Legal Education Commons^™

Thinking Like A Lawyer, Emily Calhoun

Publications

No abstract provided.

Volume 17, No. 4

The Weldon Times

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

Editors: Jolaine Antonio, Mike Christie, Chris Spiteri

Photography: Jamie Stuart

Editorial Assistants: Cindy Gorman, Scott Rollwagen

Critical Thoughts About Race, Exclusion, Oppression And Tenure, Deborah W. Post

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Volume 16, No. 6

The Weldon Times

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

Editors: Susan Anderson, Jolaine Antonio, Veronica Ukrainetz

Volume 16, No. 5

The Weldon Times

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

Editors: Susan Anderson, Jolaine Antonio, Veronica Ukrainetz

Photography: Stephen Jedynak, Jamie Stuart

"Skilling" Time, Peter B. Knapp

Faculty Scholarship

This article describes disagreements about the "MacCrate Report" on skills education for law students, as well as the connections between the Report's recommendations and legal education at William Mitchell College of Law. The final commentary focuses on what William Mitchell can do to further ensure that teaching prepares students for the learning they will have to do when they begin working as lawyers.

Teach Your Students Well: Valuing Clients In The Law School Clinic., Ann Juergens

Faculty Scholarship

Law schools, teaching primarily by the casebook method, generally avoid the thorny issues that real clients pose.' Recently, however, law review articles and the ""regular classroom"" have referred more frequently to real client stories. Law school clinics are a primary source of client stories. Despite increased attention to clinical programs, client interests are frequently subordinated to the goals of students, clinical law teachers and law schools. This article urges clinicians to constantly evaluate whether and how well they and their students take their clients' interests and perspectives on clinical education into account. It argues that clinic teachers must learn to …

The Mind In The Major American Law School, Lee C. Bollinger

Faculty Scholarship

Legal scholarship is significantly, even qualitatively, different from what it was some two or three decades ago. As with any major change in intellectual thought, this one is composed of several strands. The inclusion in the legal academic community of women and minorities has produced, not surprisingly, a distinctive and at times quite critical body of thought and writing. The emergence of the school of thought known as critical legal studies has renewed and extended the legal realist critique of law of the first half of the century. But more than anything else it is the interdisciplinary movement in legal …

Homelessness And The Use Of Reality To Enrich The Experience Of Law School, Frank Trinity

Cleveland State Law Review

When I arrived in New Haven in 1985 1 was shocked. I would go running near the campus and find myself in the middle of public housing projects. This was the first time I ever saw housing projects. I grew up in New Jersey suburbs and had never before seen a housing project. Now I was confronted with people on street comers asking for money. This experience was very upsetting. About the same time as this was occurring, I was attending first semester classes; my brain was being twisted in these courses in ways I never expected. As the semester …

Afterword: Why Deans Stay , Michael J. Kelly

Maryland Law Review

No abstract provided.

Appendix: Survey Of Law School Deans, Francis X. Beytagh

Maryland Law Review

No abstract provided.

Why Deans Stay: A Quitter's Response , Paul D. Carrington

Maryland Law Review

No abstract provided.

Problems With The Structure Of Casebooks And Instruction, John Makdisi

Cleveland State Law Review

The case method of instruction has served to instruct generations of students from the time of its introduction by Christopher Langdell at the Harvard Law School. It has much to recommend it inasmuch as the lawyers who have been trained to think, analyze and solve problems by analyzing cases include some of the best minds in the country. However, this time-honored method of instruction contains some major flaws and it is time that we reexamine a pedagogic approach satirized for its punishing role in The Paper Chase. A pedagogic approach to law training that focuses on problem solving is not …

Clinical Scholarship And The Justice Mission, Robert D. Dinerstein

Cleveland State Law Review

To many people, the relationship between clinical programs and the justice mission of American law schools is so clear as to be self-evident. These programs may pursue justice on behalf of individual clients or for groups of clients through class-action or other impact litigation. Moreover, clinical teachers frequently discuss with their students the need for the latter to serve justice in their legal careers, whether as the principal focus of their legal work or through pro bono publico activities. Indeed, for many law students, the law clinic may be the only place in which concerns about justice are discussed and, …

The Distinction Between Lawyers As Advocates And As Activists; And The Role Of The Law School Dean In Facilitating The Justice Mission, James Douglas

Cleveland State Law Review

When David Barnhizer invited me to be involved in the Justice Mission conference I jumped at the opportunity; because justice is an issue that is extremely important to me, especially being a person of color in America. In presenting my ideas about the justice mission, I will be talking about two distinct concerns. One is the role of the law school dean in facilitating the justice mission in the law schools. The second is related but applies even more broadly since it draws upon the experiences of lawyers both in their roles as practitioners and as social activists. The point …

Building Bridges Between Theory And Practice, Scholarship And Activism, Elizabeth M. Schneider

Cleveland State Law Review

The recent events of the last few weeks, the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings concerning Anita Hill's allegations of sexual harassment against Clarence Thomas, and Clarence Thomas' confirmation to the Supreme Court, have shaken the nation and I'm sure all of us in this room. These events underscore the urgency and challenge of the justice mission of legal education. In these remarks, I will briefly explore a critical dimension of this mission, the building of bridges between theory and practice, scholarship and activism, in American legal education. Our presence here signifies our commitment to the idea that law schools have a …

Advocacy Strategies In Social Welfare Policy: Homelessness, Barbara Sard

Cleveland State Law Review

I currently direct the homelessness unit at Greater Boston Legal Services after having been a welfare lawyer for fifteen years. When I first started teaching at Harvard about six years ago, I taught a course on Welfare Law. There is a value in teaching homelessness law as a discrete topic rather than lumping it under the traditional topics of welfare law or housing law. Initially, when I started teaching at Harvard, my goal was to impress the students with the fact that a poverty law subject like Welfare Law was as complicated doctrinally as anything else that they might learn. …

Teaching Morality, Robert A. Solomon

Cleveland State Law Review

Students come to law school filled with passion, with morality, with a sense of justice, and we, the law school itself, spends three years doing our best to crush them under the weight of the rule of law instead of helping them to integrate their ideas and values with the law. To the extent students are looking at clinics, they are not only looking at them as a means of touching reality. They are looking at clinics as a furlough from prison. In this conference we are talking about our goal as being that of trying to teach justice. I …

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 …

Research And The Justice Mission Of Law Schools, Mark Tushnet

Cleveland State Law Review

There are some obvious things to say about research and the justice mission of law schools, and many other contributors to this discussion have said them. For example, jurisprudence lies at the core of the classical legal curriculum, and-at least in the contemporary law school-definitions of justice are part of the jurisprudence syllabus. Because the concept of justice is not self-defining, conceptual inquiry into the meaning of justice, a traditional mode of legal research, is recurrently needed. In this way, research is tightly linked to the justice mission of law schools. In this piece, I move from global concerns--jurisprudence in …

Volume 15, No. 3

The Weldon Times

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

Editors: John Atchison, Naz Mitha, Gordon Allen

Photography: Alison Fowles, Jerome Marburg

Time For Every Purpose Under The Heaven: Service – The National Bar Association Model, Beverly Mcqueary Smith

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Ringing The Bell, Roger J. Miner '56

Legal Education

No abstract provided.

Clinics And "Contextual Integration": Helping Law Students Put The Pieces Back Together Again, Eric S. Janus

Faculty Scholarship

In legal education, as in all education aimed at practice, the relationship between theory and practice is an uneasy one. William Mitchell College of Law, one of the nation’s few free-standing law schools, has traditionally placed itself squarely on the practice side of the theory/practice axis. It has aimed to produce law graduates who could walk into a law office and begin practicing law—not lawyers who would spend additional years learning the profession at someone’s elbow. In recent years, William Mitchell has begun to embrace a more academic approach to legal education. This paper suggests that the College need not, …

Non-Sexist Teaching Techniques In Substantive Law Courses, Mary I. Coombs

Articles

No abstract provided.

The Bar Exam Essay Maze: A Roadmap Through The Tangle, Bevery Mcqueary Smith

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

History Of The University Of Puget Sound School Of Law, Anita M. Steele

Seattle University Law Review

This essay presents the history of the University of Puget Sound School of Law. Founded in 1972, the law school is a relatively young institution, still in its teens. Its gestation period, however, extends back at least sixty years. As long ago as 1912, prominent Tacoma attorneys proposed to found a law school associated with the University of Puget Sound (UPS). In the ensuing years, officials at UPS periodically raised the issue of creating a law school. Various studies were undertaken, but it was not until the late 1960s that a school of law was considered again as seriously as …

Finding Yourself In Law School, Joel J. Finer

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

The author offers suggestions for adjusting to and coping with law school and gives insight into discovering oneself in the process.

Finding Yourself In Law School, Joel Jay Finer

Cleveland State Law Review

Congratulations on your acceptance and your decision to enter law school. Some might say after reading this commentary that it was more appropriate for a commencement address. But stop to think. Commencement means beginning. This is your commencement, the beginning of your legal career. And if the values to which I refer are not somewhere in your thoughts during your law school education, when you can begin to see how your technical skills can be put to use in service of whatever justice goals you personally find most meaningful, it may be more difficult to make the connections later on. …