CSALE 2013-14 Survey of Applied Legal Education

Posted on February 23, 2015 by Mary A. Lynch

The Center for the Study of Applied Legal Education’s (CSALE) 2013-14 Survey of Applied Legal Education is now available on CSALE’s website http://www.csale.org/results.html and on SSRN http://ssrn.com/abstract=2566484

The 43-page report provides the summary results of CSALE’s third triennial survey of law school clinics and externships and the faculty teaching in those clinical courses. Over 88% of ABA-accredited law schools participated in the survey, which included theMaster Survey, Law Clinics Sub-Survey, Field Placement Course Sub-Survey, and Faculty Sub-Survey.

CSALE can also provide free customized reports on questions in the surveys – contact administrator@csale.org or rkuehn@wustl.edu.

Filed under: Best Practices | 1 Comment »

Being in the Moment with our Students

Posted on January 10, 2015 by Irene Scharf

About a month ago, when the President announced that he was taking executive action to address various issues that would assist about 5.5 million immigrants in this country, lawyers, legal services offices, religious organizations, and law schools around the country stepped up to organize, even at the very busy time of year’s – and semester’s – end, to help in whatever way they could.

For law school immigration clinics, and even for law students not enrolled in clinics but interested in helping and dipping their toes into immigration, students and their teachers experienced, in this call to action, “being in the moment” – with their teachers, with their clinics, and with the people who they will help. That immigration clinic faculty all over the country naturally took up this role modeling, while an automatic response to real need, is both a testament to them and a meaningful example law professors can set for their law students. An issue arose. People needed help. Law students were invited to participate, with their teachers, to help those in need. Law school clinics teamed up with local legal services providers. With religiously-affiliated groups. Community-wide events are being held. Everyone working toward a common, worthy goal. Students witness, and participate in, activist, justice-centered lawyering. That’s best practice.

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Building on Best Practices for Legal Education Manuscript Submitted to Publisher

Posted on January 8, 2015 by dmaranville

Four editors,  59 authors, 92 readers, three copy editors, librarians from two schools, a secretary, miscellaneous consultants, three student assistants for bluebooking, and one for setting up perrmacc links.*

Many people, occasionally in multiple roles, were needed to produce the manuscript sent to Lexis last Monday for the forthcoming book Deborah Maranville, Lisa Radtke Bliss, Carolyn Wilkes Kaas, and Antoinette Sedillo López (eds.),  Building on Best Practices:  Transforming Legal Education in a Changing World. (Lexis 2015).  A monster project — but, as I assured a friend, no, not a manuscript about monsters and not monstrously unpleasant to produce – just big, ambitious, and sometimes exhausting for the editors and authors.  A big thank you to all who participated!

The book is a follow up to CLEA’s Best Practices for Legal Education, the 2007 volume by Roy Stuckey and others that inspired this blog.  Like Best Practices, this book will be distributed for free to legal educators.  Lexis has promised to make it available in electronic format through their e-book library and to provide print copies on request.  Look for it in four to six months — if all goes smoothly perhaps in time for the AALS Clinical Legal Education Conference in early May.

The coverage of Building on Best Practices is wide-ranging.  To quote from the Introduction, “[t]his volume builds on the call to link mission and outcomes; emphasizing the themes of integrating theory, doctrine and practice, developing the broader spectrum of skills needed by lawyers in the twenty-first century, and taking up the question how best to shift law school cultures to facilitate change.”

Advance praise for the book has included:

  • “[M]ilestone in legal education . . . that legal educators will rely on as much as . . . on the first Best Practices book.”  (Patty Roberts, William & Mary)
  • “Educational for folks who don’t know much about experiential education and insightful for those who do. . . .Really something to be proud of . . . an invaluable resource to schools as they go to work on implementing the ABA’s new requirements for learning outcomes and assessment. . .The perfect product coming out at the perfect time.” (Kate Kruse, Hamline)

Once again, CLEA deserves kudos for its support of an important scholarly project on legal education.  And the Georgia State University, University of New Mexico, Quinnipiac University, and University of Washington Law Schools deserve a big round of thanks for supporting the co-editors in this project.

*  https://perma.cc/ provides an archive for those annoying website links that quickly become outdated.

Filed under: Best Practices, Best Practices & Curriculum, Best Practices & Externships, Best Practices & Setting Goals, Best Practices and Clinics, Best Practices for Institutional Effectiveness, Catalysts For Change, Diversity & Social Justice, International Initiatives and Models | Tagged: , | 3 Comments »

Helping Students Succeed in Law School

Posted on December 1, 2014 by ghess

On the first day of class in every course I tell students that my job is to help them succeed in law school. I doubt that my students remember this, especially my 1Ls who are hearing all sorts of new things from their teachers and fellow students during the beginning of their legal education. So I remind students several times during the course that my obligations as a teacher include helping students succeed.

The last time I told students about my view of my job, I began reflecting on my statement. To begin, I admitted to myself that much of my job is not tied directly to helping my students succeed. Like many legal academics, my job includes teaching, service, and scholarship. Although I think that some aspects of my service and scholarship benefit students, only the teaching portion of my job has student success as a primary goal.

Then I began to think more deeply about what it means to say that my job is to help students succeed in law school. I recognize that what constitutes “success” varies tremendously among my students. For some, success means that they avoid academic dismissal and eventually graduate from my law school. For others it means that they perform at a very high level and create many options for themselves upon graduation. Some students define success in law school by their intense and varied “hands on” experiences that they hope will prepare them for the practice of law. And other students are driven by the opportunity to use their legal learning to help people in need during and after law school. And so on…

Finally, I started reflecting on what behaviors and attitudes on my part could help students succeed. I will continue to contemplate this, but here are some initial thoughts.

Learning Environment. I can play a significant role is creating a class environment conducive to learning for all students. How? By fostering three-way respect: Teacher to Student, Student to Teacher, and Student to Student. By learning students names and something about their lives. By my expectations – they should be high, yet achievable, for every student, and for myself. By making joy and celebration part of the educational experience.

Practice and Feedback. I ask my students to learn difficult doctrine, theory, skills, and professional values. Practice and feedback are critical for that learning. So I should provide students with multiple opportunities for practice and feedback, both graded and ungraded. Providing feedback to students during the course takes a significant portion of my “teaching” time. It takes place in the classroom with large groups of students and outside of the classroom with small groups and individuals. Perhaps the most valuable use of my time during my 1L course is meeting with students to provide feedback on the graded midterm exam. It provides me with an opportunity to reinforce each student’s strengths and troubleshoot their weaknesses.

Good Faith Assumption. I try to operate as a teacher with the assumption that there is a good faith explanation for my students’ behavior. Whenever I fail to do so, my students remind me of the importance of the good faith assumption. I have many examples of my falling off of the good faith assumption wagon. Here is one from this semester. A student identified herself to me on the first day of class as “very high maintenance” (her words) requiring lots of reassurance from her teachers. Several weeks later we had a poor interaction when she interrupted my conversation with another student to ask a question. A couple weeks after that, I noticed that she appeared very unhappy and distracted in class – never smiling, rarely even looking at me. I began to obsess about her poor attitude in my class. She hated me – it was obvious. Finally I asked her after class whether she was OK because I had noticed that she seemed unhappy and distracted in class. She told me that her parents had decided to separate and her high school aged siblings were taking the news very hard. She was doing her best to help her parents and siblings get through a very tough time. Her “presence” both in and out of class have continued to improve since our conversation. Or perhaps her “presence” was fine all along and it was only my attitude that needed adjustment…

I can’t succeed for them. I can strive to create an effective teaching/learning environment. I can provide opportunities for practice and feedback. I can operate according to the good faith assumption. But only my students can do what it takes to succeed. I can support them, believe in them, challenge them, but I cannot learn doctrine, theory, skills, and values for them. At the end of the day, my obligation to help students succeed in law school is not the key to my students’ success. There is no substitute for the passion, diligence, intelligence, compassion, and judgment that students must find in themselves.

Filed under: Best Practices, First Year Law School Innovations | 2 Comments »

NEW YORK STATE BAR ASSOCIATION VIGOROUSLY OPPOSES PROPOSAL TO BRING UBE TO NY THIS JULY

Posted on November 3, 2014 by Mary A. Lynch

Less than a month ago, the New York State Courts circulated a proposal to change the New York State (NYS) Bar Exam by adopting the Uniform Bar Exam (UBE) along with a second, separately graded “New York Law Exam” segment consisting of 50 multiple-choice questions, tested for one hour on the second day of the exam.   The proposal would make the changes effective for all current graduating law students who face the bar exam in July 2015.    This past weekend, the New York State Bar Association House of Delegates unanimously opposed the proposed immediate changes,  sending a  message to the NYS Board of Law Examiners and to the New York Court of Appeals – do not bring the Uniform Bar Exam and a yet to be formulated or studied New York Exam to NYS in  July 2015.  Even more significantly, the House directed the State Bar President, based on an amendment from the floor,  to do everything possible to prevent immediate implementation of a new bar exam in New York.  

So, how did NYS get to the point where the Courts and the Bar are in such conflict over proposed changes to the bar exam?

For several years,  the NYS Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar Committee (LEAB)  (on which I have formerly served as an active member) has been studying how to improve the bar exam to make it fairer for all groups of test takers and more relevant to what graduates need to know, value and do in the early years of practice. See NYSBA Legal Education September2013Journal particularly page 31.  The Committee, through its chairs, has reached out to the NYS Board of Law Examiners and the Chief Justice about these matters without success.  The UBE was not one of the reform measures which LEAB proposed for further study or pilot projects.

Suddenly, and without notice to the NYSBA LEAB Committee,  co-chaired by  well-respected practitioner Eileen Millett and equally well-respected Touro Law Center Dean Patricia Salkin , the courts circulated and posted the following:

1) UNIFORM BAR EXAMINATION (UBE)
 POSTED OCTOBER 7, 2014

The New York State Board of Law Examiners has recommended to the New York Court of Appeals that the current bar examination be replaced with the Uniform Bar Examination (UBE). The Court of Appeals is considering adopting the UBE for the administration of the July 2015 bar exam. On October 6, 2014, the Court of Appeals issued a Request for Public Comment on the proposal. Submissions will be accepted until November 7, 2014. A copy of the Request for Public Comment is available by clicking this link:   New York Court of Appeals Request for Comment  http://www.nybarexam.org

The proposal and request for comment document asserts that  “The UBE is prepared by the National Conference of Bar Examiners (NCBE) and passage of the test would produce a portable score that can be used to gain admission in other states that accept the UBE, provided the applicant satisfies any other jurisdiction-specific admission requirements. As the UBE is accepted by more states,the portable score will facilitate lawyer mobility across state lines, resulting in expanded employment opportunities for lawyers throughout the nation and facilitating multi-state law practices.”

Given the surprise announcement from the Court on October 6, 2014 of a 30-day comment period (open until this Friday, Nov. 7th) , the LEAB and its co-chairs  had only a matter of weeks to research, discuss and prepare a report for the State Bar Association about the implications of the proposed changes. The LEAB report 10-29-2014 (2) argues that it is simply too soon to discuss the merits of the Uniform Bar Exam and its potential impact on test takers in New York because of the surprise nature of the announcement along with absence of any study or report discussing a need, a cost-benefit analysis, or a discussion of whether there could be disparate impacts on minority test-takers.  LEAB is concerned about potential increase in costs for test-takers, impact on barriers to entry to the profession in New York, and impact on the New York job market.  LEAB  discussions emphasized that the practicing bar has been pressuring law schools to meet the demands of a changing market place including, among other things, producing more “practice ready” lawyers that would presumably include a richer knowledge of New York Law.  Impacts on foreign lawyers and other important issues for consideration were also raised.

On this past weekend, co-chairs Millett and Salkin presented their findings to the NYSBA House of Delegates.  The presentation to the State Bar can be viewed here (Click on the Nov. 1 House of Delegates Meeting and then click on the Report of the Committee on Legal Education and Admission to the Bar)  Co-Chair Millett challenged the notion that the proposed reforms as outlined would actually result in  portability. Co-chair Salkin pointed out that the notion of “uniformity” seems misleading given that in NY many uniform rules are not used and that  current law school  courses focus on statutes different than those used by the UBE .   Significantly, three past presidents of the NYSBA testified against the proposed immediate changes including Steve Younger who emphasized the issues raised by New York’s special connection with international lawyers from around the globe admitted to practice  in New York State.  Many expressed concern for current students facing the July Bar, including Albany Law School Professor Michael Hutter who asked  “Why the Rush to Judgment?” Dean Patricia Salkin and Betty Lugo (President-elect of the Puerto Rican Bar Association founded in 1957) expressed particular concern that minority bar associations were not consulted, and that questions on the proposed brand new “New York Law Exam” component have never been tested on previous exams, a “best practice” for all standardized tests that are given as points of entry to higher education and the professions.

Why does this matter?

The contents, pass rates and disparate impacts of the bar exam matter tremendously .  This is our profession’s gatekeeping device.  It announces  what we value and what we do not value. It will be a make or break change for many law students starting in July who have prepared their course of study under different sets of expectations. For many schools and many students, bar exam subjects and testing methods determine their course curriculum rather than what they need to meet student learning outcomes or preparing for practice. This proposed change deserves further scrutiny and evaluation.  New Yorkers also deserve that the Court evaluate  the success of licensure practices which include clinical evaluation while in professional school as opposed to sole reliance on standardized testing.

See attached SALT Letter-NY Bar opposing the proposed changes.

My  Reaction to the Proposed Changes:

POTENTIAL ADVANTAGES:

  • Should proposed changes result in a decrease in the number of doctrinal subjects tested on the NY Bar exam that will be an advantageous change both for making the bar exam more relevant and for allowing law schools and students to craft better curricular choices to prepare them for the jobs and careers of today and tomorrow.  (see earlier BLOG post on this issue here.)

POTENTIAL DISADVANTAGES:

  • The process for adopting the proposed change is too hasty and is unfair to current third year students and to second year students who have already planned three semesters around the exam.
  • The proposed changes have not been studied appropriately. For example, no one knows if the new format, particularly the 50 question NYS multiple choice format,  will exacerbate the already disparate impact on graduates of color and/or if it will create a separate barrier for admission to those who will make great lawyers but not particularly good standardized test-takers given the speededness/speediness factor – 50 multiple choice in one hour will make or break you on the NY part!
  •  The proposed format fails to address the critical need for bar licensure to include evaluation of actual, supervised, and  limited practice of law while in law school or immediately thereafter.  As a gateway to a client-centered, civic profession, evaluation of the limited supervised practice of law could and should replace – at least some part – of the current standardized testing.

NEW YORK LAWYERS, LAW STUDENTS  AND LAW PROFESSORS ACT NOW!  Comments due by this Friday November 7th.

Address comments to:

UniformBarExam@nycourts.gov

Filed under: Best Practices, Best Practices & Curriculum, Best Practices and Clinics, Catalysts For Change, Diversity & Social Justice | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments »

Bibliography on Education Reform

Posted on September 29, 2014 by Patricia Salkin

Fall is here and in addition to the start of the academic semester, the NYSBA Committee on Legal Education and Admission to the Bar is in high gear.  So much has been written about changes in legal education in a short period of time, it can be difficult to keep track of the books, articles, columns, posts, etc. Thanks to Touro Law librarian Laura Ross, a working bibliography on legal education reform has now been posted to SSRN for all to access. http://ssrn.com/abstract=2500987 This is an ongoing work-in-progress, and Laura welcomes emails with suggestions for additions to the list.  Entries in the bibliography provide great starting points for discussion among faculty and law school constituents about the present but more important, the future, for individual law schools.  We hope you will use this to inform your teaching, scholarship and service to the school and community moving forward.  Those of us fortunate to be a part of the Academy have a wonderful opportunity at this moment in time to respond to a rapidly changing legal profession by making deliberate and informed reforms in the way we educate the next generation of lawyers.

Filed under: Best Practices, Catalysts For Change | 2 Comments »

Developing the habit of critiquing the law – or legal nihilism?

Posted on September 7, 2014 by Margaret Moore Jackson

We often ask students to consider the role of law and policy in shaping society and providing a means for solving problems. But what problems has the law ever solved?

Posing that question to students, what do they come up with? Certainly, the legal system provides a way for disputes between individual persons or entities to be resolved, one way or another. The rules of the system say that the dispute is over.

But what about overarching, systemic, societal problems? I’m thinking about residential segregation at the moment, and the resulting disparities in wealth accumulation, educational quality, and employment opportunity, just to name a few. Discriminatory housing policies were once implemented and enforced by law; then they were prohibited. Particularly where a good share of the responsibility for the development of a given problem can be directly traced to prior law, have legal reforms ever resulted in solving that problem? Is this a question that can be posed in some manner to students, as a means of developing the habit of critiquing and improving the law?

Filed under: Best Practices, Diversity & Social Justice | 3 Comments »

Legal Education and Professional Identity

Posted on August 18, 2014 by Steven Friedland

I participated in a discussion group about teaching the formation of professional identity at the Southeastern Association of Law Schools (SEALS) conference in early August, led by Professors Ben Madison of Regent University School of Law and David Thomson of the University of Denver Sturm College of Law.  It was clear there was lots of passion in the room to engage students in the formation of professional identity directly and throughout law school.  The real question was how to do it.  There were some very good ideas of how to do it within the parameters of traditional classes, such as Professional Ethics, and how to do it outside of classes by affecting the culture of a school and its environments.

One of the main problems in this area, it seems to me, is that the notion of ‘professionalism’ is often a foreign concept to students; after all, until someone becomes a lawyer, how will they understand what this means?  This is where learning science comes into play, specifically experiential education, the kind advocated by David Kolb in his famous experiential learning cycle way back in 1984.  Kolb suggested that experience should be used as a learning tool in stages. An experience serves as the first stage, and is then followed by reflection, abstraction and theorization, and finally, the transfer of knowledge to new problems or questions.

This learning cycle fits into real life quite well.  If one is learning to drive, for example, then it is important to progress from the classroom to the passenger seat to the driver’s seat.  Of course, the ‘driver’s seat’ need not be attached to a two thousand pounds of nuts, bolts and engine, but can at first be behind the wheel of a simulator.  Simulation and exercises in legal education also can serve as a platform for the formation of professional identity.  For example, a simulated oral argument about a case could involve two teams of students asked to argue different positions.  This division into groups requires collaborative work and presents an opportunity to explore how professionals participate and communicate on teams.

Students also could be given non-legal exercises that raise professional identity issues.  If students were walking home from school one night and see a $20 bill sticking out of an ATM machine with no one else around, would they take it?  Why or why not?  Does it matter whether the students were now working in a courthouse where the ATM is located or working as a lawyer for the bank that owns the ATM?

From a different perspective, what if the students were mountain climbing in the Andes Mountains and were roped up with the person closest to them in the entire world at 20,000 feet. In this hypo, the person roped to the student slips and falls off of the mountain.  The only way the student can save him or herself is to cut the rope, leading to a long fall for person #2.  Would the student cut the rope?  This question raises professional ethics of a different kind — what is the mountain climber code in this situation?  Also, what factors would the student consider in making such a decision? (A somewhat similar situation actually occurred in real life with two mountain climbers high in the Andes.  The mountain climber on the mountain cut the rope and the other climber, dangling below, fell, but survived.  I would have loved to have eavesdropped on their conversation at the bottom of the mountain. See Touching the Void (2003), based on a 1988 book by Joe Simpson of the same name.)

All told, the formation of professional identity can help students connect with and maintain the values that might have landed them in law school in the first place.  And it could weave into the understanding of law the importance of the lawyer’s role within the system – and how service to others might require a different application of values than service to oneself.

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Clinical Law Review Workshop – Registration deadline is June 30, 2014

Posted on April 14, 2014 by Mary A. Lynch

The Clinical Law Review will hold its next Clinical Writers’ Workshop on Saturday, September 27, 2014, at NYU Law School.

The Workshop will provide an opportunity for clinical teachers who are writing about any subject (clinical pedagogy, substantive law, interdisciplinary analysis, empirical work, etc.) to meet with other clinicians writing on related topics to discuss their works-in-progress and brainstorm ideas for further development of their articles. Attendees will meet in small groups organized, to the extent possible, by the subject matter in which they are writing. Each group will “workshop” the draft of each member of the group.

Participation in the Workshop requires the submission of a paper because the workshop takes the form of small group sessions in which all members of the group comment on each other’s manuscripts. By June 30, all applicants will need to submit a mini-draft or prospectus, 3-5 pages in length, of the article they intend to present at the workshop. Full drafts of the articles will be due by September 1, 2014.

As in the previous Clinical Law Review Workshops, participants will not have to pay an admission or registration fee but participants will have to arrange and pay for their own travel and lodging. To assist those who wish to participate but who need assistance for travel and lodging, NYU Law School has committed to provide 10 scholarships of up to $750 per person to help pay for travel and lodging. The scholarships are designed for those clinical faculty who receive little or no travel support from their law schools and who otherwise would not be able to attend this conference without scholarship support. Applicants for scholarships will be asked to submit, with their 3-5 page prospectus, by June 30, a proposed budget for travel and lodging and a brief statement of why the scholarship would be helpful in supporting their attendance at this conference. The Board will review all scholarship applications and issue decisions about scholarships in early July.The scholarships are conditioned upon recipients’ meeting all requirements for workshop participation, including timely submission of drafts.

Information about the Workshop – including the Registration form, scholarship application form, and information for reserving hotel rooms – is available on-line at:

http://www.law.nyu.edu/journals/clinicallawreview/clinical-writers-workshop

If you have any comments or suggestions you would like to send us, we would be very happy to hear from you. Comments and suggestions should be sent to Randy Hertz at randy.hertz@nyu.edu.

— The Board of Editors of the Clinical Law Review

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A Follow-Up to Mary Lynch’s December Challenge

Posted on January 11, 2013 by Irene Scharf

I’m following up on Mary Lynch’s December 20 blog post, in which she laments the sad state of affairs in which we generally find ourselves – violence, commercialization of the holidays, and the long dark nights of winter.  Not to mention the “darkness” apparently enveloping legal education, with fewer and fewer applicants to law school, increasing difficulty for graduates to find jobs, greater negativity from the media about law schools losing their way, being unresponsive to the needs of their students.

Mary’s wish for the season is for us to redeem ourselves by creating change for the better.  She wants to hear how we are extricating ourselves from causing harm or other detrimental effects to our students, the profession, and society.  She wants to hear stories of illumination.

I’m hoping to reply to Mary with some notes of optimism.  Here at the new (now in our third year of operation) UMass Law School, the first and only public law school in Massachusetts, we’re trying to create that better change.  We’re offering students an affordable way to become lawyers, to reach their goals without being so debt-laden that their hopes to help others in their communities are weighed-down by their own debt.  If students can get the substantive and practical knowledge necessary to become excellent, caring, ethical lawyers while attending affordable law schools, their goals of helping their own communities will be more likely to be achieved.  At the Law School, we encourage students to gain experience “in practice” by aiding others through our pro bono program as well as through two in-house clinics (Community Development and Immigration); two legal-services-based clinics, one concentrating on the civil legal needs of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe; and a robust Field Placement/Externship Program.

New programs on the horizon include a full semester (aka Vermont’s “Semester in Practice”) in-office placement as well as coordination of the Immigration Clinic with local community activists assisting in legal and organizing efforts of low-wage immigrant workers and with national organizations assisting victimized immigrant workers.  We soon hope to sponsor a pro bono Spring Break trip that will enable students to immerse themselves in the culture, language, social, and legal issues predominant in poverty-stricken nations just hours away from the Law School.

I hope that some of the energy evident in this post will inspire others to share all of the good things they are doing where they work, as I know that what I’ve described here, from my neck of the woods, indicates just a small teaspoon of leavening in the large recipe of “good work” (I’ve been baking a lot!) about which Mary is hoping to hear.   This work, rather than causing the harm so many are saying law schools are responsible for, are true stories of illumination.

 

 

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