Legal Education Commons^™

Attorney–Client Privilege In Bad Faith Insurance Claims: The Cedell Presumption And A Necessary National Resolution, Klien Hilliard

Seattle University Law Review

Attorney–client privilege is one of the most important aspects of our legal system. It is one of the oldest privileges in American law and is codified both at the national and state level. Applying to both individual persons and corporations, this expanded privilege covers a wide breadth of clients. However, this broad privilege can sometimes become blurred in relationships between the corporation and the individuals it serves. Specifically, insurance companies and those they cover have complex relationships, as the insurer possesses a quasi-fiduciary relationship in relation to the insured. This type of relationship requires that the insurer act in good …

From Judge To Dean And Back Again: Reflections On Transitions, David F. Levi

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Touring The Lilly Library, Kimberly Mattioli

Articles by Maurer Faculty

When I began my job in January 2015, I was the first person to be officially designated as the Student Services Librarian at Indiana University Maurer School of Law’s Jerome Hall Law Library. One could argue that almost all the functions of a librarian at an academic law library are indeed “student services,” but I was given the exciting, and at times overwhelming, task of making the students happy on a full-time basis.

What makes students happy? Does anything (short of free food) make law students excited about the law library? I took it as a personal challenge to find …

True Friends Never Disappear, Alberto R. Gonzales

Law Faculty Scholarship

In this reflective essay published in Student Lawyer, Alberto R. Gonzales recounts his personal and professional journey from a childhood marked by poverty to service at the highest levels of state and federal government, including as U.S. attorney general. Gonzales describes how early material deprivation fueled his ambition, leading him to elite educational institutions and a prestigious legal career. Yet, despite significant professional accomplishments—including service as a Texas Supreme Court justice, White House counsel, and attorney general—he reflects that achievement alone did not bring lasting fulfillment. Instead, he emphasizes the enduring importance of authentic relationships, particularly with family and …

Using Law School Faculty Author Profiles To Promote Impact: The U.S. News & World Report Saga Continues, Allison N. Symulevich

USF St. Petersburg Campus Faculty Publications

INTRODUCTION: When U.S. News & World Report announced that it would rank law schools’ scholarly impact, U.S. News asked law schools to work with HeinOnline, a legal database, to ensure the accuracy of the database-created faculty author profiles because they would be using Hein’s database to gather citation metrics to measure scholarly impact. DESCRIPTION OF PROGRAM: This practice article describes a project at UNC Chapel Hill in the law library to ensure that their faculty publications were included in HeinOnline’s database and that HeinOnline Author Profiles were accurate. This case study helps librarians tackling either similar law library projects or …

The Drive To Advise: A Study Of Law Students At A Pro Bono Brief Advice Project, Linda F. Smith

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

Law school aims to teach lawyering skills as well as legal analysis. While all students must acquire the skills of legal analysis, research and writing, law schools may decide what other skills to teach. Students also acquire skills and habits in informal ways, through clerkship experiences or pro bono volunteer work. However, there has been almost no study of what “skills” students pick up in these informal ways, and whether there are skills that would better be learned as part of the curriculum. This study looks at the skill of legal interviewing employed by students in a pro bono brief …

Professional Identity Formation Through Pro Bono Revealed Through Conversation Analysis, Linda F. Smith

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

Law school is supposed to teach legal analysis and lawyering skills as well as mold law students’ professional identities. Pro Bono work provides an opportunity for law students to use their legal knowledge and skills and to develop their identities as emerging legal professionals. As important as both pro bono work and identity formation are, there has been very little research regarding how pro bono contributes to students’ identity formation. This paper utilizes a data set of over forty student-client consultations at a pro bono brief advice clinic that have been recorded and transcribed. It uses conversation analysis to study …

Learning From Our Mistakes: Conversation Analysis Reveals Best Practices For A Student-Staffed Pro Bono Project, Linda F. Smith

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

Law schools make “pro bono” opportunities available to students to introduce them to the responsibilities of the profession. Often these pro bono law students help in “brief advice” projects staffed by volunteer attorneys. This staffing-supervision structure presents challenges in ensuring clients receive competent, individualized advice and the students receive adequate oversight so that this is a positive learning experience for them. This paper analyzes transcripts from 46 recorded student-client interviews and 35 student-attorney consultations. It focuses on those cases where there were “errors or omissions” -- either the client got some erroneous advice or the client did not receive complete, …

A Starting Point For Disability Justice In Legal Education, Christina Payne-Tsoupros

Journal Articles

This article explores how a disability justice framework would provide greater access to law school and therefore the legal profession for disabled students of color; specifically, disabled Black, Indigenous, and Latinx students. Using DisCrit principles formulated by Subini Annamma, David Connor, and Beth Ferri (2013), this article provides suggestions for incorporating a disability justice lens to legal education. In doing so, this article specifically recognizes the work of three disability justice activist-attorney-scholars, Lydia X.Z. Brown, Talila “TL” Lewis, and Katherine Pérez, and considers lessons from their advocacy and leadership that can apply in the law school setting.

Teaching And Learning Law And Business: An Open Resource Tool, John O. Sonsteng, Willow Najjar Anderson, Michael Carlson, John Edell, Alexander Koch, Samuel Mccollough, Hannah Mohs

Faculty Scholarship

This dissertation examines the impacts of business law education through a multi-layered review of surveys, data, and literature. The authors examine what law schools across the country offer, explore research conducted in partnership with the Minnesota and American Bar Associations, and provide a systemic review of the relevant literature. The data shows attorneys resoundingly do not believe law school coursework prepared them adequately for the business of law.

Despite the practical changes that have been made to law school education since the 1960s to the present, there is still a disconnect between what law schools say they will provide and …

“The Worst Idea Ever”: Lessons From One Law School’S Embrace Of Online Learning, Eric S. Janus

Faculty Scholarship

This essay explores one law school's contrarian and pioneering embrace of online education into the core of its J.D. program, a five-year journey undertaken by William Mitchell College of Law (now Mitchell Hamline School ofLaw). This essay makes a simple point. Online pedagogy ought to be part of the palette of tools available for the design of J.D. programs. But placing it at the core of a J.D. program is not universally to be desired. Like any pedagogy, these online tools have their strengths and their weaknesses. The particular combination of tools and methods represents a question of design: of …

Teaching With Feminist Judgments: A Global Conversation, Pamela A. Wilkins

Articles

The very idea of re-imagining and rewriting judicial opinions from a feminist perspective arises from the sense that the original judicial opinions did not "do justice" in either process or outcome. Nearly a dozen feminist judgments projects around the world have addressed this sense of injustice by demonstrating how a judgment's reasoning or result (or both) would have been different if the decision makers had applied feminist perspectives, theories,and methods. Using the resulting re-imagined feminist judgments in the classroom can help students in a myriad of ways, but especially in developing their own roles in addressing what they perceive to …

January 2020 Newsletter

Ergo

No abstract provided.

A New Frontier Facing Attorneys And Paralegals: The Promise & Challenges Of Artificial Intelligence As Applied To Law & Legal Decision-Making, Marissa Moran

Publications and Research

Artificial Intelligence/AI invisibly navigates and informs our lives today and may also be used to determine a client’s legal fate. Through executive order, statements by a U.S. Supreme Court justice and a Congressional Commission on AI, all three branches of the United States government have addressed the use of AI to resolve societal and legal matters. Pursuant to the American Bar Association Model Rules of Professional Conduct[i] and New York Rules of Professional Conduct (NYRPC), [ii] the legal profession recognizes the need for competency in technology which requires both substantive knowledge of law and competent use of technology for …

Sociolegal Research, The Law School Survey Of Student Engagement, And Studying Diversity In Judicial Clerkships, Shih-Chun Steven Chien, Ajay K. Mehrotra, Xiangnong Wang

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

The Law School Survey of Student Engagement (LSSSE) is an extraordinary asset for examining a vast array of topics related to the educational experiences of law students. By focusing on student-oriented surveys, LSSSE provides law schools and researchers an invaluable opportunity to delve into a wide range of issues dealing with the law student experience, including the career preferences and expectations of students throughout their law school years. In particular, there remains a wealth of opportunity for scholars interested in using LSSSE data to explore issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion in legal education and the profession.

The American Bar …

Integrated Learning, Integrated Faculty, Rachel Arnow-Richman

UF Law Faculty Publications

A fundamental obstacle to the success of legal education’s practice readiness movement is the “bifurcated faculty.” Most law schools continue to operate a two tiered system in which a group of elite credentialed “doctrinal” faculty enjoy the generous compensation, security, and privileges associated with tenure, while an underclass of contract faculty teach work intensive “skills” courses for lower pay and lesser status. This Essay analyzes the bifurcated faculty as a personnel practice, leveraging insights from management theory and employment discrimination scholarship to evaluate law schools as employers. It considers, first, the rise of new economy management practices that eschew static …

The Systems Approach To Teaching Business Associations, Lynn M. Lopucki, Andrew Verstein

UF Law Faculty Publications

The systems approach applies the methods of systems analysis to law. The principal method is to describe the system, situate a problem within the system, and take system mechanics into account in solving it. The system might be the “legal system”—essentially litigation. But more often, it is a “law-related system”—one not composed of law, but one in which law plays a role. That system might be crime, the Internet, the corporation, or any other activity substantially affected by law. The analyst situates the application of law in the context of the physical system as it actually operates. In business associations, …

2020 Academy Of Law Alumni Fellows Dinner And Induction Ceremony Program

Academy of Law Alumni Fellows

No abstract provided.

In Times Of Chaos: Creating Blueprints For Law School Responses To Natural Disasters, Jeffrey Baker, Christine Cerniglia, Davida Finger, Luz Herrera, Jonel Newman

Articles

No abstract provided.

Theater And Revolution In Clinical Legal Education, Jonel Newman, Fergus Lawrie, Donald Nicolson, Melissa Swain

Articles

Why does a revolutionary theatre method developed in the 1960s and 1970s by Brazilian intellectual and activist Augusto Boal belong in clinical legal education? Use of the transformative Forum Theatre method can greatly enhance legal education. Boal, a colleague and disciple of Paulo Freire (Pedagogy of the Oppressed), developed Forum Theatre as a democratic, participatory, and collaborative production between the actors and the audience, to revolutionize traditional sit-and-watch theatre. Spectators in the audience become spect-actors, halt the oppressive element in a scenario, take the place of the actors, and eliminate oppression. The over-arching goal of Forum Theatre is to illuminate …

In Times Of Chaos: Creating Blueprints For Law School Responses To Natural Disasters, Jeffrey R. Baker, Christine E. Cerniglia, Davida Finger, Luz E. Herrera, Jonel Newman

Faculty Scholarship

A recent onslaught of domestic natural disasters created acute, critical needs for legal services for people displaced and harmed by storms and fires. In 2017, Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, Maria and Michael struck much of Texas, Florida, and Puerto Rico, displacing millions from their homes. Wildfires burned throughout California and tested the capacity of pro bono and legal aid systems across the state. In 2018, Hurricane Florence flooded North Carolina, and Hurricane Michael devastated the Florida Panhandle. California again suffered wildfires, the largest and most devastating in recorded history. Natural disasters are both more common and more destructive, the “new abnormal.” …

Symposium Introduction: Teaching And Researching International Law – Global Perspectives, James Thuo Gathii, Olabisi D. Akinkugbe, Nthope Mapefane, Titilayo Adebola, Ohio Omiunu

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Welcome to the Teaching and Researching International Law – Global Perspectives Symposium. This series of blog posts gathers perspectives from international law teachers, researchers and students from different regions and all stages of their careers and legal education, to reflect together on common challenges and imagined futures of our profession. This Symposium is held in a moment of great uncertainty – but also of possibility: the Critical Pedagogy Symposium recently held on Opinio Juris offered thought-provoking commentary from across the globe on critical international pedagogy and the virtual space, while the forthcoming TWAILR series on Critique and the Canon promises …

Evidence, Rollie Thompson

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

“Evidence” is what, in our adversary system, the parties attempt to place before the neutral factfinder in order to prove their case (or disprove their opponent's case). We follow the principle of party-presentation: parties determine what specific items of evidence are offered for proof, while the impartial judge or decision maker will determine which items are “admissible” evidence, in accordance with principles of law. At the end of the trial or hearing, the fact-finder (jury, judge, tribunal, decision maker) will determine which of those admissible items of evidence are believed or not, in formulating “fact-guesses” or “findings of fact”.

Constitutional Law, Jodi Lazare

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

The materials below are the study outlines from the July 2020 and January 2021 Bar Examinations. The materials are not intended to provide legal advice, and should not be relied upon by articled clerks, transfer applicants, lawyers or members of the public as a current statement of the law.

Please note: The Bar Review Materials are updated every three years. They were last updated on May 1, 2020.

Building A Law-And-Political-Economy Framework: Beyond The Twentieth-Century Synthesis, Jedediah S. Purdy, David Singh Grewal, Amy Kapczynski, K. Sabeel Rahman

Faculty Scholarship

We live in a time of interrelated crises. Economic inequality and precarity, and crises of democracy, climate change, and more raise significant challenges for legal scholarship and thought. “Neoliberal” premises undergird many fields of law and have helped authorize policies and practices that reaffirm the inequities of the current era. In particular, market efficiency, neutrality, and formal equality have rendered key kinds of power invisible, and generated a skepticism of democratic politics. The result of these presumptions is what we call the “Twentieth-Century Synthesis”: a pervasive view of law that encases “the market” from claims of justice and conceals it …

Assessing The Experiential (R)Evolution, Allison Korn, Laila L. Hlass

Faculty Scholarship

For more than a century, law schools have resisted substantial reforms relating to experiential education. Yet, in 2014, the ABA mandated a six-credit experiential course graduation requirement for law schools, alongside a packet of experiential curriculum amendments. Proponents of experiential education had hoped for a fifteen-credit mandate, aligning law schools with other professional schools that require one-quarter to one-third skills training. Still, six credits is significant, potentially marking a striking shift in the direction of legal education. To date, no one—including the ABA—has broadly evaluated the post-mandate legal education experiential landscape. It is particularly urgent to consider recent shifts in …

The Gaps Model And Faculty Services: Quality Analysis Through A “New” Lens, Alex Zhang, Sherry Xin Chen

Faculty Scholarship

Faculty service is an important function of U.S. academic law libraries. This article evaluates three types of faculty services programs using the Gaps Model to identify, analyze, and propose ways to fill four main gaps: knowledge, policy, delivery, and service quality.

Law, Artificial Intelligence, And Natural Language Processing: A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To My Search Results, Paul D. Callister

Faculty Works

Renowned legal educator Roscoe Pound stated, “Law must be stable and yet it cannot stand still.” Yet, as Susan Nevelow Mart has demonstrated in a seminal article that the different online research services (Westlaw, Lexis Advance, Fastcase, Google Scholar, Ravel and Casetext) produce significantly different results when researching case law. Furthermore, a recent study of 325 federal courts of appeals decisions, revealed that only 16% of the cases cited in appellate briefs make it into the courts’ opinions. This does not exactly inspire confidence in legal research or its tools to maintain stability of the law. As Robert Berring foresaw, …

Global Investor Protection: Securities Law Enforcement Around The World, Matthew Diller, Martin Gelter, Eugenio J. Cardenas, Merritt B. Fox, Geoffrey Jarvis, Pierre-Henri Conac, Todd Cosenza, Jill Fisch, Yuliya Guseva, Elad Roisman, Sean Griffith

Fordham Journal of Corporate & Financial Law

No abstract provided.

Contributions To The Intellectual Life Of The Institution And The Profession, Janet Sinder

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.