Legal Education Commons^™

How Cosmopolitan Are International Law Professors?, Ryan Scoville, Milan Markovic

Faculty Scholarship

This Article offers an empirical answer to a question of interest among scholars of comparative international law: why do American views about international law appear at times to differ from those of other countries? The authors contend that part of the answer lies in legal education. Conducting a survey of the educational and professional backgrounds of nearly 150 legal academics, the authors reveal evidence that professors of international law in the United States often lack significant foreign legal experience, particularly outside of the West. Sociological research suggests that this tendency leads professors to teach international law from predominantly nationalistic and …

Teaching The Digital Caveman: Rethinking The Use Of Classroom Technology In Law School, James Levy

Faculty Scholarship

Law students who have never lived in a world without computers or the Internet are known as "digital natives."

Helping Our Students Reach Their Full Potential: The Insidious Consequences Of Stereotype Threat, Russell A. Mcclain

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Law And Economics: Contemporary Approaches, Martha T. Mccluskey, Frank A. Pasquale, Jennifer Taub

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Market Myth And Pay Disparity In Legal Academia, Paula A. Monopoli

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Influence Of Algorithms: The Importance Of Tracking Technology As Legal Educators, Brian Sites

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Uncovering And Deconstructing The Binary: Teaching (And Learning) Critical Reflection In Clinic And Beyond, Carolyn Grose

Faculty Scholarship

For me as a clinical teacher, the stalemate that so often emerges in our ongoing national conversations about things like abortion and gun control has provided new ways to think about the value of clinical teaching methodologies. The contours and contexts of the debates around abortion and gun control shift from year to year - when I started writing this, Sandy Hook and "legitimate rape" were fresh on everyone's minds. Today, we mourn Michael Brown and the massacre in Charleston, and we rail against Hobby Lobby. Despite the shifting characters, however, these debates remain a constant presence in our national …

The Ph.D. Rises In American Law Schools, 1960-2011: What Does It Mean For Legal Education?, Justin Mccrary, Joy Milligan, James Cleith Phillips

Faculty Scholarship

At a time when some perceive law schools to be in crisis and the future of legal education is being debated, the structural shift toward law professors with Ph.Ds is an important, under-examined trend. In this article, we use an original dataset to analyze law school Ph.D hiring trends and consider their potential consequences. Over the last fifty years the proportion of law professors with Ph.Ds has risen dramatically. Over a third of new professors hired at elite law schools in recent years come with doctoral degrees in fields outside the law. We use our data to consider the scope, …

Developing A Pedagogy Of Beneficiary Accountability In The Representation Of Social Justice Non-Profit Organizations, Amber Baylor, Daria Fisher Page

Faculty Scholarship

This article seeks to begin a conversation on how we teach the problem of beneficiary accountability in the representation of organizations with social justice missions: How do we guide students towards a fuller understanding of the moral responsibility to engage and respect the voices of the communities most directly affected by the non-profit organization’s mission? We look at the issue through the pedagogical lens of our experience supervising clinic students, deconstructing the problems of beneficiary accountability that students faced in the representation of two social justice organizations, surveying relevant legal scholarship on organizational representation and community lawyering, and considering alternative …

Cases And Case-Lawyers, Richard A. Danner

Faculty Scholarship

In the nineteenth century, the term “case-lawyer” was used as a label for lawyers who seemed to care more about locating precedents applicable to their current cases than understanding the principles behind the reported case law. Criticisms of case-lawyers appeared in English journals in the late 1820s, then in the United States, usually from those who believed that every lawyer needed to know and understand the unchanging principles of the common law in order to resolve issues not found in the reported cases. After the Civil War, expressions of concern about caselawyers increased with the significant growth in the amount …

Fiduciary-Isms: A Study Of Academic Influence On The Expansion Of The Law, Daniel B. Yeager

Faculty Scholarship

Fiduciary law aspires to nullify power imbalances by obligating strong parties to give themselves over to servient parties. For example, due to profound imbalances of legal know-how, lawyers must as fiduciaries pursue their clients’ interests, not their own, lest clients get lost in the competitive shuffle. As a peculiar hybrid of status and contract relations, politics and law, compassion and capitalism, fiduciary law is very much in vogue in academic circles. As vogue as it is, there remains room for my “Fiduciary-isms...”, a meditation on the expansion of fiduciary law from its origins in the law of trusts through partnerships, …

Being Good Lawyers: A Relational Approach To Law Practice, Eli Wald, Russell G. Pearce

Faculty Scholarship

In response to past generations of debates regarding whether law is a business or profession, we advance an alternative approach that rejects the dichotomies of business and profession, or hired gun and wise counselor. Instead, we propose a relational account of law practice. Unlike frameworks grounded in assumptions of atomistic individualism or communitarianism, a relational perspective recognizes that all actors, whether individuals or organizations, have separate identities yet are intrinsically inter-connected and cannot maximize their own good in isolation. Through the lens of relational self-interest, maximizing the good of the individual or business requires consideration of the good of the …

What Legal Writers Can Learn From Paint Nite, Beth Cohen, Pat Newcombe

Faculty Scholarship

Paint Nite activities and adult coloring have captured the nation’s interest and gone mainstream. Creating something on our own is what drives similar trends like the popular Do It Yourself movement and the resurgence of knitting after 9/11. At the same time, these fun, creative activities can provide us with a window into the process of legal writing. Using Paint Nite as a reference point throughout a legal writing course allows faculty to present a holistic view of the writing process and provides a useful analogy for faculty as well as an accessible context for students. Legal writing instructors share …

The Digital Revolution And The Future Of Law Reviews, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

Let me begin by congratulating the Marquette Law Review on reaching the threshold of its 100th anniversary. As you may know, Harvard established the first student-edited law review in 1887. Once the Harvard experiment was seen to be a success, other schools followed suit. Marquette was an early adopter, establishing its law review in 1916. By comparison, the school I attended, the University of Chicago, did not start a law review until 1933.

The title of my remarks could be “Will the Marquette Law Review Survive Another Hundred Years?” Or, perhaps, “Will the Marquette Law Review Survive Another Hundred Years, …

Christopher Columbus Langdell And The Public Law Curriculum, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

Teaching materials in public law courses typically rely almost wholly on judicial opinions as their primary materials, amplified by selections from the secondary literature. Constitutional text may appear independently, but statutory text rarely does, and the materials of the legislative process are generally absent. In administrative law course books, administrative opinions and the materials of rulemaking rarely fever appear. Yet these are primary materials with which lawyers must deal with increasing frequency. Lawyers encounter statutes, rules, administrative policies, and administrative disputes without judicial guidance, looking forward and not backward in time. The growth of courses in legislation and the regulatory …

The "Law" And "Spirit" Of The Accreditation Process In Legal Education, Maureen A. O'Rourke

Faculty Scholarship

In 1995, Dean Richard Matasar published an essay in the Journal of Legal Education entitled Perspectives on the Accreditation Process: Views from a Nontraditional School. With characteristic acuity, he focused on the question "whether the accreditation process promotes or discourages curricular experimentation and resource conservation," noting that "[a]s we enter an era of scarcity of resources and diminished demand for legal education, traditional well-endowed schools will continue to flourish. For the rest of us, however, only the fittest and most clever will survive. Accreditation must serve this end."

Clinical Legal Education's Contribution To Building Constitutionalism And Democracy In South Africa: Past, Present, And Future, Peggy Maisel, Shaheda Mahomed, Meetali Jain

Faculty Scholarship

Clinical Legal Education (“CLE”) courses were first introduced in South Africa nearly fifty years ago. Since then, their role has changed from addressing legal problems perpetrated by an oppressive system, to strengthening South Africa’s transition to democracy. The end of apartheid has been accompanied by a transition of focus from private law to public law. South Africa currently has seventeen public universities, each of which has a law faculty and a legal clinic. Many clinical programs’ missions are primarily dedicated to community service and providing access to justice.

Although CLE programs have undertaken some human rights and law reform work, …

Insights From Psychology: Teaching Behavioral Legal Ethics As A Core Element Of Professional Responsibility, Tigran W. Eldred

Faculty Scholarship

The field of behavioral legal ethics—which draws on a large body of empirical research to explore how subtle and often unconscious psychological factors influence ethical decision-making by lawyers—has gained significant attention recently, including by many scholars who have called for a pedagogy that incorporates behavioral lessons into the professional responsibility curriculum. This Article provides one of the first comprehensive accounts of how law teachers can meet this challenge. Based on an approach that employs a variety of experiential techniques to immerse students in the contextual and emotional aspects of legal practice, it provides a detailed model of how to teach …

The End(S) Of Legal Education, Frank H. Wu

Faculty Scholarship

Legal education is in jeopardy. There is no longer sufficient demand for the juris doctor degree from prospective students; the supply of seats exceeds the number of applicants possessing the credentials that have until recently been preferred by each respective institution. As a consequence, schools have had to implement “tuition discounting” at unprecedented levels even to enroll fewer individuals who are less qualified by conventional predictors. Meanwhile, the mainstream press, with encouragement from the organized bar, has excoriated the legal academy for its failures, whether real or perceived. These critics have wondered about the “return on investment.”

"Just Another Little Black Boy From The South Side Of Chicago": Overcoming Obstacles And Breaking Down Barriers To Improve Diversity In The Law Professoriate, Michael Z. Green

Faculty Scholarship

As I reflected on my personal experience to help address the persistence of discrimination in legal academia, I chose to focus on five areas of discussion for the open mic portion of the program held at the Association of American Law Schools Cross-Cutting Program, “The More Things Change ...: Exploring Solutions to Persistent Discrimination in Legal Academia,” held on January 4, 2015, in Washington, D.C. First, I decided to address my personal development as an only child and male in a family of mostly black women struggling through the socioeconomic challenges of being poor and black. To add to that …

Institutional Triage: Reflections On Being Acquired, Aric K. Short

Faculty Scholarship

On June 25, 2012, I walked into the dean's office at Texas Wesleyan University School of Law. He and I had been summoned by our university president to a hastily called meeting to discuss the law school's "academic program." Since I helped oversee our academic program as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at the time, I was not particularly looking forward to the meeting. I assumed there would be bad news of some sort.

Instead, we were told that Texas Wesleyan University ("TWU") and Texas A&M University ("TAMU") were in negotiations that, it was expected, would result in a "strategic …

Incubating Community Law Practices: Post-Graduate Models For Lawyer Training & Access To Law, Luz E. Herrera

Faculty Scholarship

While the greatest number of lawyers practice in solo and small firms, law schools do not devote sufficient resources to preparing law students for the opportunities and challenges that these types of law firms present. The recent economic recession has highlighted the need to better train lawyers to launch law practices right out of law school. However, experienced lawyers, law professors and state bar policy makers worry that individuals who start their own practices are not sufficiently trained to practice and could irreparably harm a client. Many new lawyers share that concern but also worry about the financial instability that …

Synergy And Tradition: The Unity Of Research, Service, And Teaching In Legal Education, Frank Pasquale

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Experiential Teaching In Theory And Practice: An Annotated International Business Transactions Syllabus, Maya Steinitz, Orit Shalomson, Naomi Steinitz-Edelman

Faculty Scholarship

In this short piece we provide an interactive, annotated International Business Transactions (IBT) syllabus. The introduction and annotations seek to connect the current discourse on experiential legal education to andragogy — the study of adult learning.

In 2013 we set out to re-develop a 3-credit IBT course. We applied various experiential pedagogical methodologies — developed initially to train Israeli air force pilots and later adapted to medical training and grounded in theoretical and empirical education research — to serve in a traditional IBT course. The goal was not only to develop legal skills such as negotiation, contract drafting, and client …

Teaching Remedial Problem-Solving Skills To A Law School's Underperforming Students, John F. Murphy

Faculty Scholarship

This article describes a course called the "Art of Lawyering" developed by the Texas A&M University School of Law to help the bottom quarter of the 2L class develop the critical-thinking and problem-solving skills they should have learned in their first year of law school. Students in the bottom quarter of the class at the beginning of their 2L year are most at risk for failing the bar exam after graduation. The Art of Lawyering gives these students the structural framework necessary to solve problems like a lawyer, improve their performance in law school, and pass the bar exam.

The …

Launching The Los Angeles Incubator Consortium, Laura Dym Cohen, Luz E. Herrera, William T. Tanner

Faculty Scholarship

This Article offers a snapshot of the initial two-month development process of a new law firm incubator program-the Los Angeles Incubator Consortium (LAIC). LAIC is a collaborative project of Pepperdine University School of Law, Southwestern Law School, and UCLA School of Law that was launched in collaboration with the Los Angeles Law Library and various local legal aid providers through seed funding from the California Commission on Access to Justice.14 Part II discusses the leadership role of California's Commission on Access to Justice in promoting incubators as models to increase the availability of affordable legal services for the modest-means population. …

Teaching And Assessing Professional Communication Skills In Law School, Denitsa R. Mavrova Heinrich

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Legal Education In Transition: Trends And Their Implications, Michael A. Millemann, Sheldon Krantz

Faculty Scholarship

This is a pivotal moment in legal education. Revisions in American Bar Association accreditation standards, approved in August 2014, impose new requirements, including practice-based requirements, on law schools. Other external regulators and critics are pushing for significant changes too. For example, the California bar licensing body is proposing to add a practice-based, experiential requirement to its licensing requirements, and the New York Court of Appeals, New York’s highest court, is giving third-year, second semester students the opportunity to practice full-time in indigent legal services programs and projects. Unbeknown to many, there have been significant recent changes in legal education that …

Are We There Yet? Aligning The Expectations And Realities Of Gaining Competency In Legal Writing, Sherri Lee Keene

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Assessing Experiential Learning, Jobs And All: A Response To The Three Professors, Robert J. Condlin

Faculty Scholarship

Does clinical practice experience improve a law student’s chances of getting a legal job? If not, would it, if employers were given better information about that experience? And if not, are there other reasons to justify a law school’s decision to fund a clinical program? The answer to the first two questions is almost certainly no. For many reasons—the uneven and situation-driven nature of clinical practice experience, the Delphic quality of practice evaluations, the availability of more effective in-house training options, and the like—most private law firms prefer to trust conventional academic credentials more than practice experience in deciding whom …