Announcements

UNMSOL Works to Improve Legal Education

The University of New Mexico School of Law has joined a consortium of ten law schools nationwide that will look at ways to improve how law schools operate. The network, led by Stanford Law School and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, will address topics ranging from curricula to providing more practical, real-world training for law students. Other schools participating are: City University of New York School of Law, University of Dayton School of Law, Georgetown University Law Center, Harvard Law School, New York University School of Law, Southwestern University School of Law, and Vanderbilt University Law School. For more information about the project, see New York Times Article

The Law Library has created an annotated bibliography to help the Law faculty with the project. The materials are arranged in four broad categories: Planning Process, Outcomes, Educational Program and Methodology, and Assessment. Click on the link for access to the material described. Faculty members should feel free to recommend additional works for the bibliography by contacting the reference librarians.

Other law librarians or members of law school faculties who are interested in curricular planning are encouraged to submit recommendations for additional articles to include in the bibliography. Please submit suggestions to law librarian, Susan Lupton at lupton@law.unm.edu.

Planning Process

Edward Rubin, "What's Wrong with Langdell's Method, and What to Do About It", 60 Vand. L. Rev. 609 (2007)

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Outcomes

Roy Stuckey, "Teaching with Purpose: Defining and Achieving Desired Outcomes in Clinical Law Courses", 13 Clinical Law Review 807 (2007)Summary of article

    • This article is premised on the author’s belief that clinical teachers have failed to articulate and demonstrate the important learning that occurs uniquely or can be accomplished best in clinical law courses. It questions whether clinical teachers are focusing their time and energy on achieving the educational objectives that can be most effectively and efficiently accomplished in clinical courses. The first part of the article observes that developing professional competence is the primary objective of legal education and explains why experiential education is essential for developing professional competence. It then examines the educational objectives that can best be achieved through all types of experiential legal education courses and discusses the unique strengths of each type of experiential course: simulation-based, practice observation and client representation. The article concludes that, although law schools in the United States cannot fully prepare students for practice in three years, they can do a much better job, if they give students more opportunities to engage in legal problem-solving and to practice the tasks that lawyers perform and if clinical teachers use their time and resources as carefully and thoughtfully as possible to achieve clearly defined outcomes.

Educational Program and Methodology

Alan Lerner, "Using our Brains: What Cognitive Science and Social Psychology Teach us About Teaching Law Students to Make Ethical, Professionally Responsible, Choices" (January 12, 2005). University of Pennsylvania Law School. Scholarship at Penn Law. Paper 122Summary of article

    • Throughout our lives, below the level of our consciousness, each of us develops values, intuitions, expectations, and needs that powerfully affect both our perceptions and our judgments. Placed in situations in which we feel threatened, or which implicate our values, our brains, relying on those implicitly learned, emotionally weighted, memories, may react automatically, without reflection or the opportunity for reflective interdiction. We can "downshift," to primitive, self-protective problem solving techniques. Because these processes operate below the radar of our consciousness, automatic, "emotional" reaction, rather than thoughtful, reasoned analysis may drive our responses to stressful questions of ethics and professional responsibility.

Gerald Hess, "Improving Teaching and Learning in Law School: Faculty Development Research, Principles and Programs", 12 Widener Law Review 443 (2006) Summary of article

    • How can we improve our teaching and our students’ learning? What can we do to inspire and support our colleagues’ efforts to become more effective legal educators? What principles guide the design, implementation and evaluation of faculty development programs? This article explores those questions through the literature on faculty development for instructional improvement in colleges and law schools. Part I of this article defines faculty development and describes the broad range of topics relevant to the improvement of teaching and learning. Part II synthesizes a set of principles for designing effective faculty development activities and programs. Part III explores in depth the central role of feedback and pedagogical knowledge in instructional improvement. Finally, Part IV articulates a model for evaluating faculty development programs and summarizes the empirical studies that assess the effectiveness of instructional improvement activities.

Hillary Sale, "Educating Lawyers" U Iowa Legal Studies Research Paper No. 07- 18 (2007) forthcoming in Journal of College Student DevelopmentSummary of article

    • Educating Lawyers, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching's new book, explores legal education and urges changes. Educating Lawyers attempts to provide a view of legal education through the lenses of the educational processes for clergy, engineers, nurses, and physicians. A premise of the study is that professional education's value depends on linking it successfully to practitioners and the public that they serve. The study first explores the Socratic method, which is key to students learning a common language and posits that over-reliance on it can create gaps in moral and ethical training. Better transparency in the classroom can address this concern. The study also concludes that experience with clients and ethical substance are missing from the traditional law school curriculum. These are issues that should be addressed and for which the price is high. Yet, legal classrooms, however they are configured, cannot resolve the fact that many law students do not arrive at studying the law through some sort of calling to the profession as do most of those choosing medical or religious professions. The study's failure to account for this ?input? issue diminishes the value of its proposed solutions. To some extent, dissatisfaction of recent graduates is not the fault of legal education or even the profession, but instead can be attributed to uncertainty and youth. Making the changes proposed, including more practice oriented opportunities, may help students learn deeper and better, but the real solution may well be to decrease, in some cases dramatically, the number of potential lawyers they admit, screening not just for aptitude, but for desire. The financial consequences of such a change would likely put many schools out of business. Over time, it would also decrease the lawyers available to fulfill the social contract with which the study began its review.

Assessment

Jon Garon, "Take Back the Night: Why an Association of Regional Law Schools will Return Core Values to Legal Education and Provide an Alternative to Tiered Ranking" 38 University of Toledo Law Review 517 (2007) Summary of article

    • American legal education produces tens of thousands of well-trained attorneys who provide competent legal service to the public. Despite our success, the system of legal education is on a path to ruin because of the confluence of the American Bar Association ("ABA") accreditation, U.S. News and World Report ("U.S. News") influence and the Association of American Law Schools ("AALS") hegemony. The system of legal education is fundamentally broken not because of the legal education produced, but because of the social and economic cost to the students and the public. The students have too few price choices and far too much debt while the public has legal services that are too expensive to provide meaningful representation for a significant portion of the population. Moreover, as preferred pedagogical and institutional choices have evolved into baseline accreditation requirements, the ability to reach a broadly diverse group of law students has been stymied. The public is being priced out of legal services, and the racial disparities threaten the credibility and stability of our legal system.