Legal Education Commons^™

Disciplining Legal Scholarship, Lynn M. Lopucki

UF Law Faculty Publications

U.S. law schools are hiring large proportions of J.D.-Ph.D.s in tenure-track faculty positions in an effort to increase the quantity and quality of empirical legal scholarship. That effort is failing. The new recruits bring methods and objectives unsuited to law. They produce lower-than-predicted levels of empiricism because they compete on the basis of methodological sophistication, devote time and resources to disputes over arcane issues in statistics and methodology, prefer to collaborate with other Ph.D.s, and intimidate empiricists whose work does not require high levels of methodological sophistication. In short, Ph.D.s impose the cultures of their disciplines on legal scholarship. Importing …

Addressing Barriers To Cultural Sensibility Learning: Lessons From Social Cognition Theory, Andrea A. Curcio

Faculty Publications By Year

Understanding subconscious biases, their pervasiveness, and their impact on perceptions, interactions, and analyses, helps prepare lawyers to represent people from cultural and racial backgrounds different from their own, and to address both individual and institutional injustice. Two law student surveys suggest many students believe lawyers are less susceptible than clients to having, or acting upon, stereotypes or biases. The survey results also indicate that many students suffer from bias blind spot – i.e. they believe that while others cannot recognize when they are acting based upon stereotypical beliefs and biases, the students know when they are doing so. The survey …

An Incredible Legacy, Kristina L. Niedringhaus

Faculty Publications By Year

No abstract provided.

What Judges Want And Need: User-Friendly Foundations For Effective Judicial Education, Duane Benton, Jennifer A.L. Sheldon-Sherman

Journal of Dispute Resolution

This article evaluates the connection between judicial education and judges’ needs and preferences. In Part I, we begin by discussing the history, purpose, and form of judicial education, charting its evolution over time. In Part II, we examine current judicial education programs and scholarship, highlighting differences and similarities between federal and state programming. In Part III, we analyze the limitations of existing scholarship and programming, arguing judicial education programs are insufficiently tied to evidence of judicial demands. We conclude in Parts IV and V by suggesting two proposals to align programming with needs: (1) an annual needs-based assessment of judicial …

Making Sausage: What, Why And How To Teach About Legislative Process In A Legislation Or Leg-Reg Course, Deborah A. Widiss

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Although a rapidly growing number of law schools require students to take a course on legislation, many of these courses teach very little about how laws are actually enacted. This essay, written for a special issue of the Journal of Legal Education, argues that study of the legislative process helps students interpret and apply statutory language.

The essay surveys existing text books and supplemental resources that could be easily integrated into a Leg-Reg or Legislation class to explain modern Congressional procedure. The focus is the multiple distinct paths that bills may take through a legislative body and the written …

Foreword: Reflections On Our Founding, Luis Fuentes-Rohwer, Guy-Uriel Charles

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Redefining Attention (And Revamping The Legal Profession?) For The Digital Generation, Lauren A. Newell

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Crisis And Trigger Warnings: Reflections On Legal Education And The Social Value Of The Law, 90 Chi.-Kent L. Rev. 615 (2015), Kim D. Chanbonpin

UIC Law Open Access Faculty Scholarship

This Essay begins by understanding the law school crisis through the framework of disaster capitalism. This framing uncovers the ways in which reformers are taking advantage of the current crisis to restructure legal education. Under the circumstances, faculty may reasonably read the contemporaneous student-led movement to require trigger warnings in the classroom as an assault on academic freedom. This reading, however, clouds the water. Part II attempts to clear the confusion by decoupling the trigger-warning movement from the broader phenomenon of law school corporatization. Trigger-warning demands might alternatively be read as a student critique of traditional law school pedagogy. Especially …

No Lawyer For A Hundred Miles? Mapping The New Geography Of Access Of Justice In Canada, Jamie Baxter, Albert Yoon

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Abstract

Recent concerns about the geography of access to justice in Canada have focused on the dwindling number of lawyers in rural and remote areas, raising anxieties about the profession’s inability to meet current and future demands for localized legal services. These concerns have motivated a range of policy responses that aim to improve the education, training, recruitment and retention of practitioners in underserved areas. We surveyed lawyers across Ontario to better understand their physical proximity to clients and how, if at all, that proximity promotes access to justice. We find that lawyers’ scope of practice varies based on a …

Judicial Education And Regulatory Capture: Does The Current System Of Educating Judges Promote A Well-Functioning Judiciary And Adequately Serve The Public Interest?, S. I. Strong

Faculty Articles

This phenomenon suggests a pressing need for further scrutiny into matters relating to the education of judges in this country. This Essay therefore considers of a number of fundamental issues relating to judicial education in the United States so as to consider, at least as a preliminary matter, whether regulatory capture exists. Given the scope of this Essay, some issues are necessarily excluded. Nevertheless, this Essay hopes to trigger a deeper debate about judicial education in this country.

The structure of the analysis is as follows. First, the Essay considers certain obstacles to research concerning judicial education as a means …

Law Libraries And Laboratories: The Legacies Of Langdell And His Metaphor, Richard A. Danner

Faculty Scholarship

Law Librarians and others have often referred to Harvard Law School Dean C.C. Langdell’s statements that the law library is the lawyer’s laboratory. Professor Danner examines the context of what Langdell through his other writings, the educational environment at Harvard in the late nineteenth century, and the changing perceptions of university libraries generally. He then considers how the “laboratory metaphor” has been applied by librarians and legal scholars during the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. The article closes with thoughts on Langdell’s legacy for law librarians and the usefulness of the laboratory metaphor.

Library Director As Change Agent: Analysis Two, Implementing Change In Difficult Times, Femi Cadmus

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Leaping Language And Cultural Barriers With Visual Legal Rhetoric, Michael D. Murray

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

This Article discusses the scholarship of popular culture, cognitive studies and brain science, data visualization studies, modern argument theory in rhetoric, the rapid development of technology in the production of documents, and technology in the reading and reception of documents, which all point to one outcome: the tools of legal education and law practice must become more visual by following principles of visual legal rhetoric and visual narrativity. Visual has become the "new normal" in communication, and legal rhetorical communication in law school and law practice must not let itself fall behind the times.

This Is Your Brain On Law School: The Impact Of Fear-Based Narratives On Law Students, Abigail A. Patthoff

Utah Law Review

Law students regularly top the charts as among the most dissatisfied, demoralized, and depressed of graduate-student populations. As their teachers, we cannot ignore the palpable presence of this stress in our classrooms—unchecked, it stifles learning, encourages counterproductive behavior, and promotes illness.

By more thoughtfully using cautionary tales, we can actively manage one source of law student anxiety. Although reining in cautionary tales will certainly not be a panacea to law student distress, elimination of all law student anxiety is neither a realistic nor a desirable goal. Fear-based stress, in moderation, can compel students to overcome challenges they never thought possible; …

From Students To Colleagues: The Legal Writing Classroom Can Create Conscientious & Empathetic Practitioners, Rachel H. Smith

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

As we teach legal writing to new law students, we want them to learn to be good writers, good researchers, and good counselors and advocates. But I also want each of my students to learn about being a good colleague—to develop a professional identity that depends on being conscientious, empathetic, and collegial. The legal writing course has a special role in exposing students to the significance of these qualities, which makes it the most important course in the first year of law school.

Intercultural Effectivenss, Mary A. Lynch, Robin Boyle, Rhonda Magee, Antoinette Sedillo López

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

The legal profession has recognized the need for cross-culturally competent lawyers. The American Bar Association, state and local bar associations, and other professional development experts have called for lawyers to develop cultural competencies. While the terminology used is not consistent, at its core, this call expresses a commitment to legal education that embraces the strengths of diverse student bodies and client populations. Legal education should more effectively help students examine how legal structures can ignore, silence, and devalue alternative perspectives and diverse identities.

BEST PRACTICES FOR LEGAL EDUCATION suggested that legal education should include training about cross-cultural competence, cited …

Using Principles From Cognitive Behavioral Therapy To Reduce Nervousness In Oral Argument Or Moot Court, Larry Cunningham

Faculty Publications

Sarah, a new attorney at a public defender’s office, is assigned to the appeals bureau. Ordinarily, Sarah spends her days researching and writing briefs, talking with clients, and brainstorming legal issues with colleagues. Today, however, she opened the mail to find a notice from the court setting a date for her first oral argument. She suffers the first of several anxiety attacks: rapid heart rate, racing thoughts, shortness of breath, sweaty palms, nausea, and feelings of panic and tension. As she reads the form letter, her hands tremble. This is the day she has dreaded. She loves to write and …

Latcrit Praxis @ Xx: Toward Equal Justice In Law, Education And Society, Tayyab Mahmud, Athena D. Mutua, Francisco Valdes

Journal Articles

This article marks the twentieth anniversary of Latina and Latino Critical Legal Theory or the LatCrit organization, an association of diverse scholars committed to the production of knowledge from the perspective of Outsider or OutCrit jurisprudence. The article first reflects on the historical development of LatCrit’s substantive, methodological, and institutional commitments and practices. It argues that these traditions were shaped not only by its members’ goals and commitments but also by the politics of backlash present at its birth in the form of the “cultural wars,” and which have since morphed into perpetual “crises” grounded in neoliberal policies. With this …

Scholarship Against Desire, Shari Motro

Law Faculty Publications

This article uses my own experience navigating the law review placement process to reflect on the dynamics that shape intellectual life at American law schools. My recent work focuses on the legal relationship between unmarried lovers who conceive. At its heart, it is about the law’s role in shaping the precursor to pregnancy—heterosexual sex. When I began researching this topic what I was most curious about was how law and culture might conspire to foster connections that are more loving and less violent, more authentic and less alienated. Pursuing this topic—which would entail exploring big existential questions to which I …

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 …