Legal Education Commons^™

Crafting A Scholarly Persona: A Panel Discussion, Ian Ayres, Paul H. Robinson, Carol Sanger, Kimberly Kessler Ferzan

Faculty Scholarship

This is an edited transcript of Crafting a Scholarly Persona, the Scholarship Section's program from the AALS Annual Meeting in 2007. During this program, three established scholars, Ian Ayres, Paul Robinson, and Carol Sanger, discussed their individual career paths – How they chose their article topics, what the goals of their scholarship are, how they view their research agendas, etc. The discussion was intended roughly to mirror Bravo's Inside the Actor's Studio.

The Injustice Of Reducing The Number Of Levels In A Grading System, William K.S. Wang

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Teaching Legal Research And Writing With Actual Legal Work: Extending Clinical Education Into The First Year, Michael A. Millemann, Steven D. Schwinn

Faculty Scholarship

In this article, the co-authors argue that legal research and writing (LRW) teachers should use actual legal work to generate assignments. They recommend that clinical and LRW teachers work together to design, co-teach, and evaluate such courses. They describe two experimental courses they developed together and co-taught to support and clarify their arguments. They contend that actual legal work motivates students to learn the basic skills of research, analysis and writing, and thus helps to accomplish the primary goals of LRW courses. It also helps students to explore new dimensions of basic skills, including those related to the development and …

Teach The Children Well: Incorporating Cultural Literacy Into The Law School Learning Experience, Debra Moss Curtis

Faculty Scholarship

This article is an examination of what and how we teach in law school. Much attention has been given to the concept of the Socratic Method and whether teaching in this manner "hides the ball" from students. Rather than focusing on whether the ball is hidden, my work shall focus on whether students know what the ball is in the first place.

Misuse And Abuse Of The Lsat: Making The Case For Alternative Evaluative Efforts And A Redefinition Of Merit, Phoebe A. Haddon, Deborah W. Post

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Balancing The Five Hundred Hats: On Being A Legal Educator/Scholar/Activist, Susan Herman

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

As A Last Resort, Ask The Students: What They Say Makes Someone An Effective Law Teacher, James B. Levy

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Everything I Wanted To Know About Teaching Law School I Learned From Being A Kindergarten Teacher: Ethics In The Law School Classroom, Debra Moss Curtis

Faculty Scholarship

This article discusses the ethics of teaching law school. It was not until the 1920s and 1930s that full-time law teachers, rather than part-time practitioners or judges, held the main responsibility for teaching at many law schools. When this shift began to occur, the field of "law professor" was born, and there arose the need for rules in all areas governing law professors, including ethics. Today, most law professors in the United States are members of both the legal and teaching professions and therefore must comply with the ethical rules of each profession. However they may be professionally licensed, law …

Aals As Creative Problem Solver: Implementing Bylaw 6-4(A) To Prohibit Discrimination On The Basis Of Sexual Orientation In Legal Education, Barbara Cox

Faculty Scholarship

I wrote this article because it is important for the legal education community to understand the important leadership that the AALS has provided in lessening the discrimination that sexual minorities encounter in legal education, and to know of the challenges and problems it encountered in making Bylaw 6-4(a) into more than a membership requirement in name only.

The Orthodoxy Of Format: Some Sketches On Legal Scholarship, William Aceves, James Cooper, Alejandro Gonzalez, Pedro Egana Marshall

Faculty Scholarship

The idea that legal scholarship should include visual elements is not a new one. Early student work blazed a trail some thirty years ago. More recent contributions have been produced by scholars such as Keith Aoki. And, in 2006, the Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke University published a comic book addressing copyright law and the fair use doctrine.

Despite these efforts, there does not appear to be any systematic attempt to use graphic art in legal scholarship. This project makes such an appeal. It challenges the conventional format for legal scholarship that has been used …

A Persistent Critique: Constructing Clients’ Stories, Carolyn Grose

Faculty Scholarship

Drawing on narrative, post-colonial, clinical and other critical theory, this article explores the role and necessity of critical reflection by lawyers in the construction of clients' stories in representation. In particular, the piece is framed by the experiences of transgender clients and their student attorneys. The piece begins by examining the "problem of representation" - the challenge of seeing and hearing clients' stories, particularly when those stories do not fit in to our understanding of how the world works. It moves on to describe first the "official stories" that govern how the legal system treats transgender people and second how …

A Conversation Among Deans, Katharine T. Bartlett, Edward Rubin, W. H. Knight

Faculty Scholarship

On March 10, 2006, the Harvard Journal of Law & Gender, Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, and Harvard Law Review co-sponsored a conference, "Results: Legal Education, Institutional Change, and a Decade of Gender Studies," to address the number of student experience studies that detail women's lower performance in and dissatisfaction with law school. Rather than advocate for a particular set of responses to the different experiences of men and women in legal education , this conference sought to foster a discussion about the institutional challenges these patterns highlight. As a means of accomplishing this end, law school deans from …

Tribute: An Extraordinary Lawyer, Arthur Leavens

Faculty Scholarship

Charles Ogletree, Jr., is one of those persons who, by virtue of his many and varied achievements, has become almost larger than life. Ogletree is a leader in the struggle for civil rights. The Author pays tribute to this tenured Harvard Law School professor.

On Nourishing The Curriculum With A Transnational-Law Lagniappe (From The Association Of American Law Schools' Workshop On Integrating Transnational Legal Perspectives Into The First-Year Curriculum, Annual Meeting, Torts Panel, January 2006), Anita Bernstein

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Helping Students Develop A Humanistic Philosophy Of Lawyering, Beth Cohen

Faculty Scholarship

This Article considers the need to help students develop a cohesive philosophy of lawyering and suggests some ideas and methods to help introduce these concepts and concerns to students. Although this Article focuses primarily on aspects of the legal research and writing curriculum and pedagogy as well as professional development programs that can enhance the curriculum, the concepts are applicable and transferable to other subjects and courses. The purpose of this Article is to explore the issues raised by a conscious decision to help students consider and develop a beneficial philosophy of lawyering in areas including the development of legal …

Grave Building: A Tribute To Charles J. Ogletree, Jr., And His Evolving Legacy, Robin A. Lenhardt

Faculty Scholarship

This tribute celebrates the tremendous legal career of Professor Charles J. Ogletree, Jr. It highlights his many contributions to the legal profession and academy, including his role in preparing a cadre of lawyers for the 21st Century; body of scholarship focusing on racial justice issues; and instrumental role in developing new approaches to civil rights lawyering.

Clinical Legal Education In Hong Kong: A Time To Move Forward, Stacy Caplow

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Justice In The Balance: An Evaluation Of One Clinic's Ability To Harmonize Teaching Practical Skills, Ethics And Professionalism With A Social Justice Mission, Lauren Carasik

Faculty Scholarship

A number of developments have firmly established the role of clinics in legal education, allowing law school clinicians greater latitude in designing programs consistent with law school curricular values and priorities. Consequently, current law school clinical offerings are comprised of richly varied structures and goals. A myriad of goals fall under the general rubric of clinical legal education. Among the most widely cited goals are providing practical skills training in a real world context, instilling a public interest ethos in students, advancing social justice, encouraging the critique of the law and legal institutions, inculcating high standards of ethics and professionalism …

Affirming Michigan’S Action: The Michigan Journal Of Race & Law's Response To Dr. Carcieri's Grutter V. Bollinger And Civil Disobedience, Adam Blumenkrantz, Jason Belmont Conn, Amrita Mallik, Michael Murphy

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Ethics Teacher's Bittersweet Revenge: Virtue And Risk Management, William H. Simon

Faculty Scholarship

Insurance companies have come to play a role in professional responsibility compliance that rivals that of courts and disciplinary agencies. The insurers, however, depart from the judicial perspective of the traditional enforcement agencies. Instead, they take the risk management perspective that Anthony Alfieri describes.

I agree with Alfieri that risk management poses real dangers of cynicism and Babbittry. Nevertheless, I also see more upside than he does. The new perspective is valuable, not just as a strategy for attracting student attention, but as an antidote to real and basic deficiencies in mainstream ethics teaching and traditional professional practice. In this …

Transsystemia – Are We Approaching A New Langdellian Moment? Is Mcgill Leading The Way?, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

To start, I'd like you to imagine an agglomeration of twenty to thirty jurisdictions experiencing a profound change in the nature of their economic realities. Their economies, and thus the transactions within them and the businesses that conduct them, have been predominantly local in character. Now, political and economic developments are producing businesses and transactions increasingly trans-jurisdictional in character. Increasingly the counseling, drafting, and litigating that goes on in lawyers' offices involves not one jurisdiction but two or three. What happens to legal education?

As the United States emerged from the Civil War and a truly national economy began to …

"The Irresistible Force Meets The Immovable Object": When Antidiscrimination Standards And Religious Belief Collide In Aba-Accredited Law Schools, Kristin B. Gerdy

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Cross-Cultural Lawyering By The Book: The Latest Clinical Texts And A Sketch Of A Future Agenda, Ascanio Piomelli

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Using A Literary Case Study To Teach Lawyering Skills: How We Used Damages By Barry Werth In The First-Year Legal Writing Curriculum, Jeanne M. Kaiser, Myra Orlen

Faculty Scholarship

First-year law students arrive for their first day of classes with varying perceptions about the practice of law and what it means to be a lawyer. Although some students have first-hand knowledge of the profession based on their work in a law office or from family members who are attorneys, many students base their entire conception of what it means to be a lawyer on images from popular media. The Authors discuss how they used a literary account to acquaint students with an authentic picture of litigation, while still teaching the rudiments of legal research and writing. The book used …

A Formstone Of Our Federalism: The Erie/Hanna Doctrine & Casebook Law Reform, Robert J. Condlin

Faculty Scholarship

The one I feel sorry for is John Ely. More than thirty years ago, in his classic article The Irrepressible Myth of Erie, he explained painstakingly, if not clearly, how thinking of the Erie/Hanna doctrine as a constitutional cornerstone of our federalism was just a mistake. Such a view, he pointed out, makes a major mystery out of what are really three distinct and rather ordinary problems of statutory and constitutional interpretation. He described the analytical and practical costs of the mistake, showed how the analysis ought to go, explained why academics and judges had failed to get it …

"Tacking Too Close To The Wind": The Challenge To Prosecution Clinics To Set Our Students On A Straight Course, Stacy Caplow

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

"In A Case, In A Book, They Will Not Take A Second Look!" Critical Reading In The Legal Writing Classroom, Debra Curtis, Judith Karp

Faculty Scholarship

This article is based on a presentation that was first assembled for the Southeastern Regional Legal Writing Conference in September 2003. The theme of that conference was "The Basics and Beyond: Building Solid Skills on Flawed Foundations." As legal writing professions with nine years of teaching experience between us, we immediately honed in on "reading" as a core lawyering skill--though it is the one that seemed most flawed in the first-year legal writing class. We determined that case analysis, statute analysis, synthesis, and application were not possible unless students critically read the material with which they were working. Many students …

You've Got Rhythm: Curriculum Planning And Teaching Rhythm At Work In The Legal Writing Classroom, Debra Curtis

Faculty Scholarship

With increased frequency, attention is being given to the methods and style of teaching the law, and to the educational knowledge of law teachers necessary for their development. While teachers in many other areas of higher education are required to take credit hours in education courses, that requirement or focus on pedagogy itself has not yet fully spilled over to legal education professionals. In addition, although law professions, have been encouraged to think and learn about the law, they generally have long since accepted the Socratic method as a primary method of teaching. Recently information about students' learning styles, and …

Practicing What We Teach: The Importance Of Emotion And Community Connection In Law Work And Law Teaching, Ann Juergens

Faculty Scholarship

Personal satisfaction and fine lawyering go hand in hand. Legal education and the legal system, however, do damage to that coupling. The author suggests that lawyers and law students can thwart personal dysfunction and professional dissatisfaction if we allow ourselves to express joy and sadness. To avoid being depleted by grief and rage, which cannot nourish satisfying law work over time, the article suggests that we attend to connections with others (all others). Lawyers who connect with their own communities may have more tools for crafting solutions for clients whose problems often implicate community. As teachers, the best way to …

A New Approach To Health Care Adr: Training Law Students To Be Problem Solvers In The Health Care Context, Linda H. Morton

Faculty Scholarship

This article focuses on the use of actual public health problems to train law students in interdisciplinary problem solving. The author describes the planning, structure, challenges and rewards in teaching her clinical course, Problem Solving and Prevention in Healthcare, to students initially reluctant to work collaboratively in teams, intimidated by a broader community context, and hesitant to interact strategically with other professionals.