Best Practices for Legal Education

Back in  2007, after many retreats, research, brainstorming sessions, and national workshops, the members of the Clinical Legal Education Association’s Best Practices Committee ( thereafter renamed  Best Practices in Pedagogy  ) published the iconic Best Practices in Legal Education, timed to be released at the same time as Carnegie’s Educating Lawyers.   The first Best Practices document captured the emerging research on how to best engage law student learning. It also focused on the preparation of future lawyers in accordance with our profession’s expressed values and commitment to justice.  It did not claim to be the definitive “last word” on Legal Education.  In fact, that was the whole point.  Legal Education needed to evolve to meet the challenges of each new generation of lawyers-to-be and the world in which they would emerge.

At the inception, there was a shared understanding that work on a second edition needed to begin almost immediately and that historical wisdom should be tested in the light of an ever more diverse, global, and digitized world.  There was also an early desire to facilitate discussions in real time and to capture and share the ongoing and potentially controversial attempts to release legal education from its over 100 year old educational stagnation. Thus, the Best Practices for Legal Education blog was born.

One of this Blog’s earliest posts in 2007 was authored by the brilliant former law professor Antoinette Sedillo Lopez on Promoting Diversity.  Since then CLEA’s Best Practices in Pedagogy committee created the popular and richly informative Teaching Justice Webinar Series.   However, to consider how far we have and have not progressed please see last Thursday’s post:   Addressing Structural Racism in Law School: CUNY Law Faculty Issues Statement and Demand for Action.

Today in the turbulent summer of 2020, we evolve again to welcome new editors and crowd-source new inspirations.  I am so pleased and honored to announce that Best Practices in Pedagogy members, Professors Melanie DeRousse and Davida Finger,  have stepped into leadership and will be editors on the Blog going forward.  It has been so rewarding to work with them on this transition.  I leave this baby in good hands!

So many people – authors, assistant editors, staff, professors, Deans, colleagues – have contributed to the success of this blog over the past 13 years.  You know who you are and I thank you from the bottom of my heart.  For now, let’s look forward towards a future of “collaboration on steroids” in legal education while dismantling the structural impediments for learning and teaching which result from racism, misogyny, and other historical systems of oppression.  We can do this together!

Filed under: Uncategorized |