New Book: Arnow-Richman & Ruan on Workplace Skills

Congratulations to Rachel Arnow-Richman and Nantiya Ruan (both at Denver) on the publication of their new book Developing Professional Skills: Workplace Law (West 2016). Here's the author's description:

Incorporating professional skills and ethics into the traditional workplace law course is a critical but challenging undertaking. This easy-to-use book simplifies the effort, offering eleven discrete exercises designed to help students develop skills in the key areas of drafting, counseling, negotiation and advocacy. Each exercise involves a different substantive area of workplace law, including covenants-not-to compete, wage and hour law, employment discrimination, whistleblower protection and general common law and tort principles. The book is flexible enough to supplement any doctrinal casebook, or can be used to teach a stand-alone skills course.

Marty Katz (Denver) reviewed the book in a blog post at IALS Online. Here's an excerpt from his post:

Fortunately for us in the field of workplace law, Rachel Arnow-Richman and Nantiya Ruan have just eliminated a tremendous amount of that work. Over several iterations, they developed a first-rate experiential course in this field. And they are willing to share their work, so that we do not have to reinvent this well-designed wheel. The result is their forthcoming book (due for release in the next week or so), Developing Professional Skills: Workplace Law.

This narrow volume provides a rich set of workplace law problems that can be used, off the shelf, to teach a problem-based course. There are 11 chapters, each of which contains a detailed but manageable workplace law scenario. And while all of the scenarios are fun and thoughtfully crafted, you might consider using even a subset of them, given the book’s low price point ($25, from what I understand).

This is terrific. Developing the material for teaching skills is by far the hardest and most time-consuming part.This book is a very welcome addition to our pedagogical toolbox.

rb