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Teaching Remedial Problem-Solving Skills to a Law School\u27s Underperforming Students
No full textThis article describes a course called the “Art of Lawyering” developed by the Texas A&M University School of Law to help the bottom quarter of the 2L class develop the critical-thinking and problem-solving skills they should have learned in the first year of law school. Students in the bottom quarter of the class at the beginning of the 2L year are most at risk for failing the bar exam after graduation. The Art of Lawyering gives these students the structural framework necessary to solve problems like a lawyer, improve their performance in law school, and pass the bar exam. The course, in its current iteration, is remarkably effective, producing a significant increase in students’ grade-point averages. The article describes the theory, methods, and resources behind the course, and it includes a detailed lesson plan so that other schools can replicate the course and realize similar success
Ahead of the Curve: Turning Law Students into Lawyers
No full textIn recent years, law schools have been the subject of great scrutiny—by media, by the profession, by law students, and even by legal educators within the schools—about the quality of legal education and training they offer students who will graduate to become tomorrow’s lawyers. There may be disagreement about the severity of the problem and the solutions to the problem, but there can hardly be disagreement that the increasing focus on the quality of legal education is creating more opportunities than ever for innovation in law schools and for building partnerships with the profession to develop improved models of legal education.
When New Hampshire’s law school teamed up with the New Hampshire Supreme Court and the New Hampshire Board of Bar Examiners over a decade ago, a unique program was born. The Daniel Webster Scholar Honors Program at the University of New Hampshire provides a combination of training and assessment over a two-year period that serves as a variant to the two-day bar examination—simply stated, students who participate in the program are evaluated for bar admission based on their performance over a two-year period and do not sit for the traditional bar examination.
But, the success of the program lies not in its relationship to the bar exam. Rather, the success of the program lies in the fact that, on some measures, the students are actually better prepared for the practice of law. The combination of formative and reflective assessment administered in a practice-based context appears to produce better outcomes for students, which ultimately translates to better prepared lawyers.
The two-year program, beginning in the second year of law school, works within a proscribed curriculum that immerses students in experience-based learning settings, and both provides and demands formative, reflective, and summative assessment. The ultimate assessment comes, of course, at the end of the program when student participants are reviewed for bar admission based on their performance over the course of two years. From the outside, the program seems to have all the right elements for success, but is it actually doing a better job of preparing lawyers for practice and clients? To find out, IAALS worked with an evaluation consulting firm to conduct quantitative and qualitative analysis of existing research to evaluate outcomes of the Daniel Webster Scholar Honors Program
Timing Law School
No full textWe investigate whether economic conditions at labor market entry predict long-term differences in law graduate earnings. We find that unemployment levels at graduation continue to predict law earnings premiums within 4 years after graduation for earners at the high end and middle of the distribution. However, the relation fades as law graduates gain experience and the difference in lifetime earnings is moderate. This suggests that earnings figures from After the JD II and III -- which track law graduates who passed the bar exam in 2000 -- are likely generalizable to other law cohorts because these studies are outside the window when graduation conditions predict differences in subsequent earnings. Outcomes data available prior to matriculation do not predict unemployment or starting salaries at graduation. Earnings premiums are not predicted by BLS projected job openings. While changes in cohort size predict changes in the percent of law graduates practicing law, we find little evidence that changes in cohort size predict changes in earnings. This suggests that law graduates who switch to other occupations when law cohort sizes increase are not hurt financially by larger cohorts. For medium to high earning graduates, successfully timing law school predicts a higher value of a law degree ex-post, but simulations show that no strategy for ex-ante timing is readily available. This article has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies. A powerpoint presentation of an earlier version of this article is available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2612634
Experiential Legal Writing: The New Approach to Practicing Like a Lawyer
No full textLaw students engage in various types of “experiential” learning activities while in school, such as clinics and externships, but they graduate without the experience necessary to practice law. This is traceable to a glaring deficiency at most law schools: a writing program that is comprehensive, properly sequenced, and integrated across and throughout the law school curriculum.
First, most graduates have never drafted the documents they will encounter in law practice. Additionally, they have not drafted and re-drafted such documents while also participating in real-world simulations as they would in actual practice. Instead, students graduate having drafted an appellate brief, a contract, and maybe a complaint, and having participated in one or two oral arguments. That is akin to a medical school graduate who has perfect knowledge of human anatomy from the waist up. When a patient is carted into the emergency room with a broken leg, the medical school graduate will stand there confused and unable to diagnose or treat the patient. Law graduates face the same problem. They cannot competently solve legal problems unless they have experience in the all the parts and sub-parts of the dispute resolution process, and grapple with complex facts as real attorneys would in an actual litigation.
Second, law students do not draft litigation and transactional documents in the order that they would draft them in actual practice. They do not understand that good writing is re-writing, not merely revising. Students do not have a practical understanding of the role and purpose that litigation and transactional documents play in the dispute resolution process, or learn to exercise strategic judgment as writers, counselors, negotiators, and advocates. Graduating without a contextual understanding of law practice — and outstanding persuasive writing ability — leaves students without many essential skills.
The authors’ experiential legal writing model has two components: large-scale or cross-curricular sequencing, and small-scale or intra-curricular sequencing. In large-scale sequencing, which is applied in the first year of law school only, doctrinal and legal writing faculty design a cross-curricular hypothetical fact pattern containing legal issues from all first-year courses, and then design sequential writing assignments (and simulations) as they would occur in actual practice.
Small-scale sequencing occurs exclusively in the legal writing curriculum and consists of two subcomponents. First, students receive a multi-issue hypothetical in the first year that is chronologically sequenced and takes students through each step of the litigation and transactional process. In addition, the legal writing programs extend over all six semesters of law school, thus giving students sufficient time to practice and develop their writing skills on a variety of documents. The goal is to produce graduates who are outstanding re-writers, not just good writers, and who can practice, not merely think, like lawyers
Teaching to the Test: The Incorporation of Elements of Bar Exam Preparation in Legal Education
No full textThis essay is not a defense of the bar exam as the ultimate measure of a new lawyer\u27s ability to think like a lawyer or to practice law. Much has been said and written about the merits, or (more often) the lack thereof, of the modern-day bar exam. Rather than rehash this debate, this essay accepts the premise that the bar exam, with its positive and negative attributes, is a reality for the overwhelming majority of law school graduates, and thus, the question is whether law schools can actually enhance teaching by focusing on that looming reality. In other words, can some degree of \u27teaching to the test\u27 prove to be a useful strategy both in achieving the aims of the traditional law school education and, at the same time, better preparing students for the bar exam and for their legal careers? In short, the emphatic conclusion of this essay is \u27yes\u27 (646)
Colored by Race: Bias in the Evaluation of Candidates of Color by Law Firm Hiring Committees
No full textColored by Race: The Evaluation of Candidates of Color By Law Firm Hiring Committees” — a research study conducted in 2005 — offered some empirical evidence that racial and ethnic bias (both conscious and unconscious) was indeed present in large law firm hiring processes, and it manifested itself in some predictable and some unexpected ways. This 2015 Update of Colored by Race is the 10 year update of the 2005 study and is based on data gathered in 2015 from confidential telephone interviews with 63 partners representing 49 large law firms throughout the United States. All of the partners in this study were involved with the hiring process in their respective law firms for at least six months during their career as partners. In addition to the 63 partners, 18 diversity professionals/partners from large law firms were also interviewed. Of these 18 diversity professionals/partners, only 3 had been in the same or similar roles in 2005
Affirmative Action, Educational Equity and Campus Racial Climate: A Case Study of the University of Michigan Law School
No full textThis study involved a systematic, empirically-based examination of campus climate and how campus climate is related to the access and achievement of Black, Latino, Asian and Native American students at the feeder schools to the University of Michigan Law School and at the University of Michigan Law School itself. Previous research demonstrates that campus climate is a central determinant of college access and achievement for underrepresented students. Specifically, this research shows that students of color and women often underachieve on campuses characterized by hostile racial or gender climates. Beyond this general case, studies of law schools reveal that women and students of color often experience these environments as hostile - they often feel alienated, isolated, devalued and attacked. Where this is the case, whether it be in law school or at the undergraduate level, the educational experiences and educational outcomes for these students are negatively affected
More Money, More Opportunities: The Impact of a No-Loan Program on the Post-Baccalaureate Enrollment Decisions of Low-Income and First-Generation Students
No full textTo counter the rising costs of higher education, institutions have increasingly turned to no-loan programs to provide financial assistance to their low-income and first-generation students. However, little is known of the influence of these no-loan programs on post-enrollment outcomes. This study examines the impact of no-loan program participation on post-baccalaureate enrollment decisions using a regression discontinuity approach. Results from this study indicate a positive and statistically significant effect of no-loan program participation on graduate school enrollment for historically underrepresented and disadvantaged students
Exploring the Role of Institutional Research in Graduate and Professional Education
Get PDFA small study to learn more about the interactions between the institutional research community and graduate and professional schools
We Should Not Rely on Commercial Bar Reviews to Do Our Job: Why Labor-Intensive Comprehensive Bar Examination Preparation Can and Should Be a Part of the Law School Mission
No full textIncreasingly, law school bar passage rates are an important concern for faculty and administration, as well as students. The July 2014 bar exam saw a precipitous drop nationally in bar passage rates, including declines ranging from four to over twenty percentage points. At the same time, there have been declines in applications to law schools, declines in admissions statistics (LSAT and undergraduate GPA), and an empirically demonstrable decline in student preparedness for law school. The confluence of these events portends even greater declines in bar passage if law schools do not rethink how they prepare students for the bar exam. This Article examines developments in academic support and bar preparation programs with an eye toward suggesting models for effective in-house bar preparation programs. Specifically, this Article examines: (1) the evolution of academic support programs in law schools to include bar passage programs, with a brief description of the types of programs that traditionally have been available; (2) the particular difficulty posed by the California Bar Exam; (3) the existing types of supplemental programs, and concerns posed by programs that are limited to “bar tips” or even limited practice exams or substantive lectures, given the increased numbers of “at risk” students due to the increase in underpreparedness; (4) the supplemental program at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law, including the intensity of effort required of both faculty and students in a comprehensive program applicable to all students; and finally, (5) the bar passage results at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since adoption of a comprehensive supplemental bar passage program, that have been significantly better than would be expected by some commentators, given its ranking and relative youth as a law school. This Article suggests that the traditional focus of academic support programs, including bar preparation programs, that focus largely on perceived “at risk” students, is insufficient in light of the increased numbers of underprepared students. In order to avoid further calamitous declines in bar passage rates, law schools will have to move from traditional academic support models to models that encourage the entire cohort of students to work together, cooperatively, and that apply extensive time and effort to ensure that all students receive the benefit of these programs