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Best Practices For Legal Education

Source of information on current reforms in legal education arising from the publication of Roy Stuckey’s Best Practices for Legal Education and the Carnegie Foundation’s Educating Lawyers.
By Mary Lynch, Editor

Post Frequency: 1/day

Last Entry: July 19, 2010 at 23:07:04

Collaboration and the Development of Best Practices for Legal Education

Posted on November 19, 2008
The Midwest Clinical Conference was held in Bloomington, Indiana at the University of Indiana School of Law last week. (Terrific conference, by the way…well organized and very vibrant presentations). Kudos to Amy Applegate, Carwena Wang, and the rest of the Indiana clinical faculty for hosting! The theme of the conference was “Building Bridges: Creating Clinical [...

THE ELECTION AND BEST PRACTICES

Posted on November 05, 2008
For many of us in the United States, these past 24 hours have been filled with emotion. We experienced the most inclusive voting in our country’s history, the election of the first African American president, the power of a people’s movement and the promise of change in the midst of very difficult times...

First Year Practicum Course

Posted on November 02, 2008
My colleague Jenny Moore permitted me to post this course description for Practicum. She, Alfred Mathewson and Sergio Pareja are each teaching one section of First Year Contracts. The Practicum is a one credit course connected to Contracts. Here is her description: University of New Mexico School of Law Practicum course (Fall 2008) OVERVIEW: The goal of the first year [...

Best Practices and Math for Lawyers

Posted on November 01, 2008
I have been getting some feedback from members of the bar that recent graduates are not as savvy about math and accounting as they have been in the past. I was assured it was not just UNM graduates, but it made me think about the recommendation in Best Practices to prepare students for the practice [...

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Bar Passage and Best Practices for Legal Education

Posted on October 27, 2008
My colleague Alfred Mathewson always makes me think. He came back from the American Bar Association Bar Exam Passage conference last week. He had attended the Crossroads conference at the University of Washington too. He had some interesting observations...

More Assessment at the AALS Annual Meeting

Posted on October 22, 2008
I am really excited about moderating and serving as commentator of the second session of the Joint Program sponsored by the Clinical and Professional Responsibility Sections to be held in San Diego on Wednesday, January 7. It is on assessment and is going to be very interactive...

11th Annual Northwest Clinical Conference: On Assessment

Posted on October 21, 2008
Wish you all could have been there for the 11th Annual Northwest Clinical Conference at the beautiful Sleeping Lady Conference Center outside Leavenworth in Washington’s Cascade Mountains. Our topic? A central Best Practices issue: Assessment...

What do clinics have to do with US News & World Report? The unfortunate answer is ?not much?

Posted on October 16, 2008
If it’s fall, then the US News & World Report law school rankings ballots are arriving in law professor mailboxes everywhere. More specifically, clinic directors are receiving the separate clinical specialty ballots (as are teachers of the other separate specialty rankings), and four members of every law school faculty will get the annual “peer [...

Best Practices Makes The Chronicle

Posted on October 06, 2008
Thanks to our friends at the Clinicians With Not Enough To Do blog for finding this: Print: Due Processors: Educators Seek a Digital Upgrade for Teaching Law - Chronicle.com By PETER MONAGHAN Seattle In 1871, Christopher Columbus Langdell, a prominent jurist who had joined the law faculty at Harvard University, hit on the idea of compiling thick, imposing ?casebooks? [...

Mark Your Calendars for the 2009 AALS Workshop on Clinical Legal Education

Posted on October 02, 2008
From Jane Spinak: Dear Colleagues, On behalf of the workshop committee, I am sending a brief description of the May workshop so that you can start planning your trip soon. We will be issuing RFPs in October for the two concurrent sessions that are being planned and for organizing the affinity group meetings described below...

Passion, Context Redux (Part 2)

Posted on September 30, 2008
As I noted in my last post, one of the fun aspects of getting a few gray hairs is that we sometimes are around long enough to see a few of our ideas come to fruition. In my article Infusing Passion and Context into the Traditional Curriculum Through Experiential Learning, 51 J...

Almost No Correlation between Scholarship Production and Teaching Effectiveness

Posted on September 29, 2008
I hesitated to post this now because I really want to see some creative feedback on the previous post from Carolyn Grose! Please DO RESPOND to Carolyn’s excellent post. However, this was simply TOO good to wait to share - here’s some news from the TAXLAW BLOG that confirms what Best Practices has been “preaching”! Barton: No Correlation [...

Queries from the Best Practices Implementation Committee

Posted on September 29, 2008
We had a fantastic time in Seattle a few weeks ago, and I for one felt reinvigorated and excited about this great project we’re all involved in — you know, the one about totally reforming legal education? What we didn’t get either from the Best Practices Meets Reality workshop (see my earlier post on September [...

Passion, Context, Redux (Part 1)

Posted on September 26, 2008
A fun aspect of getting a few gray hairs: we’re around long enough to see our ideas come to fruition. Some years ago I wrote about the important role of experiential learning in providing context for law students. Passion, Context, and Lawyering Skills: Choosing Among Simulated and Real Clinical Experiences, 7 Clin...

Best Practices in Law Schools Survey is great; but what is ?clinical??

Posted on September 23, 2008
So, Deborah Rhode’s Best Practices in Law Schools Survey just hit my school, probably yours too. Brilliant concept, superb execution. Very excited about the potential impact of delivering real, solid, accurate information to USNWR respondents...

Process: Conversations and PR

Posted on September 23, 2008
Back on June 12, I posted about our “baby step” curriculum reform efforts at the University of Washington Law School last year: information gathering, conversations, and making what we currently do more visible to ourselves. Visit the website for the Crossroads Conference that I’ve been talking about in my recent posts...

Crossroads and Curriculum Reform Processes

Posted on September 19, 2008
Back on June I2, I noted that lots of folks are thinking about what processes are most likely to produce successful curricular reform. At the Crossroads Conference, we had a very interesting plenary on “Institutional Processes for Curriculum Reform”...

More Conversations on Professional Identity

Posted on September 17, 2008
For a number of years I’ve taught a course on Access to Justice that satisfied the externship classroom component requirement. Because we are restructuring our externship program, when I taught the class spring quarter the students who were taking the class only to satisfy the requirement were moved to our new externship course...

Counting Clinical Opportunities

Posted on September 16, 2008
I just finished writing a letter to the editor of National Jurist about the magazine?s ranking of the ?Best Law Schools for Practical Training? in the September issue. They don?t have a letter to the editor section, so I don?t expect it to get it published, but I did want to educate the magazine about Best [...

Materials and Podcasts From UW?s Crossroads Conference

Posted on September 16, 2008
As you’ve heard from already heard from Carolyn Grose, the conference held at the University of Washington School of Law in early September on Legal Education at the Crossroads: Ideas to Accomplishments: Sharing New Ideas for an Integrated Curriculum was a great success...

Thinking About Learning Goals

Posted on September 16, 2008
One of the more surprising aspects of law teaching is how hard it is to articulate with specificity the outcomes we are trying to achieve. Our goals seem too obvious to even discuss ? until we try to pin them down. The challenge of identifying learning goals is present at all levels of academic decision-making, [...

Working with State Bar Associations on Best Practices

Posted on September 12, 2008
The New York Bar Association’s Committee on Legal Education and Admission to the Bar invited me to present to them on Best Practices — the book, the BLOG and the movement! I did so this past Wednesday September 10th. Committee members were very interested and asked many questions...

Dispatch from the Crossroads (of innovation and reform)

Posted on September 09, 2008
Setting: Seattle. It?s sunny and warm. Mt. Rainier beams down on us like a wise and indulgent grandfather. We?re all set for 42 hours of thought, discussion and plotting revolution in and of the legal academy. And that?s what we do. Random observations: lots of men here...

ABA Council on Legal Education, Outcome Measures Committee Report

Posted on September 06, 2008
I just saw that the Outcome Measures Report is posted on the ABA web site. The Outcome Measure Committee was chaired by Randy Hertz and is a tour de force. The Report cites Best Practices and the Carnegie Report extensively, it then goes on to look at legal education in other countries, accreditation in other disciplines and regional accreditation [...

The Policies Not the People: Intercultural Relations

Posted on August 31, 2008
In Ireland recently, my family and I went on a tour with Denis Ryan, a Celtic folk musician, historian and tour guide. He took us on an anthropological tour of the Dingle Peninsula. We showed us the Ogham stones, Dun Beag, a fort built in 500 B.C., beehive huts in Faran, the Reasc Stone, the [...

Law Professors and Context-Based Education: The Clinic and the Classroom

Posted on August 15, 2008
New Mexico?s clinical model is quite unusual as far as clinic models go. All of us who teach in the clinic also teach in the classroom and many faculty members rotate through the clinic. While the model has its challenges, we think the benefits far outweigh those challenges...

Curriculum Reform: Best Processes?

Posted on June 12, 2008
In reviewing proposals submitted for the University of Washington’s conference Legal Education at the Crossroads: Ideas to Implementation Conference to be held in Seattle on Sept. 5-7, one theme that has surfaced is “process”: How do we get it to happen? What processes will be most helpful? We expect to have both showcase and workshop sessions relating [...

More on Cultural Knowledge, Self-awareness and Intercultural Communication

Posted on June 05, 2008
Over the last 18 years I have, fairly regularly, come to the beautiful, Spanish colonial town of Guanajuato, Mexico to teach in the Guanajuato Summer Law Institute. For the last three years, I have directed the program. Each time I come, I make more Mexican friends and I learn more about the Mexican culture...

Using Clickers in the Criminal Law classroom

Posted on June 04, 2008
At the conclusion of our second year of using “clickers” (the CPS system from eInstruction) in several classes at Albany Law School, I asked students in the Criminal Law class what they thought. Question 1: How did the use of CPS enhance your learning of the course material? Here are some of their responses: Preparing my answers for [...

Legal Education at the Crossroads

Posted on June 04, 2008
I agreed to join the Best Practices Blog author list at the AALS clinical conference in Tucson , but of course it took me awhile to figure out how to actually do it. Anyway, I’m delighted to be joining this exciting effort. If I had any doubts that legal education is at a crossroads, those doubts [...

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