Law School Innovation

Could the iPad help transform law school and even lawyering?

It has taken me only a few minutes to decide that I now want and need an iPad, though I am fearful (or perhaps hopeful) that the new Apple gizmo will be much better for reading blogs than for writing them.

Also, I am also already thinking about whether an iPad and other forthcoming similar e-tablet technologies might alter the resource and technology universe for lawyers, law professors and law students. 

I have never tried to do any kind of legal research or legal writing on my Droid smartphone, and I suspect that there are relatively few smartphone apps that are truly helpful to the average lawyer or law student.  In addition, I have been disappointed by the potential for my first-generation Kindle to be a means or medium for me to do professional reading of cases and other legal materials.  The Apple folks are touting the iPad as having some of the best aspects of modern e-readers and modern netbooks.  If this is true, I can readily imagine the possibility of an iPad with applications that are especially lawyer-friendly and lawyer-useful.

Thoughts, dear readers?  Is anyone (other than me) eager to read this blog on an iPad?

(Cross-posted at SL&P)

The Death of an Innovator

This past weekend, Yale Law's Daniel Freed died.  He was a tremendous teacher, and a remarkable innovator.  A full biography of his work is available here. 

I was one of the lucky people who took Prof. Freed's sentencing seminar.  It was a class which launched several academic careers, including mine.  For the first semester, we studied sentencing law and policy.  The second semester was completely different.  Judges from Alabama came to New Haven, and we met with them on Friday night and most of the day on Saturday, talking about their sentencing practices and learning more about how sentencing really worked at the ground level. 

Often, class met at 8 a.m. on a Saturday morning.  No one was late.  Perhaps that alone says all that needs to be said about the teaching abilities of Dan Freed.

-- Mark Osler

DOJ Reaches Settlements Regarding Use of Electronic Book Readers

A DOJ Press Release reports on the Justice Department reaching "separate agreements under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) with Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Pace University in New York City and Reed College in Portland, Ore., regarding the use in a classroom setting of the electronic book reader, the Kindle DX, a hand-held technological device that simulates the experience of reading a book."  The release states: 

"Under the agreements reached today, the universities generally will not purchase, recommend or promote use of the Kindle DX, or any other dedicated electronic book reader, unless the devices are fully accessible to students who are blind and have low vision. The universities agree that if they use dedicated electronic book readers, they will ensure that students with vision disabilities are able to access and acquire the same materials and information, engage in the same interactions, and enjoy the same services as sighted students with substantially equivalent ease of use. The agreements that the Justice Department reached with these universities extend beyond the Kindle DX to any dedicated electronic reading device."

This serves as a reminder that accommodations need to be considered and made if using an electronic reading device in classes.

ellen s. podgor

"Law students at great expense are getting little more than bad sociology"

The title of this post is just one of many provocative comments by law professor Charles Rounds in this potent commentary urging law schools to return to teaching traditional common-law subjects.  Here are more buzz-worthy excerpts that I hope might generate some comments here:

Professional schools need to strike a balance between book-learning and real-world experience.  The American law school now deserves failing grades in both departments.

But it gets worse. In response to complaints from the practicing bar that recent law graduates cannot write well and are otherwise unable to “hit the ground running,” the typical law school has beefed up its in-house clinics and legal writing programs. These politicized bureaucracies behave like labor unions. They are great at self-promotion and forging national networks. They are labor-intensive and thus frightfully expensive.

At best, these programs are pedagogically inefficient; at worst they are pedagogically cancerous. By chipping away at, or crowding out altogether, traditional core courses such as Agency, Trusts, and Equity, these clinical and legal writing programs are more than just a nuisance.  One’s writing improves when one has something rational and coherent to express.  Ten writing courses will not help the law student who is unable to connect the dots because he or she does not know where the dots are.

There is some irony here, as a lawyer is the agent of his or her client.  Law schools are in the business of churning out common law agents but they no longer require that their students take a course in the law of agency? How can that be?

This de-professionalization of the American law school, a phenomenon of profound concern to many in the legal profession, suggests that there is an opening for the for-profit sector.  A bare-bones, back-to-basics for-profit law school staffed by seasoned scholar-practitioners may be the answer. The more boot-camp-like the better, in that the rigor will prepare future lawyers for the work they’ll actually confront in the real world.

It would be a step in the right direction (but only a small one) if law schools were to revive and require the discrete Agency course and relegate to the extra curricular “subjects” such as these: Climate Change Justice (taught at Harvard), Social Justice Lawyering (University of North Carolina), Law and Literature: Murder (University of North Carolina), Social Disparities in Health (Colorado), Wal-Mart (Colorado), Law & Literature: Race and Gender (Duke), Sexual Orientation and the Law (Duke), Ethics in Literature (Yale), Civil Disobedience (Suffolk), and Critical Race Theory (Suffolk).

In any case, we are more likely to see such modest back-to-basics reforms emanating from a for-profit law school, whose faculty presumably would not be tenured, than from the tenured law faculties in the non-profit sector, which tend to walk in lock step. A for-profit law school that affords its students a thorough grounding in the fundamentals would soon win the respect and admiration of the hiring partners in the nation’s law firms. In time they would come to take with a grain of salt the puff pieces and propaganda of their non-profit alma maters, and of the American Bar Association which regulates them.

Posted by DAB