2021 Conference on Clinical Legal Education (AALS)

Posted on April 23, 2021 by davidafinger

Wednesday, April 28 – Saturday, May 1, 2021
Reckoning with our Past and Building for the Future

Over the next week, the Best Practices blog will share posts from sessions at the upcoming AALS Conference on Legal Education. More information about the conference is available here.

This year’s conference theme is Reckoning With our Past and Building for the Future. As experiential legal educators who teach in-house clinics and externship courses, we find ourselves in unprecedented times, reacting to stressful external conditions while also coming to terms with practices that have perpetuated inequality and injustice.  This conference engages with this new reality, while also seeking to shift our collective gaze inward, to focus on ways we can strengthen ourselves and our community of educators, in order to respond effectively to today’s challenges.  Consistent with core clinical habits of introspection and reflection, we will examine ways to reimagine the foundations of our professional work, including our collaborative relationships, instructional approaches, and forms of community engagement.  We will also explore ways to fortify ourselves as individuals, with specific attention to wellness and professional growth.  Finally, during this transformative moment in society, we will critically assess our assumptions and long-standing practices, with an eye towards advancing antiracism and inclusiveness.

Conference Subthemes:

Conference Subthemes

  1. Collaboration.  Collaboration is key to our individual and collective sustainability, particularly in the challenging external environment in which we find ourselves.  What are effective models for collaboration across clinics, subject matter areas, and disciplines?  How can we promote collaboration and linkages across different types of experiential teaching (e.g., in-house clinics, externships, practica, and simulation courses)?  What types of collaborations are needed for our clinical work, in light of the COVID-19 pandemic and movements for racial justice?  What other types of collaboration might the future require, and how can we begin cultivating those partnerships?
  2. Foundational and Emerging Lawyering Skills.  As clinicians, instruction on lawyering skills is central to our pedagogical project.  Moments of introspection and reflection permit us to examine our past practices in this area.  How can we enhance our pedagogy vis-a-vis core lawyering skills, such as interviewing, client counseling, case theory development, trial advocacy, and negotiation?  As we confront a new reality and look to the future, what emerging lawyering skills should we be integrating into our curricula, and how should we teach those skills?  How does the shift towards remote instruction and adjudication, and the ubiquity of technology, shape our pedagogy around foundational and emerging lawyering skills?
  3. Mindfulness, Self-Care, and Resilience.  Given the unprecedented stressors that we face in our professional lives and in society at large, wellness is a top priority.  What are we teaching our students about self-care and mindfulness, and how are incorporating these topics into our courses?  What practices should we as clinicians adopt to keep ourselves strong, focused, and intentional in our work? As we continue to navigate an uncertain future, how do we develop the quality of resilience — both in ourselves and in our students?  
  4. Professional Development.  The COVID-19 pandemic and accompanying economic downturn have created an uncertain future for law schools and legal educators.  Moreover, the need to respond to an ever-changing environment leaves little time for contemplating and furthering our professional growth.  What are best practices for clinicians at different stages in their careers (e.g., fellows, pre-tenure, mid-career, approaching retirement), given the unique times we are living in?   What guidance and support can we provide for clinicians who are fighting for more equal status within their institutions?  Given law schools’ focus on experiential education, bar passage, and job placement, how can we leverage our strengths as clinicians? What challenges and opportunities does the current environment present for the professional advancement of clinicians? 
  5. Clinics and the Community.  Community engagement and the advancement of social justice are often central to our work as clinical legal educators.  In the current social and political moment, many clinicians are deepening their community-based work. As we take this moment to reflect, what are some critiques of existing models of community engagement?  How do we ensure that our approaches are sustainable?  How do we balance responsiveness to pressing community concerns with the need for stability in our teaching?  As we look towards an uncertain future, what models of community-based work should we embrace?
  6. Critically Examining Our Past.  This transformational moment offers an opportunity for individual clinicians, and for the clinical community as a whole, to critically examine our past practices, including assumptions about our work as well as the structures in which we operate.  This process of self-examination also includes introspection about biases embedded in our work and the steps needed to promote antiracism and inclusiveness.  What aspects of our community and its work deserve more careful examination and critique?  How can we remedy existing deficiencies and reimagine the role and contributions of clinical legal educators?

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CLEA STATEMENT ON ANTI-RACIST LEGAL EDUCATION

Posted on April 22, 2021 by davidafinger

Nearly a year has passed since historic events and protests, domestically and internationally, brought renewed attention to racial justice and the discriminatory and racist practices ever present in our social structures. The Black Lives Matter protests called attention to the unjust and disproportionate treatment of Black and Brown individuals by law enforcement and other institutions. More recently, violent attacks have roiled Asian communities, which have already been the targets of violence and hateful rhetoric since the COVID-19 pandemic began. And publicized incidents at various institutions of higher learning have demonstrated the failure of these institutions to protect students from racism, even within the walls of academia. As law schools and faculties reflect on how to advance racial justice and equality, the Clinical Legal Education Association (CLEA) calls upon law school administrations and faculties, including experiential faculty, to play an active role in reforming our institutions and transforming our communities to be anti-racist. 

An anti-racist curriculum is essential to disrupting and undoing racism in all its forms. Experiential courses are a critical component of any effective anti-racist curriculum, as such courses often allow for individualized student engagement, via legal work in local and marginalized communities, in order to promote social change and access to justice. 

But experiential faculty should not rest on traditional notions of clinical and externship pedagogy. We encourage experiential faculty to actively implement principles of anti-racist education into their teaching. As recent events have made clear, students from marginalized backgrounds have long been considered less qualified and competent than their peers by some faculty, including law faculty. Such treatment creates an inequitable and hostile educational environment that can impede students’ ability to learn and succeed. As experiential faculty, we are particularly concerned with how racist and biased views from faculty members can negatively affect student performance in experiential courses. The elimination of biases and the perception of biases in grading and assessment is particularly important in experiential courses, which do not generally employ blind or anonymous grading. Experiential faculty must therefore create an intellectual environment that promotes a climate of equity and inclusivity for all students.  

CLEA also encourages law schools to treat their experiential faculty equitably in terms of pay, job security, and status, as those faculty members are often disproportionately women and racial minorities. Inequalities between faculty members communicate to students, whether implicitly or explicitly, the relative value of those faculty. Moreover, even as women and racial minorities tend to be overrepresented in experiential faculties as compared to non-experiential faculties, law schools must do more to increase the diversity in their experiential faculties. As a recent essay by the CLEA Faculty Equity & Inclusion Committee demonstrates, the racial diversity of clinical faculty has remained stagnant in recent decades. The need for diverse faculties in experiential education is self-evident. Demographics matter, and any lack of diversity in experiential faculty negatively affects students, clients, and communities alike. CLEA has led efforts to diversify clinical and externship faculties and will continue that work in upcoming programming at the 2021 AALS Clinical Conference, in materials developed with the AALS Clinical Section Policy Committee, and in legal scholarship. We look forward to continuing this work alongside our colleagues in the coming months and years through specific recommendations aimed at improving the dismal demographical data that our research has identified.  

Law schools should take proactive steps to ensure that their faculty members work to eliminate biases and racism in their teaching and should support their students of color, who inevitably face disparate treatment and shoulder the burdens of responding to such incidents. They should also prioritize hiring faculty members that reflect the communities they serve in their experiential programs and treat those faculty members equitably. Despite the recent attention given to anti-racist initiatives, law schools have much work to do in their quest to develop a more equitable, just, and inclusive discipline and profession. CLEA looks forward to working with its members and other members of legal academia to further these goals. 

 
This statement was drafted and approved by the CLEA Faculty Equity & Inclusion Committee and approved by the CLEA Board of Directors.  

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Welcome, 2021! – and a Round-Up of Pedagogy Sessions at this week’s AALS Annual Meeting

Posted on January 4, 2021 by Melanie Daily, University of Kansas School of Law

Dear readers, authors, commenters, and friends far and wide:

Happy New Year!

We look forward to another year of exciting and thought-provoking discussion with you through the Best Practices for Legal Education blog. 

We begin 2021 with the AALS annual meeting, being held virtually, that you can access here. 

The conference will include some fantastic programs to help us share skills and techniques in this tumultuous teaching environment. We’ve compiled a round-up of the sessions best suited for those interested in deepening our grasp of pedagogy across a wide range of subject areas. Please feel free to comment below on what you’re learning as the conference progresses!

Tues. Jan. 5

4:15-5:30pm: Section on Civil Rights, Co-Sponsored by Criminal Justice: Teaching About Civil Rights During Incarceration

4:15-5:30pm: Section on Commercial and Consumer Law, Co-Sponsored by Teaching Methods and Technology, Law, and Legal Education: Teaching Commercial Law in the 21st Century

4:15-5:30pm: Section on Professional Responsibility: Bright Ideas and Best Practices for Online Teaching in Professional Responsibility Courses

Weds. Jan. 6

11am-12:15pm: Section on Pro Bono & Public Service Opportunities, Co-Sponsored by Clinical Legal Education, Leadership, and Poverty Law: Calling Out and Leaning In to Racial and Class Inequities in Experiential Learning Opportunities

2:45-4:00pm: Section on Global Engagement, Co-Sponsored by Teaching Methods, Technology and Law and Legal Education: Virtual Mobility: Innovating and Promoting Global Legal Education in Times of Crisis

4:15-5:30pm: Section on Criminal Justice: Beyond 2020: Decarceral, Anti-Racist and Non-Traditional Teaching

Thurs. Jan 7

2:45-4:00pm: AALS Discussion Group: How the Pandemic Made Me a Better Teacher – Lessons Learned and Plans for Change

4:15-5:30pm: Section of Family and Juvenile Law: Family Law – Creative and Experiential Teaching Tips

Fri. Jan. 8

2:45-4:00pm: Section on New Law Professors: Spreading the Word – Law Professors as Teachers, Scholars, and Legal Influencers

4:15-5:30pm: Section on Teaching Methods: Best Practices for Creating and Administering Mid-Term Exams

4:15-5:30pm: Section on Women in Legal Education, Co-sponsored by Clinical Legal Education, Legal Writing Reasoning, and Research and Teaching Methods: Gender, Power, and Pedagogy in the Pandemic

Friday, Jan. 8 2:45-4:00

Sat. Jan. 9

2:45-4pm: Section on Balance in Legal Education, Clinical Legal Education, and Leadership Joint Pedagogy: Teaching Leadership Skills in a Time of Crisis

As you consider your own teaching and writing, please consider posting your original content with us.  You can learn more about the purpose and history of the best practices blog here.

With best wishes for a great 2021,

Melanie and Davida

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SALT Social Justice in Action series: Anti-Racist Hiring Practices

Posted on October 15, 2020 by davidafinger

by Professor Brooks Holland, Gonzaga Law School

The Society of American Law Teachers has been proud to share its four-part Fall 2020 Social Justice in Action webinar series. This webinar program already has presented leaders in the field to address anti-racism values and practices in three specific contexts, including anti-racism in the core law school curriculum, equity and inclusion in online legal education, and anti-racist work for the long-haul. Approximately 500 people attended these first three webinars, and many more have since viewed them on SALT’s website.

The fourth installment of SALT’s webinar series will take place on October 16, 2020 at 12:00pm PT and 3:00pm ET, and it will address one of the most important influences we as educators have on the future of higher education and the legal profession: our hiring practices. We all know that law school and higher education hiring practices is one of the areas where we most struggle to fulfill our commitment to diversity and antiracist values. To explore how we better can fulfill this commitment, SALT is honored to present three highly respected leaders in legal education to share their perspectives on anti-racist values and practices in the recruitment and retention of faculty, staff, and administrators:

Tamara F. Lawson, Dean, St. Thomas University School of Law

Angela Onwuachi-Willig, Dean, Boston University School of Law

Sean M. Scott, President and Dean, California Western University School of Law

Please join SALT for this important event! You can register for this program here.

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SALT Webinar Video Available on “Engaging in Anti-Racism Work for the Long Haul”

Posted on October 8, 2020 by davidafinger

By Olympia Duhart

Nova Southeastern University Shepard Broad College of Law

            In the midst of nonstop racialized violence and institutional assaults against minoritized communities, it is no wonder that those committed to fighting racism can sometimes feel personally overwhelmed. The Society of American Law Teachers (SALT) turned its attention to this important topic at a recent Webinar. Law school leaders and a resiliency expert offered their insights and advice to law professors engaged in anti-racism work.

            The webinar, “Engaging in Anti-Racism Work for the Long Haul: Avoiding Fatigue and Burnout” was the latest in a series of Social Justice Webinars sponsored by SALT this year. The event featured Dean Mario Barnes, Toni Rembe Dean & Professor of Law, University of Washington School of Law; Nikita Gupta, GRIT Program Director, UCLA Bruin Resource Center and Carla Pratt, Dean & Professor of Law, Washburn University School of Law. More than 130 people attended the event. A video of the event is available here. Panelists explained why law school professors are in a critical position to combat racism, and talked about the importance of self-care in confronting injustice for the long haul.

The event was part of SALT’s Social Justice in Action Webinar Series. The next webinar, “Anti-racist Hiring Practices” will be held Friday, Oct. 16, 2020 at 3 p.m. EST. Registration is available at:  https://bit.ly/307SZ6M

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SALT Virtual Series: Social Justice in Action: Incorporating Anti-Racism Frameworks into Core Law School Classes

Posted on July 29, 2020 by davidafinger
        In an effort to encourage law schools across the country to take affirmative steps to promote justice, eradicate racism, and support their law school communities in light of pervasive injustices, SALT has organized a virtual series featuring law school teachers sharing their expertise on how to educate the next generation of lawyers, support students of color, and dismantle structural inequality and racism in the United States. SALT is hosting monthly panel discussions on ways to combat racism and promote equity in law school. The first webinar, Incorporating Anti-Racism Frameworks into Core Law School Classes, will be held  on July 30, 2020.  The webinar will be recorded and made available on the SALT website. 

THURSDAY, July 30 at 3:00 pm –Incorporating Anti-Racism Frameworks into Core Law School Classes  
Register Here:  https://bit.ly/2Oewk1K
Submit Questions Here:  https://bit.ly/2ZOrMFP

Tiffany Atkins, Elon University School of Law, Dorothy Brown, Emory University School of Law, Jane Cross, NOVA Southeastern University College of Law, Hugh Mundy, UIC John Marshall Law School

NOTE:  We are collecting questions for the panelists in advance. Please submit your questions here:  https://bit.ly/2ZOrMFP

Upcoming Monthly Webinars:  Always at 3:00 pm Eastern 
August 21:  Promoting Equity and Inclusion in Online Teaching
September 18:  Racialized Trauma and Fatigue Among Academic Activists
October 16: Anti-Racist Hiring Practices   

Please share your reflections on the July webinar here.

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