Legal Education Commons^™

Ai Bots As Law Teachers: What Is Left For Human Professors To Do?, Harold I. Abramson

Scholarly Works

This article considers what bots can do as AI law teachers, how students are already using bots for learning, how to integrate the use of AI into law courses, and what faculty can do to stay ahead of the bots in their classrooms. During this discussion, the article confronts the existential question of what is left for human law professors to do in an AI world. It concludes that there is a future for humans for now, and one that might make us better teachers.

The Employment Benefits Of Law Clinics And Externships, Robert R. Kuehn

Scholarship@WashULaw

One of the reasons law students enroll in a law clinic or externship is the belief that the experience will improve their marketability. In a nationwide survey asking what was driving demand for their courses, 94% of externship directors and 66% of law clinic directors said it was, in part, because students believe those courses improve employment opportunities. Surveys of recent law graduates and employers show that students' perceptions of the positive impact of a clinic or externship experience on their job opportunities upon graduation are well founded. Research shows that clinics and externships do aid graduates in obtaining their …

How New Lawyers Value Law School Experiential Training, Robert R. Kuehn

Scholarship@WashULaw

While the legal academy continues to debate the appropriate role of experiential training in preparing graduates for practice, one group consistently embraces its value: newly-licensed lawyers. In repeated surveys over the past twenty years, early career lawyers, as well as experienced attorneys, report that law clinic, externship, and simulation courses play an important role in legal education. The research summarized herein demonstrates that newly-licensed lawyers highly value their law school experiential courses, deem them important in their transition to practice, and believe their legal education did not sufficiently prepare them for practice.

An Anthology Of Interference In Law School Clinics, Peter A. Joy, Robert R. Kuehn

Scholarship@WashULaw

An Anthology of Interference in Law School Clinics explores interference in law school clinics in the United States, addressing its long history and the legal ethics, academic freedom, and First Amendment responses to that interference. Law clinics have faced interference in their representation of clients from elected officials, business groups, alumni and, at times, even their own school administrators. This interference has targeted clinics for providing individuals and nongovernmental organizations with legal representation on important matters, including racial and gender discrimination, environmental issues, prisoner rights litigation, death penalty cases, and immigration and human rights matters. In each instance, the interference …

While Administrators Fret, Prospective Law Students Are Losing Interest In U.S. News Rankings, James Owsley Boyd

Keep Up With the Latest News from the Law School (blog)

Prospective law students across the United States are paying less attention and giving less credence to the annual U.S. News & World Report rankings of American law schools, according to new research from scholars at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law and University of Kentucky Rosenberg College of Law.

“The Decline and Fall of the U.S. News Rankings” was published this week on the Social Science Research Network by Indiana Law Professor CJ Ryan and Brian Frye, Kentucky’s Spears-Gilbert Professor of Law.

Contrary to what many in the legal education community believe, a rise in the U.S. News rankings …

Bad Therapy: Conceptualizing The Teaching Of “Thinking Like A Lawyer” As Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Chelsea Baldwin

St. Mary's Law Journal

Law students and lawyers experience mental illness and substance abuse at higher rates than the general population and other learned professions. This is bad for an individual’s wellbeing as well as their clients and society because mental illness and substance abuse increases stress which in turn decreases effective decision-making and judgment, and in worst case scenarios leads to attrition as individuals choose death by suicide which has cascading social and economic impacts. This Article identifies practices in legal education that likely combine in a causal mechanism, although not a sole cause, to the higher rates of mental illness and substance …

A Blueprint To Reclaim Legal Education From External Rankers, Scott Rempell

Seattle University Law Review

The U.S. News & World Report (U.S. News) law school rankings have impacted the perceptions and behaviors of everyone in the rankings ecosystem for decades. Commentators have almost universally condemned these ordinal rankings, yet they continue to influence the legal education market, often in highly detrimental ways.

The influence of these rankings stems from legitimate market demands, for reasons that the psychology of choice literature makes clear. People want (or need) to efficiently acquire and digest information that could help them make consequential decisions. At a time when consumers of law school information did not have such choice-making assistance, U.S. …

Whither Coursework And Nextgen Bar Exam Success?, Robert R. Kuehn

Scholarship@WashULaw

The NextGen bar exam will focus on an expanded range of essential lawyering skills and a reduced set of legal topics. Moving toward less reliance on knowledge of the black letter law concepts of past exams, it seeks to build on the successes of clinical legal education, alternative dispute resolution, and legal writing and analysis programs. With outcomes from the first NextGen exam still two years away, this commentary examines what existing research suggests about law school coursework and likely success on NextGen that might guide students and law schools in preparing for the new exam.

Measuring The Impacts Of Experiential Legal Education, Robert R. Kuehn, Peter A. Joy

Scholarship@WashULaw

Experiential legal education has become an essential component of the law school curriculum, emphasizing "learning by doing" through practical experiences in law clinics, externships, and simulation courses. This pedagogical approach offers law students the critical skills and professional values required for effective and ethical practice. Despite its recognized importance and parallels with other professional disciplines, legal education still requires minimal experiential education compared to other professions. This reluctance likely stems from lingering skepticism by some legal educators about its value, even though many stakeholders, including other educators, students, recent graduates, and other legal professionals, acknowledge its significance.

This Article is …

The Next Required Law School Course: History Of America’S Foundings, Kevin Frazier

St. Mary's Law Journal

No abstract provided.

In Response To Professor, Please Help Me Pass The Bar Exam, Jaylin K. Johnson

West Virginia Law Review

No abstract provided.

Cultivating Versatility: The Multiple Foundations Of The Law School’S Public Mission, David Sandomierski

Dalhousie Law Journal

Law schools should aspire to cultivate versatility. To accomplish this goal, the salient features of the law school should reflect three foundational intellectual pillars: a commitment to the rule of law and legal rationality, an emphasis on multiple legal process, and an appreciation for legal pluralism. Complementing these symbolically “vertical” pillars on which the law school’s activity rests are three transversal virtues that operate “horizontally” to brace the foundations. These include a commitment to critique, context, and diversity. Ultimately, legal educators should concern themselves with how they can best prepare their students for a wide range of contributions to society …

An Empirical Analysis Of Clinical Legal Education At Middle Age, Robert R. Kuehn

Scholarship@WashULaw

This article provides the first comprehensive empirical analysis of clinical legal education’s development and growth over the past fifty years. By analyzing dozens of surveys and reports on aspects of clinical legal education, including unique data developed by the authors, and comparing the results over time, this article presents a factual picture of clinical legal education’s progression from early adulthood to today’s middle age.

This article seeks to inform the present and help legal educators shape the future role of law clinic and field placement courses in the preparation of law students for the practice of law. It provides an …

Finding A Better Way: An Alternative Path To Attorney Licensure In Utah, Catherine Bramble

Faculty Scholarship

The article describes an alternative path to attorney licensure in Utah.

Antiracist Lawyering In Practice Begins With The Practice Of Teaching And Learning Antiracism In Law School, Danielle M. Conway

Faculty Scholarly Works

I was honored by the invitation to deliver the 2021 Lee E. Teitelbaum keynote address. Dean Teitelbaum was a gentleman and a titan for justice. I am confident the antiracism work ongoing at the S.J. Quinney College of Law would have deeply resonated with him, especially knowing the challenges we are currently facing within and outside of legal education, the legal academy, and the legal profession. I am fortified in this work by Dean Elizabeth Kronk Warner’s commitment to antiracism and associated diversity, equity, and inclusion work. Finally, I applaud the students who serve on the Utah Law Review for …

Law School Specialty Program Ranking Credibility, Robert R. Kuehn

Scholarship@WashULaw

U.S. News ranks law school specialty programs solely on reputation. A faculty member teaching in a specialty area at each school is asked to assess their area at other ABA accredited schools. In 2021, U.S. News added four more specialty programs: business/corporate law; constitutional law; contracts/commercial law; and criminal law. Unlike the prior nine categories, these four new programs cover core, not special, areas of a school’s educational program.

An examination of the ranking of these core areas illustrates the continuing credibility problem with the specialty program ranking system. There are noticeable clusters of schools ranked highest by U.S. News …

Organized For Service: The Hicks Classification System And The Evolution Of Law School Curriculum, John L. Moreland

Articles by Maurer Faculty

This article traces the origins and development of the Hicks Classification System, an in-house organizational scheme used by the Yale Law Library from the late 1930s to the 1990s. It explores the relationship between the Hicks Classification System and the changing pedagogical methods of the law school curriculum during the early part of the 20th century. It provides a brief biographical sketch of Frederick C. Hicks, creator of the scheme, the need for a legal classification system, a detailed analysis of Hicks’s scheme, its finding aids, and a discussion of the inherent cultural biases in the system.

Loving It To Pieces: Eu Law In Us Legal Academia, Revisited, Daniela Caruso

Faculty Scholarship

The Editors of the Special Issue have kindly invited me to update earlier reflections on the state of EU law in US legal academia. For a variety of reasons, it is important to me not to mislead the reader with the false promise of some kind of summa. What follows is my own perception of a complicated landscape, which I shall sketch lightly here in the hop of prompting other scholars of EU Law to report on their own US experience.

The Way To Barbara Armstrong, First Tenure-Track Law Professor In An Accredited Us Law School, Susan Carle

Contributions to Books

This is the third volume in a trilogy on gender issues in legal occupations. An overview of Women in the World ’ s Legal Professions (Schultz and Shaw 2003) was followed by Gender and Judging (Schultz and Shaw 2013), finally to be completed by this study on women teachers of law. All three books have been published by Hart Publishing, to whom we are grateful for their unceasing support over so many years. Our thanks also go to the International Institute for the Sociology of Law for facilitating the inclusion of all three volumes in their O ñ ati Socio-Legal …

Inclusivity In Admissions And Retention Of Diverse Students: Leadership Determines Dei Success, Danielle M. Conway, Bekah Saidman-Krauss, Rebecca Schreiber

Faculty Scholarly Works

Penn State Dickinson Law has been leading with an Antiracist admissions philosophy and corresponding plans for implementation before the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. Arguably, this approach to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)was not identified explicitly as a vision priority for the law school until July 2019, when Dickinson Law welcomed Danielle M. Conway as the first Black Dean and first woman Dean in the law school’s 186-year history. Dean Conway outlined four vision priorities to accomplish within her first five years at Dickinson Law. Vision priority number two calls upon the law school’s administrators to move the needle substantially on …

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

Journal Articles

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.

How Distinctive Should Catholic Law Schools Be?, Robert K. Vischer

Journal of Catholic Legal Studies

(Excerpt)

I was a teenager in the 1980s, and I was raised in evangelical Christian circles through which I was encouraged to listen to “Christian” rock music, not secular, which sometimes gave rise to some casuistic line drawing:

• Does U2 count as Christian? Yes, because of that line in Sunday Bloody Sunday about the victory Jesus won!

• How about Bob Dylan? Yes, but only during his three-album “born again” period!

• Amy Grant? Definitely, but even after she crossed over into the secular Top 40?

• Does the song need to mention Jesus? What if it mentions Jesus …

Reflections On A Light Unseen, Vincent Rougeau

Journal of Catholic Legal Studies

(Excerpt)

I am very pleased to have an opportunity to offer some reflections on the manuscript for A Light Unseen by Professors John Breen and Lee Strang. It is an extraordinarily comprehensive look at the history of Catholic law schools in the United States. That aspect of the work alone makes it an important contribution to the scholarship on Catholic higher education in this country, and I am sure it will become an essential resource for scholars and educators across a wide range of fields. Nevertheless, A Light Unseen is much more than a history. It also raises a critical …

Teaching Information Privacy Law, Joseph A. Tomain

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Teaching information privacy law is exciting and challenging because of the fast pace of technological and legal development and because "information privacy law" sprawls across a vast array of disparate areas of substantive law that do not automatically connect. This Essay provides one approach to teaching this fascinating, doctrinally diverse, and rapidly moving area of law. Through the framework of ten key course themes, this pedagogical approach seeks to help students find a common thread that connects these various areas of law into a cohesive whole. This framework provides a way to think about not only privacy law, but also …

How Covid-19 Rekindled The Spirit Of Teaching, Nayha Acharya

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

The abrupt end to our classes in the middle of March 2020 due to the Covid-19 situation reignited in me the real sense of what it means to be a teacher. It brought me out of the superficial notion, where being a law professor just means being someone who has students who will listen to me talk about the law, and into the deeper sense - that being a teacher involves a very special human relationship. This transition arose in me, I believe, because the Covid-19 situation forced me to slow down and sit still for a while, and that …

The 2019-20 Survey Of Applied Legal Education, Robert R. Kuehn, Margaret Reuter, David A. Santacroce

Scholarship@WashULaw

This report presents the results of the 2019-20 Center for the Study of Applied Legal Education (CSALE) Survey of Applied Legal Education. The survey was composed of two parts – a Master Survey directed to ABA accredited U.S. law schools and a Sub-Survey distributed to each person teaching in a law clinic or field placement course. Ninety-five percent of law schools and over 1,300 clinical teachers participated in the survey. The results provide valuable insight into clinical programs and law clinic and field placement courses in areas such as design, capacity, administration, funding, and pedagogy, and into the role and …

A Reflection Of My Law School Experience, Melissa A. Trinos

Journal of Race, Gender, and Ethnicity

No abstract provided.

A Reflection Of My Law School Experience, Sasha Tinis

Journal of Race, Gender, and Ethnicity

No abstract provided.

A Reflection Of My Law School Experience, Nicole Spencer

Journal of Race, Gender, and Ethnicity

No abstract provided.

Reflection Of My Law School Experience, Mayerline Rossi

Journal of Race, Gender, and Ethnicity

No abstract provided.