Legal Education Commons^™

"I Am Ronald Cotton": Teaching Wrongful Convictions In A Criminal Law Class, Cynthia E. Jones

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.

Teaching Teamwork To Law Students, Linda Morton, Janet Weinstein, Howard Taras, Vivian Reznik

Faculty Scholarship

Despite law firms’ demand for first year associates who can work collaboratively, teamwork is infrequently taught in legal education. Law professors unfamiliar with teamwork theory and practice are unlikely to use teams to engage students in their learning. As a result, law schools continue to graduate students who are unfamiliar and uncomfortable with the concept of working in teams, particularly interdisciplinary teams.

This article focuses on the teamwork teaching methods we use in the interdisciplinary courses we teach at California Western. We first provide a rationale for teaching teamwork and a brief description of what professional graduate schools are currently …

Remedies Reveals The Seamless Web, Candace Kovacic-Fleischer

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

INTRODUCTION: Remedies is a course that consolidates many of the concepts learned in the first year of law school and some from the second. A typical Remedies course will reintroduce principles from constitutional law, compare and contrast torts and contracts, and apply criminal concepts in civil contexts. Teaching Remedies can be both challenging and rewarding. Challenging because it crosses a wide variety of subject areas. Rewarding because it weaves a variety of subject areas into the "seamless web" of the law, eliciting from students an occasional "aha." Early classes in law school tend to separate courses into discrete subject areas, …

Foreword: Public Constitutional Literacy; A Conversation, Melissa Hart

Publications

No abstract provided.

Considering Class: College Access And Diversity, Matthew N. Gaertner, Melissa Hart

Publications

Each time that the continued legality of race-conscious affirmative action is threatened, colleges and universities must confront the possibility of dramatically changing their admissions policies. Fisher v. University of Texas, which the Supreme Court will hear this year, presents just such a moment. In previous years when affirmative action has been outlawed by ballot initiative in specific states or when the Court has seemed poised to reject it entirely, there have been calls for replacing race-conscious admissions with class-based affirmative action. Supporters of race-conscious affirmative action have typically criticized the class-based alternative as ineffective at maintaining racial diversity. This …

Panel Discussion Iii: Recognizing And Addressing Immigration Concerns In The Criminal Process, Violeta Chapin, Dan Kesselbrenner, Christina Kleiser

Publications

No abstract provided.

Bad Briefs, Bad Law, Bad Markets: Documenting The Poor Quality Of Plaintiffs' Briefs, Its Impact On The Law, And The Market Failure It Reflects, Scott A. Moss

Publications

For a major field, employment discrimination suffers surprisingly low-quality plaintiffs' lawyering. This Article details a study of several hundred summary judgment briefs, finding as follows: (1) the vast majority of plaintiffs' briefs omit available caselaw rebutting key defense arguments, many falling far below basic professional standards with incoherent writing or no meaningful research; (2) low-quality briefs lose at over double the rate of good briefs; and (3) bad briefs skew caselaw evolution, because even controlling for win-loss rate, bad plaintiffs' briefs far more often yield decisions crediting debatable defenses. These findings are puzzling. In a major legal service market, how …

The Missing Link: Making Research Easier With Linked Citations, Nick Harrell

Publications

No abstract provided.

Professionalism And The New Normal, Philip J. Weiser

Publications

No abstract provided.

Cases And Controversies: Some Things To Do With Contracts Cases,, Charles L. Knapp

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Teaching Remedies As Problem-Solving: Keeping It Real, Tracy A. Thomas

Akron Law Faculty Publications

I began teaching Remedies as a problem-solving course over a decade ago. I was then in my third year of teaching and found that the Remedies course just wasn’t clicking. The students, mostly third-years, were bored with the Socratic method and seemingly resistant to the demands of this important course. My teaching grew more cumbersome as I waded deeper into the mire of the complexities of a transsubstantive field. Remedies class felt like a slog in the mud for all of us. After just a few years with the course, I thought there had to be a better way. I …

Educating The Invincibles: Strategies For Teaching The Millennial Generation In Law School, Emily Benfer, Colleen F. Shanahan

Faculty Scholarship

Each new generation of law students presents its own set of challenges for law teachers seeking to develop competent and committed members of the legal profession. This article aims to train legal educators to recognize their students' generational learning style and to deliver a tailored education that supports the development of skilled attorneys. To help legal educators better understand the newest generation of law students, this article explores the traits associated with the Millennial Generation of law students, including their perspective on themselves and others, on education and on work. It then provides detailed and specific strategies for teaching millennial …

If Only We Knew What We Know, Conrad Johnson, Brian Donnelly

Faculty Scholarship

This article contributes to the broader themes surrounding law and technology raised in this symposium by taking a look at lawyering and knowledge management. This topic is presented both as a theory and with a case study. The first part provides a brief summary of the basic lawyering paradigm used in the Lawyering in the Digital Age Clinic at Columbia Law School – that all lawyering activities can be understood within the context of gathering, managing and presenting information. The second category of the paradigm is expanded upon to review the activity of managing knowledge. Then, knowledge management is positioned …

Law Schools, Leadership, And Change, Susan P. Sturm

Faculty Scholarship

Law schools train many of the nation’s leaders. As Professor Fred Rodell observed, “it is the lawyers who run our civilization for us – our governments, our business, our private lives.” The legal profession was already closely linked to leadership at the founding of the country, when lawyers constituted almost half of the signers of the Declaration of Independence and more than half of the members of the Constitutional Convention. Lawyers now bear major responsibility for leading the institutions that structure the governance, education, and day-to-day lives of the polity. Ten percent of the CEOs of the top fifty companies …

The First Year: Integrating Transactional Skills, Lynnise E. Pantin

Faculty Scholarship

My name is Lynnise Pantin. I teach at New York Law School, and my talk today focuses on integrating transactional skills into the first-year curriculum.

As a first premise, the law school curriculum is dominated by litigation oriented skills, and I can argue that there is a litigation bias that is pervasive in legal education. I am hoping that, by engaging with those of you who teach first year students, we can start to talk about creating and developing transactional skills within a context that is already there in the first-year curriculum.

Alternatives For Scheduling The Bar Exam, Mary Gallagher, Carol Buckler

Other Publications

No abstract provided.

Across The Curriculum: Integrating Transactional Skills Instruction, Jean Whitney, Lori D. Johnson, Richard Rawson, Carol Morgan

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

A Community Of Procedure Scholars: Teaching Procedure And The Legal Academy, Elizabeth Thornburg, Erik Knutsen, Carla Crifo', Camille Cameron

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

This article asks whether the way in which procedure is taught has an impact on the extent and accomplishments of a scholarly community of proceduralists. Not surprisingly, we find a strong correlation between the placement of procedure as a required course in an academic context and the resulting body of scholars and scholarship. Those countries in which more civil procedure is taught as part of a university degree — and in which procedure is recognized as a legitimate academic subject — have larger scholarly communities, a larger and broader corpus of works analyzing procedural issues, and a richer web of …

The Fun Of Teaching American Legal History, Geoffrey R. Watson

Scholarly Articles

I teach a pair of two-credit legal history courses: History of Early American Law and History of Modern American Law. I teach a variety of other courses, but none is more fun to teach than legal history.

Fortitude At Forty, Or Why A Seemingly Content, Overly Ambitious, And Detrimentally Optimistic Forty-Something Year Old Decided To Upend His Life And Go To Law School

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.