Legal Education Commons^™

Toward A Critical Corporate Law Pedagogy And Scholarship, André Ddouglas Pond Cummings, Steven A. Ramirez, Cheryl L. Wade

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

In recent years, the publicly held corporation has assumed a central position in both the economic and political spheres of American life. Economically, the public corporation has long acted as the key institution within American capitalism. Politically, the public corporation now can use its economic might to sway electoral outcomes as never before. Indeed, individuals who control public firms wield more economic power and political power today than ever before. These truths profoundly shape American society. The power, control, and role of the public corporation under law and regulation, therefore, hold more importance than ever before.

Even though corporate …

Empathy And Reasoning In Context: Thinking About Anti-Gay Bullying, Kris Franklin

Articles & Chapters

“Empathy” has negative connotations for many legal theorists, who may conceive of it as subjective, lacking in intellectual rigor, and emphasizing sensitivity over reason. Even those legal scholars who have embraced the importance of empathy in legal work have emphasized its affective dimensions: pointing out that empathy is central to human relations and motivations, and is therefore a crucial lawyering skill. This paper builds on social science literature that identifies both cognitive and affective dimensions to empathy, and recasts empathy as in part a central component to higher-order thinking in law. It draws examples from empathetic reasoning in foundational cases …

Legal Education In Crisis, And Why Law Libraries Are Doomed, James G. Milles

Journal Articles

The dual crises facing legal education - the economic crisis affecting both the job market and the pool of law school applicants, and the crisis of confidence in the ability of law schools and the ABA accreditation process to meet the needs of lawyers or society at large - have undermined the case for not only the autonomy, but the very existence, of law school libraries as we have known them. Legal education in the United States is about to undergo a long-term contraction, and law libraries will be among the first to go. A few law schools may abandon …

What Cornell Veterinary School Taught Me About Legal Education, Tina Stark

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Pricing Clinical Legal Education, Robert R. Kuehn

Scholarship@WashULaw

Some blame the cost of clinical legal education for high law school tuition. They argue that, regardless of the educational and employment benefits to students, clinical legal education, and law clinics in particular, are too expensive to expand or require for all students in a time of decreasing law school enrollments and revenues. This Article is an empirical examination of these claims. Reviewing tuition, curricular and enrollment data from all law schools, this Article demonstrates that 84% of law schools already have the capacity to provide a clinical experience to every student without adding courses or faculty, although only 18% …

Law Schools And The Legal Profession: A Way Forward, Peter A. Joy

Scholarship@WashULaw

Publicity about law schools for the past several years has been consistently bad. In news article after news article, the unifying theme has been that that there are too many lawyers, too many law schools, and that going to law school for a legal career is either a costly, risky proposition or simply a bad idea.' Of course, these laments about the legal education and the legal profession stem from the decline in the employment for lawyers in the United States since the financial crisis of 2008. While some see this simply as a mismatch in supply and demand - …

What It Means To Be A Lawyer In These Uncertain Times: Some Thoughts On Ethical Participation In The Legal Education Industry, Susan Carle

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Discusses legal employment and salary and how legal education can address the current market.

Retaining Color, Veronica Root

Journal Articles

It is no secret that large law firms are struggling in their efforts to retain attorneys of color. This is despite two decades of aggressive tracking of demographic rates, mandates from clients to improve demographic diversity, and the implementation of a variety of diversity efforts within large law firms. In part, law firm retention efforts are stymied by the reality that elite large law firms require some level of attrition to function properly under the predominant business model. This reality, however, does not explain why firms have more difficulty retaining attorneys of color — in particular black and Hispanic attorneys …

Poverty Law, Access To Justice, And Ethical Lawyering: Celebrating 40 Years Of Clinical Education At Osgoode Hall Law School, Shelley Gavigan, Sean Rehaag

Journal of Law and Social Policy

Collects papers presented at the Symposium in 2011 celebrating forty years of clinical legal education at Osgoode Hall Law School.

The E-Team Project: A Teamwork Approach To Clinical Legal Education, Hilary Evans Cameron

Journal of Law and Social Policy

In this article the author argues that the University of Toronto’s Emergency Team (E-Team)—a student pilot project created to assist people facing deportation on short notice—provided a critical service to its clients and gave its student members a unique opportunity to learn real-world legal skills. The first part of this article reviews the project’s outcomes and concludes that it was a success: the E-Team won nine of its ten cases, and its members credit the project both with teaching them crucial legal competencies that they did not encounter elsewhere and with fostering their passion for social justice law. The second …

Framing Supervisory Relationships In Clinical Law: The Role Of Critical Pedagogy, Gemma Smyth, Marion Overholt

Journal of Law and Social Policy

Clinical work in law offers important opportunities for students to learn critical, reflective and politicized approaches to legal identity and practice. Such an approach is most meaningful when it is engaged by supervising lawyers and social workers in a clinical placement. The authors of this article, the Academic Clinic Director and Executive Director of two Windsor-based clinic programs, offer context, perspective and examples of how critical pedagogy (influenced by, but distinct from, critical legal studies) provides a roadmap for supervising lawyers and the programs in which they work. The paper briefly sets the context of the authors' teaching and practice. …

Law Student, Heal Thyself: The Role And Responsibility Of Clinical Education Programs In Promoting Self-Care, Christine E. Doucet

Journal of Law and Social Policy

The purpose of this paper is to examine the importance of self-care and stress management in the legal profession, specifically within the context of clinical legal education. Studies have shown that the legal profession exhibits one of the highest rates of mental health and addiction issues. In proactively addressing the importance of self-care and stress management amongst students, clinical legal educational programs can become a part of the solution. Using the student experience at Parkdale Community Legal Services, and drawing from other student legal clinics across Canada and the United States, several recommendations around self-care and stress management training in …

Multi-Disciplinary Practice In A Community Law Environment: Clinical Legal Education Combined With Holistic Service Provision, Richard Foster

Journal of Law and Social Policy

The Monash-Oakleigh Legal Service (MOLS) is a community legal service affiliated with Monash University, Melbourne, Australia, and partly funded by Victoria Legal Aid. MOLS deals with a range of legal matters, including: criminal law, family law, tenancy and neighbourhood disputes, and a number of credit, debt, and bankruptcy issues. In July 2010, the Multi-Disciplinary Clinic (MDC) was established at MOLS to provide a holistic service to clients by involving students from three academic disciplines to deal with client issues. This paper describes some of the mechanics of how the MDC operates, including how students are assessed and supervised. It also …

Transformative Social Work In The Criminal Justice Field, Susan Noakes

Journal of Law and Social Policy

Discusses “transformative social work in the criminal justice field” based on the observations and case experiences of the registered social worker on staff at the Holistic Lawyering Project at The Law Centre a clinical legal education program in Victoria, British Columbia through the Faculty of Law at the University of Victoria. Examines the role of a social worker working with a law student and a client charged with a summary conviction offence under the Canadian Criminal Code. Provides an example of transformative change and highlights this challenging and empowering aspect of legal practice.

Not So Dangerous Liaisons: A Clinical Perspective On Interdisciplinarity, Judith Mccormack

Journal of Law and Social Policy

Clinical education represents a site where conflicting accounts of law are at maximum tension, in part because the clinical experience tends to highlight the startling contrast between the narratives and social realities of law. While this contrast provides some of the fodder for the critical exploration that characterizes clinical education, the idiosyncratic shape of law as a discipline means that much of what students require to handle that fodder in a rigorous, analytical way is located elsewhere. A clinical lens indicates that exposing students to interdisciplinary perspectives is crucial if students are to be able to understand and engage with …

Teaching Cultural Competency In Legal Clinics, Cynthia Pay

Journal of Law and Social Policy

Aims to identify various models of cultural competency training, and to reflect on ways to appropriately and effectively address this subject in a clinical legal education setting.

Conceptualizing Reflective Practice For Legal Professionals, Michele Leering

Journal of Law and Social Policy

This article examines the meaning, purpose, and promise of reflective practice in the context of the legal profession and at this critical juncture in the profession’s history. The imperatives for enhancing the reflective capacity of the profession are explored and the benefits of endorsing reflective practice as a core professional competency are reviewed. Reporting on a portion of an action research project designed to encourage reflective practice in a Canadian law school, the author synthesizes the results of a review of reflective practice literature, largely drawn from other professions, with the results of qualitative interviews with eight professors from the …

Pushing The Boundaries Of Clinical Law: Exploring How Student And Community Legal Clinics Engage With International Human Rights Practice, Geraldine Sadoway

Journal of Law and Social Policy

Explores methods of bringing stories of victims of human rights abuses to the international human rights bodies that conduct periodic reviews of country compliance with international human rights instruments. The project involved law students and community legal workers looking at innovative ways to use internet technologies to enhance and strengthen non-government (NGO) reports to UN Committees involved in monitoring Canada’s compliance with our international legal obligations.

Creating Teaching Champions: Taking The Graduate Teaching Experience Outside The Classroom, Jill Mcsweeney, Nayha Acharya, Giovanna Celli, Colin Jackson, Marissa Ley, Raghav V. Sampagni

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Teaching and learning (T&L) is considered an essential skill for graduate students (Rose, 2012). University T&L centres offer a range of workshops, seminars, and certificates, which allow students to engage with peers who are interested and enthusiastic about T&L and gain support for and confidence in their own teaching (Hughes, 2006). Still, there can be little opportunity for students to engage in more informal T&L dialogue within or outside of their department (Leger & Young, 2014). Through informal student feedback, the Centre for Learning and Teaching (CLT) at Dalhousie University identified this gap in graduate student T&L development, and created …

When Law Reform Is Not Enough: A Case Study On Social Change And The Role That Lawyers And Legal Clinics Ought To Play, Jeff Carolin

Journal of Law and Social Policy

Based on his experience as a law student in the clinical legal education program at Parkdale Community Legal Services in 2010, the author draws on poverty law scholarship to better understand his frustrations with a law reform campaign he worked on related to refugee family reunification. The scholarship’s central critique of law reform campaigns is that they are excessively narrow: they focus on a particular law and construct the law itself as the social injustice. This leads to two subsidiary problems. First, law reform campaigns ignore the underlying socio-political context that produced the law, foregoing opportunities for broader societal transformation. …

Supporting And Promoting Scholarly Life In Turbulent Times, A. Benjamin Spencer

Faculty Publications

One of the most important contributions a law school can make is to the development of the law through scholarly research. As one of the three pillars of being an academic-the other two being teaching and service-producing legal scholarship in one's respective area of expertise is an enterprise that nearly all law schools would like to support. However, during these challenging times for legal education arising from enrollment declines and the resultant adverse budgetary impacts, fully supporting legal scholarship can be particularly challenging. Having served as Associate Dean for Research I at Washington & Lee University School of Law ("W …

The Story Behind A Letter In Support Of Professor Derrick Bell, Cheryl Nelson Butler, Sherrilyn Ifill, Suzette Malveaux, Margaret E. Montoya, Natsu Taylor Saito, Nareissa L. Smith, Tanya Washington

Publications

Professor Derrick A. Bell, Jr. had a long and proud history of disturbing authority. He is widely noted as one of the founders of Critical Race Theory. His scholarship on race was not only a direct challenge to the traditionally conservative legal academy, but also to the more liberal bastions within the academy, such as the Critical Legal Studies movement. His writings about the role of race in American law have made him one of the most prominent legal scholars of a generation.

However, Professor Bell did not merely write about racial injustices. He was willing to take risks to …

Legal Academia And The Blindness Of The Elites, Paul Campos

Publications

No abstract provided.

The White Whale: Bringing Emotion And Relevance To The Contemporary Trusts And Estates Course, Wayne M. Gazur

Publications

No abstract provided.

Are Clinics A Magic Bullet?, Deborah J. Cantrell

Publications

In the current conversation about reforming legal education, one of the constant refrains is that law schools must graduate students who are "practice ready." Commentators go on to argue that for law schools to produce "practice ready" students, they must expand how they offer experiential learning. One potential way to do that is to expand clinical legal education programs. I worry that law schools (and others) are envisioning clinical legal education as a magic bullet that will solve all of the ills and imbalances present in current legal education. In this article, I demonstrate the unhelpfulness of the phrase "practice …

Out With The Old, In With The New: Two Perspectives On Implementing Libguides At An Academic And A Public Law Library, Shamika Dalton, Danielle A. Becker

Publications

No abstract provided.

All-Sis Sourcebook For Teaching Legal Research, Karen Skinner

Publications

No abstract provided.

The 'Shock And Awe' Approach To Legal Research: Helping Students Understand Their Research Deficiencies So That They Are Better Prepared To Learn Legal Research, Karen Skinner

Publications

This article discusses the unique approach that the law librarians at the University of Southern California use during first-year legal research to expose student overconfidence in research skills and to teach a new framework for improving those skills.

Presumed Incompetent: Continuing The Conversation, Carmen Gonzalez, Angela P. Harris

Faculty Articles

On March 8, 2013, the Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law & Justice hosted an all-day symposium featuring more than forty speakers at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law to celebrate and invite responses to the book entitled, Presumed Incompetent: The Intersections of Race and Class for Women in Academia (Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs, Yolanda Flores Niemann, Carmen G. González & Angela P. Harris eds., 2012). Presumed Incompetent presents gripping first-hand accounts of the obstacles encountered by female faculty of color in the academic workplace, and provides specific recommendations to women of color, allies, and academic leaders on ways …

Foreword: A Tribute To Margaret Montoya, Rachel F. Moran

Faculty Scholarship

Dean Moran provides opening remarks to the Chicana/o-Latina/o Law Review symposium, "Un/Masking Power: The Past, Present, and Future of Marginal Identities in Legal Academia."