Legal Education Commons^™

The Naming Of Baier Hall And The Jerome Hall Law Library Program

Law School Building

A video of the ceremony can be viewed here.

Entrepreneurial Esquires In The New Economy: Why All Attorneys Should Learn About Entrepreneurship In Law School, J. Mark Phillips

The Journal of Business, Entrepreneurship & the Law

As the legal industry continues to recover from the shock of the recent recession, it finds itself in a fundamentally different place than it was ten years ago, with even more tumultuous change on the horizon. Economic pressure coupled with continued technological innovation has increased attorney unemployment levels, shifted law firm business models, and changed the expectations of legal clientele. Yet, despite this radically shifting market place, legal education has remained fundamentally unchanged. This article examines the current state of the legal industry through an entrepreneurial lens and juxtaposes it with the current state of legal education. In doing so, …

Dean's Desk: Stewart Fellows Bring Global Experience To Indiana, Austen L. Parrish

Austen Parrish (2014-2022)

No abstract provided.

May 2015 Newsletter

Ergo

No abstract provided.

A Rhetorician's Practical Wisdom, Linda L. Berger

Mercer Law Review

For three years, I had the great good fortune to work in the office next to Jack Sammons. My good fortune extended to a coincidence of timing that allowed me to work with Jack on a co-authored article, The Law's Mystery. During the time I worked next door, I felt cursed by an inability to grasp concepts that to Jack appeared inevitable and essential, whether those inevitabilities and essences were to be found within the law, good lawyering, or good legal education. The curse persisted throughout the writing of The Law's Mystery.

For Jack, the essence of a …

Fisherman Jack: Living In "Juropolis"- The Fishing Village Of The Law, Mark L. Jones

Mercer Law Review

This Symposium celebrating and honoring the scholarship and teaching of my dear friend and colleague Jack Sammons provides a fitting occasion to follow up on a suggestion he made to me a couple of years ago. The occasion is especially fitting because, as I proceed with my account, I invite us to think about how Jack himself embodies and exemplifies this account in his own life. Specifically, I will extend Alasdair MacIntyre's short and partial narrative image of fishing crews and the fishing village and apply it to the "fishing village of the law," which I call "Juropolis." In doing …

Further Reflections On Teaching Professionalism: A Thank You Note To Jack Sammons, Patrick Emery Longan

Mercer Law Review

In 2009, I published Teaching Professionalism in this Law Review to describe the content and methods of Mercer's first-year course on professionalism. Since then, we have made significant changes to the course, and it seems fitting to share some of those developments in the context of a Symposium that honors the scholarship and teaching of Jack Sammons. As I noted in the earlier article, the idea for the course came from Jack before I ever came to Mercer. It is also appropriate to use this occasion for another reason. I can trace the early design of the course, and most …

Faculty Perceptions Of The Adoption And Use Of Clickers In The Legal Studies In Business Classroom, Denise M. Farag, Susan Park, Gundars Kaupins

Management Faculty Publications and Presentations

The use of clickers in the classroom can improve student engagement and motivation. However, few studies have been conducted on faculty opinions of the use of clickers. This paper measures clicker use amongst legal studies in business faculty and investigates perceptions and factors associated with adoption of clickers in the discipline. Survey results indicate that most legal studies in business faculty have either never or rarely use clickers, and very few faculty members in the discipline use clickers regularly. Instructors perceive clickers to improve teaching, but may be reluctant to adopt them because of time constraints.

Educación Legal En Los Estados Unidos Ii: Educación De Postgrado, Educación Continuada, Y Consideraciones Comparativas, Maria Elena Cobas Cobiella, M. C. Mirow

University of Miami Inter-American Law Review

Este artículo se presenta en dos partes. La primera parte, publicada en el volúmen II de esta revista, da una breve historiade la educación legal en los EE.UU., una descripción de las facultades de derecho hoy en día, y el contenido de la carrera de grado profesional de derecho en dicho país, el Juris Doctor, o J.D. La segunda parte, publicada en esta misma revista, describe los estudios de postgrado en derecho en los EE.UU., la educación continuada para abogados, y algunas consideraciones comparativas, sobre todo con respecto al Plan de Bolonia.

Legal Education Reform In Saudi Arabia: A Case Study Of Taibah University, Rayan Alkhalawi

Maurer Theses and Dissertations

Legal education reform is a hot topic today. However, legal educators generally avoid discussing this important topic. Although legal education in Saudi Arabia is unique and complex, it is very hard to find academic literature about it. While this paper provides a brief explanation of legal education in Saudi Arabia, the main purpose of this paper is to discuss whether or not the current program at the College of Law prepares graduates for the best opportunities available in the legal market. And if not, how it could do a better job of making the program reach its full potential to …

Hearing Voices: Reading As Listening In Literature, Law, And Theology, James Boyd White

Mercer Law Review

Jack Sammons has always written from the center. Whether he is writing about teaching, or the legal profession, or law, or religion, or music, or baseball, or manners, everything he says comes from the same mysterious and powerful place: coherent, honest, generous, and sincere, not at all aggressive, but insistent upon the value and importance of the inquiry at hand. Jack writes as the whole person he is, with a constant and deep integrity.

As we all know, an important part of what Jack has written about is the world of sound and music, to which he is richly alive. …

Jack Sammons As Therapist, Joseph Vining

Mercer Law Review

This has been one of my deep fears-that people around me might put simple pleasure as enough reason for living, and that I might be unable to persuade them otherwise and would have to believe they were ultimately serious in saying so.

"There is only pleasure out there to seek," people often say. As for accepting pleasure as "enough," I can imagine them telling me that it is always easier to accept something as enough if there is nothing more. They would remind me how rich the basic pleasures are if sought and achieved, of consciousness itself, of sex, of …

Mercer Law Review Luncheon Symposium Remarks For Jack Sammons, Harold S. Lewis Jr.

Mercer Law Review

Jack's career has been conventional only in his continuity at a single law school for almost thirty-five years. (As for his time at Antioch School of Law, Tim Floyd reminded us at the Symposium dinner last night that while at Antioch, Jack did pioneering and influential work on lawyer competency. It would be surprising if even Jack remembers he was there before arriving at Mercer Law School, determined to shake it up.).

Institutional longevity aside, Jack's career has been exceptional, marked by a multitude of concerns that he somehow wove together. Whatever the coursework or scholarly task at hand, his …

Transcendental Sense And A Playful Approach: The Treaty Of Waitangi, Richard Dawson

Mercer Law Review

...

My experience of reading Jack Sammons has resembled an OE [overseas experience]. In particular, I became aware of some taken-for-granted language that can conceal important dynamics in our engagement with language. I had explicitly identified some virtues relating to exercising "control" over language but had, as Sammons suggested, neglected possible vices. In order to avoid these vices, I could alter attention from "control" to "play," in the sense of a movement that can combine control with the out-of-control. (There are some virtues associated with the out-of-control, such as openness and receptivity.). Such play does not lend itself well to …

Justice, Play, And Politics, Eugene Garver

Mercer Law Review

Justice as Play is a highly illuminating gloss on Coke's idea of the law as "artificial reason," and one of its merits is that it is equally about the law as artificial and as reason. While he leans on Huizinga to talk about justice as play, Jack Sammons deepens the analogy by another meaning of play, celebrating the venerable connections between the trial and the drama as relatively insulated arenas for developing alternatives to the existing political order. According to Jack, legal argument can be regarded as play because of that relative insulation. So I want to turn from judicial …

Mercer Law Review Symposium Luncheon Remarks: Conversations With Jack Sammons, Daisy Hurst Floyd

Mercer Law Review

While this Symposium is about Jack Sammons's teaching and scholarship, I am going to exercise a speaker's privilege to focus on the personal. However, I am going to do so by borrowing from Jack's scholarly work because I, too, am going to talk about conversation. Not in the way that Jack and others have so provocatively used the word to characterize lawyers' work. But, rather I use it in a more literal way. When I think of memories of Jack, many of them are around significant conversations.

I first met Jack in 1996, when my husband Tim Floyd was invited …

Mind The Gap: Teaching Research As A Fluid, Ever-Present Concept In The First-Year Legal Research And Writing Classroom, Julie Spanbauer

Mercer Law Review

A couple of years ago, the closed-memorandum problem I assigned as the first writing project for my fresh-faced legal research and writing students involved a legal issue that I manipulated by eliminating discussion of one of the elements of a tort in order to simplify the assignment. Each of the cases provided to the students were similarly redacted to omit discussion of the same element. The students were given the standard instruction that they were not permitted to consult or cite to any outside sources. When I began reading their papers, I noticed that a majority of the students had …

What Zombies Can Teach Law Students: Popular Text Inclusion In Law And Literature, Thomas E. Simmons

Mercer Law Review

...

The productive use of zombies in a law school curriculum is not limited to hypothetical scenarios and posing "what if' questions. The content of an interdisciplinary law and literature course could be expanded to include consideration of texts that reference zombies. While serious, canonical works such as Dickens's Bleak House, Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder, and Kafka's The Trial constitute examples of literature and film that merit serious study in a course in law and literature, I will assert that lesser texts should also be included, both as a way to highlight why Martin Scorsese outshines George …

The Discursive Ethics Of Jack Sammons, David T. Ritchie

Mercer Law Review

Professor Jack Sammons has been a widely celebrated teacher, community activist, and distinguished member of the bar. He is also a prolific scholar; perhaps the most prolific scholar the Mercer University School of Law has ever seen. My interest in the body of Jack's work, and hence my focus here, is on what I consider to be the core of his scholarly agenda. I would like to caution that this is my reading of Jack's work as a corpus. I am not entirely sure that Jack would agree with this reading (especially later on when I will make some connections …

Does Law School Still Make Economic Sense?: An Empirical Analysis Of "Big" Law Firm Partnership Prospects And The Relationship To Law School Attended, Edward S. Adams, Samuel P. Engel

Buffalo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Diversity Pipeline Programs In Legal Education: Context, Research And A Path Forward, Alisa Cunningham, Patricia Steele

Commissioned Research

This report, commissioned by the AccessLex Institue, highlights the issue of diversity in legal education, provides an overview of the diversity pipeline, explores programs that seek to improve the pipeline, and provides several recommendations for leaders and supporters of diversity pipeline programs. As the racial and ethnic diversity of the United States continues to grow, it is increasingly important that comparable cultural diversity grows in the legal profession. Diversity in the legal field is central to ensuring public confidence in the legal system and provides society with a sense of fairness in the judicial system. The benefits of diverse leadership …

The Beginnings Of The Journal Of Food Law & Policy, Michael T. Roberts

Journal of Food Law & Policy

In the first sentence of the introduction to the inaugural edition of the Journal for Food Law & Policy, Margie Alsbrook, the founding Editor-in-Chief, and I, the founding faculty advisor, stated: "It is with great pride and pleasure that we present the inaugural issue of the Journal for Food Law & Policy." In celebration of the Journal's tenth anniversary, I am inclined to echo the same sentiment, but with the added proviso: "surprised!" I confess being gravely concerned ten years ago over the Journal's survivability. Food law and policy was then barely in its formative stage. The nascent, social food …

Dedication To Dean Timothy L. Coggins, W. Clark Williams Jr.

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Tribute To Gail F. Zwirner, Paul M. Birch

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Commencement Exercises 2015, North Carolina Central School Of Law

Commencement Brochures

No abstract provided.

Reframing The Socratic Method, Jamie Abrams

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

While innovations in law teaching are everywhere, these innovations are being constructed upon and limited by the ancient architecture of the case-based Socratic method, which still endures and persists throughout first-year and upper-level courses. This article highlights how the Socratic method limits the depth and breadth of innovations in law teaching and can be reframed to better catalyze other teaching innovations, create more practice-ready lawyers, and cultivate more inclusive and inviting law classrooms. Within the existing framework of law teaching – the same casebooks, class sizes, and teaching style – the case-based Socratic method can be reframed in three straight-forward …

Acknowledgements, D. Paul Holdsworth

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Addressing Access To Justice Through New Legal Service Providers: Opportunities And Challenges, Alice Woolley, Trevor C. W. Farrow

Articles & Book Chapters

Most informed observers of the Canadian and American legal systems accept the existence of a significant crisis in access to justice. One possible solution is to permit paralegals, notaries or other licensed individuals with training more limited than that enjoyed by a licensed attorney to practice in certain areas of law. This paper supports these developments, arguing for a regulated and incremental introduction of new legal service providers into the legal services market. It considers the appropriate training and scope of practice for new legal service providers, and some of the associated opportunities and challenges.

Trending@Rwu Law: David Zlotnick's Post: Earning Academic Credits On The Job In D.C., David M. Zlotnick

Law School Blogs

No abstract provided.

The Legal Academy Under Erasure, Richard E. Redding

Catholic University Law Review

We hear much about the “crisis” in legal education: steep declines in law school enrollments and graduates unprepared for practice who cannot find jobs. Proposals to address the crisis enjoy wide support and are poised to dramatically change the landscape of legal education. These reforms are harmful to law students and the legal profession, placing the legal academy “under erasure,” as Jacques Derrida would say. They erase the academic nature of law school by: (1) reorienting it from an academically-grounded legal education towards vocational training, (2) requiring just two years of study for the J.D. degree, (3) allowing graduates of …