A Community of Progressive Law Teachers Working For Justice, Diversity and Academic Excellence
Benjamin G. Davis, Associate Professor of Law, University of Toledo College of Law
As I frequently do Sunday's mornings in Toledo, picked up the Sunday Toledo Blade at the 7/11 (Comenatchi?...
By Benjamin G. Davis, Associate Professor of Law, University of Toledo College of Law
(Update: Other than Romney and Obama, I am avoiding using names of others here to respect their privacy....
By Olympia Duhart
This article originally appeared in the Huffington Post on June 19, 2012.
At its core, A Streetcar Named Desire is a story about culture clash and...
This morning NPR broadcast a report on the millionaire contributors to the various Super PACS which will only fuel the vitriol of this presidential election cycle. The list of contributors, those who have given a million or more and to which PAC, is available on line. Robert Smith, the NPR reporter, focused on Steven Lund, who had set up a phony corporation to hide the fact that he had given $1 million to Restore our Future, the Super PAC supporting Mitt Romney. I could have easily slipped into cynicism, believing that Citizens United (2010) was indeed the death knell of our democracy. I could have slipped deeper into despair thinking that the U.S. Supreme Court might overturn Citizens United, but not before the Super PACS had done their damage and gotten Obama out of office. At first I tried to elicit Stephen Colbert’s satire, his Super PAC, Making a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow. But even Stephen’s wicked humor didn’t help. That’s all I could conjure was a scene of depressed and disappointed would-be voters who might just sit out this election. I was recognizing the symptoms: cynicism, passivity, and victimhood. These are self-government’s deadly enemies.
Over at the Volokh Conspiracy, I was struck by a comment on a posting of Professor Richard Sander of UCLA Law School about “The Problem of “Science Mismatch”” discussing his ongoing Mismatch Effect work encouraging cascading blacks down to lower ranked schools. The comment was on what benefit comes from this research and replied,
“The obvious benefit is that we would stop discriminating against Asians and whites, and those blacks that were admitted would not have the rest of the world assuming that they only attended Harvard/Yale/Stanford because of racial preferences.”
Posted by Lisa R. Pruitt
The Occupy Wall Street movement has recently drawn national attention to economic inequality, and several new studies and a book just published also invite us to...
It’s hard to imagine that in 1950, roughly half of the practicing attorneys in the United States were not college educated, but had gone to law school from high school or less. Post World War II brought with it an influx of students, thanks to the GI Bill, and most of those students were men. That wartime anomaly—twenty-five percent of law school students being women—ended quickly. Standardization won out, too, according to Robert Stevens in Law School: Legal Education in America from the 1850s to the 1980s, (the basis of this series of articles on how law schools developed into what they are today). There was not that much difference in the content of the curriculum offered at a local or regional law school and that offered at Harvard, Yale, or Stanford by the late 1940s.
The ABA and AALS won: four years of college and three years of full time law school was mostly needed to sit for the bar with the noticeable exception of California (and a few other states), which still had state-accredited law schools and an apprenticeship avenue into practice. What did law school look like: large classes, the case method, and no written work apart from a final examination in each course. This was the time when law schools were the cash cows for many universities. There had been some “reform” in the 1950s and 1960s, mainly, introductory law classes, teaching fellows for tutorial help, the introduction of legal skills courses using the problem method, a few specialty seminar classes, and finally, clinical education. The biggest innovation, of course, was the acquiescence that negotiation, drafting, and counseling needed to be taught even if the case method couldn’t be instructive here.
The End of the Pipeline: A Journey of Recognition for African Americans Entering the Legal Profession by Dorothy H. Evensen and Carla D. Pratt (faculty members at Penn State and proud SALT members) is a “must” read for every law school dean, law school admissions officer, and pre law college adviser. Reading this book will deepen our knowledge about the roadblocks African American students face academically, economically, and culturally in order to cultivate an understanding of what help individuals and institutions can provide to these aspiring students along the way. Reading this book, although fraught with indignities and disappointments, is essentially optimistic, because it makes diversity more likely by identifying institutional and programmatic choices that can make achieving diversity more feasible.
Evensen and Pratt’s research examines the stories of twenty-eight African American attorneys who graduated from law school after 2000 as the new millennium began. Each participant passed the bar and is working in the profession. Using an analytic/interpretive research methodology, Evensen and Pratt interviewed these “successful” pipeline travelers. The stories reveal what at first appear to be very specific and individual paths through high school, college, law school, the bar exam, and into practice. But Evensen and Pratt found patterns and organized these stories into categories in order to understand what works to navigate through the often difficult and circuitous pipeline. These stories illustrate how much power a teacher, family member, or friend can wield with a comment or a casual attitude—whether encouraging or not. These personal histories also reveal just how much our colleges and law schools have to restructure themselves as institutions to compensate for the educational inequities that isolate and alienate especially poor African Americans. If we want to have a diverse profession, we need to shake up the cultures of our law schools.
The middle tier law schools in the years between World War I, essentially pre-standardization, and World War II, when much had been accomplished to establish a singular way to teach law, were driven to emulate Harvard, Yale, and Columbia, just as they do now. Of course, this desire back then was to get onto the approved ABA list of law schools and an invitation to join the AALS. Now this emulation comes from an additional source: U.S. News & World Report rankings.
In the years that the ABA and AALS were on the ascent, to call a law school merely a step to get its graduates through the bar exam was considered a horrific insult.
To emulate Harvard, Yale, and Columbia, a law school had to ascribe to the case book method and hire scholars, avoiding experienced practitioners who were considered mediocre in the classroom, perhaps because their intellect had been diminished by pragmatism or worse yet, cynicism.
The first rule of persuasion is to choose when to begin a story. All of this talk about deregulation of legal education and the practice of law as being good for everyone needs some historical context. (This talk sounds dangerously like it was manufactured by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce). I started that examination last week when I posted Deregulation is Just Another Word for … . Today I am moving deeper into history to help us understand how the legal profession became a profession. It’s not a pretty story, because it happened here in the United States: a radical, young, immature, racist, and intolerant place that has always had a hard time living up to its aspirations.
Looking back to the time when the American Bar Association—ABA—first began to influence legal education, I am once again heavily relying on the scholarship of Robert Stevens, Law School: Legal Education in America from the 1850s to the 1980s (University of North Carolina Press 1983).