FSU College of Law Research Center Blog

Transforming Legal Education

Transforming Legal Education:  Learning and Teaching the Law in the Early Twenty-first Century by Paul Maharg.   

Highly recommended -- Joe Hodnicki on Law School Innovation.

Posted by Jon Lutz

Most Cited Law Professors by Specialty, 2000-2007

Brian Leiter's Law School Rankings has listed the 10 or 20 (depending on field) most cited faculty by specialty. FSU College of Law faculty J.B. Ruhl was listed under Environmental Law and Adam Hirsch  was listed under Wills, Trusts and  Estates.   

You can see the entire listing here. 

Posted by Jon Lutz

Training Law Students for Real-Life Careers

A recent New York Time's article discusses curriculum reform in Law Schools.  Here's a quote from the article:

For years, law students have focused on judicial opinions, explaining why a case was decided in a particular way. But many lawyers today must read laws and regulations that have not been explained by a judge and advise clients on how to comply with them.

So both Harvard Law and Vanderbilt University Law School have modified their traditional first-year requirements, like contracts, civil procedures and torts, to include a class that teaches students how to interpret statutes and regulations.

Stanford Law and other schools are also making it easier for students to take courses in other graduate-level programs at their universities, recognizing that lawyers often need specialized knowledge in areas like business, technology, biology, international relations, engineering and medicine. Many lawyers today practice across international borders and must be familiar with foreign laws and legal systems.

“Globalization means you have to better prepare lawyers to work in a global context,” said Larry Kramer, dean of Stanford Law.

Read the entire article here.

Posted by Jon Lutz

Path to Legal Academia

This is a good review of a Harvard lunch time presentation by Prof. Daryl Levinson to students interested in entering legal academia.  An excerpt:

Instead of fancy grades, clerkships, and practical experience, the modern credential of choice for law school hiring committees is a graduate degree in an allied field such as economics, political science, and even English or psychology. Approximately twenty-five percent of entry-level professors hired last year had Ph.D.'s, and a large number had Master's degrees. While this is the biggest credential a candidate can have, don't despair if you haven't found the spare five to ten years to earn a terminal degree in molecular biophysics to help you compete for that intellectual property professorship you have your eye on. Levinson reassured the attendees that fewer than half of last year's hires had any graduate training. Law schools value Ph.D.'s because they indicate that candidates have certain qualities. If a candidate lacks the credential, he or she can still present those qualities independently.

Read the whole article here.

Posted by Jon Lutz

Law Professor Blogger Census 2007

Daniel Solove on Concurring Opinions has posted his now annual Law Professor Blogger Census.  This census  reports on how many law professor bloggers there are, their breakdown by gender, which schools have the most bloggers, what proportion of bloggers are at top ranked schools, etc. 

Posted by Jon Lutz

College and University Ranking Systems

The Institute for Higher Education Policy has published a report:  College and University Ranking Systems: Global Perspectives and American Challenges.

Supported by Lumina Foundation for Education, this new report by the Institute for Higher Education Policy highlights the ongoing global phenomenon of college and university ranking systems and the urgent need for constructive dialogue about ranking. College and University Ranking Systems: Global Perspectives and American Challenges acknowledges that while college and university rankings are growing in their frequency and popularity, greater understanding about how these ranking systems function is needed to ensure accountability and greater transparency.

Posted by Jon Lutz

Law Schools also Ranked by Blogs Now

In the Wall Street Journal Online there is an interesting article Law Schools also Ranked by Blogs Now by Amir Efrati.  The article discusses alternatives to the U.S. News & World Reports law school rankings.

Posted by Jon Lutz

Law Schools Unlikely to Boycott Magazine Rankings

The New York Times in the recently published article Some Colleges to Drop Out of U.S. News Rankings  reported that dozens of liberal arts schools are no longer participating in the U.S. News and World Report college rankings. 

The commitment, which some college presidents said was made by a large majority of participants, represents the most significant challenge yet to the rankings, adding colleges like Barnard, Sarah Lawrence and Kenyon to a growing rebellion against the magazine, participants said.

However, Law.com in the article Law Schools Unlikely to Boycott Magazine Rankings reports that a law school boycott is unlikely.

Nancy Rogers, president of the American Association of Law Schools, said that her group was not considering a move similar to that of the Annapolis Group.

"While the AALS believes that any composite rankings system is inherently flawed, the AALS supports the efforts of magazines or other entities to provide information to those interested in pursuing legal education," she said in an e-mail message.

Law schools generally fear the consequences of not participating, Levmore said, especially because the publication could go ahead and include much of the information that is available from the American Bar Association, absent input from the individual schools.

Posted by Jon Lutz

Law School Curriculum: What is technology's role?

There's an interesting article in the November 8, 2006 National Law Journal, The Law School Curriculum: What is technology's role?  Here's an excerpt:

Professor Charles Nesson, a pioneer in the use of technology in legal education and a founder of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, is teaching an experimental class called "CyberOne: Law and the Court of Public Opinion." He's talking to students about how to make an argument not just to a judge, but to a global audience. As he puts it, CyberOne is "a course in persuasive, empathic argument in the Internet space." Students are figuring out how to use blogs, podcasts, wikis, online video and virtual worlds to build their cases inside and outside of the courtroom. It's out there-both figuratively and literally, as it's also being taught in Second Life, a virtual world. Then again, Nesson is usually onto something when he's out there.

These experiments may well lead to greater use of technology in law school classrooms. But the broader question lingers: Can technology play a transformative role in legal education at a systemic level? At the Berkman Center, in partnership with LexisNexis, we've begun a research project this fall to survey lawyers and law faculties about what they think on this front. By the end of the year, we expect to publish the results and highlight some of the most promising ways forward. We don't yet know where this study will lead, but it's pretty clear that the answer doesn't lie in law schools starting to teach technology-specific courses. After all, a smart young lawyer can figure out how to use a new e-discovery software package in a few hours.

Read the entire article here.

Posted by Jon Lutz

 

Law School Curriculum

Stanford Law School Dean Larry Kramer has a long post in the Blog Law School Innovation on the topic of law school curriculum:

Ask any law school graduate what was the most significant intellectual experience he or she had in law school (that is, what really shaped their thinking, what stuck with them, what mattered most), and almost all will give the same answer: the first year. This seems to be true no matter what law school they attended, no matter what career they chose to pursue, and whether they graduated last year or fifty years ago. I spend probably half my time talking to Stanford graduates, usually beginning a first meeting by talking about their time here, and I get this answer almost 100% of the time. The first year, in other words, is the part of law school that really seems to work. The problem with legal education is in the second and third year and consists mainly of failing to keep students engaged by offering them something of equivalent educational and intellectual value to what they got in the first year. It is, from that perspective, puzzling to see not just Harvard, but most schools that think about curriculum reform focus all their energy on changing the first year.

Read the whole post here.

Posted by Jon Lutz