Legal Education Commons^™

Cultivating Justice For The Working Poor: Clinical Representation Of Unemployment Claimants, Colleen F. Shanahan

Faculty Scholarship

The combination of current economic conditions and recent changes in the United States' welfare system makes representation of unemployment insurance claimants by clinic students a timely learning opportunity. While unemployment insurance claimants often share similarities with student attorneys, they are unable to access justice as easily as student attorneys, and as a result, face the risk of severe poverty. Clinical representation of unemployment claimants is a rich opportunity for students to experience making a difference for a client, and to understand the issues of poverty and justice that these clients experience along the way. These cases reveal that larger lessons …

Keynote Discussion: Just Exactly What Does A Transactional Lawyer Do?, William J. Carney, Ronald J. Gilson, George W. Dent

Faculty Scholarship

Panel discussion from the Center for Transactional Law and Practice at Emory University School of Law’s second biennial Transactional Law Conference, “Transactional Education: What's Next?” (June 2010).

Shouting "Fire!" In A Theater And Vilifying Corn Dealers, Vincent A. Blasi

Faculty Scholarship

Five years ago, Fred Schauer published an article with the intriguing title: "Do Cases Make Bad Law?" Playing off Holmes' observation that "[g]reat cases like hard cases make bad law," Schauer explored the possibility, as he put it, that "it is not just great cases and hard cases that make bad law, but simply the deciding of cases that makes bad law.” His concern, confirmed and deepened by his characteristically balanced inquiry, was that general principles forged in the resolution of specific legal disputes can suffer by virtue of that provenance. Because such principles by definition are meant to carry …

Harry Kalven, Jr., Vincent A. Blasi

Faculty Scholarship

The first week of law school is for most students an intimidating experience. Everyone is so serious. My first week was leavened considerably by Harry Kalven. A group of students and Kalven were watching the seventh game of the 1964 World Series in the student lounge of the University of Chicago Law School. The broadcast was interrupted by a news bulletin: Nikita Khrushchev had just been deposed. Viewers were treated to several minutes of political and diplomatic analysis, with correspondents around the globe speculating on what this might mean for East-West relations. One of my classmates, an amateur Kremlinologist …

A Foxy Hedgehog: The Consistent Perceptions Of Carol Rose, Jedediah Purdy

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Should Law Schools Teach Professional Duties, Professional Virtues, Or Something Else? A Critique Of The Carnegie Report On Educating Lawyers, W. Bradley Wendel

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Road Not Taken: Catholic Legal Education At The Middle Of The Twentieth Century., John M. Breen

Faculty Publications & Other Works

No abstract provided.

Two Men And Twenty Years Of Meetings: Norman Amaker, Derrick Bell, And The Midwestern People Of Color Legal Scholarship Conference From 1990-2010., Neil G. Williams

Faculty Publications & Other Works

No abstract provided.

Experiential Learning In The First Year Curriculum: The Public Interest Partnership, Nantiya Ruan

Scholarly Works

The newest learning initiatives in legal education focus much attention on the necessity for teachers to support students' development of professional identity, including "civic professionalism,"which" link[s] the interests of educators with the needs of practitioners and with the public the profession is pledged to serve." See William M. Sullivan et al., Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law (2007). With that movement in mind, for the past five years in my legal research and writing (LRW) class, my students have partnered with non-profit organizations to provide them with legal research and advocacy documents to further the organization's public interest …

Social Reconstruction Of Race & Ethnicity Of The Nation's Law Students: A Request To The Aba, Aals, And Lsac For Changes In Reporting Requirements, Kevin Brown, Tom I. Romero Ii

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

Legal Education Comes To Nevada: The Creation Of The William S. Boyd School Of Law, Mary Berkheiser

Scholarly Works

No abstract provided.

State Of The Law School: Achieving Academic Success In Nevada, John Valery White

Scholarly Works

In the coming years, the William S. Boyd School of Law will continue to pursue its standing goal of becoming a great law school for Nevada. That project is considerably more complex today, due to significant changes taking place in the legal profession. Though our first decade's successes have created a solid foundation from which the law school can take on these challenges, the changes to the profession are rapid and many are likely long-lasting. The school's graduates face a world with a considerably tighter job market. Law schools are being asked to provide greater skills training even as the …

Providing Effective Feedback, Jennifer Carr

Scholarly Works

This article discusses the process of giving effective feedback in an academic context. Effective feedback gives students a clear explanation of what they should do, concrete steps for doing it, and the ability to ascertain whether those steps have adequately addressed the problem. The author discusses five steps that go into providing effective feedback to students.

Getting Real About Legal Realism, New Legal Realism And Clinical Legal Education, Katherine R. Kruse

Scholarly Works

Jerome Frank’s call for a “clinical lawyer-school” is cited so frequently in clinical scholarship that it borders on the canonical. Like many calls for reform in legal education, Frank’s plea for clinical lawyer-schools was based on a critique of the appellate case method of legal instruction. However, unlike most critiques, the legal realist critique was embedded within a jurisprudential challenge to the meaning of law itself, arising from American Legal Realism. Running through legal realist jurisprudence was a distinction between the “law in books” and the “law in action,” with the idea that law is not found primarily in statutes …

Using Discourse Analysis Methodology To Teach "Legal English", Craig Hoffman

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

In this study, I propose a curriculum focused on raising students’ linguistic awareness through rigorous discourse analysis and reflective writing in a legal context. Students analyze authentic, full-text legal documents using discourse analysis methodology. By carefully analyzing the language in legal opinions, appellate briefs, law review articles, law school exams, typical commercial contracts, and statutes, students become experts in analyzing and evaluating legal texts. Students learn to manipulate legal language to achieve various desired linguistic and legal effects. This approach has three primary advantages. First, it forces the students to carefully read authentic legal texts. Second, it gives students the …

Interdisciplinary Transactional Courses, Eric J. Gouvin, Robert Statchen, Anthony J. Luppino, William Kell

Faculty Scholarship

This Article represents a panel presentation on interdisciplinary work in law school transactional courses. The Authors’ focus is on the Small Business Clinic at Western New England University School of Law. Topics covered are: interdisciplinary work and the classroom, professional liability and competency issues in rendering services through a clinic, culture class issues, ethical dilemmas, delivering professional products to the client, and co-curricular opportunities.

"After Tenure Study" U.S. Law Schools Institutional Database, American Bar Foundation

Law School and Faculty Information

The After Tenure study, jointly funded by the American Bar Foundation and Law School Admission Council, is the first in-depth examination of the professional lives of post-tenure law professors in the United States. It combines a national survey of post-tenure law professors in the U.S. (undertaken in 2005-2006) with a set of follow-up interviews (conducted with a subset of the survey respondents in 2007-2008). A total of 1,175 professors completed the survey; along with 49 who answered substantial parts of the survey.

This database includes a subset of law school variables used for analyses in the larger study. Variables include: …

Reviewing Joan Delfattore's Knowledge In The Making, Suzanne Corriell

Law Faculty Publications

A book review of Joan DelFattore's Knowledge in the Making.

Speeches: The Cicl Lecture On International And Comparative Law, Mortimer N.S. Sellers

University of Baltimore Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Uc-Irvine Experiment: Will It Be Effective At Teaching Contract Law?, Gregory S. Crespi

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

The new law school at the University of California, Irvine is attempting to implement an innovative vision of top-tier legal education that focuses upon preparing students for the practice of law, and which emphasizes skills-based and experiential training. As part of that effort the school has restructured the traditional first-year law school curriculum so that several of the courses each focus on particular analytical methods, specifically common law analysis, statutory analysis, procedural analysis, constitutional analysis, and international legal analysis, rather than on a particular subject matter such as contracts, torts, etc. While there are some advantages to this new approach, …