Journal of Legal Education (Association of American Law Schools)

Eisenberg, Deborah Thompson

Guerin, Toby Treem

Will the Circle Be Unbroken : The Role of Law School Centers in Advancing Restorative Justice Theory, Practice, and Education

Browning, John G.

English

No “Robot Lawyers” Just Yet: The Role of Continuing Legal Education in Fulfilling the Duty of Technological Competence

Oranburg, Seth C.

Advanced Online Continuing Legal Education: How to Leverage Technology-Mediated Education for Lawyers’ Lifelong Learning

Ehrenreich, Nancy

When Professors Get in Their Own Way: Law Teaching and Academic Perfectionism

Fisher, Timothy

Lessons Learned: The Experiences of Non-Traditional Law Deans and the Law Schools That Hire Them

Ballakrishnen, Swethaa

Chuang, Janie

Parrish, Austen

Rosser, Ezra

271
Journal of Legal Education, Volume 72, Number 3 & 4 (2024)
From the Editors
 This issue of the journal, which includes standalone articles, 
symposium articles, and book reviews, hopefully will interest a broad cross 
section of the legal academy. This issue truly offers something for everyone, 
regardless of one’s primary teaching and research interests. 
The issue begins with the standalone articles. The first is a brief “At the 
Lectern” essay, Kirby’s on My Mind: A Material Culture Approach to Critical Legal 
Information Literacy, by Reference Librarian Nicholas Mignanelli, that explores 
ways to get students to approach legal sources critically. Next, Professor 
Andrew J. Turner’s article, Let’s Not be Creative: ‘Rigid IRAC’ and the Hidden 
Power of Formalistic Legal Writing, argues that legal writing instructors should 
unapologetically teach students to write using a traditional IRAC structure. 
In his article, A Law Professor’s Love-Hate Relationship with the Restatement (Second) 
of Contracts, Jeffrey Lipshaw expounds on the educational strong and weak 
points of the Second Restatement of contracts. The next two articles cover 
law school leadership and JD admissions. Professor Timothy Fisher’s article, 
Lessons Learned: The Experiences of Non-Traditional Law Deans and the Law Schools that 
Hire Them, uses interview data to better understand the reasons schools hire 
non-traditional deans as well as the challenges faced by such deans. When Old 
Habits Die Hard: A Comment on Sander and Steinbuch’s ‘Mismatch and Bar Passage’ by 
Sherod Thaxton offers an extended critique of an article on affirmative action 
and the mismatch hypothesis previously published by the Journal of Legal 
Education. 
Switching gears, the issue includes eleven articles written for the “Continuing 
Legal Education and the Professional Education of Lawyers” symposium 
hosted by Villanova University Charles Widger School of Law in October 
2023. The symposium brought together leaders in all aspects of continuing 
legal education (CLE) and together the articles written in connection with the 
symposium span some of the most important topics in the CLE space. The 
symposium was organized around four panels, and the publication reflects 
those panel’s substantive topics.
The symposium’s first panel focused on “Improving the Quality of 
CLE.”  Professors Tigran W. Eldred and Molly J. Walker Wilson’s article, 
Innovative Approaches to On Demand Continuing Legal Education Ethics Training: A Case 
Study, describes the successful use of actors to deliver quality instruction in 
ethics. In Law-and-Literature Studies as a Basis for High Quality Ethics CLE Programs, 
Professor David S. Caudill uses an overview both of the use of literature in 
legal education and of existing law and literature programs to support such 
educational offerings. Professor Adrian Carpenter-McKinney’s contribution, 
272 Journal of Legal Education
Continuing Legal Education for the Newly Barred Attorney: A Law School’s Responsibility for 
Generation Z in the Workplace, emphasizes the need to teach law students the soft 
skills they will need to be successful lawyers. 
The symposium’s second panel featured a diverse range of contributions 
centered on the theme “Technology and CLE.” Professor Seth C. Oranburg’s 
article, Advanced Online Continuing Legal Education: How to Leverage Technology-
Mediated Education for Lawyers’ Lifelong Learning, highlights the problem of passive 
learning in the context of recorded CLE material and gives suggestions on 
how providers can improve CLE content to better engage people. In No 
“Robot Lawyers” Just Yet: The Role of Continuing Legal Education in Fulfilling the Duty of 
Technological Competence, John G. Browning discusses efforts at the state level 
to mandate technological competence as part of lawyer’s CLE obligations 
and argues that technology education is an integral part of CLE. Similarly, 
Danielle M. Hall’s article, Technically Speaking: How to Improve Technology CLEs 
to Meet the Needs of Lawyers and Get Them to Attend, focuses on CLE technological 
programing, giving recommendations on how to improve such offerings. 
The articles associated with the next panel of the symposium, entitled 
“Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and MCLE,” show the often-contentious 
nature of work related to diversity. As suggested in her article’s title, Beginning 
at the End: A Roadmap for Mandatory Diversity Continuing Legal Education, Assistant 
Dean Lisa S. Taylor argues in favor of mandatory CLE diversity training. In 
contrast, Professor Rima Sirota details studies showing the ineffectiveness of 
such trainings and argues against the mandatory anti-bias training as currently 
practiced in her article, Mandatory Anti-Bias CLE: A Serious Problem Deserves A More 
Meaningful Response. Finally, Professor Anthony M. Ciolli’s contribution to this 
issue, Continuing Legal Education Accreditation and the First Amendment, takes a strong 
stance against the Florida Supreme Court’s attack on a diversity requirement 
that a section of the state bar had adopted with regard to section-sponsored 
CLE programs.  
The last two articles that came out of this symposium take a broad view 
of CLE. Dr. Graham T. McMahon draws upon the history of continuing 
medical education to suggest lessons for the provision of CLE in his article, 
Evolution of Continuing Medical Education in the United States: Implications for the Legal 
Community. Yanneck Ostaficzuk’s article, Is MCLE Broken? Rethinking Continuing 
Legal Education for the Next 50 Years, looks at the history of regulation of CLE 
internationally and uses that history as a springboard for discussing the future 
of CLE. Overall, we hope that readers will find in these articles not only a way 
to understand the current challenges facing CLE but also valuable ideas about 
how to improve CLE programming. 
As usual, this issue concludes with three book reviews. Judge Janet Bond 
Arterton’s review of Her Honor: Stories of Challenge and Triumph from Women Judges 
(Lauren Stiller Rikleen ed. 2023) shows the importance of the stories collected 
in Rikleen’s edited volume. Professor Arevik Avedian’s critical review of 
Herbert M. Kritzer, Advanced Introduction to Empirical Legal Research (2021) 
provides an overview of the book and concludes that while the book has 
273From the Editors
several shortcomings, such as lacking rigor of advanced empirical research, an 
effective methodology section, and a comprehensive discussion of reliability, 
it can still serve as a useful resource for anyone interested in learning about 
examples and the history of empirical research in the legal field. In How and 
When Do We Get to Maybe?, Professor Kris Franklin argues that Richard Michael 
Fischl and Jeremy Paul’s book, Getting to Maybe: How to Excel on Law School Exams 
(2nd ed. 2023), should be widely read by law faculty and law students.  
Let us end with a brief note of thanks, but first an apology. In the process 
of editing, corrections requested by the authors of a book review published 
in Volume 71 (3) by Professors Marsha Griggs and Andrea A. Curcio of Joan 
Howarth’s Shaping the Bar: The Future of Attorney Licensing (2022) were dropped. The 
corrected version is available on the JLE website as well as from the authors 
and Ezra Rosser in particular apologizes to the authors for his oversight. 
This is the final issue published with American University Washington 
College of Law as one of the host schools of the Journal. Collectively, we have 
mixed feelings about passing the baton onto New York Law School. We will 
miss the opportunity to read the many great submissions and to meet with 
our co-editors, but we know that the incoming editors will do an excellent 
job. The current co-editors would like to extend a big thank you to the many 
professors, librarians, and deans who worked on the journal for American 
University Washington College of Law over the years: Khelani Clay, Robert 
Dinerstein, John Heywood, Billie Jo Kaufman, Elizabeth Keith, Camille 
A. Nelson, Mark Niles, Diane Orentlicher, Adeen Postar, Shannon Roddy, 
William Ryan, Anthony E. Varona, and Ripple Weistling. We also would like 
to thank our copy editor, Julie Lipkin, our cite checkers, Khelani Clay and 
Emma McArthur, as well as Matt Bishop and others at Tray Inc. for their work 
formatting our issues of the Journal. Finally, it has been a privilege getting to 
work for all these years alongside our co-editors at Northeastern and at UC 
Irvine. 
Janie Chuang
Ezra Rosser
Swethaa Ballakrishnen
Austen Parrish


From the Editors

Folami, Akilah

Book Review of Unequal Profession: Race and Gender in Legal Academia

Wermiel, Stephen

Book Review of The Making of a Justice: Reflections on My First 94 Years

Gabilondo, José

Holley-Walker, Danielle

Johnson, Kristin N.

Smith, Brenda V.

Cuison-Villazor, Rose

Balancing Scholarship, Teaching and Service to Succeed on the Tenure Track – A Workshop for Pretenure Colleagues and Faculty Aspirants

Thaxton, Sherod

When Old Habits Die Hard: A Comment on Sander and Steinbuch’s “Mismatch and Bar Passage”

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