Legal Education Commons^™

Teaching American Legal History In A Law School, Peter D. Garlock

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Professor Peter Garlock describes his legal history course.

Tackling "Arithmophobia": Teaching How To Read, Understand, And Analyze Financial Statements, Paula J. Williams, Kris Anne Tobin, Eric Franklin, Robert J. Rhee

UF Law Faculty Publications

This discussion presents different ideas on how to teach accounting and practical finance to law students.

A Case For Grade Inflation In Legal Education, Joshua M. Silverstein

Law Faculty Scholarship

This Article contends that every American law school ought to substantially eliminate C grades by setting its good academic standing grade point average at the B- level. Grading systems that require or encourage law professors to award a significant number of C marks are flawed for two reasons. First, low grades damage students' placement prospects. Employers frequently consider a job candidate's absolute GPA in making hiring decisions. If a school systematically assigns inferior grades, its students are at an unfair disadvantage when competing for employment with students from institutions that award mostly A's and B's. Second, marks in the C …

Contract Stories: Importance Of The Contextual Approach To Law, Larry A. Dimatteo

UF Law Faculty Publications

How law is taught is at the center of the debate over the need to change legal education to better prepare students for a difficult and changing marketplace for legal services. This Article analyzes the benefits of using “stories” to teach law. The stories to be discussed relate to contract law: this Article asks whether they can be used to improve the method and content of teaching law. The ruminations offered on teaching contract law, however, are also relevant to teaching other core, first-year law courses.

Improving Law School "Transparency", Jeffrey E. Stake

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

A Community Of Procedure Scholars: Teaching Procedure And The Legal Academy, Elizabeth Thornburg, Erik S. Knutsen, Carla Crifo', Camille Cameron

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

This article asks whether the way in which procedure is taught has an impact on the extent and accomplishments of a scholarly community of proceduralists. Not surprisingly, we find a strong correlation between the placement of procedure as a required course in an academic context and the resulting body of scholars and scholarship. Those countries in which more civil procedure is taught as part of a university degree — and in which procedure is recognized as a legitimate academic subject — have larger scholarly communities, a larger and broader corpus of works analyzing procedural issues, and a richer web of …

Law Clinics And Lobbying Restrictions, Kevin Barry, Marcy Karin

University of Colorado Law Review

"Can law school clinics lobby?" This question has plagued professors for decades but has gone unanswered, until now. This Article situates law school clinics within the labyrinthine law of lobbying restrictions and concludes that clinics may indeed lobby. For ethical, pedagogical, and, ultimately, practical reasons, it is critical that professors who teach in clinics understand these restrictions. This Article offers advice to professors and students on safely navigating this complicated terrain.

Plus Ça Change, Plus C’Est La Même Chose, Nancy B. Rapoport

Scholarly Works

This essay takes the original plans from NYU Law School and draws analogies between those plans and the issues facing legal education today.

Benjamin Butler's 1835 Plan for the Organization of a Law Faculty and for a System of Instruction in Legal Science in the University for the City of New-York will make any law school dean feel like Yogi Berra: it’s “deja-vu all over again.” The issue of how best to organize a curriculum to train legal professionals was a hot topic then, and it’s a hot topic now.

Joining The Conversation: Law Library Research Assistant Programs And Current Criticisms Of Legal Education, David Mcclure

Scholarly Works

Law libraries should play a greater role in addressing the current crisis in legal education. Proponents for educational reform often view libraries as a vehicle for cost savings, while overlooking the ability of libraries to train students in the skills and competencies that are essential for the practice of law. Libraries’ research assistant programs can be particularly effective in imparting workplace values and lawyering skills beyond the traditional law school curriculum. This article encourages libraries to build on the strengths of their research assistant programs as a substantive way to equip law students with essential skills for today’s legal marketplace.

Roger Williams University School Of Law 20th Anniversary Celebration Announcements, Roger Williams University School Of Law

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

Professionalism And The New Normal, Philip J. Weiser

Publications

No abstract provided.

Next Phase Pedagogy Reform For The Twenty-First Century Legal Education: Delivering Competent Lawyers For A Consumer-Driven Market, Ann Marie Cavazos

Journal Publications

The underpinnings for law school training has or, I submit, soon will be, outstripped by real world requirements dictated by the demands of the legal profession marketplace. This Article is designed to add to the discourse relating to the question of what law schools supply and what law practice requires-a paradigm shift in the methodology of implementing legal education. The Article begins by reporting on the state of the law school process and how it has evolved from an apprenticeship, replete with on-the-job training, to an intellectual exercise that is somewhat removed from the requirements for becoming competent legal professionals. …

Peer Review Across The Curriculum, Patricia G. Montana

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

In 2007, two very influential institutes published reports that challenged legal educators to reconsider how they design courses, deliver instruction, assess their students’ learning and explore new ways to prepare students for the profession of law. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching published its report, Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law (“Carnegie Report”), and the Clinical Legal Education Association published its study, Best Practices for Legal Education (“Best Practices Report”) (collectively, the “Reports”). Both Reports came to the same conclusion: law schools must devote more attention and resources to helping students develop the professional skills …

Teaching Remedies As Problem-Solving: Keeping It Real, Tracy A. Thomas

Akron Law Faculty Publications

I began teaching Remedies as a problem-solving course over a decade ago. I was then in my third year of teaching and found that the Remedies course just wasn’t clicking. The students, mostly third-years, were bored with the Socratic method and seemingly resistant to the demands of this important course. My teaching grew more cumbersome as I waded deeper into the mire of the complexities of a transsubstantive field. Remedies class felt like a slog in the mud for all of us. After just a few years with the course, I thought there had to be a better way. I …

Financial Retrenchment And Institutional Entrenchment: Will Legal Education Respond, Explode, Or Just Wait It Out?, Ian Weinstein

Faculty Scholarship

Both markets and ideas have turned against the American legal profession. Legal hiring has contracted, and law school enrollments are decreasing. The business models of big law and legal education are under pressure, current levels of student indebtedness seem unsustainable, and a hero has yet to emerge from our fragmented regulatory structures. In the realm of ideas, the information revolution has sparked deep critiques of structured knowledge and expertise, opening the roles of the law and the university in society to reexamination. We are less enamored of the scholar-lawyer and gaze with longing at technocrats. I hope that clinical law …

Across The Curriculum: Integrating Transactional Skills Instruction, Jean Whitney, Lori D. Johnson, Richard Rawson, Carol Morgan

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Preparing "Main Street" Lawyers: Practicing Without Big Firm Experience, Lisa Reel Schmidt, Steve Garland, Robert Statchen

Faculty Scholarship

This Article is the transcript of a panel presented at Emory’s Third Biennial Conference on Transactional Education. The panelists advance two premises: First, that law schools need to teach transactional skills because many students will either focus on transactional law or practice general law where transactional skills are necessary; and second, that some of the transactional skills the schools teach should be specific to main street lawyering because a number of students will be main street lawyers. The panelists explain how the transactional skills necessary for main street lawyering differ from skills needed in litigation and big law firms. They …

Experiential Education In The Lecture Hall, Jessica Erickson

Law Faculty Publications

Legal education today is composed of two separate worlds. The first world includes clinical faculty, law skills faculty, and other related faculty. These faculty members have long embraced experiential education, and they organize and attend conferences like the "Experience the Future" symposium, hosted by Northeastern University School of Law and the Alliance for Experiential Learning in Law. The other world includes people like me- doctrinal faculty members who are still largely teaching the way we always have. As we see it, our role is to teach doctrine and legal analysis, leaving skills training and other experiential teaching to others. Experiential …

A Community Of Procedure Scholars: Teaching Procedure And The Legal Academy, Elizabeth G. Thornburg, Erik S. Knutsen, Carla Crifo, Camille Cameron

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

This article asks whether the way in which procedure is taught has an impact on the extent and accomplishments of a scholarly community of proceduralists. Not surprisingly, we find a strong correlation between the placement of procedure as a required course in an academic context and the resulting body of scholars and scholarship. Those countries in which more civil procedure is taught as part of a university degree — and in which procedure is recognized as a legitimate academic subject — have larger scholarly communities, a larger and broader corpus of works analyzing procedural issues, and a richer web of …

The Lawyer's Toolbox: Teaching Students About Risk Allocation, Dana Malkus, Scott Stevenson, Eric J. Gouvin, Usha Rodriques

Faculty Scholarship

This Article is the transcript of a panel presented at Emory’s Third Biennial Conference on Transactional Education. The panel focuses on techniques for teaching risk allocation as part of transactional skills classes. The panelists describe their approaches to teaching risk allocation, from syllabus design to final evaluations. How can a professor help students to understand the basic concepts of risk, the role risk plays in business and legal decisions, and how they can help clients manage risk. The techniques for teaching risk allocation include hypotheticals, visual aids, and hands-on assignments. The panelists each take their students down a different path …

Self-Congratulation And Scholarship, Paul Campos

Publications

Professor Jay Silver’s criticism of the reform proposals put forward in Brian Tamanaha’s book Failing Law Schools displays some characteristic weaknesses of American legal academic culture. These weaknesses include a tendency to make bold assertions about the value of legal scholarship and the effectiveness of law school pedagogy, while at the same time providing no support for these assertions beyond a willingness to repeat self-congratulatory platitudes about who professors are and what we do. The high costs for our students of the current scholarly expectations at American law schools are clear. What is not clear is whether those costs are …

The Fun Of Teaching American Legal History, Geoffrey R. Watson

Scholarly Articles

I teach a pair of two-credit legal history courses: History of Early American Law and History of Modern American Law. I teach a variety of other courses, but none is more fun to teach than legal history.

Bramble Bush Revisited: Karl Llewellyn, The Great Depression, And The First Law School Crisis, 1929-1939, Anders Walker

All Faculty Scholarship

This article recovers the plight of legal education during the Great Depression, showing how debates over practical training, theoretical research and the appropriate length of law school all emerged in the 1930s. Using Bramble Bush author Karl Llewellyn as a guide, it strives to make three points. One, Depression-era critics of law school called for increased attention to practical skills, like today, but also a more interdisciplinary curriculum – something current reformers discount. Two, the push for theoretical, policy-oriented courses in the 1930s set the stage for claims that law graduates deserved more than a Bachelor of Laws degree, bolstering …

Why Environmental Law Clinics?, Adam Babich, Jane F. Barrett

Faculty Scholarship

The law clinic has become an increasingly important part of legal education, giving students the opportunity to learn practical skills as well as to internalize core legal values. Pedagogical concerns preclude clinics from letting fear of criticism drive decisions about how they represent clients. The legal profession's idealistic aspirations pose challenges, and political attacks have answered clinicians' efforts to live up to these aspirations. An error underlies such attacks, however: holding lawyers responsible for their clients' legal positions despite the profession's duty to ensure that such positions get a fair hearing.

The Lawyer's Toolbox: Teaching Students About Risk Allocation, Dana Malkus, Scott Stevenson, Eric J. Gouvin, Usha Rodrigues

All Faculty Scholarship

This Article is the transcript of a panel presented at Emory’s Third Biennial Conference on Transactional Education. The panel focuses on techniques for teaching risk allocation as part of transactional skills classes. The panelists describe their approaches to teaching risk allocation, from syllabus design to final evaluations. How can a professor help students to understand the basic concepts of risk, the role risk plays in business and legal decisions, and how they can help clients manage risk. The techniques for teaching risk allocation include hypotheticals, visual aids, and hands-on assignments. The panelists each take their students down a different path …

Educating For The Future: Teaching Evidence In The Technological Age, Denise H. Wong

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The advent of the technological age has had significant effect on litigation practice, none more so than in the area of evidence gathering and presentation in court. A significant proportion of evidence that is gathered for both criminal and civil matters is now electronic in nature, and this necessitates a change in the way that lawyers think and advise on evidential issues. It is argued here that rather than simply focusing on principles relating to the admissibility of evidence in court, the traditional course on evidence law should be modified to equip students with an intellectual framework that conceives of …

Legal Education At A Crossroads: Innovation, Integration, And Pluralism Required!, Karen Tokarz, Antoinette Sedillo Lopez, Peggy Maisel, Robert Seibel

Faculty Scholarship

Although historically slow to change, law schools are now facing enormous pressure from educators, students, lawyers, judges, clients, and the public to rethink legal education and the lawyer‘s role in society. Now more than ever, there is robust national debate on the threshold contributions law schools should make to the preparation of law graduates for entry into practice. The clamor for reform in legal education is precipitated by a confluence of factors, including new insights about lawyering competencies and experiential legal education; the shifting nature of legal practice in the United States; a decrease in law jobs; changes in the …

Measuring The Racial Unevenness Of Law School, Jonathan Feingold, Doug Souza

Faculty Scholarship

In "Measuring the Racial Unevenness of Law School," Jonathan Feingold and Doug Souza introduce and analyze the concept of racial unevenness, which refers to the particularized burdens an individual encounters as a result of her race. These burdens, which often arise because an individual falls outside of the racial norm, manifest across a spectrum. At one end lie obvious forms of overt and invidious racial discrimination. At the other end, racial unevenness arises from environmental factors and institutional culture independent from any identifiable perpetrator. As the authors detail, race-dependent burdens can arise in institutions and communities that expressly promote racial …

Did Legal Education Fail Health Reform? And How Health Law Can Help, Wendy K. Mariner

Faculty Scholarship

Arguments over the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act illustrate the pervasiveness of health law issues in society. In court, arguments on both sides also demonstrated insufficient knowledge of the health care system and health insurance to identify and present useful arguments. Too many lawyers remained wedded to theories of constitutional law that have become disconnected from twenty-first century realities. Legal education may have something to answer for in this respect. This essay examines how legal education in health law may offer some valuable responses to ongoing critiques of legal education in general. The more law moves away from strict …

Legal Writing: A Doctrinal Course, Linda H. Edwards

Scholarly Works

Legal writing instruction in American law schools has come a long way. Although scattered experiential courses and co-curricular activities have existed since legal education moved into a university setting, the modern era of skills education began in the 1950s and 1960s, with the creation of live-client clinics at many law schools. Early legal writing programs soon followed, moving into the main stream of curricular reform during the 1980s and 1990s. As these new courses and new instructors moved into the academy, the language of legal education naturally changed. Law faculties found themselves wanting to describe these new additions to the …