News
PUTTING KNOWLEDGE INTO PRACTICE
Legal education reform is making news. Find some of the most interesting articles here.
Professor Ben Madison explores how students develop their “professional identities,” –as recommended by the Carnegie report—through journaling assignments. Journals, he observes, help students appreciate the need for mentorship, experience the challenge of balancing client confidences with obtaining meaningful help with ethical concerns, and determine what kind of lawyers they want to be.
Legal Pedagogy
By Ben Madison
The California bar’s task force is set to issue recommendations in December 2013 regarding whether to impose a practical skills training requirement on lawyers applying for admission. Whether the country’s largest bar decides to adopt hands-on experience requirements for admission will undoubtedly have great implications for other states’ law schools.
There is pushback, however, even from those who support practical skills training. “I don’t like the idea of the state bar saying, ‘This is what you should be teaching…’ Law schools should decide what they teach. Not the bar,” said Erwin Chemerinsky.
WSJ Law Blog
By Sam Favate
Last week, we announced that we now recognize ETL Fellows for their contributions to legal education. Professor Benjamin Madison of Regent University School of Law is among our first six. This article by his school details his role in advancing legal education.
Regent University
By Rachel Judy
LawWeek Colorado recently featured a story on Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers, highlighting the twenty law schools around the country that have already joined our efforts. The article included interviews with three Colorado lawyers who spoke about the steep learning curve for graduates and the need to train practice-ready lawyers.
LawWeek Colorado
By Meg Satrom
In their latest podcast, Law Schooled, a student forum blog on law school reform asks the following questions: Should law students have a say in legal education reform? Why should law students have a say in their education when elementary and high schoolers do not? What does have a say mean?
A ‘say’ is not enough, says one student. Read that response here.
One student’s exploration of whether the phrase “think like a lawyer” has lost a uniform definition, if not all meaning altogether. Here’s her take on this “flurry of semantical, romantical fun,” inspired by Judith Welch Wegner’s Reframing Legal Education’s “Wicked Problems”.
Law Schooled
The Legal Skills Prof Blog provides seven tips for how law firms and attorneys can make sure that skills-based legal education is a priority--including making a commitment to interview at schools with strong skills programs, like those in our Consortium.
Legal Skills Prof Blog
By Scott Fruehwald
A recent blog post by Jeff Lipshaw on the inevitability of multi-disciplinarity in law practice made comparisons to a Wall Street Journal article* that called for expansion of the undergraduate business major:
“. . .I understand this is about undergraduate education, and not a professional school . . . But it's the directional thrust about disciplines that I think we need to take very, very seriously.“
Law blogger Scott Greenfield makes clear in his response that he is not convinced. He cautions against “hopping on the speeding train”:
“[T]he use of the word "interdisciplinary" in law school scares me. Greatly. First, if students aren't gaining a breadth of knowledge in undergrad sufficient to prepare them to take a viable role in society after law school, then the problem seems to be that they should either address the failure at the undergrad level or not admit them to law school.”
According to Lipshaw, Nancy Rapoport, UNLV professor (and former dean of the law schools at Houston and Nebraska), suggests that "students don't get those contextual and non-legal skills from their undergraduate liberal arts education."
From the abstract of Rapoport's essay, "Changing the Modal Law School: Rethinking U.S. Legal Education in (Most) Schools":
. . . [L]aw schools should do more to explain how one’s perspective is both limiting and mutable. Too many law schools suggest that students can “see” different perspectives by, essentially, merely thinking harder.
* The Wall Street Journal article includes an interview with Bill Sullivan, Director of Educating Tomorrow's Lawyers.
Multiple Sources
Professor David Thomson gave a talk on outcomes reform in legal education on March 29, 2012, at a conference sponsored by the Center for Excellence in Law Teaching at Albany Law School. He shared some of his thoughts on the topic and his presentation materials here.
Law School 2.0
By David Thomson
Dean Chemerinsky’s most recent law review article on meaningful law school reform discusses clinical/ experiential learning, the need for giving feedback to students, and the realities of budget limitations. “Legal education has changed remarkably little in over a century," he notes. “Change is long overdue.”
Legal Skills Prof Blog
By Scott Fruehwald