Archive for the ‘Teaching’ Category

Lombardo on Legal Archaeology

posted by Frank Pasquale

Paul A. Lombardo published an essay “Legal Archaeology: Recovering the Stories behind the Cases” in the Fall 2008 issue of the Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics. It reminded me of the wonderful chapters in this volume of “health law stories.” Here are some excerpts that may be of interest:

Every lawsuit is a potential drama: a story of conflict, often with victims and villains, leading to justice done or denied. Yet a great deal, if not all, that we learn about the most noteworthy of lawsuits — the truly great cases — comes from reading the opinion of an appellate court, written by a judge who never saw the parties of the case, who worked at a time and a place far removed from the events that gave rise to litigation.

Rarely do we admit that the official factual account contained in an appellate opinion may have only the most tenuous relationship to the events that actually led the parties to court. The complex stories — turning on small facts, seemingly trivial circumstances, and inter-contingent events — fade away as the “case” takes on a life of its own as it leaves the court of appeals.

How can a law professor correct this bias? Here are some of Lombardo’s suggestions:

Read the rest of this post »

January 21, 2012 at 1:51 pm Posted in: Health Law, Philosophy of Social Science, Teaching Print This Post No Comments

HealthLawProfs on Experiential Learning, Summer Teaching

posted by Frank Pasquale

Just a quick note on two posts on the Health Law Profs blog that might interest regular readers. First, Katharine van Tassel and Jennifer Bard are developing a clearinghouse of summer law teaching opportunities. Details appear here. Second, the AALS Health Law section focused on experiential learning; some notes here.

January 14, 2012 at 9:35 pm Posted in: Health Law, Teaching Print This Post No Comments

Some Words of Advice for Law Students, from 1811

posted by Kyle Graham

As the year draws to a close, it might be worthwhile to review the following advice, provided to American law students (clerks, really) precisely two centuries ago. These words of wisdom come from William Wright’s Advice on the Study of the Law, as published by Baltimore’s Edward J. Coale with “additional notes for the American student” back in 1811. (One can view the complete text here, on Google Books.)

The student should commence with a firm resolution to become one of the most eminent attornies [sic] of the age : and though the difficulties which he will at first meet with may be great, he should not despond; because despondency will produce negligence. Let him persevere, and he will succeed.

Genius is more equally distributed among mankind than is generally allowed. . . . If all men would accustom themselves to reflection, few would be ignorant; and their want of reflection proceeds from their own folly and love of leisure, and not from the insufficiency of their natural endowments.

Habits of attention and application, properly directed, produce what is commonly called genius.

The student should make himself most intimately acquainted with the practice which is likely to be the most useful.

Mankind will undoubtedly form their opinion of the morals and attainments of the young lawyer from those of his companions. . . . If he selects for his confidential friends the libertine, the dishonourable, the malevolent, the trifler, or the uneducated, among such he will himself be classed.

The companions of a student should be few; if they are numerous, he will probably be induced to sacrifice more time to friendship and pleasure than is consistent with his professional duties, and his hopes of honourable distinction.

Politeness, says Lord Chatham, is benevolence in trifles. This then is all I require of the student.

Young men should carefully guard themselves against forming any attachment, even upon honourable principles, till years shall have matured their judgment, and a proper course of study supplied them with knowledge sufficient to enter on the world and to transact their professional business with accuracy. Attachments formed too early in life are commonly of a romantic nature, and tend to dissipate thought and unhinge the mind, and seldom terminate so happily as lively imaginations are willing to expect.

An attorney should commence his professional labours with the laudable resolution of preventing litigation, as much as possible; for petty suits are always vexatious, and seldom productive of advantage either to the litigant parties or to society.

When consulted professionally, a young attorney should not, if he can avoid it, give his opinion hastily; but consider and re-consider.

December 27, 2011 at 2:02 pm Posted in: History of Law, Humor, Teaching, Uncategorized Print This Post One Comment

The Phone Booths in Katz v. United States?

posted by Kyle Graham

I’ve chipped away at the K2-esque stack of Crim Pro and Torts exams that sit on my desk. Plus, if I grade another examination right now, my margin comments will consist solely of “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” So, notwithstanding my earlier prediction that grading would prevent further posts, I am allowing myself this entry as a reward and respite.

Here, I want to share an (arguably) interesting video with this blog’s readers. As background, my Criminal Procedure course reader begins with the seminal Katz v. United States case. The Katz case involved the government’s warrantless eavesdropping on an occupant of a phone booth situated along Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. As those of you who teach Crim Pro, or who took this course in law school already know, Katz is the wellspring of the “reasonable expectation of privacy” standard that has become the touchstone for Fourth Amendment analysis.

I use PowerPoints in my classes, and I’ve been searching fruitlessly for good visuals for the Katz v. United States case for some time. Stock photos of 1950s college-age kids stuffing themselves into telephone booths, movie posters for the Colin Farrell vehicle “Phone Booth,” and my simple line drawings don’t really convey the scene quite as well as I would like.

Toward this purpose, while procrastinating from grading examinations today, I came across a website that hosts several scrolling videos of the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles, circa the mid-1960s. I thought that one of these videos might show the fateful bank of phone booths, and in any event, continuing my search for same would provide an extremely valid excuse not to grade more exams.

According to the Ninth Circuit’s opinion below in Katz, the bank of three phone booths that Katz used was on the 8200 block of Sunset Boulevard. And, sure enough, if one scrolls down to the fourth video on the page—the one that’s 2:48 in length—about 49 seconds in, one can see a bank of three phone booths on the 8200 block. (How do I know which block this is? The Jay Ward studios—home of Bullwinkle the Moose, and featuring a conspicuous Bullwinkle statue in front—were located at 8217 Sunset Boulevard, quite close to the phone booths.)

I don’t know for certain that these are the phone booths involved in Katz (the caption for the video indicates it was recorded in 1967, whereas the facts in Katz took place in 1965; plus, I don’t know whether there was another set of phone booths on the [unfilmed] north side of the street), but they might well be. Just thought I’d pass it along; even if these aren’t the same phone booths, the video conveys a nice sense of time and place for the case.

December 20, 2011 at 8:30 pm Posted in: Criminal Procedure, History of Law, Teaching Print This Post 2 Comments

Back for One (or Two) Last Things—An Offer and a Request

posted by Kyle Graham

D’oh. I said that my preceding post would be the last for my guest-blogging stint, but I forgot about two things:

1. Criminal Procedure DVD Offer

First, this spring I hope to get around to an oft-delayed project of mine. I teach Criminal Procedure, and in that class I find it useful to show my students video clips of traffic stops, arrests, and other scenes to help illustrate some of the concepts we cover, and to press students about whether the officers’ actions, as shown, were appropriate under the circumstances.

I mostly rely on television shows (both scripted and reality) and YouTube clips for this purpose. These snippets can be entertaining. (My favorite online clip in this genre can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmnUx_wNqRE. I don’t use this clip, however, because I haven’t quite figured out how to tee it up for students, such that it has significant pedagogical value. Perhaps I should introduce it as the world’s worst search incident to arrest?) Yet the available selection leaves some gaps in my repertoire.

So, I plan on doing some filming of my own this year, to put together a more robust set of video clips to show to students. If any of you out there (1) teach Criminal Procedure and (2) would like a free copy of the DVD I hope to put together, please contact me via e-mail. I’ll put your name on a list and send you a copy once it’s done, which hopefully will occur sometime prior to the start of the fall semester. (Emphasis here on “hopefully.”)

2. Criminal Procedure < 1965 Interview Subjects Wanted

Fifty years ago, Lawrence Ritter responded to the death of Ty Cobb by traveling around the country to collect oral histories from old-time baseball players before they, too, passed along. The resulting work, The Glory of Their Times, remains among my favorite books.

In the same vein, it recently struck me that we are now losing the last generation of criminal-law attorneys who practiced in the pre-Miranda, pre-exclusionary rule, pre-Gideon era. Someone who was 30 years old in 1960—the year before Mapp v. Ohio—is now 81 years of age. While we have a sense as to what the practice of criminal law was like back before the Rights Revolution of the 1960s, it nevertheless might be useful to speak with some of the remaining practitioners from that period to better understand the similarities and differences between that period, and ours. I’m aware of some oral history projects in a similar vein, but none that ask quite the questions I’d like to ask.

I already have started to identify these practitioners, but here, I ask for your help. If any of you know someone who used to practice criminal law back in the 1950s and early 1960s—be it a prosecutor or defense attorney (or judge)—who wouldn’t mind speaking with me, I would greatly appreciate it if you would e-mail me with their contact information. Better yet, if you are such a person yourself, please feel free to e-mail me directly.

In any event, happy holidays to you all.

December 17, 2011 at 4:44 pm Posted in: Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, History of Law, Teaching Print This Post One Comment

Hammontree v. Jenner: The Rest of the Story

posted by Kyle Graham

Schoolhouse Ruins, Metropolis, NV

I recently picked up 120 Torts and Criminal Procedure examinations, which I must grade before the holidays. In a related story, this will be my last guest-blogger post on the site. Thanks to Gerard, Frank, and my other hosts for their hospitality, and to the readers of this blog for their patience. It’s been fun, at least for me.

I’ll wrap up with another Paul Harvey “here’s the rest of the story” narrative, which may be useful to those of you who teach Torts. (The rest of you will probably want to skip this one.) This entry will discuss Hammontree v. Jenner, a 1971 California Court of Appeal decision.

The Hammontree court rejected the plaintiffs’ contention that strict liability, instead of negligence, should govern a tort suit stemming from a driver’s unanticipated seizure behind the wheel. Unlike Summers v. Tice, which I discussed in a previous post, Hammontree has not cast a substantial precedential shadow. The appellate opinion is short, and gives little sign that the court considered the issue presented to be especially difficult.

The significance of the Hammontree decision derives from its leadoff spot in Franklin, Rabin & Green’s casebook Tort Law and Alternatives, which I use in my Torts class. (I’ve spoken to both the defense attorney at trial in Hammontree and the defense attorney on appeal; both were quite surprised that the case found its way into a textbook.) The authors leverage the case in a variety of ways, using it to introduce the distinction between strict liability and negligence, along with themes such as legal ethics, the mechanics of a tort case, and the nature of precedent.

Last year, I went down to Los Angeles court archives and dug up copies of the original court filings in Hammontree for the use of my students, and others. If anyone is interested in these documents (I find it quite helpful to show novice one-L students what a complaint, answer, motion for summary judgment, etc., look like, which goes a long way toward demystifying these documents), I’ve given them to Christopher Robinette over at the TortsProf blog, who kindly has posted them here.

The documents didn’t contain any big surprises, but they did harbor a few facts that may be interesting and useful to those of you who teach the case. Now that I’ve scared off (or bored to death) 99 percent of this blog’s readers, I’ll explain to the hardy few who remain, after the jump.

Read the rest of this post »

December 16, 2011 at 12:07 am Posted in: History of Law, Teaching, Tort Law Print This Post 5 Comments

Professor Graham’s Top Nine Failed Attempts to Increase His SSRN Downloads

posted by Kyle Graham

9. Offering Justin Bieber $2,500 to rave about latest article on Twitter

8. Frequent integration of trendy words and phrases like “jeggings,” “Winning!” and “Tebowing” into article titles

7. Legally changing my name to “Eddie Murphy” for one month prior to, and following, the posting of each new piece, because if Eddie Murphy were to write a law-review article, that would really be something else

6. Ill-fated promise to students that if I get up to 5,000 total downloads, A+ grades for everyone, unless I don’t like them

5. Offering Charlie Sheen $2,500 to rave about latest article on Twitter

4. Having article titles painted on the sides of the turkeys thrown from the WKRP helicopter pursuant to their Thanksgiving giveaway

3. Extensive unsuccessful efforts to have Oprah name “Why Torts Die” as her Book of the Month

2. “Rick-Rolling” people over from Cass Sunstein’s latest article on SSRN

1. Prominent advertisements that each article is guaranteed to be “100 percent Kardashian-Free”

December 11, 2011 at 3:04 pm Posted in: Humor, Just for Fun, Teaching Print This Post 5 Comments

Ye Olde Professor’s Guide to Building an Exam Curve

posted by Kyle Graham

Shortly after I joined the faculty at Santa Clara Law, I wandered into the area of our library dedicated to a collection of Arcana and Occult texts. (Disclaimer: This section of the library does not, in fact, exist.) My goal: to find advice for drafting my first set of law-school examinations. I was concerned about making my exams too easy, and wanted some tips on how to construct tough, but fair, tests.

There was no one else about; the hour was late, the staff and students had left. As I wandered about the stacks, one tome caught my eye. The gold lettering on its spine twinkled in the candlelight. I reached out for it – or did it reach out for me? – and, I swear to this day, it leapt off the shelf and sprung open in my hand.

The page that revealed itself bore the image of a man dressed in ancient professor’s garb; of what precise vintage I could not tell, and there was no caption to disclose his identity. Instead, next to the portrait on the yellowed, crumbling page lay this text, written in what I hoped beyond hope was simply reddish-brown ink: “Ye Olde Professor’s Guide to Building an Exam Curve.”

Eureka! This was precisely what I had been looking for, so I read on. I will spare the reader a full recitation of the text that followed, save to say that H.P. Lovecraft himself might have claimed its contents. To ensure that my eyes, and my eyes alone, are the only ones scarred by what these pages revealed, I will simply summarize the advice it conferred, for professors and students to do with what they will. Much of this counsel concerned the concoction of Torts examinations, but may cast its dark shadow elsewhere.

The Guide related five tips:

1. Divide and Conquer

First, the accursed manual advised me to space the facts pertinent to a given issue far apart in a fact pattern. Are you a Torts professor, testing negligence per se? If so, relate the statute or ordinance in question at the very start or very end of the fact pattern, several paragraphs away from your discussion of the conduct that might implicate the measure. Or are you a Criminal Procedure professor, testing the good-faith exception to the exclusionary rule? Reference the date of the incident―say, November 2008―in passing in your introductory sentence, along with several other foundational facts; hold back on mentioning any search of the passenger compartment of a vehicle incident to arrest until a few paragraphs later; and, a few paragraphs after that, finally mention, in as offhand a manner as possible, that the resulting case is being tried in December 2011. Voila—only the most careful exam connoisseurs will detect that you have laced their drink with a Belton/Gant/Davis good-faith issue.

2. Overlapping Theories, and Peripheral Plaintiffs and Defendants

Here, the guide recommended that I incorporate multiple theories of liability against a potential defendant; students may lock in on only one, and neglect the others. Likewise, defendants such as retailers in a strict products liability hypothetical, employers in a respondeat superior fact pattern, and landowners when intentional tortfeasors are afoot often prove difficult for students to spot, if only because their culpability seems so much less than that of other potential parties. In the same vein, in a passage I cannot help but quote directly (for I could not have written it myself), the Guide advised, ”You will find that passing references to husbands and wives, who might have easily-overlooked wrongful-death or consortium claims, will oil the slope of your curve with student tears.”

3. Dogs that Don’t Bark

The Guide instructed that the best issues, from the standpoint of creating a curve, are those that do not require extensive factual build-up, or peculiar words or phrases that will blow their “disguise” (cf. any reference to “dynamiting” in a Torts examination), but which have a huge impact on the correct answer nevertheless. With Criminal Procedure, standing (in a situation involving multiple defendants) is just this sort of issue; with Torts, but-for causation can have a similar effect―so long as one avoids the word “caused.”

4. Sleight of Hand

Here, the Guide told me, begin by writing your fact pattern such that a particular issue looks like a slam-dunk, with a particular party getting his or her just desserts. Have a drunk driver blow through a stop sign and mow down a nun; he’s guilty of negligence, at least, of course. Or, notwithstanding Rule Three, supra, use variants of the word “conspiracy” to describe a cabal, e.g., “A and B conspired to rob a bank”; they’re clearly guilty, right? Feel free to employ adverbs liberally toward this purpose, e.g., “C cruelly drove drunk and cruelly blew through a stop sign and cruelly mowed down a nun.”

Then, Step Two: Subtly structure the facts such that A, B, and C in fact cannot be found liable. Maybe the nun was pushed in front of the drunk driver, such that even a sober driver who obeyed all traffic laws would have struck her. You get the idea. This way, a student’s moral intuition may cause them to overlook the more subtle reason why, in fact, the defendant can’t be found liable, or successfully prosecuted for a crime.

5. The Ghost

Perhaps most diabolically, the Guide advised me that the best cause of action is sometimes no cause of action at all. Students, it instructed, want to find causes of action, crimes, or other violations of the law within an issue-spotter; an exam that implicates innumerable theories, all of which fail for some reason or another, will prove especially vexing to all but the most confident students.

***

The reader will have to accept my account of this text’s existence, for as soon as I read the last words above the book shuddered and shook in my hands, then crumbled into dust. Whether the text yielded wisdom, or only heartbreak, I cannot say; I recount this story solely for posterity, and desire not to be seen as an advocate of its mayhap baleful words.

December 9, 2011 at 12:01 am Posted in: Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure, Humor, Teaching, Tort Law Print This Post One Comment

A Guide to the Eight Most Suspect Types of Law Review Articles

posted by Kyle Graham

This is simply my list of the eight most suspect types of articles; I appreciate that others may suggest different, or additional, entries.

1. The Repository of Hope

“As the single-word title connotes, I am very disappointed that this article did not place in a T14 journal.”

2. The Strained Debunker

“In Part I, I will characterize a 1974 Pace Law Review note and a 2007 MySpace entry as embodying ‘conventional wisdom.’ ”

3. The Old-Wine-In-New-Bottles

“No one has evaluated the rule against perpetuities from an animal-rights perspective before, so, you know, what the hell.”

4. The One-Off

“In my previous article, I made a significant contribution to the literature. In this piece, I will coast on the vapors of that article.”

5. The Something Is Unconstitutional

“This article would make a fairly solid student note. It is my tenure piece.”

6. The Turf Staker

“My pre-emption check discovered no articles that cover this territory. I pretty much worked backward from there.”

7. The Half-Hearted Symposium Submission

“We would have tried harder, but hey, we’re talking about a symposium here.”

8. The Torn from the Headlines

“Few would recognize that the United States Supreme Court’s recent decision in ___ vs. ___ would fundamentally alter ___ law. Yet it did, or at least, you won’t be able to prove that it didn’t until this article is already well on its way to publication.”

December 3, 2011 at 1:34 pm Posted in: Education, Humor, Just for Fun, Law Talk, Teaching Print This Post 12 Comments

Law Professors, Petitions and Kristallnacht

posted by Kyle Graham

Not long ago, I was asked to sign a petition, circulating among law professors, that condemns the recent pepper-spraying of protesters at the University of California-Davis. This invitation rekindled my interest in the origins of these petitions.

Law professors qua law professors have become engaged in topical public controversies since the early 1900s. Some law professors spoke out about the Sacco-Vanzetti trial, and many professors took well-publicized positions on Franklin Roosevelt’s court-packing plan. I am unfamiliar with any widely distributed petition as to either event, however. (Although the AALS did initiate, only to abandon, a poll of law faculties designed to gauge their support or opposition to FDR’s plan.)

The first petition I have found that specifically requested the support of American law faculties circulated almost exactly 73 years ago, in early December 1938. This petition was prepared and distributed by telegram shortly after the Kristallnacht pogroms, and read as follows:

Faculty of Law [Institution, Location]

The Faculty of Law of the University of Amsterdam invites you kindly to inform them by telegram before December ten whether your Faculty of Law would be willing to second the following resolution. The invitation being wired today to all Faculties of Law in the British Empire, United States of America, France, Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, Finland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Iceland. The Faculties of Law of the Universities mentioned below noting with sorrow and dismay that in some countries innumerable people are being persecuted and tormented on account of their faith, race or political convictions and that particularly in the so called Concentration Camps innocent people are without legal procedure subjected to inhuman treatment considering that the basic principles of justice are thus insufferably violated voice their protest against this violation in view of their duty to uphold the principles of justice and the rights of man appeal to the conscience of mankind to support them in this protest and decide to publish this resolution and to communicate it to their respective governments.

The telegram, which on its face requested the support of each contacted institution (as opposed to the endorsement of individual professors) met with a range of responses. Some American law faculties (including those at Yale, the University of Chicago, the University of Michigan, the University of California-Berkeley, and the University of Colorado) signed on to the petition. At Harvard, it was agreed that individual professors could endorse the petition, if they so chose, but that no such backing would come from the general faculty, speaking as a whole and for the institution generally.

Today, it’s assumed that individual professors, as opposed to the institutions where they work, represent the proper signatories of a petition such at the one circulated by the University of Amsterdam law faculty. Were assumptions different, one presumes that there would be a lot fewer petitions in circulation. Plus faculty meetings would become much longer.

December 2, 2011 at 4:09 pm Posted in: Current Events, History of Law, Legal Ethics, Teaching Print This Post No Comments

New York Times Financial Advice: Be an Unpaid Intern Through Your 20s (Then Work till You’re 100)

posted by Frank Pasquale

Jason Mazzone has already addressed the main shortcomings of the latest N.Y. Times article by David Segal on law schools. I’d like to situate it as part of a neo-liberal ideology developing at the Times and other scriveners for the powerful.

If you pair the basic message of Segal’s piece (“law students and professors aren’t doing enough to raise corporate profits”) with that of Ed Glaeser’s anti-retirement musings in the same pages (“work into your 90s”), the ideology starts to emerge. Labor economist Mark Price pithily suggested it:

Law schools couldn’t possibly teach the wide range of firm specific skills that law firms need . . . . And yet you have a writer [pushing] propaganda that the big law firms are tired of paying for on the job training.

On the other hand it is at least comforting to know that law firms are not that different from firms in Manufacturing or Health Care[;] that is[,] they would prefer that somebody else pay for the skills that make them profitable.

This is a classic problem of uneven bargaining power familiar since the 1920s.* Why are wages falling while productivity is rising? Because firms realize they can fire current workers, shift their duties (unpaid) to frightened current employees, and reap the profits of having one person do the work of many. It’s another form of “shadow work” that contributes to the time bind so many Americans find themselves in. When 65% of economic gains go to the top 1% of the population, it’s not too hard to discern this dynamic.
Read the rest of this post »

November 20, 2011 at 1:40 pm Posted in: Law and Inequality, Law School, Teaching, Technology Print This Post 21 Comments

Farewell, Barnes and Zoning Matters, Really

posted by Sarah Waldeck

In the last week I’ve come across two teaching resources that are worth sharing. As the headline suggests, the first is about the Barnes Foundation, which closed the doors to its original home in Merion, Pennsylvania at the end of June. For years I’ve been urging my Estates and Trusts students to visit the Barnes before it is “too late,” by which I meant “before it moves to downtown Philadelphia.” I did this partly because I thought one needed to see the Barnes to fully understand the ongoing battle over its future, and partly because the Barnes was really, really cool. Now that it is officially “too late,” I will point them to this 360 degree interactive tour of the Barnes that was put together by the New York Times. Their effort really gives a flavor of the place, although many of us undoubtedly mourn that we’re left with only a computer program.

Next up is something for Property professors: an episode of This American Life entitled “Game Changer.” You can access the episode, which is about drilling for natural gas in Pennsylvania, here. Fast forward to minute 33:30 and soon a reporter will say, “The standoff between [the gas company] and [the town] started with one of the least gripping topics in all of government: zoning.” While the reporter’s explanation of the difference between conditional and permitted uses isn’t any more interesting than what I say in class, the story she tells is much more engaging than anything I’ve previously used to teach zoning. Moreover, the story of the small town that tried to write a zoning ordinance after Big Gas arrived does a better job of driving home the economic consequences of zoning than anything I’ve encountered to date.

July 12, 2011 at 2:57 pm Posted in: Property Law, Teaching, Wills, Trusts, and Estates Print This Post No Comments

F.M. LaGuardia and Lawyers In the Way

posted by Lawrence Cunningham

As a law professor and lawyer, I like law and lawyering. But I hate as much as the next guy when lawyers get in the way of people trying to do business.

In the past year, lawyers have poisoned three separate personal deals of mine, over matters neither I nor the other side needed to care about. The lawyers were hurting not helping their clients.

Lawyers need to know, and as a law professor I try to teach, the difference between legal matters and business issues. Lawyers must know the difference and stay out of the way of business matters.

All this prompts me to reprint below a wonderful letter from the inimitable Mayor of New York, Fiorella La Guardia. The letter, dated January 29, 1944, is addressed to the heads of various airlines, including American, Eastern, PanAm, and United.

The letter’s ultimate paragraph and final words speak volumes to my point, and the letter as a whole is vintage piece of written communication. Read the rest of this post »

June 29, 2011 at 5:12 pm Posted in: Law Practice, Law School (Teaching), Teaching Print This Post 7 Comments

Teaching Materials for Practicum Courses

posted by Jessica Erickson

You would have to live under a rock not to know that law schools increasingly feel the pressure to teach practical skills. Law schools can no longer teach doctrine and count on law firms to teach new lawyers the skills they need. As a result, many schools are starting to incorporate practicum-style courses into the curriculum. These courses allow students to learn litigation or transactional skills in the classroom by working on simulated cases or transactions.

My sense is that many of us are interested in teaching these courses, but the practicalities are daunting. Two years ago, I set out to create a course that would teach students how to be corporate litigators. I had visions of teaching my students an array of practical skills, including how to untangle financial statements, read complex statutes, and draft various case materials. It looked so good in my head. Then I actually tried to put together the course. There was no textbook. There were no model exercises. There was no anything… I spent a crazy amount of time putting together a course packet, coming up with weekly drafting assignments, and thinking about how to teach the skills I thought my students would need. I hesitate to say exactly how much time out of fear of scaring away others, but I still have flashbacks of sitting at my kitchen table for days on end trying to come up with creative fact patterns and drafting exercises.

At the end of the day, I was able to put together the materials for a course called Corporate Fraud & Litigation. I have taught the course twice now, and I really love it. But the preparation continues. I still develop new graded exercises every year out of fear that last year’s students will pass on their answers to this year’s students. The end result is that I spend significantly more time preparing for this course than for my other two courses combined. I am currently contemplating a complete overhaul of my course, but I have to admit that the massive work involved gives me pause.

I wonder whether the reality of having to prepare these materials—and then prepare many of the exercises anew every year—is holding back the development of these courses. Read the rest of this post »

May 5, 2011 at 8:03 pm Posted in: Corporate Law, Law School (Teaching), Teaching Print This Post 6 Comments

What’s Your Tenure Policy?

posted by Kevin Maillard

Thanks to Dan and Angel for inviting me to post. This is my first post-tenure post, and also my first guest post. I am a perma-blogger at The Faculty Lounge, so it will be fun to see how things work around here.

A number of schools are facing the question of how to structure their tenure calendars. It seems that in many places within the legal academy, tenure and promotion are combined into a 5-7 year, one-time occasion where a professor goes from untenured Assistant (or initial Associate) to Tenured Full Professor. And in many other places–often those schools following a traditional university model–like my home school of Syracuse University College of Law–the tenure process is much longer. Promotions: Assistant–>Associate–>Full Professor. And Untenured to Tenured, with no default attachment of promotion and tenure. Some schools may be a hybrid of the two: at promotion from Assistant to Associate, tenure is automatically granted. Read the rest of this post »

April 5, 2011 at 7:12 pm Posted in: Law School, Teaching, Uncategorized Print This Post One Comment

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.

Read the rest of this post »

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

Privacy vs. Security vs. Anonymity

posted by Sasha Romanosky

When I first began my PhD, I was keen to properly sort and define any new terms and reconcile them with my own education and experience. Three terms that always seemed to be intermingled were: Privacy, Security and Anonymity. Certainly they are related, but I wanted to be a little more specific and understand exactly when and how they overlapped.

First, let’s establish some basic definitions. For the purpose of this blog post, the following definitions will suffice (I’ll address alternative definitions later):
• Privacy: having control over one’s personal information or actions
• Security: freedom from risk or danger
• Anonymity: being unidentifiable in one’s actions

Next, create a Venn diagram with three overlapping circles (each circle representing one term). Then, within each area, try to provide examples that reflecte those properties. That is, imagine some situation where you would have security without privacy, or security without anonymity. When can you have all three? When can you be anonymous but lack privacy?

This may not be as easy as it seems. Certainly it helps once the definitions are set, but if nothing else, I think it’s a useful way to separate and identify the essence of these words (at least, as each of us sees them) and the contexts in which they may or may not exist. Before you continue, take a minute, examine the diagram above, and try to think of examples to fit each area.

Read the rest of this post »

January 4, 2011 at 2:47 pm Posted in: Privacy, Teaching Print This Post 8 Comments

Back to School: Research and Teaching

posted by Lawrence Cunningham

Research and teaching are what I do for a living, and I’m delighted to work at a university whose President, Steve Knapp, knows their value. In a courteous review in yesterday’s N.Y. Times, Dr. Knapp demolishes the dusty themes in a new book by the curmudgeons, Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus, Higher Education? The book bears clichés and canards against the modern university, primarily denying the value of research and rehearsing laments about its opposition to teaching. Dr. Knapp’s polite piece delightfully debunks these specious critiques.

Dr. Knapp notes the book’s strengths: it is ”lucid, passionate and wide-ranging,” “well-structured and strongly argued,” and poses “searching and sometimes troubling questions” about today’s university operations and purposes. Questions involve topics, some within university control some not, like the narrowness of academic specialization, the greediness of some faculty, and the frivolity of some student/parent demands for extras. The book usefullly identifies well-known laudable goals, like reducing student debt, “engaging students,” “mak[ing] students use their minds,” and “end[ing] the exploitation of adjuncts.”

Dr. Knapp notes that the book’s primary target, though, is research. The book makes the suggestion that, once upon a time, universities saw their role solely as education, and today they see it as all about publishing research. The authors heap heavy scorn on the notion that research actually helps teaching or is necessary to good teaching. Their most extreme proposals are that universities “spin off” medical schools and research centers, end paid sabbaticals, and abolish tenure. Dr. Knapp notes that the authors, who should know what they’re talking about, Hacker being a noted academic and Dreifus a long-time adjunct professor, rely on “sometimes sweeping generalizations.”

Read the rest of this post »

August 20, 2010 at 6:46 pm Posted in: Education, Teaching, Uncategorized Print This Post One Comment

Hypotheticals, the Classroom, and Moral Biology

posted by Glenn Cohen

Hypotheticals are a ubiquitous pedagogical tool in both the law and philosophy classrooms. I have recently been thinking about the different functions they serve and whether they are well-suited for the weight we give them. These reflections were prompted by a conference on “Moral Biology,” hosted by the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School (which I co-direct), in cooperation with The Project on Law and Mind Sciences at Harvard Law School, the Gruter Institute, the Harvard Program on Ethics and Health, and the MacArthur Law and Neuroscience Project.

I may blog a little bit later about some other of the marvelous things I learned over these two days, but for now I wanted to concentrate on some thoughts that stemmed from a public portion of the conference that can be seen here, involving Josh Greene from Harvard’s Psychology Department, William Fitzpatrick from the University of Rochester’s Philosophy Department, Adina Roskies from Dartmouth’s Philosophy Department, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong from Duke’s Philosophy Department, and Tim Scanlon, from Harvard’s philosophy department.

At around the 43 to 50 minute mark in the video, Josh discusses Trolley Problems (which ask participants a thought experiment about whether to divert a trolley from one track to another with many versions of the hypothetical) and an experiment done on them by Fiery Cushman (and a collaborator, Switzgable I believe, I could not find the actual paper) in Josh’s lab. In the experiment, before being asked whether they would endorse the principle of double effect, ethicists with PhDs were asked to reason about variants of the Trolley problem (switch vs. footbridge) presented in different orders. The experiment found that if one varied the order in which the versions were presented (but always presented all of them,) ethicists reached different conclusions about whether they would endorse the principle. [This is Josh's description in the video, again if anyone can find the paper he is discussing I will try and like to that]. The result is surprising in that it appears even those with PhD training in ethics are susceptible to order effects in reasoning about a very fundamental issue.

As Josh concedes, and others (in the panel and in written pieces discussing his work emphasize) the fact that these ordering effects occur is not itself fatal to the enterprise of philosophical analysis using intuitions. It depends on further views about how one uses these kinds of intuitions in the analysis. For present purposes, though, I want to partially side-step that question in favor of thinking about the law classroom, and how this experiment might should us a little more careful about the way we use hypotheticals.

Read the rest of this post »

August 13, 2010 at 8:22 am Posted in: Bright Ideas, Empirical Analysis of Law, Jurisprudence, Law and Humanities, Law and Psychology, Law School, Law School (Teaching), Legal Theory, Teaching, Uncategorized Print This Post One Comment

« Older Entries

Slip Opinions

Our Podcast

Posts by Author

Categories

Archives

Recent Comments

About the Blog

Archive for the ‘Teaching’ Category

posted by Frank Pasquale

posted by Frank Pasquale

posted by Kyle Graham

posted by Kyle Graham

posted by Kyle Graham

posted by Kyle Graham

posted by Kyle Graham

posted by Kyle Graham

posted by Kyle Graham

posted by Kyle Graham

posted by Frank Pasquale

posted by Danielle Citron

posted by Sarah Waldeck

posted by Lawrence Cunningham

posted by Jessica Erickson

posted by Kevin Maillard

posted by Lawrence Cunningham

posted by Sasha Romanosky

posted by Lawrence Cunningham

posted by Glenn Cohen

Authors

Guests

Previous Guests

Ownership

Blogroll