Legal Education Commons^™

The Role Of Practice In Legal Education, Richard J. Wilson

Working Papers

This document is one of several general reports presented at the 18th International Congress on Comparative Law, held in Washington, DC in July 2010. The report covers the topic of The Role of Practice in Legal Education, and includes the text of the general report, as well as the original questionnaire to national reporters and two charts, one on general law school organization and one on how practice is taught in the legal academy. The report synthesizes information received from the reporting countries - Australia, Belgium, Canada (Quebec Province), Czech Republic, England and Wales, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, …

Different Shades Of Bias: Skin Tone, Implicit Racial Bias, And Judgments Of Ambiguous Evidence, Justin D. Levinson, Danielle Young

West Virginia Law Review

No abstract provided.

Educating Lawyers With A Global Vision, Phoebe A. Haddon

Maryland Journal of International Law

No abstract provided.

Teaching Public Citizen Lawyering: From Aspiration To Inspiration, Mae Quinn

Journal Articles

A longtime social justice activist and clinical professor, Douglas Colbert,2 recently sought information from colleagues across the country3 for the second part of an important project examining a lawyer’s ethical obligation to engage in pro bono work during a time of crisis, such as the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina or 9/11.4 He sent out surveys to learn which schools actually taught the Preamble to the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct in ethics or other courses.5 As Professor Colbert’s letter explained, the Preamble states: “A lawyer, as a member of the legal profession, is a representative of clients, an officer …

Practically Grounded: Convergence Of Land Use Law Pedagogy And Best Practices, John R. Nolon

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

The changing dynamics in the field of land use and sustainable community development law demand that land use law professors rethink the way in which we prepare law students to practice law in this area. This needed paradigm shift converges with the growing momentum of the best practices movement which urges law schools to dramatically revise the curricular approach to legal education, arguing that traditional models are no longer effectively serving the goal of producing competent and fully prepared new lawyers. A perfect storm is present and a unique opportunity exists through the application of many “best practices” concepts for …

The Potential Contribution Of Adr To An Integrated Curriculum: Preparing Law Students For Real World Lawyering, John M. Lande, Jean R. Sternlight

Faculty Publications

This Article briefly reviews the long history of critiques of legal education that highlight the failure to adequately prepare students for what they will and should do as attorneys. It takes a sober look at the hurdles reformers face when trying to make significant curricular changes and proposes a modest menu of reforms that interested faculty and law schools can largely achieve without investing substantial additional resources.This Article emphasizes the special contributions that alternative dispute resolution (ADR) can provide to legal education more generally. ADR instruction is an important corrective to a curriculum that routinely conveys the erroneous implication that …

A Populist Manifesto For Learning The Law, Eric E. Johnson

Faculty Articles

In this article, I examine the questions above and conclude that there are intelligent, well-formed arguments for taking a more populist approach to teaching law. The pedagogical view I present in this article can be summed up as three interrelated propositions: • Law professors should cease to regard as sacrosanct the process of learning law through the reading of judicial opinions. • Law professors should let go of old taboos about student study-aids and other shortcuts to learning. • Law professors should strive, insofar as possible, to make learning doctrine easier and less time-consuming. In its briefest form, my argument …

From Reconstruction To Obama: Understanding Black Invisibility, Racism In Appalachia, And The Legal Community's Responsibility To Promote A Dialogue On Race At The Wvu College Of Law, Brandon Stump

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

This Note focuses on legal education in the United States and West Virginia in particular. Discussions on race, racism, and American law should take place in every legal classroom where race is relevant to the subject being discussed as a way to bridge gaps between communities. This is especially true for the West Virginia University College of Law ("College of Law"), which sits in the third whitest state in the country. The College of Law is the only law school in the state, and a majority of students at the College of Law are white and West Virginian. Thus, at …

Clinical Legal Education In Dutch Legal Culture: Clashes Of Tradition, Tolerance, And Progress In Global Law's Capital, Richard J. Wilson

Working Papers

This paper examines the current context of legal education within Dutch legal culture as a case study focusing on the growing role of clinical legal education in the Netherlands, a progressive country in Western Europe, where traditional legal education has held sway for centuries. The Dutch experience with clinical legal education, though limited, is expanding even as the traditional apprenticeship phase of law training there is undergoing major reform, responsive to the growth of "big law." These reforms are largely attributable to a history of innovation and openness in Dutch legal culture, one dimension of which is the general acknowledgment …

Who Wants To Be A Muggle? The Diminished Legitimacy Of Law As Magic, Mark Edwin Burge

Faculty Scholarship

In the Harry Potter world, the magical population lives among the non-magical Muggle population, but we Muggles are largely unaware of them. This secrecy is by elaborate design and is necessitated by centuries-old hostility to wizards by the non-magical majority. The reasons behind this hostility, when combined with the similarities between Harry Potter-stylemagic and American law, make Rowling’s novels into a cautionary tale for the legal profession that it not treat law as a magic unknowable to non-lawyers. Comprehensibility — as a self-contained, normative value in the enactment interpretation, and practice of law — is given short-shrift by the legal …

The Excitement Of Interdictory Ideas: A Response To Professor Anders Walker, Marc O. Degirolami

Faculty Publications

The very first time that I taught criminal law, I would occasionally tell my six-year-old son, Thomas, about selected cases and situations that I had come across. Thomas enjoyed these discussions—more than I would have guessed: he was captivated by the horror of Dudley & Stephens, he was uncomfortably intrigued by shaming punishments, he was appropriately outraged at all manner of outcomes that seemed to him too harsh or too lenient. But most of all, he wanted to test his own burgeoning intuitions about right and wrong, good and evil, the permitted and the forbidden, against my "criminal law stories." …

The Journey Toward Excellence In Clinical Legal Education: Developing, Utilizing And Evaluating Methodologies For Determining And Assessing The Effectiveness Of Student Learning Outcomes, Ann Marie Cavazos

Journal Publications

This Article proposes pedagogy and methodology for the assessment of student learning outcomes in a Model Clinic Program, intended to accomplish the clinic's goal of preparing students for the practice of law. The Clinic Model emphasizes apprenticeship methodology and assessment pedagogy to ensure that students are learning and developing the legal skill sets that they are expected to learn. In this Article, the Author will depict the Clinic Model in the present tense to illustrate a working, not just a theoretical, model.

The Pedagogy Of "Yes We Can": Teaching Reformative Legal Justice In The Age Of Obama, Leroy Pernell

Journal Publications

These brief comments, delivered as part of the 5th Annual Fred Gray Sr. Civil Rights Symposium, Faulkner University, Thomas Goode Jones School of Law October 21, 2009, do not challenge whether law schools and the profession sufficiently make the case for public service and commitment to societal good; admittedly most existing standards and curricula do. Rather, these comments address the opportunity for legal education to tap, and expand on, a heightened psychological and emotional commitment that might be engendered in law students following the election of Barack Obama as President of the United States.

Clinical Legal Education At A Generational Crossroads: Shades Of Gray, Karla M. Mckanders

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Clinical legal education is at a crossroads. With studies like the Macrate Report, Carnegie Foundation Report “Educating Lawyers,” and Best Practices for Legal Education there is greater focus on experiential learning. Consequently, clinics are at an inflection point regarding their future. Three distinct generations will determine the path forward: Baby Boomers, Generation X, and Millennials. Each generation brings a different set of preferences, biases, perspectives and strengths to the table. Given the changes in legal academia, what will the future hold for clinical legal education?

The following are four essays by clinicians from the three generations. They each relay their …

Integrated Legal Education, Brian K. Landsberg

McGeorge School of Law Scholarly Articles

No abstract provided.

Lrw Program Design: A Manifesto For The Future, Eric Easton

All Faculty Scholarship

All of us have, at one time or another, had occasion to consider, or reconsider, our program model. The trigger may have been a new dean; the prospect of a sabbatical inspection; a budget crisis or financial windfall; a faculty champion or saboteur; some-thing we learned at a Legal Writing Institute (LWI) or Association of Legal Writing Directors conference; or merely the cycle of bureaucratic reorganization. Those reconsiderations have led to a great diversity of Legal Research and Writing (LRW) program models: two-, three-, four-, and all-semester programs; adjunct-, contract-, and tenure-track staffing; and directors, co-directors, and no directors. Reconsiderations …

What Balance In Legal Education Means To Me: A Dissenting View, Lawrence Raful

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Studying And Teaching “Law As Rhetoric”: A Place To Stand, Linda L. Berger

Scholarly Works

This article proposes that law students may find a better fit within the legal culture of argument if they are introduced to rhetorical alternatives to counter narrowly formalist and realist perspectives on how the law works and how judges decide cases. To support this proposal, the article describes and evaluates an upper-level elective course in Law & Rhetoric, which I have offered at two law schools since 2003.

The article makes a two-part argument: first, introducing law students to rhetorical alternatives allows them to envision their role as lawyers as constructive, effective, and imaginative while grounded in law, language, and …

The Potential Contribution Of Adr To An Integrated Curriculum: Preparing Law Students For Real World Lawyering, Jean R. Sternlight

Scholarly Works

This Article briefly reviews the long history of critiques of legal education that highlight the failure to adequately prepare students for what they will and should do as attorneys. It takes a sober look at the hurdles reformers face when trying to make significant curricular changes and proposes a modest menu of reforms that interested faculty and law schools can largely achieve without investing substantial additional resources. This Article emphasizes the special contributions that alternative dispute resolution (ADR) can provide to legal education more generally. ADR instruction is an important corrective to a curriculum that routinely conveys the erroneous implication …

What We Don't Know Can Hurt Us: The Need For Empirical Research In Regulating Lawyers And Legal Services In The Global Economy, Carole Silver

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Special Introduction: October 2010, Lauren K. Robel

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

They Keep It All Hid: The Ghettoization Of Mental Disability Law And Its Implications For Legal Education, Michael L. Perlin

Articles & Chapters

The Supreme Court has, since 1972, decided more than fifty cases involving persons with mental disabilities, a docket spanning virtually every aspect of constitutional law and criminal procedure. These cases have dealt with the substantive and procedural limitations on the commitment power, the conditions of confinement in psychiatric institutions, the application of the Americans with Disabilities Act to persons institutionalized because of mental illness, the substantive and procedural aspects of the criminal incompetency inquiry and the insanity defense, the relationship between mental disability and sexually violent predator laws, and all aspects of the death penalty. Thousands of cases have been …

Reflections On Substance And Form In The Civil Rights Classroom, Doni Gewirtzman

Articles & Chapters

Legal education typically treats substance and form as unrelated entities -- the same pedagogical structure and tools are used regardless of the nature of the course. This Essay attempts to align the way we teach civil rights law with the nature of the subject matter by exploring three central conflicts that touch on both substance and form: the battle between coercion and freedom, the battle between public and private, and the battle between law and love. It argues that while the form of legal education polarizes each of these divides, the substance of civil rights law takes a more ambiguous …

Update: Using Casemap In Legal Research And Writing (Lrw) Classes And Clinics, David I. C. Thomson

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

Written “research logs” focus on the quality of the research path the student had taken, but not necessarily on the quality of the student’s thinking. CaseMap, a modern alternative to the old written research log, permits LRW teachers to enter into a student’s thinking in the critical pre-writing stage. With CaseMap, the LRW or clinical teacher can help refine the student’s legal analysis well before the student begins to write. Despite CaseMap’s limitations - namely its complexity and current incompatibility with Mac computers - this short article serves as an update of a more extensive article about using CaseMap in …

Games In The Law School Classroom: Enhancing The Learning Experience, Karin M. Mika

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Educators have always been concerned with devising ways to make education fun while engaging students in an activity that will be intellectually beneficial. This article explores the use of games in the legal writing classroom.

Journeys To 20th Street: The Inner City As Critical Pedagogical Space For Legal Education, Sarah Buhler

Dalhousie Law Journal

This essay draws on critical geographical theories to propose that the location of clinical legal education programs in inner city space can affect the production of professional identities and ideologies oflaw students. It anchors its analysis in an examination of the clinical law program at the University of Saskatchewan College of Law, where students work at a poverty law clinic in Saskatoon's inner city. The paper first turns to a critical examination of law school space, which can function to promote dominant notions about law and legal practice. The author cautions that ifnot navigated attentively, thejourney to inner city space …

Where Have All The (Legal) Stories Gone?, Nancy B. Rapoport

Scholarly Works

This essay examines whether law schools are doing a good job of teaching the art of storytelling to law students.

Pierson V. Post: The New Learning, Daniel R. Ernst

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Pierson v. Post, 3 Caines 175 (N.Y. 1805), one of the most commonly assigned cases in the first-year Property course, was a dispute over the ownership of a fox discovered at large “upon a certain wild and uninhabited, unpossessed and waste land, called the beach.” For a very long time, all that was known about the case, other than the report itself, was a vivid but antiquarian account published in the Sag Harbor Express of October 24, 1895, by the judge and local historian Henry Parsons Hedges (1817-1911). Hedges claimed to have met Jesse Pierson (1780-1840) and Lodowick Post …

Liberalization And The Development Of Legal Education Policy In East Africa: A Case Study Of Uganda, Pamela Tibihikirra-Kalyegira

Maurer Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation analyzes the liberalization of legal education and training in East Africa. It explores avenues for developing a legal education policy that addresses various problems with regard to the quality of law graduates and of legal services in the market place currently available given the large number of law graduates entering the professional field each year.

The legal systems in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda to a large extent follow the Common Law theories and practices of English Law. The three countries also share a history in the establishment of law schools and they face similar problems and challenges with …

Wikis While You Work: Incorporating Wikis In The Classroom, Samantha A. Moppett

Suffolk University Law School Faculty Works

In many instances, today's students learn more effectively through the use of technology. Wikis-Web sites that allow numerous people to contribute and edit the content of the site-are one of the newer technology tools available. This article introduces wikis, describes one way the author has used wikis as a teaching tool, and explores the advantages of using wikis in the classroom.