Best Practices for Legal Education

This was brought to my attention by Professor Irene Scharf, a frequent author on this blog.

The New York Times has an editorial yesterday on Legal Education Reform. It also appears in the paper on page A16. Here is a piece:

Addressing these issues requires changing legal education and how the profession sees its responsibility to serve the public interest as well as clients. Some schools are moving in promising directions. The majority are still stuck in an outdated instructional and business model.

Give it a read and tell us what you think!

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A new article, No Time to Lose: Negative Impact on Law Student Wellbeing May Begin in Year One  was recently published in The International Journal of the First Year in Higher Education, Vol. 2, No.2, pp. 49-60, 2011 and posted on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

Preliminary results of a pilot study of law students suggest that, during the first year of law study, students may experience changes in thinking styles, stress levels, and satisfaction with life. Although further inquiry into the cause of law student distress is necessary, the authors consider certain assumptions underlying the legal curriculum – particularly the conception of a lawyer as adversarial, emotionally detached, and competitive – to be possible sources of the negative impact on student wellbeing. It is suggested that legal educators should reexamine their curricula, particularly their conception of what it means to be a lawyer, and think creatively about ways that law schools may encourage healthier approaches to the study of law.

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The Clinical Law Review will hold its next Clinical Writers’ Workshop on Saturday, September 29, 2012, 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 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, 2012.

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.

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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Matthew J. Festa from South Texas College of Law recently published an article entitled “Academic Research and Writing as Best Practices in a ‘Practically Grounded’ Land Use Course“. Here is the abstract:

Land use is a discipline that involves diverse academic, practical, and social perspectives; it is also an ideal subject for applying nontraditional teaching methods, including those suggested by the “best practices” movement in legal education. In this article – a contribution to the “Practically Grounded” conference on teaching land use and environmental law – I suggest that a scholarly research and writing focus can help students develop their practical and analytical skills and values while achieving “best practices” goals in the context of a doctrinal land use course. In the article I set forth a pedagogical basis for including an academic writing component in a doctrinal land use course; and I discuss the experience of teaching a large land use class with a significant research and writing component. The benefits from an academic writing focus may also apply to teaching in other doctrinal fields.

You will notice the citation to the Best Practices blog at footnote 8!

Give it a read and tells us what you think.

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The next meeting of the Standards Review Committee will be on Friday, November 11, and Saturday, November 12 at the Ritz Carlton Chicago.

Meeting begins at 8:30 a.m. on Friday and ends at 3 p.m. on Saturday.

Following are links to information about on Open Forum and to the drafts and Reporter’s Notes.

Open Forum Invitation
Drafts and Reporter’s Notes

The Ritz Carlton Chicago

160 East Pearson St.

Chicago, IL 60611

http://www.fourseasons.com/chicagorc   

Ph: 312-266-1000

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A recent white paper  authored by Professor Deborah Rhode and Dmitry Bam for a consortium on access to justice concluded that access to justice issues are insufficiently covered in many law school curricula. For example, one national survey found that only one percent of law school graduates recalled coverage of pro bono obligations in their professional responsibility class or orientation program. Although many students are exposed to access issues in their clinical courses, rarely do these classes find time to “provide in-depth coverage of structural concerns in the delivery of assistance.”

To help address this situation, the Stanford Law School Center for the Legal Profession is compiling on its website law syllabi and course material relevant to key access to justice issues, including (but not limited):

• Limitations in the right to counsel and its enforcement;

• Landlord tenant, environmental justice, consumer, discrimination, immigration, and urban development concerns;

• The role of alternative delivery structures and non-lawyer providers of assistance;

• Professional responsibility, poverty, and public interest law;

• Pro bono responsibilities.

The Access to Justice Project welcomes contributions relevant to standard first year courses (such as civil procedure, torts, contracts, property, criminal law, and constitutional law) to advanced core courses such as corporations, family law, administrative law, civil rights, and professional responsibility, as well as clinics and skills classes. In other words, any curricular offerings that either incorporate access to justice as a central theme, or where the issue is threaded in part into a course that may not typically cover such issues.

Professors with questions or materials that are relevant to our project can contact the project’s research assistant LaToya Baldwin Clark at lbclark@stanford.edu.

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A new article was posted on SSRN last month by Jennifer Bard from Texas Tech University School of Law entitled Addressing the Challenge of Teaching Skills in Today’s Law Schools: How Medical Schools Used to Have the Same Problems We Do and What We Can Learn from Their Efforts to Solve Them.

Here is a piece of the abstract:

The purpose of this article was to provide resources for law school faculty members who want to integrate the skills of the practicing lawyer into today’s law school classroom by providing information about how medical schools have approached a similar task. In the last ten years, medical schools have been working to change a culture where skills were learned by observation and modeling into one where skills are taught intentionally and consistently starting in the first two years of medical school. This represents a significant change because even as medical school curriculum has evolved and changed over the past twenty-five years these pre-clinical years had focused on the acquisition of knowledge about the human body, not clinical skills. It has tried to present this information in the context of some significant differences between the resources available to medical schools which make the task of teaching skills earlier in the curriculum easier than the task will be for law schools. These advantages include a faculty which possesses current clinical skills and an extended period of subsidized apprenticeship.

Give the article a read and let us know what you think!

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By: Stacy Caplow, Professor of Law and Director of Brooklyn Law School’s Clinical Education Program

Reforming legal education has been a staple of discussion by the bench, bar and the academy forever.  Ever since the Carnegie Report kicked off the most recent round of conversations, conferences on the subject have abounded, attempts to redesign the law school curriculum have been proposed, and in a few instances, actually implemented.  As recently as last week the ABA adopted a resolution calling for law schools to “implement curricular programs intended to develop practice ready lawyers.  This halfhearted push from the practicing bar is insufficiently muscular to produce much change unless and until lawyers make practice-readiness a hiring priority and send that message to the law schools. 

It’s encouraging, therefore, when law professors, particularly non-clinical teachers, recognize the value of making meaningful connections between the academy and practice.  The recent article by my colleague, Brad Borden, and his co-author, Robert Rhee, entitled The Law School Firm, tries to “stimulat[e] the debate” about alternatives to traditional legal education.

Their proposal is that law schools establish a self-sustaining law firm where its students will receive training and whose lawyers will engage in the intellectual life of the law school.  The article outlines a model and then raises lots of unanswered, and maybe unanswerable, logistical, practical, financial, and ethical questions that would need to be resolved.  They don’t pretend to know the answers but are agents provocateurs, pushing the possibilities to new extremes.

My first reaction was to be pleased that a non-clinical colleague was concerned enough about the development of lawyering competencies to send his ideas out into the world and was happy to facilitate its circulation by posting its link on the clinic list serv.   My second reaction was to think, “Isn’t this what clinics do already, but on the margins and on the cheap?  Why not just build up the clinics, and build better bridges to the faculty.”  My third thought was, “Isn’t this model privileging a business practice that will generate income at the expense, perhaps of the traditional social justice mission of most clinics?”

Then, I reread the article and saw the model’s real potential:  It proposes a true collaboration between theory and practice, something that gets a lot of lip service but not much actualization. It identifies many issues that would have to be resolved and many choices that would have to be made, all of which are complicated.  But the proposal is rooted in some very solid values that include collaboration, experimentation, and entrepreneurship.   It’s also based in reality, not the slo-mo law practice of clinics.  At every level it argues for the mutual benefits for faculty, practitioners, and students, as well as the mutual respect for all contributions to the enterprise.

Like most big ideas, anyone could find fault or cite all of the practical obstacles to realization.  But in a gentle and respectful tone, the article challenges us to think in a new way about the time-honored critiques of legal education.  Perhaps some law school out there will take the bold step of implementing some or even all of this model.

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Late last week, the New York State Bar Association presented a proposed resolution to the ABA House of Delegates at their Annual Meeting in Toronto and the need for law schools to create more practice ready lawyers. Portions of the proposal were taken from the “Report on the Task Force on the Future of the Legal Profession”  The story was reported by John Caher in his article N.Y. State Bar Asks ABA to Support ‘Practice Ready’ Law School Education.

Here is a small piece of the article:

“We used to think that being a good lawyer simply meant knowing the law,” Doyle and Younger said in a report submitted to the ABA. “Today, we are more likely to think that good lawyers know how to do useful things with the law to help solve client problems. … Accreditation rules should emphasize how to apply theory and doctrine to actual practice, as well as encourage the process of developing professional judgment. These are critical skills that all newly admitted lawyers should have as they embark on their legal careers.”

The State Bar’s resolution does not suggest specific changes to the law school curriculum. Rather, it is a general call to revisit the issues raised by the MacCrate commission to ensure that the expectations of law clients are addressed in legal education and training.

“Too many law students and recent graduates are not as well prepared for the profession as they might be,” the State Bar said in a summary of its one-page resolution. “Law schools, bar examiners, the judiciary and the bar owe more to our young colleagues in these difficult times. This resolution is intended to cause those involved in legal education to address these issues, find solutions and revise legal education to meet these needs.”

Yesterday, the resolution was passed by the House of Delegates. The full resolution can be read here.

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Clinical Legal Education Association board members Mae Quinn and Perry Moriearty are seeking volunteers to participate on an ad hoc committee to explore the proposed elimination of Standard 503 (which virtually requires law schools to use the LSAT as the single test for admissions purposes).  The ABA Standards Review Committee recently voted to eliminate ABA Standard 503, which currently requires every prospective law student to take a “valid and reliable admission test” to assist law schools in “assessing the applicant’s capability of satisfactorily completing the school’s educational program.”  For more details, check out the SALT/CLEA report on the July meeting of the Standards Review Committee.

Now, the Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar must decide whether to accept or reject this proposal.  SALT has written to the ABA to support elimination of Standard 503 arguing that, among other things, overreliance on the LSAT has resulted in exclusion of otherwise qualified applicants from underrepresented populations.  On the other hand, the AALS wrote to oppose the proposal.

CLEA has not yet taken a formal position relating to the elimination of Standard 503, but the CLEA Board has created an ad hoc working group to further explore this issue over the coming weeks.  CLEA members are invited to join the working group and/or to contact Mae Quinn (mquinn@wulaw.wustl.edu) or Perry Moriearty (pmoriear@umn.edu) with their thoughts.

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This post comes courtesy of the blog Dorf on Law in an entry entitled “Guest Post on Teaching Legal Writing by Professor Lisa McElroy“. The post builds on an article written for the New York Times on improving law schools. Here’s a small taste:

And all of these statistics are not speculation.  Every year, the Legal Writing Institute, a professional organization with over 2000 members (disclosure:  I am member of the LWI Board of Directors) and the Association of Legal Writing Directors (disclosure: I am a past member of this organization’s Board, as well) conducts a survey of legal writing programs across the country, a survey with a remarkably high response rate (this year’s was 94.5%, with programs from 188 law schools responding). 

 

But here’s the rub:  As that same survey describes, legal writing professors are typically paid far less than their podium colleagues.  The average legal writing professor today earns $73,773, regardless of number of years teaching;  a third of legal writing directors earn (on average) $26,000 less than entry-level podium faculty members at their schools.  An average director has been teaching in law schools for 15 years.

 

And that’s not all.  Legal writing professors may occupy less desirable office space, they may be prohibited from participating in faculty governance (even on matters, like curriculum, that directly concern them), and they often carry titles like “instructor” or “lecturer” rather than “professor.”  As reflected by the fact that only 18 law schools primarily employ legal writing faculty as tenured or tenure-track professors , very few have the job security that their podium colleagues enjoy.  Again, as Garner notes, the job of teaching legal writing is the least respected in most law schools.  And what Garner does not say explicitly?  That lack of respect often trickles down:  from administration, to podium faculty, to students (one of my darkest days of teaching was when I conferenced with a first-year law student, encouraging her to put more effort into legal writing; she replied that she didn’t want to take time away from her “real courses.”)

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An interesting symposium coming up in the fall:

Symposium:  The Way to Carnegie:  Practice, Practice, Practice— a conversation about pedagogy, social justice , and cost in experiential legal education to be held on October 28, 2011 at Boston College Law School, Newton, MA

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My colleague David Achtenberg has used a unique policy for regulating student use of laptop computers in his large enrollment Civil Procedure class.  He designates the back three or four rows in the classroom as an “Internet Usage Zone” where students can, within limits of reason and legality, use their laptops in any way they wish.  The rest of the classroom is designated an “Internet Free Zone” — students can use their laptops only for class notes and for referring to class-related materials on their laptop or a flashdrive.  These students are directed that they may not access the internet for any reason and they may not use their laptop for recreation, diversion, or “doodling.”    He emphasizes to the students that there is no relative advantage or disadvantage to their choice (and in fact he was unable to find a difference in grade outcomes related to the choice in prior years). 

This is Professor Achtenberg’s third year implementing this policy. He conducts a survey after grades are submitted.  The survey results this year indicated that approximately:

• 71% thought the policy made the learning environment slightly (46%) or significantly (25%) better,
• 25% thought it had no effect
• 3.5% thought it made the learning environment slightly worse.  (No one responded that it made the environment significantly worse.)

Asked whether they would favor such a policy in future classes

• 93% would somewhat (36%) or strongly (57%) favor such a policy
• 3.5% didn’t care
• 3.5% somewhat disfavored such a policy. (No one responded that they strongly disfavored the policy.)

More information about Professor Achtenberg’s approach, a copy of his policy and the way in which he introduces it to the class, and the complete survey results, including student comments, is available athttp://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/profiles/glesnerfines/laptopusage.pdf

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