Legal Profession Blog

Villanova Symposium On CLE And Professional Education

Journal of Legal Education Symposium - Friday, October 6, 2023
Villanova University Charles Widger School of Law

The AALS Journal of Legal Education invites abstract submissions for a symposium on “Continuing Legal Education and the Professional Education of U.S. Lawyers.” The Villanova University Charles Widger School of Law and the Pennsylvania Continuing Legal Education Board will host the in-person symposium on Friday, October 6, 2023, at the Inn at Villanova University. Accepted final articles will be published by the Journal of Legal Education in a symposium issue.

The symposium will take a broad and deep look at the continuing legal education (CLE) landscape. The themes of the symposium are the purposes of continuing legal education and how effectively those purposes are achieved, including the measurement of teaching and learning. Areas of exploration could include, but are not limited to: adult learning and engaging pedagogy — i.e., best practices in delivering legal education outside the law school classroom; innovation and experimentation in the delivery of CLE, including best practices for developing and delivering online education in synchronous versus asynchronous formats; the relationship between CLE provider accreditation, program quality, and learning outcomes; legal ethics education and moving the needle on professional compliance; diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in the context of both mandatory and non-mandatory CLE, including access to quality programming and compulsory substantive content on DEI and anti-harassment content; state-by state experimentation with alternatives to fulfilling mandatory CLE, including “CLE for pro bono“ programs; and, in keeping with the spirit of the comments offered by legal education pioneer John Mulder, the important role of law schools in ensuring quality continuing legal education, Continuing Legal Education, 1 J. Leg. Ed. 378, 385 (1949).

The Journal seeks contributions and perspectives from a wide array of potential authors, including legal educators, CLE regulators and providers, and consumers of continuing legal education.

Submission Guidelines

The deadline for abstracts is March 31, 2023, and authors will be notified of acceptance by May 1, 2023. All submissions must be in English. Your abstract should be under 500 words and should identify the author(s) of your proposed presentation. If you are submitting a proposal for a panel, include the names and contact information for all participants. Submissions will be reviewed on a rolling basis. Late submissions may be considered if space remains available. Publishable quality submissions are due to the Journal of Legal Education by December 6, 2023.

To secure broad and strong participation, the symposium convenors will cover authors’ reasonable travel expenses and offer a $500 honorarium for authors who participate in person at the symposium and submit a manuscript that meets the Journal’s editorial standards.

Please submit abstracts as Word documents or in PDF to: [email protected]

Questions should be directed to:
Professor Steven L. Chanenson
Faculty Director
David F. and Constance B. Girard-diCarlo Center for Ethics, Integrity and Compliance
Villanova University Charles Widger School of Law
299 N. Spring Mill Rd.
Villanova, PA 19085
[email protected]

Zacharias (very worthy) Prize Winners Announced

The winners have been selected for the tenth annual Fred C. Zacharias Memorial Prize for Scholarship in Professional Responsibility.  

This year's co-winners are:

* Michael Moffitt, Settlement Malpractice, 86 U. Chi. L. Rev. 1825 (2019)

* Jessica A. Roth, The "New" District Court Activism in Criminal Justice Reform, 74 N.Y.U. Ann. Surv. Am. L. 277 (2019)

The award will be presented at the AALS Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C., in January, 2020.

(Alan Childress, via Sam Levine at Touro)

Call for Proposals: The Return of Sanctuary Cities: The Muslim Ban, Hurricane Maria, and Everything in Between

The Detroit Mercy Law Review will have a Symposium this spring on the topic of "The Return of Sanctuary Cities: The Muslim Ban, Hurricane Maria, and Everything in Between." The deadline for abstract submissions is December 3, 2017. At this link is one report of the the Call for Proposals. (Alan Childress)

Call for papers & nominations: Zacharias Prize for Scholarship in PR

Thanks for this reminder from Sam Levine at Touro:

Fred C. Zacharias Memorial Prize for Scholarship in Professional Responsibility

Submissions and nominations of articles are now being accepted for the eighth annual Fred C. Zacharias Memorial Prize for Scholarship in Professional Responsibility. To honor Fred's memory, the committee will select from among articles in the field of Professional Responsibility, with submissions limited to those that have a publication date of calendar year 2017. The prize will be awarded at the 2018 AALS Annual Meeting in San Diego.  Please send submissions and nominations to Professor Samuel Levine at Touro Law Center: [email protected].  The deadline for submissions and nominations is Sept. 1, 2017.

A worthy honor to the legacy of Fred, whom I am proud to have known back in the day. (Alan Childress)

Winners of the Fred C. Zacharias Memorial Prize Announced

Samuel Levine (Touro Law) advises us:

The winners have  been selected for the seventh annual Fred C. Zacharias Memorial Prize for Scholarship in Professional Responsibility. The Prize will be awarded to Leslie C. Levin, for Lawyers Going Bare and Clients Going Blind, 68 Fla. L. Rev. (forthcoming 2016), and Kate Levine, for Who Shouldn't Prosecute the Police, 101 Iowa L. Rev. 1447 (2016). The Prize will be awarded at the AALS Annual Meeting in San Francisco in January.

[Alan Childress]

Call for Proposals: Institute for Law Teaching and Learning’s Summer '17 Conference

The conference, “Teaching Cultural Competency and Other Professional Skills Suggested by ABA Standard 302,” will take place July 7-8, 2017 at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock William H. Bowen School of Law. 

The Institute invites proposals for workshop sessions addressing how law schools are responding to ABA Standard 302’s call to establish learning outcomes related to “other professional skills needed for competent and ethical participation as a member of the legal profession,”  such as “interviewing, counseling, negotiation, fact development and analysis, trial practice, document drafting, conflict resolution, organization and management of legal work, collaboration, cultural competency and self-evaluation.” The conference will focus on how law schools are incorporating these skills, particularly the skills of cultural competency, conflict resolution, collaboration, self-evaluation, and other relational skills, into their institutional outcomes, designing courses to encompass these skills, and teaching and assessing these skills. The deadline to submit a proposal is February 1, 2017. Submit proposals via email to Kelly Terry, Co-Director, Institute for Law Teaching and Learning, at [email protected].

A Word doc -- Download CFP Summer 2017 Bowen Conference -- has full information on proposals, or attending. Enjoy! [Alan Childress]

See You Next Friday

I encourage any interested ethicists, practitioners and other warm bodies to attend next Friday's Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics symposium. 

As set forth in this invite, the event promises to be address fundamental issues facing the legal profession.

WHAT:

The legal profession faces a steady stream of criticisms and suggestions for change. Two of the most significant calls for change are the specialization of the legal ethics codes and the commercialization of the legal profession. The Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics cordially invites you to attend its Volume XXIX Symposium, "Remaining Ethical Lawyers in a Changing Profession." The symposium will consist of three panels. The morning panelists will focus on whether specialized ethics codes are necessary, the afternoon panelists will delve into the ethics of the commercialization of the legal profession, and the lunch panelists will bridge these two topics by proposing that the profession focus on being not only ethical but also relational.

WHEN:

Friday, March 18, 2016

WHERE: 

Gewirz Student Center

12th Floor

120 F. St. NW

Washington, DC 20001

The journal staff has done excellent work in putting this together. As co-advisor with my colleague Mitt Regan, I am grateful for their efforts. 

Mitt has a new textbook coming out with John Villa that will be of great interest to legal ethics professors focusing on entity clients.

This unique professional responsibility textbook is focused upon the practical and ethical challenges of representing modern business organizations. All topics are organized around problems that require the exercise of sophisticated professional judgment. While the text covers the ethical standards addressed in typical professional responsibility courses, it also gives particular attention to the increasingly important interaction of ethical rules and other sources of law that define the lawyer’s duties in representing business organizations in an increasingly complex world. In addition, the book serves as the first major casebook that can be used for a course on in-house legal practice, which one of the authors has taught for fifteen years. Chapters that can be used in such a course include those that cover communicating outside the company, dealing with employees and auditors, shareholder derivative demands, whistleblowers, multinational regulation, employment rights of inside counsel, overseeing the defense of criminal investigations, selection of outside counsel, and other topics. A detailed Teacher's Manual provides guidance on how to organize and teach the material in a two- or three-credit course, as well as instruction on how to use a hands-on exercise organized as a moot board meeting as the basis for the final exam. The book is co-authored by a nationally recognized litigator who is experienced in legal ethics and a leading scholar in the field.

(Mike Frisch)

Call for papers and nominations for Fred Zacharias prize, 2015

Thanks to Sam Levine at Touro Law for letting us know:

Submissions and nominations of articles are being accepted for the sixth annual Fred C. Zacharias Memorial Prize for Scholarship in Professional Responsibility.  To honor Fred's memory, the committee will select from among articles in the field of Professional Responsibility with a publication date of 2015.  The prize will be awarded at the 2016 AALS Annual Meeting in New York City.  Please send submissions and nominations to Professor Samuel Levine at Touro Law Center: [email protected].  The deadline for submissions and nominations is September 1, 2015.

A worthy project, honoring a good man. (Alan Childress)

Call for Nominations for 5th Annual Fred C. Zacharias Prize

The deadline now less than a month away, so it is a good time to remind people of this important opportunity in legal scholarship:

Submissions and nominations of articles are now being accepted for the fifth annual Fred C. Zacharias Memorial Prize for Scholarship in Professional Responsibility.  To honor Fred’s memory, the committee will select from among articles in the field of Professional Responsibility with a publication date of 2014.  The prize will be awarded at the 2015 AALS Annual Meeting in Washington, DC.  Please send submissions and nominations to Professor Samuel Levine at Touro Law Center: email [email protected].  The deadline for submissions and nominations is September 1, 2014.

Our thanks to Sam Levine for the notice. [Alan Childress]

Call for Papers: AALS Section on PR, for Jan. 2014 AALS Meeting in NYC

Call for Papers: AALS Section on Professional Responsibility
Subject: "The Lost Lawyer and the Lawyer Statesman Ideal: A Generation Later – The Shifting Sands of the Profession’s Identity," 2014 AALS Annual Meeting, New York, NY

The AALS Section invites papers for its 2014 Annual Meeting Program. Twenty years after Professor Anthony Kronman published his seminal and controversial book, The Lost Lawyer: Failing Ideals of the Legal Profession, the question of the role of attorneys in society is more important than ever. In Kronman’s view, early generations of American Lawyers saw the attainment of practical wisdom as their ultimate professional goal. They understood that this wisdom was a character trait “that one acquires only by becoming a person of good judgment, and not just an expert in the law.” Cultivating and exercising this trait was a professional ideal that Kronman called the “lawyer-statesman ideal.” The name stressed the ideal’s “roots in the past and the air of obsolescence “ surrounding it. The ideal described someone with great practical wisdom, exceptional persuasive powers, a devotion to the public good, forgetfulness of one’s self, sympathy for others, and excellent intellectual skills. Kronman examined the lawyer–statesman ideal in the profession’s three major branches—law schools, law firms, and the courts—and warned that the profession was “in danger of losing its soul.”

Today, tsunami-like forces of change are buffeting the legal profession. Those forces include decreasing law school applications, increasing student debt, diminishing employment prospects, contracting law school budgets, curricular reform, lawyer unemployment and layoffs, rapid technological change, shrinking judicial resources in the face of expanding dockets, increasing bureaucratization of our courts, and many Americans’ lack of access to legal assistance and justice.

The author of the paper selected for this program will present the paper, joining a distinguished panel, including Professor Kronman. Panelists will address the lawyer-statesman ideal, explore related issues and problems, and suggest solutions.

Eligibility: Only full-time faculty members of AALS member law schools are eligible to submit papers.  Foreign, visiting (without a full-time position at an AALS member law school); adjunct faculty; graduate students; fellows and non-law school faculty are not eligible to submit.  Faculty at fee-paid non-member schools are ineligible.

The paper will be selected after anonymous review by members of the Section’s 2014 Annual Meeting Program Committee. In order to facilitate anonymous review, please identify yourself and your institutional affiliation only in the cover letter accompanying your manuscript, and not in the manuscript itself. The paper along with those of the other panelists will be published by the ABA Journal of the Professional Lawyer.

Entries of 20 or more double-spaced pages in length should be submitted by August 31, 2013.  Please submit as early as possible.

Submission and Inquiries directed to:
Jack Sahl
University of Akron School of Law
150 University Ave
Akron, OH 44325
[email protected]

[Posted by Alan Childress]

Call for Papers for January 2014 AALS Section Meeting

From the AALS Section on Professional Responsibility, per Barbara Glesner-Fines and John Sahl, is the call for papers for the next section meeting as part of the AALS Annual Meeting, this January in New York City.  Barbara reports, We are trying to get the word out broadly so we can have a diverse pool of papers from which to select a panel member. Sounds like a great goal. The subject is The Lost Lawyer and the Lawyer Statesman Ideal: A Generation Later – The Shifting Sands of the Profession’s Identity. The full description and criteria are here: Download Call for Papers  [Alan Childress]

Touro Law Hosts Speaker 3/20 on Orthodox Jewish Lawyering and Change in the Profession

Touro Law Center's Jewish Law Institute features Nathan Lewin as part of its Distinguished Lecture Series, on Tuesday, March 20, at 5:30 pm.  Lewin, a renowned advocate of religious freedoms and frequent arguer before the U.S. Supreme Court, will deliver a lecture, "The Legal Profession and the Orthodox Jewish Lawyer: Change Over Half a Century." It is open to the public and more information is linked here.  [Alan Childress]

Welcome To Jim Jones

Georgetown Law has announced a significant addition to its Center for the Study of the Legal Profession:

Georgetown University Law Center Dean William M. Treanor is pleased to announce that James Jones, former chair of the Hildebrandt Institute and managing partner of Arnold & Porter, will assume the role of senior fellow with Georgetown Law’s Center for the Study of the Legal Profession, beginning in January 2012.

"Jim Jones is one of the world’s leading thinkers about trends in law practice and the legal profession," said Dean Treanor. "His affiliation with Georgetown will enhance our ability to anticipate changes in the legal profession, strengthen our efforts to prepare students to meet the challenges they will face and enrich the research that we do on a profession undergoing profound changes."

Jones has served over the years in a variety of leadership positions in the legal industry. He spent more than 20 years at Arnold & Porter, serving as managing partner of the firm from 1986 to 1995. From 1995 to 2000, he was vice chairman and general counsel of APCO Worldwide. Since 2001, he has been at Hildebrandt International (later Hildebrandt Baker Robbins), a leading consultant to law firms and legal departments around the globe. For the past four years, he served as Hildebrandt's managing director. Since 2000, Jones also served as chair of the Hildebrandt Institute, the division responsible for executive education and research activities. Jones received his J.D. from New York University in 1970.

Jones has served since 1993 as chair of the Pro Bono Institute. He was also instrumental in the creation of TrustLaw, a project of the Thomson Reuters Foundation designed to promote pro bono collaboration between leading law firms and major NGOs throughout the world. He is an author and frequent speaker on topics relating to the "business of law" and has been a regular speaker to student audiences at Georgetown on trends in the legal profession.

On his new relationship with Georgetown Law, Jones said, "I am delighted to be affiliated with the Georgetown Center for the Study of the Legal Profession. Under the able direction of Mitt Regan and Jeff Bauman, the Center and its talented members have already made a positive impact on the legal profession through insightful research and publications, as well as well-focused educational programs. I look forward to contributing to the Center's success in the future, particularly in the area of executive education."

The Center for the Study of the Legal Profession was created in 2007 to promote interdisciplinary scholarship on the legal profession informed by the dynamics of modern practice; provide students and faculty with an understanding of the opportunities and challenges of a 21st century legal career; and furnish members of the bar, particularly those in public and private decision-making positions, broad perspectives on trends and developments in law practice.

(Mike Frisch)

Nominations, Submissions for Great Writing on the Legal Profession During 2010

A timely annoucement from Samuel J. Levine at Touro:

Submissions and nominations of articles are now being accepted for the first annual Fred C. Zacharias Memorial Prize for Scholarship in Professional Responsibility.  To honor Fred's memory, the committee will select from among articles in the field of Professional Responsibility with a publication date of 2010. The prize will be awarded at the AALS Professional Responsibility Section program at the 2011 Annual Meeting in San Francisco in January 2011. Please send submissions and nominations to Professor Samuel Levine at Touro Law Center: [email protected]. The deadline for submissions and nominations is November 1, 2010.

[Alan Childress]

Rotunda to Speak at Akron Law as Miller-Becker Lecturer on 10/29/10

The second Miller-Becker Center for Professional Responsibility Distinguished Lecture in Professional Responsibility is scheduled for Friday, Oct. 29, 2010, at 4:00 P.M. at the University of Akron School of Law.  Ronald D. Rotunda, the Day & Dee Henley Chair and Distinguished Professor of Jurisprudence, of Chapman University School of Law, is the Distinguished Lecturer and his presentation is entitled Lawyers: Why We Are Different and Why We Are the Same. Rotunda's presentation, in part, asks: “To what extent do the ethics rules make lawyers different from other professionals?" He is shown right.

This is right on the heels of a great new contribution to the field by the center: its first symposium law review issue on the legal profession, this one on the topic of Lawyers without Borders and Practicing Law in the Electronic Age, 43 Akron L. Rev. 1-1105 (2010), and featuring articles and essays by excellent scholars in those areas. I really appreciate that they mailed one to me and lots of other teachers of legal ethics, and I have it sitting on my desk. Well done.

[Alan Childress]

Conference: Business Complexity and the Global Business Leader

Posted by Jeff Lipshaw

Suffolk University's Institute for Executive Education and Sawyer Business School are sponsoring a conference entitled Business Complexity and the Global Business Leader, to be held at Suffolk's Boston campus, October 18-20, 2010.  Here's a description of the aims of the conference:

Global leaders are faced with business complexity of unprecedented scale and interconnectedness. The goal of the conference is to bring together academicians and business leaders from around the world to expand our thinking and learning in a new era of business incorporating complexity science. The conference is organized around three main themes: corporate longevity/sustainability; innovation; and self-organization.

The website includes a call for papers with a full draft deadline of July 30, 2010.  Papers should address the corporation as a complex adaptive system that evolves within a complex global business ecosystem, covering one or more of the conference themes: corporate longevity, self-organization, and innovation. Papers will be reviewed by the conference paper review committee with acceptances to be announced by September 24, 2010. All accepted papers will be published in the conference proceedings and posted on the conference's web site.

There's also an interesting and eclectic lineup of keynote speakers, including Geoffrey West (pictured above), theoretical physicist and the past president of the Santa Fe Institute, Phil Budden, Britain's Consul General to New England, and Juan Perez Mercader, of the Spain's Centro de Astrobiology and Harvard's Origins of Life Initiative.

5th Annual Conglomerate Junior Scholars Workshop

Posted by Jeff Lipshaw

I can tell you that one of the most difficult things for an aspiring professor to do is actually to get a paper read!  Hence, if you write in the area of business law, I strongly recommend that you give serious thought to submitting a paper to Conglomerate's Junior Scholars Workshop, now in its fifth iteration.  The deadline for submissions to Christine Hurt (Illinois) ([email protected]) is June 26, 2010, and the presentations will begin July 19, 2010.

Emory Transactional Skills Conference - Reminder!

Just a quick reminder that Emory Law School's conference, Transactional Education: What’s Next?, is being held on June 4 and June 5.  Additional information is available by following the link or contacting Edna Patterson at (404) 727-6506 or [email protected].  [Jeff Lipshaw]

Center on the Profession at Akron Law Features Adam Liptak on April 6

Posted by Alan Childress

Kicking off some of the great legal profession and ethics work now being done at the new U. Akron Joseph G. Miller and William C. Becker Center for Professional Responsibility is their inaugural offering in the Distinguished Lecturer Series on Journalism and the Law.  And it is none other than Adam Liptak of the NYTimes [right] so you know it will be interesting; his topic is Covering the Roberts Court in the Obama Era: A Reporter's Reflections.  I suspect we may hear about the Chief's fairly public complaint of feeling ambushed-ish at the State of the Union -- and on Justice Scalia's Not True heard round the world (and yes he does think it is round), for which I am grateful he did not take the oratorical lead from our Vice President yesterday in mouthing those words. Details from the center's website:

"April 6, 2010 at 4 p.m. Free and open to the public, however registration is required. One hour of free CLE credit will be offered."

More on the new Miller-Becker Center here.   Thanks, U of Akron, and well done.

Also coming April 23 is Ohio State's Nancy Rogers.  {oops--edited to note that she came last year and this is not 2009! If either Miller or Becker has invented a time machine, they are wasting it on transporting Nancy Rogers, as good as she is.  I am just saying.}

Future Ed: New Business Models for U.S. and Global Legal Education

New York Law School
April 9-10, 2010

Harvard Law School
October 15-16, 2010

Got an idea about the future of U.S. legal education? Think it’s time to go clinical? Or global? Or virtual? Should law be combined with other fields of study at the graduate or undergraduate level?

There is no shortage of commentary about the challenges facing American law schools. Driven by the Carnegie Foundation’s highly critical 2007 report and the dramatic downturn in large firm associate hiring, law school deans and administrators are scrambling to predict the future and position themselves within a rapidly changing market. But what is the likely shape of the future market—or markets—for legal education? What are the most promising models for delivering education and training in those markets? And how do we get there from here?

New York Law School and Harvard Law School are hosting a year-long contest of ideas about legal education (website here). The goal is to come up with operational alternatives to the traditional law school business model and to identify concrete steps for the implementation of new designs. The kickoff event is a two-day conference for educators, employers, and regulators at New York Law School on April 9-10, 2010, to identify problems, innovations and constraints, and to organize working groups to develop designs and strategies for implementation. Working groups will refine their ideas and reconvene for a second meeting at Harvard Law School on October 15-16, 2010. Final designs will be presented, with commentary, at New York Law School in April, 2011. 

Interested? Questions? Please email [email protected].

[Posted by Bill Henderson]