Best Practices for Legal Education

Having recently returned from the AALS Clinical Conference, which was focused on engaging in clinical legal education during tumultuous times, I’ve had a thought percolating, one about which there was little occasion to address during the conference:  how do we manage, balance, and relate our own personal political activities “in these times” vis a vis our students?

Do we inform our students of our “after hours” activities? Invite them to join us? Encourage them to engage in their own, if they can find the extra time, given their studies and case work? Encourage them to find the time?

Or would this be a mistake? Might this type of encouragement alienate our students who don’t agree with our own political views and accompanying activity, making those students uncomfortable in the clinic we operate?

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Call for Papers

The Ethics of Legal Education

AALS Section on Professional Responsibility

2018 AALS Annual Meeting

San Diego, CA

January 3-6, 2018

The Section on Professional Responsibility is pleased to announce a Call for Papers for the Section’s 2018 Program: The Ethics of Legal Education. In addition to featuring invited speakers (Professor Joan Howarth, Dean Andrew Perlman, and Dean Daniel Rodriguez), we will select up to two speakers from this call.

This panel will explore the ethical challenges U.S. law schools have faced during the past decade and will consider the path ahead. Speakers will address various subjects that may include: alternative and accelerated degree programs, for-profit law schools, accreditation decisions, admissions and scholarship practices, employment issues, and litigation filed by students and alumni against law schools. The panel will explore the factors that have influenced ethical and values-based decision-making, leadership challenges, and how law school leaders’ ethics and values in this area may influence the future of the legal education and the legal profession.

Participants need not write a paper, but will have the option to publish a paper if they choose to do so.

Any member of the full-time faculty of an AALS member school may submit a 500-1500 word proposal by August 15, 2017 to Renee Knake at rknake@central.uh.edu. The title of the email submission should read: Submission – 2018 AALS Section on Professional Responsibility.

The Planning Committee for the Annual Meeting of the Section on Professional Responsibility will review all submissions and select up to two papers by September 1, 2017. Please note that all faculty members presenting at the program are responsible for paying their own annual meeting registration fee and travel expenses.

Any questions should be directed to 2018 Program Co-chairs Renee Knake at rknake@central.uh.edu or Paula Schaefer at paula.schaefer@tennessee.edu.

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Under proposed ABA Standard 403, future law schools could have only a handful of full-time faculty members.  If those full-time faculty members teach the first year curriculum, the proposed Standard allows for upper level classes to be taught entirely by adjunct faculty as long as the law school ensures the adjunct faculty effectively teach their assigned courses.

As a practical matter, does the proposed standard mean most law schools will become institutions staffed largely by adjuncts?  Probably not.  However, it may mean that for-profit law schools will staff their upper level classes almost entirely with adjunct faculty.

For-profit schools – the beneficiaries of no restrictions on adjunct teaching

If legal education follows the trends seen in undergraduate institutions, for-profit schools are the schools most likely to take advantage of the proposed standard.  A study authored by Phillip W. Magness found that 93% of faculty at for-profit universities are part-time faculty.  This compares with 29.5% part-time faculty at four year public schools, 42% part-time faculty at four year private schools, and 65% part-time faculty at two year non-profit colleges.

At a time when for-profit law schools are facing increased scrutiny for bar pass rates, should the Council on Legal Education be considering a rule change that enables those schools to rely heavily on adjunct faculty?  What impact will an adjunct faculty have on student learning in core doctrinal courses?  These questions should be addressed.

Justification for changing Standard 403 to allow more adjunct teaching

Unquestionably, adjunct faculty serve important roles in law schools.  Practicing attorneys and judges bring a depth of experience into the classroom that full-time faculty may not have.   However, the current Standard already allows for one-third of the upper level classes to be taught by adjuncts.  Why is there a need to allow for more adjunct teaching?

The justification, as stated in the Council’s March 24, 2017 memo, is that elimination of the full-time faculty requirements allows for innovation and flexibility and that the Standard retains the requirement that schools ensure effective adjunct teaching. However, with a smaller subset of full-time faculty, many of whom will have additional institutional service work and have scholarship demands, the ability to also meaningfully supervise a large contingent part-time faculty may not be realistic.

Studies on adjuncts in undergraduate institutions

Of course, not all full-time faculty are better teachers than adjunct faculty.  In fact, on an individual level, often the opposite is true.  The question is what happens when a law school begins to rely heavily on adjuncts for two thirds of the courses students take?

For the past twenty years, undergraduate institutions have moved toward increasing use of adjunct faculty.  Although no definitive studies exist comparing undergraduate student learning outcomes between part-time versus full-time faculty, some studies suggest that student learning declines when students do not have the benefit of full-time faculty teaching doctrinal courses.

For example, a study by Florence Kirk and Charles Spector found undergraduate business students taught by full-time faculty had stronger learning outcomes than students taught by adjuncts.  Another longitudinal  study found that increased use of adjunct faculty correlated to lower undergraduate graduation rates.  However, other studies suggest adjuncts do not negatively affect student learning.

One reason for the Standard change might be that it sets the stage to allow schools to teach more online courses and staff them with adjuncts.  However, at least one study found that full-time undergraduate online faculty produced stronger learning gains than adjunct online faculty.

None of these studies examine the impact of adjuncts on student learning in law school doctrinal courses.  Before moving to a Standard that allows law schools to staff all upper level courses with adjunct faculty, it might be prudent to study law students’ learning outcomes in doctrinal courses taught by adjuncts versus those taught by full-time faculty.

Teaching aside, another study found that, not surprisingly, contingent faculty have less time for class preparation, fewer interactions with students on course and non course related issues, challenge students less, and use less interactive and collaborative teaching methods.  Additionally, adjuncts likely have less access to university teaching resources and less time to take advantage of those resources.

Adjunctification can lead to schools that have few tenured faculty members

The impact of the proposed Standard 403 change  on student learning raises some significant concerns.  Another concern is that part-time faculty are not tenured or tenure-track faculty. In undergraduate institutions, the Magness study notes that the growth in part-time undergraduate faculty resulted in “a decline in the overall percentage (though not in the absolute number) of tenured and tenure track faculty” – with tenure systems “virtually non-existent in for-profit higher education” institutions.

To the extent that tenure ensures both academic freedom and a robust system of faculty governance that protects the interests of students in an era of the monetization of education, a Standard that allows schools to significantly limit, or largely eliminate, tenure and tenure track faculty raises concerns.  This is especially true because the schools most likely to take advantage of a part-time faculty that has little voice in governance are the for-profit schools – schools which may be most likely to put economic interests ahead of educational concerns.

Notice and Comment Period Open Until July 10

 As the ABA Council on Legal Education grapples with a host of issues related to ensuring law students receive a strong legal education, is now the time to deregulate and allow schools to fully staff all upper level courses with adjunct faculty? Are the potential benefits of adjunctification when compared with the potential risks, worth the change?  Should the ABA be enacting regulatory rollbacks that may primarily benefit for profit schools?  All these are questions the Council should address before approving this Standard.

If you have thoughts about the implications of the proposed change to Standard 403 and the potential adjunctification of law schools, written comments or a request to speak at a hearing on the proposed change should be addressed to JR Clark, jr.clark@americanbar.org, by Monday, July 10, 2017.

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The University of Missouri’s Center for the Study of Dispute Resolution is exploring the feasibility of developing a searchable database of descriptions and analyses of actual cases.  This post describes our plan and invites you to respond with your comments, suggestions, and commitments to participate.

The source of cases would be course assignments in which students interview people about actual cases and then write reports including narratives of the cases.  The reports would include some standard elements to permit efficient searches but otherwise, faculty would design the assignments as they wish.  The reports could focus on disputes, transactions, and other decision-making processes.  The database project would use procedures to ensure compliance with ethical requirements and good research practices.

We have a very broad conception of dispute resolution, which includes litigation.  In the past, there was a clearer division between “alternative” dispute resolution and litigation. These days, they are thoroughly intertwined and hard to separate.  In addition to cases about traditional ADR processes, the database would include reports about pretrial litigation, trial, and appellate litigation as well as government administrative procedures, internal organizational processes, and many others.

Faculty could use the assignment in a wide range of courses including ADR, litigation practice, clinic and externship, civil and criminal procedure courses, and even courses focusing primarily on legal doctrine.  In any course, the reports would need to include detailed chronologies of events in cases, though the focus would vary depending on the subject of the course.

Students generally would be required to submit the papers to satisfy course requirements (though some students could write up cases for extra-credit, independent studies, law review notes etc.).  Students would not, however, be required to have their papers submitted to the database.  In addition, interview subjects could agree to have the interviews used for the course assignment but not the database.  There would be an agreement specifying intellectual property rights, providing that the students would retain the copyright to their reports and specifying the rights of the University of Missouri and database users.

The database would be like a variation of Westlaw and SSRN.  Like Westlaw, it would include accounts of actual cases but it would focus on empirical accounts of what happened, not analyses of legal issues limited to legally-relevant facts.  Like SSRN, it would depend on contributions by our community, though the contributions would be case reports and/or analyses of cases rather than other types of scholarly articles.

In a post on the Indisputably blog, I describe the plans for developing the University of Missouri “Stone Soup” Case Database project.  We are now soliciting input to refine the details of the database.  About June 8, we plan to circulate updated versions of key documents listed below.  At that point, we would solicit commitments for faculty to use a Stone Soup assignment in one or more courses next academic year.  If we receive enough commitments by June 19, we will proceed with this project.

The Indisputably post includes documents with:

● a vision of using the database to create knowledge collaboratively
● guidance for faculty interested in using a Stone Soup assignment in one or more courses, including getting approval from institutional review boards
● information about ethical rules permitting lawyers and other professionals to discuss cases if they protect confidentiality
● procedures to protect confidentiality
● a model course assignment to conduct interviews about actual cases
● a model solicitation or confirmation for interviews
● guidance for students in conducting and summarizing interviews
● sample research papers
● possible database fields
● a form to commit to use an interview assignment next academic year

My Missouri colleague, Rafael Gely, and Arizona State Professor Art Hinshaw used this interview assignment in their negotiation courses this semester and they found that it worked extremely well and plan to use it again.

Art told his students this was the first time doing this assignment and he asked whether he should do it again.  They gave a resounding “yes.”  He said that from the papers and the debrief in class, the assignment legitimizes the lessons from class and really pulls things together for them.

We are hopeful that we will get enough interest to proceed with this Stone Soup project. Even if we don’t, it is a terrific course assignment that you could use in virtually any course.

If you have any questions or would like to discuss this, please get in touch with me.

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by Robert Kuehn, Washington University School of Law

Unlike the education and licensing requirements for other professions, legal education and admission to the bar in the United States lack a mandated clinical experience in law school. American Bar Association Accreditation Standard 303(b) simply requires that a school provide “substantial opportunities” for its students to participate in law clinics or field placements (what are termed “clinical” courses) where they gain lawyering experiences from advising or representing clients. Under this permissive standard, only one quarter of schools ensure that each student can graduate with clinical training; five provide no opportunities to enroll in any law clinic; one provides positions in clinical courses for only 10% of its students.

Although lawyers agree that students need the training that comes from clinical courses, many legal educators and officials question the feasibility, particularly the cost, of ensuring that every student graduates with a clinical experience. However, the experiences of a growing number of schools and ABA data demonstrate that clinical education can be provided to all J.D. students without additional costs to students.

Many schools have economically provided clinical experiences to all their students for years. The City University of New York requires that each student take a twelve-to-sixteen credit law clinic or externship, with 2015 non-resident tuition the third lowest outside Puerto Rico.  Students at the University of the District of Columbia must enroll in two seven-credit clinics but pay the lowest tuition outside Puerto Rico. When Washington and Lee revised its curriculum to require twenty experiential course credits that include at least one law clinic or externship, it doubled the number of positions available to students in clinics. The school’s later review found that its new curriculum, even with the additional law clinic positions, “is not more expensive to run than the prior third year curriculum, nor the current first or second year curricula (indeed, it is less expensive).”

As of the end of the last academic year, thirty-four additional schools required each J.D. student to successfully complete a law clinic or externship prior to graduation; another nineteen guaranteed the opportunity to take a clinic or externship if the student wished. I recently published the results of a study comparing the reported tuition of schools that mandate or guarantee a clinical experience with the tuition of the remaining ABA accredited law schools — Universal Clinical Legal Education: Necessary and Feasible. Using a regression model and controlling for public-private status, U.S. News ranking, and cost of living in the area, there is no statistically significant difference between schools with a clinical mandate and those without. Likewise, there is no statistically significant difference between the tuition charged by schools that guarantee a clinical experience and those that do not. In addition, there is no statistically significant difference in the tuition charged by the fifty-six schools that mandate or guarantee a clinical experience with the schools that do not. Substituting a discounted tuition estimate for the published tuition amount did not change the results—there were no statistically significant differences in the discount tuition charged between private schools requiring or guaranteeing a clinical experience and those that did not.

There also is no evidence that schools adopting a requirement or guarantee subsequently raise their tuition at rates higher than average. Between Washington & Lee’s adoption of its new skills and clinical experience requirement and the second year of its implementation, its tuition increased at approximately the same rate as the median increase for all private law schools, even with the school’s doubling of law clinic positions.

Similarly, the tuition patterns of the twenty-five schools that adopted a clinical requirement or guarantee between 2010 and 2014 show no evidence that these schools raised their tuition as a result of the new educational opportunities. Law schools on average raised tuition 19.7% between 2010 and 2015; schools with a new clinical experience requirement or guarantee only raised tuition an average of 16.6%.

In addition to being financially feasible to adopt, the overwhelming majority of schools could provide a clinical experience today for every student without the necessity of any additional faculty, clinic or externship, or position in existing clinical courses. Based on 2015 ABA data certified by each law school’s dean, after appropriate and thorough inquiry, as “true, accurate, complete and not misleading, 171 schools (84%) reported they had enough existing capacity in their clinical courses to provide every graduate with a law clinic or externship experience, yet only 56 (27%) required or guaranteed that training.

Again reviewing 2015 tuition, the 171 schools who report existing clinical course capacity for all graduating students charged less in tuition, on average, than schools that did not have sufficient available slots, though the difference is not statistically significant. All the data, therefore, on the relationship between clinical courses and tuition indicate that the schools that would need to create additional positions in law clinic or externship courses to provide a clinical experience to all their students need not raise tuition to provide this opportunity.

The failure to ensure that each law school graduate has clinical training can no longer be justified, if it ever could have, on the basis of cost. Instead, the failure lies with the lack of commitment by those who oversee legal education and admission to the bar to changing the status quo. So, while the failure of legal education to provide clinical training for all students can be blamed on a four-letter word, that word is not “cost” but “will”— the lack of will by deans, faculties, and legal education and bar officials to ensure all students receive this much-needed training.

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I recently read an article in the Boston Globe about a professional school that is pioneering a nationwide movement to ensure students are ready to meet the needs of the 21^st century by pledging to eliminate all lectures in favor of interactive learning by 2019. Specifically, the school seeks to improve students’ listening, fact-finding, critical thinking, and collaborating skills. You might think the article was about a law school, since these are the skills often cited as crucial to law students’ future success, but the article was about the University of Vermont Medical School.

Lecture format is difficult to move away from. Students are comfortable as they feel they get a guide to what will be tested. Professors are comfortable with lectures because they learned by lecture and likely have already prepared and lectured on the material before. However, experts agree that much of what is taught by lecture is forgotten within weeks. Learning requires more than just listening to take hold.

Medical school has typically been divided into half lecture, half clinical clerkship. In this way, medical students already received more on the job training than most law students. Law schools, prompted by the new ABA guidelines, are striving for ways to introduce more active learning through experiential classes, skills requirements, and clinics. Maybe a close look at this movement in medical schools would serve us well. A 2014 review of 225 studies of science, engineering, and mathematics instruction, as well as Vermont Medical School’s own review, showed that test scores increased after team-based learning was introduced. Law schools have traditionally lagged behind curricular development in other professional schools. For example, in 2007, the Carnegie Report criticized the law school lecture format, saying “…unlike other professional education, most notably medical school, legal education typically pays relatively little attention to direct training in professional practice. The result is to prolong and reinforce the habits of thinking like a student rather than an apprentice practitioner.” Maybe it’s time for law schools to again follow these other professional schools and move further away from the lecture format.

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On Tuesday I received an event email from a bar association I was once a member of. The event was to serve as a forum for the deans from six local law schools. The next day, on International Women’s Day, I received an email from SALT seeking support for the ‘Full Citizenship Project for Law Faculty’ launched by the Legal Writing Institute (LWI) and the Association of Legal Writing Directors (ALWD). Both emails caught my attention, for similar reasons. The first pictured a set of six male law school deans, and I was keenly aware, on many different levels, of the differences between me and them. The second email was a call to action directed at a group that I am a part of. As a woman, I didn’t see myself reflected in the bar association dean email. As a visiting clinical professor, I also do not belong to the predominantly male group of tenure track faculty.

Although the Full Citizenship Statement that is seeking signatures does not exclusively affect women, it could bridge one of the many disparities that exist among primarily tenured doctrinal faculty and legal writing, clinical and academic support faculty. The statement states that full citizenship is “…necessary to ensure that law students and the legal profession benefit from the myriad perspectives and expertise that all faculty bring to the mission of legal education.”

How law students benefit from different perspectives may seem obvious to some and debatable to others. When a law school does distinguish between faculty, it communicates to students who, and what, the law school values as important. Titles, voting rights and salaries (which public institutions often make public information) make the hierarchy even more obvious. First and foremost, as a full time teacher at a law school, our mission is (or should be) to teach students how to be the people and lawyers we want to see out in the world post-graduation. Whether that mission is accomplished through legal writing, clinical experience or doctrinal classes, shouldn’t make a difference.

But I wonder if, because I am a woman and in a visiting position, does my opinion count as much as those the petition is seeking parity with? How much should we be actively seeking out those already in tenured positions versus preaching to, and seeking support from, the choir?

My own imposter syndrome voice sneaking up on me tells me I have no place writing this blog, and I try to silence her. I have been teaching for less than two years and I admittedly know less than many of my colleagues about this issue. But I believe my voice, as well as others who are new to the field, and those who have been in the trenches and already received tenure, are all important voices in the conversation.

I hope that conversations surrounding this Full Citizenship Statement take place in law school faculty meetings around the country where the very people this petition impacts, may very well be absent. I wonder if the conversations that may take place will reflect an instinctual resistance to adopt a structure that seemingly threatens to decrease one’s own power, pay or voice, or if there will be support. Just as it is vital for men and boys to be an active part of the conversation on gender and gender disparities, so too must those who are already in the privileged position of tenured faculty be an active part of the conversation around this petition.

We may struggle as teachers in how to address privilege in the clinical classroom. It is not an easy topic, notably when we have to take it out of the context of the classroom and apply it to our own lives and careers. It forces us to accept that we may have benefited from the advantage that race, sexual orientation, academic pedigree or economic upbringing may have offered. But privilege also offers the advantage of a platform and a voice, and in a movement like this, that is important. The call for equity can lessen the gap by knocking down boundaries created by arbitrary distinctions between those that meet the current qualifications for tenure track positions and those that do not. Talking about hierarchy, politics, power and pay can be incredibly uncomfortable when dissecting it within the institutional hierarchies we exist in. But now, it is necessary.

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Our friends over at Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers just posted  links to Ignite videos that were filmed during  their 5th Annual Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyer’s Conference last October.   Ignite is a wonderful conference or teaching tool which forces presenters to synthesize their message into 5 to 6 minutes presentations with quickly moving accompanying PowerPoint slides.

This year’s handy and informative videos span a wide spectrum of ideas including a really helpful curriculum design and faculty support resource from Thurgood Marshall School of Law’s Professor Charlene James, a report on a three year survey being  conducted at University of Denver about student’s experience with “experiential learning”,  and Mitchell-Hamline’s experience with Integrating Professional and Career Development across the curriculum.  Videos also addressed learning outcomes, assessment tools and assessment experiences. All of the videos are worth a quick review.

The Ignite series starts with a presentation from yours truly, and two of my colleagues from Albany Law, during which we describe  how we incorporated information gleaned from community and employer focus groups to assess our opportunities for student learning and enhance our curriculum.   In the accompanying PowerPoint, Professor Nancy Maurer provides sample handouts and other useful ideas.  Professor Christine Chung examines the business, tax, financial, and transactional curriculum to exemplify how to use focus groups, faculty guidance and national data to enhance  curriculum.

The last Ignite presentation by Suffolk’s Vice Provost Professor Jeff Pokorak raises important questions regarding professional identity and misunderstandings between the legal professoriate and legal profession which will appeal to anyone who ever struggled in this space or has ever enjoyed a Star Trek episode!

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During the midyear meeting of the the American Bar Association  (ABA) held last week in Miami, several issues were considered which relate to legal education.  I will discuss two of those issues here: the creation of the Commission on the Future of Legal Education and the proposed changes to accreditation standards concerning bar passage requirements.

First, the ABA Board of Governors created a new ABA “Commission on the Future of Legal Education”, which will become operational in August.  Championed by incoming president, Hilarie Bass, the creation of the Commission was just one component of a proposal  to restructure the power and responsibilities afforded the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar . President-elect Bass believes that the ABA’s “lack of response to the constant barrage of grievances about our system of legal education is undoubtedly impacting membership and also preventing top students from entering law school.” Bass cites “low bar passage rates, excessive law student debt, the depressed job market for new lawyers and the lack of value that employers place on the capabilities of recent law graduates” as reasons to restructure.  Although the Board of Governors voted to create the commission, it did not “sign off on the extensive slate of responsibilities that the commission would have under the original proposal from ABA president-elect Hilarie Bass.”

Earlier this month, Karen Sloan’s February 1st article in the National Law Journal helpfully outlined the arguments for and against the Bass proposal, including suggestions that the proposal was made too precipitously.  Sloan also notes those who  applauded the need for reform quoting SALT co-president Denise Roy about the need for reform in legal education and bar licensing,

“Ms. Bass’s proposal promises to do just that, and SALT supports the effort. Of course, its success will depend on naming a commission whose members are high­quality creative experts who will consider a wide range of views from both within and outside the academy.”

Clinical Legal Education Association co-presidents Beth Schwartz and C.Benjie Louis agreed that there are challenges with the current structure and are also quoted in the February 1st article:

“The Council has often ignored the comments of members of the law school community when considering changes in ABA accreditation standards.  The Council also has failed to provide leadership or a forum for discussing the challenges and opportunities of legal education and bar licensing.”

This past Tuesday, those of us who are members of the Section on Legal Education and Admission to the Bar, received an e-mail from the Chair Greg Murphy reporting  that

“the ABA Board of Governors passed a motion last week authorizing the creation of a new ABA Commission on the Future of Legal Education, which will become operational in August. The Board did not address President-Elect Bass’s proposal to change the name of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar, the functions of the Section, or the funding of the Commission on the Future of Legal Education. I have invited President-Elect Bass to come to the Council’s March meeting where these matters will be the subject of collaborative discussion. The members of the Section and other stakeholders will be kept advised, as appropriate.”

So, stay tuned!

The second issue important to legal education concerned the ABA House of Delegates vote on proposed revisions to Standard 316 concerning bar passage.  The revisions would eliminate the old more nuanced standard and replace it with the following ultimatum:

Standard 316. BAR PASSAGE At least 75 percent of a law school’s graduates in a calendar year who sat for a bar examination must have passed a bar examination administered within two years of their date of graduation.

Proponents and opponents of this proposed revision make good points. For example, consider Law School Transparency’s view that the present toothless standard (no school has ever been found to be out of compliance with 316) has permitted many schools to exploit students by enrolling some with LSAT numbers that predict failure. Equally persuasive are the views of those, such as the National Black Law Students Association  and SALT who oppose the revision on grounds that the proposal failed to address racial inequities in the law school admissions process and legal education.  In the ABA law Journal, Stephanie Francis Ward described data submitted for the initial hearing in March of 2016 by William Patton, a professor emeritus at Whittier Law School, which found that 33.4 percent of black students in California and 29.8 percent of the state’s Hispanic law students attend the five ABA-accredited law schools that would be most at risk of violating the proposed revision.

Meanwhile, CLEA called its nationwide membership  to action to oppose the proposed revision by  contacting their individual state delegates to the House.  CLEA’s formal statement in opposition acknowledges the ABA’s responsibility to discourage predatory practices but also emphasizes the need for more understanding of the diversity consequences.  The CLEA and SALT  opposition also makes crucial points about the danger of our using the current bar exam as the gatekeeper for the profession. As the SALT comment notes, “we continue to have fundamental concerns about the limitations of the current system of licensing lawyers through the bar exam and the unfortunate ways in which Standard 316 affects law school admissions and pedagogy.

In my opinion, the bright-line test which the proposed revision creates would upend the balance of legal education in a harmful way. First, there should be a deeper exploration of the consequences to the diversity of law schools and  our profession before revising. This should be done in conjunction with those committed  to remedying the embarrassing  fact that our profession is so much whiter than other professions.   Our profession is almost 90% white and has decreased in diversity between  2000 and 2010 according to ABA lawyer demographics.  Second, this proposal is likely to be  harmful to the interest of current and prospective students in proper preparation for  current practice in the 21st century economy.  One glimpse at the detailed survey work of the Foundations for Practice project demonstrates the plethora of skills which legal employers in this economy desire and which the bar exam does not even begin to test.  Third, imposition of this standard now will likely harm future students and the development of innovation in law schools for those students.  This is a time when all of us entrusted with the professional development of lawyers need to be thinking strategically about what lawyers will be doing 10 to 40  years from now. We have to be concerned about what a  future in a reduced labor economy – with artificial intelligence infused throughout it – means for the role of lawyers and the development of law students.  Finally,  making a bright-line test for only one factor – bar passage rate – and not for employment rate, skills and clinical opportunities, or other significant indicators, will reify a bar licensing process that is deeply flawed.  

In short, I agree with the ABA House vote to send the proposal back to the Council of the Section on Legal Education and Admission to the Bar for more pondering.  There must be a better way to discourage predatory behaviors by certain law schools without potentially destroying much that is good and promising in legal education.

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Statement by the AALS Executive Committee on the Executive Order

Restricting U.S. Entry for Certain Foreign Nationals

Washington, D.C. (January 30, 2017) – The following is a statement by the members of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) Executive Committee:

Law schools and universities in the United States are greatly enriched by the presence of international students and scholars from around the world. The Association of American Law Schools is thus deeply concerned by the Executive Order issued by President Donald Trump that restricts the ability of students and scholars who lawfully have the right to come to the United States from being able to enter or remain in our country. The Executive Order is inconsistent with our nation’s tradition of welcoming talented individuals from all nations to study and teach in the United States.

We commend the lawyers, including a number of law faculty, law students, and courts, who responded immediately to represent these individuals and to uphold the rule of law. The AALS urges the Trump administration to withdraw this Executive Order as inconsistent with freedom of inquiry and with basic principles of law.

I applaud the AALS for issuing this statement today. As a professional association, its first obligation is to the students and scholars affected by  the order as well as to the effect on learning in law schools and universities generally.

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This post suggests that you might want to assign your students to interview a lawyer about an actual case and it provides some materials you could adapt if you are interested.  I realize that it is probably too late for you to incorporate this into your courses this semester, but you might want to do so in the future.

This idea grew out of a symposium I organized at the University of Missouri Law School about improving negotiation theory.  Two of the speakers, David Matz and Adrian Borbély, wrote an article arguing that too little negotiation theory is based on detailed analyses of actual negotiations.  I wrote a short essay agreeing with them and suggesting, among other things, that academics interview negotiators to collect and analyze detailed accounts.  Then it occurred to me that law students could do this as a course assignments.  I am particularly interested in research about negotiation, though you could use the same process to do interviews about virtually any aspect of legal practice.

Although this assignment might seem particularly appropriate for courses focusing on practical skills, it could be valuable in one focusing more on legal doctrine.  As an illustration, Stewart Macaulay’s classic article, Non-Contractual Relations in Business: A Preliminary Study, was based on his interviews with automobile executives who helped him understand how real-world business often deviated from what Macaulay taught in his contracts class.

You could require each student to interview a lawyer for up to an hour about a recent negotiation.  You could set the parameters of the assignment in terms of the types of cases, questions to ask lawyers, and content of the summaries.  These assignments could be fairly short papers that count for a small portion of a grade or longer papers that count for more.  Indeed, if you want to make this a bigger part of students’ learning, you could require students to do several interviews.

This assignment would have several benefits.  First, it would give students experience learning about actual cases that lawyers have handled, advancing the goal of preparing students for real-world practice.  Second, students would get a chance to practice interviewing, a difficult and critically-important generic skill.  Lawyers regularly interview people about sensitive matters and must develop rapport to get the candid information they need.  Third, it would give students a chance to practice protecting confidentiality.  Students would need to assure the lawyers they interview that they would not disclose certain matters, and then students would convey key information in their assignments while avoiding disclosure of unauthorized information.

Using Student Interviews for Your Research

Although most faculty would do this purely as a course assignment, you might want to use these papers as the basis for your own scholarship.  Many law faculty are curious about how people act in real-life legal situations, as distinct from principles from black letter law, theoretical analyses, anecdotes, “common sense,” etc.  They are tempted to do some empirical research, which they often assume requires surveys with large samples.  Not so.

As explained in my post, What Me – A Social Scientist?, this is a common misconception.  Moreover, doing good survey research is much, much harder than most novices realize – and is likely to produce less useful data than they expect.  The good news is that you can do very valuable research involving relatively small samples of semi-structured interviews like the ones described above.

If you assign students to conduct these interviews solely as a class assignment, presumably you would not need to get this approved by the Institutional Review Board (IRB) at your school because it would not be considered as research.  Of course, if you do plan to use these papers for your research, you would need IRB approval.  If in doubt, check with your IRB.

I described these ideas in more detail in a post on the Indisputably blog.  In a later post, I provided documents you could adapt for this assignment.  These documents include the assignment itself, guidance for students in conducting and writing up interviews, and model solicitation letters and should be useful in getting IRB approval.  Although you shouldn’t need IRB approval if this is purely a course assignment, these documents are useful in any case because they reflect good, ethical research practice.

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Along with 1,400 other law professors, I signed a letter opposing the nomination of Jeff Sessions for Attorney General of the United States. As a law professor, I signed this letter because of my concerns about maintaining the integrity of the legal system.

Shortly after the law professors’ letter was published, my university counsel’s office got an Open Records Act request seeking my emails.

The request, from a reporter working for a conservative political publication, sought: “a copy of each email (inbound, outbound, deleted, or double deleted) for the university email accounts of Andrea A. Curcio and [a colleague who also signed the letter] from the dates of December 15, 2016, to and including January 3, 2017, which includes any of the keywords “Sessions,” or “Jeff Sessions” or “Attorney General.””

A similar request was sent to university counsel for law professor signatories working at other public institutions.

Open records requests are a key to governmental transparency. Being personally subjected to one is unnerving.

How do you avoid such a request if you work at a public law school? You stay silent. Non-involvement with anything in the least bit controversial helps protect you from the possibility that anyone will ever ask to see the content of your emails.

I have often asked myself the theoretical question: if I had lived in Nazi Germany, or in the McCarthy era, would I have remained silent or would I have taken the risk and spoken up. That question is no longer theoretical.

Celebrating Martin Luther King, Jr. Day reminds us of the courage of those who stood up for what they believed was right. Today we again have a very visible choice about whether to step off the curb or to let fear silence us.

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