clinicians with not enough to do

New Online Journal re: Teaching and Curricular Innovations

A Renaissance is occurring within legal education.  Building on the findings and recommendations of the Carnegie Report (2007), MacCrate Report (1992), Cramton Report (1979), Reed Report (1921), and other extensive research, law schools and faculty are developing creative innovative curriculum and teaching methods to better prepare students for the practice of law. 

 

The Renaissance Report™ http://renaissancereport.wordpress.com/ is an online journal hosted by William Mitchell College of Law. The journal provides a broad based, up-to-date resource of curriculum and teaching innovations for legal educators.

 

It is with great hope for the future of the legal profession and the legal education system that we invite you to join the discussion. Together we can create a legal education renaissance.

 

Join us! http://renaissancereport.wordpress.com/

 

Professor John Sonsteng, Editor

Renaissance Report Editorial Team

William Mitchell College of Law

Law school on the "Block Plan" ?

A query from Howard Wasserman at PrawfsBlawg: Legal education bubble?

For no particular reason, I was thinking today about the "Block Plan" (or "One-Course-at-a-Time") approach used at liberal arts colleges such as Colorado College and Cornell (IA) College. As the name suggests, students take (and professors teach) one class in an intensive 3 1/2- or 4-week block, take one week off, then move on to another single class. And at least Cornell plays up internship and other outside-the-classroom opportunities.

So: Any thoughts on whether law school could work on this model?

For no particular reason, I was thinking today about the "Block Plan" (or "One-Course-at-a-Time") approach used at liberal arts colleges such as Colorado College and Cornell (IA) College. As the name suggests, students take (and professors teach) one class in an intensive 3 1/2- or 4-week block, take one week off, then move on to another single class. And at least Cornell plays up internship and other outside-the-classroom opportunities.

So: Any thoughts on whether law school could work on this model?

New Book on Feminist and Queer Legal Theory

NOW AVAILABLE!

Feminist and Queer Legal Theory

Intimate Encounters, Uncomfortable Conversations

Edited by Martha Fineman, Jack Jackson and Adam Romero

Hardback edition $124.95

Paperback edition $49.95

Use discount code FLTP20 to receive a 20% discount at Ashgate Publishing.  The publisher’s website is:

http://www.ashgate.com/fltp

Outcome Measures and Regulatory Failure in Legal Education

Legal Profession Blog

[Posted by Bill Henderson]

Over the last few years, the topic of outcome (or output) measures has been a recurring theme at various association meetings and conferences surrounding legal education.  Some of this discussion is motivated by Department of Education initiatives that want to establish a clear linkage between educational cost and economic returns.  Some schools, however, believe that their fortunes will rise when they can be judged on three years of education (e.g., bar passage rates, employment, student satisfaction) rather than the input measures that drive the U.S. News Rankings.

It is hard to imagine a more impossible task than faculty from 190+ law schools reaching a "consensus" on outcomes measures.  Yet, consensus is not required.  The ABA Section on Legal Education and Admission to the Bar, through its authority to accredit law schools, can require law schools to measure, collect, and report information that the Section determines is in the public interest.   In 2007, the Section created a "Special Committee on Output Measures" and asked it to "define appropriate output measures and make specific recommendations as to whether the Section should adopt those measures a part of the [Accreditation] Standards."

So what happened?  The Special Committee's 76-page single-spaced Final Report, issued in July 2008, made little headway in defining output measures or making specific recommendation regarding accreditation. In a nutshell, the Committee recommended that the Standards be amended so that each law school would be free to define and measure its own outcomes.  In theory, these new Standards could be given teeth by the rigor of the outcome measures (or lack thereof) embodied in a school's self-study report and strategic plan (two processes already required under the accreditation process).  This excerpt from the Final Report puts the best possible spin on the Committee's recommendation:

[A]n approach that accords significant independence to law schools would make it possible for the schools to serve as laboratories for innovation and systemic improvement. ... As law schools experiment with various models of their own choosing, the data these schools generate will inform other schools' experiments and will provide a basis for fine-tuning models for instruction and evaluation. At some point in the future, it may be the case that our understanding of outcome measures has progressed so far, and that certain views have become so widely held, that the ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar will be in a position to demand greater specificity in the criteria in the [Accreditation] Standards and/or Interpretations. But, at least at the present time, the Committee believes that in drafting Standards and Interpretations, it is best to give law schools the latitude to experiment with a wide range of models.

When we step back, it is hard to believe that this thousand-flowers-bloom approach is the tack taken by the regulator charged with overseeing legal education.  To paraphrase the above passage, it says "do what you want to do, but try a little harder.  When something works well, and most schools adopt it, the Section can implement it as the new rule.  That way we can avoid difficult decisions that will upset our friends."

In truth, the Committee's approach turns the purpose of outcome measures on its head.  In the broader discussion in higher education, outcome measures are sought because they enable an apples-to-apples assessment of the effectiveness of an educational institution.  Indeed, the entire process is meant to facilitate comparisons.  Why? Because meaningful comparative information levels the playing field between those providing education (the schools) and those financing it (the students/citiizens). When outcome information is readily available, it changes behavior and alters powerful norms, including over-reliance on US News.  In the absence of apples-to-apples outcome information, the market adapts as it does now--by focusing on the basis of inputs (revenues, books, number of faculty, LSAT scores, UGPA, etc.).  It is the opaqueness of legal education that creates a vacuum needed for the US News rankings, which are nearly perfectly correlated with student entering credentials.

The Committee shrinks from the task of defining specific, comparable outcomes because it knows (at least implicitly or subconsciously) that the very process of creating meaningful outputs creates a large number of winners and losers among law schools.   Yet, by refusing to act as regulator that serves the public interest, the ABA Section on Legal Education and Admission to the Bar makes law schools the winner and law students the losers. 

If we evaluate outcome measures from the perspective of law students rather than law schools, there are at least three pieces of information that the Section should collect and publish annually in a format that facilitates school-to-school comparisons:

read the rest here

Conference: Teaching Law for Engaged Learning

 

Institute for Law School Teaching

and

Center for Engaged Learning in the Law

 

"Teaching Law for Engaged Learning," is a one-day conference for new and experienced legal educators interested in developing as teachers. The conference will take place on April 10, 2010, at the Elon University School of Law in Greensboro, North Carolina. The conference co-sponsors are the Institute for Law Teaching and Learning (Gonzaga and Washburn) and the Center for Engaged Learning in the Law (Elon).

 

Structure of the Conference

 

The conference will consist of four sessions: (1) course and class planning; (2) teaching methods; (3) assessment and exams; and (4) developing as a teacher.

 

Course and class planning. What are the most important things you want your students to learn and how will you get your students there?  In this session, participants will construct learning objectives, plan how they will know whether their students have attained those objectives, discuss what to include in a syllabus and what makes for an effective syllabus, reconsider how they start and end their courses and class sessions, and plan a single class session from start to finish.

 

Teaching methods. Participants will consider a wide variety of techniques and perspectives, from the more traditional techniques, such as lecture and questioning, to other commonly-used techniques, such as free writing, collaborative learning, PowerPoint slides, simulations, clickers, and course Web pages, to a few cutting-edge techniques, such as discovery sequence instruction, cognitive think-alouds, and in-class instant messaging. Participants will both experience and discuss how best practices can be applied to these techniques.  Participants will also consider keys to effective teaching beyond techniques, including attitudes, habits of mind, conceptualizations of students, and personal qualities and characteristics.

 

Assessment and exams.  As a result of taking a course, what should students be able to do? Design effective ways to solve clients' problems using a range of authorities and complicated facts? Would they show their learning by writing opinion letters, drafting agreements, or interviewing witness? During this workshop, participants will work from their own assessments, samples, and guidelines to design and evaluate a variety of assessments. Participants also will practice using and developing effective and sustainable ways to provide feedback, including rubrics, classroom assessment techniques, and peer review, and they will consider how to use assessment results as feedback for improving their course and class design and teaching.

 

Developing as a teacher.  Following an introduction to the research on faculty development, participants in this session will engage in a variety of teaching development instruments. For example, participants will complete a teaching inventory, engage in reflective writing, view a teaching video, practice giving feedback, and brainstorm ways to develop a sustainable teaching development practice.

SSRN: Clinical Research Institute

LSN LAW RESEARCH CENTERS PAPERS CLINICAL RESEARCH INSTITUTE (sponsored by New York Law School) Vol. 6, No. 4: Nov 12, 2009 RICHARD D. MARSICO, EDITOR Professor of Law, New York Law School richard.marsico@nyls.edu STEPHEN ELLMANN, EDITOR Associate Dean for Faculty Development and Professor of Law, New York Law School sellmann@nyls.edu Browse ALL abstracts for this journal

Links: Subscribe ~ Unsubscribe | Distribution | Network Directors | Submit ~ Revise Your Papers

Table of Contents Stories Absent from the Courtroom: Responding to Domestic Violence in the Context of HIV and AIDS Jane K. Stoever, Seattle University School of Law See One, Do One, Teach One: Dissecting the Use of Medical Education’s Signature Pedagogy in the Law School Curriculum Christine Nero Coughlin, Wake Forest University - School of Law Lisa McElroy, Drexel University - Earle Mack School of Law Sandy Patrick, Lewis & Clark Law School Storytelling Across the Curriculum: From Margin to Center, from Clinic to the Classroom Carolyn Grose, William Mitchell College of Law Decriminalizing Students with Disabilities Dean Hill Rivkin, University of Tennessee College of Law Strip-Mining and Grassroots Resistance in Appalachia: Community Lawyering for Environmental Justice Dean Hill Rivkin, University of Tennessee College of Law Chris Irwin, United Mountain Defense Anne Passino, affiliation not provided to SSRN The Cartography of Legal Inquiry Tonya Kowalski, Washburn University School of Law

itunes oral arguments?

Appellate Oral Arguments Available for Free on 'iTunes U'

from Legal Blog Watch by Bruce Carton

You've already ordered your U.S. Supreme Court baseball cards. Now it's time for all of you appellate law geeks aficionados to take the next step and get yourself some good oral arguments on iTunes to listen to while you work out. The Tex Parte Blog reports here that St. Mary's University School of Law will now be making recordings of Texas Supreme Court oral arguments available, for free, on iTunes U, Apple's online repository of free educational content and lectures, presentations, videos and podcasts from all over the world. For three years now, St. Mary's and the Texas Supreme Court have partnered to provide the court's oral arguments through live webcasts, but these arguments will now also be featured on iTunes U. A quick look at iTunes U shows that the Texas oral arguments are not the only ones available on the site. In fact, dozens -- if not hundreds -- of U.S. Supreme Court argument are also available, for free, through the Oyez Project. Here, for instance, is the iTunes U link to oral argument in the landmark case of Bush v. Gore. Listen to that one a few times on the treadmill and see if the justices' controversial...

You've already ordered your U.S. Supreme Court baseball cards. Now it's time for all of you appellate law geeks aficionados to take the next step and get yourself some good oral arguments on iTunes to listen to while you work out. The Tex Parte Blog reports here that St. Mary's University School of Law will now be making recordings of Texas Supreme Court oral arguments available, for free, on iTunes U, Apple's online repository of free educational content and lectures, presentations, videos and podcasts from all over the world. For three years now, St. Mary's and the Texas Supreme Court have partnered to provide the court's oral arguments through live webcasts, but these arguments will now also be featured on iTunes U. A quick look at iTunes U shows that the Texas oral arguments are not the only ones available on the site. In fact, dozens -- if not hundreds -- of U.S. Supreme Court argument are also available, for free, through the Oyez Project. Here, for instance, is the iTunes U link to oral argument in the landmark case of Bush v. Gore. Listen to that one a few times on the treadmill and see if the justices' controversial...

ABA and loan relief

National Law Journal: ABA proposes law student loan relief

Karen Sloan

November 10, 2009

The American Bar Association is lobbying the Obama administration and Congress to extend relief to recent law school graduates who went into debt to finance their legal educations but haven't been able to find a job because of the recession.

The ABA wants the government to let unemployed graduates convert private loans into federal ones. The change could allow them to defer repaying those loans for as long as three years.

The effort is in its early stages — executives of the largest provider of private law school loans, Access Group Inc., weren't even aware of it, according to spokeswoman Linda Smith.

"This is really intended to give them some breathing room," said ABA President Carolyn Lamm.

read the rest here

Steve Ellmann reviews Arc of Justice

Now Without Hesitation: Ossian Sweet and the power of client narrative

Ossian Sweet and the power of client narrative
We often worry that clients' voice is lost in the process of representation. The story that gets told, though not false, is a story keyed to the elements of the case, or to some other persuasive need, rather than to the client's understanding of the narrative of his or her life. But my co-author Ann Shalleck, in her chapter on "Narrative Theory and Narrative Practices" in our new book (Lawyers and Clients: Critical Issues in Interviewing and Counseling (2009) -- see my previous post for the book announcement) emphasizes that clients' own narratives change over time, and in part as a result of the influence of the lawyer. Sometimes those changes are benign. Sometimes they may not be.

In his fascinating book Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age (2004), Kevin Boyle tells the story of Dr. Ossian Sweet and his trial. Dr. Sweet was an African American physician, living in Detroit, who in 1925 made the decision to move with his family into a house in an all-white neighborhood. The results were disastrous. A white crowd swelled around his house on each of his first two nights in it; the second night, members of the crowd began hurling stones at the house, and as the stones fell someone (or someones) in the house fired into the crowd, wounding one person and killing another. Dr. Sweet and the 10 other people in the house were all arrested and charged with murder.

As Boyle tells the story, Dr. Sweet emerges as a conflicted man, who was almost overcome by anxiety as the mob surrounded his house. He seems not so much to have decided to risk everything for the sake of his right to purchase this house as to have been unable to back down from the purchase as the extent of the peril he and his family faced became clear. None of this is to his discredit; the fact is that he did exercise his right to purchase a house anywhere he could afford, and he determined to defend the house against attack, and he did so. (He did not, however, fire any shots himself.)

Boyle tells us that after their arrests, Dr. Sweet and most of the others initially told the authorities, falsely, that they weren't in the house that night to defend it but rather were just waiting for dinner when the trouble began. (Boyle, at 173-74.) Apparently it was Clarence Darrow, perhaps accompanied by Walter White of the NAACP (which had made this case a cause), who persuaded the defendants to tell the story more fully. In Boyle's words:

"For the longest time, Darrow sat with Ossian and the others, listening to them recount the evening on Garland Avenue, gently pressing them to admit to the shooting rather than cling to the unlikely stories they had concocted the night of the police interrogation, quietly reassuring them that the case could be won even if they had fired into the crowd, bridging the chasm between the famous white lawyer and ten desperately afraid colored men with his remarkable gift for empathy." (244)

Along the way, however, Dr. Sweet's understanding of his own story changed. "[H]e began to see the road he had followed to Garland Avenue as much straighter, his steps more purposeful, than they had actually been." (247) Perhaps Dr. Sweet was influenced by his sense of what a jury might respond to, and perhaps he was moved by the praise that his supporters offered for him. I don't mean that he falsified any concrete fact of his story, just that he came to see it as a story of his own manifest heroism.

That may have been fine for the two trials, at the first of which Dr. Sweet responded to cross-examination "with a dignity so fierce it was inspiring" (290), and at the second of which "he seemed to straighten in his seat as the questions were asked.... Now the fear was gone, replaced by unbending pride, the terrified little boy of Bartow given way to a New Negro willing to risk everything in defense of his family, his home, and his principles." (327-28) And the trials ultimately ended in complete legal victory for the defendants.

Unfortunately, it was not fine for Dr. Sweet as a person. Between the two trials, Dr. Sweet and his wife, Gladys (also a defendant), went on a tour planned by the NAACP. A pastor accompanying them said that "Each day he [Dr. Sweet] got more egotistic." (306). The same man said that "I averted no fewer than four scenes ... [and] abated five quarrels between the Sweets." (306-07)

Perhaps all would have been well in time. But as it turned out, Gladys Sweet and the Sweets' one-year-old daughter Iva contracted tuberculosis, very possibly from the jail in which they were confined after the arrests, and both died of it. (344) Dr. Sweet lived in the house he had bought for many years, but his life went awry in multiple ways, and at the age of 64 he shot and killed himself. (344-46) Would he have handled better the challenges he faced if he had not come to see himself, at one point in his life, as a more unambiguously heroic man than he (or almost anyone else) could be? We don't know. But the book leaves the strong impression that the case, the cause, became so great that it changed even the individuals whose cause it was, and not entirely for the better.

*******************

For me, reading Arc of Justice raised another, more personal question. In 1925, my grandfather, James Ellmann, was a young attorney practicing in Detroit and raising a family along with his wife Jean. He would go on to be active in civil rights issues, but the first trace of that activity that I've found so far on the web is in the mid-late 1930s. There's no sign that he was involved in any way in the Sweet case. I can't help but think, though, that he must have been inspired by this celebrated, dramatic case, involving local people and the most prominent lawyer of the age. So I hope that one of the effects of this case -- which brought Dr. Sweet freedom but not happiness, and helped launch the NAACP's legal challenges to racism even while Northern cities' residential segregation intensified (342-43) -- was to play some part in my grandfather's political development, and so my father's, and so mine.

Bob Dinerstein to get PIncus Award!

The AALS, the Section on Clinical Legal Education's Executive Committee, and the Section's Awards Committee would like to announce that Professor Robert Dinerstein, Professor of Law at American University Washington College of Law, will be awarded the William Pincus Award at the AALS Annual Conference in New Orleans, in January, 2010, at the Clinical Section luncheon on Saturday, January 9, 2010.  The Pincus Award honors one or more individuals or institutions of clinical legal education who have demonstrated excellence in service, scholarship, program design and implementation, and other activity beneficial to clinical education or to the advancement of justice.

 

 

Professor Dinerstein exhibits these qualities in abundance, and he continues to be a leader of the clinical movement in legal education.

Professor Dinerstein has been a tireless advocate for clinical legal education and a mentor to countless members of the clinical teaching community.  In his scholarship, in his own clinical work as a mentor to his students, as an advocate for clinic clients, in furthering clinical legal education in the United States and in other countries, and in his years of service in furthering the development of clinical legal education both through the AALS and the ABA, he has contributed and continues to contribute to the development of clinical legal education.

He is an author of important articles about clinical legal education pedagogy and the theory of practice, and he has made significant contributions to the field.  His service to the clinical community includes serving as a Chair of the Clinical Section, the AALS Standing Committee on Clinical Education, CLEA's Best Practices Project and the Best Practices Implementation Committee, and important committees of the ABA Section on Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar, including the Standards Review Committee and the Council of the Section.  He has amply demonstrated his continued commitment to improving legal education and the role of clinical legal education.

 

Professor Dinerstein's work toward advancing the cause of clinical education, his scholarship, and his commitment to his students and clients make him a worthy recipient of the 2010 William Pincus Award.

 

Technology in the Classroom -- comments? thoughts?

Hello all,

 

I am preparing the upcoming newsletter for the AALS Teaching Methods section. I'd like to include section members' thoughts on the use of technology in the classroom (and I don't mean students' use of laptops to surf the internet rather than listen to the lecture!). If you have found the use of some technology (clickers, podcasts, webinars, course websites, etc.) has enhanced the teaching of your subject in some way, I'd love to hear about it.

 

I'll publish entries up to around 500 words or so. Let me know the subject you teach, where you teach, and how you've used technology to do any of the following: (1) make your job easier; (2) enhance the students' learning of the subject; (3) test the students' comprehension of the subject matter; (4) encourage collaborative or interactive learning; or (5) anything else I'm not thinking of.

 

I'd like to receive submissions no later than November 23rd.

 

Thanks in advance for your input!

 

Rachel Croskery-Roberts

Associate Director, Legal Practice Program

Michigan Law School

SSRN: alternatives to bar exams

"An Alternative Model to United States Bar Examinations: The South African Community Service Experience in Licensing Attorneys" 

Georgia State University Law Review, Vol. 20, No.4, Summer 2004
Florida International University Legal Studies Research Paper No. 08-16

PEGGY MAISEL, Florida International University College of Law
Email: maiselp@fiu.edu

This Article examines the system of educating and licensing attorneys in South Africa to determine whether that country’s experience can provide guidance to jurisdictions in the United States that are considering proposals to reduce or eliminate the importance of bar examinations. The analysis set out here is supplemented by a companion article, providing a first-hand account of the South African system by Ms. Thuli Mhlungu, who was educated and sought admission to the bar during the last years of apartheid and the early years of the new democratic regime.

Examining the situation in South Africa makes particular sense because South Africa is a country whose tortured history parallels the United States’ history in many ways. Further, the South African system (1) has always required some form of practical training prior to admission as an attorney; (2) expanded the way to fulfill the practical training requirement ten years ago to include two alternatives being considered in the United States - community service apprenticeships and practical training courses; and (3) suffers from societal problems similar to those of the United States, including under-representation of people of color within the legal profession and inadequate resources to provide access to justice for indigent persons.

Any analysis of how helpful a consideration of the South African history of bar licensure can be for jurisdictions in the United States initially requires an understanding of the structure of that country’s bar, its system of legal education, the historical method it used for licensing law graduates, and the racial composition of its bar. Part I of this Article sets out this historical framework. After providing that historical information, Part II discusses the post-apartheid changes to bar admissions, the rationale for those changes, and how successful they have been. Part III examines key issues jurisdictions in the United States will face if they try to institute a parallel system. Finally, Part IV offers a suggestion for how U.S. jurisdictions might try to duplicate the successes achieved in South Africa.

SSRN: a student's perspective on clinic

"The Five Lessons I Learned through Clinical Education" 

CLPE Research Paper No. 40/2009

NADIA CHIESA, affiliation not provided to SSRN
Email: nadiachiesa@osgoode.yorku.ca

Legal education has long been criticized for failing to prepare students for the realities of the practice of law. This article explores how clinical legal education programmes, offered at many Canadian law schools, may respond to this criticism and provide an alternative to traditional legal education. Through a reflection on the experience of working as a student at a community legal aid clinic, the author offers a student's perspective on the challenges and rewards of pursuing this type of legal education and discusses how clinical legal education may better equip law students for their future career.

Memo to the appointments committee: how to interview minority candidates

from hunter of justice by Nan Hunter

The hiring conference for entry-level law professors, known universally and grimly as the meat market, starts today. Having survived my one year as a candidate and many years on the hiring side of the table, I herewith pass on the following advice from a non-lawyer, but similarly experienced, historian, my friend Claire Potter, aka the Tenured Radical:

...[I]n lieu of giving bad advice to candidates, I thought I would give advice to those people who were doing the interviewing instead. And it's a particular kind of advice: how not to look like a fool when interviewing what we now call a "diversity candidate." Now for the sake of brevity, let's say the candidate is either a man or a woman (technically all women are diversity candidates), but may also be either of color or queer (technically queer people are never diversity candidates. Unless they are -- for some other reason.) Because these categories are too internally various, and because in fact there is surprising overlap in some of the ways you could possibly offend the people who occupy them, let's call them: Martians. And we'll assume for the sake of clarity in what follows that "you" are not a Martian, and that "I" am. Are you ready? Let's begin.

1. Do not tell irrelevant stories about your friends who are Martians, or that your daughter decided to come out as a Martian last year and how great you feel about it. I understand that you are doing this to make us Martians feel as though we are among friends, and to demonstrate your absolute lack of Martianophobia or your committed anti-Martianism. I appreciate that. Really, I do. But you know what? It suggests just the opposite. It suggests that the Martian in your presence, who is me, is making you uncomfortable, and that you are bravely overcoming it. We Martians are used to being in the minority, but it makes us impatient to have other people remind us of it all the time -- in the name of pro-Martianism, no less. So we will all do better during the interview if you stick to scholarship, teaching and what the actual requirements of the job are.

2. Do not take me to a Martian restaurant for dinner. First of all, a Martian restaurant that is not on Mars, or in a place with a significant Martian population, is likely not to be any good. It will serve Martian food cooked to the taste of the non-Martians who populate your planet. So I will find this depressing. But furthermore, it suggests that I, as a Martian, am in danger of feeling alienated on your planet because I may not be able to access my "culture." Though a Martian, as a scholar and an intellectual, I probably feel I am a little more cosmopolitan than that.

3. While we are at dinner, stay away from topics that betray how invisible the other Martians on campus or on your planet are to you. Telling me that I may wish to live on the planet one light year away because it has a larger Martian population is one way of conveying this, as is: explaining that retaining single Martians is so difficult because it is so difficult to meet and other, marriageable, Martians on your planet; or announcing that, incredibly, there is a Martian Episcopalian church that serves the entire planet right in your canyon! So even though there aren't many Martians on campus, there will be a terrific community for me. On Sundays. (Did I say I was religious? Are you sure?)

4. Admit it if your college does a crappy job of recruiting and serving the needs of Martians. Most colleges and universities that are not on Mars do -- it's not up to you to apologize for it. As in (1), don't tell me about the one Martian who graduated Summa and won the department prize twelve years ago. And although there may be serious Martian politics on campus, don't assume that I share your view of what it means to be progressive on these issues, even -- or especially -- if you are a fellow Martian.

5. Refrain from hinting to me coyly that there is someone I "really need to meet" but not telling me why. This is the most frequent way that people have of dropping a few hairpins that I am a Martian (duh), and this other person is a Martian, but being a person who doesn't really "see" or believe in interplanetary differences, you aren't going to say the word "Martian" (wink, wink.) Most Martians find this tiresome. We aren't at a job interview to meet other Martians: we're there to get a job. And if meeting another Martian on campus is important to me, I'll tell you so.

6. Try to police your references to Martian stereotypes, whether social or intellectual. Don't ask me, for example, why I ended up a historian and not a flight engineer; don't tell me that the special barber I need to cut the hair around my antennae is in the next town over (we don't all have antennae, ok?); and don't, for heaven's sake, if I am interviewing for a Renaissance Literature position, reassure me that the Martian Studies program is very welcoming. Don't put the chair of Martian Studies on my schedule without asking me, if I am not interviewing in Martian Studies, or set up lunch with the one other out Martian to talk about how I might like to work up a Martian survey course once I get a firm grip on the courses I am actually being hired to teach.

And last of all -- if you make any of the above errors, please forget about it and move on -- don't embarrass all of us by dwelling on your faux pas and trying to repair the damage. Martians are used to being in the minority, and we can take care of ourselves, thank you very much.

JOBS: A list of 69 Fellowships

More Fellowships for Aspiring Law Professors

from TaxProf Blog by Paul Caron

Following up on my August post, Fellowships for Aspiring Law Professors (2009-10 Edition):  Jonathan Gingerich (J.D. 2010, Harvard) of the Harvard Legal Theory Forum has compiled this very helpful spreadsheet with detailed information (including application deadlines, qualifications, salaries, and duration) on 69 teaching and research fellowships.

Symposium from “Critical Race Theory at 20″ published

from Poverty Law by Ezra Rosser

Iowa Law Review has published an issue of papers coming out of the “Critical Race Theory at 20″ conference that was held at Iowa.  The papers are below:

Celebrating Critical Race Theory at 20
Angela Onwuachi-Willig

Liberal McCarthyism and the Origins of Critical Race Theory
Richard Delgado

The Re-Emergence of Race as a Biological Category: The Societal Implications—Reaffirmation of Race
Alex M. Johnson, Jr.

Post-Racialism
Sumi Cho

Jim Crow Ethics and the Defense of the Jena Six
Anthony V. Alfieri

Oh Puleez: Do We Really Need to Teach Them Not to Do That?

By Mary Alice Robbins, Texas Lawyer

Adam Reposa, the Austin, Texas, criminal defense solo who made a gesture simulating masturbation toward a prosecutor while standing before Travis County Court-at-Law No. 6 Judge Jan Breland, faces 90 days in jail. In an 8-1 decision, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals denied Reposa's application for a writ of habeas corpus in his contempt case.

Judge Lawrence Meyers, the lone dissenter in Ex Parte Adam Reposa, did not write an opinion. The CCA's unpublished opinion, written by Judge Paul Womack, presents the following summary of Breland's testimony at Reposa's contempt hearing: On March 11, 2008, Reposa appeared as counsel for a defendant in a criminal case in Breland's court. Breland asked Reposa to stop whispering to his client while she was trying to explain a plea offer to the client. After the prosecutor, Assistant County Attorney Bill Swaim, protested about Reposa's continued whispering, Reposa made the simulated masturbation gesture toward the prosecutor while looking at Breland.

Acting on Swaim's motion, Breland held Reposa in contempt. Senior Judge Paul Davis of Austin, sitting by assignment, subsequently found Reposa guilty of contempt and sentenced him to 90 days in jail. Reposa appealed to the CCA on June 2, 2008. The CCA had set bail for Reposa pending the disposition of his case.

In its decision Wednesday, the CCA overruled Reposa's five issues challenging the judgment of contempt and sentence. With regard to Reposa's challenge to the sufficiency of the evidence, Womack wrote for the majority, "Regardless of the fact that the gesture was not directed at Judge Breland, it nevertheless was a purposeful act of disrespect and an affront to the dignity of the court. As such, it rises to the level of criminal contempt."

Swaim declines comment on the CCA's decision.

When told of the CCA's decision, Reposa said, "Oh well." When asked what happens next, Reposa says he doesn't know. "I need to talk to my lawyer," he says.

To read more, go to:  http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1202435009683&rss=newswire

SSRN: ASSESSMENT and EMPIRICAL STUDIES

"Assessing Differently and Using Empirical Studies to See If it Makes a Difference: Can Law Schools Do it Better?" 

Quinnipiac Law Review, Vol. 27, 2009
Georgia State University College of Law, Legal Studies Research Paper No. 2009-22

ANDREA ANNE CURCIO, Georgia State University - College of Law
Email: acurcio@gsu.edu

Recent scholarly literature criticizes law school assessment methods as being pedagogically unsound, an ineffective way to develop good lawyers, and as standing as an unjustifiable barrier to diversifying the profession. With the publication of Educating Lawyers, and Best Practices, the academy finally has begun to engage in the kind of scholarly scrutiny of assessment that has long been the practice in other disciplines. This essay seeks to move the discussion from a focus on law school assessment shortcomings, to a discussion of the scholarly work necessary to examine and improve assessments. It does this by providing concrete suggestions for alternative law school assessments which attempt to incorporate into large-section courses the Carnegie apprenticeships of legal analysis, practical skills, and professional identity. The essay acknowledges that whether these alternatives, or even our existing assessment methods, are valid and reliable is an undetermined question. Thus, the essay urges empirical exploration of law school assessments. It provides guidance to those seeking to design empirical assessment research studies and it suggests some empirical assessment studies that can and should be done. It concludes by arguing that given the high stakes of law school assessments, law professors should devote the same level of scrutiny to assessments as is given to other scholarly pursuits.

Tweeting in Class

November 5, 2009

DENVER — Do Twitter skeptics really believe the popular microblogging service offers no educational value, or are they just afraid of it?

For W. Gardner Campbell, director of the Academy of Teaching and Learning at Baylor University, there is no question that fear of straying from the status quo has inhibited the development of Twitter as a teaching tool. “I go to conferences like Open Education 2009, and I come back with T-shirts like this: ‘Reuse, Revise, Remix, Redistribute,’ ” he said Wednesday at the annual Educause conference here. “And all it adds up to is more punishment at the hands of well-meaning, sometimes, but ultimately self-preserving institutional structures.”

read the rest here

Gender Bias Bingo

from Feminist Law Professors by Ann Bartow

“Share your experiences of at least three bias types listed below, and you will win the highly coveted “Real Professors Play Gender Bias Bingo” T–shirt!” Preview bingo card here. Play here!

New Teaching Resources from SALT

Hi all,

 

To support those interested in developing empirical scholarship about teaching and assessment issues, SALT's Committee on Issues in Legal Education has put together a list of potential social science collaborators.  The list contains the names of social science academics across the country who have expressed a willingness to collaborate with law professors who want to do empirical work on teaching and assessment but who do not have a social science background. 

 

Additionally, with the help of Washburn University Law School, SALT has developed an assessment listserv.  The listserv is a sounding board for those thinking about, or involved in, scholarship about teaching and assessment.  We read each others' work, answer questions about research design and implementation, and generally support each other in whatever way possible as we develop this area of scholarship. 

 

There is a link to both these resources on the SALT homepage: www.saltlaw.org.

 

Feel free to pass this notice along to other people listservs.  We are trying to spread the word about these resources.

 

Take care,

 

Andi Curcio

Professor of Law  [& Chair of SALT Cmte on Issues in Legal Education] Georgia State University College of Law

404 413 9157

acurcio@gsu.edu

Conference on Public Education at Howard

Reaffirming the Role of School Integration in K-12 Public Education Policy: A Conversation Among Policymakers, Advocates and Educators

Friday, November 13, 2009, 10:00 AM Howard University School of Law Washington, D.C.

Register Soon! Registration Closes on Friday, November 6.  Click Here to Register for this Conference This conference brings together a wide range of government officials to converse with educators, civil rights advocates, and scholars who support racially and economically integrated K-12 public schools.  Participants will learn about racial and socioeconomic integration incentives in current and proposed federal policies, regulations and spending programs.  Panelists and audience members also will discuss current integration efforts on the ground that sustain quality integrated schools and stable communities.

JOBS: Loyola LA Juvenile Law

Clinic Director

Loyola Law School Center for Juvenile Law and Policy

Loyola Law School, Los Angeles, is accepting applications for the Director of the Juvenile Justice Clinic.  The candidate will be expected to teach, supervise and direct clinical faculty, social workers, staff, and certified law students representing youth in the Los Angeles juvenile delinquency courts.

 

The Center is a community legal clinic that brings public service, education and advocacy together to improve the quality of legal services provided to children in the juvenile delinquency system.  The clinic provides free legal services to youth in the Los Angeles delinquency courts while providing law students with a vital skill set and the opportunity to practice in the public interest. 

 

The Clinic Director is responsible for all litigation conducted on behalf of the Center.  This includes the clinic’s representation of youth in the delinquency courts and the informal traffic courts.  The Director also works with our partners to identify clients to be represented by the Center for Juvenile Law and Policy.  The Director is jointly responsible for creating and implementing curriculum for a year-long “live-client clinic” and class, for creating, administering, and grading final exams, for assisting students with job placement, and for supervising a post-graduate fellow and new clinical faculty hires.  The Director is also expected to represent the Center at community events and participate in local committees and advocacy groups, as well as advocate for systemic change. 

 

Candidates must possess strong written and oral communication skills and a demonstrated commitment to indigent defense.  The ideal candidate should possess at least five years of relevant experience and have substantial jury trial experience.  Successful teaching, student supervision and appellate experience is desirable.  Candidates must be licensed to practice law in the state of California. 

 

The salary offered is competitive and will be based on experience.  Loyola Law School offers an attractive benefits package. 

 

Loyola Law School maintains a strong commitment to diversity in its faculty.  Applications from women and members of groups traditionally underrepresented in legal academia are especially welcome.

 

Applicants should submit the following:

Ø  A cover letter describing the applicant’s relevant experience, interest in clinical supervision and an explanation of how the position fits with the applicant’s professional goals

Ø  Resume

Ø  Writing sample of 10-15 pages

Ø  Three letters of recommendation mailed directly to the Center for Juvenile Law and Policy from the author

 

Complete applications must be received by January 8th, 2010. 

 

Please send all materials to:

 

Roxanne Hill

Clinic Director Applications

Center for Juvenile Law and Policy

Loyola Law School

919 Albany Street

Los Angeles, CA 90015

cjlp@lls.edu

Legal Aid Groups Reap Tobacco Settlement Windfall

by Petra Pasternak, The Recorder

Christmas has come early for California's legal aid organizations.

This month, $40 million is going out to more than 100 nonprofits and charities across the state from money left over in a class action settlement with makers of chewing tobacco.

The money -- in some cases hundreds of thousands of dollars -- will help local legal groups avoid cutting services and jobs as they struggle through the recession.

A check for $800,000 arrived at the San Francisco office of California Rural Legal Assistance about a week ago. Jose Padilla, its executive director, said CRLA was bracing for a shortage of about half a million dollars next year in its $13 million program, thanks to uncertainty about federal and state funding. The cy pres money will save the organization from having to cut pay by 7 percent through furloughs, or laying off six to eight of its 60 lawyers. "This is a godsend," Padilla said.

The Asian Law Caucus ran at a surplus last year, but this year fundraising for its $2 million budget is below expectations, said Executive Director Mina Liu. The $400,000 it received Tuesday "will change the conversation" at its board meeting in November. Liu said that, had the money not come in, the legal aid organization would have been discussing cutting services in some harder-to-reach parts of California, including several hundred underserved clients in the Central Valley. The money gives her confidence to go ahead with the two hires, including an attorney, to deal with increased demand for housing and elder law services. "A lot of the issue is cash flow, as opposed to where we are in terms of income and expenses," Liu said. "Cy pres boosts the cash reserves so that we know we can be a little bit more aggressive in terms of program development."

The Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles ended last year in a deficit, according to Executive Director Silvia Argueta. After cuts in travel and training and a hiring freeze, the organization is close to its $15 million budget this year. Argueta said the $700,000 in cy pres money received last week will allow the nonprofit to consider hiring a lawyer for housing work and an intake screener for domestic violence complaints. "We were going to reduce some services, including foreclosure counseling," Argueta said. "Some of our grants are ending for that work."

The Bar Association of San Francisco's Volunteer Legal Services Program received its check for $500,000 last week. The organization is planning furloughs that will cost staff between 5 and 10 percent of their salaries in 2010. "Thanks to this money, we will be able to forestall anything more drastic than that," VLSP Executive Director Tiela Chalmers said.

To read the rest of the article, go to: http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1202434993401&rss=newswire

NEWSLETTER DEADLINE

Two Weeks Until Newsletter Deadline

 

I'm sending another reminder to send information for the AALS Section on Clinical Legal Education fall 2009 newsletter.   The deadline for submissions is Monday, November 16.  Please send submissions by e-mail to olearyk@cooley.edu. 

Send:

1)information about the 2010 Annual Meeting and any events during that meeting

2)Section committee reports

3) information about your programs - cases, students, etc.

4)promotions, transfers, new hires, etc.

5)publications by clinicians

6)information from CLEA or other kindred organizations

7)information about conferences or meetings of interest to clinicians

8)announcements

9)jobs

10)Anything else of interest to clinicians

When possible, include a digital photo so we can attach faces to your names.

The newsletter is sent to everyone who is up-to-date in their dues in 2008 or 2009 so make sure your dues are paid (check the clinic database located at http://cgi2.www.law.umich.edu/_GCLE/Index.asp 

Please do NOT send items over three pages in length without checking with me; I reserve the right to cut anything that is too lengthy.  Please do not send long press releases - if you can, distill information so we can read about everyone's programs.

 

Seeking New Newsletter Editor

I am reproducing the announcement about seeking a new editor below; we have heard from a couple of people who might be interested, but if anyone else is interested this is a good time to let us know. 

 

I have been newsletter editor for over nine years and feel a need to step down.  The Section is developing an electronic communication platform and it would be great if someone with an interest in electronic communication might take over as newsletter editor.  If you are interested or willing to serve this need, please contact me (Kim O'Leary) or the Section chair, Carol Suzuki (Suzuki@law.unm.edu) to express your willingness to serve. 

 

Kimberly E. O'Leary
Thomas Cooley Law School
300 S. Capitol Ave.
Lansing, MI 48933
517-371-5140, x2626

Conference in London: "REGULATING AND DEREGULATING LAWYERS IN THE 21ST CENTURY"

             CONFERENCE ANNOUNCEMENT AND CALL FOR PAPERS          

      "REGULATING AND DEREGULATING LAWYERS IN THE 21ST CENTURY"

                          London, England                      

                          June 3 & 4, 2010                      

     The University of London's Institute of Advanced Legal 

     Studies (IALS), the University of Westminster School of 

     Law, and the Cleveland State University College of Law are 

     holding a conference on "Regulating and Deregulating 

     Lawyers in the 21st Century" June 3 & 4, 2010 at the IALS.  

     This announcement invites paper submissions from 

     individuals interested in contributing to this debate. It 

     is anticipated that papers and presentations will be 

     published subsequent to the meeting. 

     FURTHER INFORMATION:

     For further information interested individuals should 

     contact:

     CONTACT:       David Barnhizer

     Email:         MAILTO:david.barnhizer@law.csuohio.edu

     Tel:           216-687-2315

     CONTACT:       Avrom Sherr

     Email:         MAILTO:Avrom.Sherr@sas.ac.uk

     Tel:           +44-207 862 5859

     CONTACT:       Andrew Boon

     Email:         MAILTO:a.boon@westminster.ac.uk

     Tel:           +0207 911 5153

     OVERVIEW:

     Contextual critiques of the current situation are welcome, 

     with a primary focus on trends impacting legal professions 

     in the US and UK, and strategies for improved regulatory 

     approaches (including deregulation) in the US, UK and 

     Canada. The aim is concrete discussions of strategies for 

     effective regulation and deregulation in the numerous and 

     distinct economic and client-varied modes of law practice.  

     Issues include the failure of self-regulation, controlling 

     the numbers of lawyers, revising rules on the unauthorized 

     practice of law, consumer protections aimed at creating 

     incentives for lawyers to provide improved service to their 

     clients through the potential for liability, and removal of 

     inappropriate entry barriers.

     The structural transformation of legal practice in the 

     corporate hemisphere and elsewhere is more advanced in the 

     UK than in the US. This includes multi-disciplinary law 

     practice and a push to list law firms on the stock exchange 

     as some law firms in Australia started a few years ago.  

     The Smedley Report from the UK's Law Society considers the 

     problems of regulating such practices when there are 

     already serious regulatory failures in the other areas that 

     will be combined into multi-disciplinary practices.

     Expected total meeting size: 60-75 participants.

     Abstracts by 30th March 2010; Papers by 31st May 2010.  

     Publication in a planned book and journals emanating from 

     the conference. 

SSRN: Schrag on Public Interest Lawyers

"Why Would Anyone Want to be a Public Interest Lawyer?" 

PHILIP G. SCHRAG, Georgetown University - Law Center
Email: SCHRAG@LAW.GEORGETOWN.EDU

This is the inaugural address for the Delaney Family Professorship in Public Interest Law at Georgetown University Law Center. It elaborates ten reasons why law graduates might want to enter into long-term careers as public interest lawyers.

GAO slides on the cost of law school and on diversity

from Poverty Law by Ezra Rosser

An interesting GAO “report,” really a collection of slides, some quite good, on law school cost and diversity: GAO, Higher Education: Issues Related to Law School Cost and Access, Oct. 2009.

A NEW JOURNAL REVIEWING RECENT SCHOLARSHIP

Welcome to Jotwell

November 2nd, 2009 | Michael Froomkin | Jotwell | Add a comment

Welcome to Jotwell: The Journal of Things We Like (Lots). Here you will find leading academics and practitioners providing short reviews of recent scholarship related to the law that the reviewer likes and thinks deserves a wide audience.

Jotwell is a special type of law review housed on a set of inter-linked blogs. As a law review, Jotwell has only one mission: to bring to readers’ attention great recent scholarship related to the law. As a blog we invite your comments, and hope that some of our reviews will spark a conversation.

On the Jotwell main page you should expect new content once or twice a week, although as we add more sections contributions may become more frequent. Each of the subject-specific sections will have something new at least once a month. In any case, every time a new review appears in any of the subject-specific sections, an excerpt with a link to the full text will also appear here on our front page at http://jotwell.com.

There are three ways to read Jotwell.

1. You can visit this page, the main Jotwell site, which aggregates all the sections; or you can sample just the sections you like, choosing from the list in the right column.
2. If you use a newsreader, you can sign up for the RSS feed for the main Jotwell section, or select among the feeds for the subject sections by choosing the link to the RSS feed found in each section.
3. Or, if you prefer to get your updates by e-mail, you can click here to request a message every time we have new article, or click on the email link found in every subject section for a more tailored, and less frequent, reminder.

Please send your comments and suggestions, and do feel free to comment on the articles as well. We hope you will make Jotwell part of your regular reading and that you will find things you like (lots).

It's Ranking Time Again -- Here's CLEA's Statement on the Issue

CLEA’S STATEMENT ON LAW SCHOOL CLINICAL PROGRAM RANKINGS

The Clinical Legal Education Association (CLEA) issues this statement because the US News & World Report ranking elections are upon us.  Many of those who receive ballots in their capacity as clinical directors or faculty members find this ranking process very uncomfortable. There are a number of problems with the ranking of clinical programs, not the least of which is that it pits us in competition with each other, when we as a group see ourselves on the same team in a shared struggle for social justice, equity, and improved legal education. Second, there are no articulated factors for ranking clinical programs, so to a degree the voting is a bit of a popularity contest.  Third, some schools unfairly suffer because they do not have the budget or the support of their administration to produce and mail clinic brochures, or to send their clinic faculty to annual conferences.

            While we might wish the rankings would disappear or hope for collective action, the USN&WR rankings are likely here to stay and this year's clinical program ballots will soon be sent out. So, what can we as faculty who teach clinics do?  CLEA, acting on the recommendation of its Rankings Committee (Michael Pinard, Bob Kuehn, Karen Lash, Carolyn Grose, Margaret Johnson, and Karen Tokarz), urges those ranking clinical programs to focus on key factors such as the range and quality of clinical curricular offerings available to students, the law school's security of position, academic freedom, and governance rights for faculty who teach clinics, and the extent to which the school has fulfilled the goal of diversity in hiring for clinical positions with long-term security.

            The five principles identified in the AALS Task Force on Clinicians in the Academy provide helpful guideposts for ranking.  That Taskforce Report sets forth five fundamental principles that are essential for every law school to recognize and apply: (1) to end the marginalization of clinical legal education within the academy; (2) to recognize that clinical legal education is vital to the academy's goal of ensuring that law students develop as effective thinkers and practitioners and are instilled with the ethical and social dimensions of the profession; (3) to provide for security in position and academic freedom for faculty who teach clinics; (4) to provide compensation and resources for faculty who teach clinics equal to those received by non-clinical faculty so that those who teach clinics may fulfill the multi-faceted requirements of their unique positions and so that schools may recruit and retain excellent educators and develop outstanding clinical programs; and (5) to provide equal governance rights for faculty who teach clinics to ensure that the legal academy meets its societal obligation to educate for the professional development of the whole student, develops curricula that is comprehensive, integrated, innovative and relevant, and secures clinical legal education's indispensable role within the academy. 

            Beyond the issue of how to handle this year's ballots, CLEA believes that the issue of clinical program rankings and of infusing clinical education more into the equation (and balloting) for overall school rankings are topics worthy of continued conversation and strategizing and welcomes further ideas and input on these issues.

‘Run, Forrest, Run!’ (And then go get a J.D.)

From our friends at Above the Law. 

The New York City marathon happens this Sunday. We know many lawyers who will be running it, and we wish them luck.

The marathon did not impose a minimum age until 1981 (16, raised to 18 in 1988). Pegged to the upcoming marathon, the New York Times had a fascinating article earlier this week about child marathoners, focusing on Wesley Paul, Scott Black (pictured), and Howie Breinan:

The adventures of Paul, Black and Breinan offer a glimpse into a forgotten aspect of the running boom of the late 1970s. Preternaturally self-disciplined, they were among about 75 children (ages 8 to 13) who tackled the early years of the New York City Marathon in a time of novelty and naïveté….

With no conclusive study, physicians still debate risks to children who compete in marathons, like muscular-skeletal injuries, stunted growth, burnout, parental pressures and the ability to handle heat stress.

Another risk: going on to become a securities lawyer. Two out of the three child marathoners profiled by the Times now practice in that field.

Scott Black is a senior trial lawyer at the Securities and Exchange Commission in New York (after several years at Wachtell Lipton, where he worked with Lat on a number of cases). Wesley Paul is a partner at Michelman & Robinson, where he practices corporate and securities law.

We touched base with Black and Paul to ask about possible connections between their running and legal careers.

We asked Scott Black (Columbia / NYU Law) if there are any attributes cultivated by or helpful to distance running that translate into legal practice. He ticked off several: “Endurance, discipline, focus, and probably a general Type-A analness.”

Read more at:  http://abovethelaw.com/2009/10/child_marathoners.php

EXPERIENTIAL RENAISSANCE ROUNDTABLE

CHALLENGES IN CONSTRUCTING AND RECONSTRUCTING EXPERIENTIAL EDUCATION PROGRAMS

The University of Minnesota will host a curriculum and development roundtable on "Challenges in Constructing and Reconstructing Experiential Education Programs" on April 9-10, 2010.  The roundtable will include presentation of draft working documents by twelve selected clinical and experiential program faculty, with comments and discussion facilitated by an additional group of participating faculty.  The goals of the roundtable are: to create an opportunity for peer collaboration in developing strategies for meeting the challenges of new and evolving experiential programs in the wake of the Carnegie Report, Best Practices, and the MacCrate Report; to encourage thoughtful development of policy, theory, assessment tools, and educational materials for meeting these challenges; and to provide a forum for the publication and dissemination of papers defining issues, outlining strategies, and addressing needs in the changing experiential education environment.

The roundtable will be structured as follows: Each of twelve selected participants will submit a working paper of 5 to 20 pages defining and discussing a particular issue or describing and analyzing an experiential education challenge. All participants will be expected to read all twelve working papers. Each of the twelve presenters and each of the twelve commentators will be expected to provide written feedback on two of the papers. Each individual roundtable presentation will be followed by comments and discussion. Paper and presentation topics can be on any subject related to the theme of the roundtable. Possible topics might include: redefining clinical or institutional mission; changes in clinicians' role, status, or resources; specific attempts at developing an integrative curriculum; internal faculty development; dealing with student expectations and resistance; defining boundaries of clinics, externships, and simulations; assessing impact on communities or service; the politics of reconstruction; or developing educational materials in professionalism, values and skills.

Anyone interested in participating in the April roundtable is invited to submit a brief proposal, following the guidelines below, on or before November 2, 2009, to Lori Peterson at pete6294@umn.edu. Selected participants will be notified by November 16. Substantial first drafts of working papers must be submitted by March 1, 2010 and final drafts by June 1, 2010. Papers will be posted on the University of Minnesota Law School website and made available to other law teaching websites. Participants will be required to be present for the full roundtable, scheduled for Friday afternoon, April 9 and all day Saturday, April 10, 2010. 

Proposal Guidelines

Name:            E-mail:            Phone:            

School Affiliation:        Address:

Goals: What do you hope to get out of the roundtable? (250 words or less)

Current position or relevant experience: (100 words or less)

Working title of Presentation:

Abstract of Presentation: (approximately 250 words)

 

SSRN: Joy and Kuehn on Academic Freedom

"Lawyering in the Academy: The Intersection of Academic Freedom and Professional Responsibility" 

Journal of Legal Education, Vol. 59, 2009
Washington U. School of Law Working Paper No. 09-10-02

PETER A. JOY, Washington University School of Law
Email: JOY@WULAW.WUSTL.EDU
ROBERT R. KUEHN, Washington University School of Law
Email: rkuehn@wulaw.wustl.edu

The legal academy has given little thought to how practicing law within law schools affects professional responsibilities and is different from representing clients in a traditional law firm or how notions of academic freedom affect lawyering in law schools. Yet repeated attempts to interfere with law clinic representation starkly illustrate how lawyering in the academy might be different, under notions of professional responsibility and academic freedom, from other lawyering or typical law teaching.

Scholarship on interference in clinical programs has focused primarily on the impropriety of interference on the institutional autonomy of law schools by those outside the university, such as politicians or business interests attempting to pressure universities and law schools not to represent or to abandon the representation of some clients. Conversely, internal intrusions on law clinic lawyering, usually by university or law school administrators seeking to influence whether and how clinical faculty and students represent some clients, have not been well-publicized. Consequently, there is virtually no scholarly attention to the tension between the individual lawyer-professor's academic freedom and professional responsibility to clients and the law school's decision-making authority.

The authors are motivated to write this article because of some of the more egregious instances of interference on lawyering in the academy, which include the firing of two clinical faculty members for their involvement in a civil rights case, pressure by university administrators on clinical faculty to avoid taking on potentially controversial cases, and a law school deans forcing the clinic to withdraw from client representation or to limit the types of remedies sought for clinic clients. In these instances, the interference with the faculty representation of clients as part of their teaching was not motivated by educational or professional responsibility concerns but, apparently, to mollify critics of the faculty member.

Against this backdrop, this article considers how the practice of law in the legal academy is both similar to and different from the typical practice of law in a firm or public interest organization and the teaching that law faculty do in the classroom. The authors focus in particular on how notions of academic freedom apply to professors lawyering in the academy and how the professional responsibilities of attorney-professors influence their teaching pursuits and relationships with the dean, other faculty members, and the university administration.

The article focuses on two underlying questions. First, how much discretion should individual faculty have in selecting cases for their courses? Second, once a faculty member undertakes to represent a client within a course, should a dean, clinical program director, or other person not involved in the client’s representation be able to direct the faculty member's decisions on how to handle the matter? In the process of addressing these issues, we suggest an approach that seeks to be true to the professional rights and responsibilities of law faculty both as academics and attorneys.

SSRN: no more law profs?

"A World Without Law Professors" 

MATHIAS M. SIEMS, University of East Anglia (UEA), Norwich Law School, University of Cambridge, Centre for Business Research, Tilburg Institute of Comparative and Transnational Law
Email: siems@fulbrightmail.org

Inspired by Alan Weisman’s book “The World Without Us” (2007) I analyse the thought experiment of a world in which law professors suddenly vanished. First, without academic teachers legal training would shift back to the legal professions. Purely professional law schools would provide legal training for future lawyers. This is feasible in both Common Law and Civil Law jurisdictions. These professional law schools can also be involved in a more general provision of legal education. In addition, non-law faculties of universities can take responsibility for teaching on law-related subjects. Secondly, I analyse the impact on legal research. Self-referential research would diminish. Doctrinal research would persist but it would be done by practitioners and the current oversupply would melt down. At universities legal research would continue but it would shift to related fields of social sciences and humanities. Thus, the threshold would be an “academic dinner party test”: legal research would have to show that it is of interest for other academic disciplines. Overall, I would therefore expect some changes; however, legal education and research would not disappear. In some respects, one could even argue that without law professors the quality of both teaching and research may improve. The paper finishes with the implications for the current system.

Sign on to SALT's statement in support of Dawn Johnsen

When Dawn Johnsen was first nominated to be Director of the Office of Legal Counsel, SALT issued a statement, supporting her nomination.  Click here to read the statement.  The confirmation process is stalled and the attached letter is being circulated for signatures by individual law faculty by People for the American Way.  In order to sign on, contact Jen Herrick at jherrick@pfaw.org to have your name and affiliation added to the letter.  Signatures need to be collected by close of business on Friday, November 6. 

 

If anyone has questions, contact Marge Baker by email at mbaker@pfaw.org, or by phone at 202-467-2341.

 

P.S.:  The election of the SALT Board of Governors is over.  Thank you to all who voted to show your support for the five new and five returning members of the board. 

 

Hazel Weiser, Executive Director

Society of American Law Teachers -- SALT

Public Advocacy Center, Room 223

Touro Law Center

225 Eastview Drive

Central Islip, NY 11722

hweiser@saltlaw.org

631.650.2310

 

Explore our new website: www.saltlaw.org

 

SALT Annual Dinner, Saturday, January 9th, 7:00 pm, Hotel Monteleone, New Orleans--Tickets are on sale now!

 

a community of progressive law teachers working for justice, diversity, and academic excellence

______________________________________________________
This email has been scanned for all viruses.

"Grammar Girl"

Legal Writing Prof Blog

Here's another website you might be interested in - "Grammar Girl"

Grammar Girl is blog that "provides short, friendly tips to improve your writing. Covering the grammar rules and word choice guidelines that can confound even the best writers, Grammar Girl makes complex grammar questions simple with memory tricks to help you recall and apply those troublesome grammar rules. Whether English is your first language or second language, Grammar Girl’s punctuation, style, and business tips will make you a better and more successful writer."

You can sign up for her newsletter or just search through the archive of past topics like this one on the ever pesky "active versus passive voice."

Is the US News to Blame for the Increased Cost of a Legal Education?

from Law School Headlines by admin

For better or worse — and many law professors say for worse — the U.S. News and World Report rankings carry big weight with law school applicants.

But that emphasis ends up costing students more.

According to a report issued by the Government Accountability Office (embedded below), “the move to a more hand-on, resource-intensive approach to legal education and competition among schools for higher rankings appear to be the main factors driving the cost of law school,” the report says.

Specific actions schools take to increase rankings include (from pgs. 19-20):

* Strive for lower student/professor ratios
* Offer clinics and diverse elective courses
* Attract top faculty members, who require higher salaries

These are of course good things, but, since 1994, tuition has increased 7.2% for in-state public universities and 3.8% for private universities. In 2008, the report says, six public law schools reported resident tuition and fees of more than $30,000.

As the ABA Journal notes, the average debt for graduates of public law schools rose from $50,000 to $71,436. For private law schools, the average debt has risen from $75,000 in 2001-02 to $91,506 in 2007-08.

[Business Insider]

Reasons to be a Public Interest Lawyer

from Poverty Law by Ezra Rosser

In preparation for the upcoming Equal Justice Works Job Fair, I saw a post that is worth forwarding to students: 10 Reasons to Become a Public Interest Lawyer.  The list is adapted from a speech by Professor Philip G. Schrag.

 

Tooting William Mitchell's Horn

The Public Health Law Center (the former Tobacco Law Center) at William Mitchell College of Law is extremely pleased to announce that it has been asked to assist the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in analyzing and implementing the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act − historic new federal regulation to regulate tobacco products.   Under a grant of $100,731 through Emory University in Atlanta, the Public Health Law Center will help the CDC, the Food and Drug Administration, and state health departments with legal issues involved in developing and defending improved tobacco control laws and programs in the new legal environment.  The Center will also prepare a training curriculum and materials to educate health officials on the new law’s implications for state health policies.  Center Staff Attorney Maggie Mahoney, Deputy Director of the Tobacco Control Legal Consortium, will devote half her time to the one-year project.

One of America’s leading resources for improving public health policies, the Public Health Law Center at William Mitchell College of Law also serves as home to the legal network supporting the nation’s tobacco control movement.  The Center is self-supporting, funded entirely by external grants and contracts, and reimburses the College for all costs associated with its offices and overhead.  Four of the Center’s eight attorneys teach courses as Adjunct Professors, and the Center is one of William Mitchell’s largest employers of student research assistants.  Its research and scholarship are distributed widely through print and electronic publications, presentations, and academic journals.

JOBS: Buffalo clinic

The State University of New York at Buffalo School of Law is seeking candidates for a Clinical Assistant Professor position in our Affordable Housing Clinic and the Community Economic Development Clinic.  The individual will teach in both clinics and serve as Deputy Director of the Affordable Housing Clinic.  Please circulate this far and wide to any individuals who may be interested.  All interested parties should submit a cover letter and curriculum vitae to Professor Tom Disare disare@buffalo.edu by November 20, 2009.  A description of the position and the qualifications is attached.  Thank you.

New Interviewing and Counseling Book!

Visit Us Online     |     Contact Account Manager     |     Law School Exchange

Lawyers and Clients: Critical Issues in Interviewing and Counseling Stephen Ellmann, New York Law School Robert D. Dinerstein, American Isabelle R. Gunning, Southwestern Katherine R. Kruse, UNLV Ann C. Shalleck, American ISBN 978-0-31423-531-2 Lawyers and Clients: Critical Issues in Interviewing and Counseling will be published in October, is available for spring 2010 classes, and is now available for viewing on Law School Exchange. Going beyond the basics of interviewing and counseling, this book examines practical and theoretical challenges lawyers face with clients. Each chapter explores a critical issue in interviewing and counseling, such as developing connection across difference; dealing with atypical clients; using engaged client-centered counseling; bringing narrative theory to bear on lawyer-client encounters; seeking truth; pursuing moral dialogue; discussing law; and understanding how expertise affects practice. The book . . . Read More Join Law School Exchange today to view a complimentary digital copy of this text and to take advantage of the site's many other features. Law School Exchange allows law school faculty to share, digitally publish, and find scholarship and teaching materials in collaboration with an online community of peers.

Review Copy: Lawyers and Clients: Critical Issues in Interviewing and Counseling will be sent to all full-time law professors teaching interviewing and counseling. Other professors who would like to review this textbook may request a complimentary copy by emailing their account manager at westacademic@thomsonreuters.com. When placing an order with your bookstore, please refer to ISBN 978-0-31423-531-2.

Privacy Poli   |   Unsubsibe   |

Prosecutors Subpoena Journalism Student Records of Innocence Investigation

NYT:  Prosecutors Turn Tables on Student Journalists

By MONICA DAVEY

Published: October 24, 2009

EVANSTON, Ill. — For more than a decade, classes of students at Northwestern University’s journalism school have been scrutinizing the work of prosecutors and the police. The investigations into old crimes, as part of the Medill Innocence Project, have helped lead to the release of 11 inmates, the project’s director says, and an Illinois governor once cited those wrongful convictions as he announced he was commuting the sentences of everyone on death row.

But as the Medill Innocence Project is raising concerns about another case, that of a man convicted in a murder 31 years ago, a hearing has been scheduled next month in Cook County Circuit Court on an unusual request: Local prosecutors have subpoenaed the grades, grading criteria, class syllabus, expense reports and e-mail messages of the journalism students themselves.

The prosecutors, it seems, wish to scrutinize the methods of the students this time. The university is fighting the subpoenas.

Lawyers in the Cook County state’s attorney’s office say that in their quest for justice in the old case, they need every pertinent piece of information about the students’ three-year investigation into Anthony McKinney, who was convicted of fatally shooting a security guard in 1978. Mr. McKinney’s conviction is being reviewed by a judge.

read the rest here

HT Karen Van Ingen

Are Women Getting Sadder?

Or Are We All Just Getting a Lot More Gullible?
By Barbara Ehrenreich

Feminism made women miserable. This, anyway, seems to be the most popular takeaway from "The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness," a recent study by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers which purports to show that women have become steadily unhappier since 1972. Maureen Dowd and Arianna Huffington greeted the news with somber perplexity, but the more common response has been a triumphant: I told you so.

On Slate's DoubleX website, a columnist concluded from the study that "the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s gave us a steady stream of women's complaints disguised as manifestos... and a brand of female sexual power so promiscuous that it celebrates everything from prostitution to nipple piercing as a feminist act -- in other words, whine, womyn, and thongs." Or as Phyllis Schlafly put it, more soberly: "[T]he feminist movement taught women to see themselves as victims of an oppressive patriarchy in which their true worth will never be recognized and any success is beyond their reach... [S]elf-imposed victimhood is not a recipe for happiness."

But it's a little too soon to blame Gloria Steinem for our dependence on SSRIs. For all the high-level head-scratching induced by the Stevenson and Wolfers study, hardly anyone has pointed out (1) that there are some issues with happiness studies in general, (2) that there are some reasons to doubt this study in particular, or (3) that, even if you take this study at face value, it has nothing at all to say about the impact of feminism on anyone's mood.

For starters, happiness is an inherently slippery thing to measure or define. Philosophers have debated what it is for centuries, and even if we were to define it simply as a greater frequency of positive feelings than negative ones, when we ask people if they are happy, we are asking them to arrive at some sort of average over many moods and moments. Maybe I was upset earlier in the day after I opened the bills, but then was cheered up by a call from a friend, so what am I really?

In one well-known psychological experiment, subjects were asked to answer a questionnaire on life satisfaction, but only after they had performed the apparently irrelevant task of photocopying a sheet of paper for the experimenter. For a randomly chosen half of the subjects, a dime had been left for them to find on the copy machine. As two economists summarize the results: "Reported satisfaction with life was raised substantially by the discovery of the coin on the copy machine -- clearly not an income effect."

As for the particular happiness study under discussion, the red flags start popping up as soon as you look at the data. Not to be anti-intellectual about it, but the raw data on how men and women respond to the survey reveal no discernible trend to the naked eyeball. Only by performing an occult statistical manipulation called "ordered probit estimates," do the authors manage to tease out any trend at all, and it is a tiny one: "Women were one percentage point less likely than men to say they were not too happy at the beginning of the sample [1972]; by 2006 women were one percentage more likely to report being in this category." Differences of that magnitude would be stunning if you were measuring, for example, the speed of light under different physical circumstances, but when the subject is as elusive as happiness -- well, we are not talking about paradigm-shifting results.

Furthermore, the idea that women have been sliding toward despair is contradicted by the one objective measure of unhappiness the authors offer: suicide rates. Happiness is, of course, a subjective state, but suicide is a cold, hard fact, and the suicide rate has been the gold standard of misery since sociologist Emile Durkheim wrote the book on it in 1897. As Stevenson and Wolfers report -- somewhat sheepishly, we must imagine -- "contrary to the subjective well-being trends we document, female suicide rates have been falling, even as male suicide rates have remained roughly constant through most of our sample [1972-2006]." Women may get the blues; men are more likely to get a bullet through the temple.

Another distracting little data point that no one, including the authors, seems to have much to say about is that, while "women" have been getting marginally sadder, black women have been getting happier and happier. To quote the authors: "...happiness has trended quite strongly upward for both female and male African Americans... Indeed, the point estimates suggest that well-being may have risen more strongly for black women than for black men." The study should more accurately be titled "The Paradox of Declining White Female Happiness," only that might have suggested that the problem could be cured with melanin and Restylane.

But let's assume the study is sound and that (white) women have become less happy relative to men since 1972. Does that mean that feminism ruined their lives?

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/barbara-ehrenreich/are-women-getting-sadder_b_319436.html

Uniform Bar Exam Drawing Closer to Reality

States' adoption of the test reflects the legal profession?s nationalization

Leigh Jones

The National Law Journal

It could mark one of the biggest changes for lawyers joining the profession since the first U.S. bar exam was given in Delaware in 1763 -- a single bar exam aimed at standardizing attorney credentials nationwide.

Next year, at least 10 states are expected to switch to the so-called Uniform Bar Exam, and 22 other jurisdictions are positioned to adopt the test in the next few years. The test, developed by the National Conference of Bar Examiners, will allow law school graduates to transport their bar scores across state lines without re-taking exams. And backers say a uniform exam will improve the quality of bar exams, particularly in states with small test-development budgets.

The test still has big hurdles to overcome. Several of the biggest legal markets have yet to sign on: New York, California, the District of Columbia, Florida, Illinois and Texas so far have taken a pass. Some worry the test will give short shrift to important state law concepts. Others have scheduling problems and scoring concerns. And the test puts a great deal of power in the hands of the NCBE, which gives some state-level bar officials pause.

Even so, the fact that several states have accepted one test may mean a major shift for the profession. Individual states have doggedly clung to their autonomy in testing lawyers, and this would mean giving up that power. "Roughly 10" states have indicated that they will give the uniform test by 2011, said Erica Moeser, president of the NCBE, though she wouldn't provide specifics on which states will actually sign on. However, officials in Colorado, Minnesota and Missouri have said they are considering the test. Next month, representatives from the states that will be among the first adopting the test will gather in Phoenix to discuss late-stage details of implementing the exam.

"It's got to start somewhere, and it's happening," said John J. McAlary, executive director of the New York State Board of Law Examiners. New York, which administers some 15,000 bar examinations each year, is considering the uniform exam. That said, McAlary doesn't expect the state to make a move anytime soon. "There are significant challenges with it," he said. New York will not send representatives to next month's meeting.

To read the rest of this piece, go to http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1202434472731&rss=newswire

Unfortunate Marketing

Undignified Marketing Alert

from Feminist Law Professors by Bridget Crawford

The image at left is taken from the Northeastern University School of Law publicity that landed today in my faculty mailbox.  The text in the tan box in the upper left corner reads, “Faculty and students advocate together for those too-often underrepresented in the justice system.” 

That’s a nice message.

A woman sitting on the floor gazing upwards adoringly at a professor is not a nice message. 

It is as if the school is saying, “At Northeastern, our professors tower over all others.  Here, women sit on the floor and beam at their older male professors.  We like that image so much we wanted to share it with the world.  It represents a typical interaction at our school.”

Who suggested this shot?  Why did the faculty member agree to it?  Why didn’t the students object?  Why didn’t the Marketing/Communications staff reject it?  Hey, Northeastern, you can do better.

-Bridget Crawford

Hiring for Political Diversity?

On Hiring - Hiring for Political Diversity? - The Chronicle of Higher Education

By David Evans



One of my favorite higher-education blogs is Tenured Radical, by Claire Potter, a history professor at a top liberal-arts college in the Northeast. Her latest entry takes up the issue of intellectual diversity -- specifically, the hiring of conservatives -- in academic searches. She looks at that issue with a characteristic combination of thoughtfulness, analytical rigor, and lack of dogma that is perhaps at odds with the title of her blog.

As I've said before, I'm in English, and came of age academically during the "canon wars" and the debates over "political correctness." I am, by personal inclination, what you might call a pragmatic leftist (if my conservative friends and colleagues will grant that such a category exists at all), and "should," by the predictive models of some critics of higher education, be an exemplar of exclusionary hiring practices that strongly favor liberals or radicals.

I have overseen a tremendous number of faculty searches, and have been party to a huge number of discussions about search parameters and desiderata, as well as conversations about particular candidates at various points in the process. The surprising thing about those experiences is actually how little "politics," in the sense of dividing up the pool into left and right, has ever come into play.

There have certainly been a few instances where dogma of some kind (and it's not always been leftist dogma) has had some impact on a search process. But in general, I'm pleased to say that my colleagues have genuinely looked for the best teacher, scholar, and colleague according to professionally reasonable measures rather than ideology. As a result, we've hired a mix of people with a mix of political positions and attitudes.

Something that Tenured Radical's entry doesn't really bring up is the interesting dichotomy between "political" conservatism and "academic" conservatism, and I think that distinction is worth probing. I don't think, for example, that a strong interest in Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton necessarily makes one a political reactionary even if one's approach to those texts is traditional in the extreme. Similarly, I have known some quite conservative colleagues who have had pretty radical scholarly and pedagogical programs in areas like Queer Theory. I've even known a couple of leftist bibliographers!

The point really is that academic politics -- in the macro sense rather than institutionally -- are pretty complex. We tell our students to avoid simplistic dichotomies and to develop comfort with ambiguity, inconclusiveness, and honest debate. When it comes to the politics of our colleagues, I think we ought to model that approach ourselves.

JOBS: CUNY lawyering

The City University of New York career opportunity
CUNY School of Law
Title		Law School Instructor
Location/Department		Faculty – Lawyering Seminar/Skills/Doctrinal
Position Detail		Teaching
FLSA Status		Exempt
Compensation		$39,832-$86,595, commensurate with experience
Web Site		www.law.cuny.edu
Notice Number
Closing Date		Open until filled, review of resumes begin Nov. 9, 2009
Position Description and Duties
	The Law School seeks applicants with a demonstrated commitment to our social justice mission for a full-time teaching position. The Law School Instructor hired in this cycle will primarily teach First-Year Lawyering Seminar, the foundational course in CUNY School of Law's nationally recognized lawyering curriculum, with particular focus on the training development of public interest/public service lawyers. Spanning all three years of law school, the Law School's lawyering curriculum was hailed by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in its 2007 Report, Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law. CUNY Law innovatively and successfully integrates students' learning of practical skills and the ethical demands of professional identity with their learning of legal theory and doctrine. The Law School's First-Year Lawyering Seminar teaches legal analysis, legal writing, professional responsibility, and other lawyering skills by integrating clinical methodology with substantive, theoretical, and doctrinal material. Using simulation exercises and hypothetical cases, students role-play lawyers, clients, judges, and/or legislators confronted by legal issues arising from material in their other first-year courses. The Lawyering Seminar focuses on the ways in which lawyers work and think in various areas of practice, with a focus on public interest law. Students develop their analytic skills by writing and revising legal documents on which they receive feedback and critiques. They also acquire new qualitative skills, such as active listening, collaborative problem solving and decision making, self-evaluation, and ethical reasoning. Students are encouraged to develop critical awareness of the social, legal, philosophical, political, and psychological content of their work. The Law School views these perspectives as central to a future lawyer's understanding of his/her status and role, including the mandates and aspirations of the New York Rules of Professional Conduct. Second-Year Lawyering Seminar and required clinical courses in the third-year build on the skills learned in the first year.   The instructor may, in accordance with the law school's needs, teach additional lawyering seminars, a doctrinal course, and/or provide academic skills instruction or other program support. This position is full-time and the instructor will be expected to teach and/or assist with the design and development of curriculum materials during the summer.       The Law School Instructor will be responsible for committee work and such administrative, supervisory, and other functions as assigned. In their first two years of service, Law School Instructors may opt into participating in faculty meetings, pursuant to the CUNY School of Law Governance Plan. Instructors may assume other faculty governance responsibilities and serve on committees as appointed by the Dean or Committee on Committees. Upon reappointment for three or more years of continuous service, Law School Instructors may participate in governance activities without an annual opt-in process.   Law School Instructors will perform other related duties as necessary or as directed by the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs.
Qualification Requirements
	For appointment as Law School Instructor, the candidate must have demonstrated outstanding qualities of personality, character, legal ability, and commitment to public service or public interest law. S/he must have a minimum of five years' practice experience, excellent writing skills, and substantial experience teaching in the areas of legal writing, lawyering, and legal analysis/legal methods. Additional doctrinal teaching experience is a plus, particularly in the area of commercial law. S/he must show a willingness to cooperate with others for the good of the institution. S/he must also have a J.D. or LL.B. from an accredited law school.
To Apply		Send cover letter and resume to:
		facultyappointments@mail.law.cuny.edu Maureen McCafferty, Coordinator of Faculty Recruitment Please indicate the position for which you are applying
questions		Email:
		Susan Markus, Director of Legal Writing Center Instructor Search Committee markus@mail.law.cuny.edu

I Can't Believe We Didn't Make the List!

From our friends at the TaxProf blog:

100 Best Professors Who Blog

OnlineCollege released 100 Best Professors Who Blog.  Here are the "Law & Politics" blogs on the list:

1. ImmigrationProf Blog: These bloggers offer a law professor’s view on immigration.
2. TaxProf Blog: Paul Caron is a professor of tax law at the University of Cincinnati.
3. Patently-O: This blog offers a look into patent law.
4. Instapundit: Glenn Reynolds is a law professor, author, and more.
5. ProfessorBainbridge: Check out this blog to read about the life and work of a corporate law professor.
6. The Volokh Conspiracy: The Volokh Conspiracy offers a look into the US legal system and courts.
7. Concurring Opinions: Concurring Opinions discusses the law, universe, and more.
8. PoliBlog: Read about the master science of politics on PoliBlog.
9. The Faculty Lounge: On this blog, you’ll find conversations about law, culture, and academia.
10. Discourse: Discourse writes from the fringes of the public sphere.
11. The Hugh Hewitt Show: Hugh Hewitt discusses politics and current events.
12. Indisputably: On this blog, you’ll learn about negotiation, mediation, arbitration, and dispute resolution.

Lawyering from the Heart

	Lawyering from the Heart Deborah Kenn, Syracuse University College of Law 2009. 230 pages. ISBN: 978-0-7355-8652-9.
	ABOUT THE BOOK Lawyering from the Heart features interviews with twenty-two talented law school graduates who stayed true to their dreams of using their education for the benefit of society. They embarked on careers as public interest lawyers. Informative, motivating, and inspiring, their stories show the satisfaction and rewards they found by living their values and following their passion. Authored by committed public interest lawyer and law professor Deborah Kenn, Lawyering from the Heart features: A candid and inspiring look at the quality of life of public interest lawyers Illuminating interviews conducted by the author A diversity of experience — from lawyers who graduated in the past five years to others who have been practicing for more than thirty Practical information about career development as a public interest lawyer Helpful advice for minimizing debt and making ends meet Extensive appendices that list state and law school Loan Repayment Assistance Programs (LRAPs) and Public Interest Law Resource Groups Are any of your students wondering whether it would be financially feasible or realistic for them to pursue careers as public interest lawyers? Now there’s a short but powerful paperback that you can recommend that will provide students with the courage and inspiration to live their values: Lawyering from the Heart, by Deborah Kenn. SUMMARY OF CONTENTS

Juvenile Justice conference

REGISTER NOW!  

http://www.law.ufl.edu/centers/childlaw/juvenilejustice/conferences/

Juvenile Justice:  Passages, Prevention, and Intervention

 

February 19 and 20, 2010

 

Sponsored by:

Juvenile Justice Project

Center for Children and Families

University of Florida Levin College of Law

 

In collaboration with the Center for Race and Race Relations, University of Florida Levin College of Law

 

Co-sponsors:  Child Advocacy Project, Harvard Law School and the Juvenile Justice Clinic, Georgetown University School of Law

 

Plenary Speakers:  Geoffrey Canada, founder of the Harlem Children’s Zone

Shay Bilchik, director, Center for Juvenile Justice Reform,               Georgetown University

 

 

 

Juvenile Justice Project website:  http://www.law.ufl.edu/centers/childlaw/

 

Conference website:

http://www.law.ufl.edu/centers/childlaw/juvenile justice/conferences/