PrawfsBlawg

Thursday, September 02, 2010

Pro Bono/Public Service Graduation Requirements: Yay or Nay?

According to A Handbook on Law School Pro Bono Programs, published by the AALS in June 2001, "123 law schools currently have pro bono opportunities available for their students." These programs are relatively new, with Tulane in 1987 becoming "the first American law school to institute an administratively supported service program for the express purpose of instilling an ethic of pro bono service within all law students. This program was also the first pro bono graduation requirement in an American law school, requiring all students to perform 20 hours of law-related public service in their third year of law school." 

According to the report, as of 2001, 14 schools, including Tulane, have "pro bono graduation requirements programs," i.e., they "require students to perform a set number of hours of law-related public service. The number of hours required by these programs ranges from 20 to 70. The students’ service is pro bono as they receive neither academic credit nor pay for their service."  Another 12 schools have "public service requirement programs," under which they "require students to perform law-related public service but are flexible in the form of the service, allowing service in pro bono placements, externships, clinics, and/or internships to count towards the requirement. Some of these programs allow the requirement to be met only through participation in a for-credit clinic. A few of the programs do not require actual service but allow the requirement to be met by exposure to poverty law through a class or independent study." Gonzaga's program is similar to this latter type of program, "except that it allows non-legal service to meet the graduation requirement." The remaining schools have voluntary pro bono/public service opportunities under which they might utilize a referral system or public service center.

Having never been at a school with a mandatory pro bono/public service requirement, I am curious if those at such schools could share their experiences. It seems like a great idea to me, but obviously there are also costs involved. I am thus curious to see how those with personal knowledge have seen such requirements play out. I am also curious to see how those at schools without such a requirement feel about adding one. You can respond by answering the following poll and/or leaving a comment.

 

-Colin Miller

Posted by Evidence ProfBlogger on September 2, 2010 at 09:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Wednesday, September 01, 2010

Two (or more) Bodies: Problem or Opportunity?

Not sure how I ended up on its email distribution list but I often receive email blasts from the American Association of University Professors. Today's was about how universities could address the increasingly challenging situation of hiring faculty with a partner or spouse who is also an academic. I personally would love to see FSU hire more couples (or threesomes, or more; those 3 of you who have read Privilege or Punish know that I've got nothing against the polyamorous).  I think I read not long ago that UVA has 11 couples on its law school's faculty. If true, um, wow!

Anyway, after the jump is the email and its relevant links. Feel free to weigh in with comments on success/horror stories. Please don't use the comments to make specifically disparaging remarks though!

Continue reading "Two (or more) Bodies: Problem or Opportunity?"

Posted by Dan Markel on September 1, 2010 at 09:18 PM in Life of Law Schools | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Greetings

Greetings.  Brendan Maher here, and I'm very much looking forward to guest-posting over the next month.  I’m particularly fond of civil procedure and ERISA and especially love talking about the latter, which might make me the most boring cocktail guest in the entire world.   I believe I make up for it by being an excellent dancer.  

One of the attractions of being a law professor is how idea-centric it is.  Ideas make life interesting and the future exciting, and the 21st century's a wonderful time for professional idea-lovers, because the internet makes so many serious ideas accessible for both consumption and discussion.   SSRN, Westlaw, and various blogs have influenced the evolution of my own thinking in ways that are undoubtedly positive but also…fun.  Which, to paraphrase Kurt Vonnegut, is a thing we shouldn’t forget to have. 

In short: I’m delighted to be joining the roster of guest Prawfs.  Looking forward to a month of conversations!

Posted by Brendan Maher on September 1, 2010 at 07:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

What Class That Is Currently Optional At Many Law Schools Should Be Made Mandatory?

I would like to thank Dan Markel for inviting me back for another guest stint at PrawfsBlawg. The last time I was here, I led my posts with an entry about what class more law schools should add to their curricula. I ended up getting some very good responses: classes in plea bargaining, depositions, law firm management, statistics, state constitutionalism, etc. Based upon the good responses, I thought I would lead this set of guest posts with an entry asking what class is currently optional at many schools but should be made mandatory.

Of course, this begs the question of whether law schools should increase the number of mandatory classes, so let's start with this poll:

Continue reading "What Class That Is Currently Optional At Many Law Schools Should Be Made Mandatory?"

Posted by Evidence ProfBlogger on September 1, 2010 at 12:17 PM in Life of Law Schools, Teaching Law | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)

Course Releases vs. Reducing the Teaching Load

As usual, I should begin with an apology for my sporadic (if ever there was a euphemism) blogging here as of late.  Part of it has been guest-stints elsewhere; part of it has been a little bit of writing (why can't book reviews have 24,000 words?!?).  But I hope to resume relatively normal Prawfs status shortly, and am bolstered in my hopes by the fact that I have a course release this fall, meaning that I'm teaching one class, as opposed to our usual two (we're a fairly strict 2+2 school, regardless of credits or enrollments).

This is the first time in my career that I've had a course release. Miami (where I started) had a strict 10-credit-per-year program for juniors, and American had not, until this year, allowed tenure-track juniors to participate in the course release program available to tenured profs, at least in part because entry-level folks get a course release their first two years anyway (which I missed by spending my first two years somewhere else). I'm not trying to generate sympathy; I love teaching, and actually miss having a big class this semester to go along with my seminar--or at least I will until grading time. 

Needless to say, because I have too much time on my hands, this got me thinking about the merits of course-release programs. In one sense, they're awesome. They give their beneficiaries time to write, to blog, and to otherwise catch up on the myriad projects on which they might have hypothetically fallen behind while teaching 14 credits last year. And at American, at least, this has all been with an eye toward slowly moving our faculty toward a three-course teaching load. The strongest counterargument, I have to think, is that they're not great for students--the more of us who have courses "released," the fewer courses we can offer collectively, and so either our offerings become less diverse, or we become more dependent upon visitors or adjuncts.

Continue reading "Course Releases vs. Reducing the Teaching Load"

Posted by Steve Vladeck on September 1, 2010 at 11:47 AM in Blogging, Life of Law Schools, Steve Vladeck, Teaching Law | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Rotations

Hard to believe that the new month is soon upon us, and with it, the indisputable end to summer. Alas. One bright shining light amidst this gloom: rotations!

I'm thrilled to welcome for the first time at the blog Emily Gold Waldman (Pace) and Brendan Maher (OKCU); and to welcome back some familiar voices including Rick Esenberg (Marquette); Lior Strahilevitz (UChicago); Susan Kuo (South Carolina); and Colin Miller (JMLS).

I was delinquent in getting the rotations set up over the summer, so I owe a special thanks to Miriam Baer and Eric Johnson for pitching in overtime during August, as well as all our great July bloggers. Thanks again for all your posts!

Posted by Dan Markel on August 31, 2010 at 10:23 PM in Blogging | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

My Devalued Marriage

I recently kissed my wife good-bye at the airport and took off for California, where, just days before, a federal district court had declared a ban on gay marriage to be unconstitutional.

Many of those who support the ban on gay marriage argue that marriage between a man and a woman will be devalued if same-sex couples are allowed to marry. "Huh?" you may be thinking. "How could that possibly be the case?" 

I know, it sounds absurd. But amazingly enough, though it defies logic, I actually noticed the effect as soon as my plane crossed into California airspace. It was weird, but I could actually feel my marriage devaluing.

Continue reading "My Devalued Marriage"

Posted by Eric E. Johnson on August 31, 2010 at 09:52 PM in Constitutional thoughts, Current Affairs, Television, Travel | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)

The Dude From Stratford-Upon-Avon Abides

I'm happy to say that the phenomenal Shakespeare-Coen Brothers mashup The Two Gentlemen of Lebowski, which I believe I posted about at some point, is going to be published in book form.  More here.  As if I needed to say more to recommend it, here is a stage direction from the work: Alarums. Enter Oliver and the two NIHILISTS, bearing a marmot.  

Posted by Paul Horwitz on August 31, 2010 at 09:29 PM in Paul Horwitz | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Monday, August 30, 2010

Aspiring Prawfs: Go to Phoenix

Some of my peeps at ASU are hosting a cool conference on Oct 2 for those folks who are aspiring to get in the teaching law game. It's a pretty good setup, naturally, and more evidence of ASU bringing their a-game. (Yes, they're hosting Prawfsfest! 8 in December--how could you tell?)

 

 

Posted by Dan Markel on August 30, 2010 at 11:22 PM in Getting a Job on the Law Teaching Market, Life of Law Schools | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

Form and Substance in the Reform of American Legal Education

The reform-of-legal-education blogging bandwagon continues to roll.  In the legal blogosphere, a good deal of attention has been paid in particular to Jason Mazzone's post at Balkinization suggesting the division of the law school into two physically separate departments, one focused on the study of law as an academic subject and the other on professional education in lawyering.  It also features interesting comments from Jerome Kowalski, who also promotes a book of his on the subject and who laments the absence of some form of mandatory clerkship prior to bar admission.  Both of these points have some validity, I think, but both of them also raise questions about what, exactly, we are debating in talking about reforming legal education, and whether we are confusing form for substance.  

Continue reading "Form and Substance in the Reform of American Legal Education"

Posted by Paul Horwitz on August 30, 2010 at 08:44 PM in Paul Horwitz | Permalink | Comments (14) | TrackBack (0)

Tea Parties and the Ethnocentrism of the Left

The recent event to “restore honor” hosted by Glenn Beck before the Washington Monument provides an occasion to ask once more that question that occupied blogs and op-ed pages back in April: Are Tea Partiers or other attendees at these virtually 100% white and conservative events “racist”? My perverse inclination is to answer, “of course – and so are we all.” In the words, of the Avenue Q song, everyone – you, me, and, yes, the Tea Partiers – is all a little bit racist. The Tea Party’s critics are just more adept at making their targets feel self-conscious about their prejudices.

I’d qualify the paragraph above by stipulating that, by “racist,” I mean “ethnocentric” in Kinder’s and Kam’s sense of the term. The Tea Partiers – like everyone else – tend to divide human society into in-groups and out-groups and use those divisions to reinforce their own sense of identity and self-worth. (Donald Kinder & Cindy Kam, Us Against Them: Ethnocentric Foundations of American Opinion at pages 31-41). As Kinder and Kam note, ethnocentrism “is not a sickness”: “Ethnocentrism is normal.” (page 8). Indeed, its ubiquity suggests that it might be hardwired into our brains by natural selection, as a way of giving ourselves a sense of self-esteem and security. Henri Tajfel’s “minimal group experiments” show that people develop group loyalties and biases from the most transient and trivial characteristics – say, their estimates of dots on a computer screen (over-estimators consistently favor their fellow over-estimators and under-estimators favor under-estimators!)

It should not be a surprise that white, middle-class, suburban and rural evangelically Protestant Christian homeowners will develop a bias favoring similar people. Their polled values and beliefs regarding different ethnic groups, – hard-working or lazy, intelligent or unintelligent, etc – seem to reflect these biases. (Incidentally, Tea Partiers do not score exceptionally higher on such measures of ethnocentrism than whites in general).

But you, Gentle Reader, do you harbor any ethnocentric biases towards those Tea Partiers whom you deride as racists?

Continue reading "Tea Parties and the Ethnocentrism of the Left"

Posted by Rick Hills on August 30, 2010 at 03:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (12) | TrackBack (0)

Sunday, August 29, 2010

The Rise (and Rise?) of the Skype Interview

Through the grapevine, I've now heard that some schools are asking/requiring candidates to do Skype interviews first. I'm not sure if this is in lieu of a DC screening interview or as a pre-cursor to one, but I was wondering what y'all thought of this as a practice that appcomms should adopt. To my mind, I can see the benefit of using the Skype interview as a substitute for most DC interviews because it would give the candidates and the appcomms more time if needed than the 1/2 hour slot, and would probably mean that more due diligence could be done on both ends prior to the meeting in person for a callback. If used as a substitute for DC it would also cut financial costs, which some schools are certainly mindful of during these tight times.  But I have no experience with this and perhaps those who have done these (either as candidate or interviewer) might have different reactions. Please feel free to share your thoughts or recommendations in the comments.

Posted by Dan Markel on August 29, 2010 at 06:12 PM in Getting a Job on the Law Teaching Market, Life of Law Schools | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBack (0)

Shawn Bayern's Conveyance Interpreter

My FSU colleague, the incomparable Shawn Bayern, is generously circulating an instructional tool for those who teach property.  Here's how wunderprawf Al Brophy describes and reacts to this new teaching tool over at the Property Prof Blog.

I've been worried for some time about computers taking over; here's more evidence of it....

Shawn Bayern of Florida State University has a web program that is a "conveyance interpreter" that diagrams grants of estates ("To A for life, but if he becomes a lawyer, then to B for 21 years" and so on). The program uses a "context-free grammar" to understand the language of the conveyance, and then it generates an image that maps out the resulting property interests. Shawn borrowed the style of the images from diagrams that Andrea Peterson, his Property professor at Berkeley, used in class. In fact, Shawn wrote it when he was a property student.

I've been playing with it some this morning --- and I have to report that it's pretty darn cool. Just in time for the start of the new year. This could be the new teaching tool of the season! Hours and hours of fun just waiting you and your students.

For instance, [above you can see] the diagram Shawn's program drew for the grant "to A for life, then to B and her heirs if B survives A."  The "conveyance interpreter" is available here.

The fact that we're one step closer to our jobs being taken over by computers is a story for another time.

Now, Shawn, where's the program to evaluate the rule against perpetuities?

 

 

Posted by Dan Markel on August 29, 2010 at 04:20 PM in Property, Teaching Law | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)

PrawfsPuzzler: Law Prawfs Crawsword!

The first-ever Prawfs crossword puzzle! (Or should we say "crawsword" puzzle?)

There's only one special thing to note: In keeping with the hide-the-ball and antique-language traditions of law school, no warning is given in the clue when Latin is required.

Across:

1. Hypothetical estate

7. For a soft-spoken prof.

8. A grade awarded at some universities for academic dishonesty or lack of attendance

Continue reading "PrawfsPuzzler: Law Prawfs Crawsword!"

Posted by Eric E. Johnson on August 29, 2010 at 03:03 PM in Games | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Saturday, August 28, 2010

More on "Whither Law Schools?"

The posts by Rick and by Kristen Holmquist below on legal education are very interesting.  I also recommend both Jonathan Adler's post on the subject at the VC, as well as the comments on it (sometimes because they are right and sometimes because they illustrate some deeply held views about legal education).  Let me add two or three cents.

First, as some of the comments to Adler's post demonstrate and despite what some of his commenters seem to think, the distinction between "practical" and "theoretical" or "academic" law teaching, or between legal academics with significant practice experience and those with little experience, does not track the left-right divide.  Some left-leaning legal academics, including many who write on theoretical questions, have significant practice experience and bring it to bear in their teaching and scholarship.  Some right-leaning legal academics, or those who use methods generally associated with more conservative political views, have little practice experience and write more on a theoretical level and with an interdisciplinary bent (see "economics, law and").  Arguments about practice versus theory have no particular political valence.  

Continue reading "More on "Whither Law Schools?""

Posted by Paul Horwitz on August 28, 2010 at 12:51 AM in Paul Horwitz | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBack (0)

Friday, August 27, 2010

Law School and Lawyering: A Post by Kristen Holmquist (BerkeleyLaw)

Hey there - stopping by again to throw my two cents into the whither-law-school debate. As Rick Garnett notes below, the Bruce Newton piece "Preaching What They Don't Practice: Why Law Faculties'
Preoccupation with Impractical Scholarship and Devaluation of Practical Competencies Obstruct Reform in the Legal Academy" has gotten more than a little attention around the law blogs in the last few days. And I
guess I’m not surprised. It taps straight into the reform debate as it’s been framed (theory vs. practice; academy vs. profession). And it captures many reformers’ frustration with law school’s curricular inertia while our students are paying through the nose then and graduating a little too often without jobs.

I share, however, Rick’s frustration with the underlying assumption in this framing. That the ideas explored in interdisciplinary scholarship - ideas at the intersection of law and psychology and economics and
sociology, for example - are somehow irrelevant (or not very relevant) to 'practical' lawyering.  I've recently posted a draft that attempts to get at some of this. I don’t mean to diminish Newton’s concerns for our students. I simply hope to add to the discussion.  Here's the abstract:

Since the 2007 release of the Carnegie Report on the status of legal education, energy around reform has been tremendous. Indeed, schools of every rank have taken heed of the Report’s finding that while law school teaches students to think like lawyers, it woefully underprepares them to act as such. This essay challenges Carnegie and its conclusion that law school successfully teaches lawyerly thinking. The Report
artificially severs an attorney’s thinking from her doing and thus belies the interrelatedness of understanding, experience, evaluating and creating. It defines ‘thinking like a lawyer’ downward to a crisp and detached doctrinal analysis - one that looks more like law-as-puzzle than a serious attempt to solve complex human (or corporate) problems.
This narrow view obscures the context and content that lawyers work with and within, and it fails to reflect the more complex take on lawyering that lawyers and lawyering theorists describe. Sophisticated empirical
and theoretical accounts of lawyering recognize the recursive nature of knowledge and experience in a way that broadens our understanding of what it means to think like a lawyer.

Through this essay I attempt to fold context and content back in to our notion of lawyerly thinking. And I propose curricular and pedagogical changes that law schools might adopt to better reflect and encourage
this richer, fatter, understanding. While it is true that students’ lack of practical training may deny them the ability to write a fantastic brief, legal education’s problems are bigger than that. Law school’s consistent focus on case-method learning may also deny students the opportunity to engage in higher-order thinking about law and policy, about problems and goals, about potential paths, obstructions, and
solutions.

Kristen Holmquist is Academic Support Programs Director and Lecturer in Residence at UC Berkeley Law

Posted by Ethan Leib on August 27, 2010 at 10:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (9) | TrackBack (0)

Van Zandt steps down as dean at Northwestern

David Van Zandt, long-serving dean at Northwestern (my beloved alma mater) is stepping down to become president of The New School in New York. Van Zandt has served as dean since 1995 (he was hired during my 1L year) and has overseen some major curricular and faculty initiatives. These include an overwhelming emphasis on hiring JD/PhD's doing interdisciplinary and empirical scholarship, the development of an accelerated (and controversial) two-calendar-year JD program and three-year JD/MBA program, and curricular additions focusing on the "business" of practicing law. He also instituted one of the earliest formal VAP programs for people trying to break into law teaching (NU hired VAPs back in 1998) and formalized certain programs designed to prepare students for teaching careers.

Not everything he has done has universally praised. But even Brian Leiter, a frequent critique of the way Van Zandt has played the U.S. News game, labels him a "transformative" dean, saying "very few law school Deans have stamped a law school with as clear an identity" as he has. It will be interesting to see what direction the faculty takes in choosing a successor and whether the dean change reflects a course change for the school.

Posted by Howard Wasserman on August 27, 2010 at 12:06 PM in Howard Wasserman, Life of Law Schools | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

"Preaching What They Don't Practice"

A number of law-blogs have taken note of this paper, by Bruce Newton, called "Preaching What They Don't Practice:  Why Law Faculties' Preoccupation with Impractical Scholarship and Devaluation of Practical Competencies Obstruct Reform in the Legal Academy" (Phew!).  (See Bainbridge, Caron, Law Librarian, etc.)  Here is Newton's abstract:

In response to decades of complaints that American law schools have failed to prepare students to practice law, several prominent and respected authorities on legal education, including the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, recently have proposed significant curricular and pedagogical changes in order to bring American legal education into the twenty-first century. It will not be possible to implement such proposed curricular and pedagogical reforms if law schools continue their trend of primarily hiring and promoting tenure-track faculty members whose primary mission is to produce theoretical, increasingly interdisciplinary scholarship for law reviews rather than prepare students to practice law. Such impractical scholars, because they have little or no experience in the legal profession and further because they have been hired primarily to write law review articles rather than primarily to teach, lack the skill set necessary to teach students how to become competent, ethical practitioners. The recent economic recession, which did not spare the legal profession, has made the complaints about American law schools’ failure to prepare law students to enter the legal profession even more compelling; law firms no longer can afford to hire entry-level attorneys who lack the basic skills required to practice law effectively. This essay proposes significant changes in both faculty composition and law reviews aimed at enabling law schools to achieve the worthy goals of reformists such as the Carnegie Foundation.

Critiques like this are nothing new, of course, and (just as "of course") have some bite.  But, they can be (and I worry that Newton's might be) overstated.  Sure, we all remember (or know!) legal scholars and law teachers who seem way-disconnected from the practice of law and who we cannot imagine actually advising a client, putting together a deal, or arguing a case.  But, the suggestion that -- even at those awful, top-tier theoretician-factories that Newton has in his sights -- faculty members who are hired not only to teach skills and doctrine but also to investigate and reflect on the history, animating principles, normative failings, etc., of our craft and tradition (our learned profession) "lack the skill set necessary to teach students how to become competent, ethical practitioners" seems too sweeping.  The suggestion reflects, I suspect, a narrower-than-mine view of what it means to be a "competent, ethical practitioner" -- a real lawyer.

Nearly a year ago, responding to a claim (similar to Newton's) at the WSJ Law Blog that difficult economic times might result in a turn toward the "useful" in law schools ("Perhaps the focus will be more on teaching students on how to draft interrogatories than on reading John Rawls. If we’re reading Gerding correctly, law school may become less fun, but perhaps more useful."), I wrote: 

In my own view, for what it’s worth, it would be very sad if the lesson that law schools took away from all this is that they should become more narrowly technical and practitioner-preparatory in their approach.  In my view, law school needs to be *more* interdisciplinary, and the study of law needs to be approached *more*  like a humane discipline, than they currently are.  The world does not need, really, blinkered-but-efficient-and-proficient technicians; it does need, though, lawyer-citizen-leaders who are well read, ethically sensitive, public minded, and theoretically sophisticated.  There are huge problems with the profession, I think, but the answer to those problems is not, it seems to me, for law schools to resign themselves to the relatively unambitious task of providing fodder for the current (or post-crash) law-firm machine; instead, we need to produce people who have the ability and intellectual resources to transform the profession and help the profession to be what it should be.

This sounds, I admit, abstract and Ivory-Tower-ish (almost a caricature of out-of-touch tenured academics' self-important musings), even elitist.  I am uncomfortable with that.  To be clear, I think *practicing* law is (or, at least, should be) both "fun" and "useful" (it has certainly be fun for me!).  The disdain for everyday law practice that one sometimes encounters in the more rarified precincts of the academy is, at best, off-putting.  My sense, though . . . is that the *practice* of law, properly and richly understood, is . . . more (deeper, bigger, harder) than I think people give it credit for.  It is absolutely the role of good law schools to produce good lawyers; I'm just suggesting that the problems with the structure of the profession have not shown that the way to produce good lawyers is to shrink our understanding of what it means to be a good lawyer.  The big-firm model of legal-services delivery seems messed up and dysfunctional, no doubt.  I'm pretty sure, though, it's not because students have been reading too much Rawls.  (Well, maybe it is.  But it's not because they have been reading too much Jacques Maritain or Thomas Aquinas.  =-)  ). 

I think what I wrote is true, and is also responsive to some of what Newton is worried about.  To be clear:  It is essential that law schools provide, value, and reward the best possible legal-skills training to those students we are training to become lawyers.  But, it is also essential to remember -- those in the practice who are criticizing legal education need to remember -- that we are not only "training lawyers"; we are also forming professionals:  citizen-leaders and teachers who play a vital role in the project of securing and defending the rule of law in the service of the common good, as well as in helping people avoid and solve technical legal problems.  To say this is not to defend all hiring practices or all law schools' practices; it is just to warn against embracing too quickly a too-quick criticism.

Posted by Rick Garnett on August 27, 2010 at 10:58 AM in Life of Law Schools | Permalink | Comments (18) | TrackBack (0)

Thursday, August 26, 2010

What Can You Accomplish as a Lawyer? Renowned Lawyer and Legal Scholar Bruce Winick Has Died

I've just received the sad news that my friend and former colleague Bruce Winick, distinguished professor of Law & Medicine at the University of Miami School of Law for some 36 years has died.  Bruce will be most remembered as the co-founder, along with David Wexler of the University of Arizona, James E. Rogers School of Law, of the extraordinary scholarly and law reform enterprise known as Therapeutic Jurisprudence. TJ to its many friends, is the scholary study of how law and legal procedures influence the psychology of those who are subject to it (or practice in it), as well as the law reform project of altering the law to optimize its psychological advantages and minimize its psychological disadvantages.  TJ had its intellectual problems.  As Elyn Saks argued some years ago, there are all too many circumstances when the psychological consequences of legal choices are cross cutting (as for instance in forcibly medicating a person suffering severe psychosis).  Still, one would be hard pressed to name a body of academic legal scholarship that has had more law reform significance in the past quarter century.  Scores of drug courts, mental health courts, and other "problem solving" courts of all kinds in the US, Europe, Australia and elsewhere no doubt, trace their intellectual DNA to TJ.  In an era when criminal law in the US has been dominated by a widespread surrender to populist punitiveness, TJ was practically the only significant counter force in law reform.

Continue reading "What Can You Accomplish as a Lawyer? Renowned Lawyer and Legal Scholar Bruce Winick Has Died"

Posted by Jonathan Simon on August 26, 2010 at 03:51 PM in Criminal Law, Jonathan Simon, Judicial Process, Legal Theory | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

Free, Downloadable Casebook for Torts

This week I posted Volume One of a freely downloadable casebook for torts. After using three different casebooks over the past three years (I like changing things up), I decided to create my own for this year. It's available as a pdf through SSRN.

Not only should all instructors and students feel free to download this casebook and use it for free, but if any instructor out there would like to customize it, add to it, delete from it, etc., let me know, and I will be happy to give you the original document to work from. So, in an informal sense, it's open source. 

This casebook is extremely basic. There are no notes, no questions, no problems, and no exercises. Volume One only has cases, plus one statute. The value of the work is solely in terms of the editing. With no bells and whistles, it's not for everyone. But if you tend to use a casebook only for the cases, then mine might be worth checking out. 

Continue reading "Free, Downloadable Casebook for Torts"

Posted by Eric E. Johnson on August 26, 2010 at 03:09 PM in Teaching Law, Torts | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Criminal Justice and the Constitution in 2020: An ACS Conference at FSU

I'm thrilled to announce an upcoming conference at Florida State Law about "Criminal Justice and the Constitution in 2020." Everyone's invited--please tell all your crimprof friends, among others.

Florida State University College of Law and the American Constitution Society are pleased to present a symposium dedicated to an exploration of current and future developments in crime control and equality, punishment and the Constitution, national security and liberty, and citizenship and community. Click here to register for the conference. There is no fee to register but we do ask attendees to register in advance so we can plan accordingly. And if you're coming to town, let me know--and I'll fill you in on the relevant social stuff too.

Conference Schedule

Thursday, October 7 Evening Event:

Keynote Address by Steve Bright, Southern Center for Human Rights

Friday, October 8 Morning Events:

Opening Remarks by Professor Jack Balkin, Yale Law School

Panel One - National Security and Liberty:

Jack Balkin, Yale Law School

John Parry, Lewis & Clark Law School

Deborah Pearlstein, Princeton University Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs

Marc Rotenberg, Electronic Privacy Information Center

Chris Slobogin, Vanderbilt University Law School

Panel Two - Crime Control and Equality:

Susan Bandes, DePaul University College of Law/Florida State University College of Law

Darryl Brown, University of Virginia School of Law

Song Richardson, DePaul University College of Law

David Sklansky, UC Berkeley School of Law

Friday, October 8 Afternoon Events:

Panel Three - Punishment and the Constitution:

Doug Berman, The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law

Sharon Dolovich, UCLA School of Law

Reid Fontaine, Florida State University College of Law

Dan Markel, Florida State University College of Law

Panel Four - Citizenship and Community:

Jack Chin, University of Arizona College of Law

Bernard Harcourt, University of Chicago Law School

Wayne Logan, Florida State University College of Law

Richard Myers, UNC School of Law

Streaming video of the conference will be available at www.law.fsu.edu/events/criminallawconferencevideo.html.

 

Posted by Dan Markel on August 26, 2010 at 02:07 PM in Constitutional thoughts, Criminal Law, Current Affairs | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)