At this afternoon’s AALS plenary session on “Rethinking Legal Education For the 21st Century”, wonderful discussion occurred on legal education reform in a packed room of avid listeners. Two of the Carnegie Foundation Report’s authors, Judith Wegner and Bill Sullivan, discussed the findings of the report. Professor Martha Minow described curricular reform and process at Harvard. New Mexico Dean Sue-Ellen Scarnechia discussed the need for experiential and non-experiential teachers to build respect and collaboration capital and to break down biased perceptions of each other. Panelist Vicki Jackson of Georgetown reported on Georgetown’s first year course “FIRST WEEK. ” (Scheduled for the first week of the second semester, FIRST WEEK offers a brief and intensive integrated simulated experience in which students work with problem based materials in a global lawyering context based on legal concepts such as contracts or torts which were taught in the previous semester).
Ed Rubin, Dean of Vanderbilt and moderator of the panel described the reforms the Vanderbilt faculty and administration have undertaken. As Chair of the AALS Committee on the Curriculum, Rubin encouraged audience members to post their curriculum reform efforts on a new AALS site dedicated to documenting curriculur reform ideas – http://www.aals.org/services_curriculum_committee.php.
There were more questions than the panelists had time to hear. This Blog would be a good place to continute the discussion from this afternoon……. Reactions?