Legal Education Commons^™

The Crisis Of The American Law School, Paul Campos

Publications

The economist Herbert Stein once remarked that if something cannot go on forever, it will stop. Over the past four decades, the cost of legal education in America has seemed to belie this aphorism: it has gone up relentlessly. Private law school tuition increased by a factor of four in real, inflation-adjusted terms between 1971 and 2011, while resident tuition at public law schools has nearly quadrupled in real terms over just the past two decades. Meanwhile, for more than thirty years, the percentage of the American economy devoted to legal services has been shrinking. In 1978 the legal sector …

You Can Handle The Truth: Using Pop Culture To Teach Legal Research., Karen Skinner

Publications

No abstract provided.

Legal Research Class Experiment Showed You Can’T Ignore The Basics, Karen Skinner

Publications

No abstract provided.

Aall Secretary Is The Joint Institute Luncheon Speaker, Karen Skinner

Publications

No abstract provided.

A Senior Faculty Member’S Favorite Sabbatical: My Teaching Sabbatical, John B. Mitchell

Faculty Articles

Professor John Mitchell had taken several typical sabbaticals—travel and research culminating in several articles and a book—and up until the last minute, his spring 2009 sabbatical promised nothing very different. And then with a single phone call, his sabbatical book project collapsed. There was nothing else about which he was passionate at that time, and it seemed stupid to arbitrarily choose a topic and then spend the next four years writing a book he didn't care about. In the midst of scrambling desperation, the idea of a sabbatical focused not on a scholarly project, but on his primary teaching focus …

The Status Of Clinical Faculty In The Legal Academy: Report Of The Task Force On The Status Of Clinicians And The Legal Academy, Bryan Adamson

Faculty Articles

In the midst of ongoing debates within the legal academy and the American Bar Association on the need for "practice-ready" law school graduates through enhanced attention to law clinics and externships and on the status of faculty teaching in those courses, this report identifies and evaluates the most appropriate modes for clinical faculty appointments. Drawing on data collected through a survey of clinical program directors and faculty, the report analyzes the five most identifiable clinical faculty models: unitary tenure track; clinical tenure track; long-term contract; short-term contract; and clinical fellowships. It determines that, despite great strides in the growth of …

Darth Vader, John B. Kirkwood

Faculty Articles

An obituary for Thomas J. Holdych, contracts and commercial law professor at the Seattle University is presented.

Reflections On My Colleague, Tom Holdych, Janet Ainsworth

Faculty Articles

An obituary for Thomas J. Holdych, contracts and commercial law professor at the Seattle University is presented.

Tom Holdych: A Tribute, In “In Memory Of Professor Thomas J. Holdych”, Chris Rideout

Faculty Articles

An obituary for Thomas J. Holdych, contracts and commercial law professor at the Seattle University is presented.

Report On The 2010-11 Csale Survey Of Applied Legal Education, David A. Santacroce, Robert R. Kuehn

Other Publications

This report summarizes the results of the Center for the Study of Applied Legal Education’s (CSALE) 2010-11 Survey of Applied Legal Education. The 2010-11 Survey was CSALE’s second triennial survey. The results provide valuable insight into the state and nature of applied legal education in areas like program design, capacity, administration, funding, pedagogy, and the role of applied legal education and educators in the legal academy. Law schools, legal educators, scholars, and governmental agencies examining or navigating issues in these and other areas rely on CSALE’s data. They do so with the summary results provided here, in the Report on …

The Status Of Clinical Faculty In The Legal Academy: Report Of The Task Force On The Status Of Clinicians And The Legal Academy, Bryan L. Adamson, Bradford Colbert, Kathy Hessler, Katherine R. Kruse, Robert R. Kuehn, Mary Helen Mcneal, Calvin G. C. Pang, David A. Santacroce

Other Publications

In the midst of ongoing debates within the legal academy and the American Bar Association on the need for 'practice-ready" law school graduates through enhanced attention to law clinics and externships and on the status of faculty teaching in those courses, this report identifies and evaluates the most appropriate modes for clinical faculty appointments. Drawing on data collected through a survey of clinical program directors and faculty, the report analyzes the five most identifiable clinical faculty models: unitary tenure track; clinical tenure track; long-term contract; short-term contract; and clinical fellowships. It determines that, despite great strides in the growth of …

Teaching Health Law In Rural Ethiopia: Using A Pepfar Partnership Framework And India's Shanbaug Decision To Shape A Course, Sallie Thieme Sanford [email protected]

Articles

In April 2011, I taught a month-long intensive health law course at Haramaya University College of Law in rural eastern Ethiopia. Given the burgeoning interest in global health law, I suspect, and hope, that others are considering teaching similar courses, whether as visiting or resident faculty. This essay attempts to ease their course preparation workload. I will describe how I used two recent documents – India’s 2011 Shanbaug decision and Ethiopia’s 2010 PEPFAR Partnership Framework – to shape the course. Both of these are worth consideration for use in a variety of health law and policy courses based in low-income …

Incorporating Literary Methods And Texts In The Teaching Of Tort Law, Zahr K. Said

Articles

Literature is comparatively under-investigated as an arena for tort pedagogy and for first-year courses in the legal curriculum generally. Where literature tends to appear in law school, it most frequently does so in the form of stand-alone law-and-literature classes, which usually focus heavily on literature.

In teaching a first-year tort law course at the University of Washington School of Law, I have explicitly used literature to aid and amplify legal analysis. The emphasis has been on law, rather than on literature. Nonetheless, literary texts and methods helped my students investigate how the law conceives of, and expresses, duties and losses …

Antisemitism In The Academic Voice: Confronting Bigotry Under The First Amendment, Kenneth Lasson

All Faculty Scholarship

The romanticized vision of life in the Ivory Tower - a peaceful haven where learned professors ponder higher thoughts and where students roam orderly quadrangles in quest of truth and other pleasures - has long been relegated to yesteryear. While universities like to nurture the perception that they are protectors of reasoned discourse, and indeed often perceive themselves as sacrosanct places of culture in a chaotic world, the modern campus, of course, is not quite so wonderful.

This chapter examines the relationship between antisemitic and anti-Zionist speech and conduct, how they both play out on contemporary university campuses - and …

Volume 37, No. 1

The Weldon Times

A student-run newspaper published at the Schulich School of Law at Dalhousie University.

Editor in Chief: Max Rothschild

Layout Editor: Kate Rothschild

Editors: Suzanne Kittle, Phil Moreria

Volume 37, No. 2

The Weldon Times

A student-run newspaper published at the Schulich School of Law at Dalhousie University.

Editor in Chief: Max Rothschild

Layout Editor: Kate Rothschild

Editors: Suzanne Kittle, Phil Moreria, Alex Gorlewski

Alternative Justifications For Academic Support Ii: How “Academic Support Across The Curriculum” Helps Meet The Goals Of The Carnegie Report And Best Practices, Louis N. Schulze Jr.

Faculty Publications

In the wake of two momentous critiques of legal education, popularly known as the “Carnegie Report” and “Best Practices,” law schools are reconsidering certain basic assumptions about how we educate future lawyers. Even the most forward-thinking reformers, however, struggle with the details of how to implement many of the recommendations of those reports. Providing more formative assessment, for instance, is a laudable objective but one that has serious ramifications in terms of resource expenditures. This article seeks to provide a remedy for many of these struggles: “Academic Support Across the Curriculum.” This piece argues that the reconceptualization of an under-leveraged …

Deconstructing Crac: Teaching Proposed Findings Of Fact And Conclusions Of Law In A Legal-Writing Program, Larry Howell

Faculty Law Review Articles

No abstract provided.

Not Your Parents' Law Library: A Tale Of Two Academic Law Libraries, Julian Aiken, Femi Cadmus, Fred Shapiro

Faculty Scholarship

As academic law libraries continue to face the inevitability of a rapidly changing landscape which includes a new breed of digital users with sophisticated technological needs, it remains to be seen what libraries will look like in years to come. It is certain that libraries as we know them today will have changed, but to what extent? An ability to remain adaptable and to anticipate the evolving needs of users in a dynamic environment will continue to be key for libraries to remain relevant, and even to survive, in the 21st century; vital to this endeavor will also be an …

States Side Story: Career Paths Of International Ll.M. Students, Or "I Like To Be In America", Carole Silver

Articles by Maurer Faculty

This Article draws on an empirical study of the careers of international law graduates who earned an LL.M. in the United States, and considers the role of a U.S. LL.M. as a path for building a legal career in the United States. It identifies the institutional, political, and economic forces that present challenges to graduates who attempt to stay in the United States. While U.S. law schools prize the international diversity of their graduate students, this study reveals that the U.S. legal profession is most accessible to international students from English-speaking common law countries, whose language and background allow them …

Issues Facing Academic Law Libraries - New Challenges, New Opportunities, Linda K. Fariss

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Law libraries are facing new challenges, including evolving methods of legal research, and space and budget constraints. This article explores those challenges, and looks at the opportunities that accompany changes.

Dichotomy No Longer? The Role Of The Private Business Sector In Educating The Future Russian Legal Professions, Philip Genty

Faculty Scholarship

In his 1916 work The Law: Business or Profession?, Julius Henry Cohen describes an American legal system in which uniform standards for regulating, disciplining, and educating the profession are just beginning to be developed, albeit unevenly. In discussing the differences between a business and a profession, he argues that a profession requires a uniform set of standards to guide it in matters of ethics, as well as a system of rigorous legal education that includes a firm grounding in these ethical principles.

Perhaps most surprising for a book written in the early twentieth century – long before the …

Becoming A Legal Scholar, Samuel W. Buell

Faculty Scholarship

There is now a literature on how to become a law professor. The first book-length treatment of the subject, Becoming A Law Professor, displays a common fault of this literature in directing candidates’ focus on process at the expense of substance. The present body of material on the market for new legal academics does not persuade candidates of the necessity of locating their agendas and voices as scholars, much less does it show them how to go about that vital search. It also risks contributing to a tendency of credentialing processes to standardize resumes without improving outcomes. A second-generation literature …

Advanced Fundamentals Of Appellate Advocacy In A Moot Court, Siyuan Chen

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

This article discusses some of the more advanced techniques and “tricks” in mooting and is meant primarily for students who are aiming to compete in moot court competitions for the first time. It builds upon the basic fundamentals that would have been taught in a Legal Writing course, and covers the four key components of a moot: the opening, the arguments, the answering of questions, and the conclusion/ rebuttals.

Gender And The Crisis In Legal Education: Remaking The Academy In Our Image, Paula A. Monopoli

Faculty Scholarship

American legal education is in the grip of what some have called an “existential crisis.” The New York Times proclaims the death of the current system of legal education. This is attributed, in part, to the incentivizing of faculty to produce increasingly abstract scholarship and the costs this imposes on pedagogy and the mentoring of students. At the same time, despite women graduating from law schools in significant numbers since the 1980s, they continue to lag behind in the most prestigious positions in academia—tenured, full professorships: From academic year 1998-99 to academic year 2007-08, the percentage of women full professors …

Making Irac Visible, Suzanne Darrow Kleinhaus, Nancy Chanin

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

It's Not Just A Writing Problem, Suzanne Darrow Kleinhaus

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

A Heretical View Of Teaching: A Contrarian Looks At Teaching, The Carnegie Report And Best Practices, Gary Shaw

Scholarly Works

This article takes a position contrary to those of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching Report, Educating Lawyers and Best Practices for Legal Education. It argues that much of the harm those reports attribute to Socratic dialogue is misguided— that the problems that arise are a result ofbad teaching technique rather than any flaw intrinsic in Socratic dialogue. It then goes on to argue that because many of the problems the two reports are trying to address are due to poor teaching rather than the Socratic dialogue, the reports’ recommendations cannot achieve the results hoped for. Current law …

Changing The Modal Law School: Rethinking U.S. Legal Education In (Most) Schools, Nancy B. Rapoport

Scholarly Works

This essay argues that discussions of educational reform in U.S. law schools have suffered from a fundamental misconception: that the education provided in all of the American Bar Association-accredited schools is roughly the same. A better description of the educational opportunities provided by ABA-accredited law schools would group the schools into three rough clusters: the “elite” law schools, the modal (most frequently occurring) law schools, and the precarious law schools. Because the elite law schools do not need much “reforming,” the better focus of reform would concentrate on the modal and precarious schools; however, both elite and modal law schools …

Degree Pedigree: Assessing The Effect Of Degree-Granting Institutions’ Ranks On Prospective Employment At Academic Law Libraries, Ashley A. Ahlbrand, Michael Johnson

Articles by Maurer Faculty

In the academic law library hiring process, candidates are assessed based on a variety of factors. The study conducted here focuses on education—specifically the institutional rank of degree-granting law and library science institutions—to explore how the rank of one’s graduate education might influence hiring decisions at academic law libraries.