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Average Amount Borrowed, 2001-2012
No full textThis source includes data on the average amount borrowed by students at ABA-approved law schools for the academic years beginning in 2001 to 2012
The Roosevelt-Cardozo Way: The Case for Bar Eligibility After Two Years of Law School
No full textThis paper argues for a revision of the rules of the New York Court of Appeals to allow students to sit for the bar after two years of law school classes. This revision, reflecting what the rule had been when both President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Associate Justice Benjamin Cardozo attended Columbia Law School, would cut the costs of legal education for many students by 1/3, hence addressing in part the concern that law school debt drives down the availability of public service lawyers. Moreover, such a move would put pressure on law schools to deliver educational services more attuned to the practical needs of their students in order to secure their enrollment for the third year. This is a matter of considerable importance at a time many law schools place fewer than half of their graduates in full-time positions requiring legal training. Although the proposal does not address what law schools do or should do, reducing the law school study requirement for bar eligibility from three to two years may encourage some law schools to embrace a more professional than rather purely academic orientation that should in turn lead to enhanced skills training for students likely to be practising on their own or in small firms not capable of providing sustained training. A better trained solo or small-firm practitioner will better serve the legal needs of Americans of average means
Time: An Empirical Analysis of Law Student Time Management Deficiencies
No full textThis Article begins the much needed research on law students’ time famine. Time management complaints begin early in students’ legal education and generally go unresolved. As a result, practicing attorneys identify time famine as a leading cause of job dissatisfaction. To better arm graduating students, law schools must treat time as an essential component of practice-readiness. Unfortunately, most law schools ignore their students’ time management concerns, despite growing calls for greater “skills” training in legal education.
To date, legal scholarship has overlooked psychological research on time management. Yet, this research is an essential starting point to effective instruction. Rather than viewing time management as a singular concept, this research shows it is actually multi-dimensional, compromised of multiple time structure skills and behaviors. This more nuanced understanding of time management means each dimension can be isolated, measured, and remediated. Rather than a shotgun approach, law schools can tailor instruction to law students’ specific deficiencies.
To help identify these deficiencies, this Article presents a psychometric study of 1Ls – the first study to ever quantify law students’ time management problems. The study identifies five specific dimensions 1Ls lack: perceived control, present orientation, structured routine, goal setting, and mechanics. Using this information, the Article offers tailored advice on incorporating skills across the curriculum to help remedy these deficiencies. By learning foundational time management skills during law school, students have at least a fighting chance of managing time famine in practice
Internal Grants and Scholarships, 1991-2012
No full textThis source includes data on the total dollar amounts awarded by ABA-approved law schools as internal grants and scholarships for the academic years beginning in 1991 to 2012
Living and Book Expenses, 1990-2012
No full textThis source includes data on the average living and book expenses of single students living on campus at ABA-approved law schools for the academic years beginning in 1990 to 2012
Admission to Law School: New Measures
No full textStandardized tests have been increasingly controversial over recent years in high-stakes admission decisions. Their role in operationalizing definitions of merit and qualification is especially contested, but in law schools this challenge has become particularly intense. Law schools have relied on the Law School Admission Test (LSAT) and an INDEX (which includes grade point average [GPA]) since the 1940s. The LSAT measures analytic and logical reasoning and reading. Research has focused on the validity of the LSAT as a predictor of 1st-year GPA in law school, with almost no research on predicting lawyering effectiveness. This article examines the comparative potential between the LSAT versus noncognitive (e.g., personality, situational judgment, and biographical information) predictors of lawyering effectiveness. Theoretical links between 26 lawyering effectiveness factors and potential predictors are discussed and evaluated. Implications for broadening the criterion space, diversity in admissions, and the practice of law are discussed
A Puppy Lawyer is Not Just for Christmas: Helping New Lawyers Successfully Make the Transition to Professional Practice
No full textThe research reported here is a pilot project which investigated the transitionary period from study to work for entry-level lawyers. The research was designed to identify factors which may assist new lawyers in making this a successful transition.
This is crucial research. There is no similar empirical work in Australia focusing on the transition towards a legal professional. The support and endorsement of the Law Society of the Australian Capital Territory ensured that the pilot could provide some valuable preliminary data.
The design of the study consisted in tracking a small sample of newly admitted lawyers who volunteered to be followed through their first year. The sample consisted of eleven participants (4 male and 7 female) employed variously in private and public practice in the territory. Their median age was 25 years. They worked in a range of different practices – small, medium and large private firms, and government legal practices, legal aid and community legal centres.
Data was collected between 2009 and early 2011. The study used a multi-method qualitative research approach to gather information through interviews, participant observation and self-recording of daily work activity.
Data analysis showed the crucial importance of appropriate supervision and mentoring to new lawyers’ capacity to gain autonomy and competence. Also notable was new lawyers’ need to see their work as intrinsically worthwhile, either when it provided a direct public service or more indirectly. Pro bono work was important to them. New lawyers were also keenly alert to the real ethical climate of the practice in which they worked. The way a practice treated its staff (both professional and support) was seen as a reliable indicator of its ethical culture
A Primer on Diversity, Discrimination, and Equality in the Legal Profession or Who is Responsible for Pursuing Diversity and Why
No full textThe legal profession lags behind other occupations in achieving diversity, and its quest for equality is frustrated by conceptual disagreement and confusion about the meaning of diversity, means of pursuing it, and responsibility for doing so. As a result, while minority under-representation and inequity constitute a serious problem, the profession’s diversity discourse is stuck in a state of counterproductive disarray.
The goal of this article is to explore and clarify some of these confused conceptual dimensions of diversity in the hopes of moving the equality agenda forward. Part I unpacks the concept of diversity, demonstrating that while commentators often proceed on the assumption that diversity is a well-defined concept, several competing definitions and meanings are in fact being pursued by various constituencies. It then identifies two of its distinct yet often confused components: formal diversity, and substantive diversity, exploring their justifications and studying the complex relationship between these facets of diversity and the notions of equality and discrimination. Based on this framework, Part I concludes by examining accountability and responsibility for diversity, analyzing the circumstances under which legal actors and institutions are obligated to pursue it. It establishes that the legal profession and all of its constituencies and members have a non-utilitarian duty to pursue substantive diversity, and argues that leaders of the bar, as well as actors who cause, even unintentionally, under-representation have a heightened duty to pursue diversity.
Part II applies this diversity framework by offering a contextual analysis of discrimination, underrepresentation and diversity in large law firms. For quite some time now large law firms have been in the forefront of diversity initiatives, committing significant resources to advancing diversity with somewhat disappointing results. Part II makes two contributions to understanding large law firms’ diversity efforts, and, in particular, their relative failure to achieve their stated goals. First, it asserts that commendable as they are, diversity initiatives are mistakenly regarded as voluntary, and ought instead to be thought of as mandatory. This, to be clear, is far from semantic, as large law firms’ tentative approach to diversity helps explain its shortcomings. Second, it explains why diversity efforts have not been as successful as expected and suggests ways of pursuing diversity more productively
Enrollment by Gender, 2011
No full textThis source includes data on full-time and part-time enrollment by gender at ABA-approved law schools in the 2011-2012 academic year
Why Don’t They Get It? Academic Intelligence and the Under-Prepared Student as ‘Other’
No full textLaw teachers today face classes filled with students from a multitude of backgrounds with profoundly different learning styles, levels of academic preparation and readiness. The more traditional model of intelligence posits four or five learning styles that classify students in their primary learning mode, such as visual, kinesthetic and experiential. Gardner’s more recent notion of multiple “intelligences” more profoundly expands on learning styles by linking them with actual ability to learn and perform in a specific context. We propose an additional “intelligence” of sorts – “academic intelligence.” This intelligence refers broadly to a student’s actual level of “academic preparation,” i.e., a student’s readiness or ability to engage productively with an academic environment and to benefit from that interaction. We believe a student’s academic intelligence is about more than simply cognitive skills; it’s akin to culture, including not only cognitive, but also affective and social skills, all of which contribute to an entering student’s success in law school.
Our observation after years of teaching is that some students enter law school with a part of their “academic intelligence” missing or under-developed and these students are unsuccessful despite hard work and teacher’s best efforts. Teachers’ frustration with students’ inability to “get it transforms these students into the “Other,” and therefore unknowable and unreachable on an academic level. This Essay concludes that “otherness” is not immutable, but rather is amenable to various teaching methods laid out in this essay. This Essay begins by emphasizing the teacher’s responsibility to bridge the gap between students’ readiness and the course objectives. Next, it highlights the failure of traditional law school pedagogy to reach the under-prepared student. To conclude, we suggest a framework for addressing the cognitive component of academic intelligence, which emphasizes the importance of teaching academic and legal reasoning skills explicitly. We discuss in detail, as examples, teaching the academic skill of case briefing and the legal reasoning skill of issue spotting in a core first-year course