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We Are All on the Journey: Transforming Antagonistic Spaces in Law School Classrooms
No full textThis essay begins and ends with Fisher II, the most recent addition to the law on diversity in admissions to institutions of higher education. The body of the essay, however, focuses on diversity in law schools and specifically on transforming the law school classroom, which is too often antagonistic space for traditionally underrepresented students. The long-term project of creating law schools and a legal profession that are inclusive, that are spaces of belonging, is a journey on which admissions is only one milestone. Though this is a shared project—we are all on the journey—our individual experiences inform and guide this larger journey.
I begin with my own work on equity and inclusion in the law school classroom. The goal is to create a learning environment that communicates to students from groups that have traditionally been underrepresented and/or marginalized that they belong in law school and that they bring valuable experiences and perspectives to the enterprise of law. I include specific teaching strategies that exemplify how faculty can integrate equity and inclusion into “regular” doctrinal classes. I then draw from research on the importance of social belonging to learning and work on microaggressions to provide a framework for these strategies. I end with reflections on how teaching for belonging leads to more searching and more extensive struggle to move law toward equity and justice
Positive Legal Education: Flourishing Law Students and Thriving Law Schools
No full textThere is a wellbeing crisis in the legal field and legal education may be the catalyst. Law students are the most dissatisfied, demoralized, and depressed of graduate student populations. The Socratic method is infamous for inducing anxiety in law students and law school grades are often determined by a single final exam at the end of a grueling semester. Law students cite competition, grades, and workload as major stressors, and if legal educators ignore their harmful impact, it will likely suppress learning and fuel illness.
Law students start law school with strong mental health and high life satisfaction measures, and within the first year of law school experience a significant increase in anxiety and depression. The impairment in wellbeing continues beyond the first year of law school and into legal practice. A recent study surveyed 12,825 lawyers and discovered that 23% of licensed, employed attorneys identify as problem drinkers, 28% experience depression, and 19% suffer from anxiety. Lawyers rank 4th in suicides among professionals and many recent lawyer suicides are linked to depression. Something bad is happening to law students and the wellbeing crisis bleeds into legal practice.
Lawyers are leaders in business, government, and the legal system, possessing the power to drive social progress, but they are not living up to that responsibility. Law school socializes students to extreme competition and punishing levels of stress which compromise both wellbeing and cognitive capacity. Lawyers shape policy, and when they are educated to believe that competitive enterprises are the most productive, they promote replicating them throughout society. Neuroscience and Positive Psychology research has established that when it comes to solving problems, cooperative endeavors outperform competitive initiatives. The American love affair with competition stifles creativity, hinders innovation, and thwarts social progress. Competition promotes antagonistic behavior, a combative mentality, and the eternal cycle of the never-ending feud, where all energies are spent on the battle with the opposition, and problems are rarely improved or solved. Progress toward a more equitable society will be enhanced when legal education entrepreneurs train lawyer leaders to be divergent thinkers whose focus is on problem-solving.
This article proposes a new field of inquiry called Positive Legal Education that leverages research findings from Positive Psychology, neuroscience, and Positive Education to inspire innovation in legal education and curate a culture of wellbeing in the legal field. Section II of this Article describes the negative impact legal education has on law student wellbeing. Section III explains neuroscience research on habit learning, knowledge acquisition, and the impact of stress on cognition. Section IV details the five Positive Psychology elements required to achieve wellbeing. Section V demonstrates how wellbeing initiatives have improved academic performance and thriving in secondary and college education. Section VI illustrates how law student knowledge-base, legal skill acquisition, and professional identity development can be enhanced with discipline-specific growth mindset and self-efficacy training, and the shift from the grade curve to competency-based grading. Section VII depicts how lawyers can become transformational leaders. Section VIII covers four practices lawyers can undertake to deal with the harmful effects of stress. The article concludes with recommendations for scholars and legal education entrepreneurs who want to transform legal education
Scholarships at Risk: The Mathematics of Merit Stipulations in Financial Aid Awards
No full textAmerican law schools often condition financial aid grants on the maintenance of a certain grade point average (GPA). Merit stipulations, as these conditions are known, require that students meet or exceed minimum academic standards, typically at the end of their first year in law school. Students must meet these stipulations in order to keep all or part of their financial aid for the remaining two years of law study. But the very existence of a merit stipulation discounts the value of a grant. That discount can, and should, be calculated according to the probability that a student may fail to fulfill the merit stipulation attached to her or his financial aid grant. This Article serves as a first step toward equipping prospective students to assess their own economic prospects by framing the problem of merit stipulations in law school financial aid as one of applied mathematics
Law School-Administered Financial Aid: The Good News and the Bad News
No full textIn 2015, the ABA Task Force on Financing Legal Education reported a vast increase in law school-administered financial aid over the previous ten years. Financial aid administered by law schools was even the most rapidly rising cost factor for law schools collectively. At first glance this increase might seem like some good news for persons sharing my values and worldview. Historically financial aid has been associated with helping the financially needy, encouraging them and members of underrepresented identities to attend law school, and helping make it possible for students who want to devote their careers to low-paying, public-interest-oriented work to achieve their dreams. In fact, however, as the task force makes clear, almost all the increased financial aid is being awarded to applicants with high LSAT scores and high undergraduate GPAs — what is called “merit” these days. Any correlation between the beneficiaries of increased financial aid and the kinds of students who traditionally benefited from law school-administered financial aid is purely coincidental
Will I Pass the Bar Exam? Predicting Student Success Using LSAT Scores and Law School Performance
No full textTexas Tech University School of Law has undertaken a statistical analysis of its recent alumni, comparing their performance in law school with their success on the Texas bar exam. The authors conclude that LSAT predicts bar exam success while undergraduate GPA does not. The study also replicates findings in previous literature that both 1L and final law school GPA predict bar exam success. Going beyond existing literature, this study also conducted more specific analysis of how student performance in specific courses can predict success on affiliated subcomponents of the bar exam; the Article identifies which courses have significant impact on bar exam performance and which do not. Additionally, the Article reports a completely new analysis of whether student participation in curricular student engagement activities (such as journal, clinic, and advocacy competitions) predicts bar exam success
Harvard Law School Report on the State of Black Alumni II: 2000-2016
No full textOn January 10, 2017, President Barack Obama delivered his formal farewell address to the country in Chicago, the city that had given him his political start. In reflecting on the achievements and challenges of his two terms in office, the president paid special attention to an issue that he knew would, for better and for worse, define his presidency: Race. In the simple, yet elegant, language that even his harshest critics have come to respect, the president said this about the state of race relations after eight years of the Age of Obama: After my election, there was talk about a post-racial America. Such a vision, no matter how well-intended, was never realistic. For race remains a potent and often divisive force in our society. I’ve lived long enough to know that race relations are better than they were 10, 20, 30 years ago — you can see it not just in the statistics, but in the attitudes of young Americans across the political spectrum. But we are not where we need to be. All of us have more work to do.
In this Report, we offer a preliminary assessment of how much progress had been made — and how much work remains to be done — in a part of the American economy President Obama knows well: the legal profession. We do so by examining the careers of the black graduates of President Obama’s law school alma matter in the 16 years since the beginning of the new millennium. Harvard Law School provides an important lens through which to study these issues. One hundred and fifty years ago this year, the Law School enrolled George Lewis Ruffin, who would go on to be the first black person to graduate from any law school in the United States. In the intervening years, Harvard has graduated more black lawyers — over 2,700 — than any law school in the country with the exception of the great Howard University School of Law. Among their ranks are some of the most powerful and influential lawyers in the world, including the 44th President of the United States and the country’s former First Lady, Michelle Obama ’88.
In 2000, the Harvard Law School Center on the Legal Profession released a Report on the State of Black Alumni: 1869-2000 chronicling the achievements and continuing challenges of this remarkable group of lawyers on the basis of a comprehensive survey of the careers of over 650 of the school’s African American alumni. In this new Report, based on a second survey of the school’s black alumni, including those that graduated in the new millennium and matured during the Age of Obama, we both bring that history up to date and offer new perspectives for this new era.
Collectively, we hope that these two reports will provide the “common baseline of facts” that President Obama identified in his farewell address as key to a civil dialogue in a functioning democracy, for a profession that will always have a central role in guaranteeing the freedom and equality that are the cornerstones of our democracy
Tuition Discounting Study of Private Law Schools 2016
Get PDFThe 2016 NACUBO/AccessLex Tuition Discounting Study of Private Law Schools was commissioned by AccessLex Institute in part to provide more recent information on tuition discounting practices at law schools, and to measure the effects of discounting on law schools’ finances. The use of institutional grant aid to attract and retain law students has become even more important, as many programs have had to grapple with declines in their numbers of applicants and enrollments. This challenging context has prompted law schools to implement a variety of practices and policies to raise their enrollments, including increasing their financial aid expenditures. The data in this brief are based on a tuition discounting survey NACUBO sent to 113 U.S.-based private nonprofit law schools, all accredited by the American Bar Association (ABA). Because only 36 of these schools responded to the survey, the findings should be interpreted in context and with caution towards applying them too broadly. Nonetheless, the results provide compelling data for discussion of tuition discounting and other financial aid practices at law schools and present a foundation for future discussion and research efforts
Attorneys\u27 Career Dissatisfaction in the New Normal
No full textThe 2008 economic recession had a seismic impact on the legal profession. This Article is the first to empirically assess whether the recession has made law an unsatisfying career. Relying on survey data from over 11,000 active members of the State Bar of Texas, we find that only 13.5% of all attorneys and 11.5% of full-time attorneys are dissatisfied with their careers. Newer attorneys report greater career dissatisfaction than more experienced attorneys, yet they too are largely satisfied. We also determine using logistic regression that three factors are highly predictive of lawyers’ career dissatisfaction: 1) comparatively low incomes; 2) working in private practice as opposed to in government or in a non-profit/public interest setting; and 3) law firm employment in a non-partnership role. Law school debt and lower class rank have only minor effects on career dissatisfaction whereas race, gender, years of practice experience, practice area, and firm size have no independent effects
Intersectionality and the Careers of Black Women Lawyers
No full textThis article, which is based on the findings presented in the full report, focuses specifically on issues of intersectionality by highlighting key areas in which gender differences among black law graduates are particularly salient. As the following sections demonstrate, while much progress has been made, black lawyers continue to face significant obstacles in their legal careers. Moreover, that black women continue to face particularly high barriers is of paramount importance given that the majority of black law graduates are women
Changing the Construct: Promoting Cross-Cultural Conversations in the Law School Classroom
No full textPromoting cross-cultural awareness should be an important aspect of professionalism training in legal education. Cross-cultural awareness is essential to our students as they prepare to practice in an increasingly diverse domestic and international legal marketplace with competence and confidence. At the very least, faculty should help students avoid becoming the next lawyer or judge to be sanctioned for culturally off ensive behavior. More broadly, early and repeated faculty attention to cross-cultural issues can improve the learning environment for all students while they are still in law school. Although such training can be diffi cult and uncomfortable for both the professor and the students, it is far better for our students to make mistakes within the safety of the classroom, where the ramifications of their errors will not be career ending, and better if by learning from mistakes students develop cultural competencies that will serve them and their clients in their future careers. In short, promoting cross-cultural awareness is part of our obligation to educate our students in professionalism. Accordingly, this article provides a blueprint for incorporating these valuable but challenging discussions into the law school classroom.
Part II of this article identifies the pedagogical and institutional advantages of infusing legal instruction with discussions designed to promote crosscultural awareness. Part III discusses how to create an effective and safe classroom environment for conducting cross-cultural discussions by assessing the classroom climate, establishing a respectful and approachable relationship with students, and developing the cultural literacy and emotional knowledge to lead cross-cultural conversations with sensitivity and openness. Part IV explores specific techniques and best practices for promoting cross-cultural conversations that raise or implicate diverse cultural assumptions and expectations. Part V suggests techniques for dealing with student resistance and classroom incivility, and Part VI concludes the article