Legal Education Commons^™

Transferability: Helping Students And Attorneys Apply What They Already Know To New Situations (Part 2), Edward R. Becker

Articles

Part 1 of this column (January 2019) described several ways that professors and supervisors can help young attorneys transfer their knowledge of legal skills and legal practice to new situations. The pedagogical techniques discussed in Part 1 look forward, helping novice lawyers make connections between what they learn today and how to put those lessons into play tomorrow. This month’s column changes direction. Successful knowledge transfer also looks to the past. When young lawyers and law students are introduced to what might first appear to be brand-new legal skills, their ability to quickly make sense of that new information is …

Transferability: Helping Students And Attorneys Apply What They Already Know To New Situations (Part 1), Edward R. Becker

Articles

Every fall, I work with my first year law students to begin developing their legal writing skills. They work hard learning how to analyze cases objectively, predict how a court might resolve a dispute, and convey their assessments to an experienced attorney. Their improvement from September to December is noticeable. They have only one semester of law school behind them and still have much to learn, but they’re on their way…In the second semester, we begin focusing on advocacy. The first assignment asks students to draft a pretrial brief. When I review the drafts, I’m struck by how many problems …

Foundations: Curriculum & Faculty, University Of Michigan Law School

Miscellaneous Law School History & Publications

Michigan Law Faculty are the best of the best. As you look through these pages, you will see some of their accomplishments: They serve as senior advisers to policymakers and governments around the world, they argue important cases in courts of every level, and they produce superb research that addresses society's greatest problems.

Our faculty also take teaching very seriously. They are dedicated to using their research and experience to help create a curriculum that will challenge and transform you. Michigan Law's rich curriculum features foundational courses that evolve with the needs of the profession, a wide array of upper-level …

Can Mindfulness Help Law Students With Stress, Focus, And Well-Being: An Empirical Study Of 1ls At A Midwestern Law School, Richard C. Reuben, Kennon M. Sheldon

Faculty Publications

Recent calls for law students, lawyers, judges, and others in the legal profession to try mindfulness training to reduce stress and enhance wellbeing beg the question of whether mindfulness will "work" for those in the uniquely rigorous environment of law. There is no empirical research on mindfulness effects for lawyers - unlike the medical field, where research has found beneficial effects of mindfulness training for doctors, nurses, and other health care providers. To fill this gap in the literature, we conducted an empirical study of forty-seven first year, first semester law students at the University of Missouri School of Law …

Mindfulness In Legal Ethics And Professionalism, Peter H. Huang

Publications

Mindfulness involves paying attention with curiosity in an intentional, open, and compassionate way to life as it unfolds moment to moment. Law students, lawyers, law professors, legal clients, and indeed all people can improve their lives through mindfulness. Mindfulness can lead to individual benefits and personal transformation. Mindfulness can also lead to societal benefits and social change. This invited symposium contribution exemplifies how mindfulness can facilitate the positive personal and professional development of law students by presenting excerpts of law students' answers discussing mindfulness to questions from the final examination of the course: Legal Ethics and Professionalism. Notably, none of …

Fake News, Alternative Facts, And Disinformation: The Importance Of Teaching Media Literacy To Law Students, Marin Dell

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Collaboration With Doctrinal Faculty To Introduce Creac, Beth Hirschfelder Wilensky

Articles

When legal writing professors introduce CREAC (or IRAC, TREAT, etc.), our examples necessarily use some area of substantive law to demonstrate how the pieces of legal analysis fit together. And when we ask students to try drafting a CREAC analysis, they also have to learn the relevant substantive law first. Students might be asked to analyze whether a worker is an employee or independent contractor or whether the elements of a tort claim are satisfied. But that means that students need to learn the relevant substantive doctrine while they are also grappling with the basics of CREAC. In the language …

Using Appellate Clinics To Focus On Legal Writing Skills, Timothy Pinto

Articles

Five years ago, I went to lunch with a colleague. I was teaching a legal writing course to 1L students, and he taught in a clinic in which 2L and 3L students were required to write short motions and briefs. Several of his students had taken my writing class as 1Ls, and he had a question for me. "What the heck are you teaching these students?" he asked as we sat down. He explained that several of his students were struggling with preparing simple motions. They were not laying out facts clearly. They were not identifying key legal rules. In …

Positive Legal Education: Flourishing Law Students And Thriving Law Schools, Debra S. Austin

Maryland Law Review

No abstract provided.

Collaborating For Transformation, Marjorie A. Silver

Journal of Experiential Learning

No abstract provided.

Experiential Legal Education: How The University Of Kansas School Of Law Alumni Are Contributing To Teaching Professional Skills, Suzanne Valdez

Journal of Experiential Learning

No abstract provided.

Restoring Power: A Law School’S Response To A Superstorm, Melissa H. Luckman, Patricia R. Sturm

Journal of Experiential Learning

No abstract provided.

The Seven Principles For Good Practice In [Asynchronous Online] Legal Education, Kenneth R. Swift

Mitchell Hamline Law Review

No abstract provided.

Teaching The Art Of Effective Advocacy In The 21st Century: A Paradigm Shift, John O. Sonsteng, Samuel Heacox, Hannah Holloran, Cara Moulton

Mitchell Hamline Law Review

No abstract provided.

Reaching And Teaching Millennials: Designing The Future Of Student Services, Kimberly Mattioli, Brian Detweiler, Mike Martinez Jr.

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Today’s students have come to expect library services that are quite different from their predecessors and law librarians must evolve to meet their needs. As law libraries in the United States face the realities of declining enrolment and decreasing budgets, it is imperative that we find new and creative ways to build positive relationships with our students while also preparing them for the realities of practicing law in an environment driven by rapid technological change. Three law librarians from the United States, Brian Detweiler, Kimberly Mattioli, and Mike Martinez, Jr., discuss their successes and failures in reaching out to their …

As A Last Resort, Ask The Students: What They Say Makes Someone An Effective Law Teacher, James B. Levy

Maine Law Review

There is an adage among doctors that “as a last resort, ask the patient.” It is a not so facetious reference to the observation that because doctors are so highly educated and trained, they can start to believe they know what’s best for their patients better than the patients themselves. Consequently, these doctors may discount, or altogether ignore, the opinions of the very people they are suppose to be helping. The same observation could be made about the law professor-student relationship. Unlike doctors, though, our relationship with students is hierarchical, and thus we may be even less inclined to “ask …

A Revealed Preferences Approach To Ranking Law Schools, Brian L. Frye, Christopher J. Ryan Jr.

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

The U.S. News & World Report (U.S. News) “Best Law Schools Rankings” defines the market for legal education. Law schools compete to improve their standing in the U.S. News rankings and fear any decline. But the U.S. News rankings are controversial, at least in part because they rely on factors that are poor proxies for quality, like peer reputation and expenditures per student. While many alternative law school rankings exist, none have challenged the market dominance of the U.S. News rankings. Presumably the U.S. News rankings benefit from a first-mover advantage, other rankings fail to provide a clearly superior alternative, …

Tuition Discounting Study Of Private Law Schools 2016, Accesslex Institute, National Association Of College And University Business Officers

Commissioned Research

The 2016 NACUBO/AccessLex Tuition Discounting Study of Private Law Schools was commissioned by AccessLex Institute in part to provide more recent information on tuition discounting practices at law schools, and to measure the effects of discounting on law schools’ finances. The use of institutional grant aid to attract and retain law students has become even more important, as many programs have had to grapple with declines in their numbers of applicants and enrollments. This challenging context has prompted law schools to implement a variety of practices and policies to raise their enrollments, including increasing their financial aid expenditures. The data …

Eying The Body: The Impact Of Classical Rules For Demeanor Credibility, Bias, And The Need To Blind Legal Decision Makers, Daphne O’Regan

Pace Law Review

This Article focuses on law students and attorneys, not parties, witnesses, experts, and others. Part I briefly provides background: the pivotal role of classical rhetoric in western education, including the United States, the dispositive position of demeanor credibility in oral trial, and the persistent doubts about its reliability—doubts turned into certainty over two decades of research. Part II compares modern and ancient manuals to explain the rules of elite demeanor and its ideological claim to truth. Part III compares ancient and modern understanding of popular delivery; that is, choices in non-verbal communication that run counter to the elite rules and …

Experiential Skills In Legal Education: Introducing Tomorrow’S Practitioners To Practicing Law, Edward R. Becker

Articles

Welcome to the “Future of Law,” a new column that will appear regularly in the Michigan Bar Journal. This month, we kick off a recurring series devoted to legal education. These articles will highlight new developments and ongoing efforts at the five Michigan law schools to introduce students to experiential skills and more effectively prepare them to practice law. In future columns, authors will shed light on what law schools are doing to prepare students for practice and, we hope, inspire more Michigan attorneys to get involved—or, for some of you, become further involved—in those efforts. Why is this inaugural …

The Downside Of Requiring Additional Experiential Courses In Law School, Douglas A. Kahn

Articles

In recent years, the bar has expressed dissatisfaction with what is considered by some to be inadequate preparation of law students to begin practicing law immediately after graduation. There are several reasons why this has become a matter of concern for the legal profession. The profession itself has undergone significant changes. Although there are a few exceptions, most law firms no longer wish to spend time training their young associates or allowing them much time to develop the skills they need. First, clients are unwilling to pay for the time a young lawyer spends in acquiring needed skills. Second, the …

Bringing Purposefulness To The American Law School’S Support Of Professional Identity Formation, Louis D. Bilionis

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

Ten years after the publication of Educating Lawyers, a growing number of American law schools are taking initiative to better support their students in the formation of professional identity. There is widespread recognition that success in these efforts requires an element of “purposefulness” on the part of law faculty and staff. Experiences, environments, and pedagogies that actually work for professional identity formation must be crafted and promoted with intentionality. Bringing the requisite purposefulness to the effort, however, will take a mindset about the education of a lawyer that will be new to many in legal education. This article explores that …

Experience 100+, University Of Michigan Law School

Miscellaneous Law School History & Publications

100+ facts about the University of Michigan Law School and Ann Arbor, Michigan for the 2017-2019.

The Law School (2013), Margaret A. Leary

Book Chapters

This chapter describes the growth and changes to the University of Michigan Law School for the period 1973-2013.

Resurrecting (And Modernizing) The Research Treasure Hunt, Nancy E. Vettorello

Articles

First-year associates will spend forty-five percent of their time on legal research; second- and third-year associates will spend thirty percent. And unfortunately, employers find their associates’ research skills lacking. This is not a new complaint. Employers have been complaining for more than a hundred years that recent law graduates cannot research well. None of this is lost on those who teach legal research, who have long debated the best way to do so. Techniques for teaching research have changed over time, and methods once thought appropriate were sometimes later disfavored. Changes were driven both by pedagogy and by the ever-changing …

Reimagining Legal Education: Incorporating Live-Client Work Into The First-Year Curriculum, Nancy Vettorello, Beth Hirschfelder Wilensky

Articles

Since 2015, Legal Practice faculty have partnered with local legal services organizations and the law school’s own clinics to provide our 1L students with client interaction, under the close supervision of experienced attorneys. So far, our students have worked with the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center, Legal Services of South Central Michigan, and the school’s Unemployment Law Clinic.

What Do Indiana Law Schools Do For Students In Need?, Inge Van Der Cruysse

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Using Advanced Conflict Waivers To Teach Drafting, Ethics, And Professionalism, Edward R. Becker

Articles

On a substantive and ethical level, I tell my students to take on faith that if you were to do all of this and take all this into account, if you were to apply the conflict of interest and the disqualifications rules, it could make it extremely difficult or many of the firms involved in these matters to avoid being conflicted out; especially, if the parties and the kind of firms involved were not dealing with these conflicts and issues until a problem arose. The question I ask my students again at this point is what could be done. What …

Using Grit And Growth Mindset To Foster Resilience And Professionalism In Law Students And Attorneys, Carolyn Broering-Jacobs

Law Faculty Presentations and Testimony

The presentation introduced current research showing correlation between grit, growth mindset, and success in varied disciplines, then suggested several means for improving grit. Attendees discussed several problems that a young lawyer might experience and considered how grit and growth mindset might affect the lawyer's response to the problem.

Inward Bound: An Exploration Of Character Development In Law School, Heather D. Baum

University of Arkansas at Little Rock Law Review

No abstract provided.