Legal Education Commons^™

American Legal History Survey: Syllabus, Anders Walker

All Faculty Scholarship

This syllabus provides an overview of American Legal History, focusing on the manner in which law has been used to organize American society. Several themes will be traced through the semester, including law’s role in encouraging innovation and regulating social relations, in part through the elaboration of legal disciplines like property, tort, contract, criminal law, tax, business associations, administrative law, environmental law, securities regulation, commercial law, immigration, and health law. Emphasis will also be placed on the origins and evolution of constitutional law, from the founding to the present.

The Law Review Games, Miriam A. Cherry, Paul M. Secunda

All Faculty Scholarship

A Parody in which The Hunger Games meet the law review submission process.

The Aba, The Aall, The Aals, And The “Duplication Of Legal Publications”, Richard A. Danner

Faculty Scholarship

Between 1935 and 1940, the American Bar Association, the Association of American Law Schools, and the American Association of Law Libraries joined forces to work on solutions to a problem often referred to as the “duplication of legal publications.” The need for practicing attorneys and law libraries to purchase multiple and duplicative versions of published law reports and other law books was burdensome in costs, complicated the research process, and contributed to what the American Law Institute identified as the two chief defects of American law: “its uncertainty and its complexity.” This article highlights the efforts of the ABA, the …

Not Your Parents' Law Library: A Tale Of Two Academic Law Libraries, Julian Aiken, Femi Cadmus, Fred Shapiro

Faculty Scholarship

As academic law libraries continue to face the inevitability of a rapidly changing landscape which includes a new breed of digital users with sophisticated technological needs, it remains to be seen what libraries will look like in years to come. It is certain that libraries as we know them today will have changed, but to what extent? An ability to remain adaptable and to anticipate the evolving needs of users in a dynamic environment will continue to be key for libraries to remain relevant, and even to survive, in the 21st century; vital to this endeavor will also be an …

Becoming A Legal Scholar, Samuel W. Buell

Faculty Scholarship

There is now a literature on how to become a law professor. The first book-length treatment of the subject, Becoming A Law Professor, displays a common fault of this literature in directing candidates’ focus on process at the expense of substance. The present body of material on the market for new legal academics does not persuade candidates of the necessity of locating their agendas and voices as scholars, much less does it show them how to go about that vital search. It also risks contributing to a tendency of credentialing processes to standardize resumes without improving outcomes. A second-generation literature …

The Feminist Academic's Challenge To Legal Education: Creating Sites For Change, Ann Shalleck

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.

Herding Cats: Role Ambiguity, Governance, And Law School Clinical Programs, Binny Miller

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.

Financing The Future Of Legal Education: "Not What It Used To Be", Steven R. Smith

Faculty Scholarship

This Article will first review the substantial improvements in legal education and track the sources of the funding for these improvements. It will look at whether law school is, and continues to be, a good economic investment for most students. It will then consider the current economic circumstances of legal education and the possible coming disconnect between expectations and reality. It will conclude by considering what could improve the lot of legal education in the future and, to the contrary, what could make matters much worse.

You Can Handle The Truth: Using Pop Culture To Teach Legal Research., Karen Skinner

Publications

No abstract provided.

Aall Secretary Is The Joint Institute Luncheon Speaker, Karen Skinner

Publications

No abstract provided.

Antisemitism In The Academic Voice: Confronting Bigotry Under The First Amendment, Kenneth Lasson

All Faculty Scholarship

The romanticized vision of life in the Ivory Tower - a peaceful haven where learned professors ponder higher thoughts and where students roam orderly quadrangles in quest of truth and other pleasures - has long been relegated to yesteryear. While universities like to nurture the perception that they are protectors of reasoned discourse, and indeed often perceive themselves as sacrosanct places of culture in a chaotic world, the modern campus, of course, is not quite so wonderful.

This chapter examines the relationship between antisemitic and anti-Zionist speech and conduct, how they both play out on contemporary university campuses - and …

The Faculty Workshop, Pierre Schlag

Publications

This essay explores the ubiquitous law school institution, “The Faculty Workshop,” as an entrée into and manifestation of contemporary American legal thought. The Faculty Workshop is examined both as a regulator and expression of legal thought - at once governance system and symptom. We close by discussing “Stage 4.”

A Shift To Narrativity, Derek H. Kiernan-Johnson

Publications

Slipshod, inconsistent use of core Applied Legal Storytelling terminology muddles its discourse and hampers its growth. Refining the field’s vocabulary is essential, but insufficient, as exclusive focus on the field’s objects of inquiry, such as story and narrative, and the means of creating or conveying them, such as storytelling and narrating, risks losing the “A” in ALS. We need a new focus, one unburdened by the ambiguities and negative associations of existing options that more accurately reflects Applied Legal Storytelling scholars’ unique contributions. A shift to narrativity. Narrativity, as imagined here, is a top-level quality of a legal text or …

David Getches: A Tribute To A Leader And Scholar, Matthew L.M. Fletcher, Kristen A. Carpenter

Publications

No abstract provided.

The Crisis Of The American Law School, Paul Campos

Publications

The economist Herbert Stein once remarked that if something cannot go on forever, it will stop. Over the past four decades, the cost of legal education in America has seemed to belie this aphorism: it has gone up relentlessly. Private law school tuition increased by a factor of four in real, inflation-adjusted terms between 1971 and 2011, while resident tuition at public law schools has nearly quadrupled in real terms over just the past two decades. Meanwhile, for more than thirty years, the percentage of the American economy devoted to legal services has been shrinking. In 1978 the legal sector …

The Master Mason: How Professor Baldus Built A Bridge From Learning To Law And The Legacy Of Equal Justice He Leaves Behind, James E. Baker

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

These are Chief Judge Baker’s remarks eulogizing the late Professor David Baldus. Chief Judge Baker observes that Professor Baldus was an extraordinary educator-lawyer who mastered the fields of social science and statistics. He adds that Professor Baldus was diligent in his research and strived to make the law accessible. Chief Judge Baker discusses how Professor Baldus’s research on the death penalty and proportionality review successfully bridged the law and learning, without ever losing sight of compassion.

What We Are Learning, Stephen Ellmann

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Raising The Bar: Law Schools And Legal Institutions Leading To Educate Undocumented Students, Karla M. Mckanders, Raquel Aldana, Beth Lyon

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This paper explores the adoption of best practices for the admission and graduation of undocumented students as lawyers and promoting their integration into the legal profession. Law schools are already both knowingly and unknowingly admitting and graduating undocumented students. It is our contention in this paper, after careful analysis, that no law precludes law schools from admitting undocumented students, offering them in-state tuition or other types of private and even public financial aid in states that permit it, or allowing them to participate fully in the law schools’ educational opportunities. We acknowledge that there are tensions around the decision to …

Book Review: International Law Stories, Frederick W. Dingledy

Library Staff Publications

No abstract provided.

Dichotomy No Longer? The Role Of The Private Business Sector In Educating The Future Russian Legal Professions, Philip Genty

Faculty Scholarship

In his 1916 work The Law: Business or Profession?, Julius Henry Cohen describes an American legal system in which uniform standards for regulating, disciplining, and educating the profession are just beginning to be developed, albeit unevenly. In discussing the differences between a business and a profession, he argues that a profession requires a uniform set of standards to guide it in matters of ethics, as well as a system of rigorous legal education that includes a firm grounding in these ethical principles.

Perhaps most surprising for a book written in the early twentieth century – long before the …