Legal Education Commons^™

Beyond Litigation: Legal Education Reform In Japan And What Japan's New Lawyers Will Do, George Schumann

University of Miami International and Comparative Law Review

No abstract provided.

Paid Family Leave In American Law Schools: Findings And Open Questions, Laura T. Kessler

ExpressO

There exists a substantial literature on the status of women in the legal profession, including studies on women students’ experiences in law schools, gender bias on law school faculties, and family leave policies and practices among legal employers. However, no recent study examines the family leave policies and practices in American law schools. This study seeks to fill that gap. Its findings are threefold. First, almost three quarters of law schools provide wage replacement during a family leave that is more generous than required by federal law. Second, there is a positive relationship between teaching at top-tier and private law …

When The Inquisitorial And Adversary Systems Collide: Teaching Trial Advocacy To Latin American Lawyers, Leonard L. Cavise

ExpressO

The first part of the article reviews the principal differences in the two systems as it affects trial procedure. The article then reviews those aspects of accusatorial trial proceedings that caused the greatest degree of discomfort to the foreign lawyers. Finally, the article attempts to posit a few recommendations that should help not only to ease the transition process but also to anticipate the next level of procedural and substantive obstacles.

The Case For A Flat-Earth Law School, Erik M. Jensen

Faculty Publications

This essay suggests - usually politely - that the American legal academy has been overdoing its push for globalization, and, as a result, education in the basics has suffered. That's a pity because law school graduates need to know the basics to be successful not only in Smalltown USA, but also on a world stage.

Teaching As Art Form - Review Of The Elements Of Teaching, David I.C. Thomson

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

The authors of this gem of a book—both retired college teachers who gave their professional lifetimes to teaching—write simply and passionately about what it takes to be an effective teacher, and manage to reduce the key aspects of a complex process down to nine primary elements. In so doing, they provide not only a road map of aspiration for the new teacher, but also signposts of inspiration for the experienced teacher.

Teach The Children Well: Incorporating Cultural Literacy Into The Law School Learning Experience, Debra Moss Curtis

Faculty Scholarship

This article is an examination of what and how we teach in law school. Much attention has been given to the concept of the Socratic Method and whether teaching in this manner "hides the ball" from students. Rather than focusing on whether the ball is hidden, my work shall focus on whether students know what the ball is in the first place.

Misuse And Abuse Of The Lsat: Making The Case For Alternative Evaluative Efforts And A Redefinition Of Merit, Phoebe A. Haddon, Deborah W. Post

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Legal Writing Programs And Professionalism: Legal Writing Professors Can Join The Academic Club, James M. Boland

St. Thomas Law Review

Sociological jurisprudence has been a major factor in legal interpretive schemes for over a century, but this has not been reflected in most legal writing programs. These programs must produce legal writers who not only are competent writers, but are also competent legal theorists who know the difference between classical rule-based reasoning and modem interpretive methods. Concomitantly, legal writing professors must produce scholarship that reflects the diversity of these more complex schemes, rather than just writing about writing. This article will first describe the current condition of legal writing programs, and then suggest changes that more thoroughly introduce students to …

Coastal Kingdom, A New Vehicle For Teaching Property: How I Became Queen For More Than A Day, Ann R. Shorstein

St. Thomas Law Review

The creation of Coastal Kingdom, as described in the following sections, is my attempt to maximize the limited time that the students spend in a first year survey course by emphasizing infusion and rigor.

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

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Everything I Wanted To Know About Teaching Law School I Learned From Being A Kindergarten Teacher: Ethics In The Law School Classroom, Debra Moss Curtis

Faculty Scholarship

This article discusses the ethics of teaching law school. It was not until the 1920s and 1930s that full-time law teachers, rather than part-time practitioners or judges, held the main responsibility for teaching at many law schools. When this shift began to occur, the field of "law professor" was born, and there arose the need for rules in all areas governing law professors, including ethics. Today, most law professors in the United States are members of both the legal and teaching professions and therefore must comply with the ethical rules of each profession. However they may be professionally licensed, law …

The Impact Of The 9/11 Attacks On National Security Law Casebooks, Tung Yin

St. Thomas Law Review

In this book review, I use the 9/11 attacks and the subsequent American responses as a framework for reviewing four casebooks currently available for use in courses on national security or antiterrorism. It is hardly surprising that law professors might themselves respond to the 9/11 attacks by adjusting content in appropriate courses. While casebooks may have other uses, their primary purpose is undoubtedly intended to be in law school courses. In turn, law school courses have a number of goals, among them the imparting of substantive knowledge in the particular field of law, as well as the development of students' …

The Orthodoxy Of Format: Some Sketches On Legal Scholarship, William Aceves, James Cooper, Alejandro Gonzalez, Pedro Egana Marshall

Faculty Scholarship

The idea that legal scholarship should include visual elements is not a new one. Early student work blazed a trail some thirty years ago. More recent contributions have been produced by scholars such as Keith Aoki. And, in 2006, the Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke University published a comic book addressing copyright law and the fair use doctrine.

Despite these efforts, there does not appear to be any systematic attempt to use graphic art in legal scholarship. This project makes such an appeal. It challenges the conventional format for legal scholarship that has been used …

Internationalizing U.S. Legal Education: A Report On The Education Of Transnational Lawyers, Carole Silver

Articles by Maurer Faculty

This article analyses the role of U.S. law schools in educating foreign lawyers and the increasingly competitive global market for graduate legal education. U.S. law schools have been at the forefront of this competition, but little has been reported about their graduate programs. This article presents original research on the programs and their students, drawn from interviews with directors of graduate programs at 35 U.S. law schools, information available on law school web sites about the programs, and interviews with graduates of U.S. graduate programs. Finally, the article considers the responses of U.S. law schools to new competition from foreign …

Reflections On Law Schools And The Idea Of The University, Thomas E. Baker

Faculty Publications

Thomas Baker is one of the founding faculty members of the Florida International University College of Law and this article is based on a speech delivered in October of 2002 during the university's Annual Faculty Convocation. It details the composition of both the entering classes and the law faculty and discusses the law school's mission to provide opportunities for minorities to attain representation in the legal profession that is proportionate to their representation in the population. It explores the role of law schools in higher education and notes the FIU College of Law's efforts to incorporate important developments in the …

Eating Our Cake And Having It, Too: Why Real Change Is So Difficult In Law Schools, Nancy B. Rapoport

Scholarly Works

This essay discusses the experiences of one law school trying to integrate the rankings into its strategic plan. It discusses the intersection of considerations designed to improve the rankings with considerations designed to improve the school as a whole, and it mentions the difficulties inherent in strategic planning in an academic environment.

Introduction: The Jurisprudence Of Justice Stevens Symposium, William Michael Treanor

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Fordham Law School opened its doors on September 28, 1905, a school with ten students and six faculty members. That day marked a great beginning, and on September 28, 2005, we began a year-long celebration of Fordham Law's history and the law school community's remarkable achievements over 100 years. The heart of any great academic institution is, of course, academics, and, as part of the centennial celebration, we are hosting an extraordinary series of conferences. This issue of the Fordham Law Review presents the papers produced by the first of the year's conferences, the Symposium on the jurisprudence of Justice …

Taking Diversity Seriously: Affirmative Action And The Democratic Role Of Law Schools: A Response To Professor Brown, Carla Pratt

Faculty Articles

No abstract provided.

Introduction: One Hundred Years Of International Law At Fordham University, William Michael Treanor

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In the past 100 years, the connotations of the term "international" have changed dramatically. The ideas we have of concepts such as "international communication" and "global travel" are dramatically different from what those concepts would have meant to our forebears - if they had even thought in such terms. But an international perspective is not new at Fordham Law School. The idea of the interconnectedness of our social and legal systems with those of other Nations is one of the foundational values of our school, and it has shaped our history since we opened our doors 100 years ago.

From …

Incorporating Transnational Materials Into Traditional Courses, Franklin A. Gevurtz

McGeorge School of Law Scholarly Articles

No abstract provided.

Open Access In Law Teaching: A New Approach To Legal Education, Matthew T. Bodie

All Faculty Scholarship

The "open access" movement seeks to change our approach to the distribution of scholarship in the fields of science, medicine, the social sciences, and law. This Essay argues for the application of these principles to legal education itself. Open access would mean greater flexibility, interaction, and innovation in the creation of course materials. It would lead to new teaching methods and new forms of feedback between student and professor. Open access centers on particular legal subject areas could facilitate national and international collaboration. Ultimately, the open access law school would ameliorate the growing standardization and commodification of legal education by …

Library Research Labs: A Hands-On Approach To Taking The First Step With Your Students To Reflect Good Practice In Legal Education, Samantha A. Moppett, Rick Buckingham

Suffolk University Law School Faculty Works

In 2002, Suffolk University Law School began offering library research labs to students in the first-year Legal Practice Skills (LPS) course to give them the opportunity to tackle their first legal research exercises as part of a small group with the ready assistance of a reference librarian and an LPS professor.

This article describes the structure of the research labs and explains how they reflect the "Seven Principles of Good Practice in Legal Education" that were developed to improve student learning, enhance law school teaching, and increase faculty and student personal satisfaction.

Four Decades Later, Robert Covington

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

Hal Maier and I have taught on the same faculty for four decades. I still like him and enjoy his company, and there are not many people of whom I can say that forty years later. We have agreed and differed with one another on a whole range of issues, from the shape of the first-year curriculum to politics and back again, but have managed to stay friends through it all. Perhaps this is because we could put our differences to one side in the interest of what we insisted was music back when Hal was the drummer and I …

A Teacher's Teacher, Lonnie T. Brown

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

Jackie Robinson once said, "A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives." By that measure, Harold Maier has led an extraordinarily important life. I know that he has had a profound impact on innumerable students throughout his career and upon one in particular. I continue to learn because Professor Maier inspired me, and I teach others because of the wonderful example he set. Though he has now left the classroom, Professor Maier's legacy as a teacher will always endure through the countless minds he has awakened and lives he has touched.

Misuse And Abuse Of The Lsat: Making The Case For Alternative Evaluative Efforts And A Redefinition Of Merit, Deobrah W. Post, Phoebe A. Haddon

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Transsystemia – Are We Approaching A New Langdellian Moment? Is Mcgill Leading The Way?, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

To start, I'd like you to imagine an agglomeration of twenty to thirty jurisdictions experiencing a profound change in the nature of their economic realities. Their economies, and thus the transactions within them and the businesses that conduct them, have been predominantly local in character. Now, political and economic developments are producing businesses and transactions increasingly trans-jurisdictional in character. Increasingly the counseling, drafting, and litigating that goes on in lawyers' offices involves not one jurisdiction but two or three. What happens to legal education?

As the United States emerged from the Civil War and a truly national economy began to …

Internationalizing U.S. Legal Education: A Report On The Education Of Transnational Lawyers, Carole Silver

ExpressO

This article analyses the role of U.S. law schools in educating foreign lawyers and the increasingly competitive global market for graduate legal education. U.S. law schools have been at the forefront of this competition, but little has been reported about their graduate programs. This article presents original research on the programs and their students, drawn from interviews with directors of graduate programs at 35 U.S. law schools, information available on law school web sites about the programs, and interviews with graduates of U.S. graduate programs. Finally, the article considers the responses of U.S. law schools to new competition from foreign …

Advancing Public Interest Practitioner Research Skills In Legal Education, Randy J. Diamond

Faculty Publications

The information revolution has dramatically altered the legal research landscape, expanding the bounds of legal authority. Practitioner research requires more than traditional legal research. It also encompasses factual investigation, non-legal information, interdisciplinary and audience research. Many new lawyers are ill-prepared to research novel and unusual situations, to cope with unwritten laws and local customs, and to meet shifting authority expectations.

Teaching Legal Research And Writing With Actual Legal Work: Extending Clinical Education Into The First Year, Steven D. Schwinn

ExpressO

In this article, we advocate using actual legal work to teach legal research and writing courses, including first year courses. By “actual legal work,” we mean work that is part of an ongoing or planned lawsuit, transaction, negotiation or other form of legal representation. We offer an overview and critique of the traditional legal writing curriculum, and we describe our initiatives to build upon and enhance that curriculum with the use of actual legal work. We conclude with some thoughts on the relative merits of our approach and ideas for following our model.

Two Rules For Better Writing, Amy E. Sloan

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.