Clinical Law Prof Blog

The New Champions of the Presumption of Innocence?

Like many of you who were concerned about the confirmation and hasty swearing in of our newest Supreme Court Justice, I woke up this morning tempted to despair. As I caught up with the public statements of McConnell, Collins, and others, however, I realized that there’s no need to fear for the independence of the judiciary—especially as it relates to criminal justice reform and mass incarceration. Indeed, those of us who spend our days in prisons, jails, courtrooms, and classrooms—worried about the school to prison pipeline; implicit (and explicit) racial bias; institutionalization; and whether our indigent clients can ever get a fair shake in this country—now know for certain that we have new champions in our corner, new converts to our cause: Republican Senators!

Mitch McConnell, who for years has played a leadership role in the Senate, supporting, for example, the war on drugs, disparities between sentencing for crack cocaine and powder cocaine convictions, the federal death penalty, and limitation of federal habeas relief, has now proclaimed himself the Standard Bearer for the Presumption of Innocence! Mitch, welcome to the team! I would never have guessed that this was your pet issue! Criminal defense attorneys don’t judge, however; it’s never too late to start spending time with people of color just hoping they can get a jury of their peers to see them as human beings! As they say on The Price is Right (not a reference to your donor base)… Come On Down!

And Senator Susan Collins, dang girl! I’m totally borrowing from your statement in my next appeal challenging the sufficiency of the evidence of a criminal charge! This is good stuff:

...we will be ill served in the long run if we abandon the presumption of innocence and fairness, tempting though it may be. We must always remember that it is when passions are most inflamed that fairness is most in jeopardy...

I literally couldn’t have said it better myself. I know it must have taken a good deal of principle to risk alienating your base, which—let’s be honest—has supported you more for your votes supporting, say, withholding federal funding from sanctuary cities and authorizing (and extending) the Patriot Act. But you did it!! You planted your feet and stood up for the little guy facing the awesome power of the federal government arrayed against him. Well, not quite—but close enough.

So this is just an educated guess, but I suspect our new Presumption of Innocence Champions are going to start with national bail reform. I mean, that’s kind of low-hanging fruit, so it only makes sense. Divorcing considerations of wealth from considerations of whether a (presumed innocent) defendant will show up for court is a no-brainer! First, it supports the new Republican cause celebre (sweet! political points scored!). Second, it saves money (which is Republicans’ second favorite thing!) related to the expense of housing presumed-innocent defendants as they await trial—some for as many as several years. Third, it keeps families together until there has been a definitive adjudication of guilt. That only makes sense for Senators Collins and McConnell. I can’t wait to stand with them on this!

The next steps in criminal justice reform are anyone’s guess, really, and the sky’s the limit! There are so many many many many opportunities in America to support the ideal of the presumption of innocence and protect those facing charges when “fairness is most in jeopardy,” according to Senator Collins. All I know is, I want in! I mean, I’ve been waiting my whole career for someone to listen to the voices crying out in the wilderness for true justice for those facing criminal accusations. Oh me of little faith.

Nancy Hunt: Lawyering in the Nation's Capital

I am proud to announce the publication of Prof. Nancy Hunt's new textbook, Lawyering in the Nation's Capital. 

Prof. Hunt directs Pepperdine's exceptional Washington D.C. Externship Semester.

Here is more about the book from West Academic:

Lawyering in the Nation’s Capital, a new book by Professor Nancy Hunt of Pepperdine University School of Law, is the essential guide for the Washington lawyer, providing clear and succinct explanations of complicated procedures, legal issues, and conflicts arising in and among the branches of the federal government and the intertwined private sector.  Peppered with insight from DC practitioners of law and lobbying, fascinating legal questions, and historical facts, the text examines the work of attorneys across the three branches of the federal government, in nonprofits, and in law and lobbying firms.  

Lawyering in the Nation’s Capital, recently published by West Academic, draws on recent events, political conflicts, and cases as its explains the work of Washington lawyers.  The discussion of this work across the private and public legal sectors spans topics including  

• Congressional procedures that circumvent the illusive “regular order.”
• How lobbyists interact with Congress, explained by lobbyists themselves.
• The daily work of the agency lawyer, and why it takes agencies so long to promulgate regulations.
• Unique aspects of nonprofits lawyering in Washington.
• The specialized work of lawyers in the Office of White House Counsel, the Office of the Solicitor General, and the Office of Management and Budget within the Executive Office of the President.

Professor Hunt’s text demystifies some of the most complex issues about how our federal government operates and how the private sector responds to government action, while posing thought-provoking questions about the outer limits of the power of each of the branches of government. 

 

Tyner: The Leader's Journey

A guest post from Dr. Artika Tyner on her new book, The Leader’s Journey: A Guide to Discovering the Leader Within: 

 

Lawyers are the gatekeepers of justice, democracy, and rule of law. We are called upon to create access to justice and preserve the foundational tenets of fairness and equity. As gatekeepers, lawyers should also utilize their legal training to serve as leaders. This process of social change can be evidenced through the furtherance of social justice, transformation of the legal system, and public policy reform. 

The preparation for assuming the role of lawyer as leader should begin during the formative years of a lawyer’s professional identity- law school. Law schools are in a prime position to aid law students in developing their leadership capacity by connecting their practical experience with an understanding of leadership development and one’s ability to advance social change. The adoption of a leadership development and social justice curriculum is a “new frontier” for legal education by in which the potential of law students to serve as leaders and agents of change can be realized. As a former clinical law faculty member of the Community Justice Project, I was inspired to write my new book which provides law students with a practical guide on how to develop their leadership skills.  

Leadership is a journey often mistaken for a destination. The Leader’s Journey: A Guide to Discovering the Leader Within contains practical guidance and inspiration for that journey. My new book will provide law students with inspiration on how to develop their individualized leadership style and make an impact. This is the foundation of leadership growth. In three parts, the book explores core values of leadership and how these values can inform a law student’s understanding of leadership. 

 

 Part 1: Leading Change—Planting People, Growing Justice (Why Lead?) 
Leadership is about influence. Law students have the power in their hands to positively influence the world around them. I start each course with asking my students: “What is in your hands to make a difference in the world?”

Part 2: Your Leadership Qualities (What Makes You a Leader?) 
Effective leadership requires developing the necessary tools to lead change, such as:  fostering creative problem solving skills and engaging in community-building in order to eradicate the access to justice gap.

 Part 3: Your Leadership DNA (What Is Your Individualized Leadership Style?) 
One’s leadership style is as unique as your DNA. It is the individualized, unique composition of each student’s leadership skills, technical competency, and life experiences. The challenge on this leadership journey is to discover how to leverage one’s leadership talent. Through the exploration of a range of leadership styles, law students will gain tools for leading more effectively. They can customize these styles to create their very own signature brand.

This collection of quotes serves as a source of inspiration and guidance on each student’s leadership journey. The quotes function as a critical reflection tool. As students take the time and reflect on each quote, they will gain new insights and build their leadership platforms. This type of reflection provides an opportunity for law students to strengthen their leadership skills and share these lessons with others. 

Book Review of Building on Best Practices: Transforming Legal Education in a Changing World

This year, I am serving on my law school’s curriculum committee, outcomes assessment task force and our self-study committee for an upcoming ABA site visit. These posts involve many of the most pressing questions of the day in legal education, and they intersect often with clinical and experiential learning.

For these reasons, I was very happy and a bit intimidated to receive an invitation from the Journal of Legal Education to review Building on Best Practices: Transforming Legal Education in a Changing World, edited by Deborah Maranville. Lisa Radtke Bliss, Carolyn Wilkes Kass, and Antoinette Sedillo Lopez, and written by many others.  I have the privilege of friendship and collaboration with many of these authors and editors, and they are doing innovative, wise work on the hardest issues of our enterprise.  Their work and insight hit home. 

Please read and use the book; it will make our law schools better.  It will make us better teachers and scholars and will promote better outcomes for the students who trust us. It takes its place within the canon of legal education theory and practice, from McCrate to Carnegie to the original Best Practices. It is not the destination of our work, but it is a useful, important stop along the way. 

Here is an excerpt from my review, available on SSRN here and at 65 J. Legal Educ. 988 (2016).

Building on Best Practices charts the path for institutional and curricular reform within the prevailing structure of outcomes assessment. Like the refined demands of new ABA accreditation standards, Building on Best Practices draws from the trend toward objective measurement of identifiable goals. Institutional assessment follows a constructive, progressive cycle: identifying outcomes and goals, developing means to measure progress toward those goals, measuring performance in light of the desired outcomes, evaluating results, and developing and implementing changes, before starting again.

Thus, rather than evaluating a school based on its inputs, like the metrics of an incoming class, the library budget, or faculty research assistance, a school should measure its success based on how well it achieves the goals it sets for itself. Building on Best Practices proposes this process as the means to strengthen and improve the enterprise of legal education. Each law school must reckon what it wants to be in a topsy-turvy environment, then mark out a course to achieve it well within its own contexts and markets. It is not enough for schools to add or remove programs, to build a space, or to invest in a class with higher entrance metrics. Instead, schools must be able to articulate why they should do those things, to have a clear purpose for making the moves they make, and to use good tools to determine whether they work.

Get "Building on Best Practices" for Free Only through 2016!

"As you may know, when Building on Best Practices:  Transforming Legal Education in a Changing World was published by LexisNexis, we had an agreement that it would be available for free as an e-book, on line, with printed copies for sale. However, Carolina Academic Press recently bought out Lexis Nexis’ print inventory, causing some confusion regarding availability. Negotiations are still underway.  The  book is currently available in hard copy for sale for $50 ($45 internet discount – to order, go to http://www.cap-press.com/books/isbn/9781630443207/Building-on-Best-Practices )  We expect that the ebook will remain available at no cost from Lexis Nexis through the end of 2016.  In order to obtain a free copy, the instructions have changed.  Please submit a request for a free copy of the eBook by sending your request to [email protected].  After December 31, 2016 there will likely be a fee to obtain a copy of the e-book.

We hope you will strongly encourage your Deans, Academic Deans, Experiential Deans, and your school’s curriculum committee members to read the book.  The book provides helpful guidance and answers on the most important topics in legal education, even the dreaded learning outcomes and assessment projects that are underway at every law school."

Lisa Radtke Bliss and Carrie Kass and the Best Practices Implementation Committee:

Laila Hlass

Jill Engle

Michele Pistone

Jill Engle

Melanie DeRousse

Carrie Sperling

Susan Brooks

Emily Suski

 

Rebellious Lawyering at 25

“Radical lawyering,” I then wrote to myself in field notes, “somehow has to be anchored in the world we’re trying to help change. Built from the ground up. Made a part of what my relatives, friends, and allies do in rebelling against all that has oppressed us and our ancestors, all that seems now still likely to subordinate our descendants. Informed by how we cope and fight and by how we laugh at ourselves. Mindful of how we sometimes get hemmed in and corrupted and deluded by big institutions and tiny habits. Aware of how we sometimes convert apparently insignificant opportunities into important advantages, defiantly making strengths of our weaknesses.”

Gerald López, Introduction, Rebellious Lawyering: One Chicano’s Vision of Progressive Legal Practice (1992).

When I was in law school in the mid-90s, I went to a conference at Yale titled "Rebellious Lawyering." To this day, it was one of the best conferences I have ever attended. It was inspiring, invigorating, and creative, and convinced me that I had found my tribe. The impetus for and foundation of that conference was Gerald López’s influential book Rebellious Lawyering: One Chicano’s Vision of Progressive Legal Practice (1992). 

For years afterwards, I kept the conference poster displayed above my kitchen sink. "Not another cog in the wheel," it proclaimed. The poster remained up even during my eight years as a corporate lawyer when I found a supportive firm (Pillsbury) that allowed me to be a "Rebellious Lawyer," at least in my pro bono work on behalf of children and non profits.

Thus, when I heard about the possibility of a "Rebellious Lawyering" symposium, my ears immediately perked. My tribe was reuniting!

In the ensuing months, the symposium has now come together and will take place on Sunday, May 1, 2016, during the annual AALS Conference on Clinical Legal Education in Baltimore, Maryland. The half-day symposium will include an opening keynote address by Gerald López “reflecting on the major themes of his book and a plenary session immediately following the keynote with clinicians who are interpreting and extending these themes and who will be reflecting on the lessons of Rebellious Lawyering for clinical legal education.” 

Related to the symposium, the Clinical Law Review will be issuing a special Spring 2017 symposium volume, Rebellious Lawyering at Twenty-Five. The issue will celebrate the 25th anniversary of the publication of the book.  

According to the RFP circulated by the Clinical Law Review:

Rarely has a critical text had such a deep and abiding impact on lawyering practice and theory as Gerald López’s Rebellious Lawyering. Lopez’s text (and a group of related works of legal scholarship written during an especially fertile period of critical thinking and writing on poverty law) has inspired generations of lawyers and shaped public interest legal practice since its publication almost 25 years ago. The imperative for lawyers to ally with those mobilizing in poor, immigrant, and communities of color against overpolicing and inequality is as strong today as it has ever been.  

To celebrate the 25^th anniversary of Rebellious Lawyering, the Clinical Law Review invites the submission of abstracts describing potential full-length articles and essays, as well as shorter comments and dispatches, for inclusion in a symposium issue reflecting on the meaning of the text two-and-a-half decades after its publication.

Authors are encouraged to reflect broadly and critically on rebellious lawyering in general, and the book in particular, to offer case studies, critiques, theoretical amendments, pedagogical insights, and other kinds of engagement with these ideas.  What insights does rebellious lawyering offer us today? How have concepts of rebellious lawyering shaped our practices as lawyers and clinical educators? How do we describe an instance or series of instances of lawyering rebelliously? How have we failed to lawyer rebelliously in a given moment? How does lawyering and legal education today nurture and/or suppress rebellious practice? How can the ideas contained in the text be deepened, updated, reconstituted, extended? In style and substance, we hope for creativity and rebelliousness in the submissions.

Abstracts are due by October 30, 2015. The journal will expect to notify authors of symposium acceptances in November. If you wish to participate in the Clinical Law Review symposium, please email abstracts describing your proposed symposium contribution by October 30, 2015 to [email protected].  While there is no prescribed length for an abstract, we anticipate that many abstracts will be in the range of 1 - 3 pages. 

If you have any questions about the symposium, please direct them to Sameer Ashar, Chair of the Clinical Law Review’s symposium committee, or to any other symposium committee members:

Amna Akbar, [email protected]

Sameer Ashar, [email protected]

Phyllis Goldfarb, [email protected]

Brenda Smith, [email protected]

Building on Best Practices

I am a bit of a Veruca Salt when it comes to certain things, including books, especially ones that promise to be transformative--“I want it and I want it now, Daddy!” And so last December, I demurely offered to copy edit Building on Best Practices: Transforming Legal Education in a Changing World before it went to the publisher. This was no sacrificial duty on my part. I had the opportunity to read a couple of the chapters in draft form earlier in the year and I was impatiently hungry for more—a lot more, and now! The pedagogical feast did not disappoint. 

The editors describe the goals of Building on Best Practices  as a “[R]eflection on the best of current and emerging practices in legal education that will guide individual teachers and law school administrations in designing a program of legal education that meets the needs of the lawyers of tomorrow. Today's law students will enter a profession vastly different from the one their predecessors experienced, for which different skills, knowledge and values are necessary. This book is an attempt to synthesize important developments in legal education that have occurred since the publication of Best Practices for Legal Education. It is designed as a resource for anyone who hopes to contribute to the betterment of legal education and wishes to explore positive opportunities for change.” 

As promised, the book builds on Best Practices in Legal Education, which was written by Roy Stuckey et al. and published by CLEA in 2007. Building on Best Practices takes into consideration the crisis in legal education, advances in technology, the diversification of students in U.S. law schools, changes in the profession, new accreditation standards, the further development of educational research into how we learn, and much, much more.

Coincidentally, I was reading the book while attending the 2015 AALS Annual Meeting, and as I moved from the sessions and discussions at the Annual Meeting back into the pages of the book, I was struck by the level of synchronicity between the concerns raised by our colleagues at the meeting and the insights and guidance provided by Building on Best Practices. The book is both timely and relevant at a time when legal educators need help—badly. Legal education is at least in flux, and possibly, in crisis, and it is crucial that we recognize our challenges and collaboratively identify and implement solutions to help us move forward into a new stage in history.

That collaboration is evident from cover to cover in Building on Best Practices. Edited by Deborah Maranville, Lisa Radtke Bliss, Carolyn Wilkes Kaas, and Antoinette Sedillo Lopez (eds.), it includes contributions from more than 50 legal educators from law schools across the country. The publisher, LexisNexis, is making the $50 print book available to every legal educator in the U.S. at no cost and has already made the ebook version available (also at no charge).   

Here's the link to the ebook, in case you, like me, just can’t wait to devour more: http://www.lexisnexis.com/store/search/search-results.jsp?_requestid=31396\.

"Why Flunking Exams is Actually a Good Thing."

  

Over the past year, I have been working with my undergraduate institution's Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Initiative (SoTL). Throughout this effort, I have been amazed while learning about various methdologies used among other discplines. Conversley, at times, I have been driven into the depths of despair (slight exageration) at the woefully inadequate measures of my own, and a fair amount of law school, teaching.  

I found this most recent article, passed along from SoTL, to be illuminating, and I wanted to share it with my clinical colleagues (who I am now "tagging" with the responsibility of continuing to pass the article along to other educators).  

In sum, the article is based on a recent study by Elizabeth Ligon Bjork, professor of psychology at UCLA, and postdoc research associate, Nichoals Soderstrom, who found that pre-testing students (helping them realize how much information they are lacking from the start), can be effective for improving academic performance and retention.  "Bjork’s experiment suggests that pretesting serves to prime the brain, predisposing it to absorb new information."  

It's incredible how such a seemingly simple flip can have a significant impact in the classroom....This article, along with my SoTL work, have made it very clear that I have "miles to go before I sleep..." 

____________________________________________________________________

The author of the New York Times article is Benedict Carey.  [On a side note, apart from reporting for the Times, Mr. Carey  also has a book coming out later this month "How We Learn: The Surprising Truth About When, Where and Why It Happens."]

Related articles

The Education Issue: Why Flunking Exams Is Actually a Good Thing

Changing Lives: Lawyers Fighting for Children

I just received a copy of Changing Lives: Lawyers Fighting for Children, which was edited by Lourdes Rosado, Associate Director of the Juvenile Law Center, and published by the ABA Section of Litigation Children’s Rights Litigation Committee. The book highlights the key role that children's attorneys can play at defining moments in their lives, including in juvenile dependency and delinquency courts, immigration proceedings, school proceedings, and impact litigation, for example. There is a teaching guide available for the book. The ABA is offering a 20% off discount through June 23 with the discount code LIVES20. The ABA may also be able to offer your students a discount code if you want to use this book in your clinic or another course. It is also expected to be published as an e-book, at a discounted rate. Contact Cathy Krebs at [email protected] for more information. Here is a description:

"The book Changing Lives: Lawyers Fighting for Children demonstrates the critical role that lawyers play in changing the life courses of our most at-risk children. Without legal representation, the children profiled in this book likely would have gone down a path that was detrimental to their safety, their well-being, and ultimately their ability to grow into happy and successful adults. Changing Lives: Lawyers Fighting for Children well illustrates the difference that a highly trained and skilled attorney can make in the life of a child in need. Each chapter of the book profiles a real child in a variety of substantive areas that include:
• Child welfare (abuse and neglect)
• Juvenile delinquency
• Special Education
• Runaway and homeless youth
• Immigration
The chapters also include practice tips and checklists, as well as resources for developing the expertise needed to zealously represent children in crisis to achieve the best outcome and ultimately help them grow into happy and successful adults.
The authors of Changing Lives: Lawyers Fighting for Children hope to raise awareness about the need for legal representation for children and to encourage and support attorneys who advocate for children."

Time for Summer Writing

By now, most of us have donned our academic regalia for commencement and wished our new alumni well on their bar preparations and the launch of their legal careers.  Time to take a deep breath, plan your well-deserved family vacation, and drop off that seven-pound load of professional clothes at the dry cleaner (finally!).  We now have twelve weeks ahead of us before we start ramping up for the Fall 2014 semester.

Twelve weeks?  Not coincidentally, twelve weeks is just enough time to write a high-quality law review article.  Now you might think that as clinicians we are not bound by scholarship obligations, and at your school you might be right technically, but the fact remains that we have chosen to work in a profession in which scholarship, not practice, is the coin of the realm.  Thus, regardless of your school’s published criteria for the advancement of clinical faculty, you should consider using a substantial portion of your summer for scholarship so that your purse is full of academic currency.

If you want to get "rich" this summer, academically speaking, here are ten basic tips for productive writing:

1. Even though classes may have ended, do not change your schedule.  Go to the office every day, all day and write.  Our academic associate dean here at Willamette once told me that the first step to being a productive writer is putting your backside in your chair and keeping it there.
2. Block your time and be disciplined.  I remember reading that we are only highly productive for a few hours per day.  Identify what those hours are for you and schedule your writing blocks during those periods.  During your writing periods, turn off email and close the Internet browsers.  ALWAYS.  Do not open them until your writing time has ended.  Use the other four hours or so for less demanding work such as reading, researching, and answering emails.
3. Quantify your writing.  Some professors I know mandate that they write a certain number of words per day.  Others require that they write for a certain length of time.  Regardless of how you measure your output, set quantitative writing goals and allocate sufficient time to achieve them.
4. Set qualitative writing goals.  It is not enough to write a lot or even regularly.  You must improve your writing through researching, outlining, developing, drafting, revising, proofreading, and external editing and feedback.  Develop a 12-week writing plan that includes all of these stages to ensure that your work is high-quality.  A resource to help you can be found here. 
5. Don’t wait for days of uninterrupted time.  They will never come, or at least, not very often.  Even during the summer, requests for letters of recommendation and bar references continue to stream in, some clinic cases are still active, and many of us are engaged in summer teaching, supervision, and are presenting at conferences.  Do not let these prevent you from writing this summer.  When I first joined the academy, I read a book about how to be a successful professor.  It referenced a study that showed that professors who worked on their scholarship every day, even for just one hour, were far more likely to get tenure than those who wrote in blocks of uninterrupted time.  So write every day.
6. Ask for (and offer!) help.  I suspect that many doctrinal law professors are introverts and many clinical law professors are extroverts (which is what makes our conferences such a riot!).  The consequence of this is that we may need to develop writing partnerships or even writing support groups with whom we can talk about our writing, set goals, exchange drafts, and hold one another accountable.
7. Write your first draft from your own ideas.  One of the criticisms of my early academic writing is that my voice did not come through.  I was lacking confidence and so would hide behind third-party authorities and quotations from “experts.”  The suggestion of Martha Minow, Dean of Harvard Law School, for overcoming this very common characteristic in emerging academic writers is that we should write the first draft without reference to resources.  Simply write your own ideas down and then build out from there.  That way, your voice and ideas form the core of your piece.   
8. Tap into your passions.  At a workshop for new clinical professors, I remember being in a working group about scholarship led by Philip Schrag.  An intelligent young woman said that she did not have any expertise or ideas to share in scholarship.  Professor Schrag spent just seven minutes asking her about her experiences and background and identified 3-4 topics for law review articles based on her interests and experience.  Don’t undervalue your ideas and experiences.  If you need to brainstorm, call someone.  If you don’t know whom to call, call or email me (916-719-7796; [email protected]) and I will try to help you brainstorm or get you matched with a mentor.
9. Remember that the prime submission cycles are August and late January/February.  Plan to submit your summer work during those periods for the best placement.  ExpressO is a popular portal for submitting law review articles to numerous journals simultaneously. 
10. If you would like to present your article in a supportive and scholarly workshop before submission to a law review, consider applying to the Clinical Law Review’s Writers’ Workshop to be held at NYU Law on September 27, 2014.  The deadline for applying is June 30.  More information and the application can be found here.

Now, enjoy your summer and write on!

 

 

 

As a follow up to my blog post on Monday, "Do Women Professors Underperform" (http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/clinic_prof/2014/04/do-women-professors-underperform.html), I wanted to share a tweet I caught late last night from Karen Shook (@TimesHigherArts), the books editor for Times Higher Education: "I receive many confident emails from scholars recommending I cover their books. Some are novices, some are eminent. Almost none are women." Apparently, not only do we write and cite ourselves less, we also do not ask for reviewers to read our scholarly works. If we are uncomfortable because we view these acts as crass self promotion, I suggest that we form circles of support that include both men and women from within and outside our institutions and ask them to read our works and, if they like them, share and promote them with others. We know that women are generally better received when other people promote our work than when we promote our own, so as you are preparing for your summer writing, ask yourself, "Who comprises my circle of supporters?" If you don't have one, start building one. Just as importantly, ask yourself, "Whom can I support and promote?" And then build time into your schedule to do just that.

Bryant, Milstein & Shalleck: Transforming the Education of Lawyers: The Theory and Practice of Clinical Pedagogy

Today Elliott Milstein announced the publication of Transforming the Education of Lawyers: The Theory and Practice of Clinical Pedagogy (Carolina Academic Press).  His co-editors are Sue Bryant and Ann Shalleck.

From Prof. Milstein’s message:   

Published by Carolina Academic Press, the book focuses on what and how to teach students about being a lawyer as they take responsibility for clients in a clinical course.  The book identifies learning and lawyering theories as well as practical approaches to planning and teaching all components of a clinic; it highlights how the four clinical methodologies—seminar, rounds, supervision, and fieldwork—reinforce and complement each other.  It illustrates how uniting supervision of students’ fieldwork with teaching in the clinical seminar and in rounds can create ethical, skilled, thoughtful practitioners imbued with professional values of justice and service.  With contributions by both seasoned and newer clinical educators, the book addresses issues faced by all who teach in experiential lawyering courses.

All chapters are co-authored.  Co-authors include Jane Aiken, Bob Dinerstein, Conrad Johnson and Jean Koh Peters.  The book also includes essays about clinical teaching.  Essayists include Mark Neal Aaronson, Bryan Adamson, Alicia Alvarez, Claudia Angelos, Sameer Ashar, Beryl Blaustone, Juliet M. Brodie, Elizabeth B. Cooper, Deborah Epstein, Carolyn Grose, Kristin Henning, Conrad Johnson, Donna Lee, and Wallace J. Mlyniec. We have donated royalties from the book to CLEA.

He also notes that the publisher is offering a 20% discount off the purchase price of $49.00 for people attending the 2014 AALS Conference on Clinical Legal Education, and the discount is good through the end of July, 2014.