Best Practices for Legal Education

The following post comes to us from Professor Lisa Bliss:

CLEA’s Best Practices Implementation Committee, co-chaired by Lisa Bliss and Carrie Kaas, is currently focused on developing a second volume, tentatively titled “Building on Best Practices: The Walls are Coming Down.”

Published in 2007, Best Practices in Legal Education: A Vision and A Roadmap, by Roy Stuckey and Others, was released the same year as Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law (the Carnegie Report). Both publications offered important ideas for legal education. Some viewed the Carnegie Report as the critique, and Best Practices as the answer. Both publications likewise have been often cited in conversations about legal education reform.

Following the release of Best Practices, it became a resource for law teachers. It was helpful for curriculum planning on a micro as well as a macro level. The book can be summarized as containing three major questions that legal educators should ask:

1. What is your mission?
2. What is your method?
3. What is your measure?

After a few years, it became clear that there were important topics in legal education that received little or no treatment in the original Best Practices book and that there were new developments that merited examination. The Best Practices Implementation Committee embarked on a project to identify those topics and authors to contribute to writing a follow-up book. The Co-Editors of the new book project are Deborah Maranville and Antoinette Sedillo-Lopez. The new book will differ from the original in its format and approach.

Among the topics to be addressed in the new book are the following:

Mission:
• Setting goals for the program of instruction – mission statements

Method:
• Professional Identity
• Interdisciplinary
• International
• Integration and Problem-solving
• Pro Bono
• Intercultural Competence
• Experiential
• Externships
• Technology
• Delivery of instruction

Measure:
• Assessing student learning
• Assessing institutional effectiveness

The chapters are currently being written. The authors are organized in topical committees, made up in part by volunteers who responded to a call for proposals for the new book that was issued in 2011. The co-editors are pursuing publishers for the second volume and hope to see the book published in late 2013 or 2014. If you have questions about the project, please contact Deborah Maranville at maran@uw.edu or Antoinette Sedillo Lopez at lopez@law.unm.edu. Watch for more information about this project in an upcoming CLEA newsletter.

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