Law School Innovation

The Professor-Driven Curriculum

One of the classes I teach is White Collar Crime.  It is a three-credit class, one credit more than my sentencing class, appeals and habeas, and juvenile justice. 

Many, if not most, schools offer a class on White Collar Crime-- it is a sexy, intriguing area of the law with real societal importance and great stories embedded within the cases.  Questions of greed, morality, celebrity, and the culture of affluence twist through much of the reading and analysis in the field.   Moreover, those who practice in this area tend to be high-paid partners in large firms rather than the solo practitioners we find in the rest of criminal law.   It's no wonder, either-- there is real money in defending or consulting on these issues.  One firm, for example, billed 1.5 million hours in connection with the recent SEC settlement with Siemens (including the hours of the accountants they retained).

Few if any the students in my class will ever have a significant practice in prosecuting or defending major white collar crimes.  My WCC class may turn out to be one of the least practical classes that they take.

Meanwhile, my school does not offer a similar class in Narcotics law, which also covers a sexy, intriguing area of the law with real societal importance and great stories embedded within the cases.  Importantly, nearly all of my students who go into criminal law will handle drug cases.  This class, if it existed (and I don't know if it exists anywhere), would be one of the most relevant classes a future prosecutor or defense attorney could take.

Given the similarities between this real and imagined class, why is it that the one covering material less relevant to my students' futures is a part of the canon, while the more-relevant class is not?

My hunch is that part of the answer is that America's law professors are more comfortable teaching about white-collar crime than drug crime.  We professors tend to come from a background where we have a better understanding of securities transactions than meth sales, and often our practical experience is at exactly the type of firm which does that kind of work.

Is it right that the professors' interests and backgrounds shape the curriculum, rather than the needs of the students?  It does strike me as a production-driven model (that, is the Soviet "you will consume what we make") rather than the consumption-driven pattern Americans usually prefer.

For what it is worth, any blame at my school for not offering narcotics law is mine-- it never occurred to me until now to propose that class to our curriculum committee.

-- Mark Osler

   

Google Fast Flip

Google FastFlip may offer a new way to quickly read news stories. It certainly looks like one can flip through headlines and first paragraphs faster than previously. For a preview see here.

News stories on google fastflip can be found here and here.

ellen s. podgor

Watching Kanye West Rather than Your Professor

Farhad Manjoo has a reminder of the remarkable amount of time we might spend away from our work pursuing digital distractions available online.

It seems useful to remind students to avoid such distractions during the course of this coming school year.  It is hard to imagine the email or Facebook status update that requires immediate review or response during class.

Distractions from work, of course, are not the purview of students alone--emails and news often distract me during my own writing.

Anupam Chander

Great Law Schools, Great Football?

College football and the legal academy are two worlds that both seem obsessed with rankings.  What may be surprising is how little overlap there is between those two worlds.  Intriguingly, those rankings, at least at the very top, are nearly mutually exclusive.  As of today, only one school (Cal) has both a top-10 law school and a top-10 football team. 

Of course, the dearth of great football programs coinciding with great law schools is in part due to prioritization by schools.  The Ivy League chose not to continue with high-cost I-A football long ago, and thus it is not surprising that Yale, Harvard, Columbia, and Penn are not powerhouses.  NYU and Chicago play in Division III, at the other end of the spectrum from their academic reputations, and Duke, Northwestern and the University of Virginia often lose more games than they win in Division I-A (as did Michigan last year).

A few intriguing questions arise from comparing these lists.  First, there are a number of football powerhouses that also host excellent law schools just outside the top rank, including USC, the University of Texas, and Ohio State.  What if... they funded their law schools like their football programs?  Would that be enough for them to break through? 

Second, is it just about money?  Consider the one school on both lists, Cal-Berkeley.  It is the flagship school for a state under severe budget restrictions, which has been feeling a pinch for a while and certainly is not as well-funded overall as many of the other top schools.  How do they do such a good job at both simultaneously?

At a superficial level, the job of improving a law school's ranking is similar to bumping up a football program.  Hiring is crucial, and getting the right students into the program.  However, in football there is an objective measure that trumps all others:  performance on the field.  How different would our rankings be if they were based on such an objective measure?  And what does it say about us that when we do consider "objective" measures, it almost always has to do with scholarship rather than the outcomes of our students' lives? 

-- Mark Osler

"The recession makes externships a sweeter deal for students"

The title of this post is the headline of this interesting recent article from the National Law Journal. Here is how it starts:

Without summer associate programs to rely on, law students are turning to alternate ways of gaining practical experience and making connections that could lead to full-time employment.

Many students are doing externships to fill that need. They work, unpaid, for credit under the supervision of faculty and an on-site attorney at a government agency, nonprofit organization or sometimes a corporation. (By contrast, internships can be for credit or for pay.) American Bar Association rules prohibit law firm externships.

Once thought valuable but not essential, externships are gaining a new stature as students do everything they can to land a job. Demand for, and participation in, externships have increased significantly, according to law school administrators.

As the economy batters law students' hopes for employment and law firms cut back or eliminate summer-associate programs, law schools are answering the criticism that they have done a poor job preparing law students for real legal work. Schools are revamping their programs, enlarging their focus to include many more opportunities for practical training. Externships are part of that picture.

"Reality's knocking: The recession is forcing schools to bow to reality"

The title of this post is the headline of this effective new National Law Journal article which highlights the various ways in which lean economic times are impacting law schools.  Here is a snippet that spotlights necessity being the nuturing mother of innovation:

The movement to incorporate practical skills into legal education isn't new, but legal educators and researchers report that the floundering economy is increasing incentives for law schools to revamp their curricula to prepare students for the realities of the legal profession. "A lot of the changes are in response to the marketplace," said David Van Zandt, dean of Northwestern University School of Law. "Students are concerned about getting jobs, and everybody wants to be relevant."

Graduates face stiff competition for law firm positions, and clients are balking at footing the bill to train new attorneys. Consequently, law school leaders consider it more important than ever to send students into the profession armed with practical skills, not just extensive knowledge of case law and legal theory.  More law schools are modifying coursework and adding practical classes to help students develop the skills past graduates have had the luxury of learning on the job. In that vein, a growing number of law schools are emphasizing teamwork, leadership, professional judgment and the ability to view issues from the clients' perspective.

"I think we are at a moment of historical change across the landscape of legal education," said Washington and Lee Dean Rodney A. Smolla. "When we look back at this period in five to 10 years, we will mark it as the time when the whole mission of law schools made a fundamental turn."

Some related recent posts:

• Is the bad economy going to change the relatiohsip between schools and firms?
• "Law school pays students to stay away"
• The bad summer
• Susskind on "The End of Lawyers? The End of Law Schools?" - liveblog
• How do tough times and tuition increases impact law school innovation?

Posted by DAB

Vanderbilt Law: America's Best Orientation?

In response to my earlier post regarding orientation, I received a detailed response from Suzanna Sherry, who has revamped the orientation at Vanderbilt.  One striking innovation is that they treat orientation as a class-- with tests and credit.  The basis for the class is the book Suzanna wrote with Tracey George, "What Every Law Student Really Needs To Know."  In whole, there are many aspects of the Vanderbilt orientation that other schools should consider emulating, including the time commitment, the breadth of what is covered, and the idea of treating orientation as a separate class.

 

Suzanna's description of this effort is below. 

 

The course is called "The Life of the Law," and meets for 3 hours a day for four days (Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday in two 90-minute blocks, and Friday in one 3-hour block; Monday is reserved for welcoming and administrative matters). There's an objective-question exam on Friday afternoon. The course is pass-fail. Last year two of us co-taught it to all 225 incoming JD & LLM students in one room (!). This year we added two more faculty and broke the students into two sections, each co-taught.

 

Basically, the course introduces them to law school, to pervasive legal concepts, and to techniques for reading, understanding, and using legal materials.

 

Tuesday we start with a brief description of law school and law school classes, including making them read made-up excerpts from a case, a statute, and a contract and answer simple questions (their first of three increasingly difficult case-reading exercises to get them up to speed for their first day of the regular semester). Then we review American civics, and describe the different sources of law, the basic methods of legal interpretation, and the court system(s) in the U.S.

 

On Wednesday we cover reading and reasoning. They read an excerpt from Morse v. Frederick (the BONG HiTS 4 JESUS case in the Supreme Court) and learn how to decipher case citations, distinguish law from fact and substance from procedure, brief cases, and anticipate the professor's questions (their second case-reading exercise). We also lead a discussion that tries to apply Morse as precedent to hypotheticals involving high school bans on various t-shirt slogans. We teach them about analytical and analogical reasoning. (We also play a "Legal Knowledge" game as a midweek review of what they've learned so far.)

 

Thursday is all about concepts. We start with the pervasive legal doctrines that all their professors think someone else is teaching them, like standards of review, burdens of proof, stare decisis, states of mind. We also cover basic law and economics concepts (like efficiency, market failure, and transaction costs), and some basic behavioral economics (cognitive biases) as well as a grab-bag of other tools for legal argument, including slippery slopes, baselines, and the difference between normative and positive.

 

On Friday they do their final case-reading exercise, which comes pretty close to a regular class. We hand out a 3-page excerpt from a recent Supreme Court case, lecture on the background concepts they need to understand it, and then question them Socratically. They also get a library tour (which took much less time than allotted, incidentally).

 

-- Mark Osler