Journal of Legal Education (Association of American Law Schools)

Cofone, Ignacio

Malé, Pierre-Jean G.

How to Choose a Law Review: An Empirical Study

Dinerstein, Robert

Paul, Jeremy

Rolland, Sonia E.

Rosser, Ezra

593
From the Editors 
As our regular readers know, the Journal of Legal Education moved swiftly 
in Spring 2020 to assemble reactions from law teachers across the country to the 
many challenges created or exacerbated by the COVID-19 panic. The national 
response was so marvelous and so voluminous that we are just now digging 
out, even as co-hosting of the Journal has begun passing from Northeastern 
University School of Law to our good friends at the University of California, 
Irvine. Our production delays, rather than any tardiness on the part of the 
authors, explain why many of the articles within this issue were crafted a couple 
of years ago. We hope you will agree, however, that the topics explored by 
our authors are of great interest to everyone concerned with training the next 
generation of lawyers. 
This issue, still captained at Northeastern, contains a series of retrospective 
articles reflecting on some of the challenges and trends that law schools have 
confronted in these difficult times. We begin with a close look at a sustained 
effort to make on-line legal education as effective, if not more effective in some 
contexts, as the traditional classroom. Karen Thornton, Steven L. Schooner and 
Markus Speidel share their experience with on-line learning in a well-developed 
program at George Washington University focused on government procurement 
law. They provide considerable insight on what worked for them and what did 
not, with special emphasis on a key lesson we should all have taken to heart 
by now. On-line teaching at its best bears little resemblance to the haphazard 
approach law schools were forced to embrace when COVID-19 hit so fast and 
so hard. These authors make a strong case that with careful planning, suitable 
financial support, and guidance from those trained in on-line course creation 
and delivery, superb results are possible.
Armed with a treasure trove of data gathered in tri-annual surveys admin-
istered since 2007 by the Center for the Study of Applied Legal Education 
(CSALE), an independent nonprofit developed by the authors, Robert R. 
Kuehn and David A. Santacroce look back on the dramatic growth of clinical 
legal education and field placements that has occurred over the last fifty years. 
The authors document the American Bar Association’s increasing emphasis on 
experiential legal education and delve deeply into questions of clinical faculty 
status, compensation, and demographics; the design of clinical and field place-
ment programs; the leadership structure for such programs; the topics covered 
and methods of instruction; and the continuing unmet student demand for 
experiential learning. Anyone interested in the future of clinical legal education 
will want to review their findings and conclusions.
Katherine C. Cheng, Jessica Findley, Adriana Cimetta, Heidi Legg Bur-
ross, Matt Charles, Cayley Balser, Ran Li, and Christopher Robertson also 
Journal of Legal Education, Volume 71, Number 4 (Summer 2022)
594 Journal of Legal Education
look back on a controlled experiment. They describe their own endeavor, as 
well as similar efforts, to provide students a leg up on law school performance 
through summer programs that offer training and testing in key skills such as 
rule formulation, case briefing and issue analysis. Readers will immediately rec-
ognize the significance of such programs and their potential to level the playing 
field for students who have faced economic and other educational obstacles as 
the country enters a new era of law school admissions during which the U.S. 
Supreme Court has outlawed giving boosts to applicants solely based on race. 
And the authors’ description of the success of their own program, dubbed JD-
Next, provides an uplifting counterweight to the findings in our final article by 
Richard Sander and Robert Steinbuch. 
Professors Sander and Steinbuch obtained data from three law schools 
concerning entering student credentials, law school performance, demographic 
breakdown and bar performance. They use this data in support of their conclu-
sion that students who enter law school with academic credentials significantly 
below the median of their classmates at the same school tend to be less likely to 
pass the bar exam on the first try. Their work asks everyone in legal education 
to take this finding seriously, and they are hopeful that more schools will share 
data that might confirm or cast doubt on their hypothesis. 
We understand this article presents only one narrow perspective on the far 
broader topic of preferences given to law school applicants whose entering 
LSAT or GPA might be explained by historical or individual disadvantage. Nor 
do the authors explore in depth the obvious alternative approach in which law 
schools, eager to give credit to students who have overcome obstacles, could 
devise programs aimed at ensuring that every student has a maximum chance to 
succeed. Because we want to ensure that our readers have a chance to consider 
multiple points of view, we will be publishing, in a subsequent issue, a reply 
to Professors Sander and Steinbuch that tackles the broader questions raised 
by what has come to be known as “mismatch” theory. In light of the Supreme 
Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admission v. Harvard, restricting use of race 
alone as a factor in university admissions, and the Journal’s desire to promote 
alternative points of view, we anticipate continued dialogue concerning the best 
way to ensure diversity in law school classrooms, a goal vital to the Association 
of American Law Schools, see AALS By-Law Section 6-3(c), and wholeheartedly 
supported by the JLE Editors.
As always, we close with book reviews. In his essay, Peter A. Joy assesses two 
books that propose meaningful criminal justice reform based upon the authors’ 
personal, albeit contrasting, experiences with the current system. In The Rage 
of Innocence: How America Criminalizes Black Youth, Kristin Henning draws upon her 
years as a public defender and Director of Georgetown University’s Juvenile 
Justice Clinic to present a compelling description of the many ways the system 
treats Black youth far more harshly than whites guilty of similar transgressions. 
In her book, Just Pursuit: A Black Prosecutor’s Fight for Fairness, Laura Coates also 
tells stories of how vulnerable, and often Black, defendants get the short end 
of the stick and how this fact exacerbated the challenges she faced as a Black 
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woman prosecutor when an Assistant United States Attorney in the District of 
Columbia. César F. Rosado Marzán uses comments from his students enrolled 
in his seminar on low-wage work to explore Scott L. Cummings’ extraordinary 
688-page study, An Equal Place: Lawyers in the Struggle for Los Angeles, which richly 
describes the roles lawyers played in a series of social justice movements in our 
nation’s second largest city. Finally, in his review of David I.C. Thomson’s book, 
The Way Forward for Legal Education, Stephen Daniels enthusiastically applauds the 
author’s call for a complete revamping of legal education, which would include 
an online/hybrid first year and far more experiential training. 
We will save the many expressions of gratitude we owe to so many who have 
helped us these last nine years for our final issue. In the meantime, we look 
forward to your reactions and comments. Enjoy.
Jeremy Paul
Sonia E. Rolland
Robert Dinerstein
Ezra Rosser
From the Editors


English

From the Editors

Griggs, Marsha

Curcio, Andrea A.

Book Review of Shaping the Bar: The Future of Attorney Licensing

Parmet, Wendy E.

Book Review of Common Good Constitutionalism

Kuehn, Robert R.

Santacroce, David A.

An Empirical Analysis of Clinical Legal Education at Middle Age

Paul, Jeremy R.

1
From the Editors 
Teaching Law Beyond Borders: Comparative Approaches 
This themed double issue presents a collection of articles and reflections 
exploring the objectives and methods of law teaching in different legal cultures.
Law is taught as an undergraduate/first degree course in much of the world, 
and as a graduate/postgraduate course in some places, as in the United States. 
Some educators see law as primarily a professional degree, designed to impart 
skills and analytical tools that students can apply across a range of practice areas. 
Elsewhere, law is more akin to a field of the humanities, in which the intellectual 
discovery of arguments, theories and schools of thought is the principal object 
of learning. These varied approaches to legal education commend different 
teaching methods. Some are the product of tradition; some are designed to 
develop specific professional skills in an evolving profession. Even the subject 
matters included within legal education vary across cultures. In all these ways, 
law and legal education are situated in a local political, social and economic 
context. Yet, in a globalized world where aspiring legal professionals increas-
ingly seek a multinational and multicultural education, opportunities abound 
for law teachers to share methods and pedagogical approaches. 
This issue called upon legal educators worldwide to share experiences, 
experiments, and theoretical perspectives on the value of different approaches 
to legal instruction. They tackled topics such as different forms of experiential 
education, models for integrating legal practice and theoretical learning, novel 
ways to engage students with legal doctrine, techniques for building interdisci-
plinarity into the legal curriculum, formats for skills-oriented courses, and more. 
Philip McConnaughy’s article The Evolving Mission of Peking University’s School of 
Transnational Law reflects on the trajectory of a U.S. J.D.-style program offered 
in China. At a time of ongoing geopolitical and economic tensions between 
China and the United States, this experiment in embedding a cross-cultural legal 
education in a Chinese institution offers fascinating insights. McConnaughy 
deftly describes the political, cultural, and legal challenges and opportunities 
he is navigating as Dean and Professor of Law at Peking University School of 
Transnational Law. Ray Campbell, also Professor of Law, Peking University 
School of Transnational Law, picks up the narrative with a specific focus on 
Teaching U.S. Civil Procedure to Non-U.S. Students: Educating Students for a World of Legal 
Pluralism. Campbell’s deep exploration of the normative and the technical aspects 
of teaching civil procedure might equally benefit those who are teaching the 
subject to U.S. law students or to foreign students in the United States. Shift-
ing the lens back to legal teaching in the United States, Kathryn Hendley and 
Alexander Straka examine the demographics of foreign students coming to 
Journal of Legal Education, Volume 72, Numbers 1 & 2 (Fall & Winter 2022/23)
2 Journal of Legal Education
U.S. law schools in International Students from the Perspective of U.S. Law Schools. The 
authors analyze the results of empirical work they developed to better understand 
data regarding U.S. law programs aimed at foreign students. Their research 
will be of interest to law school leadership as well as legal education’s govern-
ing bodies and program directors, administrators, and support staff. Taking 
Singapore as a case-study, Howard Hunter’s essay on the Education of Common 
Lawyers in a 21st Century Environment offers further reflections on the shape of legal 
education across borders. Fabio de Sa e Silva’s essay reviewing The Globalization of 
Legal Education: A Critical Perspective (Bryant Garth & Gregory Shaffer eds., 2022) 
and Theresa Kaiser’s review of Susan Bartie and David Sandomierski’s edited 
volume American Legal Education Abroad: Critical Histories provide ever more insights 
about trends in cultural cross-fertilization within legal education. 
While these writings provide generally uplifting accounts of opportunities 
for legal education in a globalized world, in many corners of the world law is 
taught under severely adverse conditions. András Pap’s article Risks, Threats and 
Resources for Resilience: Reflections from a Hybrid Illiberal Regime is a sobering testimonial 
to the quickly accumulating hurdles facing law teaching and academic freedom 
in Hungary. For a broader context, readers may want to refer to Volume 71 
of the Journal of Legal Education at page 238 et seq., where Tom Ginsburg 
documented the increasing threat to academic freedom in many parts of the 
world and its relationship with “democratic backsliding.” Cori Alonso-Yoder’s 
review of Robert F. Barsky’s book Clamouring for Legal Protection: What the Great Books 
Teach Us About People Fleeing from Persecution considers the plight of those directly 
targeted by persecution.
A second set of articles presents innovative teaching journeys. David Oppen-
heimer, Panos Kapotas and Laura Carlson ambitiously engaged in Teaching Law 
Across Six Continents (apparently, there is no legal education option in Antarctica!). 
Pushing administrative, technical, and cultural boundaries in every sense, they 
created a truly global classroom. Turning to the challenges of online and remote 
education, Joan Blum offers ways to improve teaching and learning feedback 
with Herding CATS: Building Student Engagement in Remote Learning in the U.S. and 
Uzbekistan. Back in a physical classroom, Tuukka Tomperi, Outil Korhonen, 
and Sampo Mielityinen transformed a traditional international law class by 
introducing Debate as a Pedagogical Practice: The Case of Teaching International Law in 
Finland. Their detailed inquiry into the pedagogical values of debate, tracing its 
origins all the way back to Ancient Greece, proposes an alternative model for 
those who might wish to step away from the podium. While such formats are 
often reserved for more advanced treatments of a subject, the authors explore 
their use of the approach in a more introductory course. 
The double issue concludes with two articles on clinical legal education in 
resource-constrained developing countries. Mizanie Abate Tadesse’s article 
Revamping Ethiopian Clinical Legal Education to Pursue its Twin Pedagogical and Social Justice 
Missions” considers how clinical legal education can be delivered effectively, 
both for the students and for their clients, with lessons for other programs in 
similar socio-economic contexts. The article will be valuable for educators, 
3
administrators, and funding bodies. Likewise, Ai Nhan Ho examines Clinical 
Legal Education as a Means to Reform Vietnamese Legal Education: An Examination of its 
Current Situation. Both articles share some conclusions, in particular related to the 
difficulty of ensuring the long-term financial stability of clinical programs, but 
also provide an array of approaches to clinical education beyond the traditional 
understandings that offer avenues for serving more clients and training students 
for a variety of skills. Interestingly, both bodies of research were themselves 
products of cross-border legal education exchanges as they were developed by 
their authors while in the United States and in Australia, respectively. 
As international communication continues to expand through improved 
technology, facilitating cross-cultural cooperation can help fuel worldwide 
academic growth and coordinated efforts to improve lives through the law. We 
hope you find this issue helpful in thinking about your own approach to law 
beyond borders. 
As we sign off with our final issue, on behalf of everyone at Northeastern 
University School of Law, we would like to thank Judy Areen and our partners 
at AALS, especially James Greif, for having given us the opportunity to co-host 
the Journal of Legal Education for nearly a decade. We are grateful to so many 
who have aided our efforts. Our co-hosts at Southwestern, at the University of 
Washington, and most recently at American University have been the sort of 
inspired collaborators one dreams about when entering a cooperative venture. 
Our team here at Northeastern, led splendidly for several years by Margaret 
Woo, and edited at various times by Elizabeth Bloom, Hemanth Gundavaram, 
Stevie Leahy, and Danielle Tully, made the work not only rewarding but fun. Julie 
Lipkin, our editor-at-large, kept us honest with incisive critique and refreshing 
humor. And our production editors Stephen Evans, Scott Akehurst-Moore and 
Rachel Bates did the hardest work of all, with Scott and Rachel doing double 
duty as our research team, assisted in the early years by Catherine Biondo. It’s 
hard to say goodbye, but pride in our work and delight over the JLE’s new 
hosts at UC Irvine, give us strong confidence for the JLE’s future.
Sonia E. Rolland
Jeremy Paul
Robert Dinerstein
Ezra Rosser
From the Editors


Tomperi, Tuukka

Korhonen, Outi

Mielityinen, Sampo

Debate as a Pedagogical Practice: A Case Study from Finland on Teaching International Law

Thornton, Karen D.

Schooner, Steven L.

Speidel, Markus

Graduate-Level Distance Learning: Enhanced Student Experience, Significant Scalability Challenges: A Multiyear Case Study

Blum, E. Joan

Herding CATs: Building Student Engagement in Remote Learning in the United States and Uzbekistan

Alonso-Yoder, Cori

Book Review of Clamouring for Legal Protection: What the Great Books Teach Us About People Fleeing from Persecution

Not a member yet

How to Choose a Law Review: An Empirical Study

From the Editors

Book Review of Shaping the Bar: The Future of Attorney Licensing

Book Review of Common Good Constitutionalism

An Empirical Analysis of Clinical Legal Education at Middle Age

From the Editors

Debate as a Pedagogical Practice: A Case Study from Finland on Teaching International Law

Graduate-Level Distance Learning: Enhanced Student Experience, Significant Scalability Challenges: A Multiyear Case Study

Herding CATs: Building Student Engagement in Remote Learning in the United States and Uzbekistan

Book Review of Clamouring for Legal Protection: What the Great Books Teach Us About People Fleeing from Persecution

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