Legal Profession Commons^™

Gender Inequity Throughout The Legal Academy: A Quick Look At The (Surprisingly Limited) Data, Kristen K. Tiscione

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The long-standing overrepresentation of female law faculty in skills teaching and service-oriented positions is well documented. In contrast, the historical underrepresentation of female law faculty in top dean and tenured or tenure-track teaching positions has been widely recognized but difficult to quantify. The American Bar Association has a link in the statistics archives of its website to a chart from Fall 2013 on the gender, ethnicity, and status of law faculty. The Association of American Law Schools (AALS) links to the same chart on its website. This chart replaced a similar chart covering 2008 to 2009 that the ABA has …

Access To Law Or Access To Lawyers? Master's Programs In The Public Educational Mission Of Law Schools, Mark Burge

Faculty Scholarship

The general decline in juris doctor (“J.D.”) law school applicants and enrollment over the last decade has coincided with the rise of a new breed of law degree. Whether known as a master of jurisprudence, juris master, master of legal studies, or other names, these graduate degrees all have a target audience in common: adult professionals who neither are nor seek to become practicing attorneys. Inside legal academia and among the practicing bar, these degrees have been accompanied by expressed concerns that they detract from the traditional core public mission of law schools—educating lawyers. This Article argues that non-lawyer master’s …

Ok, Google, Will Artificial Intelligence Replace Human Lawyering?, Amy Vorenberg, Julie A. Oseid, Melissa Love Koenig

Law Faculty Scholarship

Will Artificial Intelligence (AI) replace human lawyering? The answer is no. Despite worries that AI is getting so sophisticated that it could take over the profession, there is little cause for concern. Indeed, the surge of AI in the legal field has crystalized the real essence of effective lawyering. The lawyer’s craft goes beyond what AI can do because we listen with empathy to clients’ stories, strategize to find that story that might not be obvious, thoughtfully use our imagination and judgment to decide which story will appeal to an audience, and creatively tell those winning stories.

This article reviews …

Rural Practice As Public Interest Work, Hannah Haksgaard

Maine Law Review

As the rural lawyer shortage continues to grow, rural states and communities must find new ways of attracting law students and graduates to rural practice. This Article explores incentives based on conceptualizing rural private practice as public interest work. Rural lawyers provide public interest lawyering through pro bono cases, mixed practices, community service, and even through providing fee-paid services in rural communities. The Article asserts that law schools and rural communities can capitalize on this view to recruit new lawyers and argues that federal loan forgiveness programs should be expanded to cover rural lawyers.

Foreword, Mac Walton Editor-In-Chief

Maine Law Review

No abstract provided.

Connecting Prospective Law Students' Goals To The Competencies That Clients And Legal Employers Need To Achieve More Competent Graduates And Stronger Applicant Pools And Employment Outcomes, Neil W. Hamilton

St. Mary's Journal on Legal Malpractice & Ethics

The author’s chapters in the 2018 professional responsibility hornbook, Legal Ethics, Professional Responsibility, and the Legal Profession, discuss the new data available to help law faculties and students understand the competencies that clients and legal employers want. The foundation for many of these competencies—like ownership over continuous professional development and the relational competencies with clients and teams—is the student’s professional identity or moral core. But students need help to understand these connections.

We have seen some very useful new data over the last few months that will help build bridges among the three major stakeholders in legal education: the …

From Decoder Rings To Deep Fakes: Translating Complex Technologies For Legal Education, Jason Tubinis, Rachel S. Evans

Presentations

Technological developments are disrupting the practice of law” is a common refrain, but the last few years has seen some particularly complex pieces of technology become the hot new thing in legal tech. This session will look at blockchain, quantum computing, artificial intelligence, and ‘Deep Fakes’ as examples of how instructors can stay abreast of technological developments and inform themselves about their impacts in the legal profession. Then we will look at how to translate the complexities and jargon of these examples into lessons for for-credit courses, one-off informational sessions, or meetings with stakeholders.

Learning outcomes:

• Participants will be able …

Data Visualization: Tips & Tricks, Amy Taylor, Carol A. Watson

Presentations

Data visualization has quickly become a fixture in daily life, from presentations of charts and graphs by media organizations to presentations of data analytics and case relationships by legal database providers. This program will walk participants through the four conceptualizations of data presentation, as well as an exploration on using data visualization to persuade your audience. We will present law library examples for each concept, using free and low cost data visualization tools.

Legal Education Unbundled (And Rebundled), Megan Carpenter

Law Faculty Scholarship

This essay calls for an unbundling of legal education, much like the kind of unbundling we have seen in the cable, music, and print news media. It suggests that the standard legal education "bundle"-the generalized JD-is just one of many forms of legal education that can be packaged appropriately for today's legal education market needs.

The Rise Of The Creative Law School, Gregory W. Bowman

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

No abstract provided.

From The Courtroom To The Classroom: How A Litigator Became A Transactional Drafting Professor, Amy Bauer

Publications

No abstract provided.

The New Normal Ten Years In: The Job Market For New Lawyers Today And What It Means For The Legal Academy Tomorrow, Bernard A. Burk

FIU Law Review

No abstract provided.

Ringing Changes: Systems Thinking About Legal Licensing, Joan W. Howarth, Judith Welch Wegner

FIU Law Review

No abstract provided.

Training Powerful Legal Communicators: What Does The Future Hold, Nicholas W. Allard, Heidi K. Brown

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

De-Grading Assessment: Rejecting Rubrics In Favor Of Authentic Analysis, Deborah L. Borman

Seattle University Law Review

Assigning grades is the least joyful duty of the law professor. In the current climate of legal education, law professors struggle with issues such as increased class size, providing “practice-ready” graduates, streamlining assignments, and accountability in assessment. In an effort to ease the burden of grading written legal analyses, individual professors or law school writing programs or both may develop articulated rubrics to assess students’ written work. Rubrics are classification tools that allow us to articulate our judgment of a written work. Rubrics may be as extensive as twenty categories and subcategories or may be limited to only a few …

Battling Fake News And Developing Digital Literacy Skills In The Legal Profession, Carol A. Watson, Caroline Osborne, Kris Niedringhaus

Presentations

Alternative facts? Truthiness? Post Truth? Hardly a day passes without someone making a reference to fake news. But why should lawyers care and what can information technology professionals and the legal academy do about it?
In order to fulfil a lawyer's duty of technology competency, digital information literacy is essential. Legal professionals must be able to locate, evaluate and use online information effectively. Evaluation of the reliability of digital information is a complex skill that must be mastered for the successful practice of law.
This program will discuss digital information literacy in the context of fake news. The session will …

“So Teacher, What Is The Right Answer?” Incorporating Critical Thinking Into The Mexican Legal Education: The Application Of The Us Model, Dr. Ying Chen

University of Miami Inter-American Law Review

No abstract provided.

Law School Leadership And Leadership Development For Developing Lawyers, Louis D. Bilionis

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

A growing number of legal educators are calling for greater attention to leadership development as an element of legal education at American law schools. Some make the case directly in the name of leadership education. Others see leadership development as part of a broader law school responsibility to provide purposeful support for students in the formation of their professional identity. For yet others, development of leadership skills figures in a law school’s appropriate commitment to the professionalism, professional development, or wellness of its students. These educators, though employing different locutions, constitute a “coalition of the willing” – law school faculty …

Then And Now: A Perspective, Caroline D. Glassman

Maine Law Review

I am very pleased to have been asked to speak to you tonight for it gives me, in the first instance, an opportunity to compare the status of women in the law when I entered law school with that in more current times. I do this without fear of contradiction for I can safely vouch for the fact that there is no other person present here tonight who was a woman law student 50 or so years ago.

Keeping Students Awake: Feminist Theory And Legal Education, Martha Minow

Maine Law Review

I am not exactly sure why, but when I turned to think about legal education for today's conference, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein came to mind. It was not because of my own nightmares that my chosen profession as law professor involves turning ordinary people into monsters, although that's a thought we can explore perhaps over drinks. It was because of this comment Shelley makes in the book: “If the study to which you apply yourself has a tendency to weaken your affections, and to destroy your taste for those simple pleasures in which no alloy can possibly mix, then that study …

Teaching And Assessing Soft Skills, Sophie M. Sparrow

Law Faculty Scholarship

[excerpt from article] It is our job as legal educators to put our law graduates in the best position to succeed as new lawyers.1 And to succeed, law graduates must possess certain qualities or character traits that will enable them to thrive within legal organizations.2 Despite many calls for reform in legal education to include more practice-related skills, including professionalism, many law professors teaching doctrinal courses are reluctant to incorporate teaching professional competencies and behaviors.3 They are unwilling to do so even though they have long decried students’ lack of professional skills.4 Professors complain that students show up late for …

Well-Timed Solutions For Legal Education And The Bar, William D. Henderson

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Mindful Lawyering: The Key To Creative Problem Solving, Kathleen Elliott Vinson, Samantha A. Moppett, Shailini Jandial George

Suffolk University Law School Faculty Works

Mindful Lawyering introduces students to creative problem solving and mindfulness in the context of law school and beyond, presenting checklists, scenarios, and hypotheticals that invite student engagement. The Table of Contents, Introduction, and Chapter One are available to download here.

The Power Of Imagination: Diversity And The Education Of Lawyers And Judges, Barry Sullivan

Faculty Publications & Other Works

No abstract provided.

Adventures In Higher Education, Happiness, And Mindfulness, Peter H. Huang

Publications

This Article recounts my unique adventures in higher education, including being a Princeton University freshman mathematics major at age 14, Harvard University applied mathematics graduate student at age 17, economics and finance faculty at multiple schools, first-year law student at the University of Chicago, second- and third-year law student at Stanford University, and law faculty at multiple schools. This Article also candidly discusses my experiences as student and professor and openly shares how I achieved sustainable happiness by practicing mindfulness to reduce fears, rumination, and worry in facing adversity, disappointment, and setbacks. This Article analyzes why law schools should teach …

Visual Literacy For The Legal Profession, Richard K. Sherwin

Articles & Chapters

Digital technology has transformed the way we communicate in society. Swept along on a digital tide, words, sounds, and images easily, and often, flow together. This state of affairs has radically affected not only our commercial and political practices in society, but also the way we practice law.

Unfortunately, legal education and legal theory have not kept up. Inconsistencies and unpredictability in the way courts ascertain the admissibility of various kinds of visual evidence and visual argumentation, lapses in the cross examination of visual evidence at trial, and inadequately theorized notions of visual meaning and the epistemology of affect tell …

Legal Deserts: A Multi-State Perspective On Rural Access To Justice (Forthcoming), Danielle M. Conway

Faculty Publications

Rural America faces an increasingly dire access to justice crisis, which serves to exacerbate the already disproportionate share of social problems afflicting rural areas. One critical aspect of that crisis is the dearth of information and research regarding the extent of the problem and its impacts. This article begins to address that gap by providing surveys of rural access to justice in six geographically, demographically, and economically varied states: California, Georgia, Maine, Minnesota, South Dakota, and Wisconsin. In addition to providing insights about the distinct rural challenges confronting each of these states, the legal resources available, and existing policy responses, …

“The Lost Lawyer” Regained: The Abiding Values Of The Legal Profession, Robert Maccrate

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

No abstract provided.

Eying The Body: The Impact Of Classical Rules For Demeanor Credibility, Bias, And The Need To Blind Legal Decision Makers, Daphne O’Regan

Pace Law Review

This Article focuses on law students and attorneys, not parties, witnesses, experts, and others. Part I briefly provides background: the pivotal role of classical rhetoric in western education, including the United States, the dispositive position of demeanor credibility in oral trial, and the persistent doubts about its reliability—doubts turned into certainty over two decades of research. Part II compares modern and ancient manuals to explain the rules of elite demeanor and its ideological claim to truth. Part III compares ancient and modern understanding of popular delivery; that is, choices in non-verbal communication that run counter to the elite rules and …

A Blueprint For A Fairer Aba Standard For Judging Law Graduates’ Competence: How A Standard Based On Students’ Scores In Relation To The National Mean Mbe Score Properly Balances Consumer Safety With Increased Diversity In The Bar, William Wesley Patton

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

Current and recently proposed American Bar Association (ABA) standards regarding students’ bar passage rates have a significant disparate impact on states that have adopted difficult bar examination passage standards (the Multistate Bar Exam (MBE cut scores). Many scholars have demonstrated that the ABA bar passage standards have a negative impact on diversity in the bar by discouraging law schools from enrolling large numbers of minority students, who have, traditionally, performed below state mean in passage rates on the exam. This study presents a new and supplemental standard for the ABA to use in monitoring student outcome measures and law schools’ …