Law School Innovation

Gearing up for the (innovative?) 2008 edition of AALS annual meeting

I am now in gear-up mode for next week's Association of American Law Schools meeting in NYC.  (Of course, co-blogger Gene Koo was way ahead of me and has organized great some AALS events discussed here.)

This year there are a large number of official AALS panels for would-be law school innovators (which is not surprising given that the AALS meeting theme this year is "Reassessing Our Roles as Scholars and Educators in Light of Change").  Though I won't be able to make all the LSI-friendly sessions (some of which are at the same time!), the following panels are ear-marked in my program:

Friday, Jan. 4 (full schedule here)

• Section for the Law School Dean
  The Carnegie Report on Educating Lawyers from the Perspective of the Law School Dean
• Section on New Law Professors
  New Law Faculty as Catalysts for Change
• AALS Concurrent Plenary Session:
  Rethinking Legal Education For The 21st Century
• AALS Concurrent Plenary Session:
  E-Expertise: How blogs, SSRN, Listservs, On-line Research Resources, and Other Electronic Technologies are Changing the Legal Academy of the 21st Century
• AALS Committee on Libraries and Technology Program
  Scholarly Gatekeepers and Electronic Information: Brave New World?
• Section on Pro Bono and Public Service Opportunities
  The Total Package: Utilizing Public Service to Bring Legal Practice into the Doctrinal Classroom

Saturday, Jan. 5 (full schedule here)

• Section on Continuing Legal Education
  The Educational Continuum for Lawyers: Collaborations Among the Academy, Bench, and Bar
• Open Source Program
  Implementing Scholarship
• Section on Balance in Legal Education
  What Does ‘Balance in Legal Education’ Mean?”
• Section on Scholarship
  The Future of Legal Scholarship

This is only an abridged list of LSI-friendly sessions at AALS this year.  Notably, even the curmudgeonly Orin Kerr notes here that "whatever the past failings of the AALS, this year's offerings look much better than the usual ones."  And Eric Muller provides here a link this his essential AALS-meeting user's guide.

Posted by DAB

Teaching Students to Think Like 1870s Lawyers

When we talk about law school "innovation," we're really talking about law school reform. And isn't it about time? Law schools have succeeded in teaching students to think like lawyers: "1870s lawyers," said Edward L. Rubin, dean of Vanderbilt University Law School, in the Chronicle of Higher Education's Leading Legal Educators Call for a Shakeup in How the Law Is Taught (sub. required).

Hat tip to TaxProf Blog. -- Joe Hodnicki

Advances in Book-Hauling Technologies

Gene's post on the likely failure of the Kindle within law schools was spot-on, unfortunately.  It seems that the most important technological advances relating to law books is in the devices to carry them.

When I began teaching seven years ago, I was surprised to find the students flooding into school dragging wheeled suitcases.  It looked like a flight attendant convention.  The functionality of those wheeled bags became clear, though, once I saw others staggering with gigantic and fully-laden backpacks.  The wheeled cubes were made possible by the development of rubber in-line skate wheels, which were eventually adapted for use with luggage.  Thus far, these skate wheels are probably the most successful technology we have relating to textbooks.

We provide lockers at school, but the students take nearly everything home with them to complete all of their reading.  Each one of these pack animals, I imagine, represents a failure of technology.  If not the Kindle, then what?  Is part of the problem our current expensive process of using large textbooks, only a fraction of which will sometimes be assigned for a given class?  It seems there must be a better way.

-- Mark Osler