Law School Innovation

ABA Journal provides review of state of new Irvine law school

The August 2009 Issue of the ABA Journal has this new piece on the new UC law school, which is titled "Irvine by Erwin: Can a top legal academic create a law school that is both innovative and elite?".  The piece highlights innovations in various ways, as highlighted by this snippet:

With its first class — which has a median GPA of 3.65 and a median LSAT score of 167 — descending on campus this month, the 56-year-old Chemer­insky’s ambition is about to be put to the test. Can UC Irvine be both among the best law schools and among the most innovative?

If not, it will not be for lack of trying.  “There isn’t a need for another law school that replicates the others that are there,” Chemerinsky says.  “We have the wonderful benefit of a blank slate and the chance to create the ideal law school for the 21st century.”

UC Irvine will include an interdisciplinary curriculum and a mandatory semester in one of the planned eight law clinics.  Students will be required to conduct intake interviews for legal aid clients and to study international law in the first year — a subject that is merely optional in the upper classes at most schools.

Another innovation is the course titled “The Legal Profession.”  The two-semester class will bring in speakers from many areas of practice “so that students can gain a sense of the different kinds of work the profession does,” according to an online description of the curriculum.

Chemerinsky wants to maximize “serendip­itous interaction with faculty and students.”  That’s why lounge chairs sit outside the faculty offices, so the students don’t have to sit on the floor while waiting. The chairs are arranged in groups to encourage discussion.

Rocking chairs, modeled after one owned by librarian Beatrice Tice’s mother, will be placed near the library windows to promote serenity.  Reproductions of paintings of SoCal scenery, copied from some on view in the Orange County Art Museum, will further the Zen vibe.

The innovations extend beyond the learning environment.  Each student will be assigned a practicing lawyer as a mentor.  Financial planners will be invited to campus to help students with budgeting and — for those in the second class and beyond — managing the burden of law school loans.  Students will have multimedia portfolios to show potential employers, in addition to ordinary resumés.  They’ll receive grades, but there will be no class rankings.

"Wanted: Law School Deans -- Lots of Them"

The title of this post is the title of this intriguing article in The National Law Journal.  Here are some snippets:

Even in this economy, there seems to still be a demand for one high-paying job: law school dean. At least 27 law schools throughout the country are searching for new deans, and many are having a tough time filling the position.

Law schools from Harvard to the University of Arizona to Case Western to the University of Miami have all embarked on dean searches, and some are finding somewhat slim pickings, with the same applicants recycled for many of the jobs.

That's because law school deanships, once highly sought after, are now high-stress jobs, thanks in part to the economy. With fundraising plummeting, donors in short supply and state budgets being slashed, law school deans are finding themselves up to their necks in stress. Many have quit in the past year to go back to teaching, which still pays fairly well and has far fewer headaches....

The old model for finding a dean was to look internally at one's best professors, according to Susan Prager, executive director and chief executive officer of the Association of American Law Schools. That has been replaced in the past couple of decades by the model of hooking a dean or associate dean at a better law school, to give one's school cachet.  "You try to go up the pecking order," Jarvis said.

But in the past year or so, schools -- either unsatisfied with the crop of candidates or unable to persuade top choices to take the jobs -- appear to be reverting to the old model.

In addition to noting the ways in which a tough economy impacts law school hiring, this article led me to wonder whether any of the schools search for a dean might consider getting creative and innovative in their efforts. 

In this context, recall that Duke recently turned to a member of the federal judiciary to fill its top spot.  Might other schools have success convincing (supposedly underpaid) federal judges to come to the academy?  Or how about state judges?  Or how about all the lawyers leaving government service with the change of federal Administrations? 

Indeed, last I heard, former AG Alberto Gonzales was still looking for a job.  Particularly if a school looking to grab some headlines and generate some buzz, a search committee could do a lot worse than considering even controversial lawyers who are not among the usual dean suspects.  Just a thought.

Posted by DAB

What does everyone think about free tuition and other early UC-Irvine innovations?

Last week the AP had this story, headlined "SoCal law school tempts students with free tuition," about the efforts by UC-Irvine to get a flying start with top students in its first class.  Here are snippets from the story:

A new law school opening next fall in Southern California is offering a big incentive to top students who might be thinking twice about the cost of a legal education during the recession: free tuition for three years.

The financial carrot is part of an ambitious strategy by Erwin Chemerinsky, a renowned constitutional law scholar and dean of the new school at the University of California, Irvine, to attract Ivy League-caliber students to the first public university law school in the state in 40 years.

Scholarship winners will be chosen for their potential to emerge three years later as legal stars on the ascendance. Only the best and brightest need apply, but the school hopes to offer full scholarships to all 60 members of its inaugural class in 2009. Subsequent classes will be on a normal tuition basis.

Chemerinsky is convinced the prospect of free education, combined with a public-interest curriculum and the University of California moniker, will quickly fill his first class and eventually land Irvine among the nation's best law schools. "Our goal is to be a top 20 law school from the first time we are ranked," he said....

Chemerinsky said he has made substantial progress toward raising the $6 million needed to fund full scholarships for his inaugural class. He's promising students a unique educational program with hands-on experience in legal clinics and eventual job interviews with more than 70 law firms, public interest law organizations and government offices.

Still, in a society seemingly overloaded with lawyers, the question arises: Do we need another law school to churn out more lawyers? "There isn't a need for another law school like all the rest," Chemerinsky answers. "This is our chance to create the ideal law school for the 21st century."

I have not been following closely the development of UC-Irvine School of Law, but I was intrigued to see lots of talk of innovation at its official website.  In particular, one section of the site discusses "Our Difference" with these entries:

• Visions of Change
• Dynamic Leadership
• Innovative Approach
• Making History

I would be really interested in hearing from anyone following closely the UC-Irvine experiment with early assessments about how things are going there.

Posted by DAB

The University of Louisville's law faculty SSRN aggregator page

»  Reprinted from The Cardinal Lawyer and MoneyLaw  «

The University of Louisville is justifiably proud of its law faculty and of the high-impact academic work generated by this community of scholars.  In earlier posts (like this and this and this), The Cardinal Lawyer has made much of SSRN.Despite its small size, and despite having taken active part in SSRN for less than two years, the University of Louisville ranks 41st among American law schools in recent SSRN downloads and 57th in all-time downloads as of October 12, 2008.

Many law professors and some law schools make an effort to promote papers available for download from SSRN.  The University of Louisville has taken aggressive measures to promote its entire faculty's SSRN portfolio.  Louisville publishes an SSRN aggregator page that collects every faculty member's contributions to the SSRN database as they are made.  A summary of each article, complete with a link to that article's own SSRN page, appears on the aggregator page.  And best of all, in harmony with Law 2.0 and the thoroughly interconnected environment in which contemporary legal education operates, the University of Louisville's faculty SSRN aggregator page has its own RSS feed .

ouisville's own SSRN aggregator page complements but does not replace the University of Louisville School of Law Legal Studies Research Paper Series on SSRN.  This series has its own subscription mechanism.  Like other subscribers, I receive periodic updates by e-mail and can click through to my colleagues' most recent work.

One byproduct of Louisville's faculty-wide SSRN aggregator is an individual SSRN aggregator page for each member of the faculty.  Consider, for example, the SSRN treasure troves associated with my colleague, Judith D. Fischer. Judy's University of Louisville-generated SSRN aggregator page and regular SSRN page testify to a prolific and creative mind.  For my own part, I am considering the possibility of linking to my own UofL-generated SSRN aggregator page wherever I have already seen fit to promote my regular SSRN page.  Through its facility with scripts and feeds, Louisville's information technology staff has given the entire faculty many weapons for heightening awareness, within the academy and among members of the public at large, of the powerful legal scholarship being generated at the University of Louisville.

— Jim Chen

The Carnegie report cheatsheet for deans

Judith Wegner, one of the co-authors of Educating Lawyers (the Carnegie report) was kind enough to share with me the slides she used for the Dean's Section at the AALS annual meeting last week. I thought this would be useful/interesting for anyone who wanted a quick download of the report's main findings and recommendations:

Carnegie Report on Legal Education: Perspectives for Deans

As for the role of law school deans in pushing change, I would love to hear Jim weigh in, but one strong point I took away from Martha Minow's presentation on the panel was that (a) the Dean must be fully invested and bring everyone else on board, and (b) the effort should focus on an actual process that will lead to meaningful, even if incremental, progress. I've posted this before, but I continue to believe that a movement approach can work if there's enough commitment. And based on the buzz and turnout last week, I think the will is there, if only a few of us start believing that change is possible.

Also, please note that you can now download an MP3 recording of the plenary panel on law school reform.

- Gene Koo

Raw outline of "Rethinking Legal Education For The 21st Century"

Below are the "raw" notes I took in the AALS Friday afternoon plenary session, "Rethinking Legal Education for the 21st Century" featuring Edward L. Rubin (Vanderbilt University Law School), Vicki C. Jackson (Georgetown University Law Center), Robert Mac Crate, Esq. (Senior Counsel, Sullivan and Cromwell), Martha L. Minow (Harvard Law School), Suellyn Scarnecchia (University of New Mexico School of Law), William M. Sullivan (Senior Scholar The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching), Judith W. Wegner (University of North Carolina School of Law).

Update: MP3 recording of this session now available.

[The panel began with Bill Sullivan outlining the Carnegie Foundation's Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law.]

Bill Sullivan (Carnegie Foundation)

Prof ed's common goal as it moved into university: a threefold apprenticeship:

• knowledge
• competence for practice
• Identity + prof. purpose

Experiential learning

• Mastery
• Judgment

AALS will be collecting best practices at

http://aals.org/curriculum

Ed Rubin (Vanderbilt)

Law schools teach all three years at same level of sophistication. Vanderbilt now offers areas concentration, incrementing analytical sophistication, guided by faculty

Vicki Jackson (Georgetown)

1. Globalization - an opportunity to rethink our fields

2. Expanding learning experiences.How we teach is what we teach -- Problem-solving, reflective

   • Social science about learning
   • Critiques about legal education
   • [Illegible -- help?]

3. Law + Legal systems to Justice / Fairness. "Week 1" (of 2nd semester)

   • Intro to realistic, complex multiunit problem
   • Problem-based experiential setting
   • Assigned + act out roles
   • Collaboratively w/ role group

   • Builds on 1st-year content

MacCrate

ABA 25 years ago urged reassessment together

Martha Minow (Harvard)

theme: "choice"

Once it became clear that we were serious, there was little disagreement (but enormous resistance). There were two contradictory objections to each idea:

• "We've tried that before."
• "We've never tried that before."

Autonomy of prof. in the classroom leads to need to learn to play well together

1. "What do students need now?" not "How did I learn law.” Student as a person on a map
2. Some of mastery, not labeled w/ doctrine. Rather, problem-solving, strategy
3. Ethics + Role: taking agency
4. Institutional design change: choice

How change happened at Harvard:

• Leadership: Dean on committee, attend every one
• Process, not report
• Ambition: pursue something faculty is afraid of: results not guaranteed

Exceed existing constraints

• Look outside: medical, business, policy
• More process: agreement before the vote
• It's not over: ongoing, not episodic

Suellen Scarnecchia (University of New Mexico School of Law)

Clinical faculty at NM are tenured [applause]

Do we have the right faculty? Yes: we can integrate the 3 apprenticeships with current personnel. But what stops us?

• History: clinical and legal writing faculty fought to get in
• Bias about each other (mutual between faculty and clinical)

We need

• respect
• collaboration

JUDITH WEGNER

1. A reason to change (Purpose)

   • We're smart
   • Self actualization (letting the energy out)
   • Conscience + stewardship: build a better society

2. Multiple dimensions of teaching

   • Beyond intellectual knowledge: new epistemology. We construct knowledge in context.
   • Beyond content

3. It's About learning

   • Students learn better that way
   • - Values / motivation
    
   • - Experiential:learn by doing
   • Progression
   • Advising: career choices, values, courses

4. It's About Learning

   • Take assessment seriously
   • Bifurcate bar exam: 1st year analytics

QUESTIONS

What are the challenges in next 20-30 years

• Suellen: tuition,outcomes assessment
• Judith: faculty retirement (replenishing); new generation of learners
• Martha: technology - a new environment w/ new students -- what happens outside classroom?
• MacCrate: practice charge

Talk about Social Justice + Ethics in the curriculum

• Judith: visiting classes - almost no mention of "justice" in over 200 classrooms. No sense of "profession." Fun analytics can miss "who are the people"? Try 3-unit courses on lawyers + role of law in 1st year
• Sullen: Alumni concerned about hiring 1Ls with no ethical training
• Vicki: Specialization of law leads to "I don' t know legal ethics." Need to relate among faculty and expertise
• Martha: asks her students why "law school" is not "justice school."Hidden curriculum leading into the job market, secret message of "don't talk about justice - it sounds naive." Professors lack theory of how to get to a more just world
• Bill: Dearth of real knowledge (research) into what happens in law school.Likewise little knowledge about actual practice. Think @ more kinds of research about practice

Students as subjects/ agents

• Engage students about their aspirations
• Are professional schools about high-level theory or judgment?

Casebooks as a barrier to innovation: publishers not moving quickly enough?

• Judith: Check out CALI’s eLangdell initiative [editor's note: this question was not a plant!]

A VAP innovation from Harvard Law School

Thanks to this post from Orin Kerr at Volokh, I saw this notable piece from the Harvard Law Record , headlined "Dean Starts Program to Boost Practicioners Into Academia," which reports on a new Visiting Assistant Professor (VAP) program in the works at Harvard Law School.  Here are the basics:

Dean Elena Kagan has initiated a new program to bring practicing lawyers to Harvard Law School and provide them an opportunity to start careers in academia.  While the program is still in its planning stages, Kagan happily met with reporters from the Record to describe the program and her vision for the law school faculty. The program, which is set to begin in the 2008-09 academic year, will bring practitioners who are interested in academia to Harvard for a two-year position, with the tentative title of "Visiting Assistant Professor."  These positions will function much like the Climenko and Houston fellowship positions at Harvard Law and fellowships at other schools that are geared towards recent graduates.

As this post at Concurring Opinions highlights, VAP programs are all the rage.  Indeed, Paul Caron has this lengthy and growing list of schools that have VAP or fellowship programs for aspiring law professors.  To my knowledge, though, the in-development Harvard program is the first that will be intentionally geared toward practitioners.

I suspect this program will end up attracting mostly young practitioners (i.e., folks with only a few years in practice) because of economics and other factors.  Still, Dean Kagan merits props for this intriguing new approach to the VAP model.

Intriguingly, the comments to Orin's post really go after the usual anti-practitioner bias reflected in much of the elite law school academy.

Posted by DAB

Who gave the best advice to Dean Erwin Chemerinsky?

Over at TaxProf here, Paul Caron has assembled all forty of the provocative responses he got to this question:

What is the single best idea for reforming legal education you would offer to Erwin Chemerinsky as he builds the law school at UC-Irvine?

I would be interested to hear LSI reader responses to all this unsolicited advice for the new Dean, and I would be especially grateful to hear from anyone who identified any enduring themes in all this advice.

Posted by DAB

Innovation, publicity and the development of new law schools

I have not blogged on the hiring-firing-rehiring of Professor Erwin Chemerinsky as the new Dean of the new UC Irvine law school in part because the rest of the legal blogosphere has been all over the story.  (The WSJ Law Blog and Brian Leiter's Law School Reports have been particularly effective at covering developments, and TaxProf Blog has had great round-ups.)

But now that the dust is settling, the affair provides a nice setting for reflections on publicity and innovation, especially in the context of a new law school. 

First, though the Chemerinsky affair makes a lot of folks look bad, the new UC Irvine law school has gotten a lot of unexpected publicity (and the school now likely will continue to generate added publicity as legal media and professors watch more closely how now-Dean Chemerinsky and the UC system moves forward).  Though not all publicity is good publicity, I do think the whole affair could end up a net win for a new school that surely would struggle to make a name for itself in a crowded law school market.

Second, on the assumption that various folks in the UC system may now need to give Dean Chemerinsky extra room to operate as he sees fit, Dean Chemerinsky may have a truly unique opportunity to innovate in a setting that may be uniquely friendly to innovation.  California has a lot of different law schools, a lot of different legal markets, and a lot of different legal and non-legal appeals for potential students and potential faculty.  Because UC-Irvine needs to start from scratch in a dynamic and competitive marketplace, there may be lots of opportunities and even a strong demand for the development of a truly innovative law school.

But, third, perhaps the marketplace for innovation and prestige in law schools may be stacked against Dean Chemerinsky and UC-Irvine.  Michael Dorf made this point (in a less that PC-way) in interesting recent posts here and here.  Here is the start of Dorf's skepticism on law school innovation potential:

When I last saw Erwin Chemerinsky I asked him why he wanted to be the dean of a new law school. He was enthusiastic in response, talking about the opportunity to place his stamp on legal education as the founding dean of the UC Irvine Law School.  I was skeptical and remain so.  Chemerinsky has enormous talent and energy but I sincerely doubt that anyone could change legal education significantly without buy-in from the faculty of an already top law school.

Though I do not concur with all of Dorf's points, I do think he is flagging some important and troublesome issues about elite law schools as, to coin a phrase, "innovation market-makers."

Law School Deans Denounce Web Site Content

Link: Law School Deans Speak Out on Web Site Content - washingtonpost.com.

The deans at two top law schools have admonished the operators of an Internet message board that hosts chats containing personal attacks against female students and racist and homophobic remarks. Letters written by the deans at Yale University and the University of Pennsylvania law schools, were issued after an article in The Washington Post aired the debate over AutoAdmit, a message board that was created as a forum to exchange advice on law schools and firms. The women who were targeted in some chats had complained to the site owners that the commentary was offensive and false, but they received no relief. Cohen and the site's co-owner, Anthony Ciolli, a third-year law student at Penn, defended AutoAdmit as a forum for free speech. In an open letter to the "Yale Law School Community," Dean Harold Koh noted that AutoAdmit contained numerous "false and hurtful assertions" by anonymous posters, and that some included names and personal information of Yale students. Some chats contained claims that women had sexually transmitted diseases. One Yale student, The Post reported, believed that the chat content, which was accessible in a Google search, contributed to her inability to find a summer job. "Such anonymous, personal attacks on individuals are despicable," Koh wrote. "These malicious attacks, as well as racist, sexist and homophobic speech, have no place in the Yale Law School community." The Penn law school dean, Michael A. Fitts, and the associate dean, Gary Clinton, posted a letter on the site Thursday, stating that while they understood the right to engage in spirited debate, "we all have a moral and professional obligation to engage in that debate in a responsible manner." They said that though the university thought it had no basis to act against Ciolli, the derogatory comments could serve as a basis for defamation suits and "may increasingly become the subject of concern by bar admissions committees." Meanwhile, ReputationDefender, which is representing several women who were targeted on AutoAdmit, has engaged a law firm to explore civil and criminal claims on the women's behalf, ReputationDefender chief executive Michael Fertik said.

Note to AutoAdmit proprietors: CDA Section 230 may well not be the invincible shield against liability that you clearly believe it to be. Anupam Chander

Simulations, part 1: Thinking like (and being) a lawyer

In my next few blog posts I’m going to focus on the role of simulations in the law school curriculum, writing both with reference to my current research as well as my own experience developing and participating in simulations.

Simulations and games can provide learning environments in which students develop the knowledge, skills, values, and identity that uniquely define a profession, according to Prof. David Shaffer of the University of Wisconsin. His new book, How Computer Games Help Children Learn, outlines how carefully-designed games can, with appropriate scaffolding by teachers, help learners develop appropriate “epistemic frames” for understanding the world and solving problems. While Shaffer’s book focuses on K-12 education, its focus on professional frames offers a very promising avenue to implement the recommendations of the Carnegie study to integrate doctrine with lawyering skills and ethical and moral considerations.

Simulations and Epistemology: “Thinking like clients”

Stanford might well be the leading law school developing simulation-based courses as part of its broader efforts to reshape upper-level classes, as Dean Larry Kramer described in an earlier LSI post. In a recent chat, Dean Kramer described to me the goal of these simulations as helping law students to “think like a client” rather than merely “think like a lawyers” across different doctrinal areas. Through simulations, law students work in teams with students from other graduate schools to solve a fully-described, substantive problem. “The responses from students,” he states, “have been tremendous.”

To get a better sense of how Stanford’s simulations might help law students to “think like clients,” I spoke with Stanford’s Vice-Dean, Mark Kelman, who offered several examples. In one recent course, eight law students worked prepped eight graduate science students for a simulated patent litigation (validity and infringement) case. The law students’ role was to help the scientists convey technical information to a lay audience. According to Kelman, “For the lawyers, if you can’t learn to both prep and understand the people who are the source of the IP, you’re grossly handicapped in your work.”

What, then, does it actually mean to “think like a client”? Returning to Shaffer’s framework of (1) knowledge, (2) skills, (3) values, and (4) epistemology, it seems clear to me that the IP simulation Prof. Kramer sketched out does not intend (primarily) to teach lawyers the knowledge or skills to be an engineer. Rather, by introducing law students to engineers’ values and broader sense of identity, these simulations help future lawyers better represent future clients by better understanding their needs. (Conversely, future engineers learn how to work with their attorneys to craft more effective IP protections for their inventions).

Of course, learning to “think like a client” is itself a skill – one that Dean Kramer is betting as foundational to not just “thinking like” but actually being a lawyer.

-- Gene Koo

WWaJD?: Welcome Dean Levi

In this post congratulating contributing editor Jim Chen on his new position as Dean of the Brandeis School of Law at the University of Louisville, I noted the buzzing throughout the law school world about "What Will Jim Do?" to innovate at his new institution.  Today, as covered well by Peter Lattman and How Appealing and Orin Kerr,  the question is "What Will a Judge Do?" as dean of a law school.  To be more specific, what will Judge David Levi, who currently serves as the chief federal judge for the Eastern District of California in Sacramento, do when taking over as Dean of the Duke Law School later this year?

As Peter Lattman's post highlights, Judge Levi has an academic pedigree: Levi's father "served as dean of the University of Chicago Law School and then as that university's president, before being appointed by President Ford as Attorney General in 1975."  And yet, Judge Levi's bio indicates that he has never before been a law professor.  (The official announcement from Duke notes that Judge Levi "will be teaching a course on complex litigation this spring at the University of California at Davis School of Law, where he is one of the founders of the American Inns of Court chapter.")

It is fun to speculate about how a long-time federal district judge will adjust to, and seek to shape, the peculiar academic environment of an elite law school.  I am hopeful that Judge Levi, once he is Dean Levi, will be an innovator.  (Notably, in Duke's announcement, a quote from Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh describes Judge Levi as an "innovative federal judge."  I'm not quite sure what this means. If one accepts the Chief Justice's view of judging in umpire-terms, I doubt it would be a compliment to say the umpire working the plate is an "innovative" umpire.) 

I am especially eager to watch how Judge Levi will handle the (growing?) divide between legal scholarship and legal practice.  On this theme, I was struck by this quote from Duke's Provost concerning Judge Levi's appointment:

He will serve the university well in enhancing the distinctive identity of Duke Law School as a place that recognizes the importance of aligning the highest standards of academic scholarship with a real commitment to addressing challenges within the profession and making law school relevant to the changing world of legal practice.

As I have argued in this paper and try to prove in my chief blog, I think scholarly blogging is an effective way to align "the highest standards of academic scholarship with a real commitment to addressing challenges within the profession and making law school relevant to the changing world of legal practice."  I wonder if Dean Levi will agree.