Legal Education Commons^™

Shifting The Lens: A Primer For Incorporating Social Work Theory And Practice To Improve Outcomes For Clients With Mental Health Issues And Law Students Who Represent Them, Susan Mcgraugh, Carrie Hagan, Lauren Choate

All Faculty Scholarship

This Essay is an effort to promote the inclusion of interdisciplinary practice in our work as attorneys and in our roles as clinical legal professors. As the legal community continues its renewed emphasis on skills training, law schools should look to other professions in order to produce more lasting solutions for our clients and for more satisfactory outcomes for our lawyers. In this Essay, the authors discuss their work incorporating social work theory and practice into clinical legal education when dealing with clients who have serious mental illness. With some studies reporting up to 64.2% of inmates in the United …

Creating And Teaching A Specialized Legal Research Course: The Benefits And Considerations, Erika Cohn

All Faculty Scholarship

This article outlines the author's experience creating and teaching a specialized legal research course. It includes the reasons for offering such a course, tips for selecting a topic and developing a syllabus, getting the course approved, creating student interest, developing a teaching plan, and evaluating the course.

Volume 37, No. 4

The Weldon Times

A student-run newspaper published at the Schulich School of Law at Dalhousie University.

Editor in Chief: Suzanne Kittell

Layout Editor: Kate Rothschild

Editors: Hannah Choo, Paul Neville, Alex Hartwig

Volume 38, No. 4

The Weldon Times

A student-run newspaper published at the Schulich School of Law at Dalhousie University.

Editor in Chief: Max Rothschild

Layout Editor: Kate Rothschild

Editors: Suzanne Kittle, Phil Moreria, Alex Gorlewski

Note: The issue was misprinted as Volume 37, no. 4

An Examination Of The Challenges, Successes And Setbacks For Clinical Legal Education In Eastern Europe, Dubravka Aksamovic, Philip Genty

Faculty Scholarship

The authors first met in 2000, and have collaborated in conferences, workshops, and other projects since then. We also represent two sides of an international exchange that has frequently occurred in the past 15 years: a European law teacher who attends training sessions, networks with colleagues from other European universities, learns about American models of clinical education, and possibly receives some outside funding; and an American law teacher who is graciously hosted by Europeans, promotes American models of clinical education, and, one hopes, observes, listens and learns about the European system. We are also experienced teachers within our own universities …

A Writing Revolution: Using Legal Writing's 'Hobble' To Solve Legal Education's Problem, Kristen Konrad Robbins-Tiscione

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The attached article responds to a 2011 article by John Lynch, published in the Journal of Legal Education, that urged legal writing faculty to return to an outmoded and ineffective writing pedagogy, the “product approach,” on the grounds that it would make teaching legal writing easier. This article builds on the work of Carol McCrehan Parker and others interested in writing across the curriculum and argues that the only way to reduce legal writing’s “hobble” and to solve legal education’s problem is to create a six-semester writing requirement. The reason law students are graduating without adequate preparation for practice is …

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

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

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 clients and …

Process, Practice, And Principle: Teaching National Security Law And The Knowledge That Matters Most, James E. Baker

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The meaningful application of national security law requires a commitment to substantive knowledge, good process, and a capacity to cope (and indeed thrive) under the prevailing conditions of practice. This paper describes how and why to teach these three essential elements of national security law from an academic and practitioner perspective.

The paper starts with substantive law, placing emphasis not just on the breadth of knowledge and interpretive skills required, but also on the importance of depth, perspective, theory, purpose, history, and legal values in teaching the law. Next, the paper describes the importance of timely, meaningful, and contextual process, …

Deal Deconstructions, Case Studies, And Case Simulations: Toward Practice Readiness With New Pedagogies In Teaching Business And Transactional Law, Michelle M. Harner, Robert J. Rhee

Faculty Scholarship

In this short commentary, we explore the use of two interrelated pedagogical methods for teaching transactional and business law. The first method is deal deconstruction, which analyzes the set of final deal documents and outcomes. This method is backward-looking, conducting a post-mortem on business transactions and analyzing the parties’ choices memorialized in the agreement against the legal and financial alternatives. The second method involves case studies and simulations, which are commonly seen in business schools. This method is forward-looking, exposing students to the uncertainties and situational contexts of doing deals and deal-related litigation. Together, these complementary methods help students understand …

Law Firm Internships And The Making Of Future Lawyers: An Empirical Study In Singapore, Seow Hon Tan

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

This article examines the findings of an empirical study of law students from the Singapore Management University on their internship experiences at private law firms. As internships are frequently undertaken by law students, it is necessary for stakeholders to understand their impact on the values and ideals of law students in relation to the law and legal practice. This article seeks to increase the consciousness of law school educators, lawyers, and the professional bar about how law firm internships are contributing to the making of future lawyers, so as to facilitate the reflection by these parties as to their roles …

Testing, Diversity, And Merit: A Reply To Dan Subotnik And Others, Andrea A. Curcio, Carol L. Chomsky, Eileen Kaufman

Scholarly Works

The false dichotomy between achieving diversity and rewarding merit frequently surfaces in discussions about decisions on university and law school admissions, scholarships, law licenses, jobs, and promotions. “Merit” judgments are often based on the results of standardized tests meant to predict who has the best chance to succeed if given the opportunity to do so. This Article criticizes over-reliance on standardized tests and responds to suggestions that challenging the use of such tests reflects a race-comes-first approach that chooses diversity over merit. Discussing the firefighter exam that led to the Supreme Court decision in Ricci v. DiStefano, as well as …

Exporting The Legal Incubator: A Conversation With Fred Rooney, Fred Rooney, Justin Steele

Scholarly Works

This article is an edited transcript of an interview with Fred Rooney, currently the Director of the International Justice Center for Post-Graduate Development at Touro Law Center. As the inaugural director of the City University of New York (CUNY) School of Law’s Community Legal Resource Network (CLRN), Mr. Rooney pioneered the first law-school based legal incubator. In this interview he discusses the creation of the CLRN, the evolution and growth of legal incubators, and his experience launching the Community Legal Services Center (Centro Comunitario de Servicios Legales or CECSEL) at the Autonomous University of Santo Domingo (UASD) in the Dominican …

Testing, Discrimination, And Opportunity: A Reply To Professor Harvey Gilmore, Dan Subotnik

Scholarly Works

This article was written as part of an ongoing dialog about the author’s previous article, "Does Testing = Race Discrimination?: Ricci, The Bar Exam, the LSAT, and the Challenge to Learning," which defended the Supreme Court’s decision in Ricci v. DeStefano, as well as defending testing more generally against charges of irrelevance, racial obtuseness, and most seriously, race discrimination.

This article specifically responds to an article written by Professor Harvey Gilmore which focuses mostly on the SAT and the LSAT.

Contesting A Contestation Of Testing: A Reply To Richard Delgado, Dan Subotnik

Scholarly Works

This article was written as part of an ongoing dialog about the author’s previous article, Does Testing = Race Discrimination?: Ricci, The Bar Exam, the LSAT, and the Challenge to Learning, which defended the Supreme Court’s decision in Ricci v. DeStefano, as well as defending testing more generally against charges of irrelevance, racial obtuseness, and most seriously, race discrimination.

This article specifically responds to Richard Delgado’s article, Standardized Testing as Discrimination: A Reply to Dan Subotnik.

Race Indeed Above All: A Reply To Professors Andrea Curcio, Carol Chomsky, And Eileen Kaufman, Dan Subotnik

Scholarly Works

This article was written as part of an ongoing dialog about the author’s previous article, Does Testing = Race Discrimination?: Ricci, The Bar Exam, the LSAT, and the Challenge to Learning, which defended the Supreme Court’s decision in Ricci v. DeStefano, as well as defending testing more generally against charges of irrelevance, racial obtuseness, and most seriously, race discrimination.

This article specifically responds to Andrea A. Curcio, Carol L. Chomsky, and Eileen Kaufman’s article, Testing, Diversity, and Merit: A Reply to Dan Subotnik and Others.

The First Thing We Do, Jorge R. Roig

Scholarly Works

There is currently a concerted effort to dumb down America. In the midst of this, the American Bar Association’s Council of the Section on Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar recently agreed to propose that tenure for law professors be eliminated as a requirement for accreditation of law schools. This article analyzes the arguments for and against tenure in legal academia, and concludes that the main proposed justifications for eliminating tenure are highly questionable, at best. A lawyer is more than a legal technocrat. Lawyers are policy makers and public defenders. They are prosecutors and activists. And the development …

Alumni Services: Strategies For Keeping The Law Library's Doors Open After Graduation, Michelle M. Trumbo

Articles by Maurer Faculty

No abstract provided.

Student, Esquire?: The Practice Of Law In The Collaborative Classroom, Nantiya Ruan

Scholarly Works

Law faculty and non-profit lawyers are working together in a variety of partnerships to offer students exposure to "real life" clients in the first year of law school, as well as in advanced courses in substantive areas. Teachers engaged in this client-centered advocacy through experiential frameworks have broken out of their isolated silos in the law school (e.g., legal writing, clinical, externship, and doctrinal) and begun to work together. To help students develop a sense of professional identity, cultivate professional values, and tap into key intrinsic motivations for lawyering, such as serving the public good, collaborative classrooms have an important …

What It Means To Be A Lawyer In These Uncertain Times: Some Thoughts On Ethical Participation In The Legal Education Industry, Susan Carle

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Discusses legal employment and salary and how legal education can address the current market.

Deals Or No Deals: Integrating Transactional Skills In The First Year Curriculum, Lynnise E. Pantin

Faculty Scholarship

This article joins a growing body of scholarship on the pedagogy of transactional law and skills. This article challenges the traditional pedagogy of teaching law students to think like a lawyer and argues that law schools should shift the analytical framework of a litigation-dominated model, which is typically taught in the first year, to a model that incorporates transactional skills teaching into the first year law school curriculum. This approach will (1) create a greater balance of skills taught in the first year and (2) address the mandate to train more practice-ready lawyers. This article argues that the best place …