Clinical Law Prof Blog

Jennifer Rosato Named New Dean at NIU College of Law

Jennifer Rosato comes to NIU from Drexel University in Philadelphia where she was part of the administrative team that created and launched the Earle Mack School of Law. She served as acting dean during the schools first year of operation (July 2006-April 2007) and was a consultant on the project for a year prior. The experience she gained in those roles, Rosato says, will be useful when she takes over the top spot at NIU Law on July 1, 2009. The insights she gleaned in helping to open the doors at Drexel, combined with her outstanding record of scholarship and leadership in nearly two decades as a legal educator, make her a wonderful candidate to assume the mantle of leadership at NIU Law.

For her part, Rosato says that the NIU job was attractive for a number of reasons. One of the aspects that appealed to her was NIU Laws commitment to diversity. "I have benefitted greatly from increased opportunities that others worked to create in the legal profession. I am excited to become part of those efforts at NIU Law, which has long been a leader in expanding access to legal education," says Rosato, who will become one of only two Latina law school deans in the nation and the second woman to hold the title of dean at NIU Law. The school received the 2007 Diversity Award from the Council on Legal Education Opportunity and has been ranked in the top 10 for faculty diversity by the Princeton Review for the past four years. The colleges long history of preparing students for careers in public interest law also fits well with her belief in emphasizing service in the legal profession. As dean, she pledges to work to find new opportunities for the college to interact with and serve the university and the broader community.

Prior to her time at Drexel, Rosato was the associate dean for Student Affairs at Brooklyn Law School, where she also served as co-director of the Center for Health, Science and Public Policy and as professor of law. She began teaching at Brooklyn in 1992, and before that taught at Villanova University School of Law. Since entering the academy, she also has taught at University of Pennsylvania Law School and New York University School of Law. Her scholarship focuses on diverse legal issues that affect children and families, with an emphasis on issues related to bioethics. Rosato earned her J.D. degree from the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where she was editor-in-chief of the University of Pennsylvania Journal of International Business Law and won the Edwin R. Keedy Moot Court Competition. She clerked for the Hon. Thomas N. ONeill Jr. of the U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Pennsylvania, before becoming an associate with Hangley, Connolly, Epstein, Chicco, Foxman & Ewing.

-jl

Yet More Congratulations in Order for Washington-St. Louis

They are gaining a wonderful new colleague in Bob Kuehn. Professor Appell issued the announcement today:

It is our great pleasure to announce that Bob Kuehn will be joining the Washington University Law School faculty in July as Professor of Law. As most of you probably know, in addition to being a leader in clinical legal education and research, he is President-Elect of CLEA. His ties to Washington University are longstanding and deep. They include a productive (and useful) scholarly partnership with Peter Joy and a shared interest and expertise in environmental law and clinics with Maxine Lipeles, the Director of our fabulous Interdisciplinary Environmental Clinic, which Bob will co-direct with Maxine. Maxine feels particularly excited because this marks Bob’s return to teaching an environmental clinic, something he has not done for nearly a decade.  According to Maxine, Bob’s “work in many ways inspired the subsequent expansion of environmental clinics around the country.”  Maxine notes that it was Bob who first brought the environmental clinics group together at the January 1999 AALS meeting in New Orleans.

-jl

New Year, New Members on the CLEA Board

The Clinical Legal Education Association (CLEA) President Michael Pinard has issued the following announcement:

The CLEA Board is happy to announce that Bob Kuehn (Alabama) has been elected CLEA Vice-President, and that Esther Canty-Barnes (Rutgers), Leigh Goodmark (Baltimore), Kate Kruse (UNLV), Binny Miller (American), Jeff Pokarak (Suffolk), and Yoli Redero (Vanderbilt) have been elected to serve as board members. The CLEA Board appreciates deeply all of the individuals who ran for board positions, as well as our membership who voted to fill these important positions. We look forward to working with you and for you in the New Year.

-jl

Primer on Clinical Legal Education: Second Installment (a.k.a. "The Mother Lode")

Since my first installment, Professor Vanessa Merton delivered a wonderfully complete answer to a prospective clinical law prof's query: "What Resources Exist for Folks Interested in Entering the Academy as a Clinical Law Professor?"  Professor Merton has graciously allowed me to post her response, which could very well make further posts on this subject superfluous:

Here's a compendium of ideas I've sent to folks over the years. If you’re serious about this academic thing, you need to gear up the way you’d gear up for a heavy trial.  Learn some of the history so you better understand what’s happening now: start with overall perspective from Robert Stevens, Law School: Legal Education in America from the 1850s to the 1980s.  Then focus on the history of clinical education, e.g., Margaret Martin Barry, Jon C. Dubin & Peter A. Joy, Clinical Education for This Millennium: The Third Wave, 7 Clinical L. Rev. 1 (2000).

Read through Best Practices for Legal Education – all of it – takes about four hours to eyeball the pages, get the basic concepts. (You can get it for free.) Or read it more carefully if you really want to impress (and learn).  If you’re determined to wow, do the same with the Carnegie Foundation’s Educating Lawyers and Greg Munro’s Outcomes Assessment for Law Schools. Read the MacCrate Report, a/k/a Legal Education and Professional Development: An Educational Continuum, published by the ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar. Poke around that website for a while. You could benefit from reading through the ABA’s Standards for Approval of Law Schools and three of the Section's recent Committee reports on Outcome Measures, Security of Position, and Transparency.

Look through the materials generated by the Institute for Law School Teaching at Gonzaga Law, which you should be able to find in any decent law school library.

Go to the CLEA website:  Just a wealth of ways to learn the vocabulary -- read the Mission Statement, dive into past CLEA Newsletters to get a sense of current and perennial issues, read through the CLEA Bibliography of Clinical Teaching and Scholarship, read the New Clinicians Handbook, etc.

You should be familiar with LexternWeb and the AALS Section on Clinical Legal Education, and perhaps Washburn Law's list of Best Law Teacher nominees.

Read some classics: Tony Amsterdam’s Clinical Legal Education - A 21st Century Experience, 34 J. Legal Educ. 612 (1984); Learning from Practice (2d ed.) by Ogilvy et al. and Chavkin’s Clinical Legal Education. If you can get your hands on them, read through The Lawyering Process: Materials for Clinical Instruction in Advocacy, by Bellow and Moulton, and Dvorkin, Himmelstein and Lesnick, Becoming a Lawyer: A Humanistic Perspective on Legal Education and Professionalism.

It'd be useful to skim through as many back issues of the Clinical Law Review as you can -- available at any law school library, and abstracts of most CLR articles are accessible from the CLEA website.  Then there's the Journal of Legal Education –- reading through several back issues (you did say this is what you want to do for a living, didn’t you?) can help you pick up on what's happening in legal academe in general. 

Go to the Society of American Law Teachers website and browse.  Attend a SALT Public Interest retreat where you will meet the coolest law professors. 

Natch, if you can find out who is actually interviewing you, it wouldn't hurt to peruse one or two of their latest articles and read their bios. 

Also could check out:

Breaking into the Academy: The  University of Michigan Journal of Race and Law Guide to Programs for Aspiring Law Professors. The Guide was designed to help law students and lawyers break into legal academics.  It contains advice on negotiating the application process, addresses and phone numbers of helpful organizations and citations to articles about the demographics of the law teaching profession.  In addition, the Guide contains listings of Law Teaching Fellowship Programs, Graduate Law Degree Programs and Legal Methods Teaching Programs which might be of interest to those considering law teaching.  Additional resources are available in Eric Goldman's piece Careers in Law Teaching, as well as Douglas J. Whaley, Teaching Law: Advice for the New Professor, 43 Ohio St. L. J. 125 (1982).

A good way in may be through one of the numerous teaching fellowships now available.

Also you should be aware of, if not regularly following, blogs like:

Best Practices for Legal Education

clinicians with not enough to do, and

Clinical Law Prof Blog

Write a book or two, of course.  Failing that, find a book or two that really intrigues you or pisses you off and write a book review. You’ll quite possibly be able to get it published quickly.

Good luck!

Again, heartfelt thanks to Prof. Merton. -jl

CSALE SURVEY RESULTS ARE HERE

The Center for the Study of Applied Legal Education (CSALE) is happy to announce that the results of its 2007-08 Survey of Applied Legal Education are now available free of charge at www.CSALE.org. The results provide valuable insight into the state and nature of applied legal education in areas including program design and structure, pedagogical techniques and practice, and the treatment of applied legal educators in the legal academy. Over 147 schools provided data on their overall programs, challenges they face, and the rights and responsibilities of those teaching in them. Four hundred and ten in-house, live client clinics and 235 field placement programs provided detailed information on how they teach and operate. And hundreds of individual clinicians provided information on a wide range of topics including voting rights, promotion and retention standards, and compensation. For a report summarizing the results, or to get the raw data, please visit www.CSALE.org. (N.B. Special thanks go out to Prof. David Santacroce for patiently working with me while I recently mined the comprehensive and invaluable data sets provided by CSALE.-jl )