Legal Education Commons^™

Leading From Where You Are: How Projects Build Leadership Skills In Law Libraries, Susan Azyndar, Yan Yu

Journal Articles

Practical ways to develop leadership skills through collaborative projects–no title required.

What Beginning Law Students Learn When Ai Gets Personal, Kristina Swanson

Journal Articles

From the Introduction

While legal writing and research professors wrestle with artificial intelligence (AI)'s impact on the skills we teach, one thing is clear: beginning law students cannot discern whether AI answers to legal questions are correct. AI-generated responses to legal questions sound right and are designed to bolster the beleaguered law student's confidence. Deliberately programmed to hook customers, AI-generated answers often begin by praising the brilliant question and expressing electronic empathy for the difficulty the student may have had answering it. The end result: students with the wrong legal answer and misplaced confidence.

Shortcomings Of Law School And Big Law, Julian Velasco

Journal Articles

This paper, presented as part of a colloquium on  Lawyers and Their Institutions, considers two important institutions — law schools and "big law," especially transaction practice at elite law firms — and argues that they exert a problematic influence on developing attorneys by inculcating opposing types of disrespect for the law. First, the process of legal education often suggests that the law is fundamentally indeterminate. Second, big law tends to suggest to junior associates that law is largely irrelevant. Such misunderstandings can result in a misconception of the purpose of law and give a false impression of the lawyer's …

Human Rights Methodology For Clinical Instruction: Legal Theory And Interdisciplinary Practices To Realize Human Rights Outcomes, Diane Desierto

Journal Articles

The interdisciplinary fact-finding and analytical methodologies of global human rights law, when translated to experiential learning practices (e.g., in the form of human rights legal assessments that integrate international law with domestic law and inject rigorous plausibility evaluations of client claims applicable to global as well as domestic fora) can usefully enhance and expand United States law school clinical teaching practices and the transfer of practical lawyering skills. By teaching law students: (1) the wide range of available human rights factfinding and empirical tools; (2) the techniques for broad use and application of primary and secondary evidentiary sources; and (3) …

The Limits Of Generative Ai In Administrative Law Research, Susan Azyndar

Journal Articles

The author recounts an administrative law classroom experience using generative AI. She considers the complexities of administrative law, AI training, professional responsibility, and traditional resources.

Gender And Incivility In A Law School Moot Court Competition, Frank Rosenblatt, Irene Victoria Massimino

Journal Articles

The authors recently coached a team in a law school moot court competition that featured troublesome behavior from several male judges towards the female participants. This post first describes the competition and what happened. It then considers how this example speaks to larger truths about gender and incivility in litigation particularly, and the legal profession generally.

Teaching Administrative Law Research: Preparing Law Students For Regulatory Practice, Susan Azyndar

Journal Articles

A quick skim of daily headlines shows the breadth of regulatory law, from recommendations to limit the F.B.I’s use of warrantless surveillance to how the Consumer Product Safety Commission defines e-bikes. Many lawyers practice exclusively in regulatory settings, confronting these new developments continuously, and even lawyers who focus on less regulation-centric areas will still encounter administrative law. Law students, therefore, need to develop skills particular to practicing in this legal environment.

Genteel Culture, Legal Education, And Constitutional Controversy In Early Virginia, Matthew J. Steilen

Journal Articles

This article focuses on the movement to reform legal education in early national Virginia, offering a fresh perspective by examining the connection between legal education and society and culture. It challenges the notion that constitutional ideas were the primary driving force behind reforms and argues that social status and “manners” played a more significant role. Wealthy elites in Virginia associated manners with education, sending their sons to college to become gentlemen, as it secured their aspirations to gentility and their influence over society and politics. Reformers sought to capitalize on this connection by educating a generation of university-trained, genteel lawyers …

The Buffalo Model: An Approach To Aba Standard 303(C)'S Exploration Of Bias, Cross Cultural Competency, And Antiracism In Clinical & Experiential Law, Kim Diana Connolly, Elisa Lackey

Journal Articles

This Article offers an early analysis of ABA Standard 303(c) following its recent adoption in 2022. ABA Standard 303(c) requires that law schools “shall provide education law students on bias, cross-cultural competency, and racism.” The Author suggests that 303(c) formalizes what many clinical educators have already been teaching: inclusion, justice, and belonging. Following the 2020 shootings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, many law schools have revisited their diversity, equity, and inclusion programming and implemented various new initiatives and training. Despite current efforts, the Author notes that planning and resources will need to be allocated toward compliance efforts in order …

Festschrift Symposium: Honoring Professor Sam Pillsbury, Michael Waterstone, Guyora Binder, Mary Graw Leary, Deborah W. Denno, Stephen J. Morse, Scott Wood, John T. Nockleby, Gary C. Williams, Samantha Buckingham, Samuel Pillsbury, Kevin Lapp

Journal Articles

The Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review is pleased to publish this Festschrift Symposium Honoring Professor Samuel Pillsbury. The following is an edited transcript of the live symposium held at LMU Loyola Law School on Friday, March 25, 2022.

The Secret Sauce: Examining Law Schools That Overperform On The Bar Exam, Derek T. Muller, Christopher J. Ryan Jr.

Journal Articles

Since 2010, law schools have faced declining enrollment and entering classes with lower predictors of success despite recent signs of improvement. At least partly as a result, rates at which law school graduates pass the bar exam have declined and remain at historic lows. Yet, during this time, many schools have improved their graduates' chances of success on the bar exam, and some schools have dramatically outperformed their predicted bar exam passage rates. This Article examines which schools do so and why.

Research for this Article began by accounting for law schools' incoming class credentials to predict an expected bar …

By The Inch, It’S A Cinch: The Case For Go-Ing Slow In First-Year Legal Writing Courses, Patrick J. Long

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

Swimming With Broad Strokes: Publishing And Presenting Beyond The Lw Discipline, Robin Boyle-Laisure, Stephen Paskey

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

Legal Uncertainties: Covid-19, Distance Learning, Bar Exams, And The Future Of U.S. Legal Education, Christine Corcos

Journal Articles

The COVID-19 pandemic forced the U.S. legal academy and legal profession to make changes to legal education and training very rapidly in order to accommodate the needs of students, graduates, practitioners, clients, and the public. Like most of the public, members of the profession assumed that most, if not all, of the changes would be temporary, and life would return to a pre-pandemic normal.

These assumed temporary changes included a rapid and massive shift to online teaching for legal education, to online administration of the bar exam in some jurisdictions, or the option to offer the diploma privilege in others. …

If The Music Hadn’T Stopped, Or Reflections On The Great Kerfuffle: Historicism’S Continuing Grasp For Truth, John Henry Schlegel

Journal Articles

I was pretty indifferent to my undergraduate education, but I hated law school because it was full of things one couldn’t do. One couldn’t use a statute analogically, couldn’t take into account realpolitik when analyzing cases, couldn’t rethink legal education from the bottom up, and it was pretty much “out there” to count votes when predicting case outcomes. Six years later, when in 1973 I came to teach at Buffalo, I experienced a quite different world; there were all sorts of possibilities. The great intellectual kerfuffle that went by many names—structuralism, post-structuralism, postmodernism, even Marxism and Critical Legal Studies (CLS)—burned …

Critical Interviewing, Laila L. Hlass, Lindsay M. Harris

Journal Articles

Critical lawyering—also at times called rebellious, community, and movement lawyering—attempts to further social justice alongside impacted communities. While much has been written about the contours of this form of lawyering and case examples illustrating core principles, little has been written about the mechanics of teaching critical lawyering skills. This Article seeks to expand critical lawyering theory, and in doing so, provide an example of a pedagogical approach to teaching what we term “critical interviewing.” Critical interviewing means using an intersectional lens to collaborate with clients, communities, interviewing partners, and interpreters in a legal interview. Critical interviewers identify and take into …

On Being First, On Being Only, On Being Seen, On Charting A Way Forward, Veronica Root Martinez

Journal Articles

This Essay reflects upon my professional experiences as a Black woman both at Notre Dame and beyond. It argues that it is important for students to have demographically diverse professors within their educational environments. It calls for the Notre Dame Law School community to continue to create a diverse, equitable, and inclusive culture.

A Starting Point For Disability Justice In Legal Education, Christina Payne-Tsoupros

Journal Articles

This article explores how a disability justice framework would provide greater access to law school and therefore the legal profession for disabled students of color; specifically, disabled Black, Indigenous, and Latinx students. Using DisCrit principles formulated by Subini Annamma, David Connor, and Beth Ferri (2013), this article provides suggestions for incorporating a disability justice lens to legal education. In doing so, this article specifically recognizes the work of three disability justice activist-attorney-scholars, Lydia X.Z. Brown, Talila “TL” Lewis, and Katherine Pérez, and considers lessons from their advocacy and leadership that can apply in the law school setting.

Academic Law Library Director Status Since The Great Recession: Strengthened, Maintained, Or Degraded?, Elizabeth G. Adelman, Karen L. Shephard, Richard J. Patti, Robert M. Adelman

Journal Articles

The status of the academic law library director is central to the educational mission of the law library. We collected data from 2006 to 2016 showing a 25 percent decrease in tenure-track directorships. We also found one in four changes in directorships since 2013 resulted in the new director having a degraded status compared to her predecessor.

The Professor As Institutional Entrepreneur, Roger P. Alford

Journal Articles

Law professors are all about ideas, and the creation of an institute, clinic, or center within a law school is the instantiation of an idea. Ideas embodied in law school institutions become crystallized in the fabric of a school, changing its culture, internalizing its values, and reflecting its priorities. Robert Cochran has helped to establish multiple institutes, centers, and clinics at Pepperdine Caruso Law School, and in so doing he has become the law school's great serial entrepreneur. The institutes Cochran helped to establish have become laboratories to give expression to his ideas about the relationship between faith, ethics, and …

Persons And The Point Of The Law, Richard W. Garnett

Journal Articles

This short essay is a comment and reflection on a manuscript by Professors John Breen and Lee
Strang, "A Light Unseen: A History of Catholic Legal Education in the United States." It is based on remarks presented at a February 14, 2020 conference, sponsored by the Journal of Catholic Legal Studies and the Center for Law and Religion at St. John's University School of Law. It
addresses, among other things, Breen and Strang's argument that a Catholic law school should have a distinctive "intellectual architecture" and proposes that a distinctive moral anthropology -- that is, an account of what the …

To Dress For Dinner: Teaching Law In A Bureaucratic Age, John Henry Schlegel

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

Learning In "Baby Jail": Lessons From Law Student Engagement In Family Detention Centers, Lindsay M. Harris

Journal Articles

Between 2014 and 2017, more than 40 law schools and likely well over 1000 law students engaged in learning within immigration family detention centers. The Trump Administration’s “zero tolerance” policy and implementation of wide-scale family separation in 2018 led to increased involvement by professors and students in the constantly shifting landscape of immigration detention. As the detention of immigrant families becomes increasingly entrenched, this article hits the pause button and assesses the benefits and challenges of the various approaches to, and proposes some principles for, law student engagement in this crisis lawyering in immigration detention centers, for families, and beyond.

Can Female Academics Say "No" Both Professionally And Elegantly To Excessive Work Demand? Yes, But You Might Have To Call A Friend, Angela Mae Kupenda

Journal Articles

Whether one’s academic supervisor is a White man or woman, or a person of color, the ability to say “no” to our supervisors is critical for one’s professional success and personal wellbeing. Some of us are incessantly asked to take on extra service, extra duties, to relieve someone else because they have “more important things” to do, and “just to do it” because it must be done and because we have that extra strength in our DNA, some seem to think.

Continuing Derrick Bell's Devotion In Creative Action, Angela Mae Kupenda

Journal Articles

I remember my first time seeing Derrick Bell in person and hearing him speak, just a few years before he passed away. I was in awe of him for many reasons, but primarily for two reasons. First, I noted from watching him with his devoted students, how mutual was the devotion coming from him—devotion to them as people and as those who would surely carry on his great work of seeking to forge equality in America and beyond. And second, I was in awe of him because of his devotion to the elimination of racism, while at the same time …

Embracing Our First Responder Role As Academics - With Inspiration From Langston Hughes, Angela Mae Kupenda

Journal Articles

In the midst of the post-2016 political crisis, our role as academics is that of First Responders. In physical crises, like a fire, First Responders play an important role. They intentionally put themselves in harm’s way to fulfill an overarching purpose of helping others, even at their own risk. They strategically prepare, train, and work for years to prepare for this role in the midst of crisis. As academics who care about equality, we are First Responders.

Collaborative Relationships Between Law Librarians And Legal Writing Faculty, Susan Azyndar, Ingrid Mattson

Journal Articles

From the Introduction

How would you characterize the professional relationship between law librarians and legal writing faculty in your law school? Satisfying? Productive? Fraught? Nonexistent? Given law schools’ great demands on these groups’ time and talents and the ABA’s increased emphasis on experiential skills, law librarians and legal writing faculty should strive to develop a meaningful dialog. In this way, each group will better understand what the other can provide in terms of expertise, and the two groups can develop a mutually beneficial work dynamic.

Compensatory Women's Rights Legal Education In Eastern Europe: The Women's Human Rights Training Institute, Isabel Marcus

Journal Articles

To compensate for the absence/minimization of women's rights in the law faculty curriculum in post-socialist states, in 2002 a coalition of women's rights NGOs, funded by OSI, developed a Women's Human Rights Training Institute (WHRTI) in Sofia, Bulgaria. Now embarking on its sixth cycle and having graduated more than 100 lawyers (mostly working in NGOs in post-socialist states), WHRTI has developed a women's rights legal education and training program triad consisting of feminist legal theory, women's rights legal practice, and feminist legal pedagogy. The goal of the program is to educate and train lawyers to understand and use various domestic, …

Equality Lost In Time And Space: Examining The Race/Class Quandary With Personal Pedagogical Lessons From A Course, A Film, A Case, And An Unfinished Movement, Angela Mae Kupenda

Journal Articles

This essay is both personal and pedagogical. My hope is that it issues a clarion call to legal educators and administrators to choose the pursuit of racial and class equality. I believe that, as law faculty and administrators, we must first address our personal quandaries with race and class before we can effectively address the racial and class implications in our pedagogical or administrative roles in legal education. This essay focuses on race and class and is a clarion call for legal academics and administrators to address ongoing structural racism and classism in our institutions, by starting with our own …

Mentoring Pluses For Underrepresented Faculty, Angela Mae Kupenda

Journal Articles

Much has been written about the demands from mentoring students. Mentoring is regarded as service work placed on top of faculty demands of teaching, scholarship, and more service. While the benefits to underrepresented faculty are numerous, here I focus on three: mentoring students can help save our career when we are tempted to leave the building running fast; mentoring students can provide student allies to help verify the truth about our greatness; and, mentoring students helps to pass on the legacy.