clinicians with not enough to do

What’s Marriage Worth To You? Heterosexual Woman Puts Her Right To Marry Up For Auction On E-Bay

From our friends at the Gender and Sexuality Law Blog (http://blogs.law.columbia.edu/genderandsexualitylawblog/)

 

by KATHERINE FRANKE

 

In my last post I urged heterosexual people to do more than express their condolences to the gay community for the defeat of the marriage equality bill in the New York State Senate last week.  Well, Jamie Frevele, an avowed heterosexual woman, has gone even farther than I had imagined.  She has put her right to marry up for auction on E-bay.  As of now, she has received 20 bids and the current bid is $138.00 – but the auction will run until December 12th – so you have plenty of time to bid:

Frevele explains the auctioning of her right to marry thus:

I’m an unmarried heterosexual woman, and since I probably won’t be using my right to get married, I would like to give it away. I would like to sell it to the highest bidder and donate the proceeds to an organization that supports LGBT rights since the government designed to protect all of us is picking and choosing based on what they think is icky, weird, orunkown to them.

Bid now, and you can have my super wonderful privilege and legal ability to get married as many times as you want in a classy place like the one pictured. You don’t have to know the person, you don’t have to like them, you don’t have to think through your decision to get married or anything – you can just do it! Because you can! Come on, it’s cool to get married, and think of the pictures you’ll have to show people of this person that they will definitely think is so wrong for you and probably is! But heavens to BETSY, do NOT marry someone of the same gender because that would be a mockery of the institution of marriage.

And if it doesn’t work out, just get divorced. Half the cool people who get married do that anyway.

For the rest of the post, click here:  http://blogs.law.columbia.edu/genderandsexualitylawblog/2009/12/08/whats-marriage-worth-to-you-heterosexual-woman-has-put-her-right-to-marry-up-for-auction-on-e-bay/

SSRN: Martha Fineman on Images of Gender & Equality

Martha Albertson Fineman (Emory University - School of Law) has posted Evolving Images of Gender and Equality: A Feminist Journey (New England Law Review, Vol. 43, Emory Public Law Research) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

This chapter, which will be included in Transcending the Boundaries of Law, M.A. Fineman, Ed (Routledge 2010) brings a historical and analytic gaze on the concept of equality in the US legal system. Beginning with the establishment of Portia Law School for women and court decisions like Muller v. Oregon, I discuss the tension between seeking equality as sameness of treatment and seeking positive improvements in the lives of women. While women have officially attained legal equality with men, in terms of being able to vote, practice a profession, and own property among other things, the benefits of citizenship are still distributed in highly unequal ways. In part this is because as a nation Americans value autonomy over equality and thus sacrifice substantive equality in the name of greater independence, ignoring the realities of our shared states of episodic dependency and constant vulnerability.

Martha Albertson Fineman (Emory University - School of Law) has posted Evolving Images of Gender and Equality: A Feminist Journey (New England Law Review, Vol. 43, Emory Public Law Research) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

This chapter, which will be included in Transcending the Boundaries of Law, M.A. Fineman, Ed (Routledge 2010) brings a historical and analytic gaze on the concept of equality in the US legal system. Beginning with the establishment of Portia Law School for women and court decisions like Muller v. Oregon, I discuss the tension between seeking equality as sameness of treatment and seeking positive improvements in the lives of women. While women have officially attained legal equality with men, in terms of being able to vote, practice a profession, and own property among other things, the benefits of citizenship are still distributed in highly unequal ways. In part this is because as a nation Americans value autonomy over equality and thus sacrifice substantive equality in the name of greater independence, ignoring the realities of our shared states of episodic dependency and constant vulnerability.

Poverty Law Newsletter

For the law professor audience: 2009 Poverty Law Prof Newsletter

from Poverty Law by Ezra Rosser

It’s time for the 2009 edition of the Poverty Law Newsletter.  Please let me have your news items by Friday, December 11.  If you would like to be included, tell me which category(ies), listed below, the entries go in.  Format your entries by starting with your name in bold and your school in parentheses.  If you refer to someone else (eg, a co-author), please do the same for their names.

Categories:

• Upcoming Conferences
• Books and Book Updates
• Articles and Other Publications
• Speeches and Presentations
• Legislative and Regulatory Activities
• Personal Notes

For inclusion in the newsletter, please email me directly at [email protected].

It’s time for the 2009 edition of the Poverty Law Newsletter.  Please let me have your news items by Friday, December 11.  If you would like to be included, tell me which category(ies), listed below, the entries go in.  Format your entries by starting with your name in bold and your school in parentheses.  If you refer to someone else (eg, a co-author), please do the same for their names.

Categories:

• Upcoming Conferences
• Books and Book Updates
• Articles and Other Publications
• Speeches and Presentations
• Legislative and Regulatory Activities
• Personal Notes

For inclusion in the newsletter, please email me directly at [email protected].

Teachers Manual for Lawyers and Clients

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Teacher's Manual to 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 978-0-31423-532-9 West Academic Publishing is pleased to announce that the Teacher's Manual to Lawyers and Clients: Critical Issues in Interviewing and Counseling is now available for download on Law School Exchange. Join Law School Exchange today to download a complimentary digital copy of this teacher's manual 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: Professors who would like to review a print copy of this teacher's manual can request a complimentary copy by emailing their account manager at [email protected]. Please refer to ISBN 978-0-31423-532-9.

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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

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 [email protected] STEPHEN ELLMANN, EDITOR Associate Dean for Faculty Development and Professor of Law, New York Law School [email protected] 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

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.

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: [email protected]

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: [email protected]

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.

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

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: [email protected]

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.

SSRN: Schrag on Public Interest Lawyers

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

PHILIP G. SCHRAG, Georgetown University - Law Center
Email: [email protected]

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.

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).

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: [email protected]
ROBERT R. KUEHN, Washington University School of Law
Email: [email protected]

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: [email protected]

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.

New Interviewing and Counseling Book!

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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 [email protected]. When placing an order with your bookstore, please refer to ISBN 978-0-31423-531-2.

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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

SSRN: Law Educator Journal

Best Practices for the Law of the Horse: Teaching Cyberlaw Through Simulations

Ira S. Nathenson, St. Thomas University School of Law

Legal Reading and Success in Law School: The Reading Strategies of Law Students With Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD)

Leah M. Christensen, Thomas Jefferson School of Law

The Forgotten Sovereigns

Tonya Kowalski, Washburn University School of Law

Making Law Students Client-Ready: A New Model in Legal Education

John Burwell Garvey, Franklin Pierce Law Center
Anne F. Zinkin, New Hampshire Supreme Court

Watch, Listen, and Learn

Kathleen Elliott Vinson, Suffolk University Law School

SSRN: Ethics and Legal Blogs

"The Ethical Obligations of Lawyers, Law Students and Law Professors Telling Stories on Web Logs" 

The Law Teacher: The International Journal of Legal Education, Vol. 41, p. 287, 2007
Widener Law School Legal Studies Research Paper No. 09-22

ANNA P. HEMINGWAY, Widener University School of Law
Email: [email protected]

This article examines how blogging has developed and considers the ethics of blogging and its impact on the legal profession. It examines blog entries from lawyers, law professors and law students and suggests that the rules of the Bar may be colliding with the manner of online storytelling occurring by legal professionals. The article takes an in-depth look at how blogging has impacted legal education and the relationship between faculty and students. It proposes ways in which incorporating blogging assignments into law school courses can assist students in developing ethical story-telling on web logs.

Audio Clips in Law Reviews

Multimedia Comes to the Law Reviews.

from The Faculty Lounge by Eric Muller

This is a nifty idea:  a law review essay on the impact of oral advocacy in the U.S. Supreme Court that's published online so that the reader can click through and listen to audio clips of  Supreme Court arguments.

The essay is Stephen A. Higginson, Constitutional Advocacy Explains Constitutional Outcomes, 60 Fla. L. Rev. 857 (2008).

I like this idea.  (Not so crazy about the web design, but that's a different matter.)

 

This is a nifty idea:  a law review essay on the impact of oral advocacy in the U.S. Supreme Court that's published online so that the reader can click through and listen to audio clips of  Supreme Court arguments.

The essay is Stephen A. Higginson, Constitutional Advocacy Explains Constitutional Outcomes, 60 Fla. L. Rev. 857 (2008).

I like this idea.  (Not so crazy about the web design, but that's a different matter.)

 

SSRN: Carolyn Grose on Storytelling from the Clinic to the Classroom

"Storytelling Across the Curriculum: From Margin to Center, from Clinic to the Classroom" 

William Mitchell Legal Studies Research

CAROLYN GROSE, William Mitchell College of Law
Email: [email protected]

Narrative theory and storytelling have emerged as threads in legal scholarship steadily over the past 20 years. Beginning in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, the 'Legal Storytelling' movement sought to acknowledge and include the voices of 'outsiders' in legal scholarship and dialogue. More recently, the 'Applied Legal Storytelling' movement has emerged as scholars encourage each other to use storytelling to enhance their understanding of particular skills lawyers practice, and how to improve those skills. Scholars in the 'Law and Literature' movement explore the uses of literature to help lawyers stay connected to their imaginations, to their creativity, and to their humanity. Each of these scholarly movements has led to, or grown out of, professors’ experiments with using particular kinds of narrative theory and storytelling as part of their pedagogy.

In clinical teaching and scholarship, storytelling has always assumed pride of place for all of these reasons: to help students hear and incorporate the voices of 'outsiders' as they engage in and practice various lawyering skills, and to challenge them to think creatively and compassionately about their case strategy and practice. Lucie White’s 'Sunday Shoes' piece and Binny Miller’s 'Give Them Back Their Lives' are just two examples of narrative theory and storytelling practice that many clinical teachers use either explicitly or behind the scenes in their supervision or seminar teaching.

I believe narrative theory and storytelling can be used even more fundamentally, cutting across types of courses and types of lawyering. I teach skills, doctrinal and clinical courses, and I use narrative theory and storytelling in all three, all with the same goal: to help students recognize that as lawyers, they are not only hearers and tellers of stories, but also, and perhaps most important, constructors of stories. And that, simply put, is what I mean by narrative theory. The practice of storytelling is the craft of constructing stories, based on choices made with intention and reflection by the lawyer and her client. A pedagogy that relies on this theory and practice leads students to realize that The Law itself is a set of stories that have been adopted by decisionmakers, and that those stories have been constructed by none other than lawyers, just like themselves.

My particular pedagogy relies on an exploration of both narrative theory and the practice of storytelling. Most, if not all, of my classes - regardless of their official content - involve discussions about what stories are and what makes them 'good' (persuasive, compelling), both substantively (the 'what' of the story) and technically (the 'how' of the story). That’s the narrative theory. In addition, my students spend a lot of time constructing and deconstructing stories, focusing on their elements - both the 'what' and the 'how' - and on the choices that resulted in the story’s substance and structure. That’s the storytelling practice.

In this piece, I develop the idea of using storytelling across the curriculum to teach students this kind of critical thinking and reflection about their role as lawyers. In Part One, I describe the importance of storytelling and stories in the craft of lawyering. Part Two reviews briefly how clinical and non-clinical teachers use storytelling in their teaching. The bulk of the piece - Part Three - is a description and analysis of my own teaching and how it achieves the goal of developing students’ critical thinking skills and reflective practice. I provide concrete examples of my teaching, as well as critique and analysis based on narrative and lawyering theory scholarship.

The piece concludes with the suggestion that narrative theory and storytelling as a pedagogy used systematically across individual courses and the curriculum has the potential to transform a student’s experience of law school, resulting in her development as an empowered, reflective, and socially responsible member of the legal profession, regardless of the kind of law she practices or the kinds of clients she represents.

Judging Women Judges

from The Faculty Lounge by Alfred Brophy

Stephen J. Choi, G. Mitu Gulati,  Mirya R. Holman, and Eric A. Posner have a new article up on ssrn, "Judging Women."  Here's their abstract:

Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s assertion that female judges might be “better” than male judges has generated accusations of sexism and potential bias. An equally controversial claim is that male judges are better than female judges because the latter have benefited from affirmative action. These claims are susceptible to empirical analysis. Primarily using a dataset of all the state high court judges in 1998-2000, we estimate three measures of judicial output: opinion production, outside state citations, and co-partisan disagreements. We find that the male and female judges perform at about the same level. Roughly similar findings show up in data from the U.S. Court of Appeals and the federal district courts. 

I saw an earlier version of this this summer and it (no surprise) generated a ton of discussion.  One conclusion I took away from this is that the quality of judging (as measure by the measures here) is pretty even across courts.  I'm not sure what that says about judges' quality or the measures that Choi et alia employ to measure quality.

read the rest here

ELLMANN on "End-of-life" discussions and lawyer-client communications

"End-of-life" discussions and lawyer-client communications

A remarkable article in the NY Times not long ago, by Anemona Hartocollis, "At the End, Offering Not a Cure but Comfort" (August 20, 2009, starting at page A1).

First, it reports that "Dr. Nicholas Christakis, an internist and social scientist at Harvard who has studied end-of-life care, has found that doctors are generally bad at making prognoses. The better they know a patient, the worse they are at prognosticating, possibly, Dr. Christakis has theorized, because they view death as a personal failure. Most predictions are overly optimistic, he has found, and the sicker the patient, the more likely the doctor is to overestimate the length of survival." (Page A16) Without having seen Dr. Christakis' study, it seems to me that another factor here may simply be empathy -- the better the doctors know the patients, the more they feel for them and the more they hope they'll survive and the more their predictions are shaped by their hopes. If accurate predictions are what we want here -- far from a self-evident proposition, as the article reflects -- then this would be a reason for doctors not to know their patients so well. It would, similarly, be a reason for lawyers not to know their clients so well.


READ THE REST HERE

New Publications from the ABA Commission on Homelessness & Poverty

from Poverty Law by Ezra Rosser

“Educating Children Without Housing: A Primer on Legal Requirements and Implementation Strategies for Educators, Advocates and Policymakers” (Third Edition)

“Educating Children Without Housing,” Third Edition, addresses the federal educational mandates related to homeless students under the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act. The manual provides innovative strategies for educators and school administrators, state coordinators and policymakers, and advocates and attorneys to play a role in ensuring the education rights of children and youth experiencing homelessness. The revised edition includes new sections on creating access to early childhood education opportunities, the Head Start Act, IDEA, the Fostering Connections to Success and Increasing Adoptions Act, financial aid and college access and support programs. This third edition contains strategies designed to assist communities to exceed compliance and move toward greater commitment — to embody not only the letter but also the spirit of the law — including a new section on collaborating with community agencies. The book also includes a directory of resources for educators, advocates, and policymakers. Many states have purchased the publication in bulk and distributed it to liaisons, as well as to each school district and school administrator. Discounts for bulk orders are available.

“Runaway and Homeless Youth and the Law: Model State Statutes”

This is a unique publication that provides guidance for policymakers, advocates, attorneys and service providers on how state laws can assist homeless and runaway youth. The laws were developed by experts in the field with input provided during two national conferences. The comprehensive resource provides not only model statutes, but background information and research to provide context for each issue. Additionally, the authors have provided commentary to assist in the implementation of the law. “Runaway and Homeless Youth and the Law: Model State Statutes” is a necessity for any person or agency interested in improving state laws so that these vulnerable youth can find safety, services and stability.

The book addresses the following legal issues faced by runaway and homeless youth (and their providers): Education; Status Offenses; Family Law Issues; Health (access to health care); LGBTQ youth; Immigration;  Access to custodial systems; Discharge from custodial systems; Housing; Identification (birth certificates, SS cards); Public Benefits; Access to legal services; Employment; Legal issues for runaway and homeless youth service providers.  This book was cosponsored by the National Network for Youth and drafted in conjunction with our joint conferences held in June 2008 and January 2009.

-Thanks to Amy Horton-Newell for the heads up!

READ THE CLEA NEWSLETTER

The September, 2009 issue of the CLEA Newsletter has been published and is available on the CLEA Website, http://www.cleaweb.org, under Newsletters.

As previously announced, the CLEA Newsletter is now only published in electronic format and posted on the CLEA website.  No hard copies are mailed.

 

The next issue of the CLEA Newsletter will be published in February, 2010.  Please feel free to submit items for the newsletter to me throughout the year.  Thanks.

-Larry
Professor Larry R. Spain
Texas Tech University School of Law
1802 Hartford Avenue
Lubbock, Texas  79409-0004
(806) 742-3787 x227
(806) 742-4199 FAX
[email protected]

New Book - Skills & Values: Legal Negotiating

LexisNexis is pleased to announce the availability of one of the first titles in our Skills & Values Series, Skills & Values: Legal Negotiating, by Charles B. Craver (George Washington University). As noted in the Preface:

This book is designed to demonstrate how individuals actually negotiate. It covers the different stages of the negotiation process, the various negotiation techniques people are likely to encounter, the impact of negotiator styles on bargaining interactions, the importance of nonverbal communication, the way in which gender-based stereotypes may affect bargaining encounters, the unique aspects of telephone and e-mail interactions, international business and human rights negotiations, multi-party interactions, ethical issues negotiators are likely to encounter, and mediation. It thus makes it easy for negotiation students to comprehend how bargaining interactions develop and to appreciate the different factors that affect those encounters.

Many of the chapters include references to materials that have been posted to a Web Course (powered by Blackboard) that was created for this book. We recently sent you a review copy of Skills & Values: Legal Negotiating. To access the online content, including the Teacher’s Manual and other support material:

• Go to the LexisNexis Law Schools Portal (www.lexisnexis.com/lawschool)
• Enter your LexisNexis Custom ID and Password (please contact 1-800-455-3947 if you misplaced your Password)
• Once on the home page, select “Web Courses” tab (towards the middle of the page)
• Click the “Access Web Courses” button
• Web Courses will open in a separate page
• Click on “Skills & Values” link
• Scroll down the list to find “Skills & Values Legal Negotiating”
• Click the “Enroll” button
• Enter the access code SVlegnegTM to access the Legal Negotiating course

 

A copy of the Instructor’s QuickGuide to LexisNexis Web Courses was included with the book shipment. Click here for the PDF version of the Instructor’s QuickGuide. If you plan to adopt this innovative approach to integrating skills-based training in your Legal Negotiating class, please contact Sean Caldwell ([email protected] / 513-721-2506) and he will customize the Skills & Values: Legal Negotiating Web Course for use in your class. Do not hesitate to let me know if there is anything I can do to facilitate your adoption of our materials.

FROM THE CLEA NEWSLETTER ETHICS COLUMN: Paul Cain on Morality and Justice

Thinking About Ethics

The CLEA Legal Ethics Committee is pleased to present the third newsletter column of "Doing the Right Thing: An Analytical Model Examining the Interplay between Ethical Professional Conduct, Morality, and Justice," by Paul Cain, Managing Attorney, Northern Illinois University College of Law. We hope future columns will address some of the ethical issues we all confront in clinical legal education such as conflicts of interest, confidentiality, and competence. If you would like to suggest a topic or write a short column, please contact Professor Faith Mullen, Co-Chair CLEA Ethics Committee, at [email protected].

DOING THE RIGHT THING: AN ANALYTICAL MODEL EXAMINING THE INTERPLAY BETWEEN ETHICAL PROFESSIONAL CONDUCT, MORALITY, AND JUSTICE

Paul J. Cain*

"We cannot seek or attain health, wealth, learning, justice[,] or kindness in general. Action is always specific, concrete, individualized, [and] unique."1

John Dewey

This article summarizes an article that I had published at 10 T.M. COOLEY J. PRAC. & CLINICAL L. 149 (August 2008).2  The article explores the interplay between competing obligations and the difficulty in deciding the right thing to do.3 I propose an analytical model to help resolve these often difficult questions. The model uses a series of questions and related issues to determine the right decision in a methodical, well reasoned manner. In my article I apply the model to three scenarios in which difficult ethical and moral decisions had to be made in representing clients. The scenarios and the application of the model to them will not be discussed in this short article.

The first scenario discusses whether testifying before a grand jury and disclosing my deceased client's confidences was the right thing to do. The second scenario involves law students, whom I supervised, representing an elderly Middle-Eastern woman in political-asylum removal proceedings whose story did not seem credible but who was likely to be arrested and put to death if she was forced to return to her country. Students had to decide about evidence to present to the immigration court. The third scenario discusses a prosecutor's decision to deceive a murder suspect to get him to surrender to police. My article describes the analytical model, its components, and then discusses how the model's application would affect each decision when applied to each scenario.

The article starts with the premise that most attorneys and law students want to do the right thing. Contrary to our public image,4 and perhaps even our self-image within the legal community, most attorneys are not primarily interested in earning big bucks and trampling over adversaries.

READ THE REST HERE AT p. 7

Poverty Law Issue published by William Mitchell Law Review

from Poverty Law by Ezra Rosser

And better yet, it is all publicly available here.  The articles are below:

POVERTY LAW

Ann Juergens
Foreword

Lawrence R. McDonough
Wait a Minute! Residential Eviction Defense in 2009 Still Is Much More Than “Did You Pay the Rent?”

Katherine Barrett Wiik
Justice for America’s Homeless Children: Cultivating a Child’s Right to Shelter in the United States

Margaret C. Hobday, Geneva Finn, and Myron Orfield
A Missed Opportunity: Minnesota’s Failed Experiment with Choice-Based Integration

Professor Deborah A. Schmedemann
Pro Bono Publico as a Conscience Good

Nina W. Tarr
Ethics, Internal Law School Clinics, and Training the Next Generation of Poverty Lawyers

Robert Hornstein
Teaching Law Students to Comfort the Troubled and Trouble the Comfortable: An Essay on the Place of Poverty Law in the Law School Curriculum

Stella L. Smetanka
The Disabled in Debt to Social Security: Can Fairness Be Guaranteed?

Sam Glover
Has the Flood of Debt Collection Lawsuits Swept Away Minnesotans’ Due Process Rights?

Patrick L. Hayes
A Noose Around the Neck: Preventing Abusive Payday Lending Practices and Promoting Lower Cost Alternatives

SSRN: 2 by ANTOINETTE SEDILLO LOPEZ

"Making and Breaking Habits: Teaching (and Learning) Cultural Context, Self-Awareness, and Intercultural Communication Through Case Supervision in a Client-Service Legal Clinic" 

Washington University Journal of Law and Policy, Vol. 28, 2008

ANTOINETTE SEDILLO LOPEZ, University of New Mexico School of Law
Email: [email protected]

This Article begins by offering teaching objectives that can be used to focus supervision and education on effective representation of clients from different cultures as issues arise in the course of representation. The Article then discusses the context of student supervision and explains how case supervision sessions can be extremely effective moments during which to pursue those teaching goals. The Article next examines vignettes that grew out of cases handled by the University of New Mexico's Clinical Law Program

.

"Leading Change in Legal Education - Educating Lawyers and Best Practices: Good News for Diversity" 

Seattle University Law Review, Vol. 31, No. 4, 2008

ANTOINETTE SEDILLO LOPEZ, University of New Mexico School of Law
Email: [email protected]

This article argues that if the curriculum proposals made in Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law (2007) and Best Practices for Legal Education: A Vision and a Road Map (2007) are widely implemented in law schools then students of color and members of groups that are under-represented will particularly benefit.

SSRN: Legal Writing and Real Cases

"Insights from Clinical Teaching: Learning About Teaching Legal Writing from Working on Real Cases" 

HELEN A. ANDERSON, University of Washington - School of Law
Email: [email protected]

I began teaching legal writing in 1994, but I've since had the occasional foray into practice through supervising students who represented clients in our state's appellate courts. I directed an appellate clinic for two years, and most recently I supervised two students who briefed and argued a case in the Washington State Supreme Court. These experiences have taught me some important lessons that I have brought back to my legal writing classes. The clinical cases have not only reminded me what writing for practice really entails, and how hard it is to follow our sage writing advice, but they have given me key insights into aspects of writing that we (or at least I) don't always address in first-year legal writing classes.

In supervising students who are writing for a client, ethical dilemmas come up immediately, deadlines matter, and the faculty member has to be product-oriented. The final product is important in a way that the final product of a legal writing assignment is not. We are forced to follow a piece of writing all the way through to the end and make sure it is right. Collaboration has to work. And in the end, when we realize the outcome of our efforts, we come face-to-face with our limitations. This last lesson, the limitations of “good” writing, is one of the most important lessons I learned from directing a clinic.

ABA Magazine for and about Women Lawyers

Home  |  Features  |  Columns  |  About the Commission on Women in the Profession

Women on Capitol Hill See Light Shining on a Long List Spring 2009 Vol. 17, No. 4     Features   Women on Capitol Hill See Light Shining on a Long List by Cynthia L. Cooper The 111th Congress wasted no time addressing women's issues. On January 6, 2009, the first day that the nation's newly elected representatives convened in the Capitol, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act was introduced in the House of Representatives. While workers erected presidential inauguration scaffolding outside on the Mall, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) also worked hard. She had declared at a December forum with Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) at Hunter College in New York that legislation of importance to women would be of primary concern to her. "We will put these issues forth," Pelosi said. (continue reading) Sign of the Times: Will Corporate Budget Restraints Affect In-House Diversity Initiatives? by Hannah Hayes While the economy continues on a downward spiral, job security in the corporate world is shaky at best, and soon-to-be graduates preparing to launch their legal career wonder what opportunities exist after law school. What's more, in these uncertain times, corporate budget constraints have nudged aside important issues such as job parity, retention, work/life balance, and diversity in the legal workplace. Even though diversity no longer is the politically correct buzzword that it was in the 1990s, it is good business sense in today's global economy and multicultural marketplace. (continue reading) Eliminating Barriers to Women's Advancement: Focus on the Performance Evaluation Process by Consuela A. Pinto Women lawyers are entering the pipeline in significant numbers, but few are emerging as leaders in their law firms. Hidden gender bias is the blockage that makes it virtually impossible for women to break through the glass ceiling in law firms. Although gender bias is subtle, its effect can be minimized by reducing the blockage in the pipeline. The keys to reducing its impact on partnership decisions are two fold—(1) raise awareness about bias so that it can be recognized and (2) design a bias-free evaluation process. The performance review process is a critical point of impact because it is the primary professional development tool. (continue reading) Careers: The Supreme Generalists - General Counsels Keep Their Departments Going—Even in Tough Times by Ann Farmer While it's often said that the buck stops with the general counsel, these days that also means stretching the buck. As much as ever, a general counsel's job requires a savvy blend of legal and business acumen. General counsels are responsible for providing comprehensive, long-range legal advice. But they must also be adept at belt-tightening. And they are expected to spot trends and issues before they become problems. (continue reading)   Columns   Chair's Message Accelerating Change by Leveraging Our Influence by Bobbi Liebenberg Voices Valuing Civil Rights and Liberties: From Queens to the Federal Bench by Nancy Gertner   Commission on Women News Commission events, programs, and projects   Short Takes News relating to women and the law

Search   Browse Past Issues of Perspectives

SSRN: Predicting Lawyer Effectiveness

"Predicting Lawyer Effectiveness: A New Assessment for Use in Law School Admission Decisions" 

MARJORIE M. SHULTZ, Boalt Hall School of Law, University of California, Berkeley
Email: [email protected]
SHELDON ZEDECK, University California, Berkeley
Email: [email protected]

The problem of how to define merit and achieve equity in high stakes selection is deeply contested in the many arenas of our society where scarce resources and privileges are allocated. Law school admission is one such arena. The Law School Admission Test (LSAT) dominates current admission decisions for law school, but it assesses only a few competencies and has a large adverse impact on minority applicants. Moreover, the LSAT and its associated Index Score focus on law school performance and are not strongly predictive of lawyer performance.

Innovative exploratory research by two UC Berkeley faculty (Marjorie Shultz, Law and Sheldon Zedeck, Psychology) has demonstrated that on-the-job professional effectiveness of lawyers can be predicted. The new Shultz-Zedeck tests, developed based on models from employment selection and promotion and the field of industrial psychology, identify and assess many factors not measured by the LSAT that are vital to lawyer efficacy, such as problem solving, advocacy, practical judgment, and communication skills. Exploratory research conducted with participation of more than 5000 law grads suggests that tests can be developed and validated that will predict professional performance (as appraised by peers and supervisors). Equally important, performance on these new tests shows no significant race, ethnic or gender differences. This research has the potential to diversify the pool of students admitted to law schools and to do so on the basis of a principled definition of merit rather than on the basis of more politically and legally controversial methods of race-conscious affirmative action. The next step is a national validation study to ready this new approach to law school admission for adoption by the nation’s law schools.

New Book on Babies in the Child Welfare System

Reversing the Odds

Improving Outcomes for Babies in the
Child Welfare System

By Sheryl Dicker, J.D.

"Draws on the latest research, rich case studies, and Dicker’s years of experience
to show the field how it can meet the health care needs of young children who
have suffered in systems that are supposed to help them." —Robert G. Schwartz,
Executive Director, Juvenile Law Center, Philadelphia, PA
“A powerful statement on why we must take much better care of our most
vulnerable children … Using true stories that demonstrate successful and
unsuccessful community responses … Ms. Dicker points the way to better
outcomes for these children.”—Judge Leonard Edwards, Judge-in-Residence, California
Administrative Office of the Courts, Center for Families, Children & the Courts, San Francisco, CA
Babies and young children are involved in an increasing number of cases in family
and juvenile courts. Many of these children are at high risk for physical, cognitive,
and social-emotional delays—and often don’t have access to the services and
supports that could make all the difference. This is the book that will help
attorneys, judges, and other professionals ensure comprehensive healthy
development of these vulnerable children from birth to age 3.



Download Author flyer_legal

SSRN: Tremblay on Shadow Lawyering

"Shadow Lawyering: Nonlawyer Practice within Law Firms" 

Indiana Law Journal, Vol. 85
Boston College Law School Legal Studies Research Paper No. 181

PAUL R. TREMBLAY, Boston College - Law School
Email: [email protected]

Lawyers commonly associate with nonlawyers to assist in their performance of their lawyering tasks. A lawyer cannot know with confidence, though, whether the delegation of some tasks to a nonlawyer colleague might result in her assisting in the unauthorized practice of law, because the state of the law and the commentary about nonlawyer practice is so confused and incoherent. Some respected authority within the profession tells the lawyer that she may only delegate preparatory matters and must prohibit the nonlawyer from discussing legal matters with clients, or negotiating on behalf of clients. Other authority suggests that the lawyer may delegate a wide array of tasks as long as the lawyer supervises the work of the nonlawyer and accepts responsibility for it. A good faith lawyer reviewing the available commentary would find it difficult to achieve appropriate guidance for her work. This uncertainty affects not only lawyers working with paralegals and law clerks, but firms hiring out of state lateral associates and partners, and law school clinical programs engaged in transactional work.

This Article articulates a framework for assessing delegation choices, a framework which is both coherent and sensible. The framework relies on insights about lawyering judgment and risk assessment, client informed consent, and unauthorized practice of law prophylaxis. Any delegation of work by a lawyer to a nonlawyer involves an exercise of the lawyer’s judgment about an appropriate balance of risk and efficiency, along with an eye toward the client’s informed choice about how to achieve the goals of the representation most efficiently. The prevailing unauthorized practice of law dogma prevents a client from seeking the most economical representation by only retaining a nonlawyer, but that dogma trusts lawyers to protect a client’s interests. With those considerations in place, this Article shows that the profession cannot, and in fact does not, deny the lawyer any categorical options in making delegation choices, except for those involving public court appearances. Aside from sending a nonlawyer to court, a lawyer may responsibly delegate any of her lawyering activities to a nonlawyer associate, subject to the prevailing conceptions of competent representation and subject to the lawyer’s retaining ultimate responsibility for the resulting work product and performance.

Some commentary and some court opinions suggest a different answer to the questions addressed here, but those authorities do not withstand careful analysis. This Article shows that a more careful reading of the commentary and the court dicta supports the framework and the thesis offered here. Nonlawyers may not independently engage in activity which equates to the practice of law, if by “independently” we mean without supervision and oversight from a lawyer. That important and uncontroversial limitation, however, is the only categorical restriction on a lawyer’s discretion. A supervised nonlawyer may play a much more active and important role in a lawyer’s overall representation of her client than many have claimed. For the client, that is a very good result.

SSRN: Teaching Creativity

 "'The Play of Those Who Have Not Yet Heard of Games': Creativity, Compliance, and the 'Good Enough' Law Teacher" 

Journal of the Association of Legal Writing Directors, Vol. 6, 2009

MARY R. FALK, Brooklyn Law School
Email: [email protected]

If there is creative thinking out there in the law offices and courts of our country, it is present not, in the main, because law school does a good job of teaching that skill. Not surprisingly, employers of new law graduates believe we could be doing a better job of turning out creative thinkers. These are problems that I have been thinking about and writing about these past 15 years - all the while teaching students in their first year to toe the intellectual line and then trying to convince them as upper-class students to think new thoughts about the law.

Recently, I’ve been led to consider these issues in a different light. That light is cast for me by the work of developmental psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott. Although he founded no school or movement of his own, Donald Winnicott was one of the past century’s most influential psychoanalysts, both as a theorist and as a practitioner. When I first began to read Winnicott, two major and related themes in his work interested me particularly: first, his notion of “good enough” caregiving and second, his understanding of the role of play in the lives of infants and adults, the relationship of play to creativity, and the consequences of the absence of play. This essay is an attempt to see what as a lawyer, law teacher and, more particularly, as a writing teacher, I might usefully take from Winnicott the theorist, the professional, and the writer.

SSRN: Teaching Transactional Lawyers

"What Law Schools Should Teach Future Transactional Lawyers: Perspectives from Practice" 

UCLA School of Law, Law-Econ Research Paper No. 09-17

MICHAEL WORONOFF, Proskauer Rose LLP, University of California, Los Angeles - School of Law
Email: [email protected]

Since at least the 1980’s, law schools have been chided for doing a poor job at teaching skills. This criticism has been accompanied by pressure to increase their emphasis on skills training. The pressure increased with the publication of the McCrate Report in 1992, and then again with the publication of the Carnegie Report in 2007. But is the underlying premise correct? This article is an edited version of my remarks given at the 2009 mid-year meeting of the AALS Conference on Business Associates. In those remarks, I respond to the questions 'Are law schools teaching students adequate transactional skills?' and 'From the standpoint of preparing students for a transactional practice, what would you like to see law schools change?' To answer these questions, I first describe different categories of knowledge a successful lawyer should have, and examine what people mean when they refer to skills. I then discuss which of these categories of knowledge law schools can and should teach, and which should be left to law firms (based on the comparative advantages of each). Finally, after noting that the heavy focus of law school critics on skills training mask some more significant issues, I share my thoughts on how law schools can change to better prepare students for a transactional practice.

Dean Rivkin on school exclusion

"Legal Advocacy and Education Reform: Litigating School Exclusion" 

Tennessee Law Review, Vol. 75, No. 265, 2008
NYLS Clinical Research Institute Paper No. 07/08-28
University of Tennessee Legal Studies Research Paper No. 68

DEAN HILL RIVKIN, University of Tennessee College of Law
Email: [email protected]

School exclusion has existed as a dark side of public education since the creation of America's public schools. Several cases in the United States Supreme Court memorably invalidated State and school system efforts to deny equal educational opportunities to marginalized school children and youth. In these cases, the over-riding multiple values of education were poignantly articulated in the majority decisions.

School exclusion has stubbornly persisted. It takes many forms. This article surveys the most prominent pathways to school exclusion, highlighting what has been called the "School-To-Prison-Pipeline." Various legal challenges are also evaluated. The pros and cons of litigating school exclusion cases are also assessed.

"Professional skills and values in legal education: the GPS model"

Legal Writing Prof Blog: Scholarship alert: "Professional skills and values in legal education: the GPS model"

This one comes to us from Professors Gerald Hess of Gonzaga and Stephen Gerst from Phoenix School of Law. It can be found at 43 Val. U. L. Rev. 513 (2009). From the introduction:

An old story about life: A grandparent was teaching a grandchild about our inner lives. “A struggle is going on inside of me, you, and everyone else. It is a fight between two wolves. One wolf is anger, envy, regret, greed, guilt, lies, resentment, and superiority. The other wolf is joy, humility, love, kindness, generosity, truth, and compassion.” “But which wolf will win?” asked the grandchild. Answered the grandparent, “The one you feed.”

A modern story about the conflict in legal education: It is not a fight between good and evil. Instead, it is a struggle about the fundamental purposes and methods to educate the next generation of lawyers. Mainstream legal education has fed the wolf of legal theory, doctrine, and analysis. This is a good wolf-effective lawyers need deep understanding of the law and critical thinking skills. The underfed wolf in legal education is competence in a broad range of professional skills and the development of professional values. This too is a good wolf.
Professional skills and values education is beginning to receive the serious attention that it deserves. This Article offers one model of educating law students in professional skills and values. Part I summarizes the repeated calls for legal education to adopt and pursue an obligation to more fully prepare students for the profession. To answer those calls, Part II describes the development and delivery of the General Practice Skills course, a six-credit, required, simulation-based course that directly addresses skills and professionalism. Part III makes recommendations for the design and delivery of courses that focus on teaching professional skills and values.

I am the scholarship dude. (jbl)

SSRN: Public Interest Litigation

"Public Interest Litigation: Insights from Theory and Practice" 

Fordham Urban Law Journal, Vol. XXXVI, 2009
UCLA School of Law Research Paper No. 09-19

SCOTT CUMMINGS, University of California, Los Angeles - School of Law
Email: [email protected]
DEBORAH RHODE, Stanford Law School
Email: [email protected]

In the American struggle for social justice, public interest litigation has played an indisputably important role. Yet over the past three decades, critics from both the left and right have challenged its capacity to secure systemic change. The critiques have varied, but have centered on two basic claims. The first is that litigation cannot itself reform social institutions. The second related concern is that over-reliance on courts diverts effort from potentially more productive political strategies and disempowers the groups that lawyers are seeking to assist. The result is too much law and too little justice.

These critiques, although powerful in their analysis of the limits of litigation, have generally failed to adequately acknowledge its contributions and the complex ways in which legal proceedings can support political mobilization. This Article seeks to move beyond these critiques by situating the debate over public interest litigation in a richer theoretical and empirical context. In essence, our argument is that such litigation is an imperfect but indispensable strategy of social change. Our challenge is to increase its effectiveness through better understanding of its capacities and constraints. To that end, we draw on two bodies of work: research on law and social change, and research on social philanthropy. The first literature offers a detailed empirical and theoretical picture of how lawyers mobilize law to change institutional rules and redistribute power. In its empirical dimension, this research explores the ideals and practices of public interest lawyers and how their strategies are informed by where they work—non-profit public interest organizations, large firm pro bono programs, plaintiff-side law firms, and law school clinics. In its theoretical dimension, this literature draws on the sociology of law and social movements to explore the interplay between legal proceedings and political mobilization. A second body of work, which focuses on strategic philanthropy, holds important insights for how public interest organizations and pro bono programs can most effectively direct their social reform efforts.

We draw a number of lessons from this research. The first is that litigation, although a necessary strategy of social change, is never sufficient; it cannot effectively work in isolation from other mobilization efforts. Second, money matters: how public interest law is financed affects the kinds of cases that can be pursued and their likely social impact. A deeper understanding of financial constraints and opportunities in different practice contexts is therefore critical to effective reform. A third key insight is the importance of systematic evaluation. Only through more reflective assessments of the impact of litigation can we realize its full potential in pursuit of social justice.

SSRN: Theraputic Jurisprudence in the Clinic

"Through the Clinical Lens: A Pragmatic Look at Infusing Therapeutic Jurisprudence into Clinical Pedagogy" 

Thomas Jefferson Law Review, Vol. 30, p. 463, 2008

EVELYN HAYDEE CRUZ, Arizona State University - College of Law
Email: [email protected]

In recent years, several clinicians have written about infusing Therapeutic Jurisprudence into their courses. Therapeutic Jurisprudence is the use of behavioral sciences to study the emotional effects of the law on legal participants and the development of approaches to minimize the negative effects of the law on the individuals. This article reflects on why the time is ripe to cross-pollinate and points to some clinical practices that could benefit from a pedagogical development that incorporates Therapeutic Jurisprudence.

This article describes the development of client-centered interviewing and the use of narrative in clinical education to illustrate three points. First, use of these tools demonstrates that clinical theory welcomes and develops by embracing ideas from other disciplines. Second, in discussing the evolution of clinical theory, similarities to Therapeutic Jurisprudence concepts become apparent to Therapeutic Jurisprudence scholars. Third, Therapeutic Jurisprudence has been the subtext and not the primary force behind experimental theories. Hence, the therapeutic benefits of client-centered representation and narrative were generally unaddressed until the turn of the century when clinicians grew more comfortable with reconnecting empathy and holistic representation to practical legal training. In addition, clinicians have begun to focus on the importance of the attorney's psychological well being in the client-attorney relationship, creating yet another opportunity for collaboration between Therapeutic Jurisprudence and clinical education.

SSRN: Clinics and Virtual Worlds

"The Promise of Virtual Worlds for Global Justice Education (Poster Presentation)" 

ANDREA M. M. SEIELSTAD, affiliation not provided to SSRN
Email: [email protected]

Virtual worlds are emerging frontiers for experiential learning and the teaching of lawyering skills and perspectives. They also offer specialized opportunities for interdisciplinary and cross-cultural collaboration with people with internet access from around the world.With proper training, planning and integration with other Web 2.0 platforms and traditional class-room methods, law clinics may make effective use of virtual worlds to augment real-world problem-solving and justice initiatives as well as to enhance student learning and reflection about issues of local as well as global concern. The poster, presented on May 9, 2009 at the American Association of Law School's annual clinical conference in Cleveland, Ohio, presents results of three-year teaching demonstration utilizing the virtual world, Second Life TM, in teaching online mediation skills to law students. Its primary purpose was to set forth and create discussion among clinical teachers and legal scholars about potential applications of virtual worlds to real-world justice initiatives in legal education.

NYT: New Policy Permits Asylum for Battered Women

check out quote from Karen Musalo and Richard Boswell's photo!!

By JULIA PRESTON

Published: July 15, 2009

The Obama administration has opened the way for foreign women who are victims of severe domestic beatings and sexual abuse to receive asylum in the United States. The action reverses a Bush administration stance in a protracted and passionate legal battle over the possibilities for battered women to become refugees.

Richard Boswell

Rody Alvarado sought asylum in the United States after fleeing abuse in Guatemala.

Related

Case Documents (PDF, portions redacted by lawyers representing L.R.): Supplemental Brief | Declaration of Support

In addition to meeting other strict conditions for asylum, abused women will need to show that they are treated by their abuser as subordinates and little better than property, according to an immigration court filing by the administration, and that domestic abuse is widely tolerated in their country. They must show that they could not find protection from institutions at home or by moving to another place within their own country.

The administration laid out its position in an immigration appeals court filing in the case of a woman from Mexico who requested asylum, saying she feared she would be murdered by her common-law husband there. According to court documents filed in San Francisco, the man repeatedly raped her at gunpoint, held her captive, stole from her and at one point tried to burn her alive when he learned she was pregnant.

The government submitted its legal brief in April, but the woman only recently gave her consent for the confidential case documents to be disclosed to The New York Times. The government has marked a clear, although narrow, pathway for battered women seeking asylum, lawyers said, after 13 years of tangled court arguments, including resistance from the Bush administration to recognize any of those claims.

Moving cautiously, the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately recommend asylum for the Mexican woman, who is identified in the court papers only by her initials as L.R. But the department, in the unusual submission written by senior government lawyers, concluded in plain terms that “it is possible” that the Mexican woman “and other applicants who have experienced domestic violence could qualify for asylum.”

As recently as last year, Bush administration lawyers had argued in the same case that in spite of her husband’s brutality, L.R. and other battered women could not meet the standards of American asylum law.

“This really opens the door to the protection of women who have suffered these kinds of violations,” said Karen Musalo, a professor who is director of the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies at the University of California Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco. Professor Musalo has represented other abused women seeking asylum and recently took up the case of L.R.

“Gideon Meets Goldberg: The Case for a Qualified Right to Counsel in Welfare Hearings”

Article of Interest: “Gideon Meets Goldberg: The Case for a Qualified Right to Counsel in Welfare Hearings”

from Poverty Law by Ezra Rosser

(Published) Article of Interest: Stephen Loffredo & Dan Friedman, Gideon Meets Goldberg: The Case for a Qualified Right to Counsel in Welfare Hearings, 25 Touro L. Rev. 273 (2009).  Abstract below:

In Goldberg v. Kelly, the Supreme Court held that welfare recipients have a right under the Due Process Clause to notice and a meaningful opportunity to be heard before the state may terminate assistance. However, the Court stopped short of holding due process requires states to appoint counsel to represent claimants at these constitutionally mandated hearings. As a result, in the vast majority of administrative hearings involving welfare benefits, claimants— desperately poor, and often with little formal education—must appear pro se while trained advocates represent the government. Drawing on the theory of underenforced constitutional norms, first articulated by Dean Lawrence Sager of the University of Texas School of Law, this Article argues that state legislatures have an independent constitutional duty to recognize and fund a qualified right to appointed counsel at welfare administrative hearings. Although the courts feel themselves to be institutionally constrained from implementing the Due Process Clause to its full extent, elected representative officials suffer from no such incapacity. Indeed, they must conscientiously enforce the requirements of due process to protect against the “brutal need” poor people will suffer if erroneously deprived of subsistence benefits, and also to assure administrative integrity. This Article concludes with a legislative proposal that aims to effectuate the due process mandate of counsel at welfare administrative hearings, taking into account the direct and indirect cost of implementation.

SSRN: Law Student Learning Styles

"Law Students are Different from the General Population: Empirical Findings Regarding Learning Styles" 

Perspectives: Teaching Legal Research and Writing, Vol. 17, No. 3, p. 153, 2009
St. John's Legal Studies Research Paper No. 09-0173

ROBIN BOYLE, St. John's University School of Law
Email: [email protected]
JEFFREY MINNETI, Stetson University College of Law
Email: [email protected]
ANDREA HONIGSFELD, Molloy College
Email: [email protected]

The authors conducted an empirical study comparing the learning styles of law students with young adults at other educational institutions. The law school sample population came from St. John's University School of Law in New York and Stetson University College of Law in Florida. The law school data were compared with the learning styles of a random sample of college and graduate students, provided by Performance Concepts International. All subjects assessed their learning styles by using Building Excellence ("BE"). BE is an on-line assessment tool.

The BE profiles used in this study resembled the class learning-style profiles taken at the respective law schools in prior years. Thus the consistent BE profiles of law school students confirmed that the law school data set was reliable.

The Dunn and Dunn Model was used because it of its comprehensive design. The Model currently includes 26 learning-style elements. Data for this study included results of these elements.

In this study, the results showed that the learning styles of law students differed significantly from college and graduate students for 14 different elements of the 26 elements studies. To have significant findings for 14 categories, and to have each with this level of significance, is unusual. Some of the learning-style preferences of law students comport with our commonly held understanding, such as having a stronger preference for Verbal Kinesthetic tendencies (they learn by speaking while simultaneously listening). However, the general student population was more tactual, as opposed to the law population, despite the proliferation of laptops in the law school classroom.

The findings confirm observations that professors may have about law students, but some findings are surprising.

SSRN: Legal Education

Tomorrow's Research Today LEGAL EDUCATION ABSTRACTS Vol. 6, No. 28: Jun 30, 2009 HANNAH R. ARTERIAN, EDITOR Dean and Professor of Law, Syracuse University College of Law [email protected]

Table of Contents Law Students are Different from the General Population: Empirical Findings Regarding Learning Styles Robin Boyle, St. John's University School of Law Jeffrey Minneti, Stetson University College of Law Andrea Honigsfeld, Molloy College The Other Side of the Story: Using Graphic Organizers as Cognitive Learning Tools to Teach Students to Construct Effective Counter-Analysis Lisa McElroy, Drexel University - Earle Mack School of Law Christine Nero Coughlin, Wake Forest University - School of Law 'Public Service Must Begin at Home': The Lawyer As Civics Teacher in Everyday Practice Bruce A. Green, Fordham University School of Law Russell G. Pearce, Fordham University School of Law Cowboy Jurists & the Making of Legal Professionalism Wesley Pue, University of British Columbia - Faculty of Law Faculty Services and the Five Love Languages of Law Professors Galen L. Fletcher, Brigham Young University - J. Reuben Clark Law School Elizabeth Mertz, The Language of Law School: Learning to 'Think Like a Lawyer'. (Book Review) Kate O'Neill, University of Washington - School of Law

SSRN: Race/Gender/Sexual Orientation in the Law School Classroom"

"Making Up is Hard to Do: Race/Gender/Sexual Orientation in the Law School Classroom" 

Harvard Journal of Law and Gender, Forthcoming
Washington U. School of Law Working Paper No. 09-05-04

ROBERT S. CHANG, Seattle University School of Law
Email: [email protected]
ADRIENNE D. DAVIS, Washington University School of Law in St. Louis
Email: [email protected]

This exchange of letters picks up where Professors Adrienne Davis and Robert Chang left off in an earlier exchange that examined who speaks, who is allowed to speak, and what is remembered. Here, Professors Davis and Chang explore the dynamics of race, gender, and sexual orientation in the law school classroom. They compare the experiences of African American women and Asian American men in trying to perform as law professors, considering how makeup and other gender tools simultaneously assist and hinder such performances. Their exchange examines the possibility of bias that complicates the use of student evaluations in assessing teaching effectiveness. It hypothesizes that the mechanism by which this bias manifests itself is a variant of stereotype threat, one that they call projected stereotype threat, where stereotypes of incompetence or accent are projected onto the bodies of teachers marked by difference. They examine how institutions respond or, as is more typically the case, fail to respond to these problems. They conclude with some suggestions for change, asserting that if institutions want to pay more than lip service to the goal of diversity, the success and employment conditions of women and minorities will improve only through the hiring of more women and minorities and by addressing directly the issue of bias to educate students about bias and its discriminatory effects on instructors whose bodies are marked by perceived differences and how such bias interferes with their learning.

The Clash Of Ages: How Technology Divides Workers

by Joshua Brockman, All Things Considered, June 22, 2009 Listen Now[3 min 24 sec]

 

 

At her Chicago office, Kelly Huang connects with a friend in New York via Facebook. AP

 

If you're a boss, what do you do about employees who love to tweet, text and social network throughout the day? It's a question companies are grappling with as the generation gap threatens to create a communications divide.

Eric Pro, a 19-year-old electrical engineer at Aquas Inc. in Bethesda, Md., takes a few seconds out from his workday to send a quick text message on his T-Mobile Sidekick. He says he's in trouble with his girlfriend and he's trying to smooth things out.

While Pro may be worried about how things stand with his love interest, recent studies show real tensions are rising between Gen Y, or 20-something employees; Gen X, or 30-something workers; and their older, less tech-savvy, baby boomer bosses.

Culture Clash

"I'm old-school, but I am willing to learn," says 56-year-old Carmen Larsen, the president of Aquas, an engineering and IT company. Larsen says she typically reaches for a phone before a keyboard. But her daughters, who work with her, help with the learning curve.

"People go out of the office to take a cigarette break for 10 minutes, people take coffee breaks and people take Facebook breaks," says Emma Evans, Larsen's 19-year-old daughter. "It's kind of become built into our way of life."

In fact, 62 percent of Gen Y workers say they engage in social networking from work. That's according to LexisNexis, an online information service. The results of LexisNexis' Technology Gap Survey show vastly different attitudes about appropriate technology use among various generations in the work force. And this is creating a clash of cultures — especially during meetings.

Debate Over Multitasking

"You can have Gen Y-ers who are busy looking at their BlackBerrys. They've got their laptops flipped open, they're engaging in social networking right during the course of a meeting, and you have a boomer rolling their eyes, not understanding it," says Michael Walsh, the CEO for LexisNexis U.S. Legal Markets. "Two-thirds of boomers that were surveyed indicated that they felt that use of devices, technology — such as e-mail, social networking, the Internet, etc. — contributed to a decline in office etiquette."

Meanwhile, Gen X-ers are caught between having to manage and bridge the gap.

Walsh says the generational divide is most intense in Fortune 500 companies because senior management is typically made up of baby boomers. But it's also an issue that small companies like Aquas — with just over 30 employees ranging in age from 18 to 68 — have to contend with.

Social Networking's Reach

According to a workplace study on social networking and reputation risk by consulting giant Deloitte, nearly three-quarters of employees surveyed say they think it's easy to damage a company's reputation using social media.

Companies are cognizant of the far-reaching impact employees can have on their brand through social networking and other online activities. In April, when two Domino's pizza employees posted a video online showing one of them sticking cheese up his nose and sneezing on food, it sent shock waves through the corporate world.

Still, Deloitte's study also found that more than half of employees say their social networking is none of their employer's business.

Sharon Allen, chairman of Deloitte's board, says employers shouldn't put too many rules and restrictions into place: "We do believe as well that the ability to touch base with friends and family during the course of the day allows them to have a better mix of work and life."

Like it or not, technology is blurring the lines between work and leisure. In his book Elsewhere, U.S.A., New York University professor Dalton Conley even coined a term for it: "weisure."

Going Global: Antipoverty Lessons from Around the World

Poverty Law Prof Blog

New Issue of Pathways:

The Spring issue of Pathways, the poverty, inequality, and social policy magazine of The Stanford Center for the Study of Poverty and Inequality, has now been published.  The issue (full PDF available here) includes:

Editors' Note by David Grusky and Christopher Wimer

TRENDS
Getting to Equal: Progress, Pitfalls, and Policy Solutions on the Road to Gender Parity in the Workplace
Have we "stalled out" in the historic march toward gender equality in the workplace? Pamela Stone weighs the evidence and makes the case for a new way forward.

RESEARCH IN BRIEF
New research developments
A surprising trend in wealth inequality, the biological determinants of poor children's academic performance, the long-term effects of job displacement, and other cutting-edge research.

GOING GLOBAL: ANTIPOVERTY LESSONS FROM AROUND THE WORLD
Flexicurity
Joshua Cohen and Charles Sabel argue that the time has come to build a 21st century labor market modeled on key principles of Denmark's "flexicurity" system.
Pro-Poor Stimulus: Lessons from the Developing World
Martin Ravallion looks to antipoverty programs in developing countries to understand how developed nations like the United States can provide stimulus while reducing long-term poverty.
Combating Poverty by Building Assets: Lessons from Around the World
Ray Boshara describes the key features of asset-building programs throughout the world and examines how the United States can apply them to achieve economic security for the poor.
Northern Exposure: Learning from Canada�s Response to Winner-Take-All Inequality
Jacob S. Hacker describes how the United States and Canada have taken two different roads and why the Canadian road provides lessons that the United States might take to heart.

INTERVENTIONS
Spotlight On...Growing Power and the Urban Farming Movement
In our new "Spotlight On" feature, we talk with Growing Power's Will and Erika Allen about the potential and future of urban agriculture in combating poverty

SSRN: Assessment Down Under

"Student Assessment in the Clinical Environment - What Can We Learn from the US Experience?" 

Monash University Faculty of Law Legal Studies Research Paper No. 2007/18
International Journal of Clinical Legal Education, 2007

ROSS L HYAMS, Monash University - Faculty of Law
Email: [email protected]

Clinical legal education has a relatively short history in Australia of some thirty years. By contrast, the US has a much longer and diverse history of clinical pedagogy and has been successfully teaching and assession students in University legal clinics for over half a century. Traditional law school teaching methodology relies heavily on the Langdellian style of lectures, tutorials and then a form of summative evaluation. Clinical pedagogy is a radical departure from this style and as such assessment of clinical students necessitates a different approach. Clinicians have a duty to offer assessment regimes which ciomplement the clinical technique of law teaching.

SSRN: Undertraining of Women and Minorities

"The Undertraining of Lawyers and its Effect on the Advancement of Women and Minorities in the Legal Profession" 

Duke Forum for Law & Social Change, Forthcoming
NYU School of Law, Public Law Research Paper No. 09-31

IRENE SEGAL AYERS, New York University - School of Law
Email: [email protected]

The undertraining of law students documented in a century?s worth of critiques of legal education, most recently by the Carnegie Foundation, has different and much more detrimental consequences for the post-J.D. careers of women and minority attorneys. However, studies of their early careers focus primarily on problems with law-firm mentoring and pay little, if any, attention to how the earlier training that these lawyers received (or failed to be given) in law school might have contributed to the later career obstacles they face. Conversely, studies of the ways that law schools undertrain law students pay little or no attention to how the deficiencies in the current model of law school education may disproportionately disadvantage women and minority law students later in their careers. This article examines an emerging literature, narratives of professionalization by women attorneys of color, and puts those narratives into the dual context of critiques of legal education (exemplified by the Carnegie Report) and critiques of law-firm practice (exemplified by the recent A.B.A. study ?Visible Invisibility: Women of Color in Law Firms?) in order to demonstrate how law schools contribute to the career difficulties faced by women and minority attorneys. Two types of undertraining occur: 1) formal curricular undertraining; 2) self-undertraining, caused by the disengagement produced by law school culture. Only by reforming the curriculum and culture of legal education can law schools live up to the democratic civic mission they espouse as proponents of equal opportunity.