Legal Education Commons^™

Archiving The Pandemic: What It Has Meant To Chronicle What We Wish To Forget, Katyayani Suhrud

FIU Law Review

In the summer of 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic and all that it brought it with was still very new, Jindal Global University, where I am a law student, began putting together an archive of this time for the university community. This piece explores what it meant to archive the pandemic while simultaneously living through it, and how other people’s stories and experiences affected my own. Attempting to distance myself from the pandemic did nothing to aid its everyday struggles. Rather, choosing to be intimately involved with how it was affecting the lives of others and also my own proved …

Foreword To The Symposium: The Life And Work Of Robert M. Cover, Samuel J. Levine

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Racial And Ethnic Ancestry Of The Nation's Black Law Students: An Analysis Of Data From The Lssse Survey, Kevin D. Brown, Kenneth G. Dau-Schmidt

Articles by Maurer Faculty

This article proceeds in three substantive parts. In Part I, we discuss the changing racial and ethnic ancestries of Black people in the United States since affirmative action began. In Part II, we discuss the LSSSE data set that we use along with our weighting procedure based on the ABA data. Also in Part II, we discuss the Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS), a subset of the American Community Survey (ACS). We use the ACS PUMS to provide comparative national data to analyze the relative representation of each group of Blacks among law students. In Part III, we present the …

A Tribute To The Scholarship Of Professor Dale Oesterle, Jeffrey J. Haas

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

The Impact Of The Covid-19 Pandemic On First-Generation Women Test-Takers: Magnifying Adversities, Stress, And Consequences For Bar Exam Performance., Freiburger Erin, Victor D. Quintanilla, Kurt Hugenberg, Sam Erman, Nedim Yel, Anita Kim, Mary C. Murphy

Articles

By magnifying gender- and socioeconomic status-based inequalities, the COVID-19 pandemic caused stress and disrupted career progress for professional students. The present work investigated the impact of pandemic-related stress and prevailing barriers on structurally disadvantaged women preparing for a high-stakes professional exam. In Study 1, we found that among US law students preparing for the October 2020 California Bar Exam—the professional exam that enables one to become a practicing attorney in California—first-generation women reported the greatest stress from pandemic-related burdens and underperformed on the exam relative to others overall, and particularly compared to continuing-generation women. This underperformance was explained by pandemic-related …

Feedback Loops: Keep/Cut, Patrick Barry

Articles

In the first of installment of this new column on feedback in the September Illinois Bar Journal, we began to address the pernicious problem of vague feedback—that unhelpful, empty-calories form of (non) guidance that deprives people of learning what they’re currently doing well and what they need to ix. Without concrete, explicit guidance, it can be really tough to grow and improve.

Feedback Loops: Surviving The Feedback Desert, Patrick Barry

Articles

I ask my law students the following set of parallel questions on the very first day of “Feedback Loops,” a course I have been teaching for the past couple of years: What did you get better at last year? How do you know? What should you get better at this year? How do you know?

An Empirical Analysis Of Clinical Legal Education In Middle Age, Robert R. Kuehn, David A. Santacroce

Articles

Modern clinical legal education has turned fifty. Much has been written on its development and history, both as a pedagogy and in relation to the broader enterprise of legal education. But there has been no longitudinal empirical analysis documenting that growth until now. By looking at a series of nationwide surveys starting in 2007 and comparing those results to surveys dating back to the 1970s, this article paints a factual picture of clinical legal education’s progression from early adulthood to middle age.

Race Belongs In Week One Of Lrw, Beth H. Wilensky

Articles

I talk to my 1Ls about race and the law in their first week of law school. In doing so, I have discovered that discussing race helps me introduce foundational concepts about legal writing and law school that we will return to throughout the year. That is partly because race is relevant to nearly every topic law school touches on. But it is also because race is present in—and often conspicuous in its absence from—court opinions in ways that provide rich fodder for discussing how to approach law school. That topic interests all students—even those who might be skeptical about …

Designing Interdisciplinary, Early Intervention Dispute Resolution Tools To Decrease Evictions And Increase Housing Stability, Christine N. Cimini

Articles

This Article provides a unique glimpse into the development of an early-intervention, pre-court, interdisciplinary dispute resolution project intended to decrease evictions and increase housing stability for recipients of subsidized housing in Seattle. With a grant from the Seattle Housing Authority (SHA), a coalition of non-profit organizations had the rare opportunity to design a dispute resolution system into existence. A dispute system design team was formed and began by examining the interconnected problems of housing instability, eviction, and houselessness. Despite thorough research on dispute system design and extensive meetings with stakeholders, the deign team encountered numerous challenges. This Article identifies the …

The Kids Are Alright, Rachel H. Smith, Rosa Castello

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

As with the law itself, law students are always changing. And law professors should regularly consider how those changes will impact the classroom and our pedagogical approach. For our year-long Legal Writing course, the law students of 2021-22 surprised us with the careful and nuanced way they thought about language. Our 1L students were more interested in parsing the meaning, effect, and approach to potentially offensive language than any students we had taught before. We learned a lot from them. And what we learned will have a lasting impact on how we teach legal writing and design our legal …

Legal Fiction: Reading Lolita As A Sentencing Memorandum, Christina Frohock

Articles

No abstract provided.

Lawyering 'Twisties': Naming And Untangling Performance Anxiety, Heidi K. Brown

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Putting The Bar Exam On Constitutional Notice: Cut Scores, Race & Ethnicity, And The Public Good, Scott Johns

Seattle University Law Review

Nothing to see here. Season in and season out, bar examiners, experts, supreme courts, and bar associations seem nonplussed, trapped by what they see as the facts, namely, that the bar exam has no possible weaknesses, at least when it comes to alternative licensure mechanisms, that the bar exam is not to blame for disparate racial impacts that spring from administration of this ritualistic process, and that there are no viable alternatives in the harsh cold world of determining minimal competency for the noble purpose of protecting the public from legal harms. All a lie, of course.

But rather than …

Table Of Contents

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents

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 …

Opened Doors: A Tribute To Jon Forman, Katheleen Guzman

Other Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Forensic Science In Legal Education, Brandon L. Garrett, Glinda S. Cooper, Quinn Beckham

Faculty Scholarship

In criminal cases, forensic science reports and expert testimony play an increasingly important role in adjudication. More states now follow a federal reliability standard, following Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals and Rule 702, which calls upon judges to assess the reliability and validity of such scientific evidence. Little is known about what education law schools provide regarding forensic and scientific evidence or what types of specialized training they receive on scientific methods or evidence. Whether law schools have added forensic science courses to their curricula in recent years was not known. To better understand the answers to those questions, in …

What Law Schools Should Leave Behind, Danielle L. Tully

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

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 …