Pedagogy

SALT’s new podcast, Teaching Social Justice, is now live! The first episode features Lisa Brodoff, the Director of the Ronald A. Peterson Law Clinic and an associate professor at Seattle University School of Law. The second features Matthew Fletcher, Professor of Law and Director of the Indigenous Law & Policy Center at…

Join us in honoring Professor Katie Eyer and Professor Lua Yuille at the SALT Annual Awards Celebration on January 5, 2018 in San Diego SALT is proud to recognize Associate Professor Katie Eyer (Rutgers) and Associate Professor Lua Yuille (University of Kansas) as its 2017 Junior Faculty Teaching Award winners.

SALT proudly recognized Professor Vinay Harpalani as the 2016 Junior Faculty Teaching Award winner at its Teaching Conference reception on September 30.  The award recognizes an outstanding recent entrant into legal education who demonstrates a commitment to justice, equality and academic excellence. It is designed to honor an emerging teacher and support…

SALT Comments on Proposed Standard 316 Revisions While the proposed standard’s simplicity has appeal, unanswered questions remain about how the standard will work, especially in view of the recent worrying declines in the rate of bar passage in many states and for many schools. We urge the Council…

Daly Quigley letter to American Law Professors (1) To: Law Professors Interested in International Social Justice From: Erin Daly, Widener University Delaware Law School, Bill Quigley, Loyola University New Orleans College of Law Dear Colleagues: We write to invite you to participate in an exciting experience — to share…

Written by Hazel Weiser Here’s where I disagree with Professor Tamanaha.  It’s not that SALT has been silent or callous about the rise of student debt.  As Dean Van Cleave so passionately stated in her recent blog, to solve the economic problem the profession faces, we have to answer…

The New York Times recently declared, “American legal education is in crisis.” One cause, the editorial argued, is legal education’s traditional preference for theory over practice: “In 2007, a report by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching explained that law schools have contributed heavily to this crisis by giving ‘only casual attention to teaching students how to use legal thinking in the complexity of actual law practice.’” Widely publicized calls to reform legal education have come from Best Practices; its blog; and other blogs, e.g., "Room for Debate – The Case Against Law School."

Judicial vacancies restrict access to the federal courts, make litigation more expensive, and insidiously undermine the credibility of government. And a confirmation process that prevents qualified candidates of an elected president’s party from taking office sways the judiciary further to the right despite an election where voters said civil liberties, clean air, privacy, reproductive rights, social justice, and corporate accountability were important issues for our federal government to maintain and safeguard. The Alliance for Justice has created a fantastic resource to help educate voters and civic leaders about the state of judicial nominations. The Judicial Selection Project has a running count of vacancies in the district and circuit courts, along with profiles of all of the current nominees. It’s a great lesson in the advise & consent function of the Senate, or at least what can go wrong with it.

I just finished reading Moneyball by Michael Lewis, although I haven’t seen the film yet, which is up for six Oscars on Sunday night. As someone uninterested in sports (except for basketball), I couldn’t quite understand why I was so intrigued by a book about baseball and statistics. And I mean engrossed in this book, reporting like an eager third grader every night at dinner as I delved deeper into the Oakland A’s dugout. Billy Beane, played by Brad Pitt in the film, decides to use a different schema for recruiting and retaining ball players during the 2002 baseball season. Breaking all of the rules of what matters about a player’s stats, Oakland's general manager Billy Beane, with the help of Peter Brand, a Harvard educated math wonk, played by Jonah Hill, methodically holds fast to a new set of statistics to assess the value of any player. This is called sabermetrics. Beane throws out 150 years of baseball wisdom in a single baseball season. A totally different way of assessing the value of a player, um, that sounds intriguing.

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.

One of the pedagogy sessions at the AALS New Teachers Workshop was led by Paula Lustbader (Seattle) and Laurie Zimet (UC Hastings) who focused on how to bring technology into the classroom so that we aren’t competing with Facebook, Twitter, and GiltGroup.com. (I’ll leave those links out so that you will finish this posting!) Paula and Laurie are gifted teachers of teachers, modeling for the newbies how abandoning lecture and incorporating technology will make teaching and learning more dynamic, and empower rather than infantilize students. So with Paula and Laurie in mind, I watched Stephen Colbert this week, in real time, awed once again by the sheer chutzpah of his comedy.

am sitting at a table along with some of the legal publishers at the AALS Workshop for New Law Teachers and the excitement in seeing candidates whom I’ve met at the SALT-LatCrit junior faculty development workshops, the People of Color programs, and the recent SALT “Breaking In” programs walk into the Mayflower Hotel as new law teachers is fantastic!

This semester marks the end of Professor Margaret Montoya’s law teaching career at UNM School of Law. Professor Montoya will leave the Law School to serve full-time as Senior Advisor to Chancellor Paul Roth at Health Sciences for one more year prior to her retirement. This is my final salute to an inspiration, a valued colleague, a fierce voice, an innovative teacher, a renowned and prolific scholar and a friend. Her remarkable achievements are truly tremendous and she leaves both a legacy and a huge impression in our legal landscape that will take an effort to fill.

This report reviews the results of the April 2011 meeting of the Standards Review Committee (SRC), but omits discussion of the committee discussion of security of position, which is reviewed in a previous report, available here. In each section, reference is made to subcommittee reports; those are subcommittees of the SRC, charged with drafting language and bringing it to the full committee for discussion and ultimate decision. The standards and topics addressed in this report are: * Bar pass rate requirements (Standard 301) * Admissions and student services, including use of the LSAT in admissions (Chapter 5) * Student learning outcomes (part of Chapter 3) * Other issues in Chapter 3: Program of Legal Education, including discussions of attendance policies, distance education, and paid externships * Faculty responsibilities (Standard 404) * Law school administration and organization (Chapter 2) * Facilities (Chapter 7)

The Standards Review Committee (SRC) held an open forum at the beginning of its meeting on April 2-3. Commentators focused on security of position and its relationship to law school governance and academic freedom. Speakers from SALT, CLEA (the Clinical Legal Association), ALWD (the Association of Legal Writing Directors), and the AALS, along with a number of individual faculty members, raised concerns about a subcommittee draft that would eliminate any requirement of tenure or other job security for law faculty from the ABA’s accreditation standards. This memo summarizes the public testimony on tenure and security of position, the SRC’s debate about the proposed changes to the tenure/security of position standard, and the outcome of that debate.

Written by Ezra Rosser Should self-identified "public interest" law students should do law review or, depending on the school and the nature of the program, moot court?  Months ago I promised I would work on a blog entry related to this question for the Equal Justice Works Blog, but I admit still being conflicted about the issue.  What follows are my thoughts, but they are subject to change and on this issue often do change.  As a law student, my first bonding with upper level, 2L & 3L, students happened at a NLG Disorientation retreat.  There I was told two memorable things: (1) your professors sold-out and though they sound progressive, they decided NOT to DO public interest work, and (2) you don't have to and probably shouldn't do law review.  Now, in my current position I am perhaps particularly nervous about and pained by (1) (something I have written about here), but (2) stuck with me while a student.

Written by:  Deborah Post Let’s talk dystopia.  Would we want to see factory law schools where students are passed along an assembly line to graduation; where the exclusive measure of the quality of education is test performance on regularly administered multiple choice or short answer tests? We have all had those conversations with law students who admit they never did any research or wrote a paper while they were undergraduates.  Last year I had a student from a reputable state university whose major was political science.  The student confessed that the only paper she wrote in four years of college was in an art history class. If accreditation standards are revised to eliminate the requirement of tenure and the peer review of those who are full time faculty with job security, I have no doubt that most universities will quickly adopt a strategy of replacing tenured faculty with part time or contingent faculty.  An AAUP report in 2009 on contingent faculty indicated that 70% of academic labor is now contingent. For resources on the use of contingent faculty in U.S. colleges and Universities see generally http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/issues/contingent/ .  We know the widespread use of contingent faculty in undergraduate schools is an unsound educational practice because we have seen the results.   The overuse of contingent faculty has been identified as one variable affecting the acquisition of knowledge by undergraduate students. Quality suffers when educators are treated as fungible – when one teacher is as good as another -- and when the need to contain costs prompts managers to think about “downsizing” by using part time employees.  This failed strategy has crippled the U.S. economy and compromised higher education.  It is not a model we want to adopt in our professional schools.

Written by Katie Porter Elizabeth Loftus (UC-Irvine Law) has co-authored a new paper on lawyers' abiliy to predict outcomes in litigation. She and her colleagues surveyed about 500 lawyers with pending litigation, asking them to specify a minimum goal for their case and providing a confidence estimate for the chances of meeting that goal. The key finding: "Overall, lawyers were overconfident in their predictions." The article lays out all the ways that this can be harmful to clients, and to our legal system in general. I've been thinking about the role of law schools, and legal educators, in cultivating this optimism bias. The researchers find that lawyers don't get better at estimating outcomes with more years of experience; recent grads and old hands are equally likely to overestimate their odds of success. How can law schools counter this overconfidence? What are the risks of doing so?

Written by:  Angela Harris There were maybe twenty of them. One or two women beamed encouragingly as I stood up. I love the ones who support you: open faces that track your face, smiles and nods, puzzled looks when they get lost. But the bodies of the ones who drew my attention were rigid and tight. Arms folded over chests. Gazes studiously focused on nothing. I was there with my black face and my assigned readings to talk to this colleague's criminal procedure class about race and space.

Written by:  Deborah Post Last week we learned that Jim Perdue,  Chairman of Perdue Foods Inc., spoke to Maryland legislators on behalf of the small farmers he claimed would be forced out of business if the environmental law clinic at University of Maryland Law School is allowed to sue Perdue and one of its growers.  I was familiar with Perdue's relationship with small farmers.  Some years ago -- in 1998, to be precise -- I wrote a contracts exam using the pleadings filed in Monk v. Perdue Farms, Inc., 12 F. Supp.2d 508 (D.Md. 1998),  by plaintiff's attorney, Roger L. Gregory, then partner in the firm of Wilder and Gregory, now judge on the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. Monk was a case about racial discrimination. Several black farmers alleged that they were not accorded the same treatment under the terms of Perdue's standard form contract as white farmers.  In that respect, the Monk case bore some resemblance to Reid v. Key Bank of Southern Maine, Inc., 821 F.2d 9 (1st Cir. 1987), a case I cover in contracts when I teach students about the implied duty of good faith. Mr. Reid was the only borrower at the bank to have his line of credit cut off, his note accelerated, his collateral seized without the bank officers first calling him in to the bank for a meeting.  Reid is still mentioned in other casebooks in notes about lender liability or the subjective test for good faith, but these notes appear to sidestep the issues of race and motive altogether.  The relationship between motive, malice and racial prejudice is admittedly somewhat ambiguous in Reid because the jury found there was no racial discrimination by the bank.  Nevertheless, Reid is still a case that calls attention on the disparate treatment one black businessman received and the inferences that could be drawn from that fact.