Legal Education Commons^™

Not A Pretty Picture: Race, Gender, And Inequality In The Legal Profession And Legal Education, Tanina Rostain

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Responding to renewed interest in law school as a path to a career “to do well and do good,” this essay examines Nelson, Dinovitzer, Garth, Sterling, Wilkins, Dawe, and Michelson’s The Making of Lawyers’ Careers and its account of inequality and opportunity in the American legal profession. Based on a 20-year study of more than 2,000 lawyers, the book traces how credentials, race, gender, class, and law school selectivity profoundly shape career trajectories. The essay situates those findings within the divide in private practice between corporate practice and people law and interrogates the professional ideology—rooted in the lawyer’s traditional role …

Religious Freedom, Jesuit Mission, And Dei, William M. Treanor, Amelia J. Uelmen

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The ability of Jesuit educational institutions to pursue a central part of their mission – that of fostering diverse, equitable and inclusive educational environments – is under attack. This essay outlines several dimensions of their religiously-grounded mission and the reasons to strongly protect from government interference the rights of Jesuit universities to implement programs and practices that align with DEI values. First, for Jesuit universities, these programs and practices are rooted in a much deeper culture of the more than 2,000-year old Catholic intellectual tradition and the now 500-year old tradition of Jesuit spirituality. Second, drawing on the classic work …

Required Learning, Voluntary Service: A Critical Look At Mandatory Cle And Pro Bono Options, Rima Sirota

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This chapter critically examines the intersection of mandatory continuing legal education (MCLE) and pro bono service in the United States, focusing on the growing practice of awarding MCLE credits for pro bono work. It argues that MCLE, widely justified as promoting lawyer competence, rests on a striking lack of empirical support and is structured in ways that undermine effective professional learning. A pro bono option for earning MCLE credit, introduced as an incentive to expand access to justice, has similarly failed to demonstrate measurable impacts on pro bono participation. Nonetheless, the pro bono option holds untapped potential because, if properly …

Holding The Line On Academic Freedom In Law School Clinics, Ty Alper, Praveen Kosuri, Beth Lyon, Alicia E. Plerhoples, Laura Riley, Robin Walker Sterling

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Since the emergence of modern clinical legal education, law school clinics have periodically faced political interference in their selection of clients and cases, interference that threatens clinics’ essential dual missions of training practice-ready lawyers and providing legal services to marginalized clients who would otherwise lack representation. While such pressure is not new, contemporary threats differ in scale and institutional form. Today, funding, oversight, and enforcement mechanisms are weaponized in an attempt to discipline universities, heightening institutional anxiety and prompting some universities to contemplate preemptive constraints on clinic autonomy in the name of risk management and reputational protection. This shift to …

Just Research And Citation, Amanda Levendowski

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Contemporary research and citation practices are often unjust. Data cartels like Westlaw and Lexis have parent companies that prioritize profits in ways that threaten immigrants. Even before the Dobbs decision, search engines could be deployed to weaponize data against pregnant people seeking reproductive care. Women and people of color have been legal scholars for more than a century but, as many scholars have observed, colleagues consistently under-cite, mis-cite or appropriate those scholars’ work with minimal recourse. Citation materials are often inaccessible to disabled people, poor people, or the public due to poor design, paywalls, or unpreserved content that falls prey …

Georgetown University Law Library, Georgetown University Law Center, Austin Martin Williams

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The story of the Georgetown University Law Library (Law Library) is one of exceptional growth, innovation, and change throughout its more than 100 years in existence. While the Law Library's history is rich in detail, it cannot be fully told without exploring the history of both the Georgetown University Law Center (Law Center) and Georgetown University (University).

Teaching Global Health Law: Preparing The Next Generation For Future Challenges, Lawrence O. Gostin, Sarah L. Bosha, Benjamin Mason Meier

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Following from sweeping law reforms across the global health landscape, there is a need to prepare the next generation to advance global health law to ensure justice for a healthier world. Educational programs across disciplines have increasingly incorporated the field of global health law, with new courses examining the law and policy frameworks that apply to the new set of public health threats, non-state actors, and regulatory instruments that structure global health. Such interdisciplinary training must be expanded throughout the world to prepare future practitioners to strengthen global health law — ensuring a foundation for global health in legal studies …

Mandatory Anti-Bias Cle: A Serious Problem Deserves More Meaningful Response, Rima Sirota

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This essay addresses the problematic convergence of two recent trends: (1) the expansion of jurisdictions requiring anti-bias training (ABT) as part of mandatory continuing legal education (CLE), and (2) the growing recognition among social scientists that such training, at least as currently practiced, is of limited effectiveness.

Forty-six American states require continuing legal education (CLE), and eleven of these states now require lawyer ABT as one facet of CLE requirements. I have previously criticized the mandatory CLE system because so little evidence supports the conclusion that it results in more competent lawyers. The central question tackled by this essay is …

Brown Now: The Surprising Possibility Of Progressive Reform, Louis Michael Seidman

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

For four decades, the Supreme Court has engaged in a determined, systematic and successful effort to transform and tame Brown v. Board of Education. But in this article, written for a symposium on Brown at 70, I suggest a surprising counterweight to the standard narrative. If one takes modern doctrine seriously -- a big if, I concede-- it has the potential to support some progressive goals.

In particular, modern doctrine might provide progressives answers to three questions:

1. Are race-conscious but facially neutral means of increasing diversity at state institutions of higher education constitutional?
2. Are legacy admissions to state run institutions …

Breaking The Rules, Rima Sirota

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

“Breaking the Rules” is a legal research and writing assignment that I crafted for students completing their first year of law school. The assignment honors new students’ desire for skills that will allow them to effectively challenge the status quo of settled but discriminatory legal rules. Part I of this article is an essay that contextualizes and explains the assignment; Part II provides the assignment itself.

Progressive Prosecution Or Zealous Public Defense? The Choice For Law Students Concerned About Our Flawed Criminal Legal System, Abbe Smith

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This Article addresses a question asked by many law students concerned about our flawed criminal legal system: should they become a prosecutor in an office run by a progressive prosecutor, or a public defender in an office devoted to zealous, client-centered (or holistic) defense? The Article starts with an anecdote about Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner’s road show to recruit law students and young lawyers, and then proceeds as follows: First, this Article makes the case for progressive prosecution; then, it makes the case for zealous indigent defense; then, it identifies the obstacles and challenges for both kinds of lawyers …

Does The 1l Curriculum Make A Difference?, David A. Hyman, Jing Liu, Joshua C. Teitelbaum

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Georgetown Law’s Curriculum B (also known as Section 3) offers a unique opportunity to study an alternative 1L curriculum. The standard 1L curriculum has been around for decades and is still offered at the vast majority of U.S. law schools. Leaders in the legal academy often talk about experimenting with the 1L curriculum, but hardly anyone does it. Georgetown Law has. We study whether Georgetown’s Curriculum B yields measurable differences in student outcomes. Our empirical design leverages the fact that enrollment in Curriculum B is done by lottery when it is oversubscribed—meaning our study is effectively a randomized controlled trial. …

Race And Entrepreneurship: Reclaiming Narratives, Priya Baskaran, Alicia E. Plerhoples

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This essay makes the case for engaging in counter-narratives and inclusive storytelling within the transactional clinic curriculum. The authors leverage lessons from Critical Race Theory to amplify the voices and experiences of underrepresented entrepreneurs and marginalized communities in both clinic seminar and selected casework. In doing so, we challenge hegemonic narratives of entrepreneurship and expose our law students to the presence and impact of interlocking systems of subordination that minimize the existence and contributions of entrepreneurs of color. We challenge our law students and ourselves to become more creative and thoughtful lawyers to a more inclusive and diverse set of …

Teaching Doctrine For Justice Readiness, Amanda Levendowski

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Clinics strive to teach students lawyering skills. But clinics should also teach students how to use those skills to confront injustice and promote justice, an approach Jane Aiken refers to as “justice readiness.” Casework for clients presents many opportunities for students to become justice ready, but not all matters do so equally. Clinics come with built-in limitations. Some matters involve injustices in one area of law while leaving others untouched. And others don’t require creative advocacy for justice. Casework remains a powerful driver of justice readiness, but it cannot do the job alone.

Teaching students doctrine through a social justice …

The History Wars And Property Law: Conquest And Slavery As Foundational To The Field, K-Sue Park

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This Article addresses the stakes of the ongoing fight over competing versions of U.S. history for our understanding of law, with a special focus on property law. Insofar as legal scholarship has examined U.S. law within the historical context in which it arose, it has largely overlooked the role that laws and legal institutions played in facilitating the production of the two preeminent market commodities in the colonial and early Republic periods: expropriated lands and enslaved people. Though conquest and enslavement were key to producing property for centuries, property-law scholars have constructed the field of property law to be largely …

Can Continuing Legal Education Pass The Test? Empirical Lessons From The Medical World., Rima Sirota

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Mandatory continuing legal education (CLE) takes millions of hours and hundreds of millions of dollars from American lawyers every year, with the burden landing in disproportionate fashion on new lawyers, public interest lawyers, and solo practitioners. CLE proponents insist that the system protects the public by maintaining lawyer competence. In the forty-five years since the first jurisdictions began requiring CLE, no evidence has emerged in support of this claim.

This Article argues that mandatory CLE is indefensible in its current state. Either the legal profession and the CLE industry must commit to study and change, or it is time to …

Training Future Health Justice Leaders — A Role For Medical–Legal Partnerships, Edward B. Healton, William M. Treanor, John J. Degioia, Vicki W. Girard

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

No abstract provided.

Setting The Health Justice Agenda: Addressing Health Inequity & Injustice In The Post-Pandemic Clinic, Emily Benfer, James Bhandary-Alexander, Yael Cannon, Medha Makhlouf, Tomar Pierson-Brown

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The COVID-19 pandemic surfaced and deepened entrenched preexisting health injustice in the United States. Racialized, marginalized, poor, and hyper-exploited populations suffered disproportionately negative outcomes due to the pandemic. The structures that generate and sustain health inequity in the United States—including in access to justice, housing, health care, employment, and education—have produced predictably disparate results. The authors, law school clinicians and professors involved with medical-legal partnerships, discuss the lessons learned by employing a health justice framework in teaching students to address issues of health inequity during the pandemic. The goal of health justice is to eliminate health disparities that are linked …

The Dreaded Parenthetical, Brian Wolfman

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This essay concerns the use -- and, particularly, the overuse and misuse -- of explanatory parentheticals in legal briefs. The essay describes four particular concerns about parentheticals that appear in briefs. Parentheticals shouldn't be used to repeat what you’ve just said or to say something that easily can be taken out of the parenthetical and placed in ordinary text. Generally, parentheticals shouldn't be used to drive the substance of a brief. The ordinary prose should do that work. And if there’s a good reason to use a parenthetical, try to place it at the end of a paragraph where it …

Lighting The Fires Of Learning In Law School: Implementing Aba Standard 314 By Incorporating Effective Formative Assessment Techniques Across The Curriculum, Julie L. Ross, Diana R. Donahoe

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The American Bar Association now requires law schools to incorporate formative assessment into the law school curriculum by providing feedback to students relating to course-specific learning goals before the end-of-semester exam. Peer reviews and self-evaluations are two powerful formative assessment techniques that faculty can use to meet the new ABA standards to assess the students’ learning outcomes while courses are ongoing, creating more effective learning environments within the classroom.

This article argues that peer reviews and self-evaluations can be successfully used across the law school curriculum to deepen student understanding, encourage student cooperation, and develop students’ abilities to be self-regulated …

Conquest And Slavery In The Property Law Course: Notes For Teachers, K-Sue Park

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This piece contains ideas for teaching about the foundational place of the histories of conquest and slavery to American property law and the property law course. I begin by briefly reviewing how these topics have been erased and marginalized from the study of American property law, as mentioned by casebooks in the field published from the late nineteenth century to the present. I then show how the history of conquest constituted the context in which the singular American land system and traditional theories of acquisition developed, before turning to the history of the American slave trade and the long history …

Building Bridges Across Curricular And Status Lines: Gender Inequity Throughout The Legal Academy, Kristen K. Tiscione, Melissa H. Weresh

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

No abstract provided.

Gender Inequity Throughout The Legal Academy: A Quick Look At The (Surprisingly Limited) Data, Kristen K. Tiscione

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The long-standing overrepresentation of female law faculty in skills teaching and service-oriented positions is well documented. In contrast, the historical underrepresentation of female law faculty in top dean and tenured or tenure-track teaching positions has been widely recognized but difficult to quantify. The American Bar Association has a link in the statistics archives of its website to a chart from Fall 2013 on the gender, ethnicity, and status of law faculty. The Association of American Law Schools (AALS) links to the same chart on its website. This chart replaced a similar chart covering 2008 to 2009 that the ABA has …

On The Values Of Words, Michael J. Cedrone

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Mary Norris' Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen and Kory Stamper's Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries use observations about language as a touchstone for a nuanced examination of deeper truths about language, culture, and law in a changing world. In so doing, they point to deeper truths about the use of language and its consequences. Law students, lawyers, and law professors will benefit from journeying with Norris and Stamper towards the goal of crafting prose that is clear, accurate, and inclusive. In particular, the legal community will benefit from the books' efforts to define …

Reflections On A More “Catholic” Catholic Legal Education, William M. Treanor

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

I am grateful to Professors Breen and Strang for their thoughtful book about Catholic legal education in the United States. It is an important topic, and their work promises to be a significant contribution to the conversation about the mission of Catholic law schools. My reflections here will focus on Chapter Five.

All of us participating in this symposium are engaged in the collective enterprise of thinking through and implementing what it means to be a Catholic law school. As a historian, personally I am well aware of the value of studying where we have been as part of the …

On Being Old Codgers: A Conversation About A Half Century In Legal Education, Mark Tushnet, Louis Michael Seidman

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This conversation, conducted over three evenings, captures some of our thoughts about the last half century of legal education as both of us near retirement. We have edited the conversations so as to eliminate verbal stumbles and present our ideas more coherently, slightly reorganized a small part of the conversation, and added a few explanatory footnotes. However, we have attempted to keep the informal tone of our discussions.

The Next Great Challenge: Making Legal Writing Scholarship Count As Legal Scholarship, Kristen K. Tiscione

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The Legal Writing Journal published my first article. For that reason alone, it is special to me. As I am sure is true for many legal writing scholars, the Journal helped me find my voice, provided welcome validation, and conferred value on my scholarly effort. I have a copy of each print volume in my office, and like old friends, they are always there when I need them. I miss receiving each new cream and green issue in the mail, devouring it, and adding it to my collection, but the online version is equally pleasing in a different way and …

Curing The Cost Disease: Legal Education, Legal Services, And The Role Of Income-Contingent Loans, John R. Brooks

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The costs of both legal education and legal services have been rising steadily for decades. This is because they share a common root: the constant above-inflation growth in the cost of labor-intensive goods and services known as the “cost disease.” The cost disease story roots cost growth not in market failure or bureaucratic waste, but in natural, even healthy, economic forces—productivity and wage growth. Because the source of this cost growth is productivity growth, the nature of the cost disease is such that an economy as a whole can afford these rising costs. But in a world of deep income …

The Case For More Debt: Expanding College Affordability By Expanding Income-Driven Repayment, John R. Brooks

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Income-Driven Repayment (IDR) for federal student loans is rapidly becoming the primary tool that the federal government uses to provide progressive funding to individuals to pay for college. Under these programs, borrowers can choose to pay back their loans as a percentage of income, with eventual debt forgiveness after 10-25 years. If administered well, these programs can make student loans affordable for everyone, regardless of income. In this symposium essay, I argue that for IDR to meet its goal of providing affordable higher education to everyone, the federal government needs to raise the individual borrowing limits on Direct Loans and …

“Best Practices”: A Giant Step Toward Ensuring Compliance With Aba Standard 405(C), A Small Yet Important Step Toward Addressing Gender Discrimination In The Legal Academy, Kristen K. Tiscione

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In March 2014, the American Bar Association (ABA) voted to leave Accreditation Standard 405 undisturbed.” The ABA’s decision required law schools to continue to grant tenure to traditional law faculty, yet permitted them to continue to deny tenure to clinical and legal writing faculty. At the same time, recognizing the need for increased professional skills training, the ABA voted to increase the number of experiential credits law students must complete from one to six. As explained to the ABA Council in advance, these two decisions work together to increase the demands on skills faculty, who are predominantly female, yet keep …