Archive for the ‘Law School (Teaching)’ Category

More Data on Classroom Laptop Use

posted by Sarah Waldeck

Jeff Sovern of St. John’s University School of Law recently conducted a research study that observed student laptop use in 60 sessions of various law school courses.  Although the study contains some methodological limitations (which Professor Sovern fully acknowledges), it is another window into how laptops affect classroom dynamics.  The full article can be found here and Professor Sovern’s abstract is reproduced below:

This article reports on how law students use laptops, based on observations of 1072 laptop users (though there was considerable overlap among those users from one class to another) during 60 sessions of six law school courses. Some findings:

 •More than half the upper-year students seen using laptops employed them for non-class purposes more than half the time, raising serious questions about how much they learned from class. By contrast, first-semester Civil Procedure students used laptops for non-class purposes far less: only 4% used laptops for non-class purposes more than half the time while 44% were never distracted by laptops.

•Students in exam courses were more likely to tune out when classmates asked and professors responded to questions and less likely to tune out when a rule was discussed or textual material read in class.

 •For first-semester students, policy discussions generated the highest level of distraction while displaying a PowerPoint slide which was not later posted on the web elicited the lowest level.

 •With some exceptions, what was happening in the class did not affect whether upper-year students tuned out or paid attention.

• The format used to convey information – lecture, calling on students, or class discussion – seemed to make little difference to the level of attention.

 •Student attentiveness to the facts of cases is comparable to their overall attention levels.

The article speculates that student decisions on whether to pay attention are responses to the tension between incentives and temptation. While the temptation to tune out probably remains constant, ebbs and flows in incentives may cause students to resist or yield to that temptation. Because first-semester grades have more of an impact on job prospects, first-semester students have a greater incentive than upper-year students to attend to classes. Similarly, because students probably anticipate that rules are more likely to be tested on exams, students perceive that they have more of an incentive to pay attention when rules are discussed. Conversely, students may suspect that matters asked about by classmates are less likely to be tested on and so their grades are unlikely to be affected if they miss the question and answer, reducing the incentive to pay attention.

Because of methodological limits to the study, the article notes that its conclusions cannot be considered definitive, and so it urges others to conduct similar studies.

  April 18, 2011 at 12:02 pm   Posted in: Law School (Teaching)   Print This Post   5 Comments

Digital Law Books: II

posted by Lawrence Cunningham

As we all migrate to the digital world, imagine the future of the law school course book by reflecting on its history, purposes, and promulgation over the seven generations since C.C. Langdell initiated our current mode of legal education in 1870.

Some see the future of digital course books as a radical shift, akin to the original revolution of Langdell’s Contracts casebook. Others dismiss it as a simple marketing maneuver, the way post-Langdell addition of notes, questions or problems might be regarded.

In a new essay, I look back at casebook history to find it suggests that digital course books are more likely to be something in between, an incremental but meaningful evolution. The essay, a chapter in a new book on the subject, engages with great innovations in law school course books over the past century-plus, highlighting historic contributions from luminaries across the century and today.

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  April 5, 2011 at 1:17 pm   Posted in: Contract Law & Beyond, Education, Law School (Scholarship), Law School (Teaching), Law Student Discussions, Law Talk, Teaching   Print This Post   No Comments

Technology Musings

posted by Taunya Banks

Recently the New York Times carried a front page story about an eighth grade girl who foolishly took a nude picture of herself with her cell phone and sent it to a fickle boy – sexting. The couple broke up but her picture circulated among her schools mates with a text message “Ho Alert” added by a frenemy.  In less than 24 hours, “hundreds, possibly thousands, of students had received her photo and forwarded it. In short order, students would be handcuffed and humiliated, parents mortified and lessons learned at a harsh cost.”  The three students who set off the “viral outbreak” were charged with disseminating child pornography, a Class C felony.

The story struck a nerve, not only with the affected community, but with the Times’ readers as well.  Stories about the misuse and dangers of technology provide us with opportunities to educate our students, and us. In a Washington State sexting incident, for example, the teen charged had to prepared a public service statement warning other teens about sexting to avoid harsher criminal penalties.  But the teen’s nude photo is still floating around.  Information has permanence on the internet.

Few of us appreciate how readily obtainable our personal information is on the internet.   Read the rest of this post »

  April 3, 2011 at 2:43 pm  Tags: academia, Google, Law School  Posted in: Culture, Google & Search Engines, Law School (Teaching), Legal Ethics, Privacy (Gossip & Shaming), Social Network Websites, Uncategorized   Print This Post   No Comments

Randomization Uber Alles?

posted by Dave Hoffman

Jim and Cassandra write:

“To Dave, we say that our enthusiasm for randomized studies is high, but perhaps not high enough to consider a duty to randomize among law school clinics or among legal services providers.  We provided an example in the paper of practice in which randomization was inappropriate because collecting outcomes might have exposed study subjects to deportation proceedings.  We also highlighted in the paper that in the case of a practice (including possibly a law school clinic) that focuses principally on systemic change, randomization of that practice is not constructive.  Instead, what should be done is a series of randomized studies of an alternative service provider’s practice in that same adjudicatory system; these alternative provider studies can help to assess whether the first provider’s efforts at systemic change have been successful.”

I meant to cabin my argument to law school clinics.  And I do understand that there may be very rare cases where collecting outcomes will hurt clients (such as deportation).  But what about a clinic that focuses on “systemic change.” Let’s assume that subsidizing such a clinic would be a good thing for a law school to do (or, put it another way, we think it is a good idea for current law students to incur more debt so that society gets the benefit of the clinics’ social agitation).  Obviously, randomization of client outcomes would be a terrible fit for measuring the success of such a clinic.  It would be precisely the kind of lamppost/data problem that Brian Leiter thinks characterizes much empirical work.

But that doesn’t mean that randomization couldn’t be useful in measuring other kinds of clinic outcomes.  What about randomization in the allocation of law student “employees” to the clinic as a way to measure student satisfaction in the “learning outcomes“? Or randomization of intake and utilizing different client contact techniques as a way of measuring client satisfaction with their representation (or feelings about the legitimacy of the system?)  One thing that the commentators in this symposium have tried to emphasize is that winning & losing aren’t the only outputs of the market for indigent legal services.  Controlled study of the actors in the system needn’t be constrained in the way that Jim and Cassandra’s reply to my modest proposal to mandate randomization suggest.

  March 29, 2011 at 1:23 pm   Posted in: Empirical Analysis of Law, Law Rev (Yale), Law School (Scholarship), Law School (Teaching), Symposium (What Difference Representation)   Print This Post   One Comment

Westlaw Next

posted by Sarah Waldeck

Lately I’ve found myself thinking more than I have for a long time about the process of legal research.  This is because of an intriguing article by Ronald E. Wheeler, Jr., the director of the library at the University of San Francisco Law School.   Wheeler’s article (which can be found here)  discusses Westlaw Next, the new search engine rolled out by Westlaw in 2010.  Several features distinguish Westlaw Next from Classic Westlaw; most notably, that Westlaw Next is a sort of “Google for lawyers” because it uses a crowd sourcing algorithm that relies on the actions of other Westlaw users to rank the relevance of documents retrieved in a search.   Wheeler’s article is a must-read for anyone who teaches legal research to law students and a should-read for any scholar who uses or has research assistants using Westlaw Next. Read the rest of this post »

  March 22, 2011 at 5:51 pm   Posted in: Law School (Scholarship), Law School (Teaching)   Print This Post   3 Comments

Accreditation Sunlight

posted by Dave Hoffman

The Conglomerate Masters Forum on Legal Education is underway, and worth checking out.

In my post, I recommend that the ABA accreditation process should model itself after the SEC and move toward an exclusively sunlight model. David Zaring, perhaps surprisingly, favors regulation, though he admits that it makes legal academia “cozy.” Christine Hurt comes out against accreditation-driven tenure.  Other folks are posting shortly, so head over to the ‘Glom and join the discussion.

  March 22, 2011 at 2:53 pm   Posted in: Blogging, Law School, Law School (Scholarship), Law School (Teaching)   Print This Post   No Comments

The ABA’s Ugly Table Fetish

posted by Dave Hoffman

TaxProf reports on the ABA’s possible move toward more substantively revealing employment statistics.  Key to the change would be a table that each law school would have to post on its website.  The Table would list salaries and employment of law school graduates, and break it down into quartile percentiles.

What’s useful about this kind of disclosure is that it avoids the problem of misleading means and medians in salary– itself caused by missing data. That is, law schools aren’t able to collect salary information for each graduate. When schools calculate mean/median salaries, they exclude missing graduates, and thereby overemphasize the importance of high earners. As the relevant committee explained:

“Schools receive salary information from a fairly small percentage of graduates. Graduates reporting their salaries are skewed towards those earning the most . . . A school that touts median salary information, without appropriate qualifiers, is misleading prospective students. We propose that all salary information clearly indicate the number of respondents and percentage of all graduates . . . We would not require schools to disclose any salary information for a given category unless there are at least five respondents.”

To the extent you think that law schools are bad actors, and that the market won’t motivate disclosure, this is a good reform.  I have a different perspective: it is a bad idea for an accreditation agency to micromanage the internal workings of law school business, especially when the data is then connected to the machinations of a deeply flawed, secretive and corrupting ranking magazine.  I have particular doubts about disclosure of salary data.  It seems to me that this is a classic example of a liberal policy that might have unintended consequences – salary collusion between market makers in the entry level job market.  It’s also the case, as I am about to discuss in a Conglomerate Masters Forum, that the ABA’s meddling in the internal affairs of the schools can be seen as (yet another) attempt to increase the price of legal education & resulting consumer costs, while protecting incumbents.  To be clear: law schools should be pressured to disclose more about outcomes (and inputs).  But when that pressure comes from an accrediting agency that happens to be a guild, you have to worry about what’s happening behind the scenes.

However, let’s pretend like this exact disclosure requirement is welfare maximizing. How should it proceed?  The ABA wants  to mandate that schools produce & display a very, very ugly table.  But, for Tufte’s sake, why?  All of the information in that table could be better displayed in figures – Henderson’s bimodal distribution (using # of graduates on the y-axis), and then a few bar charts displaying where people work.  I am quite confident that this is possible because I am putting the finishing touches on Temple’s self-study accreditation document, which liberally uses figures – instead of tables – to display data on employment, revenues, debt, and admissions.  As Epstein, Martin and Boyd explained, Tables are ugly and are terrible tools to communicate data, especially summary statistics.   If the ABA thinks that communicating this data is important, it should mandate that the data be presented in a clear way, not in an ominous, busy, 11 (!) column Table that no one, ever, will read.

Shucks, it is as if the ABA wants to pretend to care about disclosure, so as to maintain its accreditation monopoly, but to implement sunshine in a form that effectively destroys its utility.

  March 20, 2011 at 2:17 pm   Posted in: Law School, Law School (Teaching)   Print This Post   9 Comments

Laptops, Again

posted by Sarah Waldeck

Over at PrawfsBlawg, Rick Garnett has drawn attention to Kristin Murray’s forthcoming article Let Them Use Laptops: Debunking the Assumptions Underlying the Debate Over Laptops in the Classroom.   Since my own laptop ban was cited in the article, I read it with particular interest.    I’m still thinking about the piece, which for me means that it was worth reading. 

One of Murray’s central points is something that I suspect most professors who decide to ban laptops have considered:   students have different learning styles and some of them will be genuinely aided by having a laptop in class.   Because of this, I tried or considered several of the alternatives to laptop bans that Murray endorses—incentives for participation, a personal request that laptops only be used for classroom purposes, and so forth—and ultimately found these alternatives  wanting.   For me, particularly in the large core courses that I teach, the relevant question is always:  what policy decision is going to benefit the most students?  

To argue that I and others of my ilk have gone too far with an all-out ban, Murray relies primarily on a survey of laptop practices that was taken by Temple and Georgetown law students.  In fairness, Murray notes her own reservation s about the merits of self-reporting.  But I found many of the survey comments unpersuasive, primarily because they so remind me of what my own students said prior to participating in my laptop-free classroom.  Many—although by no means all—students had very different comments about the value and effects of their laptops by the end of the semester.  

Murry’s paper arguably predicts this result. One of the assumptions (presumably made by laptop advocates) that Murray seeks to debunk is that “[b]ecause they are digital natives, law school students make informed choices about laptops and learning.”   Murray finds that students bring “laptops to class with only some of them thinking critically about their own note-taking, study and learning habits.”   This raises a question about these same students’ abilities to report critically on their own laptop practices.  What should we make, for example, of the more than 55% of students using their laptops for non-classroom related activities who say they “never miss anything” or only “occasionally miss something minor”?   

Murray’s article also has me thinking about how the professor side of the equation fits into the whole laptop debate.  I would not be the first to comment on how scary it is to walk into a laptop-free classroom and realize that you are the only entertainment in the room.  I will also confess that during a visit to a school where I didn’t ban laptops, teaching sometimes felt easier because I knew that if the students didn’t find the material engaging they had something else to do.   I don’t know how we would measure the effects that laptops have on professor performance, but it’s an interesting question.

  March 10, 2011 at 1:31 pm   Posted in: Law School (Teaching)   Print This Post   8 Comments

GW’s Junior Scholars Finalists

posted by Lawrence Cunningham

Thanks to my colleague, Lisa Fairfax, GW has finalized the program for this year’s Junior Faculty Business and Financial Law Workshop and Prize (detailed here).   Of the more than 100 papers submitted, the following dozen presenters were chosen.  [Commentators appear in brackets; I've shortened some paper titles.]  

 The workshop will take place at GW on April 1 and 2, 2011.  We are delighted by the submissions, congratulate those chosen, and stress that making the selections was difficult because of the volume of amazing papers.  We encourage everyone interested to attend and look forward to the weekend.

Adam Leviton (Georgetown), In Defense of Bailouts [George Geis (Virginia) & Art Wilmarth (GW)]

Jodie Kirshner (Cambridge), A Transatlantic Perspective on Regional Dynamics and Societa Eurpoea [Francesca Bignami (GW) & Theresa Gabaldon (GW)]

Alan White (Valparaiso), Welfare Economics and Regulation of Small-Loan Credit: Lessons from Microlending in Developing Nations [Michael Pagano (Villanova) & Lawrence Mitchell (GW)]

Nicola Sharpe (Illinois), Corporate Board Performance and Organizational Strategy [Deborah Demott (Duke) & Michael Abramowicz (GW)]

Julie Hill (Houston), The Rise of Ad Hoc Bank Capital Requirements [Anna Gelpern (American) & John Buchman (E*Trade Bank & GW Adjunct)]

Michael Simkovic (Seton Hall), The Effects of Ownership and Stock Liquidity on the Timing of Repurchase Transactions [Richard Booth (Villanova) & Henry Butler (Mason)]

Michelle Harner (Maryland), Activist Distressed Debtors [Donna Nagy (Indiana Bloomington) & Lisa Fairfax (GW)]

Saule Omarova (UNC), The Federal Reserve Board’s Use of Exemptive Power [Patricia McCoy (Connecticut) & Arthur Wilmarth (GW)]

Heather Hughes (American), Suburban Sprawl, Finance Law and Environmental Harm [Scott Kieff (GW) & Lawrence Cunningham (GW)]

Robert Jackson (Columbia), Private Equity and Executive Compensation [Norman Veasey (Weil Gotshal) & William Bratton (Penn)]

Brian Quinn (BC), Putting Your Money Where Your Mouth Is: Post Closing Price Adjustments in Merger Agreements? [Gordon Smith (BYU) & John Pollack (Schulte Roth)]

Mehrsa Baradaran (BYU), Reconsidering Wal-Mart’s Bank [Heidi Schooner (Catholic) & Renee Jones (BC)]

This is one of many events sponsored by GW’s Center for Law, Economics and Finance.

  February 28, 2011 at 8:53 pm   Posted in: Corporate Finance, Corporate Law, Law School, Law School (Hiring & Laterals), Law School (Law Reviews), Law School (Scholarship), Law School (Teaching), Law Talk, Securities, Securities Regulation   Print This Post   One Comment

Harvard Clinic Responds to Greiner Study

posted by Dave Hoffman

  January 24, 2011 at 2:06 pm   Posted in: Behavioral Law and Economics, Civil Rights, Empirical Analysis of Law, Law School (Teaching)   Print This Post   No Comments

Teaching Professionalism

posted by Michelle Harner

One of my favorite courses to teach is Legal Profession (i.e., ethics and professionalism) because it truly is an “ah-ha” moment for many law students. I tend to believe that not many students consider the “profession” part of the “legal profession” prior to attending law school. Rather, I suspect they view law school as a means to an end—landing a lucrative job (or at least that was the case in days gone by; see here,  here and here). They probably give little thought to the fact that they are preparing to join a “profession.”

I know that many even inside the legal profession question whether it remains a profession or is now just a business and all about the bottom line. (For interesting discussions of this debate, see here, here, here and here). I am very traditional in this respect, and I hold dear the notion that the law is an esteemed profession. (I particularly like Roscoe Pound’s definition of the legal profession as “a group…pursuing a learned art as a common calling in the spirit of public service—no less a public service because it may incidentally be a means of livelihood.”) And I am proud to be a member of that profession.

For this reason, I stress the nature of the profession and what it means to be a professional in the early days of Legal Profession. I often quote the Preamble of the Model Rules of Professional Conduct to emphasize that a lawyer does more than serve clients. “A lawyer, as a member of the legal profession, is a representative of clients, an officer of the legal system and a public citizen having special responsibility for the quality of justice.” I then use a series of hypothetical problems to work through what that triad of responsibilities means for lawyers. You can actually see the light bulb go off for some students.

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  January 20, 2011 at 2:44 pm  Tags: Law School  Posted in: Law School (Teaching), Legal Ethics   Print This Post   2 Comments

The Opposite of Dog Eat Dog

posted by Lawrence Cunningham

At a Faculty Meeting years ago, our distingished new Dean, who’d been Dean elsewhere, President of a University, and CEO in the private sector, began by saying how people often ask him: “What’s the difference between the academic world and the corporate world?” 

The Dean said he replied: “In the corporate world, it’s DOG EAT DOG, whereas in the academic world, it is exactly the other way around.”  Those assembled at the Faculty Meeting laughed knowingly.

Just as the guffaws died out, my great and wonderful friend, a learned faculty member, and former Dean,  quipped: “Do you mean, in academia, it’s GOD EAT GOD?”  Louder knowing laughter erupted and I still laugh about it today.

Academia can be a wonderful place. Yet it’s no Ivory Tower and can be viscious , especially for younger scholars, doing graduate work at elite institutions.  It usually gets better but it can be tough later too. 

There are many ways to cope. One is remembering to research and write for yourself, in the first instance, not to please or even influence others.  Of course, it can be rewarding to have those effects and, especially, to be cited favorably, but that usually comes in due course.

Keeping a sense of humor and some sobriety about also helps.  Whenever I hear about the lion cages of graduate study, or vexing insecurity during early years of untenured appointments, I share the foregoing memorable scene.

  January 19, 2011 at 1:09 pm   Posted in: Humor, Just for Fun, Law School (Teaching), Law Student Discussions, Law Talk   Print This Post   No Comments

Socializing Students to the Practice of Law

posted by Michelle Harner

When I was in private practice, I never gave much thought to how law schools prepare students for a career in the legal profession. I was fortunate to have a very positive law school experience and even more fortunate to end up in a small practice group within a big law firm that took pride in training its young associates. (I also had a wonderful mentor during my judicial clerkship experience.) As a result, I never felt unprepared for the practice of law.

It was not until I left practice and started teaching that I truly appreciated the gap between legal education and legal practice. I know that statement is not a new revelation; many have discussed the lack of practical skills imparted to students during their three years of law school (see, e.g., here, here, here and here). And I do not make it to criticize legal education (for the most recent critique, see here).  Although some things could be done differently (for a collection of articles on legal education reform, see here), I believe that teaching students critical analytical skills provides a solid foundation for legal practice and inculcates a skill set that translates beyond the legal profession (see here and here). I raise it, however, to share my recent, very enjoyable experience with third year law students in Business Planning.

This fall, I co-taught Business Planning with my colleague, Dan Goldberg, who focuses his teaching and scholarship on tax law. Dan and I worked together to prepare lesson plans and assignments, and we co-taught each class meeting. In fact, we structured the class to simulate a small law firm; Dan and I played the role of the tax and corporate partners, and the students played corporate associates.  (For a discussion of training law students to be more client ready, see here.)

The class started with one of the law firm’s long-time individual clients seeking the law firm’s assistance in structuring a new business venture among the firm’s client and two other individuals. The students confronted ethical issues presented by this request and then helped the individuals evaluate their entity choice options from tax, governance and general business perspectives. This exercise introduced students to business plans, balance sheets and organizational documents. The hypothetical law firm and student associates served as counsel to the newly-formed business entity during the remainder of the semester, and they helped this hypothetical client work through liquidity and growth issues, an unsolicited purchase offer and an initial public offering.

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  January 10, 2011 at 7:40 am  Tags: Education, Law School  Posted in: Law School (Teaching)   Print This Post   16 Comments

Experiments in Lawyering: Does the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau Deserve a Merit Badge?

posted by Dave Hoffman

Mike Heise highlights a paper by James Greiner (Harvard) and Cassandra Wolos Pattanayak:  What Difference Representation? From the abstract:

We report the results of the first in a series of randomized control trials designed to measure the effect of an offer of, and the actual use of, legal representation. The results are startling. In the context of administrative litigation to determine eligibility for unemployment benefits, a service provider’s offer of representation to a claimant had no statistically significant effect on the claimant’s probability of a victory, but the offer caused a delay in the proceeding. Because a substantial percentage of the provider’s client base consisted of claimants who were initially denied benefits but who would have that initial denial reversed as a result of the litigation, the delay an offer of representation caused inflicted a harm upon such claimants in the form of an additional waiting time for benefits to begin, this with no concomitant increase in the probability of a favorable outcome. In other words, these claimants would have been better off without the offer of representation. Other classes of claimants were unaffected, but in cases with a certain profile, the delay hurt the financing of the unemployment system, again with no concomitant benefit in the probability of a favorable outcome for the claimant. We were also able to verify a delay effect due to the actual use of (as opposed to an offer of) representation; we could come to no firm conclusion on the effect of actual use of representation on win/loss. Stepping back, we use these results as a springboard for a comprehensive review of the quantitative literature on the effect of representation in civil proceedings. We find that this literature provides virtually no credible information, excepting the results of two randomized evaluations occurring in different legal contexts and separated by over three decades. We conclude by advocating for, and describing challenges associated with, a large program of randomized evaluation of the provision of representation, particularly by legal services providers.

Greiner/Pattanayak take (very) broad swipes at a variety of previous studies of representation.  Putting that aside, the results from the paper are unsettling, at least if your prior is that legal representation always helps the poor.  And I wanted to pull out one part of the article that is particularly interesting.  From pages 6-7:

[Our] ideas polarized the legal services community.  Some organizations overcame initial nervousness about defining measurable outcomes and about ceding partial control over case selection to a randomizer and embraced the effort. In doing so, these providers demonstrated the courage necessary to subject their programs to gold-standard evaluation. Among the most courageous were the students of the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau (“HLAB”), a student-run, faculty-overseen legal services office that is part of the clinical educational program at Harvard Law School. But other organizations opposed our effort. One group did not limit its opposition to a refusal to participate on its own part. Instead, when it discovered that HLAB was conducting a randomized evaluation, it halted its previous practice of suggesting that clients it could not itself represent call HLAB.

  December 21, 2010 at 5:41 pm   Posted in: Articles and Books, Civil Rights, Empirical Analysis of Law, Law School (Teaching)   Print This Post   6 Comments

Lighthouse No Good

posted by Dave Hoffman

Prompted by a tip from the civ pro listserv, I just read William Prosser’s wonderful speech, Lighthouse No Good, delivered at  Temple Law School in 1948.  In Lighthouse, Prosser talks about what it’s like to teach law, and to grow older in the profession.  There are some wonderful – unforgettable - lines.  Among them:

“On Teaching: At last the day comes when [the professor] confronts his first class. I wish I could convey to anyone who never has sat in that perilous seat the trepidation, the dismay, the feeling of helpless inferiority, which which a new professor looks into all those fresh young faces — younger, that is, by at least five years than he- which are regarding him with such manifest skepticism and disapproval.

On Grading: The examination is given, the great pile of bluebooks is brought into his office, and he attacks them with eager anticipation.   It is then that the ghastly truth is borne in upon him, the consternation and the horror, and he finds out just how good a teacher he is.  It is then he realizes the full underlying truth in that old lament of the French horn player in the little German band, ‘I blow in it so sweet, and it comes out so sour…’”

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  December 16, 2010 at 9:43 pm   Posted in: Articles and Books, Law School, Law School (Teaching)   Print This Post   3 Comments

The Esperanto of Citation Formats

posted by Dave Hoffman

Prompted by students, I’ve been thinking recently about the ALWD Citation Manual.  In doing so, I’m aware that I’m deeply in the weeds of legal-academic esoterica. Indeed, even thinking about writing about citation probably would be #2 or #3 on the list of things that distinguish airy and irrelevant law professors from grounded and practical lawyers.  Regardless, the topic seemed a good fit for a blog post, so here goes.

As you probably don’t care to know, the ALWD offers a non-bluebook approach to legal citation, designed to be authoritative (being created by legal writing professors, not students), coherent, and easy-to-use.  At various times, it’s been adopted by a large number of law school’s legal writing programs.  The biggest problem with the ALWD is that it isn’t The Bluebook.  Differences between the ALWD and the Bluebook aren’t always trivial in a world where minor differences in citation format can change a student’s first-year legal writing grade and determine membership on a law review.  When graduating from law school, ALWD followers may thus experience the same frustration that confronts users of obviously superior Dvorak keyboard.  Or, since the ALWD is  pushed by a tightly-knit, organized, guild of legal writing professors, perhaps the better analogy is to Esperanto.  If we all spoke the constructed language of peace and understanding, and cited our speeches using ALWD, we would better understand each other and be less aggravated by missing the commas between see and e.g. Alas, neither ALWD and Esperanto has gotten the market reception that their backers hoped for.  Why not?

To inquire a little bit into this topic, I asked one of my LRW colleagues to circulate to the LRW-professor list a question about their experiences with teaching citation. I got a ton of responses, for which I’m quite grateful.  They follow, shorn of attribution, after the jump.

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  November 21, 2010 at 5:48 pm   Posted in: Law School, Law School (Teaching), Sociology of Law   Print This Post   7 Comments

Assessment Assessment

posted by Dave Hoffman

Academics – driven by their accrediting agencies - have a new buzzword.  We are all now charged with thinking about assessment.  How well are we doing at the goals we set out for ourselves?  How do we know?  How do we know if our processes of assessment are appropriate?  As an academic (non-legal) blogger observed:

Going beyond the reasonable notion that you should periodically take a deeper look at what you’re doing, pedagogical reformers of many sorts get convert zeal and treat assessment as a moral imperative.  But, when a religion has enough zealous adherents, it might suddenly become mainstream.  And when it goes mainstream, it goes from being pure to being mass market lowest common denominator oversaturation.  The word “assessment” is no longer just confined to careful examinations of how well something is working.  It isn’t even just applied to a bureaucratic ritual of report-writing focused on the curriculum.  It’s applied to every piece of paper, every report, every bit of data, any and every piece of bureaucracy and hoop-jumping and report-generating.  The odds are good that a time sheet will soon be marked “Hours assessment” and an account statement will be marked “Fiscal assessment.”

This proselytizing ideal has obviously caught on in the ABA’s self-study process, which requires not just a strategic plan and a strategic planning process, but also that the school show that it regularly evaluates its self-assessment and thinks about whether the school’s goals are good ones.  Schools which fail to have a process, plan, and plan assessment will be disapproved until they come to their senses.

It’s no small irony – nor I’m sure am I the first to note – that there is no evidence at all that schools which regularly engage in planned reflection produce better outcomes for students or for society than schools who muddle through with less formal techniques.  I’m not even sure that it is possible to design an experimental study that would make the case for assessment, given external validity concerns.  The case against self-reflection is pretty simple: deciding what academics ought to maximize is a hard problem, and any answer arrived at by any group of people will necessarily be too vague to provide hooks for truly useful tactical choices, especially when the time spent planning uses up  productive resources .  Indeed, it’s possible that designing ever-more-particularly assessment metrics (and plans for achieving those metrics) encourages us to set ever-more-narrow goals, which are then, comfortably, met.

All in all, I’d give the current assessment trend a 23.3 on an A to ∂ point scale, where our goal is to hit a ß.

  November 3, 2010 at 2:06 pm   Posted in: Law School, Law School (Rankings), Law School (Scholarship), Law School (Teaching)   Print This Post   One Comment

Congrats to PA Bar Passers!

posted by Dave Hoffman

Pennsylvania’s Bar results came out last week.  Congratulations to all passers, and especially to my graduating students who are now licensed lawyers.  The statewide pass rate for first-time takers was 84.68 percent.  The rates for the Pennsylvania area law schools were:

Penn                92.86%

Temple            92.34%

Villanova        89.87%

Widener (H)   87.67%

Pitt                  86.93%

Duquesne       86.47%

Penn State      83.64%

Widener (D)   82.61%

Drexel             81.32%

Rutgers (C)    77.85%

Because failing the bar can be economically devastating, bar passage is a very, very important marker of  a law school’s success – certainly more so than SSRN download rankings!!   Being above the state’s average is a big deal, and worth celebrating.  Temple had a problem on this score about a decade ago, and we made serious efforts to help our students be better prepared to enter practice.  I’m glad to see that our efforts are bearing fruit.

Incidentally, the combined rates (July/Feb) are consistent – though Penn falls a bit — and I’ve posted that list after the jump:

Read the rest of this post »

  October 15, 2010 at 4:03 pm   Posted in: Law School, Law School (Rankings), Law School (Teaching), Uncategorized   Print This Post   One Comment

What Makes a Good Workshop Tick? Reflections and Questions on Procedure

posted by Glenn Cohen

I’ve been thinking a lot this week about workshops. I regularly participate in three. One I co-run with Einer Elhauge on Health Law, Bioethics and Biotechnology as a class that students can enroll in which also attracts a number of faculty and fellows from Harvard Law School, other faculties, and the greater Boston area. I also regularly attend and sometimes present at our general faculty workshop, which also occasionally involves presentations from scholars outside of the law school. Finally, the Harvard Juniors get together about once every two to three weeks to workshop one of our papers in a small and informal group.

Each of the workshops have a different rhythm, format, and purpose. Our school is large enough that we can sustain both the general workshop and more specialized ones. Lately, though, I have been thinking about how workshop formats facilitate some kinds of discussions or developments but not others.  If, as I constantly tell my students in Civ Pro, procedure often shapes substance, why should that be any less true when it comes to workshops?  So I’ve started asking around to hear how others run their workshops and here are some variations I have heard of:

The first dimension is the presence/form of a “presentation”.

- Let the presenter present the paper for the usual 15 minutes.

- Let the present present for only 5 minutes.

- No presentation at all, right into the Q & A.

- Have another individual present the paper instead of the presenter.

- Have both the presenter but also a separate commentator.

A second dimension goes to how questions are handled including questions of how to manage a queue.

- Have “protected” time for presentation versus allow questions immediately.

- Have a strict queue that people get on in sequence by raising hands and the moderator writing their names down.

- Have a queue but allow follow-ups from the questioner or others on that line outside the queue.

- Take raised hands each time without a queue.

A third dimension goes to attempts to mold the type of questions.

- Require anyone who asks a question to also suggest something they liked about the paper.

- Have the presenter spell out precisely what they want feedback on in advance.

Finally, for workshops that mix students and faculty, there are further questions about whether to keep separate queues for the two groups, begin with faculty, begin with students, etc.

I’d be curious to hear about the results from experiments with workshop format along these and other dimensions. Did the quality or type of interaction change significantly?  Are there best practices we should be thinking about?

  September 15, 2010 at 11:33 am   Posted in: Law School, Law School (Teaching), Law Student Discussions, Uncategorized   Print This Post   3 Comments

The Journal of Legal Education’s Bipolar Issue

posted by Dave Hoffman

I rarely read the The Journal of Legal Education.  The Journal, sent to every law professor in the country, is printed “as a public service” by Westlaw, which means that it is indirectly subsidized by the clients of practicing lawyers. Regardless of the merits of that practice, and indeed the Journal’s existence, there is a good and useful article in the recent issue:  Jane Yakowitz’s “Marooned: An Empirical Investigation of Law School Graduates Who Fail the Bar Exam.”  In the Article, Yakowitz focuses on the 150,000 law school graduates who have “taken but never passed a bar exam”: 1 in 10 law school J.D.s.  She creatively amasses data from various sources to conclude:

1)  African American and Latino and hispanic law graduates are “at least twice as likely as white graduates to become a never-passer”.

2)  If a graduate comes from a poor background, all else equal she is just as likely to pass the bar on the first administration as a student from a richer background. But if she fails the first time,  being poor is correlated with becoming a never-passer.  Yakowitz argues that this result follows from a lack of resources to study and prepare a second and third time.

3)  In the short term, bar failure significantly reduces employment and earnings.  In the long term – ten years – never-passers “bounce back”.  Though they never make as much as lawyers, they “surpass the trajectory of average college graduates their age.”  Most are working in legal settings.  That said, they make about “$17,000 less than J.D.-holders the same age and gender…”  And compared to lawyers who passed, never-passers experience significantly more career instability.  They are divorced more often than passers, and are less likely to live with their children.  In sum, never-passers decision to attend law school turns out to be a raw deal – though in the latter half of their careers, may pay mild dividends.

All in all, a decidedly useful and sobering piece of scholarship.  Law schools whose students pass the bar at less often than the state average should be thinking hard about changes they can make.  About a decade ago, Temple faced a problem like this, and we dealt with it through various forms of mentoring, and by lowering our curve to give students in trouble more sharp notice of what they were facing.  Our bar passage rate rebounded sharply, which is a source of great comfort after reading Marooned.

It’s a shame the rest of the issue is full of snarky work in which various authors assert that law schools intend to obfuscate and prevent learning because they are willfully blind to the blinding truth (discovered by the authors) that this is a bad way to teach doctrine.  As if that what the main purpose of law teaching was – as opposed to understanding why the rules work the way they do.  It is true that you need to know the rules to pass the bar exam.  But passing the bar exam – however wealthy and healthy it might make you – will not make you good lawyer.

  September 14, 2010 at 11:13 am   Posted in: Law Practice, Law School (Scholarship), Law School (Teaching)   Print This Post   5 Comments

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