Law School Innovation

Should law schools help "incubate" solo practicioners?

The question in the title of this post is prompted by this article in the National Law Journal, which is headlined "The next solo incubator will be in San Diego."  Here are excerpts:

Recent graduates of Thomas Jefferson School of Law who want to launch solo practices will soon have some extra support from their alma mater.  The school is the latest to start a solo incubator — a post-graduation program intended to provide affordable office space and mentoring from law faculty and alumni to help graduates gain experience and learn how to run their own practices.

The City University of New York School of Law was the first to create such a program in 2007, and the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law, the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law and Pace Law School have followed.

"We don't take part in their law offices, but we'll provide mentorship and support," said Thomas Jefferson professor Luz Herrera, who is spearheading the initiative. "We'll also have a listserve that will put them in contact with more experienced attorneys."

The school will start taking applications for the program in July, and expects to have between six and eight participants initially.  They will spend between 12 and 18 months in the incubator.  Assisting them will be MBA students at San Diego State University, who will research the solo practitioner market in the city to help identify unmet legal needs and suggest prices for their services, Herrera said....

Fred Rooney, who developed CUNY's solo incubator, traveled to San Diego to help Herrera and other Thomas Jefferson faculty to help develop to the program.  He said he has been fielding requests from many law schools for information and ideas.  "As more solo incubators are conceptualized by law schools, each one is going to be unique," Rooney said. "I think the Thomas Jefferson model is going to emphasize cross-border matters," given that San Diego's close proximity to the Mexican border.

Thomas Jefferson will start a solo practice concentration within its curriculum next fall to prepare students who want to go that route. The school has asked local bar associations and practicing attorneys to submit proposals for what that curriculum should cover, Herrera said. The preliminary plan calls for a series of practicing attorneys to lecture on topics ranging from how to market yourself to how to maintain good relationships with opposing counsel.

I have long feared that too much of the professional and professionalism training that I try to give to my students in both doctrinal and skills courses unduly reflect only the large-national-firm "BigLaw" realities I experienced in my years in practice.  Thus, I very much like the idea of law school classes and related programming that is focused around a different model/structure for legal practice.

That said, I have always wonder how effective and successful  a true "solo" practitioner can be over time without eventually getting significant help from other lawyers and/or professional staff.  For that reason, I am not sure I like the idea of encouraging young lawyers to be thinking about a "solo" practice rather than a "small" practice.  Put differently, before embarking on a sustained effort to "incubate" solo practioners, I think a law school might be best served by exploring what kinds of small firm structures appear to be most successful in their region -- as judged by the client market and in the view of lawyers working therein -- and then developing programming to help junior lawyers join or develop these kinds of small-firm structures.  Such a program might not only serve the students, but also local small firms (which, I suspect, have little time/ability to recruit and train junior lawyers, even if/when they have the need for them as their legal business increases).

Posted by DAB

Wash. U. innovates with online law masters programs

I am intrigued to see this new article from the New York Times concerning showing the details of a real law school innovation coming from the Show Me State.   The article it headlined "Law School Plans to Offer Web Courses for Master’s," and here are excerpts:

The law school of Washington University announced Tuesday that it would offer, entirely online, a master’s degree in United States law intended for lawyers practicing overseas, in partnership with 2tor, an education technology company.

Legal education has been slow to move to online classes, and the new master’s program is perhaps the earliest partnership between a top-tier law school and a commercial enterprise.

“We don’t know where the students are going to come from exactly, but we believe there is demand abroad for an online program with the same quality that we deliver in St. Louis, accessible to people who can’t uproot their lives to come to the United States,” said Kent D. Syverud, the dean of the law school, which currently offers students on campus a Master of Law degree, or LL.M., in United States law for foreign lawyers. “It’s not designed to prepare students for the bar exam.”

Nonetheless, graduates of the new program, which will include live discussions via webcam and self-paced online materials, would probably be eligible to take the California bar exam.

Washington University will share the revenues from the $48,000 program — the same tuition paid by students at the St. Louis campus — with 2tor, which will provide marketing, the Web platform and technical support, including a staff member to monitor each live class and deal with any technical problems that arise.

2tor, a four-year-old company based in Maryland, has partnerships in place with the University of Southern California, Georgetown and the University of North Carolina for online graduate degree programs in education, business, public administration and nursing....

A growing number of law schools offer online master’s degrees in specialized areas of law, like taxation, health care, estate planning, the environment or business transactions. Florida Coastal School of Law, a commercial school, offers a master’s in United States law, created, like the Washington University program, for international lawyers.

New York University Law School’s online Executive LL.M in Tax program enrolls more than 100 students, mostly from the United States, with a smattering from other countries. “Online students can see videos of all the brick-and-mortar classes,” said Joshua D. Blank, faculty director of the graduate tax program, which has been available online since 2008. “We use the same technology Netflix uses to watch movies online. Now that there’s the technology to do this, I think there’s a lot of room for these programs to grow.”...

Classes will be kept small and, Mr. Syverud said, will re-create the discussion between students and professors that characterizes most in-person legal education. Mr. Syverud said he hoped to enroll 20 students in the first group, starting in January, and have four groups a year, totaling more than 100 students.

Posted by DAB

Is there a success story?

Law schools across the country seem to share a common belief:  That if their faculty publish more academic scholarship, and place it in better journals, then the U.S. News ranking of the school will improve.  Schools have expended great time and expense on this project, and reshaped their faculties in pursuit of this goal.  In hiring and at tenure review, most places view scholarship as being more important than teaching, in part for this reason.  This belief has played a role not only in restructuring our institutions, but our values.

Is it a myth?

Looking back over several years of rankings, I have trouble identifying schools for whom this tactic was successful.  After all, if scholarship can result in a long-term improvement in the rankings, shouldn't there be success stories? 

So tell me-- where are they?  What are the schools that managed, through increased scholarship rather that other factors, to significantly improve their rankings over the long-term (as opposed to brief jumps)?

Anyone?  Anyone?  Bueller?

-- Mark Osler 

A New Blog About Law School Reform, by Students

It's about time!

I got a message recently from Tina Tanhehco, who is a law student at UNC.  She and a hardy band of fellow students at a variety of schools have started a new and vibrant blog called Law Schooled, which already has built up an intriguing pile of thoughts (including this take on some of my posts here).

Here is their mission statement:

Law Schooled is an open forum for students to discuss legal education and law school reform.  This blog and network aims to include all members of the law school community in a substantive discussion about how students can play a role in shaping the future of legal education.

From what I can see, these guys are articulate, thoughtful, and use technology well.  I hope more students jump on their bus, and things really start to roll!

-- Mark Osler

 

Four provocative suggestions for law school reform from Brian Leiter

I am not sure what prompted this new post at Brian Leiter's Law School Reports, titled "Four Changes to the Status Quo in Legal Education That Might Be Worth Something," but I think it is a post that is surely worth reading.  Here are highlights of Leiter's proposals:

1.  Higher education in America includes research universities and teaching colleges (the latter placing less emphasis on research); law schools need the same division of labor, so that we have some law schools that are Harvard and Chicago, and some law schools that are Oberlin and Reed.  How to bring it about is the really hard part, but changes to ABA accreditation rules could surely help....

2.  Judge Posner suggested some time ago that law school be shortened to two years, with a third year optional depending on a student's career goals. Those who want to be tax lawyers could do what is, in effect, the LLM in tax in the third year; those who want to be legal scholars could devote the third year either to cultivating scholarly skills or teaching skills, depending on their academic goals (per #1); those who haven't secured permanent employment after two years could use the third (at some appropriately reduced cost) in externships designed to enhance marketability, with some supervision from academic or clinical faculty; and so on....

3.  Cut the number of law reviews by 75%, and turn the remaining ones over to faculty supervision, with students still working on them, but no longer vested with editorial control....

4.  Finally, and no doubt most controversially, law schools need real tenure standards and real post-tenure review. Real tenure standards means law schools should deny tenure two or three times as often as they presently do, and on the basis of a genuine qualitative review of scholarship.  Post-tenure review -- say, once every ten years -- should operate within the current tenure framework, which means termination only for good cause....

Thoughts on this list?  Other suggestions or modifications of justified law school reforms?

Posted by DAB

The 2013 US News law school rankings: A call on Yale to drop out

Today is the day that the US News Law School Rankings are released. This is not a reason for celebration even where (as here) a school jumped up in the rankings. As I have written recently, these rankings create bad incentives and are a poor measure of what we do, at any school.

Big scandals at Villanova and Illinois should have sent a message out about the risks of trying to cheat. But, gaming of the numbers continues. I was shocked to see in this NY Post article that Fordham Law School is boosting its employment numbers by giving almost 15% of its graduates temporary jobs at the school itself. This matters a great deal in the rankings, since most schools in Fordham's range report an employment rate well over 80%-- so a true reporting of independent employment would knock Fordham down the rankings significantly.

We'd be better off without these rankings, all of us. I say that despite the fact that my alma mater is #1 overall, that my home school is seeing a big jump up.... we all would be better off without them.

Treating the US News Rankings like they matter is something that nearly all law schools do, because no one wants to drop out of the system and go to the 4th Tier. We all know it is wrong, and we all keep doing it, even when it is worsening (or, some would say, creating) the crisis in legal education.

It's time for the leaders to lead. Yale Law should drop out of the system, and urge others to follow. I loved my time at Yale, value what they do, and will feel the same way regardless of rankings. True leadership is bold, often selfless, and moves towards what is true and good. It is time for Yale to lead.

-- Mark Osler

The 2012 Conference of Religiously Affiliated Law Schools!

May 2-4, Touro Law School will be hosting the 2012 RALS conference, which is open to all (including those who teach at non-religious institutions).  You can get all the details here.  This wil be the first time such a conference has been held at a Jewish-affilliated school.

Religiously-affiliated law schools have been at the forefront of many innovations over the past two decades, such as the inclusion of social justice within the mission of a school.  At past conferences, a vigorous discussion has grown out of the diversity of views within this group, which includes Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish institutions. 

The conference is timed so that participants can conveniently combine their time at Touro with a weekend in New York City.

-- Mark Osler    

The Danger of False Proxies

I'm coming to the realization that in many parts of my work, I am dealing with the same demon:  False proxies.  In short, a false proxy is a quantitative, seemingly objective measure that inaccurately or incompletely reflects the truth and sends our efforts in the wrong direction.

For example, in my field of criminal law success is still measured in many quarters (on the law enforcement side) by how many people we lock up and for how long, but this is a false proxy for real success in solving problems.  This false proxy is enhanced by an underlying and even worse proxy-- that we use the weight of drugs possessed as a proxy for the culpability of an individual defendant, a standard that leads to high sentences for mules and street dealers.

In advising my students, I find that salary serves as a false proxy for the quality of a job.  Setting aside those people who have high debt to be paid off, there seems to be a weakness for the easy marker of big money even when the need is not there.

Finally (and probably predictably for readers of this blog) there is the false proxy of US News rankings as a measure of law school quality.

What is so alluring about these quantitative measures?  Primarily, they are easy-- we can evaluate things without the heavy lifting involved in sorting through nuanced outcomes and individualized circumstances.  We live in a society where quantification is prized, but rank-ordering everything has a steep price.  What is lost is too often those things that are deep and challenging and meaningful, and we academics (critical thinkers that we are) need to take the lead in modeling a better way.

-- Mark Osler

 

 

CALI Offering Free Open Online Course on Digital Law Practice

The Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI) is once again pushing the envelope in legal education by offering law faculty, law students, and lawyers an opportunity to participate in a Massively Open Online Course (MOOC) entitled Topics in Digital Law Practice. This free, online, 9 week course is open to all with live sessions held on Friday afternoons beginning Friday, February 10, 2012 at 2 PM ET. 

From the course website:

This course is designed to provide an overview of the changes that are occurring in the practice of law today, especially with respect to technology. It will introduce law students for real-world situations that they will encounter in the job market and point law professors to new avenues to cover in their courses.

The course will run for one hour a week for nine weeks and will feature a different guest speaker each week. Each class will be delivered via webcast and will have a 30 minute lecture presentation followed by a question & answer period and an online, interactive homework assignment for all course students to complete. There will be no formal assessment like midterms or a final exam.

The audience for this seminar is primarily law students and law faculty who will be given priority. Anyone else can join the course for one or all of the sessions. The presentations will be recorded and posted to the course blog.

Registration for this course is required.

 

-- Elmer R. Masters
Full disclosure: I am CALI's Director of Internet Development

SOPA Teach-In

No blackout, but a teach-in in lieu thereof:

 

Some thoughtful comments on SOPA:

 

Mark Lemley, David Levine & David Post--Stanford Law Review Online--Don't Break the Internet.

EFF, Stop the Internet Blacklist Legislation

Mozilla et al Letter on SOPA

Law Professors' Letter in Opposition to SOPA (I signed the letter)

TechDirt's Mike Masnick, Open Letter to Chris Dodd

 

Floyd Abrams' testimony in defense of the Protect IP Act

Anupam Chander

"While legal academia dithers over reform, the profession may be passing them by"

The title of this post is the sub-heading of this new piece in The National Law Journal, which carries the main headline "What is law school for, anyway?". The piece is a must-read for all would-be law school innovators, and here are excerpts:

The state of the profession has not traditionally been a focus of law professors, said George Washington University Law School professor Thomas Morgan, author of the book The Vanishing American Lawyer.  That remained true until about one year ago, when more people within the academy started taking note of the rumblings within the profession, he said. "We need to try and bridge what is a mutual set of problems," Morgan said.

Still, there remains a gap between the magnitude of change advocated by some within the profession and the modest innovations law schools are pursuing.  Those innovations include a wider array of clinics, harnessing technology in simulations and student projects, and teaching transactional lawyering skills.

"I think they are rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic," said Susan Hackett, chief executive officer of consulting firm Legal Executive Leadership and former general counsel of the Association of Corporate Counsel.  "The discussion seems to be, 'Let's add a Thursday evening extra-credit course on the legal profession that meets for a couple of hours.' That's just tweaking around the edges."

Instead, Hackett suggested a re-engineering of law curricula to include an initial phase of core courses followed by a year of executive education-style classes covering topics including business skills, legal technology and behavioral management.  The final phase would involve clinics or externships in law firms, legal departments, government agencies or nonprofit organizations.  These could replace the traditional law firm summer associateships and would be more substantive, she said.

Missing in the conversation was any focus on what skills corporate clients actually want in their lawyers, Hackett said, such as the ability to solve problems and understand financial statements.  "I truly think there are a significant number of people in legal education who think that what a client wants is irrelevant," she said.  "They just want to teach the law."

Others warned that framing the discussion solely in terms of what large law firms and corporate clients want ignores that the vast majority of law school graduates don't work in so-called Big Law, but rather in small firms, solo practice, government or nonprofits — or even as nonlawyers.  Identifying exactly what skills and knowledge students should take away from law school is more complicated than critics suggest, said University of Richmond School of Law Dean Wendy Perdue and Northeastern University School of Law Dean Emily Spieler.

Posted by DAB

Leaders, it's time to lead

While in Washington last week for the AALS convention, I was able to hear two law school leaders say these two things:  (1)  The U.S. News ratings are a false proxy for quality, they stifle innovation and degrade our service to students, are leading us to financial disaster, and are making us corrupt; and (2)  At my institution, I am doing everything I can to maintain or increase the US News rank of our school.

In other words, these leaders were both saying that the pursuit of rankings is corrupting and bad, and that they are complicit in it.   

To identify something as wrong, in such a profound way, and continue to serve that wrong ideal is poor leadership, it lacks integrity, and it serves as a terrible example to our students and communities.  All that we do as educators is a form of teaching, and what this is teaching is the accommodation of clearly bad principles. 

If you want to a lead a law school, damn it, then lead.  If that means rejecting the tyranny of the rankings, then do so.  Stop being complicit.  Lead the rebellion.  Quit in protest.  Stand for something.  Lead, already.

-- Mark Osler

 

 

Diversity Officers--for Corporations, Law Firms, and Law Reviews

The Wall Street Journal reports that law firms and many Fortune 500 companies have an executive who is responsible for promoting diversity within the firm: "About 60% of Fortune 500 companies currently have a CDO or executive role designated for diversity, according to a recent study by Heidrick & Struggles, an executive search firm."  One law firm which has recently created such a position did so because it found that "Without any rigid structures in place, the firm's majority—white male attorneys—were unconsciously choosing to partner with other white male colleagues on assignments," according to the firm's chairman.

Could law review editors be subject to similar unconscious biases--reflected in the selection of new editors, the selection of articles, and the selection of symposium contributors?

The California Law Review (one of my favorite law reviews) has been proactive on this front--appointing a Diversity Editor to consider these issues. Perhaps law reviews could assess their past practices--along the three axes of editor selection, article selection, and symposium contributor selection--and see whether the results require a review of their practices, and perhaps the installation of a diversity officer.

Anupam Chander

"Hope — but not blind optimism — helps boost law school performance"

The title of this post is the headline of this interesting new piece from The National Law Journal.  It begins this way:

Which new law students will perform the best academically during their first semester and be the most satisfied with their lives? Those who are realistically hopeful, according to research into the way hope and optimism affect law student performance.

A study published in the December edition of the Journal of Research in Personality, and featured last year in the Duquesne Law Review, concluded that students who came to campus with high levels of hope got better grades and were more satisfied with their lives after completing their first semester, which tends to be the most stressful.

The researchers distinguished hope from optimism, high levels of which boosted life satisfaction but not first semester grades. "Optimism is the expectation that the future will be good, regardless of how this happens," said Kevin Rand, an assistant professor of psychology at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. "Hope is the expectation about things you have actual control over."

Rand conducted the research with Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law clinical associate professor Allison Martin and psychology graduate student Amanda Shea. The team launched the project in part because of the reputation law school has for exacting a high toll on students' mental health, Rand said.

"We know that graduate education can be stressful, but the existing research shows that there is actually something worse about law school," he said. "It's uniquely bad. We wanted to see who comes through that toxic environment unscathed."

The researchers asked 86 members of the incoming class at McKinney in 2007 a series of questions about their levels of hope and optimism. They also examined participants' undergraduate grade-point averages and Law School Admission Test scores.

The team then surveyed the participants after four months in law school and collected their first semester grades, performing a statistical analysis to determine how the factors related to each other. "I was a little surprised — having gone through the law school process myself — that the LSAT scores were not as correlated to the first semester grades," said Martin. "Hope was a better predictor of academic success in our study."

High rates of hope correlated to higher law school GPAs, as did higher undergraduate GPAs. There was no significant relationship between high levels of optimism and law school grades. However, higher levels of both optimism and hope predicted psychological well-being and life satisfaction among the survey participants.

The researchers cited previous studies on hope and achievement in higher education to help explain the results. Students with high levels of hope had greater graduation rates and GPAs, were more engaged in learning and were better equipped to deal with academic stresses. They tended to be better at staying on task, setting goals based on previous performance and keeping motivated.

By contrast, students with low levels of hope tend to focus more on performance than on learning, Martin said. They have so much anxiety about failing tests that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Previous research into optimism and undergraduate students' academic performance found a positive correlation between the two, but research specific to law school has found that pessimism, or a "healthy skepticism," actually predicted academic success.

Should I be optimistic or hopeful that this new research will help future law student?

Posted by DAB

The "Rennaisance Report"

Right up our alley is a new online journal based at William Mitchell Law School called "The Renaissance Report: A Journal of Legal Education in Transition."  You can check out their web site here.

They don't seem to have much content up yet, so it is hard to tell where this might go, but I love the idea of innovation in our field (which is why I remain involved here).  I'm intrigued by the idea that legal education is in transition, because I don't see that as a present truth.  Many of us hope that there will be a transition to a healthier, more student-centered model, while others fear that the status quo will be upset by economic realities, but I don't see either one of those things happening yet. 

Specifically, there are three elements of the status quo in legal education that seem resistant to change:

1)  Perhaps most importantly, rankings continue to shape crucial decisions in legal education.

2)  The personal incentives for most law professors favor scholarship over teaching and advocacy.

3)  There are no real attempts being made to roll back costs and tuition.

When at least one of those things begins to show movement, I'll say we are in transition.  Right now, I think it might be fairer to say that we are in the shadow of transition, as it moves inevitably towards us.  The actual transition will begin either when disaster strikes (the collapse of our current economic model) or real leaders step up to either reject the hegemony of rankings, rethink the role of scholarship, or make the painful choices that will finally shrink costs and tuition.

-- Mark Osler

 

 

Financial Times' Special Supplement on Innovative Law Schools 2011

The Financial Times has just published a new set of stories on law school education around the world. (I should note that the report on LLM programs misses the fabulous intimate and friendly program we have at UC Davis.)

The Financial Times, a London-based paper, seems to understand developments in law school pedagogy better than the New York Times' recent efforts to do the same--see here and here.

Anupam Chander

Ph.D's and a cutting critique

Yesterday, several people forwarded to me this fascinating article from the New York Times.  The critique of law schools presented there cuts to several truths:  That too much of our scholarship has no impact on anything (and goes largely unread), that we are not student-centered enough, and that we in the legal academy are often more focused on impressing one another rather than addressing real problems in our society.

One of the intriguing criticisms in the article centers on the increasing trend toward hiring professors who have a Ph.D., but no legal experience.  I think this is a fair critique, and one which merits close examination as we keep in mind our status as a professional rather than a graduate school.  My own scholarship is almost always narrowly focused on a discrete issue in the real world, and that is intentional-- I don't want to waste my time on things that don't have a chance to solve a problem.  For the same reason, most of the classes I teach consist largely of practical teaching for the real world:  How to write a sentencing memo, for example, or what happens at an initial appearance behind the scenes.  My most recent entry on SSRN argues in favor of more experiential teaching.

Still, we must be discerning in that critique of Ph.D.'s in our midst.  It's unfair to assume that all Ph.D.'s in the legal academy produce work which is disjoined from real-world legal issues. 

In pondering this, I remember that my own experience overlaps with the very start of this trend.  I was a research assistant for the late Stanton Wheeler at Yale Law School, at a time when Prof. Wheeler was still a controversial figure because his background (and Ph.D.) centered on sociology rather than the law. 

Given that, though, there were few legal academics I have come across who are more focused on real-world legal problems than Prof. Wheeler.  This probably is no accident, as his tenure overlapped with the last of the Legal Realists at Yale. 

For example, he is largely remembered for his pioneering book with Kenneth Mann and Austin Sarat, Sitting in Judgment:  The Sentencing of White-Collar Criminals.  That book was centered on 51 in-depth interviews with federal judges; Wheeler went right to the source in describing how the law actually works. 

Rather than critiquing Ph.D.'s in the academy, we need to look more closely at the scholarship all legal scholars are producing, and rethink the way we value that work.  Stanton Wheeler was not a lawyer, but few of us produce such valuable and relevant scholarship, or teach such clear-minded truths. 

-- Mark Osler

"Professor's plea: Say no to 'law school porn'"

The title of this post is the headline of this new piece appearing in The National Law Journal. Here are excerpts:

It's that time of year when law school faculties are inundated with so-called "law school porn" — slick mailings extolling the virtues of individual law schools meant to sway voting in the U.S. News & World Report's reputation survey, now underway.

Some legal educators believe the annual barrage of mail has gotten out of control, and proves that rankings are driving administrative decisions.  They say it's time to stop paying for glossy brochures and invest that money in students.

"Some of the stuff I get is gorgeous," said University of New Hampshire law professor Sarah Redfield. "It's almost a book. Some people are spending a bunch of money on this."

A study released in 2009 that was partially funded by the Law School Admission Council, "Fear of Failing: The Effect of U.S. News & World Report Rankings on U.S. Law Schools," reached the same conclusion: that administrators are spending significant amounts of money on brochures and marketing materials in hopes of getting better results on the reputation survey.  The survey is based on voting by legal educators, lawyers and judges, and accounts for 40 percent of a school's ranking score.

In a recent blog post, University of California at Los Angeles School of Law professor Stephen Bainbridge estimated that this material — commonly referred to in legal academic circles as "law school porn" — comprises 67 percent of his work mail. He added that never reads it. He noted that he has started to receive law school promotional materials via e-mail, which he dismissed as spam.

This material does serve a few purposes, according to University of Alabama School of Law professor Paul Horwitz, who defended them on the PrawfsBlawg blog. They can provide useful information about as recent faculty hires, scholarly publications and other innovations, he wrote.

"On the whole, unlike many, I would rather receive these materials than not receive them," Horwitz wrote. "That's true even if, as is generally the case, they're ridiculously fulsome, as long as they're also informative. As long as a school wants to tell me more about who it's hired and what its folks are writing, I'll be happy to read its mailers."...

Redfield brought a thick stack of the material to a law school admissions conference at St. John's University School of Law on Nov. 11.  It represented about one quarter of what she had received this fall, she said. She theatrically dropped the stack into a recycling bin, producing a loud thud, and issued a challenge to the law deans in the audience and to U.S. News Director of Data Research Bob Morse, who sat on a panel with her.  Law schools should do away with law school porn and put the money toward diversity scholarships, Redfield said.

Morse did not sign on to the challenge, nor did his dismiss it out of hand.  Redfield's idea was met with skepticism by St. John's Dean Michael Simons.  He did not specify what the school spends on its mailings, but stipulated that it would not be enough to fund even a half-scholarship. The National Law Journal contacted a number of law schools to ask what they spend; none responded.

Does Having a Diverse Law School Faculty Affect Students? One Study

A fascinating study, summarized here by National Jurist.

Faculty diversity impacts law review membership, study finds

Law schools with a diverse faculty are more likely to have law review members and leaders who are minorities or women, a new study suggests. The report, completed by The New York Law School Law Review, looks at female and minority representation among law review membership and leadership at ABA-accredited law schools. Membership on a school's law review is an indicator of future career success.

“Getting into law school is only half the battle — for better or worse, grades matter a lot and law review membership is one of the most prominent indicators of academic achievement,” said Dana Brodsky, one of four 3L editors who conducted the research. “Our survey shows a possible connection between the overall environment a school provides and the achievement of its women and minority students.”

 

More empirical research here would seem to be in order to understand the effects, if any, of faculty diversity on student outcomes.

Anupam Chander

The importance of appreciating (and teaching) iPad realities for lawyers and law students

I am at a great session (on a Sunday morning!) of the Appellate Judges Education Institute concerning modern brief writing and reading in our digital age.  The biggest take-away is that the iPad has become a "game-changer" in part because already perhaps as many as half of all appellate judges nationwide are at least sometimes reading briefs on an iPad and because it seems likely that soon all judges will read most briefs on screens.  

This sessions is reinforcing my belief that law schools should be looking for ways to intergrate iPads and/or other e-readers into their skills curriculum.  Notably, a Ninth Circuit judge on reported that his circuit is providing all its judges with iPads, and I strongly believe it should be only a matter of time before some clever law schools (and/or law publishers) figure out the opportunities and advantages that might flow from giving groups of students pre-programmed e-readers with specialized applications and/or content.

Some related prior posts:

• Could the iPad help transform law school and even lawyering?
• An iPad in a Law School Class -- A Skeptical View
• How an iPad (or an even better e-tablet) could transform legal education
• Incorporating Technology & University Responses
• How could/should Apple (or other tech companies) partner with a law school to foster e-casebooks?
• Supreme Court Justices are now doing work on iPads and Kindles, when will law students?
• “I think [the iPad] could very well be the biggest thing to hit school technology since the overhead projector.”

 Posted by DAB