Washington & Lee has implemented a new third year curriculum focused on experiential learning. The Washington Post covered this story here. But more interesting is the ongoing conversation had on the Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog on whether the 3rd year of law school is really necessary. See “Is W&L Already providing the 3L Experience of the Future?” .
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The faculty at Golden Gate University School of Law unanimously approved changes to the first-year curriculum to go into effect with the class that matriculates in the fall of 2010. They have decided to allocate a total of five credits to Legal Writing & Research for first year students (2 credits in the fall and 3 credits in the spring). They believe that this will better prepare their students for legal work in the summer and for subsequent upper division writing courses.
In addition, they are very excited to create first-year electives that will have no more than 25 students and introduce students to a range of skills other than legal writing and research. Students will be able to select these spring semester electives, some of which will focus on transactional skills, for example working with unmarried co-habitants who want to put their understanding in writing. Other electives will focus more on litigation skills in the context of alleged employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, or enforcing environmental laws through citizen lawsuits. Golden Gate University will also offer one or two electives that focus on statutory interpretation and jurisprudence.
Earlier this year the Golden Gate University School of Law faculty unanimously adopted the MacCrate skills and values as objectives of our JD program. Creating these first-year electives will ensure that all students are not only introduced to skills such as client counseling and negotiation, but are also able to practice these during their first year and reinforce the analytical skills that they learn in the doctrinal courses.
GGU School of Law welcomes thoughts from others who are working on similar courses. Please comment below.
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An article in the August, 2009, ABA Journal profiled the new law school at the University of California at Irvine which was entering its first year. The article reported some interesting things, including a claim that “it is designed to be among the most innovative law schools in the nation.” Dean Erwin Chemerinsky was quoted as saying, “We have the wonderful benefit of a blank slate and the chance to create the ideal law school for the 21st century.” The article, however, was thin on details about plans for the curriculum.
The article reported that there will be a two semester “professionalism” course in the first year in which practictioners from many areas of practice will help students “gain a sense of the different kinds of work the profession does.” First year students will also be required to conduct intake interviews for legal aid clients. Two years from now, the school will require students to spend a semester in one of the eight planned in-house clinics.
So far, so good, but it is not clear how committed the school really is to innovative teaching or experiential learning. There was no mention in the article or on the school’s website as to whether the school has clearly articulated its educational objectives or whether the program of instruction will progressively develop knowledge, skill, and values or integrate the teaching of theory, doctrine, and practice.
The Associate Dean of Clinical Education and Service Learning Programs, Carrie Hempel (formerly at Southern California) was quoted as saying that she gets the “chance to recruit a group of the finest clinicians in the country to come here and build their own dream clinical courses.” Allowing people to come in and build their own courses does not sound like there will be a program of progressive learning into which these courses will fit. Most unfortunately, the article makes it sound like there will be a group of people identified as “clinicians” rather than members of the faculty who happen to teach clinical courses. I hope I am wrong.
It is not apparent that classroom instruction will be any more innovative or skilled than at traditional law schools. The first members of the faculty were largely recruited from elite law schools, including Berkeley and Duke. As a group, the faculty ranks 10th in the nation in ”scholarly impact,” and UC-Irvine intends to be considered an elite law school from the beginning. All members of the faculty may be excellent teachers who are devoted to preparing students for practice, but there is no mention of this in the article or on the school’s website.
Will UC-Irvine’s law school really be an innovative place that can legitimately claim to be the ideal school for the 21st century? I hope so, but it is too early to tell. Meanwhile, if anyone has more details about the curriculum, please share it with us.
Roy
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Anything new with the ABA Section of Legal Education & Admissions to the Bar’s Standards Review Committee?
Best Practices devotees know that in Sept. 08 the committee began a comprehensive review of standards that includes considering the contents of reports by two special subcommittees, on Outcome Measures and Security of Position and comments on the reports.
My sources describe the committee as “in a deregulatory mood” and the current version of the Outcome Measures report as “surprisingly good”. Not yet having coalesced around a decision, at their October 9-10 meeting the committee did the usual for complex issues & referred the Outcome Measures report back to committee.
Next meeting: January 8 and 9, New Orleans at the AALS Convention. Stop by! (Don’t expect them to be taking comments at this meeting.)
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A fun aspect of getting a few gray hairs: we might be around long enough to see our ideas come to fruition. Some years ago I wrote about the important role of experiential learning in providing context for law students. Passion, Context, and Lawyering Skills: Choosing Among Simulated and Real Clinical Experiences, 7 Clin. L. Rev. 123 (2000) and Infusing Passion and Context into the Traditional Curriculum Through Experiential Learning, 51 J. Legal Educ 51 (2001). Continue reading
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I’ve been thinking about ways of incorporating clinical experiences in doctrinal classes. The importance of this practice has not only been demonstrated by our Best Practices authors and the Carnegie Foundation, but especially by our own observations of our students as they enter clinical courses. To my mind it’s now obvious that students sitting in doctrinal classrooms for 1-2 years before getting involved in a clinical setting is not just unproductive, but counter-productive to their learning how to “be” lawyers. The way it is now, those who do enroll in clinics have little context for clients’ real legal problems, scant sense of what it means to gather the facts, and little notion as to how those facts fit with in the relevant law. Given this, I’ve recently suggested/mentioned to faculty at my school that they consider working on a “real” case in their doctrinal classes. The response was underwhelming. There was concern about additional work.
Has anyone out there been successful in encouraging non-clinical faculty to work with a group of students on direct case representation? If so, can you offer some suggestions as to how it might be made to work, especially how it might be accepted as a productive and enjoyable way to teach?
formative assessment.
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Karen Sloan
September 7, 2009
Washington and Lee University School of Law has thrown out its traditional third-year curriculum and replaced it with a series of legal simulations meant to prepare students to practice law in the real world.
First-year students at Duke Law School and the new University of California, Irvine School of Law will take a yearlong course examining different legal careers and the ethical and professional issues associated with those career tracks.
A new LL.M. program at the University of California at Los Angeles School of Law is designed to give recent law school graduates the skills their predecessors would have developed as starting law firm associates.
The movement to incorporate practical skills into legal education isn’t new, but legal educators and researchers report that the floundering economy is increasing incentives for law schools to revamp their curricula to prepare students for the realities of the legal profession. Continue reading
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I think we are at a point in the legal education reform movement, where terminology to identify the complementary but distinguishable kinds of “Experiences” and kinds of “Learning” seems important.(Deborah Maranville, Russell Engler, Sue Kay and I are working on a piece which analyzes some of this….)
For purposes of the lists some of us are in the process of creating to identify schools which are mandating experiential learning, I think it would be helpful to discuss our terminology. In my mind, I divide or group the categories by four (4) factors (with sub-factors within): Continue reading
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As I read Dean JoAnne Epps July 20th National Law Journal’s opinion piece on the call to legal education reform, I am reminded that each one of us understands the themes and threads of this movement differently. These differing threads and themes weave together in rich texture and ultimately strengthen the commitment to reform. Continue reading
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I have just returned from Washington, D.C., where I spent the last week fully immersed in clinical teaching methods at the second Summer Institute for Clinical Teaching at Georgetown University Law Center. There were approximately 25 attendees, many with years of teaching experience, who came from all over the country to engage in four days of intensive learning. Continue reading
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In response to several inquiries of Albany Law School’s Family Violence Litigation Clinic students concerning tax issues related to separation and divorce, we decided to engage in an experiment that turned out to be a huge success. The Low Income Taxpayer Clinic (“LITC”) and Family Violence Litigation Clinic (“FVLC”) students were asked to prepare and present an interactive class to share the knowledge that they had gained throughout the semester in a manner targeted to the unique issues faced by each Clinic. We followed a Best Practices approach of integrating substantive doctrine, skills, theory and social science all in one class and the feedback from the students was very positive. Continue reading
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Cost is often cited as an obstacle to providing real experiential learning opportunities. Overcoming those cost barriers will require creativity. That’s one reason I’m so excited about an experiment coming out of the Washington state Access to Justice Board’s ATJ & the Law Schools Committee. Next fall three legal services providers will collaborate with the three Washington Law Schools on the Rubin Externship Advocacy Project , a full-time externship during the fall term. The externship will be supported by an intensive jointly developed classroom component in which attorneys from the three legal services providers, as well as faculty from the three law schools will participate. Can it be a model for additional collaborative efforts? We’ll see.
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I’ve been musing on the subject of “gravitas” lately. Why?
Now, I’ve talked to Larry Marshall about this subject. He’s an amazing and thoughtful guy. And most of us would probably agree: if the one, or three, or five schools that produce most of the law teachers in the country radically change their curriculum and teaching methods in the next five years, we’ll see major transformation in other schools in another ten to fifteen years, if not less. So maybe that’s a sensible strategy.
At the same time, I’m not so comfortable with the “it’s all about the gravitas” approach. Maybe it’s because many people thought John Kerry had “gravitas” back in 2003. And lots of folks thought Barack Obama didn’t in 2008.
Maybe because so many of the innovators in teaching methods and curriculum in the last decade have come from schools that lack “hierarchy gravitas”, but felt compelled to help their students learn better.
And maybe it’s because I fear the potential (or reality) of transformative efforts being undermined by fractures along the gravitas axis. Of the “grav’s” wasting time reinventing wheels long since created and put on the vehicle by the un-grav’s. Of the ungravs getting discouraged because the gravs get all the glory for work that was initiated by the ungravs.
Tip o’ the hat to the un-grav’s for doing all the work in the trenches for all these years. Another tip o’ the hat to the grav’s for moving the transformation checker down the board with the LEARN initiative. And, please, all you gravs out there, keep working on inclusiveness and giving credit where it’s due.
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The value of active, collaborative learning is a key “best practices” theme. And it overlaps with a major theme we heard from employer representatives in a series of listening sessions my law school held a few years ago. Public interest, government, firms — they all wanted our graduates to know how to work in teams and manage complex projects.
Law schools have traditionally given students few opportunities to work in teams. And even the few opportunities available –moot court or clinic partnerships– typically haven’t come with instruction on how to work well in teams. With the help of our wonderful reference staff — a shout out to Mary Whisner, just awarded the UW’s Distinguished Librarian award — I’ve been trolling for resources for instruction on teamwork. So thought I’d share a few finds:
MIT’s Teaching and Learning Laboratory has several useful handouts “developed for an undergraduate course in professional communication in which students work together in teams of three or four on semester-long projects.”
See http://web.mit.edu/tll/teaching-materials/teamwork/index.html
Working in teams is much more common in business schools and there’s a literature on it, including:
Hansen, Randall S.,Benefits and Problems With Student Teams: Suggestions for Improving Team Projects. Journal of Education for Business; Sep/Oct2006, Vol. 82 Issue 1, p11-19
Vik, Gretchen N., Doing More to Teach Teamwork Than Telling Students to Sink or Swim., Business Communication Quarterly, Vol. 6, Issue 4, pp. 112-119 , Dec. 2001
And, of course, it’s a big item in the business literature.
Polzer, Jeffrey T, Making Diverse Teams Click. Harvard Business Review; Jul-Aug2008, Vol. 86 Issue 7/8, p20-21
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Best Practices for Legal Education 