Legal Education Commons^™

Pursuing Justice In An Unjust World: Arjuna In America, Marc Galanter

Cleveland State Law Review

The knowledge that emerges from research is not automatically translated into policy, but becomes part of a political struggle. But deepening that struggle by challenging our understandings and liberating us from false problems and false solutions is one of the things that law schools can do for justice. The quest for justice is a political quest. In his stirring essay, ‘Politics as a Vocation,’ surely one of the most profound examinations of the nature of political action, Max Weber tells us that the political vocation demands passion, responsibility and something more: "... the decisive psychological quality of the Politician [is] …

Hidden Messages In The Required First-Year Law School Curriculum, Leslie Bender

Cleveland State Law Review

The traditional required first-year law school curriculum transmits powerful hidden messages. The hidden messages contained within this required core tell students what is most important for all lawyers to know. I am going to suggest a proposed required first year curriculum as a heuristic model for examining hidden messages in curricula generally. The proposed curriculum tells students from the day they receive their registration packets that issues of justice, truth, equality and freedom are important to all lawyers. By the organization of the curriculum, we tell them that these values (or their absence) animate doctrine and process, rather than the …

Teaching About Justice And Social Contributions, Talbot D'Alemberte

Cleveland State Law Review

I have tried to state, in very brief outline, my case that the law schools and the large law firms have thrived on the “Paper Chase” model and that they are not fulfilling the mission which I will, without apology, call the seminary mission. They are not teaching us about justice. Each of us is at this conference because we are concerned with the way legal education operates today and most of us believe that it can be improved. Before this is over, I hope you design a grand agenda for change and I feel privileged to help begin that …

The Spirit Of Justice, Henry Ramsey Jr.

Cleveland State Law Review

This "Justice Mission" conference is organized around a topic that is of great importance throughout the world. I underscore throughout the world. The American Bar Association, with the lead being taken in part by the Section of Legal Education and Admission to the Bar, is engaged in what is known as the Central and Eastern European Law Initiative (CEELI). This is an attempt to work with law schools, law teachers and law administrators in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe; to bring to them the benefits of the American legal educational system as they attempt to deal with the …

Law Schools, The Justice Mission, And Bob Mckay, John Sexton

Cleveland State Law Review

The general points I make link to the justice mission of law schools. We must produce people prepared to practice at the very highest levels; and we must produce the kind of detached thinking that one associates with a great research institution. Most of us were educated in the system created by Langdell: the casebook method. It is startling that Langdell's method enjoys the pervasive dominance of legal education that it does. The notion of a static corpus juris which provided the foundation upon which Langdell built his model is impossible to maintain. Another general observation, the demographics of our …

Challenging Injustice: A Dedication To Bob Mckay, Norman Redlich

Cleveland State Law Review

In viewing the agenda for this conference, Bob McKay, as a chronicler of justice, might sound some words of caution. First, I know he would point out that the starting point for achieving the justice mission of American law schools is with the law professor. Second, while I note that one workshop is devoted to the topic, "The Justice Mission of the Legal Profession," I fail to observe a session devoted to a topic that was of deep concern to Bob McKay, namely, the justice mission of the law professor within the legal profession. Third, it is not sufficient for …

Teaching About Justice Through Creative Strategies, Anthony G. Amsterdam

Cleveland State Law Review

When discussing justice, it helps us to look at our legal institutions from outside the narrow, closed circle in which most of us operate most of the time or believe we operate. Part of the problem is that all of our legal institutions and much of our rationality are the products of an evolution that is only several thousand years old. But we have a set of instincts and a neurological system that have evolved over more than a million and a half years. Human beings became human and they still live in the shadow of the cave. Our instinct …

Nurturing The Impulse For Justice, Lynne Henderson

Cleveland State Law Review

By dwelling on doctrine and appellate case analysis we too often lose sight of the underlying assumptions behind the law and the social consequences of the law. By doing so we fail to give students even a glimmer of understanding as to what they need to know to fight injustice effectively. We spend much classroom time rationalizing the real and evading difficult questions of social justice. We do almost nothing to help our students develop any sense of justice or injustice or ways of identifying how the law produces justice and injustice. Let me work through an example of how …

Law Schools Should Be About Justice Too, Henry Rose

Cleveland State Law Review

Millions of low and middle-income Americans face legal problems every day. Most cannot afford an attorney. What is remarkable about these legal problems is that they are ignored by legal educators. American law schools, the training ground for our lawyers, do not focus on the civil legal problems of low and middle income persons. American law students are taught to focus on the legal problems of persons or entities able to pay for legal services. Not only are the common legal problems of Americans not studied in our law schools, the maldistribution of legal services in the society is barely …

The Justice Mission Of American Law Schools, David Barnhizer

Cleveland State Law Review

Justice has been seen by many scholars as a premise about which much can be said but virtually nothing either proved or disproved through the application of the methodologies that provide the grounding for science. While justice is undeniably representative of a slippery and evasive set of concepts, it paradoxically reflects the fundamental values of Western society without which we cannot hold together the thin tissue of political organization that we call the "Rule of Law." As is described in the latter part of this article, justice is in fact a simple meta-principle, one about which we need not be …

Book Reviews, Paul Carrington, J. Allen Smith, Stanley D. Rose

Vanderbilt Law Review

Book Reviews --

The John Randolph Tucker Lectures--1953-1956 Lexington, Virginia School of Law, Washington and Lee University, 1957. Pp. 208.

reviewer: Paul Carrington

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Desegregation and the Law By Albert P. Blaustein and Clarence Clyde Ferguson, Jr. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press,1957. Pp. xiv, 332.

reviewer: J. Allen Smith

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The Federal Tort Claims Act By William B. Wright Forward by Emile Z. Berman New York: Central Book Co., 1957. Pp. 248.

reviewer: Stanley D. Rose

What's Wrong With Modern Legal Education, John G. Hervey

Cleveland State Law Review

Some one once observed that the size of a man is measured by the size of the things that he will let bother him. Which is to say, that what concerns the legal profession, and those who aspire to enter it, is the adequacy of the job that is being done. The great majority of the lawyers have had training in the law schools of the country - very few come to the practice today via law office study. The practicing profession is, therefore, but the mirror that reflects the schools in which the lawyers were trained. If the bench …

The Teaching Of Practice And Procedure In Law Schools, Edson R. Sunderland

Articles

Procedure is merely the means of co-ordinating effort, of harmonizing differences, of offering every one equality of opportunity in offense and defense before the law. Without it there would be confusion, favoritism, and injustice. If the subject were viewed in this fundamental way, and were studied conscientiously as an incident and aid to the development and determination of the merits of controversies, the criticisms now so fiercely directed against it would largely disappear. In its use it is indispensable, in its abuse only does it cause trouble. A professional conscience to curb that abuse, and professional learning and skill to …