I just finished the interview process for the deanship at my law school, the University of New Mexico, and I am pleased to say that Best Practices for Legal Education was all over it. In presenting my vision for the law school, I presented the concept of Continue reading
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The Association of American Law Schools (AALS) Section on Clinical Legal Education joined with the Section on Professional Responsibility to sponsor a program at the 2009 AALS Annual Meeting. The first panel focused on the development of legal ethics in law schools and the effects of clinical legal education on graduates. I will post something about that panel in the next few days, but this post will focus on the second panel- which was entitled ” Innovative Curricular Developments: Implementing Best Practices for Educating Lawyers.” This panel demonstrated methods for providing criteria-referenced evaluations in real-client clinical courses as well as for use in simulations. Continue reading
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I just finished writing a letter to the editor of National Jurist about the magazine’s ranking of the “Best Law Schools for Practical Training” in the September issue. They don’t have a letter to the editor section, so I don’t expect it to get it published, but I did want to educate the magazine about Best Practices and Carnegie. The methodology of the ranking was apparently to count the total number of students enrolled in the school and divide that by the number of clinical spots available and then rank the law schools based on that quotient.
At a law school like New Mexico which has a mandatory clinic, they apparently only counted the mandatory clinic slots (about a third of the student body since clinic is normally taken in the third year of law school). We ended up ranking 14th. I realize that is pretty good, but then the article states that the top school, Yale, offers clinical opportunities to 90% of its student body. Of course, schools such as UNM, CUNY, UDC and others that require clinic for graduation offer clinical opportunities to 100% of the student body. So, I am unsure how a school that offers clinic to 90% of its students is ranked higher than those schools that offer it to 100% of its students. In addition, the raw numbers fail to take into account the rest of the law school curriculum and its commitment to training that is consistent with Best Practices and Carnegie. Of course, the schools that were ranked at the top of the survey are excellent schools and likely to do well, in large part, because of their commitment to clinical legal education
Roy Stuckey has asked whether someone should evaluate law schools based on the ideas in Best Practices. While it is great that magazines such as National Jurist are interested in writing pieces about practical education, given these quantitative types of rankings, the idea of some qualitative evaluation would be a service to future law students.
Filed under: Best Practices & Setting Goals, Catalysts For Change, Uncategorized | Tagged: clinical legal education, National Jurist | 2 Comments »
Warren Binford, Annette Appel and I are leading a concurrent session at the AALS Clinical Conference in Tucson this May. Our session is entitled “Strategic Planning: Learning From Our Mistakes and Growing From Our Experiments.” We are planning to engage the audience in some strategic planning techniques. In thinking about our upcoming session, I reflected on Best Practices and curricular planning because I think that a law school’s curriculum is foundational to its identity and its aspirations.
The Best Practices book suggests that a law school’s curriculum should “achieve congruence in its program of instruction”. Congruence requires that law schools harmonize educational programs with their mission, their curricula with educational outcomes, and instructional objectives with their curricula (p.93). The ideas derive from educational theory and research, but also make a lot of common sense. It makes sense that a law school should connect its program of instruction to its mission. For example, if a law school has a social justice mission, its curriculum would not make sense it if was primarily a business focused curriculum–and vice versa. If a law school touts its strengths in an area, its program of instruction as well as the research agenda for the institution should reflect that strength. Continue reading
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Best Practices for Legal Education 