Legal Education Commons^™

Teaching Electronically: The Chicago-Kent Experiment, Richard Warner

Seattle University Law Review

Certain basic goals are widely shared, relatively uncontroversial, and sufficiently important that it makes sense to ask whether computer technology can improve our ability to achieve those goals. Consider the following four goals. This Review will focus primarily on the second goal (understanding the rationales behind the rules). Of course, to improve students' abilities to achieve this goal may also improve their abilities to achieve the first goal (knowledge of black letter rules) as a knowledge of a rule is obviously a precondition of understanding its purpose. Improving students' abilities to understand the rationale behind a rule may also improve …

Making The Move From Law Practitioner To Law Professor, Or How Not To Simplify Your Life, Susan J. Becker

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

The author discusses her transition from litigation practice to teaching law. She concludes that there are three discrete yet connected components of a law professor's job which closely parallel that of a litigator: teaching, administrative service, and scholarship.

How We Teach: A Survey Of Teaching Techniques In American Law Schools, Steven I. Friedland

Seattle University Law Review

A person's law school teaching is predicated on or supported by one or more learning theories, therefore, Part II of this Article discusses cognitive and developmental learning theories and how they relate to law school teaching methods. Part III explains the teaching survey that was sent to the law schools, including the questionnaire used and the type of respondents who answered. Part IV of the Article reproduces the questionnaire results. Part V analyzes those results. This Article concludes that teaching methods should be consciously related to the learning process. Only by focusing on how students learn can a teacher truly …

Law Teachers And The Educational Continuum, Michael K. Jordan

Faculty Scholarship

There are many difficulties in teaching the law. These problems are often referred to generically as the difficulty in training students to "think like lawyers." The primary focus of the literature discussing these concerns has, therefore, been on how law schools should assist students in developing this ability. Underlying much of this literature is the assumption that what is needed is some tinkering with the law school curriculum. Students are believed to enter law with a set of abilities and potentialities that are honed by the law school curriculum to produce something called a lawyer or the skill denominated as …

Teaching Research To Faculty: Accommodating Cultural And Learning-Style Differences, Jane Thompson

Publications

Ms. Thompson explores the challenge of teaching law school faculty how to research effectively, especially in light of a unique "faculty culture" and differences in individual learning styles.

Faculty Spotlight - Kyle D. Logue, Kyle D. Logue

Articles

Most of my teaching and research efforts are currently spent in two general fields of law - taxation and insurance. Which raises an interesting question: Why would a rational person decide to devote a good portion of his academic career to areas of law that many people - lawyers and nonlawyers alike - find painfully boring and unreasonably complicated? The ta and insurance lawyers in the audience, of course, already know the answer - that ta ation and insuran e are e ceptionally interesting topics and that, if one wants to understand how the real world works (in particular, the …

Symbiotic Legal Theory And Legal Practice: Advocating A Common Sense Jurisprudence Of Law And Practical Applications, Jean R. Sternlight

Scholarly Works

Lawyers and legal academics are waging a fierce war over the soul of legal education in the United States. The various battles in this war include disputes over the proper emphasis on teaching versus scholarship; the need for clinical, practical, or transaction-oriented education versus the need for theoretical education; and the need for traditional doctrinal work versus the need for interdisciplinary or more liberal arts-oriented education within law schools. The war also plays itself out in discussions over law school hiring and tenure decisions.

In this Article I urge that practice and even the most abstract theory are complementary, not …

The Odds Against Teaching Conflicts, Gene R. Shreve

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

All We Really Need To Know About Teaching We Learned In Kindergarten, R. Lawrence Dessem

Faculty Publications

Being asked to talk recently about teaching to non-law school professors caused me to think about some of the successful techniques I have used or seen used in law school teaching. I was concerned, though, that these techniques might not be transferrable to other teachers in other settings. However, the more I thought about it the more I realized that the techniques we use in teaching law students are comparable to, if not identical with, techniques used by any successful teacher. These are the same techniques we all have seen utilized by our best teachers over our many years of …

Looking Back In Pursuit Of The Art Of Law, Gordon A. Christenson

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

As part of the centennial celebration of the Washington College of Law, I am pleased to accept the invitation of The Law Review to revisit those six fascinating years of my deanship from 1971 to 1977. It is time for a backward glance in light of the profound changes that have since taken place in society, as well as in the Washington College of Law (WCL).

A Holistic Approach To Criminal Justice Scholarship, William T. Pizzi

Publications

No abstract provided.

The Poverty Of Socratic Questioning: Asking And Answering In The Meno, Thomas D. Eisele

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

This Essay examines Socratic teaching by investigating Socrates' practice in the Meno. Its companion essay, Bitter Knowledge: Socrates and Teaching by Disillusionment, examines Socratic teaching by investigating my own practice in law school today. They are meant to complement and to complicate one another, as they also are meant to extend and to supplement some of the views of Socratic teaching expressed in two earlier essays of mine: Thomas D. Eisele, Must Virtue Be Taught?, 37 J. LEGAL EDUC. 495 (1987) [hereinafter Eisele, Virtue]; and Thomas D. Eisele, "Never Mind the Manner of My Speech": The Dilemma of Socrates' Defense …

Symposium On Law, Literature, And The Humanities. Introduction: Conducting Our Educations In Public, Thomas D. Eisele

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

This symposium grew out of James Boyd White's Marx Lecture, given April 21, 1994, at the University of Cincinnati, and this issue owes its existence to some happy coincidences with that event. One coincidence was the idea occurring to a number of us that, as nice as it would be to publish Professor White's thoughts on the Crito in these pages of the Law Review, how much nicer still it would be to surround those thoughts, or to follow them, with the thoughts of other scholars in the field, showing how these others responded to the text discussed by White …

Bitter Knowledge: Socrates And Teaching By Disillusionment, Thomas D. Eisele

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

This essay examines Socratic teaching by investigating one aspect of my own practice in law school today; its companion essay, "The Poverty of Socratic Questioning: Asking and Answering in the Meno," examines Socratic teaching by investigating Socrates' practice in the Meno. They are meant to complement, and to complicate, one another. They also are meant to extend and to supplement some of the views of Socratic teaching expressed in two earlier essays'ofmine: Must Virtue Be Taught?, 37 J. LEGAL EDUC. 495 (1987); and "Neuer
Mind the Manner of My Speech," 14 LEGAL STUD. F. 253 (1990).

Lawyer Competence: Perceptual Prisms, Self-Scrutiny, And The Looking Glass, Jonathan K. Stubbs

Law Faculty Publications

In recent years legal academia has begun to reimbrace in its scholarship an old and effective teaching device: narrative. This Essay respectfully tips its analytical mortar board in the direction of this venerable tradition passed down through countless generations of teachers and learners, inside the academy and out, and acknowledges a literary "debt" to Lewis Carroll as we consider a classic exchange between Alice and Humpty Dumpty. ...

Thinking Things, Not Words: Irvin Rutter's Pragmatic Jurisprudence Of Teaching, Gordon A. Christenson

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

Those of us in legal education and in the profession of law are in debt to the Law Review for publishing in this issue the last work of the late Professor Irvin Rutter, Law, Language, and Thinking Like a Lawyer.

On the occasion of Irvin Rutter's retirement in 1980, I briefly summarized these earlier contributions, locating them within the legal realist tradition, and we awaited the publication of his last work, then still in draft not quite satisfactory to Professor Rutter. In this essay, I situate his final work on teaching law in the pragmatist tradition with special emphasis on …

Advice For The New Law Professor: A View From The Trenches, Susan J. Becker

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

A decade ago, Professor Douglas Whaley published an essay that offers comfort and advice to those commencing the metamorphosis from practitioners, judicial clerks, and students into professors of law. The purpose of this article is twofold: to offer a confirmation from the trenches of many of Professor Whaley's observations and to supplement his suggestions with some of my own.

Teaching Legal Research: Past And Present, Joyce Manna Janto

Law Faculty Publications

For years librarians have debated which procedures will most effectively instruct law students in the art of legal research. Ms. Janto and Ms. Harrison-Cox trace the history of these efforts and propose a model program for the teaching of legal research.

Book Review. Teaching Conflicts, Improving The Odds, Gene R. Shreve

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Karl Krastin, Ronald B. Brown

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Problem-Based Learning: An Alternative Approach To Legal Education, Suzanne Kurtz, Michael Wylie, Neil Gold

Dalhousie Law Journal

This paper is intended to provide legal educators with an introduction to problem-based learning. Problem-based learning has several variations and each of them will be briefly reviewed with a view to providing insights as to how the method might be used. We will underscore the pedagogical rationale for the method and place it in the context of developments in legal education generally. In addition we will describe what a teacher actually does when using a particular variation of the method.

Wittgenstein's Instructive Narratives: Leaving The Lessons Latent, Thomas D. Eisele

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

Philosophical Investigations is one of the great works about instruction, as Stanley Cavell says, because it is a great work of instruction. It dot::s not simply tell us about instruction; it shows us instruction in action-by instructing us. But it does this in a disconcerting way; it instructs us indirectly or latently. And often it uses stories to do this.

Wittgenstein rarely states a thesis or a conclusion that he then wants us simply to approve or accept. Rather, he directs our attention to some fact or phenomenon and invites our response to it, sometimes by giving us his response …

"Our Real Need": Not Explanation, But Education, Thomas D. Eisele

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

Wittgenstein wrote nothing on legal theory or law, so there is no obvious textual basis on which to draw possible connections between Wittgenstein and legal theory. And Wittgenstein abhorred theorizing in philosophy. So the odds are slim that Wittgenstein would have accommodated himself or his work to similar activity in the law. Where does this leave us?

At sea, which is where we normally are in life and, thus, where Wittgenstein wants us to recognize ourselves as being when doing philosophy too. But theory can disguise this fact from us, as it also can make us think that we have …

Joining Hands And Smarts: Teaching Manual Legal Research Through Collaborative Learning Groups, Thomas Michael Mcdonnell

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

My hypothesis was that a group of law students who research a problem together will learn legal research better than students who work individually. I further hypothesized that if the group research could be undertaken during class time under the direct supervision of the instructor and the teaching assistant, the students would be less intimidated by manual research tools and would be better prepared to work on their own. The following three-step method was employed: (1) the students read about the tool; (2) the instructor discussed the tool in class; and (3) immediately following the discussion, students went to the …

Goodness And Humanness: Distinguishing Traits, James E. Moliterno

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Teaching Professional Responsibility In Law School, Alvin Esau

Dalhousie Law Journal

After eight years of teaching a three-credit course on The Legal Profession and Professional Responsibility to second- and third-year law students, I am left with a sense of great dissatisfaction with the whole enterprise. So deep is my dissatisfaction that I am questioning whether to continue or move into a different course instead. This paper is an opportunity to take stock of my experience and attempt to map out the causes of my dissatisfaction, and to seek some vision, if possible, of what the course should be about, how to teach it, and why I should bother. To give the …

Must Virtue Be Taught?, Thomas D. Eisele

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

No abstract provided.

The Activity Of Being A Lawyer: The Imaginative Pursuit Of Implications And Possibilities, Thomas D. Eisele

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

If law as an activity emerged naively and unpremeditated, as a direction of attention pursued without premonition of what it would lead to, then by now it has hollowed out a character for itself, as Oakeshott says, and has become specified in a "practice." Having acquired this firmness of character, as Oakeshott further says, law may present itself as a puzzle, thus provoking reflection. Thinking about law in this manner or mood is something that I wish to call "philosophy of law," and this is itself an honorable activity with a character and mannerisms of its own.2 In law school, …

New Help Wanted Signs, Scott Anderson

Bryant Garth (1986-1987 Acting; 1987-1990)

No abstract provided.

Acting Dean Prefers Teaching, Scott Noblitt

Bryant Garth (1986-1987 Acting; 1987-1990)

No abstract provided.