Best Practices for Legal Education

Faculty Governance and Academic Freedom Requires Committee Work

“Because faculty self-governance is integral to the effective functioning of law schools, and because that self-governance requires productive committees, the “reward” for efficient and strong faculty service work performance is often more service work. The opposite is also true. Faculty members who demonstrate lack of competence or responsibility when engaging in committee work are not called upon to serve.”

This quote comes from Addressing Social Loafing on Faculty Committees, an article Professor Mary Lynch and I recently published in the Journal of Legal Education.  The article identifies an institutional equity problem with significant career consequences.

Some Colleagues Do the Work While Others Reap the Rewards

As we note, “Socially responsible faculty members who fully engage in committee work help sustain a robust system of faculty governance. However, they do so at the expense of time available for their own scholarly pursuits. By ensuring the work gets done, they also provide some colleagues the freedom to disengage and focus on individual career-enhancing scholarly endeavors with no penalty and potentially significant individual rewards. This can create significant institutional inequities.”

The time spent on legal scholarship frequently  results in significant rewards.  Merit raises often depend largely upon scholarly productivity.  Prolific scholars get speaking invitations and enhance their national reputations, leading to potential additional job prospects.  Productive scholars also often get course releases, and some are light-loaded on committee work.  These workload releases allow faculty members the opportunity  to enhance their scholarly productivity and continue the cycle of rewards based upon that scholarship.

These benefits seldom inure to those who engage in the institution-sustaining work necessary to support faculty governance and the academic freedoms it protects.  In fact, the opposite is true.  Stellar committee work performance often results in additional committee work assignments, thus cutting ever more deeply into time available for scholarship.

Women Faculty Shoulder A Disproportionate Share of “Institutional Housework”

Institutional inequities when it comes to allocation of committee work and other internal service activities also raise potential gender equality issues.  Although many men do more than their fair share of committee work, multiple studies have found that that the lion’s share of what some have dubbed “institutional housework” falls on women faculty members’ shoulders.

For example, one study found that although both male and female undergraduate associate professors averaged a sixty-four-hour work week, institutional service work and other institutional commitments resulted in the women professors having 220 fewer hours than their male counterparts to devote to scholarly endeavors during the academic year.   Another study  found women undergraduate faculty at all levels of their career, and across disciplines, on average, spent more time on internal service work than their male counterparts.

I don’t know of any formal studies focused on legal education.  However, over ten years ago, Nancy Levit gathered anecdotal evidence suggesting that law schools are not strangers to “institutional housework” gender equity issues.  And, those equity issues may be on the rise.  At many schools, committee workloads have increased due to rapidly changing legal education models.  Some schools also have seen a reduction in faculty.  Thus many schools now look to clinical and legal writing faculty to take on significant committee work responsibilities. This inclusiveness in faculty governance is important.  However, clinical and legal writing faculty members are disproportionately women.  Asking these faculty members to shoulder a growing share of the institutional housework means they have less time to spend on the external work and scholarship upon which their promotions, and their academic reputations, often hinge.

Proposed Solutions

Disparate workloads often are not about who is assigned to particular committees, but rather they exist in context of who actually does the committee’s work.  In Addressing Social Loafing on Faculty Committees, we explore some of the potential reasons for internal committee workload disparities and propose some solutions.  For example, we suggest using “committee work contribution evaluations to highlight communal responsibilities, set clear expectations, communicate that certain behaviors are valued and important, and motivate change by setting normative standards for committee work participation.”   The article provides a sample rubric faculties could use to set normative expectations about committee work contributions for all faculty members.

We also suggest recognizing committee workhorses with more than a round of applause at a faculty meeting.  We encourage faculties and deans to consider the contributions to faculty governance made by committee workhorses and to reward those who perform outstanding service with release time from committee work to ensure they have time to engage in scholarship.

These are just two potential solutions. Many more likely exist.  The question is not whether there is a way to address the workload inequity problem.  Rather, it is whether deans and faculties are willing to openly admit the problem exists and to take the steps necessary to remedy it.

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Why did you go to law school?  Why did you decide to go into academia?  What do you want to accomplish in your work?  What do you hope for your students?

I recently read a great article that reminded me why I went to law school and became an academic.

Probably like many subscribers to this blog, I wanted to use the legal system to make the world better – and help students, lawyers, and others do so too.  As instructors, we hope to inspire our students to maintain good values and prepare them to do good deeds as they embark in the world as professionals.

This post summarizes my Indisputably blog post describing ways that you might do this as part of the Stone Soup Project.

Coming of age in the 1960s and 70s, I was particularly concerned about redressing historic injustices.  I appreciated that adversarial struggle, including litigation, was necessary to promote positive social change.  But I also recognized limitations of that approach and my interest in dispute resolution reflected my aspiration for a world in which citizens would be able to make progress through mutual respect and democratic cooperation.  While the dispute resolution movement has made some contributions to helping have-nots in society, that is not its focus or necessarily the result of its work.

I saw a way to tie these concerns together and provide a deeper rationale for the Stone Soup Project when I read Michèle M. Leering’s article, Enhancing the Legal Profession’s Capacity for Innovation: The Promise of Reflective Practice and Action Research for Increasing Access to Justice, 34 Windsor Yearbook of Access to Justice 189 (2017).  Since 1985, Michèle has been the executive director of the Community Advocacy and Legal Centre in Ontario, Canada.  She also is a PhD candidate at Queens University Faculty of Law in Canada.

My Indisputably blog post provides extended excerpts from her article to give you the gist of her ideas.  I encourage you to read the entire article if these ideas move you.

Here, I will include a few quotes from her article.  Then I suggest some ways that you might use Stone Soup in your courses to do action research so that you and your students might contribute to making this a better world, while providing outstanding instruction for your students.

Excerpts From Michèle’s Article

“This article explores the promise that ‘reflective practice’ and ‘action research’ offer for fostering a culture of innovation in the legal profession and the justice sector.  I believe that cultivating reflective practice beginning in law school and encouraging legal professionals and the organizations they work for to use action research strategies will synergistically contribute to a more reform-oriented and responsive legal culture and justice system.”

“At its most fundamental level, reflective practice requires skills in self-assessment–in the spirit of continually improving practice–to ensure one becomes a more proficient legal professional.  However, this is only the beginning; this minimum standard is then enriched by adding critical reflection of all kinds (on assumptions, on practice, on law, on justice, on ‘law as lived,’ on what constitutes legal knowledge), and self-reflection.  Integrating the insights gained from these reflective domains leads to further insight and richer professional knowledge.”

“Action research is a form of research that is used when there is a desire to improve practice and/or to create change with organizations or systems.  Using largely qualitative data collection methods, it is well suited to situations where little is understood about the problem or the lived experience. . . . It is ideally suited for supporting innovation in the access to justice sector because it encourages reflection and action in a cyclical process that incrementally and iteratively begins to change the situation while it is being researched.”

She concludes:  “To increase the willingness of legal professionals to engage in action research, a pragmatic approach to build this form of research would be to create succinct resource kits unique to legal education, the legal profession, and the justice sector needs.”

Stone Soup is the kind of “resource kit” that she describes.

How You Can Use Stone Soup Action Research in Your Courses

Michèle’s ideas combine theory, empirical research, teaching, legal practice, and social action.  In my Indisputably blog post, I suggest a few examples of how faculty can apply her ideas with a particular dispute resolution focus, which I summarize below.  These ideas can be applied in virtually any law school course.

We can constitute our classes as action research teams (along with all the other things we do in our courses).  Faculty can define the research questions (as Doug Yarn did in his mediation course, focusing on mediators’ case prediction behavior), students can define the questions (as a dispute resolution clinic class did following a mediation training unit), or faculty can arrange to do participatory action research, in which the stakeholders participate in the process of defining the research questions.

Some research projects could be designed to contribute to institutional development while others would analyze practice problems or focus on theoretical questions.

Examples of Institutional Design Studies

To conduct action research, students could conduct interviews of stakeholders in a system and possibly observe some proceedings.  Ideally, researchers would interview parties in addition to professionals.  This presents significant ethical and practical difficulties, however, so generally you would not include parties as research subjects.  Interviewing parties is possible, though you would need to undertake some additional, rigorous procedures.

Here are a few examples of systemic problems that your class could analyze, which may or may not address problems of disadvantaged groups.

• self-represented litigants’ problems in navigating the courts
• employees’ problems in making complaints to their employers
• parties’ problems dealing with contracts with binding pre-dispute arbitration provisions
• organizations’ problems in handling ongoing flows of litigation

Theoretical and Practical Problems

We all know that people sometimes don’t follow the theories we teach – though sometimes they do.  That’s what we have heard from colleagues whose students have done Stone Soup assignments.  Indeed, a major purpose of the Stone Soup Project is to have students inquire about the extent to which people do and don’t follow our theories.  Here are some examples of theoretical and practical projects that classes might work on collectively.

• identify strategies for lawyers to deal with uncooperative and unrealistic lawyers and parties
• identify strategies for lawyers to develop more productive relationships with clients
• learn how lawyers and litigants evaluate likely court results (as research shows that most of them do a lousy job of it)

To use your classes to conduct action research, you would need to get research projects approved by the ethics research board at your school.  This can be a hassle and I plan to write a blog post with suggestions to make this as easy as possible.

Potential Outcomes

If your class undertakes an action research project, it can produce many different outcomes and products, including:

• good, empirically-informed class discussions
• compilation of students’ research into a single document, which might or might not be published
• practical materials such as informational brochures to help self-represented litigants navigate the courts
• materials to train professionals
• (possibly confidential) briefings of stakeholders about research results
• public conferences to discuss research results
• recommendations for development or modification of institutional systems

From the initial Stone Soup experiments, we know that students generally are quite jazzed by these assignments.  They crave learning about the real world and love talking with lawyers and other practitioners.

Imagine how much more excited they would be if their Stone Soup activity made a positive contribution to society.

And imagine how you would feel if you develop a course that makes this happen – and you do so on a regular basis.

If Not Now, When?

Do these ideas touch your deep hopes and dreams?  If so, you can realize them through the Stone Soup Project.

Presumably it is too late to incorporate these ideas for action research into courses for the coming semester.  But I hope that you will seriously consider doing so next academic year.

If you haven’t finalized your plans for your courses this semester, you might include assignments in which students individually conduct interviews or observe cases.  This post includes materials to develop interview assignments.  Last year, there were more than 19 course offerings in which faculty used these assignments.  This post collects faculty’s assessments of the assignments in their courses.  In addition to traditional ADR courses, faculty used Stone Soup in courses on access to justice, evidence, externship, and trusts and estates.

If you will use a Stone Soup assignment this semester, please let me know and we can add you to the list of the inaugural cohort of Stone Soup faculty.

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Robert Kuehn, Washington University School of Law

Though clinical faculty have largely moved out of the proverbial basement, they remain a distinct sub-group within most law faculties. Often labeled as something other than law professors (“clinicians”) because of their teaching methods and goals, faculty that teach law clinic and externship courses also differ as a group by gender, race, employment status, and salary from “podium” faculty teaching doctrinal courses. And unlike the movement out of the basement, it’s not clear that clinical and doctrinal faculty are moving closer to each other on those attributes.

So who are the faculty who teach law clinic and externship courses? Predominantly female, and more so today than in the past. In the latest survey by the Center for the Study of Applied Legal Education (CSALE) of over 1000 faculty who teach in a law clinic or externship course, 62% identified as female. Externship courses are more heavily taught by female faculty than law clinics, as 75% of full-time externship teachers are female. As the graph below shows, over the last decade an increasing proportion of clinical faculty are female.

Faculty who teach legal writing are even more heavily female — 72% identify as female. In contrast, the ABA reports that females (now half of all J.D. students) make up 44% of full-time teaching faculty, and a significant part of that percentage is comprised of clinical and legal writing faculty.

Clinical faculty also are predominantly white, but less so than a decade ago. In the most recent CSALE survey, 21% of full-time faculty who primarily teach in a law clinic or externship identified their race/origin as something other than white. There was little difference in race/origin between externship and law clinic teachers. The percentage of minority clinical teachers has increased by over 50% since the first CSALE survey in 2007-08.

Minorities make up a significantly greater percentage of clinical faculty than of legal writing and slightly more than law faculties as a whole. Only 11% of legal writing faculty are non-Caucasian, while 20% of all law teachers and approximately 32% of J.D. students at ABA-approved law schools are minorities.

There are no data on the percentage of LGBTQ faculty from available surveys of law faculty. The AALS Directory of Law Teachers surveys do ask whether the teacher is a member of the LGBT community. However, the AALS has not published reports on data from its annual directories since 2009.

There are stark differences in employment status between faculty groups. In 2016-17, only 23% of clinical faculty had tenure or were on tenure track; 9% had clinical/programmatic tenure/tenure track. The percentage of traditional tenure/tenure track clinical positions has declined from 31% in CSALE’s 2010-11 survey and 46% in 1998.[1]

Only 18% of legal writing faculty were tenured or on tenure track in 2016; another 6% were in positions with programmatic tenure/tenure track.[2] ABA data suggest that 90% of law faculty who primarily teach doctrinal courses (i.e., all 2013 full-time “teaching resources” minus clinical, legal writing, and skills teachers) are tenured or on tenure track.

Salaries are a final area of difference, even within clinical faculty. The table below illustrates differences in law clinic and externship teacher salaries between those entering or early in their teaching career and clinical faculty as a whole. There is no significant difference between the median salary for externship faculty and the median for law clinic teachers.

The median salary for legal writing faculty is estimated to be about $10,000 lower than the median for clinical faculty, based on a review of the median of average 2015 salaries for directors and other full-time legal writing faculty. Tenured and tenure-track faculty make considerably more than clinical and legal writing faculty. The median salary for an assistant professor on the tenure track was $105,000 in the 2015-16 SALT salary survey, approximately $20,000 more than clinical teachers at a comparable point in their careers and approximately $10,000 more than the median for all legal writing faculty. The median salary for a tenured professor was over $145,000.

Data, of course, present an incomplete picture of law faculties. And while we should be careful not to let our differences define us, it’s hard to move to where you want to be without first knowing who you are. This data will hopefully help answer “clinical faculty, who are you?”

[1] Richard K. Neumann Jr., Women in Legal Education: What the Statistics Show, 50 J. Legal Educ. 313, 328 (2000).

[2] Assn’ of Legal Writing Directors & Legal Writing Institute, Report of the Annual Legal Writing Survey (2016) (preliminary data from 2016 survey) (on file with author).

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In my ten years of law school teaching, I have had so many great classes but I have never had a class quite like yours. It is not just that you made me feel good about the future of the legal profession. You did that, but the thing that was special was the atmosphere you created in the classroom. I think you all learned more as a result.

I tried to say some of this to you on the last day of class. But I have thought about it more since then, and I want to say this publicly. My purpose is twofold: I want to say thank you to the sixty of you, and I want other law students to know what they can do to get more out of each class.

In a large class, it can be hard to feel that everyone is engaged in the material and participating in the discussion. But that happened this semester. As the semester progressed, I tried to piece together what was happening. I think the following things that you did were especially important:

• You all contributed to the conversation. Many of you regularly raised your hands because you wanted to add something to the class discussion. And every single one of you participated when I asked you to discuss a case or answer a question. You all were consistently well prepared for class. There were no free riders in this class.
• You never belittled or talked about one another during class. I have to admit, I watched and waited for you to be disrespectful to one another in small (but typical) ways – but it never happened. Anyone who has ever taught a law school class knows what I was expecting. Students roll their eyes and whisper to one another about the student who tells a long story, who asks a convoluted question, or who acts especially interested in the material. But I never saw you treat one another with anything but respect.
• You used your laptops to take notes. I know when students are using their laptops to chat with one another during class – because I see a large number of people smile at the same time, all looking at their laptops and not me. I never saw that in your class. Those of you who used laptops seemed to be taking notes. I know there may have been moments when you looked at Facebook or answered an email from your mom, but it was never obvious that you were doing that. And I appreciate that and so do your classmates.
• You were willing to play along. I often asked you to role-play during the class. And you did it! You did not complain when I asked you to defend the deposition of a belligerent client, talk through whether your law firm could accept a case adverse to your sister, or bill time to a bunch of fake clients for three days. I think you learn more when you play the part of a lawyer, and I appreciate your willingness to go along for the ride.
• You made connections with other courses. You did not resist when I asked you to see that the attorney-client relationship is an agency relationship – the same thing you were studying in business associations. You did not complain, “this isn’t civ pro” when I asked you to recall something you studied in civil procedure last year and see its relationship to PR. You were able to explain the connection between legal malpractice and the negligence law you learned in your 1L torts class. Instead of denying that you studied these topics in other classes – which past students have often asserted with a straight face – you were open to seeing how these bodies of law fit together.
• You made connections between the class and the legal profession. Many of you started to recognize professional responsibility issues outside of the classroom. You told me about stories you read in the news and sent me links to court documents and outrageous attorney ads. You told me about experiences – good and bad – that you had with lawyers as their employees and their clients. You felt passionately that bar applicant Tarra Simmons should be given the opportunity to take the Washington bar exam. As future members of the legal profession, I am glad that you now feel equipped to comment intelligently upon these issues.
• You expressed thanks and showed respect. I love that many of you said big, warm hellos to one another and to me when you walked into the classroom each morning. I appreciate the way that you nodded when your classmates made good points and the way that you made eye contact with me when I talked. So many of you took the time to say thank you – often in writing – when we discussed something in class that you enjoyed or that you expect to use in practice. In all of these ways, you were good role models for me. You reminded me to take the time to make connections with the people around me and to say thank you.

If you learned something this semester and enjoyed the class, it was because of what you and your classmates did in that classroom. A professor can only do so much. A professor can be well prepared for each class and bring a passion for the material. But the real magic happens – or doesn’t happen – because of what the students contribute to the class. During this past semester, I often thought, “I wish other law students could see what is happening here.” Maybe this letter will give them a glimpse of what I saw and what students are capable of doing in any law school classroom.

Thank you.

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Out of the blue, I got an email from a student at my university who I had never met.  She said that her best friend is graduating from college this month and will start law school in the fall.  As a graduation present, she is collecting letters with advice for her friend and she asked me to write one.  So I sent her the following letter, except that I changed the names.

I invite readers to add your thoughts and other resources to share in a comment below as this link will be provided to Kelly.  What would you add or change in this advice?

__________________________________________________________________________________

Dear Kelly,

Your friend Lee obviously cares about you a lot.  She asked me (and others) to write a letter to you with advice about law school.  So here goes.

Studying law and using your legal training may be both exhilarating and daunting.  I believe deeply that lawyers generally play an invaluable role in our society.  We often help people solve difficult problems, promote justice, and make relationships and institutions function properly.  The letter and spirit of the law are the foundation of our society.

On the other hand, lawyers deserve some of the criticism we receive.  We are part of an adversarial legal system that too often perpetuates unproductive conflict, is inefficient, helps the “haves” to come out ahead, and disempowers people.

So my first piece of advice is to keep focused on your goals and how you can best achieve them.  Pay attention to the effects of the law and your work.  Many law graduates practice law in a wide variety of contexts – and some do all sorts of other things.  Commit yourself to doing some good things that law-trained people do.

I imagine that you have seen a lot of TV shows and movies portraying lawyers and perhaps even law school life.  I think that they generally distort reality a lot.  What’s called the “hidden” law school curriculum also creates misimpressions by focusing so much on appellate cases.  Although it’s important to understand the logic of appellate case analysis and the legal doctrine you will read, these cases represent only a small fraction of what most lawyers actually deal with in their work.  Appellate case analysis reflects significant hindsight bias and over-emphasis of the role of law as opposed to facts, interests, and emotions.  In practice, lawyers experience cases prospectively with large amounts of these elements, which often dwarf any uncertainty about the applicable law.

So I suggest that you develop a healthy skepticism about these images and do what you can to learn how legal practice really works.  I think that you will be a lot happier and more effective if you have realistic expectations.

As you proceed through law school and a career after graduation, you will become initiated in a tribe with a new language and customs.  This can produce a great sense of belonging and power as you learn how to use the law.  It is easy to forget how (what I facetiously call) “normal people” view the world.  You still are a normal person – don’t forget what that feels like.  Balance your work with a healthy home life so that normalcy is a regular part of your life.

Law school probably will be a lot different from your undergraduate experience.  I believe that most law school faculty really care a lot about their students and work hard to help students learn what’s important.  Unfortunately, the system of legal education in the US has been rightly criticized for too often doing a poor job of preparing students to practice law.

So don’t simply assume that you will be adequately prepared if you just “check all the boxes” you need to graduate.  Don’t give in to the temptation to do as little work as necessary to get an acceptable grade.

Instead, get the full advantage of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity by taking the initiative to carefully plan your curricular and extra-curricular activities.

Be prepared to continue learning throughout your career.  Law is constantly changing with new statutes, court opinions, and procedures.  Expectations about lawyers may change.  Rapidly-evolving technology probably will change legal practice.  Be on the lookout for these and other changes and prepare yourself to deal with them.

Generally try to see the world through others’ eyes.  This is not only a good thing to do as a human being, but it is very important to be an effective professional.  If you practice law, you will probably feel frustrated at times with some of your clients and people on the other side of litigation and/or transactions.  The better you understand their perspectives and empathize with their concerns, the more you can avoid unnecessary conflict and effectively represent your clients.

Take good care of yourself.  Law school and legal practice are extremely stressful.  Law students and lawyers often abuse alcohol and other drugs and suffer from mental health problems.  If you are having problems, don’t stuff them.  Get help.  And if you see colleagues having problems, try to help them get help.

For more detailed advice, I encourage you to read my former colleague, Steve Easton’s, article, My Last Lecture: Unsolicited Advice for Future and Current Lawyers, and my sequel, My Last Lecture: More Unsolicited Advice for Future and Current Lawyers, as well as my article, Escaping From Lawyers’ Prison of Fear.  This is probably a lot more to read than Lee had in mind.  But you will need to get used to doing a lot of reading – and this is easier than most of what you will read in law school.

In closing, I wish you great satisfaction in law school and wherever you go in life.

Sincerely,

John Lande

Isidor Loeb Professor Emeritus

University of Missouri School of Law

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I recently cross-posted “Are You Ready to Apply Unequivocal Research Findings That Students’ Use of Laptops in Class Reduces Learning” here and on the Indisputably blog.

There it stimulated a series of comments by faculty and students.  If you are interested, take a look, starting with a comment by Alyson Carrel, Northwestern’s assistant dean for law and technology.

I would love to hear others’ experiences and views about this.  Feel free to share your thoughts in a comment here or on the Indisputably blog.

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University of Michigan Education Professor Susan Dynarski wrote a compelling article in the New York Times, Laptops Are Great. But Not During a Lecture or a Meeting.

She cites research finding that when students use laptops in class, they not only reduce their own learning, but they also reduce the learning of nearby students.

The whole article is worth reading.  Here are some excerpts:

“[A] growing body of evidence shows that over all, college students learn less when they use computers or tablets during lectures.  They also tend to earn worse grades.  The research is unequivocal:  Laptops distract from learning, both for users and for those around them.

. . .

“In a series of experiments at Princeton University and the University of California, Los Angeles, students were randomly assigned either laptops or pen and paper for note-taking at a lecture.  Those who had used laptops had substantially worse understanding of the lecture, as measured by a standardized test, than those who did not.

. . .

“The strongest argument against allowing [students to choose whether to use a laptop in class] is that one student’s use of a laptop harms the learning of students around them.  In a series of lab experiments, researchers at York University and McMaster University in Canada tested the effect of laptops on students who weren’t using them. Some students were told to perform small tasks on their laptops unrelated to the lecture, like looking up movie times.  As expected, these students retained less of the lecture material.  But what is really interesting is that the learning of students seated near the laptop users was also negatively affected.

. . .

“I ban electronics in my own classes.  I do make one major exception.  Students with learning disabilities may use electronics in order to participate in class.  This does reveal that any student using electronics has a learning disability.  That is a loss of privacy for those students, which also occurs when they are given more time to complete a test.  Those negatives must be weighed against the learning losses of other students when laptops are used in class.”

Given the “unequivocal” findings described in the article, you may want to generally ban laptops in your classes.  While you are at it, you might also prohibit use of cell phones, which may be even more distracting.  Students are likely to readily accept restrictions on their use of electronic devices in class if this is a normal practice of a substantial proportion of faculty in the school.  If you are ready to start restricting use of electronics in your classes, you might encourage like-minded colleagues at your school to do so too.

In my classes, I made exceptions if students told me in advance that they had a specific reason they needed to check their cell phones (such as one student whose wife was about to give birth).  I also allowed students to use electronics to refer to role-play instructions during simulations so that they didn’t have to print them out.  Students should get accommodations for disabilities through the normal procedures.

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The past few days–let’s be honest, the past year–I’ve grappled with how to teach my law students about eradicating misogyny and sexual misconduct without politicizing my clinic, classroom, or law school.  The hard truth is that perhaps I cannot escape the “politicization” of our legal system.  The law, and justice, are after all built on a democratic system that relies on elections and appointments to assign power and mete out justice. I’ve become more open in the classroom, the clinic space, and all my student interactions about both my outrage and my optimism.  Like many, I remain outraged–and frankly, anxiety-ridden–about last year’s executive office results (I still can’t type certain words like “President” and “T#u#p” in the same sentence).  Still, I harbor optimism and pride about the political mobilization it has triggered.  One connection, I believe, is the wave of victims speaking out about sexual misconduct inflicted on them by powerful men.  Can we as law professors use these news bites as teaching material? Absolutely. Sexual misconduct is almost always criminal conduct, and its impact on the victims is wildly misunderstood. Beginning to understand it better is an obligation of our legal system, so we can devise better legal responses.  Only then can we heal as a nation of laws and of humans, incidentally and systematically.  Over on Prof. Carolyn Grose’s blog, she gives a law student the voice she deserves to discuss Al Franken and its impact on her and the law. It inspired me: http://profgrose.com/having-the-courage-to-love-like-grown-ups-thoughts-from-a-former-franken-staffer/

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Early bird registration for the AALS Annual Meeting in San Diego ends tomorrow.  

Here are some more reasons to be there, from the newly-formed Section on Technology, Law and Legal Education:  

Half-Day Program: Friday, January 5, 2018 from 8:30 am – 12:15 in Pacific Ballroom 24.

Join us for an interactive program designed to open our minds to the challenges and opportunities presented to law schools by the changing nature of student learning styles and the legal profession in the digital age. How can we respond to the changing nature of student learning? The premise of the Socratic method is that during a dialogue between professor and student A, all students are closely following along, imagining their response, and drawing understanding from their own reading and their rapt engagement with the dialogue. However valid this premise may have been in the days of Christopher Columbus Langdell, it seems dubious for the digital age. Our challenge is to find ways to meet students where they are. Digital technology offers new possibilities for learning, but also for distraction. How can we prepare our students for work in light of the changing nature of law practice? The work of Richard Susskind and others has illuminated the ways in which artificial intelligence and the worldwide digital communications network have altered the needs and possibilities of law practice. We will consider those changes and how as professors we can better prepare our students for that changing world.

We are working on this in collaboration with a group of law professors from Australia. Peter Strauss (Columbia) and Kathy Laster (Victoria University, Australia) are leading the program. Papers will be considered for publication in the Journal of Legal Education.

Pedagogy Program: “Teaching Through Technology” Thursday, January 4, 2018 from 3:30-4:45.

Technology is impacting everything — from how we shop for groceries, meet our partners, and track our daily walks to how we practice law and teach law students.  Join us to learn about how technology is being used in the practice of law and in legal education to make lawyering and teaching more effective and efficient. During the first part of the program, our speakers will talk about the state of technology in the legal practice. During the second part of the program we will hear from law professors as they discuss paper(s) relating to how faculty have incorporated the teaching of and with technology into their curricula.

Papers from this program will be published in Journal of Legal Education.

Speakers

Speaker: Ruth Hauswirth, Cooley LLP

Speaker: Emily Janoski-Haehlen, University of Akron School of Law
Speaker: Elmer R. Masters, The Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI)
Moderator: Laura Norris, Santa Clara University School of Law
Speaker: Karen Sanner, Saint Louis University School of Law

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By: David Thomson, Professor of Practice at the University of Denver, Sturm College of Law

Many of us who focus at least part of our research and scholarship on legal education reform focus most or all of that time on the situation in our own country, the United States.  With 200 law schools here engaging in numerous “natural experiments” to improve legal education (from expanding experiential learning to allowing the GRE for admissions, and more), and with the U.S. market for legal services roiling through its own changes, we have our hands full as it is.

At least speaking for myself – the author of Law School 2.0: Legal Education for a Digital Age (2009), a book about the future of legal education – for many years, I myopically focused on the situation in the U.S. exclusively.  I was, for the most part, ignorant of the situation in other countries.  But as that book slowly made its way around the world, I have found myself drawn in to a broader interaction with what is happening in legal education outside our borders.

I recently returned from trips to Japan and Russia, and I write this still dealing with the scrambled egg brain of double jet-lag (so please keep that in mind if this post makes no sense).  I thought readers of this blog might be interested in what I am learning from our colleagues in these two other countries.

It turns out everyone is dealing with the same things we are dealing with.  That is a vast oversimplification, of course, but the recurrent themes we often discuss – in conferences and scholarship and blog posts – are themes I have heard in these other countries.  Would it surprise you to know that the legal education system in Japan and Russia (whether in undergraduate form, or at the masters level) is primarily lecture based, and that there is the desire – but resistance – to move away from that?  Would it surprise you to know that clinical education is growing, but is by no means as strong as many would like it to be?  Would it surprise you to know that there is interest in best practices for teaching law, but that progress is slow?  We might be a little bit ahead of the common practices in these other countries, but the themes are much the same.

In Japan, I had the honor of making the acquaintance of Professor Akira Fujimoto, one of the founders of the PSIM consortium at Nagoya University’s faculty of law.  PSIM began by establishing a relationship with NITA here in the U.S., and NITA has long supported PSIM in its development.  It now comprises law professors and administrators at 30 Japan-based law schools, and is primarily focused on trial advocacy training.  I was a speaker at their 10th^th Anniversary symposium on Teaching Sustainable Practical Skills in early September, with Karen Lockwood, the Executive Director of NITA.  PSIM members attended the symposium to learn more about legal education in the United States, and to understand changes in law teaching that are becoming more common here.  I spoke about the “Carnegie Integrated Course” model that we developed at the University of Denver, and also about the impact of technology on law teaching in the U.S.  During the Symposium Q&A and the social event that followed, there was intense interest in learning about different models of teaching the law than the classic lecture format.

In Russia, I have been lucky to be a part of the Legal Education Exchange project, sponsored by the U.S. Russia Foundation, for the last four years.  This project brought four U.S. Law schools (Georgetown, Denver, McGeorge, and Emory) together with four Russia-based law schools (Baltic Federal, Moscow State, Russian Foreign Trade Academy, and Urals State), with each school having a “partner school” (in the order provided here).  It started with the first LEX Conference in Moscow in 2014, which brought us all together for information exchange about teaching methods, and for preliminary meetings with our partner schools.  Since then, I have traveled to Russia three times for additional meetings, and last week was at Moscow State to offer a two-day workshop on Law School Assessment in the U.S.  Over 20 professors from seven Russia-based schools attended the workshop, and there was great interest in how to draft learning outcomes and rubrics, and the backward design of courses.  I also had the pleasure of teaching MSU’s Masters degree students over two days, and was very impressed with their fluency in English, and their genuine interest in our legal system.

In both countries, there are issues of lower enrollment, reductions in bar passage rates, and complaints from the practicing bar about graduates being underprepared to practice law.  These pressures are – as they are in our country – encouraging a broader discussion about how to improve legal education, while retaining those aspects of it that remain valuable.  It has been immensely encouraging to me when I meet kindred spirits in other countries who love teaching, and who care deeply about how to make legal education better for their students.

This post, of course, is only a small window into a complex topic, but it is a snapshot from the window I have had the privilege of looking through.  I hope that others who have experience teaching best practices in other countries will comment on this post about what they have learned, so we can add to our understanding of how best practices for legal education are spreading around the world.

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If your campus is anything like mine, students are struggling. Many students, especially those from underrepresented and disadvantaged groups, face ongoing achievement gaps and report a less than favorable campus climate. What if there were a cost-effective, easily implemented, and valid way that we, as individual instructors, could increase students’ achievement and reduce educational inequalities? Would you implement it?

The good news is that such a solution exists. Social psychologist Aneeta Rattan and her colleagues have drawn from robust educational research and made policy recommendations to do just that. They suggest that when students have a growth mindset and a belonging mindset educational outcomes improve, achievement gaps narrow, and more students report a sense of belonging.

Growth mindsets: For decades, Carol Dweck has championed the well-documented benefits of nurturing growth mindsets in students. In this case, a growth mindset refers to a belief that intelligence can be developed with effort and strategy, as opposed to a fixed mindset – believing that intelligence is innate and doesn’t change much. Because students with a growth mindset believe that their intelligence can grow, they engage in behaviors that promote learning and achievement. I’ve written about how to encourage growth mindsets in an earlier post: https://bestpracticeslegaled.albanylawblogs.org/2017/06/07/intelligence-is-it-stagnant-or-malleable-exploring-formative-assessment/

Belonging mindsets: When students feel they belong in an educational environment, they perform better and are less likely to drop out of a program. This is particularly true for underrepresented students who, by virtue of being different, often feel they don’t belong.

When negative stereotypes exist, members of the stereotyped group worry about whether they fit in, whether they will succeed in law school, and whether the legal profession is for them. These worries can deplete students’ cognitive resources, zapping them of their motivation and their ability to bounce back from setbacks. Because learning depends on motivation, students without a sense of belonging fall behind.

That’s why educators must be in tune with the kind of environment they create. Do you work to encourage belonging mindsets? If so, what do you do? I’d love to hear your ideas and learn from your methods. If you haven’t spent much time yet thinking about how to foster belonging in your classroom, check out this short web course developed by researchers from Stanford University: https://www.mindsetkit.org/belonging

I also recommend reading: Leveraging Mindsets to Promote Academic Achievement: Policy Recommendations in Perspectives on Psychological Science (Aneeta Rattan, Krishna Savani, Dolly Chugh, and Carol S. Dweck 2015).

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