Legal Education Commons^™

A Modest Proposal For Expediting Manuscript Selection At Less Prestigious Law Reviews, Joseph S. Miller

Scholarly Works

The matching market in unsolicited manuscripts, submitted to general law reviews, suffers from far too much wasted student effort. This is especially so among the less prestigious law review staffs, which scramble to read submissions they cannot land in the misguided belief they owe authors serious scholarly engagement with the drafts they submit. If they set aside this quaintly artisanal view—an apparent relic of the “Paper Chase” era that ill suits the age of ExpressO and Scholastica—students can process manuscripts far more efficiently. They need only update their manuscript-review systems according to the same market imperatives that drive the professors …

Law Library Blog (January 2016): Legal Beagle's Blog Archive, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Law Library Newsletters/Blog

No abstract provided.

Alternative Spring Break 2016 Report, Roger Williams University School Of Law, Association For Public Interest Law

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

Law Student Mediators Wear A Triple Crown: Skilled, Sellable, & Successful, Laurie A. Lewis

Scholarly Articles

This Article considers several trends that converge to make it a highly favorable time for law students to obtain mediation training and work as mediators prior to graduating. Part I summarizes a brief history of the modern ADR movement, and mediation's emergence as the ADR methodology of choice. Part II discusses the proliferation of live clinics in law schools, with a special emphasis upon mediation clinics and their role in teaching unique practice-ready skills. Part III focuses on the practicalities of community mediation training as well as state requirements for mediators. Finally, Part IV considers the tight legal job market …

Intercultural Legal Sensibility As Transformation, Raquel Aldana

McGeorge School of Law Scholarly Articles

In recent years the transformation of legal practice through globalization and shifting demographics in the United States have made the inherent cross-cultural nature of lawyering more apparent. As a result, law schools are being more intentional about the teaching of intercultural legal sensibility as part of the law school curriculum. This increased interest by U.S. law schools to train lawyers in intercultural legal sensibility calls for careful engagement by legal educators to define what intercultural legal sensibility should mean, to develop methodologies in response to the desired outcomes, and to measure their effectiveness. This article offers a reflection on what …

Preserving The Llsdc Legislative Source Book With Perma.Cc, Roger V. Skalbeck

Law Faculty Publications

With LLSDC’s Legislative Source Book, Rick McKinney was constantly concerned about the collection’s stability, functionality, and availability. With any major revision to the LLSDC.org website, Rick worked to ensure that content was accessible and that he and members of the Legislative Research SIS could keep it updated. In an effort to preserve the Legislative Source Book, the collection’s core elements were captured using the Perma.cc service. These links reference archived versions of each source, presented in parallel to its current form. There is more depth and detail than presented here, which shows the collection’s complex and comprehensive coverage.

Minor Federal Government Regulatory Agencies, Kathleen Klepfer

Law Faculty Publications

Rick McKinney’s “Federal Administrative Law: A Brief Overview” is a succinct and helpful place to find information about rulemaking, common administrative law statutes, and the major administrative agencies. But what about those unsung heroes, the minor regulatory agencies whose necessity—and sometimes purpose—are lost to history? We propose this addendum to Rick’s article to give a couple of these minor agencies their due.

Leveraging Narratives: Communicating Value With Qualitative Content, Roger V. Skalbeck

Law Faculty Publications

The contemporary law library is embodied by its information resources, physical space, technology infrastructure, and the people who make it all happen. Each of these elements can change dramatically with new information tools, shifting organizational demands and emerging service models.

Volume 40, No. 3

The Weldon Times

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

Editor in Chief: Graeme Maitland

Digital Editor: Jessica Patrick

Editors: Marina Bruggeman, Melanie Gillis, Sarah Walsh

Law School Institutional Repositories: A Survey, Kincaid C. Brown

Law Librarian Scholarship

There has been a dramatic rise in the number of law libraries managing institutional repositories for their law schools. In 2011, there were some 30 law schools with such repositories; now, 80 of the top 100 law schools have their own or participate in a university-wide repository wherein the law school has an identifiable, school-specific collection or community. This article discusses a survey of the of the top 101 law schools, in hopes of facilitating an understanding of the breadth of material to be found in law school institutional repositories.

Value Added: Utilizing The Msw Perspective, Dana M. Malkus

All Faculty Scholarship

Regardless of practice area, we all must face the reality that our own perspectives
and skill sets—while valuable—bring with them certain limits that impact both our teaching and our lawyering. Adding other perspectives and skill sets to our practice settings is one way to move beyond these limits.

In this brief article, I provide reflections on the challenges and rewards of adding a Masters of Social Work practicum student (“MSW student”) to our transactional clinic team. The following description provides an overview of three ways the MSW student added value to the Entrepreneurship and Community Development Clinic at St. Louis …

Christopher Columbus Langdell And The Public Law Curriculum, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

Teaching materials in public law courses typically rely almost wholly on judicial opinions as their primary materials, amplified by selections from the secondary literature. Constitutional text may appear independently, but statutory text rarely does, and the materials of the legislative process are generally absent. In administrative law course books, administrative opinions and the materials of rulemaking rarely fever appear. Yet these are primary materials with which lawyers must deal with increasing frequency. Lawyers encounter statutes, rules, administrative policies, and administrative disputes without judicial guidance, looking forward and not backward in time. The growth of courses in legislation and the regulatory …

Doctoral Studies In Law: From The Inside Out, Dia Dabby, Bethany Hastie, Jocelyn Stacey

All Faculty Publications

This article explores the purpose, structure and experience of doctoral studies in Canadian law schools. Relying on an auto-ethnographic methodology, where we draw on our personal experience as doctoral students, we identify three tensions in doctoral studies in law. We explore how these tensions — between practice/theory, structure/space, and supervisory/other relationships — emerge from the structure of doctoral studies in law and how they manifest themselves in the lived experience of doctoral students. We detail how these tensions are product of the ambiguous and underexplored nature of doctoral studies in law. By making these tensions explicit, we encourage doctoral students, …

Lawyers' Empire And The Great Transformation, Douglas C. Harris

All Faculty Publications

Writing through the years of World War II and attempting to understand its horrors, the carnage of World War I, the great depression, and the rise of communist and fascist regimes, Karl Polanyi posited that Western Europe had undergone The Great Transformation through the nineteenth century. Built around policies of economic liberalism and the gospel of the self-regulating market, this transformation had produced a century of unparalleled peace and material wealth in Europe, but the unmooring of the market from other social forces, and the remaking of land and labour as commodities, would unleash, when the buttressing pillars faltered, the …

The "Law" And "Spirit" Of The Accreditation Process In Legal Education, Maureen A. O'Rourke

Faculty Scholarship

In 1995, Dean Richard Matasar published an essay in the Journal of Legal Education entitled Perspectives on the Accreditation Process: Views from a Nontraditional School. With characteristic acuity, he focused on the question "whether the accreditation process promotes or discourages curricular experimentation and resource conservation," noting that "[a]s we enter an era of scarcity of resources and diminished demand for legal education, traditional well-endowed schools will continue to flourish. For the rest of us, however, only the fittest and most clever will survive. Accreditation must serve this end."

Ube-Shopping: An Unintended Consequence Of Portability?, Suzanne Darrow-Kleinhaus

Scholarly Works

Preparing for the Uniform Bar Examination (UBE) may require more than just learning the law; it also means learning in which jurisdiction you should take it. While there is not much that is new about the UBE’s individual components – the Multistate Essay Examination (MEE), the Multistate Performance Test (MPT) and the Multistate Bar Examination (MBE) – what is new is that where you take the UBE may make the difference between passing and failing. This is possible because of the convergence of bar exam test practices of “portability,” “relative grading,” and “scaling” of scores. By adopting the UBE, jurisdictions …

Clinical Legal Education's Contribution To Building Constitutionalism And Democracy In South Africa: Past, Present, And Future, Peggy Maisel, Shaheda Mahomed, Meetali Jain

Faculty Scholarship

Clinical Legal Education (“CLE”) courses were first introduced in South Africa nearly fifty years ago. Since then, their role has changed from addressing legal problems perpetrated by an oppressive system, to strengthening South Africa’s transition to democracy. The end of apartheid has been accompanied by a transition of focus from private law to public law. South Africa currently has seventeen public universities, each of which has a law faculty and a legal clinic. Many clinical programs’ missions are primarily dedicated to community service and providing access to justice.

Although CLE programs have undertaken some human rights and law reform work, …

Insights From Psychology: Teaching Behavioral Legal Ethics As A Core Element Of Professional Responsibility, Tigran W. Eldred

Faculty Scholarship

The field of behavioral legal ethics—which draws on a large body of empirical research to explore how subtle and often unconscious psychological factors influence ethical decision-making by lawyers—has gained significant attention recently, including by many scholars who have called for a pedagogy that incorporates behavioral lessons into the professional responsibility curriculum. This Article provides one of the first comprehensive accounts of how law teachers can meet this challenge. Based on an approach that employs a variety of experiential techniques to immerse students in the contextual and emotional aspects of legal practice, it provides a detailed model of how to teach …

The Humanities In The Law School Curriculum: Courtship And Consummation, Linda H. Edwards

Scholarly Works

Today the humanities occupy a small corner of the law school curriculum. Might they instead become a more vibrant partner in legal education? Might law and humanities scholarship escape the pages of law reviews and teach us something important about how to read and understand the law?

Despite the long theoretical dominance of legal realism in scholarly circles, much of legal education as we know it has remained mired in Langdell's formalist vision of the law—a vision of a narrow, abstract, impersonal system bereft of human meaning and value. But we can do better. We can approach law, and teach …

Research Instruction And Resources In The Transactional Skills Classroom: Approaches To Incorporating Research Instruction Into Transactional Skills Courses, Lori D. Johnson, Jeanne Price, Eric H. Franklin

Scholarly Works

Professors Lori Johnson, Jeanne Price, and Eric Franklin discuss methods of teaching legal research skills in the context of a transactional law class.

Seeing Higher Education And Faculty Responsibility Through Richard Matasar's Critiques Of Law Schools: College Completion, Economic Viability, And The Liberal Arts Ideal In Higher Education, John Valery White

Scholarly Works

Professor John Valery White argues that the crisis in higher education has been framed around discomfort with and critiques of changes that have taken place in the last few decades as universities grew and became more complex, and more expensive. These arguments raise valid and significant concerns about higher education and its subcomponents like legal education but on the whole have missed the true challenge to higher education of recent years. He argues that the significant current policy push to improve college attainment has led to the loss of academic authority and leadership by higher education institutions, their administrators, and …

Finishing The Job Of Legal Education Reform, Mary Beth Beazley

Scholarly Works

In this article, Professor Beazley advocates for the extension of tenure to skills faculty for the good of law faculty and of legal education. She argues that extending tenure to legal writing and other skills faculty will help to advance the goals of education reform in a variety of ways. First, equalizing the power of skills faculty will allow law schools to get the full benefit of their teaching and scholarship, a benefit that is currently blunted by ignorance and bias. Second, fair treatment of skills faculty will advance the values of equality, diversity, and inclusion: law students will benefit …

Book Review. Rethinking The Law School: Education, Research, Outreach And Governance By Carel Stolker, Ashley A. Ahlbrand

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

The End(S) Of Legal Education, Frank H. Wu

Faculty Scholarship

Legal education is in jeopardy. There is no longer sufficient demand for the juris doctor degree from prospective students; the supply of seats exceeds the number of applicants possessing the credentials that have until recently been preferred by each respective institution. As a consequence, schools have had to implement “tuition discounting” at unprecedented levels even to enroll fewer individuals who are less qualified by conventional predictors. Meanwhile, the mainstream press, with encouragement from the organized bar, has excoriated the legal academy for its failures, whether real or perceived. These critics have wondered about the “return on investment.”

Crafting Comment Letters: Teach Policy, Develop Skills, And Shape Pending Regulation, Benjamin P. Edwards, Nicole G. Iannarone

Scholarly Works

Professor Benjamin Edwards joins his colleague, Professor Nicole Iannarone, in this essay, unpacking the regulatory comment letter process and how to incorporate it into the law school curriculum. Participating in live rulemaking offers unique opportunities for students including mastering the substantive area of law, developing critical thinking skills, and developing their professional identities. The authors describe their own experiences in incorporating students into the regulatory rulemaking process. Because of the focus on securities law, their students review and comment on proposed actions by securities regulators - the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). After providing …

Opinion & Dissent: Magic Words, Lori D. Johnson

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Taste This!: Experiencing Transactional Lawyering In First-Year Contracts, Dana M. Malkus

All Faculty Scholarship

In a prior submission to The Law Teacher (“Reflection, Reality, and a Real Audience: Ideas from the Clinic"), I argued that the clinical education model provides some simple lessons that should inform all law teaching. One idea I advocated was that law teachers bring reality into the classroom whenever possible. Among other ideas, I suggested law teachers run in-class simulations based on "real world" transactions..

Over the past few years, I have had the opportunity to experiment more with this suggestion myself. At my institution, I teach a clinic course (which includes supervising students) and a transactional drafting course. I …