Clinical Law Prof Blog

Where Was Spencer When the Lights Went Out? In The Dark—Teaching!

Pandemonium!  Okay, it was not pandemonium.  It was me running around in the dark teaching.  Half an hour before class was to start, the power had gone out.  And what did my students and I decide to do when the power stayed out?  Learn together in the dark!  Would it have worked on Zoom?  No!—the power was out!  And it wouldn’t have been as much fun, been as good learning, or worked as much to help me and maybe my students get out of some February doldrums.

It had just promised to be an annoyance when the power went out in the law school building and some buildings around us.  A student and I were feeling lucky.  We had just done a hearing by phone in a room that would have gone very dark with no windows.  We had left it for my office to debrief.  What would have happened in an administrative hearing if the lights went out?  It would have failed and likely would have ended.  Our client would likely have had to wait months for another chance at a hearing.  But we had done it and were debriefing in my office when the power went out.  It was darkish, but we kept going by the light from my windows, both of us Monday morning quarterbacking the hearing a bit and taking down the adrenaline from the hearing. 

But then the power stayed out and we were supposed to have class.  Our classroom is on the sixth floor, my office on the first, and whether the elevators worked or not, we weren’t going to get in them.  And then the emails came from my students on my phone, telling me they were upstairs.  They were?  Except for me and my student who had just done the hearing, they were upstairs all around the building.  Up the five flights I went, finding students who were wondering what was going on along the way.  I pulled them together in the classroom and almost in unison, they said to me they wanted to have the class!  I thought about class with no power.  Computers would work if charged but the internet would not work—imagine a class without internet!  Without even the possibility a text messages and emails to interrupt us.  The students told me it would be an adventure, and that they would have a story to tell about learning in the dark.  And they would not do what we might have had to do otherwise—go home and be on zoom.  We have a little light in the classroom from a large bank of indoor windows grabbing light from an atrium with a skylight two flights up.  They wanted to continue.  And we did.  It took my going up and down five flights three or four times, but we were all together and ready to learn.

Was it my best teaching?  Maybe.  I drew on a dimly lit white board laws they could not find online that we were discussing.  We did case rounds where we were able to laugh about what students remembered with and without their computers from previous classes they’d taken and they got to think about what might actually be relevant from their non-clinical classes when they were lawyers.  We gave a few ideas to the student presenting in case rounds, left, and went on to the rest of the day.  We learned that while we were learning, the school had reasonably decided to close for the rest of the day.  I met with several students later in the day individually on zoom, but we had escaped it for at least one class and did some good learning in the process.

I had been looking for something to brighten up the class, the clinic, my mood, and maybe my students’ moods.  I’ve written before in this blog about the general melancholic blues of early February.  Winter holidays are long over, and other than a mostly illusory spring break for many students and at least for this clinical teacher who will need to work through it, there is little outside of school to enliven our lives until Memorial Day and summer begins.  Two years of on and off zoom classes and Covid, including delayed in-person teaching at our school as well as most every other school I know due to the latest Covid variant, have only made February blues worse.  We could not stand another visit of the Ghost of Zoom Teaching Past, and at least for a few hours, I benefitted from my students’ resilience, and we learned and enlivened our lives together.

Externships 11: Updated Deadlines

From the organizers: 

Dear Externship Community, 

We hope you and yours are well.

We look forward to gathering for Externships 11 in sunny California October 7-9, 2022!

For those who would like to present but have a half-baked or not-at-all baked idea, the deadline to submit an  RFP Interest Form has been extended to May 15, 2022, after the AALS Conference. A committee member will be in touch to discuss your interest. The RFP submission deadline has been extended to June 17, 2022. Please mark your calendars.

Also, if you haven’t done so already, please check out the Externships 11 website! You’ll find all of the links to complete registration, submit proposals, etc. Please bookmark the page and circulate widely!

 

 

Latest Edition of ABA Legal Guide to Affordable Housing Development

Via Prof. Tim Iglesias: 

The third edition of the ABA Legal Guide to Affordable Housing Development has been published:

This book is a comprehensive legal guide to the development of affordable housing for practitioners and housing advocates. It covers all aspects of the development process, including zoning and building codes, financing, monitoring and enforcement of regulations, fair housing, preservation of affordable housing, and relocation requirements. It also includes brief chapters on the history of affordable housing and the future of affordable housing.

 

Reflections So Far on Global Programs at Pepperdine Caruso School of Law

Three years ago, my role at Pepperdine Caruso School of Law expanded to include administrative leadership for our Global Programs, including the London Program, Washington DC Externship Semester, and summer exchange program in Augsburg. It’s required a heavy learning curve, especially with pandemic complications. These are all well established programs with talented directors, and I am the next steward in a long line of professors who have developed and led these programs. For much of its history, the School of Law has developed and encouraged studying and working abroad through these Global Programs, externships, and the Sudreau Global Justice Institute. International study and engagement is deep in Pepperdine’s DNA.

This is exciting to me, because I did not study abroad in college or law school and always regretted it. I have traveled and worked abroad much since then, including teaching engagements in India, Brazil, England, and the Philippines, and an active international practice in the Community Justice Clinic. It’s cliché to say that foreign travel can change lives, but it’s true. As Mark Twain wrote in The Innocents Abroad, “Travel is fatal to prejudice,” and we need it. But this role is new territory for me outside of dedicated clinical education, and I have tried to bring the virtues and values of clinical education, professional formation, access to justice, cultural competence, and readiness for practice into these initiatives.

Prof. Nancy Hunt leads the Washington DC Externship Semester and literally wrote the book on Lawyering in the Nation’s Capital. It’s an expanded, sophisticated externship program that gives our West Coast students serious, full-time experience and relationships in DC where many stay for their careers.

Prof. Peter Wendel directs the Augsburg Exchange Program each summer with the University of Augsburg and its Summer Program on European and International Economic Law. Each summer our students study in Germany, and each fall we welcome German students to Malibu. They contribute much to our community, and our students develop expertise and cross-cultural compassion and sophistication.

The London Program is our oldest study-abroad program, beloved of alumni, and it has passed through several iterations. In this age of exploding (or exploded) student debt, less predictable and shifting JD job markets, and complex, competitive global markets, we’ve been thinking a lot about the purpose of the London Program and its return on investment for students who take a semester abroad. For law students, studying abroad is too expensive to be merely a cool diversion or change of venue; it should tangibly advance their work, vocation, and careers.  

With my colleagues who have served as Faculty Directors, including Prof. Rob Anderson in 2021 and Prof. Naomi Goodno this year (and Prof. David Han in 2020 had not the pandemic interrupted everything), and our heroic Associate Director Karen Haygreen, we have redoubled our efforts on developing curricula and experiences that are useful and particularly valuable to students with global practice in mind. We focus the curriculum on international and comparative law, international human rights, transnational conflict resolution, arbitration, entertainment, and business. Collaborative experience in practice is essential to professional formation and learning, for us and our students, so the program offers extensive externship opportunities in London, study tours to international courts and institutions (pandemics permitting), and energetic moot court competitions with British law students and young lawyers. Our Faculty Director from Los Angeles teaches alongside brilliant British faculty and practitioners.

We welcome visiting students, too; they enrich our students, classes, and community in London.

True to clinic style, these new experiences have provided rich opportunity for my own fresh reflection in our Program of Clinical Education. The fundamental lessons transfer and continually inform each other: that lawyering is lawyering but context is everything, that the rule of law is essential to justice and access to justice is essential to the rule of law, and that an abiding commitment to the dignity of all human beings is critical for democracy – here and everywhere. We should manifest these commitments wherever we find ourselves and our work, locally or globally. Collaborating with lawyers and professors around the world makes me a better lawyer and teacher, and a focus on formative outcomes in one program makes us better in every other place. My great hope is that the law students in these programs glean as much from the lawyers, teachers, and students whom they meet out in the wide world, wherever they end up practicing.