Legal Education Commons^™

Bar Examination: A Verb, Not A Noun, Marsha Griggs

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The legal profession, long steeped in tradition, is witnessing a transformative shift in the protocols for licensing new attorneys. Multiple jurisdictions are moving away from reliance on standardized testing as the sole gateway to law practice and are developing individualized (and potentially reciprocal) systems of state licensure. Ironically, the planned launch of a new standardized exam—the NextGen bar exam—appears to be a major catalyst in the transformation of state licensure pathways. This shift has the potential to realign the regulatory hierarchy in attorney admission. Such a realignment is vital to the preservation of lawyer self-governance, and it offers great promise …

Reproductive Rights And Medico-Legal Education Post-Dobbs: A Fireside Chat, Michael S. Sinha, Anna Krotinger, Maya A. Phan, Louise P. King

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The Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization was a pivotal moment that reshaped the landscape of abortion policy and delivery of abortion care in the United States. To create a space for critical reflection on the implications of Dobbs for the teaching and learning of abortion care in both medical and legal education, the authors engage in a dialogue highlighting the varied perspectives of professionals and professionals-in-training in both the medical and legal professions. As new attacks on reproductive autonomy continue at both state and federal levels, we foreshadow a tumultuous landscape for abortion policy …

Outsourcing Self-Regulation, Marsha Griggs

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Answerable only to the courts that have the sole authority to grant or withhold the right to practice law, lawyers operate under a system of self-regulation. The self-regulated legal profession staunchly resists external interference from the legislative and administrative branches of government. Yet, with the same fervor that the legal profession defies non-judicial oversight, it has subordinated itself to the controlling influence of a private corporate interest. By outsourcing the mechanisms that control admission to the bar, the legal profession has all but surrendered the most crucial component of its gatekeeping function to an industry that profits at the expense …

Anti-Carceral Theory And Immigration: A View From Two Law School Clinics, Sabrina Balgamwalla, Lauren Bartlett

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This article explores clinical teaching philosophies related to anti-carceral theory and provides examples of how to support student learning in clinics serving immigrant clients. Anti-carceral theory in this context is used to refer to an approach that resists criminalization and incarceration within law, drawing on abolitionism, intersectional and anti-carceral feminism, and decolonization.

The anti-carceral lens provides framing and language to name the dynamics of social exclusion and discrimination inherent in immigration law. It also allows us to unpack immigration regulation as a series of choices made within the larger context of law enforcement and its systems of surveillance, policing, and …

Fix Or Fox: Where Do We Go From Here?, Marsha Griggs

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Recently the National Conference of Bar Examiners (“NCBE”) announced that it will make sample questions from its proposed NextGen Bar Exam publicly available. NCBE is the entity that creates and sells all the questions used on the Uniform Bar Exam adopted in Kansas, Missouri, and thirty-six other states. In theory, the NextGen Exam is being developed in response to mounting critique that the bar exam is not a true measure of competence to practice law and claims that the exam disadvantages applicants based on socioeconomic status and race. But is the NextGen prototype a fix or a fox in the …

Book Review Of Shaping The Bar: The Future Of Attorney Licensing, Marsha Griggs, Andrea A. Curcio

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In Shaping the Bar: The Future of Attorney Licensing, Professor Joan Howarth issues a clarion call to the academy, the legal community, and the judiciary to reform the way we license lawyers in the United States. In this book Howarth identifies the current crisis in law licensing, the history of racism that created this crisis, and the tools available to address it. Shaping the Bar challenges our entrenched notions of professional identity, and it forces us to confront vulnerabilities in attorney self-regulation. It does so in a manner that will stir even those not immersed in the current debate about …

Race, Rules, And Disregarded Reality, Marsha Griggs

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Exploring issues of racial bias and social injustice in the law school classroom is a modern imperative. Yet, important conversations about systemic inequality in the law and legal profession are too often dissociated from core doctrinal courses and woodenly siloed to the periphery of the curriculum. This dissociation creates a paradigm of irrelevancy-by-omission that disregards the realities of the lived experiences of our students and the clients they will ultimately serve. Using Evidence as a launch pad, Professor Deborah Merritt has paved a pathway to incorporate these disregarded realities in doctrinal teaching. This important pathway leads to safe spaces necessary …

Diploma Privilege And The Constitution, Claudia Angelos, Sara Berman, Mary Lu Bilek, Carol L. Chomsky, Andrea Anne Curcio, Marsha Griggs, Joan W. Howarth, Eileen R. Kaufman, Deborah Jones Merritt, Patricia Salkin, Judith W. Wegner

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The COVID-19 pandemic and resulting shutdowns are affecting every aspect of society. The legal profession and the justice system have been profoundly disrupted at precisely the time when there is an unprecedented need for legal services to deal with a host of legal issues generated by the pandemic, including disaster relief, health law, insurance, labor law, criminal justice, domestic violence, and civil rights. The need for lawyers to address these issues is great but the prospect of licensing new lawyers is challenging due to the serious health consequences of administering the bar examination during the pandemic.

State Supreme Courts are …

The Bar Exam And The Covid-19 Pandemic: The Need For Immediate Action, Claudia Angelos, Sara Berman, Mary Lu Bilek, Carol L. Chomsky, Andrea Anne Curcio, Marsha Griggs, Joan W. Howarth, Eileen R. Kaufman, Deborah Jones Merritt, Patricia Salkin, Judith W. Wegner

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The novel coronavirus COVID-19 has profoundly disrupted life in the United States. Among other challenges, jurisdictions are unlikely to be able to administer the July 2020 bar exam in the usual manner. It is essential, however, to continue licensing new lawyers. Those lawyers are necessary to meet current needs in the legal system. Equally important, the demand for legal services will skyrocket during and after this pandemic. We cannot close doors to the profession at a time when client demand will reach an all-time high.

In this brief policy paper, we outline six licensing options for jurisdictions to consider for …

An Epic Fail, Marsha Griggs

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All at once, the U.S. found itself embattled with the threat of COVID-19, the new normal of social distancing, and the perennial scourge of racial injustice. While simultaneously battling those ills, the class of 2020 law graduates found themselves also contending with inflexible bar licensing policies that placed at risk their health, safety, and careers. During a global health pandemic, bar licensing authorities made the bar exam a moving target riddled with uncertainty and last-minute cancellations. This costly and unsettling uncertainty surrounding the bar exam administration was unnecessary because multiple alternatives were available to safely license new attorneys. A ball …

The Future Of Clinical Legal Scholarship, Michele E. Gilman

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The legal academy is questioning the future of legal scholarship given its costs and perceived disconnect from law practice. However, the future of clinical legal scholarship is typically left out of these debates, although it offers a powerful rejoinder to these recurring critiques – it is deeply engaged with real-world problems, and it has demonstrable impacts. In addition, clinical scholars are an overlooked conduit for disseminating scholarship outside the ivory tower. Doctrinal faculty are unaware how much clinical faculty can ensure their work has an impact beyond SSRN citation counts. As law schools consider how to implement the new accreditation …

In Search Of Best Practices On Gender Equity For University Faculty: An Update, Constance Z. Wagner

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This article updates the author’s earlier work on the search for gender equity among women faculty in the university setting in the United States. The author reflects on the fact that some of the literature in this area does not sufficiently address the challenges facing women of color. She seeks to fill the gap in her own research by referencing best practices discussed in three recent books on the professional lives of university faculty who are women of color. She argues that future work on best practices for achieving gender equity must address issues of intersectionality of race, gender, and …

Building A Better Bar Exam, Marsha Griggs

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In the wake of declining bar passage rates and limited placement options for law grads, a new bar exam has emerged: the UBE. Drawn to an allusive promise of portability, 36 U.S. jurisdictions have adopted the UBE. I predict that in a few years the UBE will be administered in all states and U.S. territories. The UBE has snowballed from an idea into the primary gateway for entry into the practice of law. But the UBE is not a panacea that will solve the bar passage problems that U.S. law schools face. Whether or not to adopt a uniform exam …

Are Universities Schools? The Case For Continuity In The Regulation Of Student Speech, Chad Flanders

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Are universities schools? The question seems almost silly to ask: o f course universities are schools. They have teachers and students, like schools. They have grades, like schools. There are classes and extracurricular activities, also like schools. But recent writings on the issue of ₀₄ free speech on campus" have raised the improbable specter that universities are less educational institutions than they are public forums like parks and sidewalks, where a free-wheeling exchange o f ideas and opinions takes place, unrestricted by any sense of academic mission or school disciplinc.¹ Some of this rhetoric is of course exaggerated, and …

Scaffolding On Steroids: Meeting Your Students Where They Are Is Harder Than Ever ... And Easier Than You Think, Kari L. Aamot Johnson

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No abstract provided.

Teaching The Transformative Fourteenth Amendment, Joel K. Goldstein

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If the constitutional law casebooks are a reliable guide, most teach the Fourteenth Amendment, like other parts of the Constitution, by presenting separately the various doctrinal topics it has raised.[1] The principal clauses of the Amendment, or really those in the second sentence of Section 1[2]—the Equal Protection, Due Process, and Privileges or Immunities Clauses—are generally extracted from its text and classes are structured around the leading cases decided under each and the resulting doctrine. Cases under the Equal Protection or Due Process Clause may be further separated. Based on the class of claimants, for instance, the cases involving racial …

Another Look At The Need For Family Law Education Reform: One Law School's Innovations, Barbara A. Babb

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The pressing need to change family law education stems from increased numbers and types of family law matters before the courts, changing legal standards, and the evolution of family law practice. The Family Law Education Reform Project, the Families Matter Report, and the IAALS Family Bar Summit recommend that traditional family law education be supplemented to reflect the importance of a holistic blend of theory and practice. This involves expanding student clinical or experiential programs, incorporating interdisciplinary studies specific to the context of family law, and enhancing continuing legal education opportunities. As one law school example, the University of Baltimore …

Implementing A First-Year Research Assessment, Savanna L. Nolan

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University of Baltimore Law librarians do not have a formal role in teaching legal research, but are frequent guest lecturers and recognized research experts. As such, we volunteered to administer UB's first summative assessment in accordance with the recent implementation of ABA Standard 314. This poster shows the steps taken to design, execute, and grade this legal research assessment, as well as how we reported the results to stakeholders.

The assessment had an objective true/false and multiple-choice section, and a subjective essay question. The librarians selected objective questions considering the core legal research competencies identified by RIPS-SIS following the MacCrate …

Reproducing Gender And Race Inequality In The Blawgosphere, Jane C. Murphy, Solangel Maldonado

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The use of the Internet and other digital media to disseminate scholarship has great potential for expanding the range of voices in legal scholarship. Legal blogging, in particular, with its shorter, more informal form, seems ideal for encouraging commentary from a diverse group of scholars. This Chapter tests this idea by exploring the role of blogging in legal scholarship and the level of participation of women and scholars of color on the most visible academic legal blogs. After noting the predominance of white male scholars as regular contributors on these blogs, we analyze the relative lack of diversity in this …

Bridging The Gap: A Joint Negotiation Project Crossing Legal Disciplines, K. E. Powell, Lauren Bartlett

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This article discusses the creation and implementation of a cross-discipline negotiation simulation project designed by two law professors at Ohio Northern University Claude W. Pettit College of Law. The project bridged the gap between podium classes and clinical experience, exposing two separate groups of students to new subject areas. Professors Lauren E. Bartlett and Karen Powell brought together two distinct law classes, one doctrinal tax class and one pretrial litigation skills class, to exercise legal skills, and learn substantive and procedural law from their classmates, while acting as an attorney or a client in a simulated negotiation.

A Human Rights Code Of Conduct: Ambitious Moral Aspiration For A Public Interest Law Office Or Law Clinic, Lauren Bartlett

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The standards regulating the decision-making and behavior of lawyers in the U.S. currently provide inadequate guidance for many of the ethical dilemmas that practicing attorneys face on a daily basis. Universal human rights principles—the concepts of morality underlying much of human rights law—provide more ambitious moral direction that lawyers can use to guide decision-making and behavior. This article discusses why additional aspirational goals are needed for the legal profession and explains how and why to apply universal human rights principles to lawyering in the U.S. The article goes on to introduce the idea of adopting a human rights code of …

Law As Instrumentality, Jeremiah A. Ho

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Our conceptions of law affect how we objectify the law and ultimately how we study it. Despite a century’s worth of theoretical progress in American law—from legal realism to critical legal studies movements and postmodernism—the formalist conception of “law as science,” as promulgated by Christopher Langdell at Harvard Law School in the late-nineteenth century, still influences methodologies in American legal education. Subsequent movements of legal thought, however, have revealed that the law is neither scientific nor “objective” in the way the Langdellian formalists once envisioned. After all, the Langdellian scientific objectivity of law itself reflected the dominant class, gender, power, …

New Wine In Old Wineskins: Metaphor And Legal Research, Amy E. Sloan, Colin Starger

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We construct our conceptual world using metaphors. Yet sometimes our concepts are flawed and our metaphors do damage. This Article examines a set of metaphors currently doing damage in law – those for legal research. It shows that while technology has radically altered the material world of legal research, our dominant metaphors have remained static, and thus, become outmoded. Conceptualizing today’s reality using old metaphors fails; it is like pouring new wine in old wineskins. To address this problem, this Article first surfaces unwarranted assumptions buried in the metaphors we use when talking about research and then proposes new metaphors …

One Model Of Collaborative Learning For Medical And Law Students At The University Of Baltimore And Johns Hopkins University, Gregory Dolin, Natalie Ram

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Medicine, like law, is sometimes referred to as a “conservative” profession, as both can change slowly, stifling innovation. While the art of medicine has produced important advances, there is at least one part of medicine that has not changed much in more than 100 years. Nearly all American medical schools have followed much the same educational model since Abraham Flexner published his famous report on the state of American medical education in 1910. The educational model promoted by that report emphasizes teaching students the science of medicine, but it is not well equipped for teaching students about the practicalities of …

Book Review: Academic Law Library Director Perspectives: Case Studies And Insights, Adeen Postar

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No abstract provided.

Building Community, Still Thirsty For Justice: Supporting Community Development Efforts In Baltimore, Renee Hatcher, Jaime Alison Lee

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Baltimore is a city of many challenges, but it possesses true communitybased strength. The city’s residents and community organizations are its greatest assets. This article highlights some of the community’s work and how the Community Development Clinic at the University of Baltimore School of Law (CDC) supports this work through its experiential learning curriculum.

The challenges facing Baltimore’s communities (systemic disinvestment, structural racism, vacant buildings, unemployment, and the criminalization of poverty, to name a few) existed long before the national media coverage and uprising surrounding the death of Freddie Gray, an unarmed Black man who suffered a fatal spinal injury …

Value Added: Utilizing The Msw Perspective, Dana M. Malkus

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Regardless of practice area, we all must face the reality that our own perspectives
and skill sets—while valuable—bring with them certain limits that impact both our teaching and our lawyering. Adding other perspectives and skill sets to our practice settings is one way to move beyond these limits.

In this brief article, I provide reflections on the challenges and rewards of adding a Masters of Social Work practicum student (“MSW student”) to our transactional clinic team. The following description provides an overview of three ways the MSW student added value to the Entrepreneurship and Community Development Clinic at St. Louis …

Taste This!: Experiencing Transactional Lawyering In First-Year Contracts, Dana M. Malkus

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In a prior submission to The Law Teacher (“Reflection, Reality, and a Real Audience: Ideas from the Clinic"), I argued that the clinical education model provides some simple lessons that should inform all law teaching. One idea I advocated was that law teachers bring reality into the classroom whenever possible. Among other ideas, I suggested law teachers run in-class simulations based on "real world" transactions..

Over the past few years, I have had the opportunity to experiment more with this suggestion myself. At my institution, I teach a clinic course (which includes supervising students) and a transactional drafting course. I …

Faced With Crisis: The Importance Of Establishing A Comprehensive Crisis Management Plan, David E. Matchen Jr., Jason Hawkins

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By now, the story surrounding the death of Baltimore man Freddie Gray while in police custody is common knowledge. A series of protests afterward and emergency responses by state and local governments turned the lives of many of Baltimore’s residents upside-down for more than a week in late April and early May, including the staff at the law libraries at the University of Baltimore School of Law (UB Law) and the Thurgood Marshall Law Library at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law (Carey Law). The mood got progressively uglier as the days wore on until, just …

Teaching "Ferguson", Chad Flanders

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What we now refer to simply as "Ferguson" erupted in August of 20T4 and immediately raised a cluster o f legal issues. What crime had Michael Brown allegedly committed? Did Officer Darren Wilson commit a crime when he shot at Brown? Protests ensued, and they in turn inspired a police response, a response that seemed to many more violent than the protests themselves. What of the First Amendment rights o f the protesters and o f the journalists covering them? What laws were they-protestors and some journalists-supposedly breaking?¹

As the days and weeks passed, the legal issues multiplied, and …