Law School Innovation

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