Legal Profession Commons^™

In Praise Of Law Books And Law Reviews (And Jargon-Filled Academic Writing), Cass R. Sunstein

Michigan Law Review

Many people, including many lawyers and judges, disparage law reviews and the books that sometimes result from them on the ground that they often deal with abstruse topics, of little interest to the bar, and are sometimes full of jargon, including excessively academic and impenetrable writing. Some of the objections are warranted, but at their best, law books and law reviews show a high level of rigor, discipline, and care; they have a kind of internal morality. What might seem to be jargon is often a product of specialization, similar to what is observed in other fields (such as economics, …

Student Funded Fellowship 30th Annual Auction For Public Interest, University Of Michigan Law School

Event Materials

Program for the Student Funded Fellowship 30th Annual Auction for Public Interest.

How Cosmopolitan Are International Law Professors?, Ryan Scoville, Milan Markovic

Michigan Journal of International Law

This Article offers an empirical answer to a question of interest among scholars of comparative international law: why do American views about international law appear at times to differ from those of other countries? We contend that part of the answer lies in legal education. Conducting a survey of the educational and professional backgrounds of nearly 150 legal academics, we reveal evidence that professors of international law in the United States often lack significant foreign legal experience, particularly outside of the West. Sociological research suggests that this tendency leads professors to teach international law from predominantly nationalistic and Western perspectives, …

The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly: Reflections Of A Counterclerk, Gil Seinfeld

Michigan Law Review First Impressions

Everyone has strong feelings about Justice Scalia. Lionized by the political right and demonized by the left, he has been among the most polarizing figures in American public life over the course of the last halfcentury. It is hardly surprising, then, that in the weeks since Justice Scalia’s death, the public discourse surrounding his legacy has exhibited something of a split personality. There have, of course, been plenty of appropriately respectful—even admiring—tributes from some of the Justice’s ideological adversaries; and here and there one of the Justice’s champions has acknowledged, with a hint of lament, the acerbic quality of some …

Child Welfare Appellate Advocacy, Vivek Sankaran

Book Chapters

The appellate system serves important functions in child welfare cases. It ensures that the relationship between a child and his or her parent is not unjustly terminated. It forces juvenile courts and child welfare agencies to strictly follow statutes, court rules, and agency policies. And it preserves public faith in the system by serving as an independent check to correct mistakes that occur.

But the appellate system is only as good as the advocates who appear before it. This chapter is intended to be a resource for those advocates, both those who have practiced child welfare law for many years …

Representing Parents In Child Welfare Cases, Vivek Sankaran

Book Chapters

A parent's constitutional right to raise his or her child is one of the most venerated liberty interests safeguarded by the Constitution. The law presumes parents to be fit, and it establishes that they do not need to be model parents to retain custody of their children. If the state seeks to interfere with the parent-child relationship, the Constitution mandates: (I) that the state prove parental unfitness, a standard defined by state laws, and (2) that the state follow certain procedures protecting the due process rights of parents. The constitutional framework for child welfare cases is premised upon the belief …

Representing Children And Youth, Donald N. Duquette, Ann M. Haralambie

Book Chapters

The role of the child's attorney is unique in American jurisprudence and not yet clearly defined by law or tradition. There is an emerging consensus, however, that children in dependency cases should have lawyers and those lawyers should be as active and as involved in their cases as are lawyers for any other party in any other litigation. Although state law and policy makers differ as to what voice the child should have in determining the direction and goals of the litigation, that is, whether the child's lawyer should represent the best interests of the child as determined by the …

Culture As A Structural Problem In Indigent Defense, Eve Brensike Primus

Articles

In Part I, I will describe the ways in which today's right-to-counsel challenges are similar to and different from those that faced the writers of the 1961 symposium. I will also explain in more detail why the structural conditions of criminal defense work to create (and, to some extent, always have created) a cultural problem in indigent defense delivery systems across the country. In Part II, I will discuss why I believe that we are, once again, facing a moment for potential reform, albeit reform that is different in scope and kind from that which was possible in the 1960s. …

Drawing (Gad)Flies: Thoughts On The Uses (Or Uselessness) Of Legal Scholarship, Sherman J. Clark

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform Caveat

In this essay, I argue that law schools should continue to encourage and support wide-ranging legal scholarship, even if much of it does not seem to be of immediate use to the legal profession. I do not emphasize the relatively obvious point that scholarship is a process through which we study the law so that we can ultimately make useful contributions. Here, rather, I make two more-subtle points. First, legal academics ought to question the priorities of the legal profession, rather than merely take those priorities as given. We ought to serve as Socratic gadflies—challenging rather than merely mirroring regnant …

Incentivizing Lawyers To Play Nice: A National Survey Of Civility Standards And Options For Enforcement, Cheryl B. Preston, Hilary Lawrence

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

In the last decade, most commentators assume that lawyers’ behavior is now diving to new lows, notwithstanding a flurry of professionalism and civility creeds adopted in the 1980s and 1990s. Proponents of making such creeds enforceable argue that a return to professionalism may improve lawyers’ well-being, restore the public’s confidence in lawyers, and raise the expectations of behavior, not only with respect to civility but also with respect to violations of the Rules of Professional Conduct (hereinafter, as adapted in various jurisdictions, the Rules of Professional Conduct or the Model Rules)

2015 Distinguished Alumni Award Ceremony, University Of Michigan Law School

Event Materials

Program of ceremony honoring Thomas E. Kauper and Yoichiro Yamakawa.

Characteristics Of Attorneys Representing Children In Child Welfare Cases, Britany Orlebeke, Andrew Zinn, Xiaomeng Zhou, Donald N. Duquette

Articles

Every day in state and local courts throughout the United States, judges are called upon to decide who should have the responsibility for the immediate and long-term care of neglected and abused children. Federal recognition of the right to independent advocacy for children subject to these proceedings originates with the 1974 Federal Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA). As a condition of receiving federal funds for child abuse prevention services through CAPTA, states must provide for the appointment of an appropriately trained guardian ad litem (GAL) for every child whose case results in a judicial proceeding. A guardian ad …

The Legacy Of Senator Edmund Muskie, Robert Hirshon

Articles

I am delighted to be with you this morning. My relationship with Senator Edmund Muskie actually predated my birth. It arose from my grandfather's ownership of a building in Waterville, Maine. On the ground floor was a dry goods and clothing store operated by my grandparents and frequently visited by Jane Gray, the future wife of Edmund Muskie. On one of the upper floors in 'the building was a small office that my grandfather rented to an aspiring young lawyer who had recently graduated from Cornell Law School and had returned to Maine to practice law. That young lawyer was …

Retaining Color, Veronica Root

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

It is no secret that large law firms are struggling in their efforts to retain attorneys of color. This is despite two decades of aggressive tracking of demographic rates, mandates from clients to improve demographic diversity, and the implementation of a variety of diversity efforts within large law firms. In part, law firm retention efforts are stymied by the reality that elite, large law firms require some level of attrition to function properly under the predominant business model. This reality, however, does not explain why firms have so much difficulty retaining attorneys of color — in particular black and Hispanic …

Overstating The Satisfaction Of Lawyers, David L. Chambers

Articles

Recent literature commonly reports US lawyers as disheartened and discontented, but more than two dozen statistically based studies report that the great majority of lawyers put themselves on the satisfied side of scales of job satisfaction. The claim of this article is that, in three ways, these statistically based studies convey an overly rosy impression of lawyers’ attitudes: first, that many of those who put themselves above midpoints on satisfaction scales are barely more positive than negative about their careers and often have profound ambivalence about their work; second, that surveys conducted at a single point in time necessarily fail …

Letting Go Of Old Ideas, William D. Henderson

Michigan Law Review

Two recently published books make the claim that the legal profession has changed (Steven Harper’s The Lawyer Bubble: A Profession in Crisis) or is changing (Richard Susskind’s Tomorrow’s Lawyers: An Introduction to Your Future). The books are interesting because they discuss the types of changes that are broad, sweeping, and dramatic. In suitable lawyer fashion, both books are unfailingly analytical. They both also argue that the old order is collapsing. The Lawyer Bubble is backward looking and laments the legacy we have squandered, while Tomorrow’s Lawyers is future oriented and offers fairly specific prescriptive advice, particularly to those lawyers entering …

Frost For Lawyers: 'The Best Thing That We're Put Here For's To See', Sherman J. Clark

Michigan Law Review

Why should lawyers read Frost? First of all, of course, it can bring great pleasure. As Robert Pinsky put it, poetry brings pleasures “both intellectual and bodily” and can provide “a satisfaction central to life.” And this is particularly true of Frost, whose poems are both accessible and enjoyable. This does not mean that there are no challenges in his poems. Frost does make us work. Indeed, as I hope to explore in this Essay, the work he asks us to do is essential to what we can learn from his poems. But this work is itself engaging and invigorating …

Review Of Failing Law Schools, Richard O. Lempert

Reviews

Brian Tamanaha's book Failing Law Schools is neither sociology nor a synthesis of social science research. Rather it is social commentary rooted in Tamanaha’s experience as a law professor, the literature on legal education, and barely analyzed data on law school costs and student outcomes. Tamanaha cannot be blamed for the absence of sophisticated research on matters that cry out for empirical investigation nor for having to rely on data sources that at best capture only a few bivariate relationships, but these limitations make his causal analyses and proposed solutions less than compelling. Still the book is not without its …

Aspire: You Can Go Anywhere, University Of Michigan Law School

Miscellaneous Law School History & Publications

Pamphlet with information about the University of Michigan Law School alumni careers.

Teaching Legal History Through Legal Skills., Howard Bromberg

Book Chapters

I revolve my legal history courses around one methodology: teaching legal history by means of legal skills. I draw on my experience teaching legal practice and clinical skills courses to assign briefs and oral arguments as a means for law students to immerse themselves in historical topics. Without distracting from other approaches, I framed this innovation as teaching legal history not to budding historians but to budding lawyers.

Clinical Collaborations: Going Global To Advance Social Entrepreneurship, Deborah Burand, Susan R. Jones, Jonathan Ng, Alicia E. Plerhoples

Articles

In the summer of 2012, transactional law clinics from three U.S. law schools: George Washington University; Georgetown University; and the University of Michigan launched a collaboration to serve a common client — Ashoka, a global nonprofit organization that supports close to 3,000 social entrepreneurs across 76 countries. While clinic collaborations within universities happen occasionally, clinic collaborations across universities are unusual. This essay focuses on the motivations, operations, lessons, and next steps of this cross-university, clinical collaboration aimed at advancing social entrepreneurship globally. Specifically, this essay examines why the collaboration was launched, how the collaboration is structured, what the collaboration offers …

Training The New Litigator: Some Assembly Required, Leonard M. Niehoff

Articles

The financial crisis of 2008 brought the legal profession to a crossroads. Indeed, it brought the profession to so many crossroads that we awoke to find ourselves in a surreal cityscape that seemed to consist of nothing but dangerous intersections. Law firms faced tough decisions about which way to go: Should we get smaller, or stay the course, or take advantage of the buyer's market for new and lateral hires? Should we jettison struggling clients or stand beside them? Should we cut budgets for business development, or do we need them now more than ever? Should we pursue some practice …

Overstating The Satisfaction Of Lawyers, David L. Chambers

Articles

Recent literature commonly reports US lawyers as disheartened and discontented, but more than two dozen statistically based studies report that the great majority of lawyers put themselves on the satisfied side of scales of job satisfaction. The claim of this article is that, in three ways, these statistically based studies convey an overly rosy impression of lawyers’ attitudes: first, that many of those who put themselves above midpoints on satisfaction scales are barely more positive than negative about their careers and often have profound ambivalence about their work; second, that surveys conducted at a single point in time necessarily fail …

Reflections On The End Of The Federal Law Clerk Hiring Plan, Aaron L. Nielson

Michigan Law Review First Impressions

As applicants, federal judges, and law school career counselors everywhere frantically come to terms with the new clerkship landscape, one truth is inescapable: the Federal Law Clerk Hiring Plan ("the Plan") is dead. On January 29, 2013, the D.C. Circuit-the Plan's last and best defender-announced that it would no longer follow the Plan. The consequences of that announcement have been swift. For the last several months, months earlier than almost anyone expected, untold numbers of federal judges across the country have been rushing to hire law clerks. For these judges, the unregulated clerkship market of the pre-Plan era is back. …

Satisfaction In The Practice Of Law: Findings From A Long-Term Study Of Attorneys' Careers, U. Of Mich. Public Law Research Paper No. 330. (2013), David L. Chambers

Bibliography of Research Using UMLS Alumni Survey Data

For forty years beginning in the late 1960s, the University of Michigan Law School conducted annual surveys of its alumni. The project included fifty successive graduating classes, with all but the most recent classes surveyed more than once. Over thirteen thousand alumni participated. Over the forty years, American legal education and the American legal profession underwent huge changes. When the study began, there were almost no women or minority students at Michigan and very few in the country as a whole. The vast majority of all students and lawyers were white and male. By the end, white men constituted far …

Making Method Visible: Improving The Quality Of Science-Based Regulation, Pasky Pascual, Wendy Wagner, Elizabeth Fisher

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

Scientific inferences are theories about how the world works that scientists formulate based on their observations. One of the most difficult issues at the intersection of law and science is to determine whether the weight of evidence supports one scientific inference versus other competing interpretations of the observations. In administrative law, this difficulty is exacerbated by the behavior of both the courts and regulatory agencies. Agencies seldom achieve the requisite visibility that explains the analytical methods they use to reach their scientific inferences. Courts—because they appreciate neither the variety of inferential methods nor their epistemic foundations—do not demand this level …

The Transformative Potential Of Attorney Bilingualism, Jayesh M. Rathod

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

In contemporary U.S. law practice, attorney bilingualism is increasingly valued, primarily because it allows lawyers to work more efficiently and to pursue a broader range of professional opportunities. This purely functionalist conceptualization of attorney bilingualism, however, ignores the surprising ways in which multilingualism can enhance a lawyer's professional work and can strengthen and reshape relationships among actors in the U.S. legal milieu. Drawing upon research from psychology, linguistics, and other disciplines, this Article advances a theory of the transformative potential of attorney bilingualism. Looking first to the development of lawyers themselves, the Article posits that attorneys who operate bilingually may, …

Oh, The Treatise!, Richard A. Danner

Michigan Law Review

In his foreword to the Michigan Law Review's 2009 Survey of Books Related to the Law, my former Duke colleague Erwin Chemerinsky posed the question: "[W]hy should law professors write?" In answering, Erwin took as a starting point the well-known criticisms of legal scholarship that Judge Harry Edwards published in this journal in 1992. Judge Edwards indicted legal scholars for failing to engage the practical problems facing lawyers and judges, writing instead for the benefit of scholars in law and other disciplines rather than for their professional audiences. He characterized "practical" legal scholarship as both prescriptive (aiming to instruct attorneys, …

Sff Auction 2013, University Of Michigan Law School

Event Materials

Program for the March 21, 2013 Student Funded Fellowships Auction.

The Landscape Of The Legal Professions In Europe And The Usa: Continuity And Change, Xiaomeng Zhang

Law Librarian Scholarship

Overall, all articles in the book are thoroughly researched, documented, and presented with in-depth scholarly analyses. Although it is entitled The Landscape of the Legal Professions in the Europe and the USA, the European focus is apparent and dominant. On the other hand, comparative methodology is employed in most of the articles, either through a comparison of Europe nations and the United States, or through comparisons and contrasts among European countries. It will be of invaluable assistance to scholars interested in legal professions and legal system specifically and foreign and comparative law in general. It will be a great addition …