Legal Education Commons^™

Fix Or Fox: Where Do We Go From Here?, Marsha Griggs

All Faculty Scholarship

Recently the National Conference of Bar Examiners (“NCBE”) announced that it will make sample questions from its proposed NextGen Bar Exam publicly available. NCBE is the entity that creates and sells all the questions used on the Uniform Bar Exam adopted in Kansas, Missouri, and thirty-six other states. In theory, the NextGen Exam is being developed in response to mounting critique that the bar exam is not a true measure of competence to practice law and claims that the exam disadvantages applicants based on socioeconomic status and race. But is the NextGen prototype a fix or a fox in the …

Book Review Of Shaping The Bar: The Future Of Attorney Licensing, Marsha Griggs, Andrea A. Curcio

All Faculty Scholarship

In Shaping the Bar: The Future of Attorney Licensing, Professor Joan Howarth issues a clarion call to the academy, the legal community, and the judiciary to reform the way we license lawyers in the United States. In this book Howarth identifies the current crisis in law licensing, the history of racism that created this crisis, and the tools available to address it. Shaping the Bar challenges our entrenched notions of professional identity, and it forces us to confront vulnerabilities in attorney self-regulation. It does so in a manner that will stir even those not immersed in the current debate about …

Aging, Health, Equity, And The Law: Foreword, Joan C. Foley

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Moving Toward A Competency Based Model For Fostering Law Students’ Relational Skills, Susan L. Brooks, Marjorie A. Silver, Sarah Fishel, Kellie Wiltsie

Scholarly Works

Legal education has long been criticized for failing to provide adequate professional training to prepare graduates for legal practice realities. Many sources have lamented the lack of sufficient attention to the range of competencies necessary for law graduates to be effective practitioners and develop a positive professional identity, including those that are intra-personal, such as self-awareness, critical self-reflection, and self-directedness; those that are interpersonal, such as deep and reflective listening, empathy, compassion, cross-cultural communication, and dialogue; and those that engage with the social/systemic dimension of lawyering, such as appreciating the role of multiple identities, implicit bias, privilege and power, and …

The Lawyers Justice Corps: A Licensing Pathway To Enhance Access To Justice, Eileen Kaufman

Scholarly Works

The idea for establishing a Lawyers Justice Corps emerged out of efforts to solve a problem: how to license lawyers at a time when COVID-19 had expanded the need for new lawyers while also making an in-person bar exam dangerous, if not impossible. We-the Collaboratory on Legal Education and Licensing for Practice'-proposed the Lawyers Justice Corps to provide a different and better way of certifying minimum competence for new attorneys while at the same time helping to create a new generation of lawyers equipped to address a wide range of social justice, racial justice, and criminal justice issues. When implemented, …

Teaching About Justice By Teaching With Justice: Global Perspectives On Clinical Legal Education And Rebellious Lawyering, Olinda Moyd, Catherine F. Klein, Richard Roe, Mizanur Rahman, Dipika Jain, Abhayraj Naik, Natalia Martinuzzi Castilho, Taysa Schiocchet, Sunday Kenechukwu Agwu, Bianca Sukrow, Christoph Konig

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

The inspiration for this Article was the 2021 Conference of the Global Alliance for Justice Education (GAJE), a biannual gathering since 1999 of law educators and others interested in justice education from around the world. Due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the conference was conducted virtually. During the three-day conference, over 450 participants from 45 countries gathered to participate in the sharing of workshops and presentations, ranging from discussions of papers to five-minute "lightning talks." In addition, there were virtual spaces for social meetings with new and old friends. The authors attended as many of the sessions as possible in …

Founding The Marshall-Brennan Constitutional Literacy Project, Stephen Wermiel

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

There are many different approaches to civic literacy, reflecting the dedication of so many individuals and organizations and their creativity committed to the task. For the Marshall-Brennan Constitutional Literacy Project, the approach has been to have law students educate young people about their rights through Supreme Court cases and moot court arguments.

What Inclusive Instructors Do Book Review, Jamie Abrams

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Inclusive teaching is not just an aspirational goal. It is our ethical obligation to students. Our students can spend years dreaming of attending law school and working to achieve that goal. They can spend decades paying off the costs of attendance. Law faculty owe every student of all backgrounds, races, religions, genders, learning abilities, ages, socioeconomic statuses, immigration statuses, and military statuses an environment in which they feel like they belong and can thrive. WHAT INCLUSIVE INSTRUCTORS Do powerfully reminds us that inclusive teaching is not identified by obscenity law's "I know it when I see it" murkiness. Rather, it …

In Memoriam Professor Emeritus Egon Guttmon, Claudio Grossman, Walter A. Effross, David Snyder

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

When I think about Egon, the first thing that comes to mind are the memories when we met in 1982 at the Washington College of Law (WCL), where he was working as a full-time faculty member. I was coming at that time from my sabbatical in the Netherlands and as a Fulbright Scholar. From the beginning, Egon sought to provide me with a welcoming environment. He approached me, finding shared backgrounds and interests, which is always greatly appreciated, particularly when you are in a new institution. Egon noted that we both had an intellectual interest in international law. In addition …

Can Continuing Legal Education Pass The Test? Empirical Lessons From The Medical World., Rima Sirota

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Mandatory continuing legal education (CLE) takes millions of hours and hundreds of millions of dollars from American lawyers every year, with the burden landing in disproportionate fashion on new lawyers, public interest lawyers, and solo practitioners. CLE proponents insist that the system protects the public by maintaining lawyer competence. In the forty-five years since the first jurisdictions began requiring CLE, no evidence has emerged in support of this claim.

This Article argues that mandatory CLE is indefensible in its current state. Either the legal profession and the CLE industry must commit to study and change, or it is time to …

Lawyering Paradoxes: Making Meaning Of The Contradictions, Susan P. Sturm

Faculty Scholarship

Effective lawyering requires the ability to manage contradictory yet interdependent practices. In their role as traditionally understood, lawyers must fight, judge, debate, minimize risk, and advance clients’ interests. Yet increasingly, lawyers must ALSO collaborate, build trust, innovate, enable effective risk-taking, and hold clients accountable for adhering to societal values. Law students and lawyers alike struggle, often unproductively, to reconcile these tensions. Law schools often address them as a dilemma requiring a choice or overlook the contradictions that interfere with their integration.

This Article argues instead that these seemingly contradictory practices can be brought together through the theory and action of …

Law’S Contributions To The Mindfulness Revolution, Elizabeth F. Emens

Faculty Scholarship

These are phenomenally challenging times. Mindfulness is a tool that can help lawyers support themselves, each other, their clients, and their collaborators in the hard work needed to build community and take action. For these and other reasons, mindfulness has made major inroads into law and legal institutions. Law firms, law schools, and courthouses offer training in mindfulness meditation to support the cognitive clarity and emotional self-regulation necessary for the demanding work of analyzing problems, resolving conflicts, overcoming bias, and doing justice. A growing literature, from empirical social science to legal scholarship, catalogs these and other benefits of mindfulness for …

Building Fierce Empathy, Binny Miller

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

In this Article I explore the process of building and sustaining empathy with clients in the context of representing juvenile lifers-- people convicted of serious crimes as children and sentenced to life or sentences that ensure that they spend most of their lives in prison--in a law school clinic. Before turning to my own lawyering experiences and those of my clinic students, I ground the discussion of empathy in the competing theories of Charles Ogletree and Abbe Smith about the value of empathic lawyering for public defenders. These theories, together with the contributions of other scholars, provide a springboard for …

Law School News: Rwu Law Remembers Sarah Weddington 12/30/2021, Michael M. Bowden

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Masthead & Table Of Contents

Dalhousie Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Law Library Blog (December 2021): Legal Beagle's Blog Archive, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Law Library Newsletters/Blog

No abstract provided.

A Light Unseen: The History Of Catholic Legal Education In The United States: A Response To Our Colleagues And Critics, John M. Breen, Lee J. Strang

Journal of Catholic Legal Studies

(Excerpt)

We are enormously grateful to the Journal of Catholic Legal Studies for hosting the conference on February 14, 2020, dedicated to a review of our book manuscript, A Light Unseen: The History of Catholic Legal Education in the United States, and for publishing the papers of the conference participants. We are also grateful for the opportunity to offer some reply in the pages of the Journal. A Light Unseen sets forth a comprehensive history of the book’s subject matter. The book describes the purposes for which Catholic law schools were founded, the schools maturation and success in …

Vol. 61, No. 13 (November 22, 2021)

Indiana Law Annotated

No abstract provided.

The Dream Of Property Professors, Ezra Rosser

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Michael Heller and James Salzman's new book, Mine! How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives, is a dream come true for property professors.

I suspect that many of us have moments when we think to ourselves, "wow, this stuff is really interesting," imagining that property law could somehow be of general interest. Too often that dream is killed when the eyes of non-lawyers, including family members, start to glaze over when they hear words like rule against perpetuities or trademark. Heller and Salzman have succeeded in making the stories property professors tell the stuff of a bestseller. They …

The Brief (Edition #13, November 2021), William & Mary Law School

The Brief

No abstract provided.

Letter To New Mexico Board Of Bar Examiners, Legislation/Civil Rights Clinic

Menstrual Policies and the Bar

No abstract provided.

Letter To New Hampshire Supreme Court, Office Of Bar Admissions, Legislation/Civil Rights Clinic

Menstrual Policies and the Bar

No abstract provided.

Letter To The Board Of Law Examiners For The State Of North Carolina, Legislation/Civil Rights Clinic

Menstrual Policies and the Bar

No abstract provided.

Letter To Board Of Bar Examiners, Supreme Court Of Ohio, Legislation/Civil Rights Clinic

Menstrual Policies and the Bar

No abstract provided.

Letter To New Jersey Board Of Bar Examiners, Legislation/Civil Rights Clinic

Menstrual Policies and the Bar

No abstract provided.

Letter To Bar Admissions Administrator, Commonwealth Of The Northern Mariana Islands Supreme Court, Legislation/Civil Rights Clinic

Menstrual Policies and the Bar

No abstract provided.

Letter To Regulatory Counsel, Oregon State Board Of Bar Examiners, Legislation/Civil Rights Clinic

Menstrual Policies and the Bar

No abstract provided.

Letter To Oklahoma Board Of Bar Examiners, Legislation/Civil Rights Clinic

Menstrual Policies and the Bar

No abstract provided.

Letter To Board Of Bar Examiners, Commonwealth Of Puerto Rico Supreme Court, Legislation/Civil Rights Clinic

Menstrual Policies and the Bar

No abstract provided.

Letter To Chief Appellate Clerk, Palau Supreme Court, Legislation/Civil Rights Clinic

Menstrual Policies and the Bar

No abstract provided.