex skills in order to gain expertise.”

Arguably, this separate treatment reinforced what has too often been a divide between doctrinally-focused teaching and practice-focused teaching. Best Practices recognized that “experiential education can be employed as an adjunct to traditional methodologies regardless of …

The Socratic Method, Elizabeth G. Porter

Books

The Socratic method, one of Langdell’s most well-entrenched reforms to legal education, remains the law’s signature pedagogical technique. Although the term means different things to different people, its essence in the law school classroom is student analysis of cases led by a teacher, who calls on students to articulate gradually deeper understandings of a legal doctrine or theory.

Socratic learning requires students to think on the spot, answer precisely, and take intellectual risks. For over a decade now, the Socratic method has been out of fashion among those who write about legal pedagogy. In addition, the method’s critics describe what …

Ensuring Effective Education In Alternative Clinical Models, Deborah Maranville

Books

Best Practices for Legal Education organized its discussion of experiential courses around the “simulation-based courses, in-house clinics, and externships” typology without specifically defining what structures fall within each category or discussing the variations. The discussion of in-house clinics focused on fundamental principles for effective teaching and supervision and the need for appropriate facilities and office support. It only implicitly addressed the range of issues presented by alternative structures for clinics and did not address alternative externship structures or variations that combine features of both.

Faculty Status And Institutional Effectiveness, Deborah Maranville, Ruth Anne Robbins, Kristen K. Tiscione

Books

Legal education has expanded to incorporate practice-oriented topics and courses over the past several decades, and student academic support services have multiplied in response to changing student populations. As a consequence of these changes, law schools are overdue to address the issue of the status of the individuals they hire to fill the multiple and ever expanding needs and interests of students.

Should law schools hire new personnel as teachers, staff, or administrators? If hired as teachers, what titles and governance rights should they be given? Should they be eligible for tenure, presumptively renewable long-term contracts, or short-term contracts? What …

Institutionalizing The Uspto Law School Clinic Certification Program For Transactional Law Clinics, Jennifer S. Fan

Articles

With 188 transactional law clinics nationwide and the United States Patent and Trademark Office (“USPTO”) Law School Clinic Certification Program (“Program”) recently established as a statutory program of the USPTO, this Article argues that every transactional clinic that works on trademark and patent applications should apply to become part of the Program. In satisfying the participation requirements of the Program, transactional law clinics will usher in a new, uniform way to educate aspiring intellectual property attorneys. As a result, the law students will not only be “practice ready,” but also more effective attorneys once they are in practice. Participating in …

‘Truth And Reconciliation’: A Critical Step Toward Eliminating Race And Gender Violations In Tenure Wars, Tamara F. Lawson, Angela Mae Kupenda

Articles

“All is fair in love and war,” and . . . tenure battles? However, even in war there are rules of engagement. In “tenure wars” rules apply too. The American Bar Association requires law schools to employ clear rules of engagement in “tenure wars,” akin to how the United Nations collectively proscribes rules of war between nation states as well as punishes violations committed on the battlefield. When innocent nations are attacked by illegal acts of aggression, a coalition of the willing allies within the United Nations defends against the aggression.

Even if all is fair in love, war, and …

"Nowhere To Run; Nowhere To Hide": The Reality Of Being A Law Library Director In Times Of Great Opportunity And Significant Challenges, Penny A. Hazelton

Articles

Edited remarks presented at a program on January 5, 2015 at the Association of American Law Schools Annual Meeting in Washington, DC.

Experience The Future: Papers From The Second National Symposium On Experiential Education In Law: Alliance For Experiential Learning In Law, Christine N. Cimini, Roberto L. Corrada, Myra Berman, Christine E. Cerniglia, Katherine R. Kruse

Articles

On June 13-15, 2014 the Second National Symposium on Experiential Educa­tion in Law took place in Greensboro, North Carolina. The Alliance for Experi­ential Learning in Law and Elon University School of Law hosted the symposium, with the support of Northeastern University School of Law. Presenters included professors and practitioners across multiple disciplines, in­cluding business, medicine, and architecture, and they shared their insights about the value of experiential education in their fields. Working from the Alliance for Experiential Learning in Law also presented their findings and distributed a set of working papers, which eventually culminated into this report. The report covers …

Have Fun With Strategic Planning, Kellye Y. Testy

Articles

No abstract provided.

Uwlaw, Fall 2014, Vol. 68

Alumni Magazines

No abstract provided.

Uwlaw, Spring 2014, Vol. 67

Alumni Magazines

No abstract provided.

Beyond The Fakultas'S Four Walls: Linking Education, Practice, And The Legal Profession, Stephen A. Rosenbaum

Washington International Law Journal

More than fifty years after the first post-colonial Southeast Asian regional conference on legal education, commentators and educators do not necessarily agree on the appropriate curricular balance between theory, doctrine, and practice, or what role the government should play in directing the orientation of legal studies and careers in Indonesia’s law schools. The author argues in favor of legal education that is rich in experiential learning and integrates the involvement of practitioners and doctrinal faculty. This objective may be a relatively new reality in Indonesia, but also one that needs revitalization in other Southeast Asian nations and beyond. This article …

Scholarship With Purpose: The View From A Mission-Driven School, Christine N. Cimini

Articles

This essay explores the ways that a law school’s unique culture impacts the role of the Associate Dean for Scholarship. Written by the first person to hold this position at Vermont Law School (VLS), this essay focuses specifically on how the Associate Dean for Scholarship supports VLS’s commitment “to developing a generation of leaders who use the power of the law to make a difference in our communities and the world.” This vision of the role, as implemented at VLS, includes: providing support to all faculty, regardless of status; supporting faculty who speak to broad audiences; and embracing a broad …

Contract Texts, Contract Teaching, Contract Law: Comment On Lawrence Cunningham, Contracts In The Real World, Brian H. Bix

Washington Law Review

Lawrence Cunningham’s Contracts in the Real World offers a good starting place for necessary conversations about how contract law should be taught, and, more generally, for when and how cases—in summary form or in longer excerpts—are useful in teaching the law. This Article tries to offer some reasons for thinking that their prevalence may reflect important truths about contract law in particular and law and legal education in general.

Reflections On Contracts In The Real World: History, Currency, Context, And Other Values, Lawrence A. Cunningham

Washington Law Review

It is gratifying to read that this symposium issue of the Washington Law Review was stimulated by Contracts in the Real World. Thanks to the editors for the opportunity to ruminate on the place of the book’s approach—stressing context through stories—in the tradition of contracts pedagogy. To that end, Part I first pinpoints relevant historical milestones in the field of contracts casebooks. Building on that historical grounding, Part II then highlights the values of currency and context that the stories approach epitomizes. Turning more speculative, Part III considers the value of this approach from the perspective of the purpose …

The Perspective Of Law On Contract, Aditi Bagchi

Washington Law Review

What is the perspective of law on contract? This Article will consider two dimensions of the perspective we offer students. Part I will consider how we present the nature of contract law. That is, it will explore the extent to which traditional methods of teaching unduly underplay indeterminacy and disagreement. In that Part I distinguish between inductive and deductive legal reasoning and suggest we may give short shrift to the former in teaching. Part II will consider the attitude of the law toward contract as a social practice. Here I distinguish between internal and external perspectives on law and suggest …

Cases And Controversies: Some Things To Do With Contracts Cases, Charles L. Knapp

Washington Law Review

As a co-author of one of the two dozen or more currently-in-print Contracts casebooks, I obviously have both a point of view about, and a personal stake in, the survival of this particular method of instruction. Whether the legal casebook—or any other book, in the form of bound sheets of paper—will remain a part of our academic culture much longer is clearly up for grabs, however. Electronic records have so many advantages over the printed page that, at least for many purposes, they will surely become the dominant form of preserving, retrieving, and transmitting information, if indeed they are not …

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

Washington Law Review

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.

Unpopular Contracts And Why They Matter: Burying Langdell And Enlivening Students, Jennifer S. Taub

Washington Law Review

Thus, the purpose of this piece is to provide an alternative: a transformation of how Contracts is taught in law schools so that we meet a variety of educational objectives. This is less of a prescription than it is a resolution made in the public sphere: a promise to shake things up in my own classroom and thus hopefully do better by students in the long run. It is also the beginning of a search to benchmark against the practices of others, and to seek input from those who have already begun to transform their Contracts teaching materials and methods. …

Being A Dean Is A Drag . . . But Not For The Reasons You Might Expect, Kellye Y. Testy

Articles

No abstract provided.

Identifying (With) Disability: Using Film To Teach Employment Discrimination, Elizabeth Pendo

Articles

On the first day of class, I tell my Disability Law students that my objective is simple-I want to change the way they see the world. Teaching, writing, and working in disability rights has done that for me, and I want to continue to share that experience with my students. Integrating film into the classroom is one way to invite that change. When used properly, film can enhance coverage and discussion of substantive legal concepts and important policy issues surrounding employment of people with disabilities. That result is especially important to my objective, because employment and other issues critical to …

The Trials And Tribulations Of Japan’S Legal Education Reforms, Daniel H. Foote

Articles

A sense of momentum accompanied the start of Japan's new legal education system in the spring of 2004. Less than three years had passed since the Justice System Reform Council (the Reform Council) issued its final report in June 2001, proposing a major restructuring of Japan's legal training system centered on a new tier of graduate level law schools. And less than a year and a half had elapsed since the details of the law school system were decided and enabling legislation passed. Despite the tight timetable, sixty-eight law schools were ready to commence operations in 2004, having arranged facilities, …

Uwlaw, Fall 2012, Vol. 66

Alumni Magazines

No abstract provided.

Uwlaw, Spring 2012, Vol. 65

Alumni Magazines

No abstract provided.

Teaching Health Law In Rural Ethiopia: Using A Pepfar Partnership Framework And India's Shanbaug Decision To Shape A Course, Sallie Thieme Sanford [email protected]

Articles

In April 2011, I taught a month-long intensive health law course at Haramaya University College of Law in rural eastern Ethiopia. Given the burgeoning interest in global health law, I suspect, and hope, that others are considering teaching similar courses, whether as visiting or resident faculty. This essay attempts to ease their course preparation workload. I will describe how I used two recent documents – India’s 2011 Shanbaug decision and Ethiopia’s 2010 PEPFAR Partnership Framework – to shape the course. Both of these are worth consideration for use in a variety of health law and policy courses based in low-income …

Incorporating Literary Methods And Texts In The Teaching Of Tort Law, Zahr K. Said

Articles

Literature is comparatively under-investigated as an arena for tort pedagogy and for first-year courses in the legal curriculum generally. Where literature tends to appear in law school, it most frequently does so in the form of stand-alone law-and-literature classes, which usually focus heavily on literature.

In teaching a first-year tort law course at the University of Washington School of Law, I have explicitly used literature to aid and amplify legal analysis. The emphasis has been on law, rather than on literature. Nonetheless, literary texts and methods helped my students investigate how the law conceives of, and expresses, duties and losses …