Legal Education Commons^™

Nextgen Bar Success: A Student-Tested, Student-Approved Method For Completing Counseling Integrated Question Sets, Kari Milligan

Faculty Scholarship

Legal educators nationwide need to begin teaching students a method for completing Counseling Integrated Question Sets, a novel type of question the National Conference of Bar Examiners (“NCBE”) is introducing on the NextGen bar exam. Counseling Integrated Question Sets require students to answer a series of six multiple choice or short answer questions focused on client counseling or dispute resolution, as they work through an unfolding common fact pattern that also contains rules or elicits rules students have memorized.

Students who matriculated to law school in 2023 will need to answer Counseling Integrated Question Sets in order to obtain their …

Grading Legal Research, Julie Tedjeske Crane

Faculty Scholarship

Law school grading practices often conflict with legal research instruction goals. Small class sizes render norm-referenced (curved) grading unreliable, and the emphasis on ranking students detracts from learning essential skills. Drawing on scholarship on legal education and other disciplines, this article examines several grading approaches that may better serve students and instructors, including criteria-referenced, specification-based, and equitable grading systems. It offers practical suggestions for improving grading practices, such as working with colleagues on assessment design, being intentional about grading formative work, and using anonymous grading. The article concludes with a call for more discussion about grading in legal research courses.

Legal Practice Practicums: Making A Case For Change: A Way Forward, John O. Sonsteng, Michael Sonsteng, Kenneth Rubenzer

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Law, Conflict, And Hybrid Warfare: A Teaching Imperative For A Changing World, Cynthia Alkon, Andrea Kupfer Schneider

Faculty Scholarship

Lawyers increasingly find themselves at the frontlines of the battlefield, just not in the traditional sense. Hybrid warfare is a conflict form that combines traditional military offensive measures with nontraditional methods, including the harnessing of legal systems to achieve strategic goals. Lawyers have always been at the frontline of typical legal risk assessment, thinking about a client's risk of liability or regulation costs generally. Now, lawyers must stand at the ready for a lot more: lawyers must be prepared for cyber-attacks, disinformation campaigns using artificial intelligence, the use of court systems to suppress reporting or shield bad actors, and so …

What Belongs In A Constitutional Law Casebook?, Ernest A. Young

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Teaching Firearms Law: One Big Opportunity And Three Pedagogical Challenges, Joseph Blocher, Jacob D. Charles, Darrell A.H. Miller

Faculty Scholarship

The U.S. Supreme Court’s groundbreaking 2008 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller ushered in a new era for the Second Amendment: one in which the right to keep and bear arms, long dormant as a matter of practical impact and even “embarrassing” as a matter of legal scholarship, vaulted into the front ranks of constitutional law. The Court itself has only revisited the Amendment a few times since then—albeit once by revolutionizing the doctrine. Meanwhile, lower courts have issued thousands of decisions giving shape to the right, while scholars have generated work that is increasingly deep, diverse, and challenging. …

Best Practices For Creating Hypotheticals For Legal Research And Writing, Olivia Smith Schlink, Aimee Self-Pittman, Theresa Tarves, Melissa Strickland

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Reimagining Legal Education: Aligning Curriculum And Pedagogy With The Nextgen Bar Exam, Titichia Jackson

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Embracing A New Approach To Academic Success: How The Adoption Of A Growth Mindset Can Enhance Legal Education, Titichia M. Jackson

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Panel Discussion: Mindfulness In The Law School Environment, Erika George, Nicky Boothe, Kellyn O. Mcgee

Faculty Scholarship

A 2016 study of 13,000 lawyers conducted by American Bar Association Commission on Lawyer Assistance Programs and the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation found that approximately 28 percent struggle with depression, 19 percent anxiety and 23 percent stress.¹² The study found “younger lawyers in the first ten years of practice and those working in private firms experience the highest rates of problem drinking and depression.”¹³ At least one study suggests that 40-70 percent of disciplinary proceedings and malpractice claims against lawyers involve substance abuse or depression.

According to a 2016 Survey of Law Student Well-Being including over 3,300 law …

Book Review: Transformative Negotiation: Strategies For Everyday Change And Equitable Futures, Peter R. Reilly

Faculty Scholarship

This volume makes an immense contribution to the field of negotiation and to dispute resolution more generally. The book covers a vast amount of ground, effectively connecting theory to practice and harnessing large amounts of research to support its arguments and advice. Perhaps most importantly, this reviewer found reading the book to be—as the title suggests—a transformative experience.

Reshaping Intellectual Property Scholarship From Within, Peter K. Yu

Faculty Scholarship

Written for the Symposium collecting papers from the Race + IP 23 Conference, this article explores intellectual property scholarship that has been either overlooked or marginalized. Because scholars of color are often outsiders looking in, the article identifies opportunities to reshape intellectual property scholarship from within. Even though the focus of this article was chosen with readers of this Symposium in mind, its insights will be relevant to all scholars.

This article begins by calling on scholars to develop a deeper appreciation of the intrinsic motivations of authors and inventors. It then discusses the oft-overlooked inequalities of creativity and innovation …

Contracting Hoop Dreams: Using Sports Law To Teach Transactional Practice, Cody Jacobs

Faculty Scholarship

One of the places I find the most joy in teaching legal writing is problem development—writing compelling factual scenarios that give students interesting legal issues to work through is rewarding and fun.  The best prompts will motivate students to really jump into their role representing their client and encourage them to think about the “big picture”—how the law ties into social, political, and economic structures in society at large.  Much has been written about the best ways to do this in the context of litigation assignments (briefs, memos, etc.), but there has been less discussion about problem creation in the …

Critical Race Theory As Legal Epistemic Justice, Jasmine Gonzales Rose

Faculty Scholarship

“Critical Thinking: Not Critical Race Theory” and “Teach Truth: Not CRT,” proclaimed the front and back of a T-shirt on a fellow traveler passing in the airport. I was startled by the blatant misconceptions. The core pursuits of critical race theory (“CRT”) are to think critically, discover truth, and diversify knowledge about race and racism. Although I was aware of then-President Trump’s executive order barring federal diversity training and bills modeled after it, nothing had prepared me for the realization that my academic subfield had become so widely criticized that it was now the subject of T-shirt slogans. A few …

Negotiating Police Reform, Cynthia Alkon

Faculty Scholarship

In the summer of 2020, after the murder of George Floyd, the national conversation around police reform intensified and was part of a conversation with students at Texas A&M University School of Law. Students wanted more discussion and teaching about police, police misconduct, police reform, and defunding the police. Following those discussions, I created a simulation on local level police reform that, as of this writing, I have used twice in my negotiation class. Simulations are helpful teaching tools in a variety of settings, including law schools. Simulations can be particularly useful to help students discuss difficult topics in different …

Civic Education And Democracy's Flaws, Robert L. Tsai

Faculty Scholarship

Today, liberalism and democracy are beset by competitors that seek to return power to religious traditionalists or partisans masquerading as civic republicans. In such an environment, can civic education do some good, and even help bridge our society’s deepening divides?

Seana Shiffrin has characteristically brought deep learning and penetrating insight to the project of civic education in a modern democracy. Against a “dominant” model of citizenship in which “citizens vote and hand off power to their representatives”— which she believes encourages the people to maintain an unhealthy distance from government— she proposes a richer account of political community in which …

Putting The Lawyer First: Framing Well-Being In Law As An Ethical Dilemma, Aric Short

Faculty Scholarship

A disturbingly high percentage of our students continue to be unwell. In the most recent and comprehensive survey of law student well-being in 2021, almost 70% of law students responded that, in the past twelve months, they believed they needed to seek help for emotional or mental health problems. Embedded screening tools in the survey suggested that 34% of respondents were clinically depressed and 54% suffered from clinical anxiety. 44% of respondents reported being drunk in the past thirty days, 33% had engaged in binge drinking in the preceding two weeks, and 38% had smoked marijuana in the past twelve …

Breaking Down Siloes And Building Up Students: The Transformational Possibilities Of Professional Identity Formation, Lindsey P. Gustafson, Aric K. Short, Robin Thorner

Faculty Scholarship

Under the ABA’s sequenced approach to implementation of Standard 303(b)(3), schools should now have developed plans for providing opportunities for professional identity formation and should be implementing them. These plans must provide students with an “intentional exploration of the values, guiding principles, and well-being practices considered foundational to successful legal practice.” In addition, these plans should provide for frequent opportunities for development, “during each year of law school and in a variety of courses and co-curricular and professional development activities.”

Because Standard 303(b)(3) is necessarily tied to the unique character, existing
structures, and available resources of a law school, each …

Persistent Identifiers And The Next Generation Of Legal Scholarship, Aaron Retteen, Malikah Hall-Retteen

Faculty Scholarship

This article discusses the importance of the most common persistent identifiers in scholarly communications—the digital object identifier and the ORCID identifier—to legal scholarship. Persistent identifiers help preserve and disseminate academic content and data-driven services that leverage this information standard are now integrated into the publication process. Because legal publishers have not widely adopted persistent identifiers, the legal discipline cannot enjoy the benefits offered by this system. This article looks at barriers to implementing persistent identifiers among legal publishers and provides an anecdotal example of creating a sustainable workflow between the law library and student-run law journals.

Teaching "Is This Case Rightly Decided?", Steven Arrigg Koh

Faculty Scholarship

“Is this case rightly decided?” From the first week of law school, every law student must grapple with this classroom question. This Essay argues that this vital question is problematically under-specified, creating imprecision in thinking about law. This Essay thus advocates that law professors should present students with a three-part framework: whether a case is rightly decided legally, morally, or sociologically.

Additionally, this Essay argues that disaggregating the question exposes deeper deficiencies in legal education. Many law professors do not provide students with serious grounding to engage in rigorous thinking about the relationship between law, morality, and justice, not to …

Consumer Law For Gen Z Law Students, Neil Sobol

Faculty Scholarship

Whether they are consumers, representing consumers, or advising clients dealing with consumers, law school graduates will inevitably confront numerous consumer law issues. Moreover, most students entering law school are members of Generation Z and face a new wave of consumer laws arising from the 2007–2009 recession and the rapid growth of new technologies. Clickwrap agreements, email spoofing, cybercrimes, cryptocurrencies, fintech, identity theft, online disparagement, data privacy, artificial intelligence, robocalling, and autonomous vehicles are among the evolving topics in modern consumer law. Despite the growth in consumer law concerns, many law students have limited access to consumer law options, with almost …

Re-Evaluating Gpt-4’S Bar Exam Performance, Eric H. Martinez

Faculty Scholarship

Perhaps the most widely touted of GPT-4’s at-launch, zero-shot capabilities has been its reported 90th-percentile performance on the Uniform Bar Exam. This paper begins by investigating the methodological challenges in documenting and verifying the 90th-percentile claim, presenting four sets of findings that indicate that OpenAI’s estimates of GPT-4’s UBE percentile are overinflated. First, although GPT-4’s UBE score nears the 90th percentile when examining approximate conversions from February administrations of the Illinois Bar Exam, these estimates are heavily skewed towards repeat test-takers who failed the July administration and score significantly lower than the general test-taking population. Second, data from a recent …

Teaching Critical Use Of Legal Research Technology, Jennifer E. Chapman

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Implementing Aba Standard 303(B)(3): Positive Legal Education Through A Community Of Inquiry, Joshua Aaron Jones

Faculty Scholarship

According to William Adams, Executive Director of Legal Education and Bar Admissions at the American Bar Association (ABA), “Full implementation [of 303(b)(3)] [was] expected by 2023.” The revised Standard requires that law schools provide “substantial opportunities” for professional identity development (PID). Though the ABA’s Standards and Rules of Procedure for Approval of Law Schools and the related interpretations allow flexibility, the ABA left law schools without detailed guidance; without a unified professional identity concept, law schools across the country will implement a patchwork of programs, some stronger than others, that may curtail a global strengthening of the profession. Fortunately, scholars …

Academically Productive Talk In The Classroom Through Fishbowl Discussions, Mandee Baumer

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Cuing Safety In The Law School Classroom: Using A Polyvagal Theory Framework In Support Of Trauma-Informed Teaching Practices, Gigi Walker, Brian Flaherty

Faculty Scholarship

The past few decades have seen a welcomed focus on “Trauma-informed education.” This focus is often traced back to the 1997 Adverse Childhood Experiences study, which identified many significant negative outcomes that resulted from childhood trauma.¹ While the original study focused on outcomes such as chronic health problems, incarceration, and employment challenges, later researchers focused on the negative impacts on education and learning as a result of trauma.² Educators continue to work with this research trying to figure out how to be more “trauma-informed,” and to better reach those students whose lives and learning capacity have been affected …

Moving Beyond Statements And Good Intentions In U.S. Law Schools, Angela Onwuachi-Willig

Faculty Scholarship

This Article seeks to answer these questions about how law school leaders might help to cultivate antiracist cultures within their law schools, among their students, and across the legal profession, even in the face of a growing national backlash against antiracism, diversity, equity, and inclusion.³² Part I first establishes why it is important for law schools to "provide [an] education to law students on bias, cross-cultural competency, and racism," as the American Bar Association (ABA) requires, and to train future lawyers who have the abilities to combat racism. ³³ In so doing, Part I defines key terms such as …

Innovative Approaches To On-Demand Continuing Legal Education Ethics Training: A Case Study, Tigran W. Eldred, Molly J. Walker Wilson

Faculty Scholarship

In the ongoing discussions about continuing legal education (CLE), concerns have been raised about the quality of programming that is created and delivered. Critics have emphasized the weaknesses in mandatory programs, arguing that requiring annual training on topics such as legal ethics tends to fall short of stated goals.¹ Too often, it is said, such programs fail to deliver content in an engaging manner that is likely to improve competence.² The picture conjured up is of the bored lawyer, sitting in the back of a room flipping through a newspaper or some other distraction, as CLE instructors passively …

Beyond "Hard" Skills: Teaching Outward - And Inward-Facing Character-Based Skills To 1ls In Light Of Aba Standard 303(B)(3)'S Professional Identity Requirement, Marni Goldstein Caputo, Kathleen Luz

Faculty Scholarship

In this article, we share some ways in which we have adjusted our teaching to comply with Standard 303(b)(3) by addressing professional identity formation through the vehicles of outward-facing and inward-facing character-based skills. We believe that if law students do not intentionally start *811 exploring their professional identities as soon as they step foot into law school, they run the risk of believing that legal education and practice are somehow separate from their inner, personal identities as lawyers when, of course, they are, and ought to be, enmeshed. By injecting skills into the 1L curriculum that force both the development …

Rethinking Foundations And Analyzing New Conflicts: Teaching Law After Dobbs, Nicole Huberfeld, Linda C. Mcclain, Aziza Ahmed

Faculty Scholarship

This Article draws on our diverse and complementary areas of scholarly expertise and teaching experiences across law school and public health curricula to offer a multidisciplinary model for teaching in a variety of courses after Dobbs. Teaching reproductive rights and justice poses extensive challenges in the wake of Dobbs' overruling Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, upending a half century of precedents protecting a constitutional right to abortion, and returning the issue to "the people" and the states. This Article offers theoretical and pedagogical perspectives on teaching courses in Reproductive Rights and Justice, as well …