Legal Education Commons^™

Aba Standard 405(C): Two Steps Forward And One Step Back For Legal Education, Peter A. Joy

Scholarship@WashULaw

There has long been opposition to guaranteeing that all full-time law faculty have security of position and participation in faculty governance the same as or substantially similar to tenure. ABA Accreditation Standard 405(c), was meant to provide such security of position and faculty governance for clinical faculty, though this standard has not been consistently interpreted to do so. The situation for legal writing faculty is even more precarious, because the standards only require a law school to provide legal writing faculty with the security of position and other rights necessary to attract and retain well-qualified faculty. As a result, most …

Australian Best Practices - A Comparison With The United Kingdom And The United States, Peter A. Joy, Adrian Evans, Anna Cody, Jeff Giddings, Mary Anne Noone, Simon Rice

Scholarship@WashULaw

This chapter, from the book "Australian Clinical Legal Education" compares efforts in Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States to establish best practices or standards in clinical legal education and the resulting best practices that were developed. The material in this chapter may aid faculty teaching clinical courses in other countries as they consider whether to develop their own best practices in light of their cultures, legal institutions, and systems of legal education.

Preparing For The Law Library Of The Future: Required Reading, Shannon M. Roddy

Newsletters & Other Publications

Law Library Lights, vol. 60, issue 3

The False Dichotomy Between Theory And Skills Training: Why Good Lawyers Need To Pay Attention To Theory, Michael Vitiello

McGeorge School of Law Scholarly Articles

No abstract provided.

Get Real: Why And How Clinicians Should Record, Transcribe And Study Actual Client Consultations, Linda F. Smith

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

This article will argue that the legal academy has much to learn by recording, transcribing and systematically studying student-client and attorney-client consultations. Clinical faculty can utilize conversation analysis and other social science techniques to do this. Social scientists and medical providers have studied doctor-patient conversations in this way over many years. Through this systematic study researchers have reached conclusions about effective doctor-patient consultations that form the basis for teaching these skills in medical school. This article will highlight some of these studies and their findings. Some have contended that attorney-client conversations simply cannot be recorded and studied in the same …

Listen Up: Conversation Analysis Shows How Law Students Fail-And Succeed-In A Brief Advice Clinic, Linda F. Smith

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

People with important legal matters are often unable to afford representation. As a result, most parties with family law cases handle these cases themselves. Often, they rely upon brief advice clinics to help them do so. Law schools are required to provide pro bono opportunities for all law students. These pro bono opportunities can include volunteering at brief advice clinics together with volunteer attorneys. Is this a match made in heaven or a disaster waiting to happen?

Pro bono law students vary in their professional demeanor and skills interacting with clients in a brief advice clinic. They have a strong …

Bridges Ii: The Law-Stem Alliance & Next Generation Innovation, Jacob S. Sherkow

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Open To Justice: The Importance Of Student Selection Decision In Law School Clinics, Deborah N. Archer

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Lived Legal Expertise: Mobilizing The Political Agency Of Incarcerated Youth, Ian S. Schiffer

Pomona Senior Theses

This thesis analyzes how caring relationships and an emancipatory approach to law related education (LRE) within juvenile justice facilities can cultivate political agency. I focused specifically on Camp Afflerbaugh-Paige, an LA County juvenile probation facility, in La Verne, CA, as a case study. During three months of teaching a law related education class and embedding myself at the facility with an asset-based framework, I encountered a wealth of knowledge that incarcerated juveniles possess, not from formal education or research, but based in their own lived experiences. Los Angeles County Probation spends $233,000 per student per year; assuming best intentions of …

Is Legal Scholarship Worth Its Cost?, Paul Campos

Publications

No abstract provided.

Legal Education In The Blockchain Revolution, Mark Fenwick, Wulf A. Kaal, Erik P.M. Vermeulen

Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment & Technology Law

The legal profession is one of the most disrupted sectors of the consulting industry today. The rise of Legal Technology, artificial intelligence, big data, machine learning, and, most importantly, blockchain technology is changing the practice of law. The sharing economy and platform companies challenge many of the traditional assumptions, doctrines, and concepts of law and governance--requiring litigators, judges, and regulators to adapt. Lawyers need to be equipped with the necessary skill sets to operate effectively in the new world of disruptive innovation in law. A more creative and innovative approach to educating lawyers for the twenty-first century is needed.

State Bar Efforts To Deny Accreditation To Faith-Based Cle Ethics Programs Sponsored By Religiously Affiliated Law Schools, Bill Piatt

Faculty Articles

Religiously affiliated law schools focus on the integration of faith in the formation of future attorneys and leaders. Yet our students are only our students for three years. We can extend our influence and continue to provide a faith-based perspective to them and to other attorneys during the thirty, forty, or more years of their careers by offering continuing legal education (CLE) courses, which bring attorneys and judges together to provide a model for incorporating faith and morality into our professional roles. However, CLE programs must receive accreditation by state authorities if participants are to receive credit for them. Recently, …

Tribute To Sam Davis: A Georgia Perspective, Ronald L. Carlson

Scholarly Works

Sam Davis had a twenty-seven year history at Georgia, commencing in 1970. After a distinguished record as a student at the University of Mississippi School of Law, he joined the Georgia law faculty. Sam moved through the academic ranks, ultimately becoming Allen Post Professor of Law. Along the way he served, at various times, as Assistant Dean, as Associate Dean, and he was for a time the University's Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs. In 1997 he took over as Dean at the University of Mississippi School of Law. This article comments on his life and professional career, with some …

Faith-Based Law Schools: Making Mission Matter, Veryl Victoria Miles

Scholarly Articles

A faith-based law school offers unique values to the legal profession and larger community. However, this faith-based identity requires attention by the dean, faculty, administration, student body, and community. Without attention to a faith-based identity, a law school can quickly lose its religious uniqueness.

This Article makes the case that a faith-based law school needs to consider “the essentials” to making its mission matter. First, the faith-based school must make a mission statement that incorporates its church’s religious values and traditions. Second, the faith-based law school needs to create a mission-based environment. This environment can only be achieved if the …

A Role For Regulations, Standards, Best Practices And Monitoring In Enhancing Quality In Clinical Legal Education Programs, Leah Wortham

Scholarly Articles

This report analyzes and makes recommendations regarding three related documents: the Draft Model Regulation on Legal Clinic of a Higher Educational Institution as posted by the Ukrainian Ministry of Education and Science on April 19, 2017 (hereafter Regulation); the Standards for Legal Clinics Functioning in Ukraine developed by the Association of Legal Clinics of Ukraine (hereafter Standards); and an instrument to monitor law school clinics being developed by the Association (hereafter Monitoring Instrument). The report also makes recommendations about how the Association Legal Clinics of Ukraine (hereafter ALCU or Association) might be strengthened to enhance its impact in building strong …

Implementing A First-Year Research Assessment, Savanna L. Nolan

All Faculty Scholarship

University of Baltimore Law librarians do not have a formal role in teaching legal research, but are frequent guest lecturers and recognized research experts. As such, we volunteered to administer UB's first summative assessment in accordance with the recent implementation of ABA Standard 314. This poster shows the steps taken to design, execute, and grade this legal research assessment, as well as how we reported the results to stakeholders.

The assessment had an objective true/false and multiple-choice section, and a subjective essay question. The librarians selected objective questions considering the core legal research competencies identified by RIPS-SIS following the MacCrate …

Reproducing Gender And Race Inequality In The Blawgosphere, Jane C. Murphy, Solangel Maldonado

All Faculty Scholarship

The use of the Internet and other digital media to disseminate scholarship has great potential for expanding the range of voices in legal scholarship. Legal blogging, in particular, with its shorter, more informal form, seems ideal for encouraging commentary from a diverse group of scholars. This Chapter tests this idea by exploring the role of blogging in legal scholarship and the level of participation of women and scholars of color on the most visible academic legal blogs. After noting the predominance of white male scholars as regular contributors on these blogs, we analyze the relative lack of diversity in this …

Why Legal Writers Should Think Like Teachers, Laura A. Webb

Law Faculty Publications

This article proposes that new legal writers can improve their work by “thinking like teachers.” I assert that legal writing is fundamentally educative. Good writing thus requires good teaching. The article discusses the “curse of knowledge,” which makes it difficult for a writer who fully understands her topic to remember how a reader who is less knowledgeable about the topic will approach the material. It then explores three concepts from the science of learning — context, chunking, and connections — and discusses how a writer can use these concepts to effectively teach her readers.

Bridging The Gap: A Joint Negotiation Project Crossing Legal Disciplines, K. E. Powell, Lauren Bartlett

All Faculty Scholarship

This article discusses the creation and implementation of a cross-discipline negotiation simulation project designed by two law professors at Ohio Northern University Claude W. Pettit College of Law. The project bridged the gap between podium classes and clinical experience, exposing two separate groups of students to new subject areas. Professors Lauren E. Bartlett and Karen Powell brought together two distinct law classes, one doctrinal tax class and one pretrial litigation skills class, to exercise legal skills, and learn substantive and procedural law from their classmates, while acting as an attorney or a client in a simulated negotiation.

A Human Rights Code Of Conduct: Ambitious Moral Aspiration For A Public Interest Law Office Or Law Clinic, Lauren Bartlett

All Faculty Scholarship

The standards regulating the decision-making and behavior of lawyers in the U.S. currently provide inadequate guidance for many of the ethical dilemmas that practicing attorneys face on a daily basis. Universal human rights principles—the concepts of morality underlying much of human rights law—provide more ambitious moral direction that lawyers can use to guide decision-making and behavior. This article discusses why additional aspirational goals are needed for the legal profession and explains how and why to apply universal human rights principles to lawyering in the U.S. The article goes on to introduce the idea of adopting a human rights code of …

Volume 41, No. 3

The Weldon Times

A student-run newspaper published at the Schulich School of Law at Dalhousie University.

Editor in Chief: Marina Bruggeman

Digital Editor: Jessica Patrick

Editors: Theron Davis, Lisandra Naranjo Hernandez, Melissa Pike

Law As Instrumentality, Jeremiah A. Ho

All Faculty Scholarship

Our conceptions of law affect how we objectify the law and ultimately how we study it. Despite a century’s worth of theoretical progress in American law—from legal realism to critical legal studies movements and postmodernism—the formalist conception of “law as science,” as promulgated by Christopher Langdell at Harvard Law School in the late-nineteenth century, still influences methodologies in American legal education. Subsequent movements of legal thought, however, have revealed that the law is neither scientific nor “objective” in the way the Langdellian formalists once envisioned. After all, the Langdellian scientific objectivity of law itself reflected the dominant class, gender, power, …

The Problem With Aba Standard 405(C), Kathryn M. Stanchi

Scholarly Works

This essay takes the position that clinicians and legal writing faculty deserve better than "not too bad." Standard 405(c) needs to be called out for what it is: an institutionalized bar to professional advancement divorced from any reasonable measure of merit.

Jerry L. Mashaw And The Public Law Curriculum, Peter L. Strauss

Faculty Scholarship

Jerry L. Mashaw’s magisterial account of the first one hundred years of Administrative law sharply distinguishes between internal and external administrative law – between those contributions to the regularity and legality of agency behavior that emerge from its own institutions and practices, and the constraints imposed by external actors – legislative, executive, and judicial. The “systems of internal control and audit” he found common to nineteenth-century governance are subordinated, if not suppressed in today’s thinking about administrative law.

In our world of multiple transsubstantive statutes and ubiquitous judicial review, we tend to think of our administrative constitution as a set …

Rhetoric & Reality In The Aba Standards, Linda L. Berger

Scholarly Works

The rhetoric of Chapters 3 and 4 of the ABA Standards creates, maintains, and perpetuates hierarchies in law school faculties. Those hierarchies subordinate some categories of faculty members and the courses they teach. Without change in the Standards or their implementation, these hierarchies will remain, and the values and norms of traditionally privileged faculty and subject matters will become even more firmly embedded as representing the best of the legal academy. By adopting the 405(c) “best practices” policy statement, individual law schools and law faculties take upon themselves the power to demonstrate that the ABA Standards are the floor, not …

When Less Is More: An Ideological Rhetorical Analysis Of Selected Aba Standards On Curricula And Faculty, Linda L. Berger

Scholarly Works

This chapter undertakes an ideological rhetorical analysis of several key provisions of Chapters 3 and 4 of the American Bar Association’s Standards for Approval of Law Schools, specifically, the interrelated provisions that regulate the curriculum and specify the required conditions of employment for the faculty of a law school. The analysis of selected ABA Standards regulating curricula and faculty supports rhetorical analyst Sonja Foss’s conclusion that the “dominant ideology controls what participants see as natural or obvious by establishing the norm. . . . [and] provides a sense that things are the way they have to be as it asserts …

In Praise Of Margaret Howard, Nancy B. Rapoport

Scholarly Works

Professor Nancy Rapoport joins a group of distinguished colleagues in paying tribute to Professor Margaret Howard.

The Case For A Uniform Cut Score, Joan W. Howarth

Scholarly Works

To our detriment, attorneys have become accustomed to state-by-state disparities in the cut score for our national, multiple choice licensing test, the Multistate Bar Exam (MBE). MBE cut scores range from 129 in Wisconsin to 145 in Delaware. The states with the most licensed attorneys, New York and California, use MBE cut scores of 133 and 144, respectively, which land on different sides of the national MBE score bell curve bulge. No one pretends that these disparities are justified because practicing law as a new lawyer is more difficult in California than in New York. The MBE cut score is …

Teaching Health Law From A Social-Ecological Perspective, Lindsay Wiley

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

I started teaching health law relatively recently-in the fall of 2010, just after the Affordable Care Act ("ACA") was enacted, but before much of it had been implemented. This timing has been a blessing because I started with a fresh slate rather than adding the ACA on top of a previously developed course. It has also been a curse, but ultimately I appreciate that I started teaching the course at a time when the ACA was under constant threat. The ever-evolving nature of health law means that health law teachers must always bear in mind a goal that applies to …

How Does A Radical Lesbian Feminist Who Just Knows How To Holler Somehow Become A Noted Legal Scholar, Nancy Polikoff

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.