Legal Education Commons^™

Law, Universities, And The Challenge Of Moving A Graveyard, Wendy Collins Perdue

Law Faculty Publications

Against this dark narrative genre, Carel Stolker‘s new book, Rethinking the Law School, stands in sharp contrast. Having been both a law school dean and university president at Leiden University in The Netherlands, Stolker brings the perspective of a dean who has sought to innovate, and of a university president who has dealt with the political, academic, financial, and managerial complications of a modern university. The book offers a broad look at legal education around the world, along with a thoughtful exposition of the challenges facing law schools and law deans. Stolker is no cheerleader for the current state of …

Teaching To The Test: The Incorporation Of Elements Of The Bar Exam Preparation In Legal Education, Emmeline Paulette Reeves

Law Faculty Publications

This essay stops far short of advocating for a three-year bar exam course in place of a traditional law school education. It does not even argue for dedicating the final semester of law school to bar exam preparation. Rather, it suggests that the incorporation of elements of bar preparation into the law school curriculum actually can accomplish the dual objectives of, first, making law school education more efficient, and, second, enhancing the students' educational experience and grasp of the legal principles and skills necessary for passing the bar and, ultimately, becoming better lawyers.

Specifically, this essay urges law schools and …

How Improving Decision-Making And Mindfulness Can Improve Legal Ethics And Professionalism, Peter H. Huang

Publications

Lawyers who behave unethically and unprofessionally do so for various reasons, ranging from intention to carelessness. Lawyer misconduct can also result from decision-making flaws. Psychologist Chip Heath and his brother Dan Heath, in their best-selling book, Decisive: How to Make Better Decisions in Life and Work, suggest a process to improve people’s decision-making. They introduce the acronym WRAP as the mnemonic for these decision-making heuristics: (1) Widen your options, (2) Reality-test your assumptions, (3) Attain distance before deciding, and (4) Prepare to be wrong. The WRAP process mitigates these cognitive biases: (1) narrow framing of a decision problem, (2) …

Towards A Pedagogy Of Diversity In Legal Education, Faisal Bhabha

Osgoode Hall Law Journal

There is resounding consensus that diversity in legal education is a priority. Yet, North American law schools continue to be criticized for failing to reflect the diversity of the society that they are training lawyers to serve. This article is a project of conceptual reorientation against a backdrop of critical scholarship and empirical evidence. Parts I and II examine the past twenty years of diversity promotion in legal education, concluding that, while several advances have been made, especially in increasing numerical representation of diverse groups in law schools, the promise of meaningful diversity remains unfulfilled. Part III suggests that reforms …

Libraries And Legal Education, Jonathan Franklin

Librarians' Chapters in Books

Academic law libraries are in the midst of radical change, probably more so than at any time in the past 100 years. Two factors are converging that make business as usual no longer viable for academic law libraries: transition of legal resources from print to digital formats and economic changes in legal education.

Best Practices for Legal Education did not address the role of law libraries in the delivery of legal education. The changes facing law schools suggest now is the time to articulate how libraries can best contribute to the endeavor. How can best practices for law libraries be …

Cross-Boarder Teaching And Collaboration, Kimberly D. Ambrose, William H.D. Fernholz, Catherine F. Klein, Dana Raigrodski, Stephen A. Rosenbaum, Leah Wortham

Chapters in Books

Since the publication of Best Practices for Legal Education, the globalization of both legal education and law practice has exploded. Today’s lawyers increasingly serve border-crossing clients or clients who present with transnational legal issues. As law schools expand their international programs, and enroll increasing numbers of non-U.S. law students, law students transcend cultural and legal borders. As a result, they deepen their understanding of—and sharpen their critical perspective on—their own national systems. Similarly, U.S. law teachers are increasingly called to engage in border-crossing teaching and other academic pursuits. Best Practices did not address these issues. The primary aim of …

Business And Financial Literacy, Dwight Drake

Chapters in Books

Law practice continues to become more complex and demand a broader range of specialized knowledge. Business and financial literacy skills, once viewed as only important in business school or for law students who intend to become lawyers representing business owners or entities, are being viewed differently by legal educators who desire to ensure that law students are prepared for practice.

The world is driven by business, and core business and financial issues routinely surface in various types of legal disputes, transactions, and planning challenges. At a minimum, knowledge of basic business and financial concepts will help a lawyer deal with …

Transfer Of Learning, Deborah Maranville

Chapters in Books

A key characteristic of effective education is that students are able to retain and build on the information, skills, and values they learn in their work in later courses and in the world. Doing so is known as transfer of learning. Ultimately, for law students that means they are able to transfer what they learn into the work they do as professionals. Best Practices for Legal Education did not delve deeply into the educational literature on transfer of learning.

Underlying its preparation for practice theme, however, was an implicit recognition that both individual law teachers and law schools as institutions …

Pathways, Integration, And Sequencing The Curriculum, Deborah Maranville, Cynthia Batt

Chapters in Books

Law school course offerings have proliferated in recent decades. This development reflects the addition of specialized doctrinal courses, a growing emphasis on interdisciplinary knowledge, and the incorporation of practice-oriented courses. From the perspective of the individual student, an expanded curriculum may create exciting educational opportunities while posing trade-offs between a generalist education and specialization.

Law schools face two key challenges. First, they must structure the curriculum so that the experiences of individual law students have some coherence, or, if you will, seem integrated. Second they must incorporate the full range of what the Carnegie Reports referred to as the apprenticeships …

Incorporating Experiential Education Throughout The Curriculum, Deborah Maranville, Cynthia Batt, Lisa Radtke Bliss, Carolyn Wilkes Kaas

Chapters in Books

In discussing experiential education, Best Practices for Legal Education focused primarily on the three traditional types of separate experiential courses: in-house clinics, externships, and simulations, and treated them in a separate chapter. These courses were defined as those where “experience is a significant or primary method of instruction” rather than a secondary method, and where “students must perform complex skills in order to gain expertise.”

Arguably, this separate treatment reinforced what has too often been a divide between doctrinally-focused teaching and practice-focused teaching. Best Practices recognized that “experiential education can be employed as an adjunct to traditional methodologies regardless of …

Faculty Status And Institutional Effectiveness, Deborah Maranville, Ruth Anne Robbins, Kristen K. Tiscione

Chapters in Books

Legal education has expanded to incorporate practice-oriented topics and courses over the past several decades, and student academic support services have multiplied in response to changing student populations. As a consequence of these changes, law schools are overdue to address the issue of the status of the individuals they hire to fill the multiple and ever expanding needs and interests of students.

Should law schools hire new personnel as teachers, staff, or administrators? If hired as teachers, what titles and governance rights should they be given? Should they be eligible for tenure, presumptively renewable long-term contracts, or short-term contracts? What …

Ensuring Effective Education In Alternative Clinical Models, Deborah Maranville

Chapters in Books

Best Practices for Legal Education organized its discussion of experiential courses around the “simulation-based courses, in-house clinics, and externships” typology without specifically defining what structures fall within each category or discussing the variations. The discussion of in-house clinics focused on fundamental principles for effective teaching and supervision and the need for appropriate facilities and office support. It only implicitly addressed the range of issues presented by alternative structures for clinics and did not address alternative externship structures or variations that combine features of both.

A Conscious Institutional Strategy For Expanding Experiential Education, Lisa Radtke Bliss, Deborah Maranville

Chapters in Books

As law schools seek to better prepare students for the profession, they are expanding experiential education in traditional contexts such as theory and practice simulation skills courses, clinics, and externships. At the same time, they are also searching for opportunities to expose students to practical learning opportunities during the entire course of their legal education by incorporating experiential education throughout the curriculum. It is a best practice to develop conscious strategies for pursuing this effort. While Best Practices for Legal Education called for the integration of teaching theory, doctrine, and practice, it did not address strategies for integrating experiential education …

The Socratic Method, Elizabeth G. Porter

Chapters in Books

The Socratic method, one of Langdell’s most well-entrenched reforms to legal education, remains the law’s signature pedagogical technique. Although the term means different things to different people, its essence in the law school classroom is student analysis of cases led by a teacher, who calls on students to articulate gradually deeper understandings of a legal doctrine or theory.

Socratic learning requires students to think on the spot, answer precisely, and take intellectual risks. For over a decade now, the Socratic method has been out of fashion among those who write about legal pedagogy. In addition, the method’s critics describe what …

The Socratic Method, Elizabeth G. Porter

Books

The Socratic method, one of Langdell’s most well-entrenched reforms to legal education, remains the law’s signature pedagogical technique. Although the term means different things to different people, its essence in the law school classroom is student analysis of cases led by a teacher, who calls on students to articulate gradually deeper understandings of a legal doctrine or theory.

Socratic learning requires students to think on the spot, answer precisely, and take intellectual risks. For over a decade now, the Socratic method has been out of fashion among those who write about legal pedagogy. In addition, the method’s critics describe what …

Faculty Status And Institutional Effectiveness, Deborah Maranville, Ruth Anne Robbins, Kristen K. Tiscione

Books

Legal education has expanded to incorporate practice-oriented topics and courses over the past several decades, and student academic support services have multiplied in response to changing student populations. As a consequence of these changes, law schools are overdue to address the issue of the status of the individuals they hire to fill the multiple and ever expanding needs and interests of students.

Should law schools hire new personnel as teachers, staff, or administrators? If hired as teachers, what titles and governance rights should they be given? Should they be eligible for tenure, presumptively renewable long-term contracts, or short-term contracts? What …

Pathways, Integration, And Sequencing The Curriculum, Deborah Maranville, Cynthia Batt

Books

Law school course offerings have proliferated in recent decades. This development reflects the addition of specialized doctrinal courses, a growing emphasis on interdisciplinary knowledge, and the incorporation of practice-oriented courses. From the perspective of the individual student, an expanded curriculum may create exciting educational opportunities while posing trade-offs between a generalist education and specialization.

Law schools face two key challenges. First, they must structure the curriculum so that the experiences of individual law students have some coherence, or, if you will, seem integrated. Second they must incorporate the full range of what the Carnegie Reports referred to as the apprenticeships …

Transfer Of Learning, Deborah Maranville

Books

A key characteristic of effective education is that students are able to retain and build on the information, skills, and values they learn in their work in later courses and in the world. Doing so is known as transfer of learning. Ultimately, for law students that means they are able to transfer what they learn into the work they do as professionals. Best Practices for Legal Education did not delve deeply into the educational literature on transfer of learning.

Underlying its preparation for practice theme, however, was an implicit recognition that both individual law teachers and law schools as institutions …

Ensuring Effective Education In Alternative Clinical Models, Deborah Maranville

Books

Best Practices for Legal Education organized its discussion of experiential courses around the “simulation-based courses, in-house clinics, and externships” typology without specifically defining what structures fall within each category or discussing the variations. The discussion of in-house clinics focused on fundamental principles for effective teaching and supervision and the need for appropriate facilities and office support. It only implicitly addressed the range of issues presented by alternative structures for clinics and did not address alternative externship structures or variations that combine features of both.

Incorporating Experiential Education Throughout The Curriculum, Deborah Maranville, Cynthia Batt, Lisa Radtke Bliss, Carolyn Wilkes Kaas

Books

In discussing experiential education, Best Practices for Legal Education focused primarily on the three traditional types of separate experiential courses: in-house clinics, externships, and simulations, and treated them in a separate chapter. These courses were defined as those where “experience is a significant or primary method of instruction” rather than a secondary method, and where “students must perform complex skills in order to gain expertise.”

Arguably, this separate treatment reinforced what has too often been a divide between doctrinally-focused teaching and practice-focused teaching. Best Practices recognized that “experiential education can be employed as an adjunct to traditional methodologies regardless of …