Journal of Legal Education (Association of American Law Schools)

Logan Siegel, Lilith A.

English

How You Tell the Story: In Search of Complex Disabled Narratives

Eyer, Katie

Am I Disabled? Disability Identity and Law Faculty

Taylor, Aaron N.

The Journey, The Work, The Impact: Reflections on my Tenure as LSSSE Director

Christensen, Chad, Ph.D

Preparing Law Students to be Successful Lawyers

Winek, Kirsten M., J.D., Ph.D

Writing Like a Lawyer: How Law Student Involvement Affects Self-Reported Gains in Writing Skills in Law School

Robel, Lauren

599
Afterword: Nudging Toward Virtue
Lauren Robel
The Law School Survey of Student Engagement began fifteen years ago 
with work by a wonderful student, Patrick O’Day, who both George Kuh, an 
eminent scholar of higher education and I had the privilege to teach at around 
the same time. Professor Kuh is the genius behind the National Survey of 
Student Engagement (NSSE), begun in 2000 as a survey of undergraduate 
students.1 Nothing similar had been attempted at law schools, and both 
George and Patrick should take immense pride in what their work generated, 
as this collection of essays and remembrances makes clear. 
From its inception and for the first time, LSSSE brought the considerable 
scholarship of student engagement to a graduate professional program. 
Beginning with practices tracked through NSSE that have been shown to 
increase undergraduate student learning, LSSSE refined its survey over the 
next decade and a half into an instrument to meet the evolving challenges of 
legal education. In doing so, as the essays in this symposium make clear, it 
gave students voice; deans a meaningful method to compare their schools with 
those of their peers; accreditors a way to evaluate institutional commitments 
around learning and student success; teachers purchase on classroom and 
climate information critical to learning; and scholars an invaluable longitudinal 
dataset that is beginning to be mined for the answers to unforeseen questions 
and to connect in unforeseen but thrilling ways to other datasets. It is being 
used in other countries, giving us a new window into globally comparative 
information about how law is taught and learned. When catastrophe strikes, 
as it did this year, we’ve learned that LSSSE’s strong institutional and research 
base can quickly focus on hastily shifted practices and help us determine how 
to ensure a strong experience for our students.2 If LSSSE achieved nothing 
more, it would be an unqualified success. 
1. See What Does NSSE do?, NatioNal Survey of StudeNt eNgagemeNt (Jan. 2021), https://nsse.
indiana.edu/nsse/about-nsse/index.html.
2. See, for instance, Jessica Erickson, Connections and Community in Distanced Classrooms, LSSSE Blog 
(Jan. 2021), https://lssse.indiana.edu/2021/01/?cat=80 (using LSSSE data on importance of 
relationships and connections to suggest ways online teachers could focus on building those 
relationships during the pandemic).
Lauren Robel is Executive Vice President and Provost, Indiana University, Bloomington. Val 
Nolan Professor of Law, Indiana University Maurer School of Law.
600 Journal of Legal Education
Despite all of these notable achievements, LSSSE has even more potential. 
Both NSSE and LSSSE were conceived in part as nudges to push institutions 
toward practices (and students toward behaviors) that would improve 
student success. 3 Both have succeeded in that effort, demonstrating that 
colleges, universities, and law schools appreciate the ability to track their 
progress at the institutional level toward a set of practices empirically shown 
to support student development.4 In recent years, as LSSSE has matured, 
it has appropriately ventured into areas beyond those at the core of NSSE’s 
concerns with undergraduates. For instance, it has solicited information that 
has explored controversies around legal education, such as student debt levels5 
and inclusion and equity.6 While LSSSE’s strong credibility comes from its 
roots in NSSE’s insistence on translating deep research on engagement and 
high-impact practices into survey questions that reinforce those practices, 
LSSSE has the ability to explore with even more depth issues critical to the 
distinctive mission of law schools. 
Perhaps the most important of those issues concerns law school’s 
responsibility for the formation of the professional identities of the vast 
majority of our nation’s lawyers. Those professional identities are, in turn, 
critical to our democracy, including not only the system of justice that is at 
the center of many of the deepest racial tensions in our country, but also the 
commitment to process, rights, and constitutionalism that underpins our 
political institution. As LSSSE celebrates its fifteenth year, its methodology 
gives it a unique opportunity to aid schools in tracking and improving what 
lessons students are absorbing about the distinctive obligations they will face 
for these issues as members of the legal profession. 
1. NSSE and LSSSE: Engagement and High-Impact Practices Move from 
the Undergraduate Experience to Law School
The Indiana University Center for Post-Secondary Research, under 
Professor George Kuh’s guidance, developed NSSE as a way to bridge the 
extensive higher education research documenting the links among students 
engaging in certain behaviors, the practices of institutions of higher education 
to support those behaviors, and educational attainment and student retention. 
3. See RichaRd h. ThaleR & cass R. sunsTein, nudge: impRoving decisions abouT healTh, 
WealTh, and happiness 6 (2008) (“A nudge . . . is any aspect of the choice architecture that 
alters people's behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly 
changing their economic incentives.”). 
4. Meere E. Deo et al., The Changing Landscape of Legal Education: A 15-Year LSSSE Retrospective, Law 
School Survey of Student Engagement (2020), https://lssse.indiana.edu/wp-content/
uploads/2015/12/LSSSE_Annual-Report_Winter2020_Final.pdf. 
5. 2015 Annual Survey Results: How a Decade of Debt Changed the Law Student Experience, Law 
School Survey of Student Engagement (2015), https://lssse.indiana.edu/wp-content/
uploads/2016/01/LSSSE-Annual-Report-2015-Update-FINAL-revised-web.pdf.
6. Meere E. Deo & Chad Christensen, 2020 Annual Survey Results: Diversity & Exclusion, Law 
School Survey of Student Engagement (2020), https://lssse.indiana.edu/wp-content/
uploads/2020/09/Diversity-and-Exclusion-Final-9.29.20.pdf. 
Afterword: Nudging Toward Virtue 601
Decades of higher education research has identified both institutional practices 
and student behaviors that positively affect students’ learning, retention, and 
satisfaction with their college experiences. NSSE has consolidated those 
practices and behaviors in two broad concepts—student engagement and 
high-impact practices—that have shaped the questions NSSE has rigorously 
explored over the past twenty years with over 6 million students.7 NSSE’s 
attention to these practices and its consistency, coupled with its exceptionally 
large reach, have in turn had an enormous impact on how institutions of higher 
education have shaped policies as varied as counseling, advising, facilities, 
study abroad, and faculty-student interaction.
Over the years, NSSE has allowed colleges and universities to understand 
their students’ experiences with a broad range of campus and classroom 
structures, including academic support structures. It has explored higher-
order learning by asking students about their opportunities to engage in 
fact, theory, and method application, analysis in depth, critical evaluation, 
and idea formation. It queries students about opportunities for reflective 
and integrative learning through a series of questions asking students how 
often they are asked to synthesize materials across the curriculum. It looks at 
opportunities for quantitative reasoning and sustained writing; collaborative 
learning with peers and professors; and the quality of interactions with those 
on a campus. It explores opportunities for students to engage in experiences 
that have been shown to have a high impact on student learning, such as 
internships, study abroad, research work with a professor, service to others, 
learning communities, and senior capstone experiences. And it asks about the 
ways in which undergraduates use their campuses. 
LSSSE’s translation of this research from undergraduates to law students 
relied, as Kuh and O’Day note, on expert judgment and consensus rather 
than empirical data.8 In the law school context, however, the concept of 
student engagement intuitively translates well. As does NSSE, LSSSE 
includes questions about intellectual activities, use of time, social integration 
and engagement with diverse perspectives, interactions with faculty, and 
collaboration with peers, all markers of student engagement. Like NSSE, 
it explores opportunities for higher-order learning, such as application 
and synthesis, and it includes questions about law school experiences that 
correlate well with NSSE’s high-impact practices, such as clinical experiences 
or field placements, service to others, research with a professor, and intensive 
cocurricular activities like moot court or law journal. And as with NSSE, 
LSSSE’s persistence and ability to permit law schools to compare themselves 
7. For a thorough discussion of NSSE’s approach to survey design and the research that 
underlies its approach, see NSSE’s Conceptual Framework, Law School Survey of Student 
Engagement (2013), https://nsse.indiana.edu/nsse/about-nsse/conceptual-framework/
index.html. See also George D. Kuh, The National Survey of Student Engagement: Conceptual and 
Empirical Foundations, 141 Using NSSE in Institutional Research 5–20 (2009). 
8. See George D. Kuh & Patrick T. O’Day, Whence Did Thee Come, LSSSE?, 69 J. legal educ. 402 
(2020).
602 Journal of Legal Education
to their peers on issues they understand to be important has likely had a 
virtuous effect. LSSSE’s recent retrospective report, for instance, shows 
gains in learning outcomes, certain kinds of institutional support, such as for 
career counseling, and social integration, such as discussions between diverse 
groups.9 
II. LSSSE Next Steps: Exploring What Makes Law School Distinctive 
NSSE differs in one important way from LSSSE: It is agnostic to the myriad 
undergraduate disciplines its respondents are studying. Law schools, however, 
have a specific responsibility that differs from many undergraduate disciplines: 
Law schools must prepare their students for a profession. When NSSE and 
then LSSSE were created, they benefited from a decades-long foundation of 
research that George Kuh and his colleagues could translate into practices 
that form the basis for these survey instruments. There is a similar literature on 
understanding professional identity formation, much but not all of it outside 
the field of law,10 and a growing interest in connecting that understanding to 
practices that could be implemented effectively at law schools.11
The question of how law schools shape professional identity, or even if 
they can, has been at the center of numerous studies by both scholars and the 
bar associations;12 over the past several years, LSSSE researchers have been 
exploring how the survey could be used to examine and, when empirically 
supported, shape law school practice in this important area. In 2011, former 
LSSSE Director Carole Silver and Project Manager Lindsay Watkins co-
authored a paper on this scholarship of professional identity and described 
two experimental sets of LSSSE questions, administered in 2008 and 2009, to 
gather more data about how schools approached what the Carnegie Report 
9. Meere E. Deo, The Changing Landscape of Legal Education: A 15-Year LSSSE Retrospective, Law 
School Survey of Student Engagement (2020), https://lssse.indiana.edu/wp-content/
uploads/2015/12/LSSSE_Annual-Report_Winter2020_Final.pdf. 
10. In addition to the Carnegie Foundation “Preparation for the Professions” series, of which 
William m. sullivan eT al., educaTing laWyeRs: pRepaRaTion foR The pRofession 
(2007) (known as the “Carnegie Report”), is a part, see Jerome M. Organ, Is there Sufficient 
Human Resource Capacity to Support Robust Professional Identity Formation Learning Outcomes?, 14 u. 
sT. Thomas l.J. 458 (2018) (noting that many schools have connected professional identity 
to student outcomes). Indeed, the entire symposium on professional identity formation 
to which this article belongs, which includes excellent contributions by Bryant Garth and 
William Sullivan, reviews much of this literature within law.
11. See, for instance, the work of the Holloran Center at the University of St. Thomas, which 
is attempting to connect professional identity formation to learning outcomes. Welcome to 
the Holloran Center, University of St. Thomas School of Law, https://www.stthomas.edu/
hollorancenter/ (last visited Apr. 2, 2021). 
12. See, for instance, sullivan eT al., educaTing laWyeRs: pRepaRaTion foR The pRofession 
(2007), supra note 11, at 126-61, citing ABA publications and studies going back to Legal 
Education and Professional Development—An Educational Continuum, Report of the Task Force on Law 
Schools and the Profession: Narrowing the Gap, 1992 A.B.A. Sec. OF Leg. Educ. & Admission (1992) 
popularly known as the MacCrate Report. 
Afterword: Nudging Toward Virtue 603
had called “the third apprenticeship” of identity formation.13 Those questions 
explored how schools approached teaching professional ethics; settings in 
which ethics could best be learned; and a myriad of qualities associated with 
mature professional development, such as acting with integrity, sensitivity to 
client relationships, capacity for moral reasoning, handling the stress of law 
practice, and serving the public good.14
From that experience, LSSSE now includes two questions specifically 
about that aspect of law school, and two that are related. First, the survey asks 
students to evaluate how much the school encourages “the ethical practice of 
law.” Second, it asks students to evaluate how much the school encourages 
pro bono and public service. And in related questions, the survey asks about 
law schools’ encouragement of the development of a “personal code of values 
and ethics.” Finally, in common with NSSE, it asks students to evaluate how 
well the school encourages “understanding people of diverse racial and ethnic 
backgrounds.”  
The events of the past year, however, give fresh urgency to expanding this 
aspect of LSSSE’s exploration of law school. Lawyers exercise substantial 
power, and their role in sustaining our commitment to the rule of law and 
democratic institutions suggests that understanding, and nudging schools 
to encourage other fundamental aspects of professional identity formation 
is critical. Can we identify, for instance, and ask about a law school’s 
encouragement of strategies for fidelity to law in the face of political pressure?15 
Can we determine what actions law schools engage in that support their future 
graduates’ understanding of the oath they will take to defend the Constitution 
of the United States?16 What about the commitment to diversity and inclusion 
that is necessary to ensure the legitimacy of courts and criminal justice?17 All 
of the questions surrounding professional identity and lawyers’ distinctive 
responsibilities have taken on additional resonance in a year in which lawyers 
and judges have been crucial actors, both in support of the rule of law and in 
opposition to it. 
At the fifteen-year mark, as LSSSE has benefited from its grounding in the 
translation of research to actionable practices, law schools and the country 
could benefit from a continued focus on the question of what makes the 
formation of lawyers distinctive, and what practices make that formation most 
effective. The work of evaluating this complicated literature and translating it 
13. Carole Silver et al., Unpacking the Apprenticeship of Professional Identity and Purpose: Insights from the 
Law School Survey of Student Engagement, 17 J. leg. WRiTing insT. 373, 400–01 (2011). 
14. Id. at 385–86.
15. See, e.g., Reid J. Epstein, A Conservative Justice in Wisconsin Says He Followed the Law, Not the Politics, 
n.y. Times (Dec. 21, 2020), https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/20/us/politics/wisconsin-
justice-brian-hagedorn.html. 
16. For a discussion of the complexity of oaths to support the Constitution, see Richard M. Re, 
Promising the Constitution, 110 nW. u. l. Rev. 299 (2016).
17. See Meera Deo’s Foreword in this symposium.
604 Journal of Legal Education
into the questions that allow us to think about how we are doing as law schools 
in this critical work will be as difficult, and as important, as the work George 
Kuh and Patrick O’Day did in LSSSE’s earliest days. Can we look forward to 
nudging ourselves, through LSSSE, toward a greater understanding of our 
roles in forming lawyers capable of virtue in their professional roles? 


Afterword: Nudging Toward Virtue

Franklin, Kris

Method Lawyering

Fetter, James

The Sisyphean Struggle for Secure Employment

Pérez, Katherine

Full Circle: From Disabled Law Student to Law Professor

Leahy, Stevie

Book Review of Integrating Doctrine and Diversity: Inclusion and Equity in the Law School Classroom

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