Legal Education Commons^™

What I Learned About Teaching Law By Being An Art Student, Michael T. Colatrella

McGeorge School of Law Scholarly Articles

When was the last time you learned a skill? I’m not referring to the time your twelve-year-old daughter taught you how to use the latest social media platform. I mean when was the last time you learned to do something that takes months or years of concerted effort to reach a level of competence? A few years ago, I did just that. I learned to draw and paint. My goal was not to be a professional artist. My goal was to become competent in drawing and painting for pleasure. As with many of us, drawing and painting were parts of …

The Practice And Pedagogy Of Carceral Abolition In A Criminal Defense Clinic, Nicole Smith Futrell

Faculty Scholarship

Current social and racial justice movements have helped to advance deeper interest in the long-standing work of carceral abolitionists. Abolitionists understand that the criminal legal process ineffectively uses state-sanctioned violence, surveillance, punishment, and exclusion to address, and counterproductively perpetuate, the underlying problems that produce violence and harmful behavior in our communities. Abolition focuses on dismantling our current carceral systems and finding completely new, restorative, and collaborative ways of addressing harmful social behaviors. While abolitionist thought has long existed in organizing and non-legal academic spaces, law students and legal scholars are increasingly considering how a carceral abolitionist perspective can inform legal …

Front Matter

Lewis & Clark Law Review

Front Matter contains Table of Contents and Masthead for Lewis & Clark Law Review Volume 25, Issue 3.

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

Faculty Scholarship

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.

Better Than Our Biases: Using Psychological Research To Inform Our Approach To Effective, Inclusive Feedback, Anne D. Gordon

Faculty Scholarship

As teaching faculty, we are obligated to create an inclusive learning environment for all students. When we fail to be thoughtful about our own bias, our teaching suffers – and students from under-represented backgrounds are left behind. This paper draws on legal, pedagogical, and psychological research to create a practical guide for clinical teaching faculty in understanding, examining, and mitigating our own biases, so that we may better teach and support our students. First, I discuss two kinds of bias that interfere with our decision-making and behavior: cognitive biases (such as confirmation bias, primacy and recency effects, and the halo …

Dumping: On Law Reviews, James Boyle

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Clinicians Reflect On Covid-19: Lessons Learned And Looking Beyond, Deborah Archer, Caitlin Barry, Priya Baskaran, Lisa Bliss, Jennifer Fernandez, Crystal Grant, Anju Gupta, Gautam Hans, Julia Hernandez, Vida Johnson, Carolyn Kaas, Alexis Karteron, Shobha Mahadev, Lynnise Pantin, Kele Stewart, Erika Wilson

Faculty Scholarship

As a result of the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic, clinical faculty had to abruptly adapt their clinical teaching and case supervision practices to adjust to the myriad restrictions brought on by the pandemic. This brought specialized challenges for clinicians who uniquely serve as both legal practitioners and law teachers in the law school setting. With little support and guidance, clinicians tackled never before seen difficulties in the uncharted waters of running a clinical law practice during a pandemic.

In this report, we review the responses of 220 clinicians to survey questions relating to how law clinics and clinicians were treated by …

We Are...Community!, Michael A. Mogill

Faculty Scholarly Works

The concept of “community” has become increasingly important in law schools, relating both to our professionalism and the education of our students. During the recent celebration of our school’s 185^th anniversary of its founding, I addressed one of the school’s core values, that of “community”. This article explores that value and its meaning both within our law schools and the greater society, serving to advance the public interest and the interests of our law students, the legal academy and practicing attorneys everywhere. The message conveys is universal and contemporary, going well beyond our anniversary celebration. Ultimately, it can help …

Embracing And Making Change In Legal Education: Serving The Law Students Of Today And Tomorrow, Danielle M. Conway

Faculty Scholarly Works

"Danielle M. Conway is Dean and Donald J. Farage Professor of Law at Penn State Dickinson Law. The following are her keynote remarks delivered Jan. 6, 2021, for the 2021 AALS Joint Section Program of the Sections on Student Services and Part-Time Division, Academic Support, Balance in Legal Education, Minority Groups, and PreLegal Education and Admission to Law School."

Educating Antiracist Lawyers: The Race And The Equal Protection Of The Laws Program At Dickinson Law, Dermot M. Groome

Faculty Scholarly Works

The year 2020 has forced us, as a nation, to recognize painful realities about systemic racism in our country and our legal system. The fallacies in our founding documents and the vestiges of our slave past are so woven into our national culture that they became hard to see except for those who suffered their daily indignities, hardships, and fears. As legal educators, we must face the role we have played in helping build the machinery of structural racism by supplying generation after generation of those who maintain that machinery and prosper within it. In this critical moment of our …

Testing Privilege: Coaching Bar Takers Towards "Minimum Competency" During The 2020 Pandemic, Afton Cavanaugh

Faculty Articles

The year 2020 was challenging for the bar exam. The longstanding argument that the bar exam is not a fair measure of the minimum competence of someone to practice law was cast into harsh relief and the truth-that the bar exam tests the privilege of its examinees-became startlingly apparent. Not only did 2020 kick off with a devastating global pandemic, but we also saw the rage against systemic racial injustice reach a boiling point just as we were charged with staying in our homes to avoid contracting COVID-19. With a pandemic raging, overt White supremacy on the rise, and racial …

Question #1: Is There A Gender Gap In Performance On Multiple Choice Exams? A. Always B. Never C. Most Of The Time, Jane Bloom Grisé

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

The correct answer to Question #1 is C. Most of the time, women score lower than men on multiple-choice exams. Question #2: How did you become interested in this topic?

A. The author likes to create multiple-choice tests.

B. The author does well on multiple-choice tests.

C. The author unexpectedly discovered this disparity.

The correct answer is C. I discovered this disparity unexpectedly and was surprised to find that women scored lower than men on multiple-choice exams and that multiple-choice exams underpredicted women's academic performance.

While educators might assume that different types of assessments such as multiple-choice and essays are …

Plagiarism Pedagogy: Why Teaching Plagiarism Should Be A Fundamental Part Of Legal Education, Brian L. Frye, Megan E. Boyd

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

As a practicing lawyer, if you aren’t plagiarizing, you’re committing malpractice. Litigators copy forms and arguments from winning briefs rather than bill their clients for reinventing the wheel. Transactional lawyers copy enforceable agreements to ensure their agreements are enforceable too. Partners routinely present documents prepared by associates (and sometimes even paralegals) as their own work. And judges are the most prolific plagiarists of all, copying briefs, opinions, treatises, and legal and nonlegal scholarship, adopting arguments from lawyers and holdings from other judges as their own and claiming authorship of opinions written primarily by their clerks or the parties to the …

Submission Of Law Student Articles For Publication, Nancy Levit, Lawrence D. Maclachlan, Allen Rostron, Staci J. Pratt

Faculty Works

Each year law students collectively write a large number of papers that could become law review articles but that are never published. Most law schools require students at some point during their time in law school to research and write an academic paper of publishable quality or seminar paper. Some of these are law review notes and comments that are not selected for publication. Others of these are papers written for specific substantive classes or to fulfill research and writing requirements. Most of these student papers - even very worthy ones - will never be published or posted online. The …

Teaching Lawyers To Think Like Leaders: The Next Big Shift In Legal Education, April Mara Barton

Law Faculty Publications

The old saying is that students go to law school to learn to think like lawyers. While thinking like a lawyer is indeed critical to becoming a good lawyer, we must also teach our law students to think like leaders. Countless leaders in politics, government, business, and the non-profit sector are lawyers. While these lawyers are smart, precise, thorough, and honorable professionals, our public and private sectors would be further served by lawyers who are also taught to understand what leadership is (and is not) and who have honed their own leadership awareness and skills.

Narrowing Access To The Legal Profession: The Pandemic's Impact On First-Generation Women, Victor D. Quintanilla, Erin Freiburger

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Antiracism, Reflection, And Professional Identity, Andrew King-Ries, Monte Mills, Eduardo R.C. Capulong

Faculty Law Review Articles

Intent on more systematically developing the emerging professional identities of law students, the professional identity formation movement is recasting how we think about legal education. Notably, however, the movement overlooks the structural racism imbedded in American law and legal education. While current models of professional development value diversity and cross-cultural competence, they do not adequately prepare the next generation of legal professionals to engage in the sustained work of interrupting and overthrowing race and racism in the legal profession and system. This article argues that antiracism is essential to the profession’s responsibility to serve justice and therefore key to legal …

Moving Ahead: Finding Opportunities For Transactional Training In Remote Legal Education, Jen Randolph Reise

Mitchell Hamline Law Review

No abstract provided.

This Is Minnesota: An Analysis Of Disparities In Black Student Enrollment At The University Of Minnesota Law School And The Effects Of Systemic Barriers To Black Representation In The Law, Maleah Riley-Brown, Samia Osman, Justice C. Shannon, Yemaya Hanna, Brandie Burress, Tony Sanchez, Joshua Cottle

Mitchell Hamline Law Review

No abstract provided.

Entrenched Racial Hierarchy: Educational Inequality From The Cradle To The Lsat, Kevin Woodson

Mitchell Hamline Law Review

No abstract provided.

Assertion And Hearsay, Richard Lloret

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

This article explores the characteristics and functions of assertion and considers how the term influences the definition of hearsay under Federal Rule of Evidence 801. Rule 801(a) defines hearsay by limiting it to words and conduct intended as an assertion, but the rule does not define the term assertion. Courts and legal scholars have focused relatively little attention on the nature and definition of assertion. That is unfortunate, because assertion is a robust concept that has been the subject of intense philosophic study over recent decades. Assertion is not a mere cypher standing in for whatever speech or conduct one …

Reloading The Canon: Thoughts On Critical Legal Pedagogy, Chantal Thomas

University of Colorado Law Review

On the first day of the first-year contracts class that I teach, I preview for the students both the general contours of the “blackletter law” that we will be learning throughout the course, and some of the perspectives that I will incorporate in developing our critical thinking and analysis of the law. My aim is to impress upon the students that their understanding of the blackletter law––the technical training that many law students think of as constituting the bulk of their educational mission––varies positively with their understanding of and capacity for critical analysis. I go about this in part by …

Making The Critical Moves: A Top Ten In Progressive Legal Scholarship, Jorge L. Esquirol

University of Colorado Law Review

No abstract provided.

Conversations After Class: 'Becoming Critical,' Or The Steps Necessary To Achieve Critical Thought For Law Students, Daniel J. Sequeira

University of Colorado Law Review

No abstract provided.

No, The Firing Squad Is Not Better Than Lethal Injection: A Response To Stephanie Moran’S A Modest Proposal, Michael Conklin

Seattle University Law Review

In the article A Modest Proposal: The Federal Government Should Use Firing Squads to Execute Federal Death Row Inmates, Stephanie Moran argues that the firing squad is the only execution method that meets the requirements of the Eighth Amendment. In order to make her case, Moran unjustifiably overstates the negative aspects of lethal injection while understating the negative aspects of firing squads. The entire piece is predicated upon assumptions that are not only unsupported by the evidence but often directly refuted by the evidence. This Essay critically analyzes Moran’s claims regarding the alleged advantages of the firing squad over …

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents

The Effect Of The Uniform Bar Examination On Admissions, Diversity, Affordability, And Employment Across Law Schools In The United States, Manuel S. González Canché, Taylor K. Odle, Ji Yeon Bae

Grantee Research

The Uniform Bar Examination (UBE), first implemented in February 2011 in Missouri and North Dakota, is a multijurisdictional or cross-state test designed to assess a minimum shared core of legal knowledge and lawyering skills. Since its implementation, UBE has now reached 37 states and territories, including the District of Columbia. Despite this prevalence, no empirical evidence exists regarding its effects on law schools’ admissions, diversity, affordability, and employment mobility of law students and graduates or of its effects on law schools’ application volumes or average bar passage rates. This study addresses this gap by providing a comprehensive examination of the …

Aristocratic Excellence, Secular Ecumenism, And The Life Of The Modern Law School: Book Review, Neil Fulton

Faculty Publications

Anthony Kronman and John Sexton have both authored books about the state of higher education: Kronman's entitled, The Assault on American Excellence; Sexton's entitled, Standing for Reason. Both authors have extensive experience as instructors and administrators. Both have academic careers centered around law schools. Both use their books to explore the critical mission of universities in modern society, political and social challenges to that mission, and how to overcome those challenges. Both books are informed, provocative, and ultimately hopeful about the future of higher education. Both, while centered on universities more generally, provide avenues to think about the …

Tribute To Professor Doug Rendleman, Katy Barnett, Alison Bell, Jeff Berryman, Neil Birkhoff, Daniel Friedmann, Thomas P. Gallanis, Claire Hagan Eller, Brandon Hasbrouck, Corey Hauser, Brant Hellwig, Margaret Howard, Alexandra L. Klein, Douglas Laycock, Benjamin V. Madison, Iii, Judith L. Madison, Kyle Mcnew, Linda Mullenix, Rami Rashmawi, Caprice Roberts, Victoria Shannon Sahani, Joan Shaughnessy, Barry Sullivan, Martha Vazquez, Edilson Vitorelli

Washington and Lee Law Review

A tribute to Professor Doug Rendleman, who served on the faculty of the Washington and Lee University School of Law from 1988 to 2020. Rendleman became Professor of Law, Emeritus in 2020.

A Tribute To Dean Michael Yelnosky, Judge William E. Smith

Roger Williams University Law Review

No abstract provided.